Dear J,
I just got back from my trip. I left September 6 and got back October 9, rode 4,701 miles through six states, saw 16 old friends, made 8 new friends, and learned a few things about motorcycle maintenance on the road.
J, I'm so inspired by the people I spent time with. I can't possibly put it all in this letter. The first and last conversations I had carry the narrative arc, though, so I'll tell you about those.
On day 2 I met Cody at the base of Mt Shasta and we hiked up to the hut he caretakes. We talked about so many things - projects we want to collaborate on, Total Art, the crush we have on the 100r people, principles and philosophies for living the good life. I asked him about Darmera, his art studio. I wanted to know how he put it together and how he runs it.
He said that what he learned is to only make something that you are stoked to do, and figure out how to make that work. Don't make something you think other people want, because you will wind up spending all of your time tending something you don't actually like.
Cody and his business partner want to make a space that is conducive to making art and attracting people that are serious about it. They don't want to 'run a gallery' in the sense of putting a lot of hustle into finding and exhibiting artists. So they only let local artists exhibit, and they're not on the hustle grind.
They teach a number of workshops, but mostly they've now developed a community of similarly serious artists who want a space they can work on their art in. And so it's mostly a space for artists to do their work. And Cody and his partner are psyched to have Darmera, this entity that allows them to spend time doing something they're psyched on, and that invites others with similar stoke to participate, and the amount of bs they have to deal with is very low.
Build containers for your stoke, and figure out how to invite similar collaborators and partners to that container. Don't build a container for what you imagine to be someone else's stoke, and attempt to jam your soul into that container. Why would you do that? (I've done that.)
When it comes to what I'm doing with my life, it's difficult to discern the difference between things I'm actually stoked to do, and ways in which I can see to improve the structures of society. My mind is wired to see structural dysfunction and be pained by it, and want to fix those structures. But that's not entirely the same thing as genuine interest and stoke, necessarily. It's easy for me to try to build something that I think might fix, or be an alternative to, a dysfunctional structure, that I'm not actually that wildly interested in. The difference between genuine stoke and 'is seriously no one else going to fix this bullshit? oh for fucks sake - here - hold my beer--' is a subtle one for me.
Among other things, for example, I'm actually interested in building beautiful built environments. I'm very aesthetically motivated, although you wouldn't know it by looking at the physical environments in my life (yet). And that, J, is because I've been fucking up for decades. I've been distracting myself and not allowing myself to participate in my own sense of wonder and stoke, because of this nagging and misplaced sense of responsibility to fix broken things. I'll build things to a minimum standard of functional completion and then move on to the next project, without allowing myself to take the time and care to address the aesthetics.
That's a big part of... all of this, that I write about and what I've been doing in my own life over the past five years, it's the Autonomy part of Deep Response. Get thyself freed, and then pursue thy stoke. It sounds so simple, and yet it remains elusive for me. It's more like: get thyself freed, and then get thyself to therapy, in order to untangle one's own dysfunctions adequately in order to be able to pursue thy stoke.
--
The last set of conversations I had were with Sunne, a new friend that Sam introduced me to. The theme of our conversations was: the world is a dumpster fire, yes. You can choose to try to figure out how to put the dumpster fire out, to change the entire world, to Save The Ship. Or, you can choose to build pockets of viable culture - boltholes of sanity in a sea of crazy, pockets of calm. You can choose to work on The Flotilla.
Will the pockets of functional experimental societies (two people building something together that is beautiful and functional counts in my opinion) come together and coalesce into a larger entity that extinguishes the dumpster fire of globalized insanity that is eating the world?
I don't know. It could. That outcome doesn't matter (let go).
The pockets we build -- the weeds growing in the cracks of industrial consumer society - might be the seedpods of the flourishing gaiacentric ecological society of the year 2325.
Or, they might be containers of beauty that ferry us to the end of our lives before blowing away in the wind.
We can't know. It isn't up to us to know. Knowing the outcome is a way of relating to the future that we (I) must unlearn, I think. Clenching so tightly to narratives of definite outcomes is an excellent method for atrocity justification. It is doomsday epistemology, a way to do bad things now in order to theoretically get good things later. But the bad things done now tend to pile up and up and the past fills with the corpses of our decisions, and the good things in the future stay in the future of our minds eye. The weight of the dead rots our broken hearts and we're lost.
Whether what we build now are the cornerstones of the future or leaves on the wind makes no difference to how we ought to think and act now. We build them not because of what we see in the future but because of what is in our hearts now: love for others, love for ourselves, love for beauty and the onrushing experience of being alive and breathing air on this rock spinning through the dark.
Take care, J,
T
October 15, 2025, Quail Haven
Highway 50.
Highway 50, outside of Eureka, NV, about to ride into the middle of an electrical storm.