Notes: On 2024 - Pulling Up Anchors

A spectral soul adrift in the digital and cosmic torrent—seeking the muse, the collective, and the spiritual substrate. Looking back over my posts, interviews, essays, and short stories from 2024, I see a metaphor emerge: a sailboat unmoored, floating through unpredictable currents, discovering new islands, waves, and tides. These journeys became waypoints, fragments of a larger search: for community, self-release, forgiveness, and connection. A search for others to learn from, for blueprints to live by, for reminders to engage with nature, the collective, the soul, and the shifting layers of the self.

2024 didn’t begin with intentions for grand transformations but rather with quiet recalibrations. It was about dismantling anchors, making micro-adjustments, and testing the sails, allowing curiosity and currents to guide me. In that openness, I found new coordinates—experiences, fragments of past settlements, and fleeting signals that whispered their own kind of order. I surrendered to the inevitability of the drift, anchoring along the way on islands of awareness, instruction and connection.

Lessons in Surrender and Forgiveness

The year taught me forgiveness—not as a grand gesture but as a raw act of surrender. I worked to unspool resentment, release the past, and float with the inevitable churn of life. In humbling myself to what I didn’t know, I found peace in the intricate labyrinths of others’ lives—their passions, mistakes, and reasons. Letting go became an act of connection.

Markers Along the Way

2024 also had its tangible markers: travel, business successes, family milestones, and personal growth. Meditation deepened my presence, peeling away ruminations of the past and future, aiming to accept the chaotic collapse of each moment, of the larger trends, and the rising of new larger ideas. Writing emerged as both a private and public pursuit—a spontaneous compulsion to translate fragments of consciousness into stories, notes, and essays (some published here others kept private). Over 500 pages bridged fiction, essays, and reflections. Writing became a ritual for making sense, for forgiving, an avenue to release the old and embrace curiosity towards the now.

Essays as Waypoints

The year began with an essay and research on the architect Fernando Castillo Velasco, exploring his shift from building for to building with. This participatory ethos became a metaphor for the start of the year’s journey—an intention to foster connection, collaboration, and shared purpose in every domain of life.

These essays trace a thematic journey of connection, anchoring, and exploration:

• “Keeping the Country, Country” explored gardening as a practice of patience and community. Inspired by Charles Hugh Smith’s wisdom—“The best protection isn’t a 30-room bunker; it’s having 30 people who care about you”—it underscored the primacy of community.
• “Wilderness as a State of Mind” reveled in creativity unbound, inspired by children building forts. The simplicity of play, tools like the Free Universal Construction Kit, and the dismantling of mental barriers encouraged an openness to the alien and the unexpected.
• “Fractured Rituals” and “On Altars” explored self-connection. Abandoning past rituals uncovered the invisible architecture of habits. Meanwhile, creating a home altar became a practice of grounding—a sanctuary for intention, reflection, and spiritual alignment towards new intentions.
• “Notes on El Salvador” reminded me of the resilience required in navigating transformative moments, and the need of a strong captain be it external or internal. Just as El Salvador faced disruptive transitions, I found myself humbled, embracing change, even in its uncertainty, as an opportunity for growth and connection.
• Similarly, “BTD and Other Discontents” critiqued centralized control, for letting go and looking to build parellel communities. This mirrored my own 2024 journey, where dismantling personal anchors and navigating fragmented, unpredictable currents became acts of reclaiming agency and fostering intentional connection.

Conversations That Shaped the Year

The interviews I conducted in 2024 mirrored themes of forgiveness, connection, and transformation, each offering unique insights:

• Architect Craig Steely encouraged releasing control and letting nature guide the flow, a lesson mirrored in my own approach to life.
• A rebel bonsai master taught me to listen, trim gently, and wait— to be patient and surrender, where growth thrives in gentle, deliberate care.
• Author Ashutosh Joshi’s modeled connection through his 1,800-kilometer walk, revealing humanity’s inherent kindness and the value of openness, step by step.
• Novelist ARX-Han modeled writing as a tool for exploring masculinity, rage, and trauma. He exemplified how writing can be a release valve for exploring complex themes like masculinity and trauma, a tuning method to larger streams of consciousness. His work encouraged me to connect authentically and explore topics without fear, to use writing as a scapel and compass.
• Author Jed, known as The Spouter, unraveled speculative philosophy, presenting unconventional narratives on petroleum and fostering open inquiry across political and ideological divides.
• Author Thomas Farber’s reflections on intimacy, acceptance, and the creative process encouraged a deeper connection with myself and others.
• Storyteller Jason Trucco’s creative approach emphasized curiosity, collaboration, and embracing everything as inspiration, fostering openness to novel perspectives.
• Author Charles Hugh Smith argued for authenticity and resilience, prioritizing human connections over material. Emphasizing networking across small decentralized community resilience over isolation.
• Anthropologist Dr. Janet Hoskins explored how cultures adapt and transform through contact, highlighting the fluidity of identities and the dynamism of cultural (personal) exchange. Her insights resonated with my 2024 explorations, emphasizing the fractal complexity in edges of hybridity.
• Dentist Dr. Elmar Jung reminded me to fearlessly challenge mainstream paradigms and prioritize the holistic as a means of true alignment.
• Stephen Chamberlin shared his journey from military service to creative expression, highlighting his own vulnerability and self-discovery. His advocacy for mental health and the therapeutic potential of writing, alternative mindsets resonated and modeled the power of reflection for connection and openness.
• Musician Kit Ebersbach shared his journey through Hawaii's music scene, emphasizing the importance of personal humility and authenticity. He inspired through his humility and dedication to create for self fulfillment, expressing the importance of connecting to the ‘āina and the soul of place.
• Tom Davidson-Marx, co-founder of Aloha Sangha, emphasized integrating spiritual journey into daily life, balancing deep meditation with everyday exploration. His focus on love and compassion resonated with my efforts to harmonize spirituality, non-duality and practical living.
• Author Matt Cardin delved into the interplay between creativity and spirituality, emphasizing the concept of non-duality—the dissolution of boundaries between self and other, creator and creation. His insights resonated with my 2024 journey, where embracing interconnectedness and transcending dualistic thinking became central to my creative and personal exploration.

Other interviews—with author James De Llis on authenticity, musician Momus on artistic freedom, and with engineer Andrew Thomson on adjusting prior knowledge—offered additional wisdom, enriching my journey of forgiveness, acceptance, and engagement with the world. I’m also grateful to the other interviews and lessons not mentioned in this essay.

Fiction as Reflection - Anchoring in the Fragmented

In 2024, fiction became both a mirror and a vessel for my journey, capturing themes of surrender, processing transformation, connection and non-duality. Stories like “Molten” and “Temple Games” embodied the emotional undercurrents and philosophical questions I grappled with throughout the year.

“Molten” explored the dissolution of boundaries into a vision of non dual interconnectedness, where the protagonist’s metamorphosis into a collective entity mirrored my own unmooring. Forgiveness became less an act of virtue and more a surrender to the larger, impersonal forces that shape us—a subsumption into the currents of existence.

Similarly, rereading “Temple Games” I see my attempts to dissect the coexistence of life and death, reverence and play, into a narrative that mirrored my efforts to balance spirituality and daily life. The story’s interplay between ritual and innocence highlighted the importance of community and tradition, themes that recurred throughout my reflections.

Writing fiction became an alchemical experiment, a process of synthesizing all the under current into meaning while surrendering to creative entropy. These stories did not only offer answers but instead mapped new coordinates in a terrain of uncertainty and journey. Like 2024 itself, they were unpredictable and alive, a testament to the strange and wonderful journey each moment provides.

Navigating to Building Parallel Communities

In 2024, these explorations let me to immerse myself also in formation and support of parallel communities—fractured nodes operating outside the gravitational pull of centralized systems. I became a member of groups like Exit Group, a fraternal business and networking collective taking a “short position on the decaying structures of the current order”, intent on constructing decentralized frameworks for future generations. My engagement extended into participation more in spiritual sanghas and an unstructured group led by author Jasun Horsley, provocatively named the “Manuopticon/Children of Job/Exiting Hellfire Club,” where men navigate seek meaning in unusual ways. These communities are more than experiments—lifelines against stagnation, a praxis for recalibrating connection and creativity in a fragmented world. I encourage others to strengthen and proliferate such alternative or traditional networks, laying the groundwork for a distributed and dynamic future. Echoing the issues brought up early in the year within “30 Friends vs 30 Bunkers”.

Looking Ahead - Generosity as Aspiration

As I turn to 2025, one waypoint crystallizes for my intentions: Generosity. Not as a moral obligation but as a metaphysical of participation—generosity toward people, ideas, and the world’s unpredictable currents. It’s a pact with the unknown, a refusal to hoard what is already flowing. Generosity means building bridges and embracing the strangeness of shared human experience, just as 2024 taught me to surrender to the currents of connection, creativity, and exploration.

Generosity is my guiding star for 2025, reminding me to share more freely—the material, the stories, lessons, kindness, soul—with those navigating their own uncharted waters.

To those drifting alongside me, thank you for your support. May we navigate these torrents together. Sending metta to all.