We all need our own philosophy

How a dream of "Drepa's Shirt" illustrates my personal philosophy and mythology

Today’s essay is part of a sixth series by a group of men writing here on Substack including myself,

Latham Turner

,

Joshua Doležal

,

Lyle McKeany

,

Dee Rambeau

, and

Michael Mohr

. You may recall our past series on fatherhood, work, “recovery,” trust, and home. This series is on personal philosophy.

Vendicari, Italy. photo by the author

One morning recently, during the time that I was beginning to work on this piece, I woke gradually from a deep, restorative sleep, the pearlescent glow of liminal space still folded around me. Not yet sensing anything of the external world, I rested in the sensuous texture of the in-between, like on a bed of warm sand, feeling the phosphorescent traces of the night’s numinous somnitions^⁠1 wash gently over me. In one of those rare moments when instead of waking to, let’s say, a maddening earworm of the Backstreet Boys, something precious was still with me, and I was able to record a message before it slipped away: that by “wearing Drepa’s shirt,” I have “lost the ability to be fed any stones at all.” I sensed the texture of the shirt itself as a subtle scintillation, like a starfield shimmering with the nearly-invisible ripple of gravity’s gentle nudge.

Philosophy never appealed to me as a young person. I never even read Shakespeare—let alone Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or Kant. I never knew that philosophy means “love of wisdom.” I always thought of it (when and if I did) as a sort of ornate, abstract calculus used in seeking to answer the great metaphysical and existential questions. I didn’t know that in much more practical terms, “philosophy” is also what a tutor might impart to a young person while walking together in the stoa—a straightforward framework, grounded in experience, that addresses the day-to-day question of “how should I live?”

My own earliest set of beliefs were really pretty much just…“no.” I was angry enough, as so many of us are, to reject almost everything. It felt good and right to refuse to align myself with anything positive—and that led me to a lot of confusion and darkness. I wasn’t aware of the corrosive nihilism of my stance at the time. I didn’t even get that there’s no way to win if I wasn’t even willing to play. I rang my lonely bell of no for so long, no wonder I remained hollow.

At the same time though, I began to take note of certain phrases that did ring true. Things that just sounded right. Words that felt like me. Some of the first were said by friends, others I found in books or quiet moments. It’s not that somehow I knew enough to treasure these artifacts; they just stayed with me, showing themselves to be important—and, over time, accumulating as part of what started to become a collection. As with dreams, as with everything, my attention encouraged more of them to arise.

From the very first that I recall, I found myself referring to these touchstones more and more often, and now, as I look back on this phenomenon, I can see that in contrast to my previous refrain, whenever one of these messages came up, instead, I felt “yes.” In more recent years, after finding and reading from various philosophies that have pulled me in—depth psychology, Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism, and various modern sources—I realized that I was assembling my own philosophy.

Of course there’s nothing novel about forming personal principles or aphorisms, but the feeling of having these emerge from my own experience and take shape as words that I can express has been deeply solidifying, empowering, and gratifying. After feeling for so much of my life that I did not have a clear sense of self, I find that in recording and working with these credos, I am writing my self into existence.

I had never heard of this Drepa (or Drapa) at the time of my dream, in which the name appeared unbidden, but one reference that I’ve turned up since then is the Old Norse term “drápa”, which refers to a form of heroic poetry which “flourished at the end of the 10^th and during the 11^th⁠2” centuries. Clearly, my unconscious was drawing on ancient material from a very specific era, because that name also points to a figure in Tibetan history from exactly that same stretch of time. In this context, Drepa/Drapa seems to mean “monk” or “scholar,” and Drapa Ngonshe^⁠3, who lived from 1012 to 1090, is known as the terton, or “treasure revealer,” credited with discovering the Four Medical Tantras which form the foundation of traditional Tibetan medicine. These two interpretations of “Drepa” both illustrate the protective, healing, and transcendental power of words, stories, and writing.

In the final days of completing my own writing here, I was twice offered the opportunity to pull a card. The first was “Story^⁠4,” the second, “The Poet,” who must “seek truth in the darkest corners of the world and carry it back for all to see.^⁠5”

I know these words. I am proud of these words. I trust these words. I am these words.

This is my hymn of protection.

I’ll give you the short version^⁠6:

Death, I see you coming^⁠7

…in the meantime, I’m here to tell the truth^⁠8.

I start with “yes.”^⁠9

As a good friend once told me: I’m always ready^⁠10.

Chances are: it’s in the van^⁠11.

I am a best friend.

I am belly laughter.

I show up—and you have an open invitation^⁠12.

I am a man who shares joy, respect, and love with my brothers^⁠13.

I reflect and embrace a multitude of masculinities^⁠14.

I surround myself with a fellowship of enlivening, beautiful genius.

I keep my relationships horizontal^⁠15, and I’m not afraid to ask the king if he’s hungry^⁠16.

I treat the women—and the men—in my life with reverence, care, and affection^⁠17.

I leave the campsite clean^⁠18.

Languages are my music, words my incantations^⁠19.

I am an engaging, evocative and incisive wordsmith^⁠20.

I have nothing to hide^⁠21.

I’ve learned that fear is just a message^⁠22.

I don’t hesitate to lead—and to lead myself first^⁠23.

Adventure doesn’t happen by accident^⁠24.

Cool is free^⁠25.

I’ve been most places^⁠26.

Once, I was always leaving, but I am no longer that person^⁠27.

I’m free to go—and I often prefer to stay.

I don’t stop in the middle of the trail^⁠28.

I take pride in a sense of situational awareness that transcends the physical.

The “I” of my Self is woven from the very patterns of nature.

I align myself with the titanic swell of the tides and amidst the fluid seams of the wind.

I am a living system in dynamic equilibrium.

I am a process of being.

My consciousness is a bodily function.

Dreams are my direct line to the otherworld.

Intuition is my birthright—and my superpower^⁠29—as well as the wellspring of creativity, and the source of what I know as magic^⁠30.

I choose freedom, which is joining with serendipity, attuning to the flow, and releasing my grip on any specific outcome^⁠31.

I know that, really, I can’t fuck it up—as long as I’m paying attention.

I’m an old goat that’s happy to eat simply, butt heads, clamber ever-skywards over scree, and walk for miles in the rain.

…and I’m still a wild boy who loves to run in the woods, hop fences, throw power-slides on steep hills, and stuff a donut or a steak in my pocket^⁠32 when I can get away with it.

The animal in me is no longer angry.

I am still a beast that wants to fuck—but mostly, I am a tender, loving bear.

I am confident enough in my uniqueness to no longer depend upon it.

This is who I get to be^⁠33—and my most basic purpose is to be myself as much as possible^⁠34.

I’m happy to admit that I don’t know. Most things don’t matter much.

I am not rigid.

I embrace opposites.

I know what it feels like to change my mind from the inside, and I know that I am doing that all the time.

I experience moments of growth, connection, and awareness as a sky-full of fireworks on a warm summer night.

I am committed to helping my unknown future self emerge, and thrive.

I know in my bones^⁠35 that “addiction is a trajectory possible with anything^⁠36”—anything at all—and, I’ve come to love my hunger for life more than any vice.

As for love, love is an energy, a way of being, and a practice.

Love is in the stars I steer by, and as I am on that course, I aim to discover more^⁠37 of that constellation.

I believe that the best use of money is for art.

I create for myself a vibrant, soulful, and sane alternative to the filthy hive of our hyper-capitalist culture machine^⁠38.

I am a master navigator, and I live for the simple joy of finding my way^⁠39.

The quality I value most is interesting—that is, that which pulls me in, and forward.

My steps on the path ring with the thrill of victory^⁠40, and the stone of my wisdom accretes from the fine sediment of my discoveries.

I have no complaints^⁠41.

I live without drama^⁠42 and stress.

I embody and seek colorful, lively energy.

I am blissfully open-minded.

I move with ease and grace.

I am calm, peaceful and warm.

I pray as^⁠43 many gods.

Speaking of gods, I once met one in a dream, and he was making a living as a waiter, in Venice^⁠44.

This statement of my values and beliefs is the accumulated evidence of my actions.

I once shielded myself with the dark, worn, and weak armor of “no.”

Now, I find that I am wearing Drepa’s shirt, which flows like the lightest incandescent silk.

With this song as my medicine, things that might poison or weigh me down no longer appear in my path^⁠45.

I’m in love with everything^⁠46.

I feel the edges of my body dissolving.

I bless you^⁠47.

¹ I asked ChatGPT “is there a word like rumination, but for the unconscious mental processes of sleep and dreaming?” Its reply included somnition, “a neologism derived from the Latin somnus (sleep). This could represent the mental processes of sleep and dreaming in the same way rumination relates to conscious thought. It conveys an active yet unconscious form of mental processing during sleep.” I like it.

² Cleasby & Vigfusson Old Norse dictionary, “Drápa”

³ The Treasury of Lives, Drapa Ngonshe

⁴ from Raluca Germain’s beautiful Whole Again deck

⁵ Kim Krans, The Wild Unknown: Archetypes

⁶ A reminder to myself to start with the short answer, after having found myself so often to be guilty of giving so much backstory that the punch line gets lost.

⁷ From another liminal dream in which I dreamt of a flock of black typewriters flying slowly in a line like migrating birds, their manual keys thwacking on paper as they wrote themselves along, trailing ink-black ribbons that swayed like sheer dresses in the wind. This evocative vision felt connected to my creative journey—for one, because I learned to type on a manual typewriter in the seventh grade, and also because at the time of the dream I was an avid paraglider pilot, and often flew, myself, high in the sky, like a bird.

Using the methods from Johnson’s Inner Work, I followed the symbols of the dream to find that the typewriters could be ’dark women’ dressed in black, and that their story could only be told by writing, but also only by deleting—or that by telling their stories, they would disappear. Typing away at those black machines would erase the women.

Along with Johnson, I was reading a lot of Jung and other Jungian writers. Despite the color scheme, the tone of the dream was not particularly dark. The black typewriters—or birds, or women—recalled the ‘black’ phase described in Iron John. Bly writes “When a person moves into the black, that process amounts to bringing all of the shadow material…back inside. That process could be called retrieving and eating the shadow.” At the time, I was still digesting the basic concept of shadow itself, and this idea of going further so as to eat the shadow felt particularly interesting. It seemed to me that, for one, this “eating” is a way of describing the “integration” that’s so often talked about these days—discovering the “pure gold” of the shadow as Wilmer puts it in Practical Jung.

Something born of the unconscious can rarely be understood directly, and so it makes sense that I’ve found it most possible to understand shadow by way of a sort of back-reference. In my case, for example, I always thought of myself as someone who loved women, to the point that many of my friends were women—often women who have been lovers—and female friends also often became lovers. No harm done there necessarily, but the shadow of that truth was that I had few male friends, and also that my friendships with women were often confused with sexual relationships. My “love” for women was also, and really perhaps in fact more something of a need, an obsession, even a form of addiction.

Eating the shadow for me in this case was realizing this deeper truth and using that to clarify my relationships with women, reduce my dependence on them, and deepen my relationships with men. It made sense that I would have to write the stories of “these women”—my stories—in order to “erase” them, that is, to accomplish that.

Another dark layer surfaced as I followed the chain of associations from the dream. Like the birds dancing in the sky, these women have to be danced into existence, and they have to disappear to appear. Every moment we are dancing with God—and then it’s over. A phrase I wrote down at the time is that “You can’t just make a list of things that are true”—which I take to mean: the only truth is lived experience. The black ribbons are the unspooling of life’s story—the opposite of ‘making a list of things that are true’—and sooner or later the ribbon, or the paper, will run out. The dance of life will end.

In seeing this image that included the end of all my stories, I saw Death—and what else but to leave him a message, and so I wrote on Death’s door: “you Fool, I saw you coming all along.”

⁸ It must have been twenty years ago that I came across David Deida’s book The Way of the Superior Man, and although much of it now seems a laughable caricature, he did also introduce many of us to the idea of the spirituality of sex—a point of view that resonated with me in part because it offered a useful contrast to the dark, angry perversions that I was often consumed by.

I didn’t become all that attached to Deida’s ideas, but I did take the opportunity to see him speak when he came through San Francisco in 2016. Toward the end of his set, I raised my hand to ask a question about the relationship I was in at the time, and although he did give me a useful answer, the tone of our exchange reminded me most of all of butting heads with another old goat that I’d once encountered: John Perry Barlow. I felt like Deida was trying to piss on me from the proscenium; I also know that’s just what it feels like sometimes, dealing with another male animal.

I was a little pissed myself, but the net positive was that a woman stopped me after the event to thank me for my honest question, and two years later I called her for some advice about yet another relationship, and also about the creative and intuitive journey I found myself on at the time, having finally decided to dedicate myself to writing.

Aside from her own reflections, this wise woman named Effie Clover suggested that I might also enjoy working with John Wineland, one of Deida’s students who by then had already developed his own highly-regarded teaching practice around what might be called ‘relational yoga.’ Not long afterwards, I found myself at a men’s workshop hosted by Wineland up in McCloud, California on the south side of Mt. Shasta.

This Wineland thing in the spring of 2019 was the first time I’d thrown myself into the ring with a large group of strong men. I expected to be intimidated, but in the course of actual events, I found myself enjoying the contact—even if, no surprise, John and I sparred a bit, just as I had with his mentor.

Back inside, we returned to the exercise, which involved standing in a circle of other men and stating what I felt to be my “purpose” (the word can’t help but remind of purple, porpoise, and papoose). Faced with the demand for an answer on the spot, what came up clearly and without effort was “I’m here to tell the truth”—which felt true, and was well received by the other men.

⁹ I’ve often wished for more invitations, and when I finally started getting more of them—as I did after meeting Marco Dalpozzo down in Brazil in 2015, after which he invited me to come back there the following year to be part of a kitesurfing film he was working on—it occurred to me to remind myself to respond more often with emphatic, positive enthusiasm, to encourage more such offers.

Once I did, that’s exactly what happened. I find that it’s also just easier and more fun to say “yes,” and that I can always change my mind afterwards if need be. There are of course lots of other good reference points for this bit of philosophy, including the “Yes, and…” rule from improv, and the power of positive leadership.

¹⁰ My friend Pam gave me this sweet little tidbit, one of the first that I came to regard as a “message” about myself, how I live, and how I am known by others. It was sometime in the late nineties, and she was living in the Mission with some other friends from college. She called me one night to invite me to a party and was delighted when I showed up not more than fifeteen minutes later to help make the scene, telling me “Bobo, you’re always ready!” I was just so pleased to be seen, and to be seen that way. I’m a bit more relaxed these days, but I still pride myself on being ready to go.

¹¹ I have a Metris van, which is sort of a baby Sprinter. It’s quite a bit smaller, but…it still has space for everything I need to turn the key and go, whenever and wherever, as I have many times in the last several years. Need a pair of gloves? In the van. A length of rope? In the van. Hatchet? In the van. Stove? In the van. Sleeping bag, iPhone charger, sunglasses, oyster knife, Pepto-Bismol, granddad’s Zippo? Dude—it’s in the van!

¹² I have a couple of friends with whom it’s sometimes a bit of a pain to find time to get together with. I’m available, but they’re not, or we make a plan, and then they cancel and apologise. At first, I often felt hurt and upset. I took it personally, because I was lonely, I needed the company, and also, I wanted to be the guy that these other guys wanted to hang out with.

After some time though, I realized that I was frustrating myself—and probably them—with this passive-aggressive attitude, and that I certainly didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a non-invitation, nor an apology for not being available— and it was me who was putting myself in that position, and that since what I want is to be invited more, I should just do that myself. To that end, I started inviting people more, and making it clear that to many of my friends that they have a open invitation to come by. It’s not architecturally ideal for my place, but sometimes I even manage to actually leave the door open—something I always admire when I see it.

¹³ I used to avoid ever saying “brother,” let alone “bro,” but in recent years I’ve come to feel that I do have many brothers amongst men—and that I am one of them. What a relief to release this rigid exclusion.

¹⁴ Excavating layer upon layer of my rejection of authority, get-a-job-a-wife-and-a-dog culture, and so many other things, I find at the root of my many “no’s” a rejection of what I understood as the avoidant and incomplete masculinity of my father, and of most of the very few other men that I knew as a young person.

It wasn’t until my late forties that I did the work to intentionally construct deeper relationships with many other men, which led me to a better sense of connection with my own self as a man, and also with the broader idea of what it means to be a man, male, and masculine. One of the most helpful concepts in all of this exploration has been the idea of a “multitude” or a “plurality” of masculinities as put forward by R. W. Connell and Grayson Perry, respectively, and that it’s not too much to say that for many of us, traditional or “hegemonic” masculinity is “a fatal burden,” and …that “we need to shout from the rooftops that masculinity is whatever you want it to be,” as Perry puts it.

I aim, as does writer David Buchbinder, to “to abandon the idea that men must conform to a certain model of the masculine if they are to be counted as men.” I’ve written about this quite a lot, perhaps especially in Anxious Masculinity, and How “love” often leaves out the truth, and It's Not a Struggle to Find Good Male Role Models.

The myth of the mono-man is mirrored in the myth of the “monolithic personality.” As described in the Internal Family Systems (IFS) psychological model, I believe instead that we contain many parts that want expression.

¹⁵ This distinction between relationships of equals vs relationships of hierarchy comes from Kishimi & Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked, which is itself based on the psychology and philosophy of Alfred Adler, a lesser-known contemporary of Freud and Jung. “If you are building even one vertical relationship with someone, you will be treating all your interpersonal relationships as vertical,” and since “all problems are interpersonal relationship problems,” if we instead have the courage to move past the fear of being disliked, and keep it horizontal, there will be more “gratitude, respect, and joy,” and a greater sense of belonging. More recently I’ve found my way to Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, which expands on these similar ideas and methods.

¹⁶ Around the time I was reading The Courage to Be Disliked, I was watching a series called The Last Kingdom. I was struck by a scene in which the king, Alfred asks Uhtred: “have you eaten?” as an example of showing his own humanity and humility. Surely, if the king can ask if you’re hungry, it’s also possible to ask the king if he is hungry.

¹⁷ As I’ve gotten more comfortable with myself as a man and deepened my relationships with other men, I’ve felt more drawn to organic moments of “homosocial affection”—a term coined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick that I learned of from David Buchbinder’s Studying Men and Masculinities.

¹⁸ This comes directly from working with John Wineland—a clear expression of the responsibility to leave any person that we’re in relationship with, at least as “clean,” if not better than we found them.

¹⁹ Toko-Pa Turner’s book Belonging is one of the most lyrical expressions of the magical, healing, grounding power of language that I’ve come across. Her book was recommended to me by a fellow kitesurfer who introduced himself to me after coming across some of my writing.

²⁰ A bit on my journey as a writer.

²¹ I have a close friend who once surprised me with a story about flying off to a well-known gambling town and spending several thousand dollars on drugs and hookers. Despite having been engaged with each other as part of a group for several years, one of the core practices of which was truth-telling, this behavior of his had remained hidden, and came to present a major problem in his married life. The lesson we all took away was to ask each other not just for important ‘updates,’ but much more specifically “What are you hiding?”

²² Some of the first writing in this era of my life was on Fear, Flow and Freedom, back in 2018. One way to think of fear is simliar to what Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance”—the shadow cast by our dreams, where the size of the shadow is exactly proportionate to the dream. “If it’s a big dream, it’s going to be a big shadow. The more Resistance I feel to something, the more certain I can be that there’s a big dream there, and that I’ve got to do it.” Another early lesson came from my friend Hitch and his willingness to walk towards fear.

²³ I haven’t read—or written—that much about leadership, but it’s always come naturally to me. I just never had much hesitation about stepping out in front, sticking my neck out, or speaking up. I’m proud of this, and I think it contributes to my ability to bring ideas to fruition.

One of the things I’ve realized about taking the leadership role is how it often isolated me from others. While often seen as a willingness to take risks, in this way it’s also often been a way of avoiding the risk of being part of something in exchange for taking point.

These days, I’m very appreciative when someone else takes the lead.

²⁴ Adventure isn’t the result of an error; it’s venturing—on purpose—into the unknown. This core lesson has recurred many times for me, but always brings up the story of how I got the job I took after graduating from college, and also of many trips like the one that I did in the summer of 2024 that required a ton of planning to create the preconditions for the kind of adventure I was after.

²⁵ Before I sold my business in 2015, I was a member of EO—the “Entrepreneur’s Organization”—for ten years. The experience was incredibly valuable for me, not only in that I finally learned to spell entrepreneur, but one of the things that didn’t sit well with me was how part of that particular culture was to seek out expensive “once in a lifetime” experiences. Even though I’m all for having enough grease to do the things I want to do, for me, cool is the Fonz—personality, sex appeal, courage, pathos, leadership—many things, but not expensive, exclusive, or flashy.

²⁶ I don’t know who said this, but it’s another one that I got from a friend who knows me well—and knows how often I’m able to respond with “I’ve been there!” when someone asks about any particular place in the world.

²⁷ So many things have changed for me. Now, when I start planning a trip, I feel anxious, and I remember: “I don’t have to leave.”

²⁸ This is really the very first of all, because I got it from my father at a very early age. There’s nothing like backpacking in the wilderness of the high Sierra to practice SA, both at the macro scale, navigating peaks and passes, and the micro, in camp and on the trail. Something I find dismaying, sometimes to the point of bodily despair, is the lack of care that I see in the behavior of so many of my fellow citizens in basic situations—on the highway, in cafes, and walking down the trail.

²⁹ Another gift from Effie Clover, also mentioned above.

³⁰ Someone special asked me about “magic” after hearing me use the word now and then, and it wasn’t until some time after that, in the late summer of 2023 as I was finishing the manuscript for An Ordinary Disaster, that I was able to connect it clearly with intuition. I’ll save my explanation of this for a forthcoming piece; in the meantime I’d love to hear our own definition of magic, if you have one.

³¹ Writer Elizabeth Gilbert speaks beautifully about being unattached to any “cherished outcome” in this conversation with Tim Ferriss.

³² I still sometimes steal little things, to even things up with the machine.

³³ This came to me while driving to a date. I was disappointed already, because I’d wanted to ask a certain woman out, but when I approached, her friend took the lead and gave me her number. Needless to say, the date was lackluster, but I got a good lesson out of it.

³⁴ see The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling for these incredibly poingnant lines/lessons: “Be more yourself than ever. ​Don’t force.​ Just be Garry.” “Your style is ‘Garry’” “So it is with material. I doesn’t matter if it's like someone else’s. It is merely a vehicle to be Garry. The more you are Garry and the less you worry about the song you’re singing, the more you’ll be yourself.”

³⁵ One of many pithy expressions that I’ve absorbed from master coach and friend Robert Ellis

³⁶ I’ve written and read a lot on the subject of addiction, but Elias Dakwar’s recent book, The Captive Imagination has had the most to say to me overall (along with Stanton Peele’s prescient Love and Addiction.) Dakwar goes deep into the connection between addiction and our universal yearning for “absolute contentment”—which is simply our universal, creative drive for more, and really, also, the “hope of making a home in ⦅⦆.”

³⁷ As with so many other things, at first I really didn’t know what to make of love, other than to say that I felt that it was a fantasy that I was against, like the writer Laura Kipnis. At some point I began to do my research though, and found myself drawn to the writing of Erich Fromm, bell hooks, M. Scott Peck, Stanton Peele, Stephen Levine, as well as more recent work on the topic by Amy Key, Todd Baratz, and even Neil Strauss.

³⁸ I’ve often used the word “machine” to refer to the culture we live in. I don’t remember where I picked that up, and AFAIK it preceded my reading of any reference, but this usage goes back to Marx, Huxley, Orwell, Lewis Mumford, and Allen Ginsburg, as well as work that I’ve since encountered personally, such as the writing of Paul Kingsnorth and Marshall McLuhan, the band Rage Against the Machine, films like Brazil, Metropolis, and Logan’s Run, The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.

Certainly one goal, or definition, of freedom is first to “escape the machine,” and then to live “outside” of it, although of course the Machine is a thing that we constructed and then entered, thinking that it would keep us safe, and offer more fulfillment, than what is outside.

Whether we call it the machine, the house, the man, The Truman Show, The Matrix, or just the “they” that folks so often refer to, we have to remember that it’s a world that we’ve built, and so no wonder that it feels, looking inwards, that we are praying to the wrong gods—that is, ourselves.

³⁹ “Wayfinding” has been a recurring theme in my writing, and I firmly believe that it’s one of the core skills that drove our evolution, and therefore also one of the few things that fulfill our drive for more, and more, ever more. The fulfillment of the ongoing process of wayfinding itself as opposed to the achievement of an ultimate goal is expressed in the philosophies of Taoism (the path), as well as the Grail myth, amongst many others. See also Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human, and Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World

⁴⁰ Those of us of a certain age will share the memory of the tagline from Wide World of Sports, but “victory” also has a more personal meaning for me. Victory isn’t about winning some sort of competition with others, it’s about how very, very good it feels to actually live well. Here’s the thing that I didn’t quite get for so very long: it is a delight knowing that I’m following my nose and finding my way that way, using my senses and intuition—and that simple thrill, delight, joy, and fulfillment is actually much greater and more accessible, closer to my everyday experience than anything typically classified as “thrilling” that it deserves explicit recognition.

⁴¹ Complaining is always boring, i.e. the opposite of interesting.

⁴² Someone who worked for me for a long time once told me that “everything’s an emergency.” Our relationship was already on thin ice, but this was the last straw. Per my above interpretation of “losing the ability to be fed stones,” I was unwilling to swallow the idea that somehow “everything” could be an emergency. No thanks.

⁴³ I was introduced to his idea of praying as by Sophie Strand’s The Flowering Wand. “Like Homer, Orpheus is plural. Rather than naming a specific heroic individual, Orpheus appears to have been used more as a spiritual title. You didn't pray to Orpheus. You prayed as Orpheus: through lyric and poetry and ecstatic worship of the natural world.”

⁴⁴ From another liminal dream: I was with a lover in Venice, Italy, sitting at a cafe along the edge of the Campo Santa Margherita, the square that I would often pass through on my way back to where I was staying when I lived there in the summer of 1990. She had gotten up to look at something nearby—flowers at a market stall, something in a window, a mother and child passing by. I stayed at the table, drinking my coffee and watching this woman that I somehow had the good fortune to be there with.

After a few moments, the waiter came over and stood next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder, looked down at me, and smiled.

Without him saying a word, I knew exactly what he meant to convey. He was telling me that he could see how much I loved her. He could see it in my eyes. He saw me watching her and gave our love the recognition that it deserved. In that brief early-evening dream-state, I felt more seen than I ever had before. Ever. This man in my dream—myself, my father, every man, and even God—looked me in the eyes and said as clearly as anyone could imagine, I see you, I see you loving her, and that love is right.

⁴⁵ Going back to my dream about Drepa’s shirt, there’s some subtle gold in the paradoxical tension between the loss of my “ability”—in the active voice—and the passivity implied by “to be fed stones.” It’s like I’m not so much losing the capacity to do something but becoming incompatible with the dynamic of passively receiving harm, or recalibrating my relationship to old patterns. It’s almost like the “shirt” makes the “stones” obsolete.

⁴⁶ This came to me around the time I was watching Rick Rubin’s series Shangri-La, in which at the end of Episode 4 he says “I’m a believer. I believe in everything. Anything. Everything.” It turns out that John Lennon is also credited with saying “I believe in everything until it's disproved,” which seems to be what Rubin meant as well, having just been through a session with a guy trying to sell him a gadget that’s supposed to have some sort of magical ability to tune recording-room acoustics—although of course in the first place I think it expresses his positivity, connectedness, and the sense that “we’re not working alone.”

Being in love with everything expresses how I felt at the time; that I’d finally come to appreciate everything around me, all the little things, the beauty of everyday life, and that, in a way, love had become the primary force in my life.

⁴⁷ At some point it occurred to me that the only way to express how I felt in certain moments with certain people would be to simply offer my blessing. Marshall Rosenberg’s anecdote in Nonviolent Communication about his friend Nafez expressing special appreciation by saying “I kiss the God in you” conveys much of what I feel in taking up this practice. It’s also a recognition of the divine presence in myself (and in all of us), in feeling able to bestow a blessing.

And this, my friends, is a Damn Fine pizza.

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The series on “Personal Philosophy”

A letter to my son

How I Became a Scholar - Pt. 2

My Personal Philosophy

Arise Each Day

It's Always Now

Further Reading

• Past series pieces on fatherhood: We Need Wild Fathers, work: Earning My Bread, “recovery”: Against Recovery, trust: How trust emerges naturally from self-awareness—and eating well, and home: Nothing said “home” to me more than an empty house

• My own writing — Anxious Masculinity • How “love” often leaves out the truth • It's Not a Struggle to Find Good Male Role Models • Fear, Flow and Freedom • Hungry for Vice • Life As A Goat • Adventure Doesn’t Happen By Accident • Round File • The Man Pays • What Is Intuition? • Patterns of Nature • my memoir: An Ordinary Disaster

• John Gray, Straw Dogs

• Elias Dakwar, The Captive Imagination

• Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work

• Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget

• Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment

• Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, Flow

• Nassim Taleb, Antifragile

• Epictetus’s Enchiridion

• Johann Hari, Lost Connections

• Harry A. Wilmer, Practical Jung

• Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious

• Toko-Pa Turner, Belonging

• Ram Dass, Polishing the Mirror

• Alan Watts, This Is It

• Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Embracing the Beloved

• Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand

• Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

• Sadhguru, Inner Engineering

• Kishimi & Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked

• John Wineland, From the Core

• Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication

• Tim Ferris podcast #770 with Elizabeth Gilbert

Questions for you

1. Have you or have you ever considered creating a similar expression of your Self?

2. What are some of the core elements of your own personal philosophy? Do you have and specific credos you can share?

3. Have you ever had a dream that influenced your waking life in a meaningful way?

4. How do you define “magic”?

5. Who are some of your teachers?

6. What’s your favorite pizza?

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