More than fifteen years ago, a single word arrived in my head and refused to leave. That word was I’Eternal (get a free chapter below), and it sat with me through more seasons than I can count. I had no story to hang it on, no characters, and no idea how a man would even begin to write such a book. I knew one thing, and I knew it in my bones. Someday that book was going to come to me.
In 2023, I sat down and tried to force it. I wrote two hundred and forty pages, read them back, and put the whole stack in a drawer. I went off and wrote Quietude instead. The other book was not ready, and if I am honest with you, neither was I.
Then this past April, the story walked back in and pulled up a chair like it had never left. This month I wrote the final page of I’Eternal, and I sat there a long time before I closed the laptop.
Here is what I understand now that I could not have understood then. The book was never the thing that needed to grow, and the man holding the pen was. The fellow who had that idea fifteen years ago had not yet lost enough, loved enough, or sat still long enough to write it. Patience was not me waiting on the book. Patience was the book waiting on me.
Years ago, I wrote a small guide called The 12 Universal Laws, and I have been thinking about it all month, because those laws had their hands all over this story.
The Law of Rhythm (see the video) says everything has its season. Anyone who has lived on Galveston Island knows the tide does not take orders from anybody, and it comes back in when it is good and ready. The Law of Perpetual Transmutation says energy never disappears, it only changes form. Those two hundred and forty pages were not wasted. They became the ground Quietude grew out of, and they taught me what I’Eternal was not. The Law of Cause and Effect says every hour you give a dream is a seed in the dirt, whether you see it come up this year or not. And the Law of Inspired Action says that when the door finally opens, you walk through it. In April the door opened, and I walked.
Now let me turn this around, because this letter was never really about me.
Somewhere in you there is a thing that showed up years ago and never left. For some of you it is a book, and for others it is a business, a song, the trip back to the town your grandmother came from, or the conversation you have owed your father for twenty years. You put it in a drawer. You told yourself the timing was wrong, or the money was wrong, or you were the wrong person for it. That thing has not gone anywhere. It is waiting on you the same way mine waited on me, and it is in no hurry, because it knows something you have forgotten. You are still growing into the person who can carry it.
So, start today, and start small. Take the idea out of the drawer and look at it in good light. Write one page, make one phone call, or put one dollar in a jar with its name on the lid. You do not have to finish it this year. You only have to let it know you remember.
I put all twelve of those laws into a guide book, and I want you to have it free. Download it, read one law each morning with your coffee, and pay attention to the one that stops you cold. That is the one that knows your name.
Don’t wait another day to plant the seed of your dreams. It can’t grow until it’s in the soil.
Well, I finally made it to Instagram. My timing is impeccable. I’ve arrived just as everyone agreed it’s yesterday’s news, which makes me the last man to show up at the party and the first one to start talking about the hors d’oeuvres.
Here’s what you’ll find if you stick around. Every day I’ll share a quote worth carrying in your pocket, and a photograph from wherever I happen to be standing. Some days that’s the sand at East Beach on Galveston Island. Some days it’s a fire pit on a cold morning in the Texas Hill Country. Each photo comes with a couple of paragraphs about what it showed me, written as plainly and honestly as I know how.
No dancing. No pointing at floating text. Just a picture, a few true sentences, and maybe a question to sit with over coffee.
Elias comes up the road in the dark and lights the ovens at half past five. The kitchen holds the cold of the night until the ovens begin to breathe. The starter waits in its jar on the steel counter, alive and sour and patient. Elias feeds it and works the dough with his hands while the roosters start up outside. The loaves rise in their baskets as the window goes from black to gray. By nine o’clock, Alen opens the oven doors, and the heat rolls out across the room. He pulls the loaves one at a time and sets them on the rack. The crusts have split along the cuts, and the rosemary on one has gone dark in the heat. Another carries pecans and black raisins that burst against the crust. They crackle as they cool, and nobody touches them yet, because the bread is still finishing.
For a hundred years, we told ourselves that progress meant never having to wait. We bought our bread in plastic bags and called the saved hours freedom. Then we spent those hours on things that left nothing on the table. Here two men give up their mornings so that people they may never meet can break bread together. A loaf like this takes two days, and most of that time belongs to the bread. You cannot hurry it, and patience is the whole lesson. Going back to your roots was never about going backward. What in your own life have you been buying in a plastic bag that you could learn to make with your own two hands?
On a winter night in Newport, a photographer finds two rows of ancient symbols in a frame he doesn’t remember taking. Their story runs back through occupied Paris, Renaissance Florence, and ancient Egypt: four lifetimes of one soul remembering its way home to itself.
My new novel arrives November 25, 2026, and I wanted you to be among the first to know. As my gift to you, the first chapter is yours, free.
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.