What an Epic Adventure This Is

On fatherhood, presence, and the gift of meeting every moment fully.

Ember turns ten months old today. 🎉

When I sat down for tea ceremony this morning, I was dancing at the edges of my limit. Ember had woken in the middle of the night. I was tired. I could feel myself with less patience than usual when I fed her breakfast — a subtle bracing against life, a resistance to fully letting the moment in.

In my back, it felt like veins of tension in my shoulders. In my stomach, like a tight ball. My breath was shallow.

And I saw: the experience of being “at my limit” is really just a story. A story that arises whenever I am not present to the sensorial experience in my body.

As I sat in tea, I breathed into the veins, into the ball in my belly. I wrapped all the tightness in tender, loving awareness. And as I did, the story dissolved. The wall I had braced against opened into a doorway.

That’s the most beautiful gift fatherhood keeps giving me: the realization that what feels like “too much” is never a fixed boundary, but always an invitation to grow my capacity to be with what is.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to be fully in this chapter, to orient toward being a 50–50 parent as much as possible. Kiki says it’s generally more like 45–55, and that feels true. I’m not the primary caregiver, but I am close. Close enough that fatherhood is not something I dip into. It is my daily life, woven into the rhythm of naps, feedings, cuddles, middle-of-the-night wakings, laughter, and tears.

The choice not to work for this initial chapter of parenthood has meant that all of it is in my body, not a side role I drop into after “real life.” Fatherhood is the path itself. And choosing this way has created a no-exit experience: I can’t outsource presence or hand off my capacity to meet what’s real to my partner. I am met with every part of myself, every limit and every edge, and I have no choice but to be with it.

That is the gift. That is the path. And the capacity I’m growing here is already shaping the work I long to bring into the world.

We just came back from our first family camping trip, four days in a campervan, two of them with another family who is growing into close friends, part of our village.

Nearly every morning since Ember’s birth, Kiki and I have sat in tea together. But this was the first time we carried the practice into nature—to drink tea with mountains holding us, the trees steady around us, the ground rising to meet us. To feel the life force of the earth moving through my body, as though nature itself were another parent holding all three of us.

And in the middle of ceremony, a hummingbird visited three times, each time hovering close by Ember’s feet as if to bless her. The magic of it lingered in me. To witness Ember being imprinted not just by us, but by the earth itself — mountains, trees, wild creatures — felt like a divine connection.

This is part of what heals me most in fatherhood: to give Ember what I didn’t receive. My father was away on a business trip when I was born. My mother worked 364 days a year in our family store. Love was there, but presence was scarce. Cuddles, touch, afternoons of being held — those weren’t the imprints of my childhood.

On this trip, sitting in nature, it struck me how much presence, play, and contact Ember is wrapped in each day. How, in particular, her body is being imprinted with the knowing that masculine presence is here — reliable and devoted.

Ember’s nervous system is being shaped by something different than what I had. Two present parents. A growing village of attachment figures. A field of safety that teaches her she belongs here. And in teaching her that, I am teaching myself. My own inner child is learning, through her, that secure attachment to life itself is possible.

Last night, Ember woke screaming in the campervan. It was the middle of the night. Kiki hadn’t slept well for days. I could feel exhaustion in myself too. Still, I sat up, pressed Ember to my chest, and held her as she felt through her emotion.

And in that moment, in a van in the middle of the forest, the thought rose in me: What an epic adventure this is.

It wasn’t an idea. It was a pulse through my whole body. Awe that this, exactly this — tired, raw, tender — belongs to the adventure. Awe that nothing needs to be excluded. That every cry, every ache, every joy is part of it.

This morning in tea, when I breathed into the tight ball in my belly, that memory returned. And it brought me to tears: tears of gratitude that this is the capacity I’ve cultivated as a father. That in the middle of the night, holding my daughter’s screams against my chest, the thought that arose in me was "what an epic adventure this is."

And it’s not just fatherhood. It’s life. Every rupture with Kiki. Every edge of resistance. Every limit that dissolves into sensation. Every cry that melts into tenderness. Every silence that opens into awe. All of it can be held as part of life’s epic adventure, as life’s gift to me.

And how beautiful to see that choosing to experience life as an epic adventure is itself devotion. The greatest devotion I can offer to life is to meet it this way: fully, gratefully, and awake to its beauty.

Ten months in, I know this truth in my body: every moment of this life — messy, beautiful, exhausting, sacred — is part of the adventure.

Here’s to Ember’s ten months. And here’s to living it all as the epic adventure it truly is.