Ramana Maharshi taught that if you follow that question far enough you discover your truth. Not the name you answer to or the story you tell about yourself, but instead your essence. The thing underneath all of it, the part that was watching before any of the rest arrived.
My own personal inquiry led me to writing a new novel. I said I was finished writing yet this book just kept rearing its head, asking to be born.
As I have mentioned, I have been living inside it all summer. It is called I'Eternal.
Four lifetimes, four cities, one soul on the edge of remembering who he truly is.
It opens with a man named Lucian Saxxon, a photographer who has spent twenty years looking at the world through a lens and never once at himself. Then one winter night in Newport, Rhode Island he catches his own eye in a frosted window, and the eye looks back.
The eye sees everything except itself. The first line wrote itself and this is where the book begins. The book is an invitation into remembering what we have always known but have somehow chosen to forget.
I have almost finished the second part of three and each step of the way I have been surprised by what has been revealed. This is why I love creating, because our creations build a world of their own that we are only a small part of.
I am ready to give you the first chapter as a preview and a thank you for allowing me in your inbox each week. You will meet Lucian at the window. You will see what he saw in the glass, and the one frame out of four hundred he does not remember taking. You will be there when the question finds him the way it found me.
Sunflowers crowded the edge of the road at the end of the day, some of them wide open and turned toward the last of the light, others already bowed and darkened and heavy with seed, all of them growing in the same few feet of ground without any quarrel between them. Adi and I were walking the way we walk in the evenings, slow and with no particular destination. The flowers held every stage of their living at once, the opening and the finishing side by side on the same stalk, none of them ashamed of where they were in it. The road ran on toward the pale gold horizon and the field went green behind them, and the whole scene asked nothing except to be noticed by someone willing to slow down enough to do it.
There is a thing I have been teaching myself on these walks, that beauty is not rare and does not hide, that it waits in the ordinary places for the ordinary eye trained to expect it. We are told beauty is something you travel to, something you save for, something that lives in the famous and the far away, and that story keeps us walking past the sunflowers on our own road with our eyes fixed somewhere else. The truth is quieter and closer than that. Beauty grows at the edge of every path a person walks, blooming and going to seed in the same breath, and the only thing it ever required was that we stop insisting it be somewhere other than here.
I’ve spent most of my life onstage, telling stories for laughs and feeling a room shift in real time. For twenty five years I hosted an improvisational show called Four Day Weekend, and that stage felt like home. In 2020 the world shifted, and so did I. The questions of the world began to matter more to me than comedy, and I turned toward writing about life's greater mysteries, finishing We’ll Always Have Paris and later Quietude, which became a quiet turning point in my life. Exploring The 12 Universal Laws widened the lens even more. Now the island reflections and everyday synchronicities I share carry one intention, which is to help you awaken to your highest potential. I am not here to convince or impress you. I simply hope to brighten your day, invite you to question what you have been told, and remind you of what you already know. Each morning I return to the same ground. I am awake. I am aware. I am able. I remember. Everything I share grows from there.