Hey friends. A couple of fun things:
April 28th-May 4th I am leading a psychedelic healing retreat in the heart of Mexico! I’ll be working with an all-star team and facilitating with two dear friends and colleagues. There are still a handful of spots left. Learn more here.
I was featured on the Psyche & Soul Podcast, hosted by the wonderful Otto Maier. Have a listen!
I have a few spots available for new psychedelic integration and mentorship coaching clients. If you are seeking to explore your inner world, are a psychedelic practitioner (or aspiring to be one,) or are looking for high level psychedelic supervision and mentorship, book a consultation call here.
Thanks for being here. Onwards!
“If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”
-William Stafford
I’ve just returned from three weeks traveling in Mexico with my partner. Back in 2021, I spent several months exploring the country and rooted into the small town of Tepoztlan, where I still have friends.
During both of these journeys, a subtle notion crept into my awareness and brought my attention to some intangible knowing that seemed to emanate out of the land itself, whispering this simple message: “You do not belong here.”
My body felt it immediately upon arrival. I constantly struggled to maintain hydration, as the skin on my fingers and hands began to peel off in some leprous pattern. I felt at any moment that the earth could shudder and shake me off its back. My northern blood felt thin on the tropical Oaxacan coast. I felt like I couldn’t even think straight.
I love Mexico, her people, culture, heritage, and history. I cannot wait to return in several months to work with several dear friends and collaborators with Right to Heal. Yet I am under no illusions, it’s just not my place.
Now, I watch the Cascadian rain pummeling down from slate-gray skies, watering the conifer roots and snow-peaked mountains that hold the valley where I was born. I witness the slow stirrings of springtime, and am reminded of the beloved seasonality that my ancestors knew in their bones. The scent of earthworms and cedar trees, the croak of ravens, and the moist wind all remind me that I am home.
As I contemplate this embodied sense of home, I am left wondering about the essential, corresponding human component of belonging: community.
Recently, my friends Ian MacKenzie, host of The Mythic Masculine Podcast, and John Wolfstone, who co-founded the School of Mythopoetics along with Ian, released their film, Village of Lovers, which I was fortunate enough to see earlier this summer when John rolled through town on a screening tour. On the surface, this documentary focuses on Tamera, a radical “free-love” community based in Portugal. Yet the film is actually an intimate study of a brave and intensely human experiment, whereby people choose to live in a functioning, multigenerational village, where life in all of its forms is welcomed and cherished. Sex is just a side effect.
Village of Lovers strongly affected me, stirring up subtle longings that I’ve felt every time I’ve visited a well functioning intentional community, farm, or land project. I feel a yearning for a quality and depth of life that feels difficult, if not impossible to achieve within the city. And I desire a longitude of relationality that I, and my extended circle of friends rarely have the bandwidth for.
I’m under no illusions about “community living,” having participated in my fair share of experimental, often chaotic, usually temporary co-living arrangements. I’ve seen communities rise and spectacularly fall, as interpersonal dynamics scuttle even the most learned “intentional community” enthusiasts. It’s not easy, and it’s usually not like we imagine it.
And yet, the desire remains to live with a depth of trust, a sense of reliance, and an unromanticized interdependence. I crave community without abstraction, a chop-wood, carry water ethic where people are valued above ideologies. I want to know people deeply, and to be known.
In the poem above, William Stafford (a beloved poet from my hometown of Portland,) wrote that when people don’t truly know each other, they can become confused, their theories about one another skewed and manipulated by forces greater than them. Whether that force is a god or an algorithm, this rings frighteningly true for our world today.
There is a tragic outcome here that I am increasingly concerned by, which I have written about before, where people turn away from each other out of an inability to engage in the difficult task of actually being in relationship, embracing paradox, and leaning into the vulnerable unknown–the bread and butter of real community.
A community is not the same as a network, because communities are composed of people whose primary motive is to care for one another. Networks, especially the online, social media variety, compassion actually seems to be at the bottom of the list of what brings people together. What god have we followed down that path? And where does it inevitably lead to? I’m honestly terrified to find out.
We are indeed all at risk of “following the wrong god home,” as Stafford wrote. Yet I wonder what gods might lead us back to each other? What gods might come to our aid as our human communities fracture apart with greater ease than ever before, at a time when we need each other more than ever?
Eros is the patron deity of Tamera, as the Village of Lovers reveals. But who is Eros, beyond the rosy cheeked cherub that reliably emerges on Valentine’s day cards once a year? Answers vary.
On the surface, Eros is the Greek god of love. But a deeper look into this god reveals that he is an ancient creator god, older than all of the Olympians, and an animating light infused into all creation.
One story from the disciples of Orpheus says that Eros was born of Nix, the goddess of night, and that when he hatched into the primordial darkness from her egg (yes, an egg,) he revealed and brought into the light all that was previously in the dark, which was the entire world. Some call him Protogonos, meaning first born, a name which hints at just how old this god truly is.
Others called him Phanes, or the one who reveals. Mythologically, this refers to his birth as the catalyst for literally revealing the world, and bringing light into a previously dark cosmos. Psychologically, Eros both reveals and magnifies aspects of ourselves when in his presence, and in the presence of that which we love. It is often said that love is a mirror. Through relationships, we come to know ourselves through the other, which is Eros’ revelatory power of illumination.
Eros is that ancient energy that we humans sometimes call love, which is actually the energy of creation and life itself. Eros is the god of life who simply wants more life. Love is the source and wellspring of it all.
In another story, Eros falls in love with a young, beautiful mortal girl named Psyche. The one rule is that she can’t see his face. Of course, she breaks it, and is sent on a long, grueling quest to persuade Aphrodite, Eros’ mother in this story, to allow her to see him again. Finally, after an unfathomable struggle, right when she is about to give up on love forever, she is whisked into the sky, and invited to join Eros and become an immortal.
Eros wants to be wanted, for us to long for more of him, or her, or it, or them. Perhaps Eros is that endless pursuit of the soul trying to see itself manifested in the world. Eros and Psyche compel us to seek out that which we long for the most, which we see most easily revealed through our relationships with others. But its a damn hard thing to do when our relational lives and communities are so fractured and far apart.
It’s often said that a romantic couple is composed of three things, two people, and a third being between them, which is the spirit of the relationship itself. Eros is that third thing, that dynamic, relational, connective spirit.
It is in this simplest of notions, that our relationships can be the abode of the divine, that we might find a way out of our terrifying predicament.
I’m not about to move to Tamera. I’m not particularly interested in trying my hand at an “intentional community” again. Nor am I looking to build my life around the deep, yet incredibly intensive inner work that constant medicine circles or group retreats can catalyze. Personally, none of that feels sustainable to me.
But Eros. Eros feels doable. Eros feels human, immediate, attainable, and perfectly imperfect. Eros feels right beneath my feet, dancing in the garden, dwelling in the swirling curling steam that arises from the tea cup that I share with my partner or a close friend. I’ll follow that god home any day, and see where his star might lead.
Stafford concludes his poem:
“For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give––yes or no, or maybe––
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”
Thanks for this deep dive into Eros brother - I love the deep mythic roots of this God as the protegenesis. And thank you for the beautiful shout out and reflection.. with you in the longing and the path.
Hermano, I hear you on the untenability of living in an intentional community yet the desire for deep community in one’s life. Those awake must remain awake!