May 7, 2026
Dear Leland and Everett,
Last post I suggested I would come back and write about the topic that inspires me. My intention today was (and is) to follow up on that commitment. Now that I sit here, I notice myself feeling a little uncomfortable; I suspect that means whatever wants to come out is pretty personal.
Actually, before I dig in, by way of preamble (and perhaps stalling just a bit, or getting the creative muscles flowing) I want to share a bit about how I have experienced the last couple of days. As mentioned in the prior letter, I intentionally stopped with a topic dangling, stating my intention to seed my next letter with a specific topic. Strangely, pretty quickly after writing, I sorta forgot what the topic was that I wanted to write about. No worry, I thought, I left myself a reminder, so I’ll know when I get back to it. It’s worth noting: this represents some progress on my part: historically I’ve tried to hold ideas like these in my head and work through them. Forgetting, or potentially forgetting, an idea created quite a bit of anxiety, and I fought forgetting aggressively, using any number of tools (the healthiest is writing the ideas down, the most common but least healthy is to let the idea consume me without taking action). Nowadays I’ve learned to trust that good ideas will return if and when they are meant to, and forgetting an idea generally doesn’t trouble me anymore.
Well, when I sat down today, I found myself still a little blanked. Typically I’ve taken such blockages to mean that I’m just not ready to tackle a subject, and waiting for “inspiration” to hit. Today, my sense (right or wrong) is that the topic still wants to be explored, but that what I’m feeling is not a lack of inspiration but in fact resistance. And so I’m going to attempt to push through, mostly for the rep, but partly because I’m hopeful some useful stuff will come out (e.g. that the resistance is blocking something useful, and that pushing through will allow the useful thing to emerge).
Part of the complication of writing today comes from an evolution since my last letter of my understanding of the problem. See, what I wanted to explore two days ago was this: I am encountering lots and lots of people in pain, and I feel simultaneously drawn to help and confused (and, again, perhaps blocked) on how to do so.
Actually, let’s dig into this a bit. I’ve come to believe that sometimes a pervading energy runs through us. So when I explore my inner state, and the energy I feel flowing through my being, I often find those around me experiencing different versions of the same energy. My first experience of this was after the 2024 presidential election; the election itself caused me quite a bit of inner turmoil. What I noticed, speaking with others, was that few were as consumed by the election as I had been, but that virtually everyone I encountered was dealing with their own version of turmoil. I talked to people whose kids had been hospitalized, or whose kids had changed schools mid-semester. I encountered folks who were experiencing such family strife that police had gotten involved. The mildest form of turmoil was talking to folks who were experiencing the busiest weeks at work that they could remember over the prior several years. What I noticed, or at least thought I noticed, was that while the specifics of the interactions differed greatly, there seemed to be something deeply familiar any time two people shared their experiences genuinely.
The Law of Attraction is an idea shared by spiritualists and self-help gurus. It broadly suggests that we attract the energy we feed. Self-help gurus teach techniques meant to manifest preferred outcomes by feeding them focus, attention, and positive energy. Spiritualists are more passive, but generally believe that our external worlds reflect our internal states. I bring this up just to entertain the possibility that I observed turmoil in those around me precisely because I was experiencing it myself. Perhaps what I was experiencing was not universal, but merely the universe reflecting back what I myself was feeling. I think this is entirely possible, and unfortunately there’s no real way to prove one way or another. What I can say is that, for the time being, the idea that certain energies seem to be flowing through the concentric circles of my life seems like a useful framing for how I interact with the world.
What I’ve noticed over the last several months, and particularly the last several weeks, has been just a general sense of chaos. I’ve felt an energy moving through me that I didn’t really like or enjoy, but seemed pretty clearly planted in the current moment. What I can celebrate about that experience: though my typical temptation would have been to attach the feeling to some portion of my life and treat it like a problem to solve, I was able to recognize that the feeling was independent of my life situation, and just felt like an energy field in my awareness.
Well, the world around me certainly reflected that chaos back to me. I have multiple dear friends going through divorce (or potential divorce) right now. I have a friend who lost his job and is struggling to make ends meet. I know several folks dealing with frightening medical situations, and I know lots of folks struggling dearly with the actions of the current presidential administration. On a global level we’ve literally seen war break out between the US and Iran. Wherever I look, whether at the level of the individual, the small group, or even the nation or the world at large, I see chaos unfolding all around me.
I’m fairly convinced that the chaos is born out of a season of death. I’ve written about this before (and related ideas as well), but my sense is that many of our current ways of doing things need to die in order to make space for new ways of doing things. But we live in a culture and an era that resists death at all costs. Thus, we’re fighting the necessary and inevitable, most notably by assigning blame to and attacking each other. We are, of course, spreading the very chaos and death we hope to avoid, but we are creating far more suffering in the process by fighting the energy we feel (and feeding it through our egos) rather than accepting the opportunities to surrender our egos and false gods in order to make space for what’s new.
In some ways, all of this is an incredibly longwinded way of saying that I see people all around me in pain, suffering while they wrestle with their internal demons. Whether it be family members, close friends, people at church, or even folks further away from me (like politicians, or folks in the news)…I see evidence of unnecessary suffering practically everywhere I look. And as far as I can tell, all of that suffering is born of ego: the ego’s need to be right, the ego’s need to be in charge, the ego’s need for the rest of the world to submit to its will.
Of course, the world doesn’t work this way. The world doesn’t ultimately answer to our egos. Our egos are absolutely capable of influencing and even shaping the world. But our egos have limits on what they can accomplish, and in this era we’re butting up against what our egos can do.
Put more accurately, our egos are attempting to carry out decades (or in some instances, centuries) worth of plans. Those plans are reaching their inevitable yet unsatisfying dead ends…and our egos don’t know how to cope. There’s an interesting phenomenon in cult followers: when a charismatic cult leader predicts certain phenomena (like the end of the world on a specific date), when that prediction gets clearly proven false, the cult followers often increase their fervor for the cult. This is, of course, counterintuitive: once the leader is proven demonstrably wrong, one might assume the cult would begin to revisit everything else about the leader’s teachings. In fact, the opposite happens, precisely because the cult followers have staked so much of their identity in the cult. Questioning the leader and the cult would mean questioning their very identity, which proves too steep a hill for most to climb, and so they reconcile the cognitive dissonance by denying obvious truths and believing increasingly outlandish falsehoods.
I see a lot of similar behavior out in the world today: people denying obvious truths and believing increasingly outlandish falsehoods. And while it’s saddening when a fringe group of cultists exhibit such behavior, I am deeply concerned by the implications of watching such behavior at the scale we’re seeing today.
You might assume that my obvious concern would be to stop the spread of outlandish cult behavior. I’ll admit: my deeper concern right now is more for those closest to me. Partly this is natural concern for the people I love most. But really, my belief is that healing naturally occurs in something resembling concentric circles: first I heal me, then I help heal those closest to me, and then on an on outward from there.
What I find deeply frustrating about the current state of affairs is the degree to which I sense I have answers that could help lots and lots of people…if only I knew how to get the message out. In some ways, what I am describing represents something of a win: Christians often talk about wanting to spread the Good News, and for the first time in my life, I broadly understand what that means. Of course, my version of the Good News is slightly different from the traditional Christian perspective, but I think it’s close enough to the same that many Christians will ultimately recognize and agree with it. And for non-Christians, I think my ideas solve some of the problems that have slowed the spread of Christianity. Ultimately, I believe we all have the opportunity to connect with God (or Source, or the Universe, or whatever one wants to call it) and operate from that place, but I also believe we all have the right to decline that opportunity.
Which, I think, gets me to yesterday’s realization: I’ve been worrying too much about what other people do. I’ve been doing the very thing I watch others do with increasing frustration. Others are indeed suffering needlessly, but I ultimately don’t control the actions they take. I only control the actions I take. And the invitation to me right now appears to be one of creation. As far as I can tell, if I engage in the creative act consistently enough, those who want will find it, and those who don’t won’t. I can trust things will work out the way they are meant to, and just focus on what I can control and contribute.
One thought occurs to me as I write this week: I am throwing way too many huge topics out at a time to be digestible. One benefit of my earlier writing was my ability to tackle bite-sized topics within individual letters. On the other hand, one thing I notice is that only every few letters covered a type of building block idea that allows me to refer back over and over again. I even noticed this as it was happening: in the early days of writing I noticed how I needed to clear several days worth of smaller, more mundane topics in order to work myself up to the larger, more significant topics. I enjoy writing about both the mundane and the significant, but will admit to wanting to maximize the amount of significant writing I do. One thing I’m realizing as I write this: writing about the mundane is likely to continue to clear space for the significant. Said differently, only by writing about the mundane am I likely to reach down and identify the significant.
The other thought that occurs to me as I write comes from my third psychedelic journey. At one point in the journey I found myself continually attempting to plant metaphorical seeds, as if dropping breadcrumbs for others to discover and follow. Eventually I realized two things: 1) that I could let go of the compulsive need to drop the breadcrumbs, and 2) I could grant myself some grace for those times where I gave into the compulsion. I’ve since realized this portion of the journey seems to apply to how I’ve attempted to communicate regarding my spiritual journey: I’ve wanted to build a foundation of logic, bringing the reader along so you might follow the breadcrumbs for your own discovery. I’m realizing that there are times and situation where I just need to articulate what I know, without providing all the supporting documentation. And, on the other hand, I recognize that I am still likely to err on the side of providing too much supporting documentation. So be it.
I’m not sure I have any grand conclusion today. It feels good to write again. I intend to do more of it in the near future. My hope is that writing leads me to attempt other forms of creation. Wish me luck. I will let you know how it goes.
I love you,
Dad
Letters to Leland 