Adi and I have been spending quite a bit of time lately at a place in the Texas Hill Country called Sovereignty Ranch, which belongs to some dear friends of ours and which I have come to love with the kind of affection that one loves a feral cat that won’t go away. It grows on you over time and before long, you kind of even like it. This past fall, the ranch was hosting a Halloween Festival and found themselves short-staffed in the restaurant, and Adi, who has never once in her life passed up the opportunity to be useful to someone she loves, volunteered us immediately and with the kind of enthusiasm that left very little room for a counter-offer. I want to be honest with you: I was not crazy about going. If you were grading my attitude on a traditional academic scale, I would give myself a C minus, and only because I showed up. I was doing nothing stellar outside of simply showing up, and even that required Adi pointing out, in her not-so-subtle way, that there is something genuinely worth cultivating in a person who is willing to step outside the comfortable perimeter of their own life to offer themselves to something larger than their own agenda...
The Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud sat at the curb the way royalty sits in a room, noticed by everyone and indifferent to all of it, white against the green of the oaks that had been standing on that street longer than anyone could honestly account for. It was the kind of car that did not belong to the present tense, built in an era when the men who made things believed that beauty was not an indulgence but an obligation, and sitting there in front of the Menard House it made you feel that the street had simply refused to move forward with the rest of the world and you were glad it had. The house stood behind it with its white columns and its dark shutters and its silence, the oldest structure on the island, and if you let yourself go soft around the edges of what you thought you knew, you could almost believe that neither the house nor the car had ever belonged to any particular decade at all.
There are streets in Galveston that do this to you if you walk them slowly enough and pay the kind of attention that daily life does not often ask for, streets that make the present feel like the thinnest of veneers laid over something much older and much less explained. The oaks know. They were here before the stories that were written about this place, and they will be here after those stories have been revised or forgotten, and they spread their arms above the white car and the white house the way they always have, covering what they know with a patience that has never needed our permission. You stood on that sidewalk and felt the decades folding back like pages, and for a moment the question was not what year it was but whether the question itself had ever mattered.
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.