April 2025: Making Love with Life

Notes on beauty, creative intimacy, sexuality, and the freedom of fatherhood

I’m continuing my monthly updates to share what’s most alive in my world. This past month has felt like a slow exhale — a month of deepening, unwinding, and discovering beauty in places I hadn’t thought to look. Here’s what’s unfolding:

I’m embracing this spring as a sacred container for intimacy with my own creativity.

I’m two weeks into The Artist’s Way, doing it alongside a dear friend here in Boulder. And I’ve chosen to treat this spring as a season to plant the seeds of my creative life—not just what I want to create, but how I want to be in relationship with creation itself.

For much of my life, I’ve oriented toward creativity as a destination—focused on outcomes, on what I’m building, producing, or achieving. But right now, I’m more interested in becoming intimate with the energy of creation. I want to know the creator within me, not just the things I make.

I’m noticing how easy it is to slip into progress-oriented thinking—toward building a brand, writing a book, shaping a body of work. And I’m gently inviting myself to shift from progress to presence. From striving to discovering.

In my morning pages today, I reflected on what it might feel like to treat my creativity like a lover—someone I was just beginning to know. To approach it slowly, sensually, reverently. To feel its rhythms. To touch its edges. To listen closely for how it wants to move.

If I truly made love with my creativity—rather than trying to use it to get somewhere—I’d drop any urgency. I’d stop rushing. I’d recognize that I’m already exactly where I need to be. Creation wouldn’t be a task to complete but a dance to enjoy. A sacred union to savor.

And in learning to make love with my creativity, I’m learning to make love with life itself.

This family hike in Boulder was one of my most favorite experiences of sacred presence and beauty this past month.

I’m owning that sexuality is part of how I’m here to help awaken humanity.

Last week, I shared a raw and intimate piece about how I found the beauty of my own orgasm—right underneath the shame and self-judgment around “coming too quickly.”

In many ways, it felt like a “coming out” moment—an initiation into a deeper layer of my sexual and spiritual journey. I posted it publicly, received beautiful reflections from friends and community, and found myself in rich yet vulnerable and tender conversations. What struck me most was how grounded I felt in letting the conversation center around my sex life—and how deeply supported I felt by Kiki throughout it all.

Even though sex has been one of the most profound portals in my own awakening, I’ve spoken about it surprisingly little—either with friends or publicly. Somewhere inside, I was still holding onto stories that I wasn’t “expert” enough, that I hadn’t figured it all out, and so I disqualified the beauty of my own lived experience.

But something is shifting. I’m beginning to truly accept that my sexual journey from a 17-year-long sexless relationship to where I am today is not something to hide or downplay—it’s medicine. It’s a gift. And not only that, I’m seeing that I carry a unique lens: a way of understanding sex as a powerful mirror for our relationship to life itself. In fact, I’m beginning to see that my sexual and creative awakening are actually one and the same stroke — that as one part of me awakens so does the other.

This is the work I’m here to do. To speak the unspeakable. To make shame beautiful. To show that our pleasure, our longing, our vulnerability, and our messiness are all sacred threads in the tapestry of awakening. And as that truth settles in my body, I feel a new sense of purpose waking up inside me.

I healed a core abandonment wound in a plant medicine journey and reconnected with life—and with the divine—in the most profound way.

Plant medicine has been one of the most powerful teachers in my spiritual journey—something I’ve written about here and here, though still not nearly to the extent that it’s shaped and transformed me.

This past month, I had a journey that felt like a true miracle—an unwinding of a core abandonment wound from childhood that’s subconsciously shaped the background of my life for as long as I can remember. The healing moved through layers I hadn’t even known were there. Patterns decades in the making—of disconnection, self-protection, and subtle separation from life—came into view and began dissolving in the presence of deep love and awareness.

Words can’t quite capture the sacredness of the experience, and I intend to write more fully when it feels right. But for now, I’ll say this: I feel more here than I’ve ever felt. More connected to life. More able to receive the beauty that surrounds me. More attuned to the subtle moments where I check out or leave—and more able to gently welcome myself back home. It’s as if the loops in my mind have mostly ended.

I’ve long had the desire to write a guide for those new or deepening on the plant medicine path—one that weaves the frames and practices I’ve found most supportive. My experiences have been shaped by a fusion of modalities that have helped me meet the medicine with depth, presence, and reverence. If this kind of resource would speak to you, I’d love to hear from you.

I’m coming into a deeper understanding of what life is truly about.

Life, I’m realizing, is about welcoming beauty—and being so taken by beauty that we can’t help but offer our own into the world. When we truly receive the beauty around us, it moves through us. And the experience of that beauty? It is love.

This isn’t just a poetic idea. It’s becoming a living truth in my body.

Lately, I’ve been slowing down enough to really see the beauty that’s already here. In our morning tea ceremonies, I’ll often find myself in tears at the sheer miracle of Ember’s existence—that Kiki and I made this luminous being with her bright, awake eyes together. That she’s here, in our arms, in our life. Sometimes I look at her and feel like my heart is going to split open from the tenderness of it all.

Last week, during my Artist’s Date, I stood for an hour with a fir tree on a trail by our house. I let my gaze soften. I breathed. I felt the texture of its needles with my fingers and noticed how brilliant its color looked. I cried as I let it in. Not because anything was wrong—but because I finally slowed down enough to feel the sacredness that had always been there.

For so long, I believed that being and doing were in tension. That if I surrendered to being, I might stop creating. But now, I’m beginning to see that true creation only flows from being. When we allow ourselves to be penetrated by beauty—by the sheer wonder of life—we don’t have to force anything. Doing arises naturally. Creation becomes inevitable. It’s the same movement.

I’m learning to let go of figuring things out—and to meet the divine in the mystery.

I’m beginning to see that “figuring things out” is actually a suboptimal strategy, especially for living a soul-led life. When I slip into that mode, my awareness contracts. My breath shortens. My body tightens. And the solutions that arise from that place tend to be small—limited by the very mind that’s trying to control it all.

But when I let go of needing to know, something opens.

Since my recent plant medicine journey, I’ve been left with a clear somatic imprint of what it feels like to rest in the unknown—and to trust it. The mystery no longer feels like a void to be feared or solved. It feels like a place of contact. Of presence. Of communion with something far greater than myself.

The mystery, I’m discovering, is the divine.

And from that place, I create differently. I live differently. I trust differently. It’s become a compass for my soul’s expression—not by showing me exactly where to go, but by inviting me to keep stepping, even when I can’t see the path.

It reminds me of that scene in Indiana Jones—where he steps into what looks like a bottomless chasm, and the bridge rises to meet his foot only after he’s committed to the step. That’s how this season of my life feels. Like creation isn’t about expressing what I already know—but about knowing God through the very act of creating. Letting the invisible bridge rise to meet me, one surrendered step at a time.

I love being a papa so much.

I’m feeling the deep freedom of fatherhood.

Those might seem like surprising words. But in my lived experience, showing up for Ember has brought me into deeper connection with what’s true—and freed me from so many invisible stories that have quietly constrained my life.

There’s a story that the masculine needs to hold it all together, to stay grounded no matter what. But what I’m discovering is the opposite: the more I let myself fully feel the overwhelm—the more I allow myself to completely fall apart, rather than resist or brace against it—the more solid I actually become.

My body and nervous system are learning that overwhelm isn’t a signal of failure; it’s the mind’s story that something is too much. One of my teachers likes to say, “Don’t believe the story that there’s a struggle.” And when I show my body, again and again, that the thing I’m resisting is survivable, I discover a deeper ground than I’ve ever known.

In devoting more of my time and energy to sacred presence—whether during tea or simply being with Ember—I’m finding a clarity around my soul’s purpose that no amount of spinning at the computer has ever brought me. I’m listening more deeply. Receiving more. Creating more beauty with less effort.

Fatherhood, I’m realizing, hasn’t narrowed my life. It’s widened it. It’s invited me to root deeper into truth, into love, into the sacred now. And from there, everything else flows.