The Summer Solstice has arrived, and the sun decided to stop for a moment. Solstice comes from the Latin sol, the sun, and sistere, to stand still, because for a few days around the longest day the sun seems to pause at the top of its arc before it turns and starts back. This morning, it reached that high point. The longest day of the year, the most light we will be given, the hinge the whole year swings on. People have marked this morning for as long as there have been people to mark it. They built temples to catch the light when it came.
A day the sun stands still asks something of us in return, we get to stand still with it. For one held breath you stop reaching for the next thing and let yourself be here, in the fullest light of the year, and you notice the part of you that is doing the noticing: not the body a year older, not the worries that came with the morning, but the one behind your eyes who has watched your whole life and has not aged a single day.
This is the country my new novel lives in. It is called I'Eternal, the “I” that never dies, and it opens on a single sentence.
“The eye sees everything except itself.”
The whole book grows out of that one impossible fact. It also turns on a solstice, the winter one, the morning the light begins to come back. There is a moment when a young woman who has returned to the same wall since she was a child finally stands before it at dawn, and the whole of who she is and always was arrives complete, and her teacher appears at the far end of the street at the very moment she is ready. The book is about the part of us that remembers across centuries what the rest of us keeps forgetting.
I have been living inside that world all summer, in a booth at the Barn Restaurant on Sovereignty Ranch between shifts, and the solstice felt like the right morning to finally tell you its name. A quiet symmetry runs through it that I never planned. Thirty-five years ago, starting out in comedy, I waited tables by day and did stand-up at night, hungry and certain the next room would be the one that finally proved I had made it. Now I bartend and bus the tables by day and write the book during the slow moments, and the old worry about status that drove me then has left me. Growing older and settling into the many stages of a life turns out to be its own kind of gift.
So, mark the turning however you like today. Step outside at some point and stand in the long light. Let the sun catch you while it holds still, and see if you can feel the one in you it has been rising on since long before you had a name. That one is not going anywhere. The light always comes back, and so, the book would tell you, do we.
Looking forward to sharing this new book with you.
Inside the Barn at Sovereignty Ranch, the pastry case holds bread baked that morning, the sourdough loaves scored and dark and lined up on the shelves beside the pastries made onsite from ingredients pulled out of the soil just beyond the door. This is how the farms and ranches of old fed the people who lived on the land and the travelers who arrived at the end of a long road, not as a transaction but as a welcome, because there was a time when feeding a weary soul was the first and simplest way of telling them they had been received. We have lost that somewhere. Food became an activity, a thing we photograph and rank and consume for entertainment, and in the trading of hospitality for consumption we forgot that a shared loaf was once the oldest sentence in any language, the one that said you are safe here and you are known.
Everyone who walks through the door says the same thing, that they can feel God on this land. They cannot always explain it and they do not need to, because the feeling arrives before the words do, the sense of being welcomed into something larger than a meal, a community of souls who are all quietly remembering the same truth they had been told to forget. Bread is only the doorway. What waits on the other side of it is the older nourishment, the recognition that passes between people who are in the process of coming home to themselves, and the bread baked from this soil is simply how the land says what it has always wanted to say to everyone who finds their way here. You belong. You always did. We are One, and you have only just remembered.
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.