It opened on an ordinary morning, visiting my father back in Alaska. I stepped into the shower, and the sense of being a separate self, the persona I had spent years building as, simply dropped away. What was left was awareness without an edge. And underneath it, a creative potency with no content to it at all, a wordless knowing that I could exhale a cosmos into existence without effort. Not my creativity. The creativity itself, the thing underneath everything, and I was somehow made of it. Not a new idea. A direct encounter with the deeper pattern that had been underneath the whole life I was building.

What followed was not an escape from the world. It was a deeper investigation into the forces that shape it. Forty-five days later, with no plan, the business began reorganizing itself from a truer center: local sourcing, composting, candlelit yoga on the top floor of the club on Wednesday nights. I forced none of it. The signal had shifted at the source, and everything downstream rearranged to match. The through-line held. I was still doing what I had always done, bringing people together, only now from a place that was finally mine. Not long after, I handed the business off and walked.

Then came the years of study. Philosophy, psychology, cosmology, creativity, the origins of language and symbolic thought. I got obsessed with words, symbols, myth, and narrative, not as decoration, but as the actual materials human beings use to shape perception, identity, and world. What I kept finding was the thing I had sensed as a kid: reality is shaped first in the unseen, then in the choices and structures that give it form.

It did not come from books alone. I ended up in the rooms of some of the most consequential thinkers of the last century, Ken Wilber, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and others. I was usually the only one there who wasn't on payroll. I wasn't studying the work for its own sake. I was a builder, asking the same question every time: how do you actually apply this? That question became a practice and a philosophy I call Evolution by Intelligent Design, a living framework for how consciousness evolves through the realities we create and inhabit.

The understanding deepened through practice as much as thought, through yoga, breath, and intentional psychedelic exploration. Somewhere in there I built the first dedicated breathwork studio in the country. It was never the point. It was one more expression of the same impulse that started with a fish tank: bring people together, help them feel more alive.