Tim Mathis's Blog, page 6

Seattle music history, by way of artists that I've behaved strangely around.

It would be hard to argue that it keeps up with the London’s and the New York’s of the world, but considered purely in terms of per capita impact, across the last three decades Seattle has to be recognized as one of the world’s musical epicenters - especially when it comes to the type of music that I like personally.

Still, when my wife Angel and I moved to Seattle in 2005, I never could have imagined how many amazing musicians I’d have the opportunity to behave strangely around.

Let’s back up.

Seattle’s music history is long. In the seedy old days, clubs in the Pioneer Square neighborhood set the context when the city wasn’t much more than a jumping off point to Alaska for loggers and miners. It was brothels and speakeasies and skid row and trouble set in a muddy wilderness paradise of mountains and the sea. The city’s European origins are a churn of immigration and itinerant sailors and desperate people seeking their fortune. In my own historical imagination anyway, it’s always had a sort of lowbrow chaotic energy that produces great music across the long gray winters when locals are forced to entertain themselves indoors. It’s hard to quantify, but the recipe is right there, and it has been for a long time.

The city has a park named after Jimi Hendrix, who was born there, and his life sized statue is one of the city’s most well-known landmarks. Ray Charles and Quincy Jones met as teenagers at the Elks Club on Jackson Street and did heroin together according to Jones, long before anyone knew much of anything about a Seattle sound.

Now let's skip ahead.

Grunge

The heyday of Seattle music hit exactly during my own teenage glory years - from 1991 - 1996 when musical tastes were being seared into my brain for life. Cable television finally reached my small town Ohio home and I was exposed to MTV during the fIrst season of the Real World, which was based in Seattle, and the city’s bands were on constant rotation: Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Hole, Mudhoney, Soundgarden.

Why did grunge happen as it did? I’m not sure. To me the music is the sound of bad weather and difficult economic times and probably heroin, which was Seattle in the late 80s and early 90s, but that was also the time that Microsoft was growing up and tech was bringing in resources, interest and hope. In 1992, Starbucks went public and was well on the way to becoming the world’s coffee McDonald’s, setting up new Seattle embassies across the country. The tumult of the early ‘90s saw a cultural transition away from the optimistic pop of the ‘80s towards gangsta rap and grittiness, and Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles gave gray, cool Seattle national exposure with cameos by Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. The city itself was notably and obviously on the cusp of significant change, and was at the epicenter of an internet revolution that was beginning to break into universal human consciousness. The music was a glimpse of a city that would be shaping the future.

Meanwhile, Seattle reached out to my own local music scene when Sub Pop, the Seattle record label that made grunge famous, signed Southern Ohio heroes the Afghan Whigs, who moved from Ohio to Seattle and developed into a core part of the early ‘90s alternative music rotation. I saw them at a legendary club called Bogarts when I was 16 in Cincinnati. I almost passed out from excitement and contact high during the show.

Nirvana had their time and deserve the attention they received, but Pearl Jam was my own favorite of the true Seattle grunge bands, and they’ve been the most enduring. They’re still making good records and Ten is still being shamelessly emulated by gravelly voiced hacks around the world. They’re also one of the few grunge-era bands that still hang around Seattle.

When we moved to the city, Angel and I bought a small unit in a cooperative building that looked a lot like the Coryell Courts Apartment from Singles, and was actually just around the corner from it. I’ve walked by the building hundreds of times. Living in the center of the city on Capitol Hill, across the years I personally experienced many of the places where Pearl Jam made their name. After their album Ten, they famously didn’t invest much into music videos and their relationship with MTV was never much better than sour, so the most famous video imagery associated with Pearl Jam all happened around Seattle in the early days of their career. Scenes of Eddie Vedder diving from speakers into a churning crowd in the video for Even Flow were recorded at the Moore Theater, which was part-owned by a doctor that Angel worked with while she was training to become a nurse practitioner. As a teenager, one of my most enduring music video memories was watching Vedder swing from rafters 30 feet in the air, defying death during a show at Magnuson Park, a spot just down the road from the hospital where I worked for a decade.

My cousin’s husband did some landscaping for Stone Gossard and said that he was a really nice guy.

I never met Stone, but I did run into Jeff Ament in a cafe near our place in Capitol Hill. He was eating with his family. Our friend was a bartender there, and told us not to stare but pointed him out. I turned my head, and I did stare, and I accidentally made eye contact. I jerked my head back around, looked down at my plate. It wasn’t a significant interaction for him I’m sure, but for me it was a taste of the rush to being acknowledged by a star and the crushing feeling in your chest when you suspect that they think you’re weird.

Christian

As a teenager, Tooth and Nail Records eventually became more important to me than Sub Pop. It’s a label with a strange but very American story. Based in Seattle, they were founded in 1993 by a guy named Brandon Ebel who recognized that Christian kids were thirsty for music that wasn’t praise and worship, and for a time, they signed every edgy band willing to be marketed in a Family Christian Bookstore. Like Sub Pop, Tooth and Nail exploded in culturally important ways, and when I had an ecstatic evangelical conversion at 16, the label became my world. It’s not too much to say that Tooth and Nail defined Christian youth culture in the ‘90s, and I joined millions of other young conservative Christians whose parents forced them to only listen to Christian music, or who wanted to differentiate themselves from their less faithful peers. For a time it seemed like Tooth and Nail signed bands regardless of talent, but they did support some really great artists: MXPX, The Juliana Theory, Starflyer 59, POD, Damien Jurado, Pedro the Lion. Those bands were how I defined my identity in my late teens.

I was a few years past my evangelical/Christian music phase when we moved to Seattle in 2005, but my first job in the city was at a warehouse where a lot of musicians worked. Maybe a lot of musicians work at all warehouses in Seattle, I’m not sure, but this particular place was full of people with peripheral connections to Tooth and Nail. For instance, a coworker who helped me remodel our bathroom played in a band with the lead singer from the Christian punk band Ninety Pound Wuss, and knew the girl who was the target of the MXPX song “Move to Bremerton.”

By that stage the label and the Christian music scene were both changing. Personally I’d mostly lost interest in that world, but I did continue to follow a musician named Dave Bazan, who was (and is) the lead singer of the former Tooth and Nail band Pedro the Lion.

Bazan was a Seattle guy himself, and had been an icon of late ‘90s Christian alternative music before abandoning his faith very publicly and releasing an album about it in 2009 called Curse Your Branches. It was very well received and debuted at #1 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart, but for me, the music felt very personal. He’d been in my headphones for hundreds of hours while I was studying in college, and he was losing faith and writing about it at a time when I was going through the same process years later.

Bazan was also friends and collaborators with another musician who I worked with at the warehouse, so I ended up at a table with him at a wedding reception. He was on his way out of religion publicly at that point, and I was on the same path. It was one of those moments that you picture as a fan, when you meet someone who has made a real difference in your life through their art. I was listening to his music on regular rotation and it meant so much to me, right in that moment.

What do you say though? He was there with his family. We’d never met before. How do you raise the topic of losing faith with a stranger at a wedding reception?

Hey, you have a cute baby. I love your music about your issues with alcohol and how there is no God. I have deep seeded issues with religion as well. Beautiful ceremony, eh?

When he introduced himself I didn’t even make eye contact. I pretended I didn’t know who he was. He talked to his wife and tended to his baby across the table while I sat wishing I could figure out how to start a conversation. I just talked to Angel. She must’ve known I was uncomfortable. We left after the cake.

The day after the Trump election I cried while I watched Bazan’s video about his daughter on my phone in that apartment that looked like the place from Singles. I wish I’d said the right thing and we’d become friends.

Post-Grunge

Grunge died, mostly, but through the early 2000’s Seattle continued to produce a stream of hard, grimy music with widespread influence. Pretty Girls Make Graves. Sleater-Kinney. Tacocat. Even if it isn’t what it was, Seattle still has a strong undercurrent of music tradition. The weather still sucks and plenty of people still struggle there. It all drives a lot of good, gritty rock.

Angel and I moved to the city when the culture was transitioning. Amazon had established itself in the warehouse district but it hadn’t eaten the inner city yet. It was still anxiety provoking to walk around the central neighborhoods at night. A guy killed one of our neighbors with an ax, and another person was stabbed at random outside of the first apartment we considered buying. Nowadays Capitol Hill is fully gentrified but at the time it was populated by a good number of actual weirdos.

I came to my own immersion in the post-grunge culture honestly. We moved to the big city to make something of ourselves. Angel graduated from the University of Washington as a nurse practitioner and succeeded. I didn’t really, especially at first. The job in the warehouse lasted for two years, so I spent a lot of time in the industrial part of the city across from a seedy hotel, packing bottles in boxes next to rock stars on their way up or their way down.

I worked briefly with a guy named Jeff Matts, who at the time played guitar in a band called Zeke, which had a big following. The only thing I remember saying to him when he mentioned that he played hardcore punk was “That’s awesome. I don’t really listen to that stuff.” He left the warehouse job when he joined the heavy metal band High on Fire. A few years later he won a Grammy.

Maybe the best post-grunge band to come out of Seattle were The Murder City Devils, who played a sort of garage horror punk and wrote great hooks. They were on hiatus when I started at the warehouse, and Spencer Moody, their lead singer, started work there around the same time as me. I knew who he was, peripherally, because my brother was a huge fan of their band, but I hadn’t listened to them much myself. They were popular mainly during my Christian music phase. Spencer’s aesthetic was ‘80s office worker who’s on the outs with his wife and slept in his car last night. He was a nice, funny guy, and I got to know him personally before I really got in to his music. We had drinks a few times. I gave him a shelf we weren’t using. I finally saw him perform live when The Murder City Devils played a packed reunion show and thought “Shit, this guy is a star.” He’s an electric performer. Nerdy, clever, and defiant, which embodies the best of what Seattle was in the ‘00s. It makes you view a person in a new light, seeing them on stage, and seeing people scream for them.

The musicians I met at the warehouse started to mean more to me as I latched on to that community while I was leaving religion. The music connected me back to my teenage identity prior to religion, and the more I appreciated their music, the more strangely I acted around them in person.

After Spencer left the warehouse, he briefly opened a small shop where he sold unusual odds and ends. I bought a signed photo of Glenn Danzig for my brother Shayne, because I knew he’d both like the photo and love knowing that it had come from Spencer’s shop. Shayne came to visit Seattle one weekend, and Spencer’s new band, Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive to Death, happened to be playing the night that he had to fly out. We went to the show but had to leave just after they performed so he could catch his flight. Spencer and the band were just sitting down as we were going, so I stopped to say goodbye and introduce my brother. They invited us to sit but I said that we couldn’t because my brother had a flight to catch, but I wanted to introduce him because he’d flown in from Ohio to see them.

“Really? You flew in to see us?!” Spencer seemed excited and flattered. The Murder City Devils were popular but Triumph of Lethargy was not on the same level.

I’m not sure why I said this but I told him, “No, not really.”

I don’t know why I left it that way. I’m not sure that I’ve talked to Spencer since then. He closed his shop and moved to Los Angeles. The Murder City Devils are playing regularly again so I’ll watch a YouTube video occasionally. It seems like Spencer’s doing well. He’s still nerdy and defiant, and he seems to laugh and joke a lot on stage.

Indie

Even after the decline of grunge, Seattle music has played a significant role in influencing other scenes. These days, the center of music culture in the Pacific Northwest is probably more Portland than Seattle. The city has had its own scene for years, but nowadays Northwestern musicians migrate south to Portland rather than north to Seattle because the cost of living is lower and the scene is more vibrant. One of the biggest bands to come out of the Portland scene in the last few decades is The Shins, and one of my Seattle musician friends ended up in the band.

Yuuki Matthews was the guy whose wedding I was at when I failed to become friends with Dave Bazan. We both started at the warehouse around the same time, and he was a great guy and a really talented musician. Even while he was working at the warehouse he was playing with a lot of talented people and at one of his shows we ended up backstage drinking free Rainier beers with Stereolab. Eventually he genuinely made it - touring with Sufjan Stevens and then joining The Shins, who he’s played with for what must be at least a decade now. I’ve seen him on TV a few times now - Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Fallon.

Yuuki wasn’t, and as far as I know still isn’t, a religious guy himself, but we fell out of touch around the same time that I left the religious world, and after his wedding. When I was leaving the church, I emailed to see if he wanted to get together. I told him I’d left the church and would try not to cry about it. I think we grabbed beers and have messaged a few times but we haven't really talked in years. Now what do I do? What do we have in common now, more than a decade later? We put bottles in boxes together. Part of me feels like that shared experience must mean something for my own future success, but I don’t know how much it means for ongoing relationships.

Emo

Death Cab for Cutie defined an era of indie rock and were maybe the last titanic band that grew up out of the old Seattle scene before people started moving to Portland. Proto-emo and genre-bridging, they have some spiritual overlap with Sunny Day Real Estate and Modest Mouse but have had wider influence than arguably any Seattle band besides Pearl Jam.

Ben Gibbard, the lead singer, still lives in Seattle and is a part of the trail running community there. He lived in our neighborhood and we’d run into him in various places, sometimes literally because Angel and I also got really into running for a time. At the Chuckanut 50k in Bellingham, Washington, I passed him on trail. I didn’t recognize him at first, but he told me he liked my buff. It was black and red. A Solomon rep had been giving them out before the race and he was wearing the same one. At the end of the race Angel out-kicked him to beat him by a few seconds. Later I wrote an article about Seattle culture for Trail Runner Magazine and he told a mutual friend to pass on that he liked it, which was flattering. I called him a hipster in the article, but he said he wasn’t offended.

The last time I’ve seen him was at a friend’s birthday party. I could’ve introduced myself and had an in, but instead I waited until he was talking to a friend, awkwardly interrupted their conversation and told the friend goodbye and hugged them, pretended not to notice him and left the party. Why? I don’t know, I just don’t know what to do with myself.

Just today I posted on Death Cab’s Facebook wall: “Foxglove through the Clearcut is a beautiful song!” Posting on a band Facebook wall - I’m not sure if this is how it’s received but it makes me feel like a weird uncle who comments on his niece’s friends’ posts.

“Looking good girls!”

Indie Folk

After Death Cab, a new wave of folksy Pacific Northwest indie rock grew up with connections to Seattle and Portland, embodied in bands like Fleet Foxes, The Head and the Heart, Band of Horses and The Cave Singers. For me, these types of bands sound like Seattle in the 2010s and the atmosphere of liberal culture in general during the Obama years - optimistic but oblivious white liberals without too many complaints. It’s a type of music that, to me, smells like pine needles and mist and a hint of smoked salmon.

My closest point of contact with this part of the scene was with a kid named John Van Deusen, the lead singer of a band called The Lonely Forest who had a couple of minor indie hits. They had an album produced by Chris Walla from Death Cab and he was a friend of a friend, and a really striking singer. I used a couple of connections to book him for a fundraiser I was coordinating for an AIDS nonprofit, and I was sure that we’d have a few hundred people in the audience. It was the first big event I’d ever organized, and in a lot of ways it was a failure. We only had about thirty people show up and it probably lost money in the end, which isn’t what you want for a fundraiser. John flew in at the last minute for the event from California, where his first niece had just been born. He was exhausted and expecting a crowd I’d guess. His performance was moving and he was gracious, but it wasn’t what I’d led him to expect it would be. He forgot his hat at the event, a yellow ballcap. I kept it in the trunk of our Corolla for months. It was a touch of celebrity and I thought maybe I’d give it back at some point, but I never did.

I found out the other day that he’s signed a contract with Tooth and Nail Records, so the circle is complete.

Hip Hop

Hip Hop in Seattle has always been an under-appreciated if admittedly small scene. Sir Mix-A-Lot was the first properly famous Seattle rapper, and his 1988 breakthrough “Posse on Broadway” was about the same street that all of those grunge guys would be hanging around a couple of years later. Broadway - it was just down the road from our place that looked like the Coryell Courts. Later, in the early 2000s, the Blue Scholars, THEESatisfaction and Shabazz Palaces made brilliant, if primarily critically appreciated music. D. Black made it as a producer and rapper locally in Seattle before converting to Orthodox Judaism and moving to Israel. Prior to the move he made an album with another guy I worked with at the warehouse - a rapper named B. Brown, It wasn’t a major commercial success but a lot of good things aren’t these days.

Ultimately Macklemore has been Seattle’s most popular hip hop export, which is maybe what the city is now. Not much grit but pulling from a history of grittiness? There’s no offense intended there. I used to work with his cousin and I like his music in that poppy kind of way. Before him, it had been a while since Seattle had produced a genuine pop star, and he’s probably the most visible Seattle artist working these days. It’s impressive that if you Google “Thrift Shop,” his song is on the first page of results. Imagine making a piece of art popular enough to supplant such a common thing. The US Census Bureau says that there are at least 25,000 thrift stores just in the United States, and he’s outranking all of them.

In 2012 I walked into our own local store - the since shuttered Capitol Hill Value Village. It was clear that something was off because the employees were noticeably more beautiful than normal. I went to the basement looking for a tennis racket, and I saw Macklemore sitting on a chair in an iconic fur coat, surrounded by cameras. I didn’t know it at the time but he was filming the video for Thrift Shop. It’s strange that they hadn’t even closed the store for the shoot but he hadn’t won any Grammys yet and he was still mostly a local artist. I recognized him, but what do you do in that situation? I pretended I was just browsing and that everything was normal. I confirmed that there were no viable tennis rackets and walked away. As far as I know, I didn’t draw any attention or actively make him feel uncomfortable. Maybe I’m getting better.

The Future

It’s hard to know where Seattle music will end up in the future. The city has a lot of things going for it, but some of the same economic factors that make it a good place to live and work are undermining its ability to support the type of music and arts scene that it had in the past. The city has hit a No Mans Land of size and affordability. Lots of people have moved south to Portland for cheaper rent, or to Los Angeles or New York for better opportunities. Death Cab is still making pretty good music but it’s been thirty years since Singles.

Let’s be honest though, I’m not 25 anymore either. Whatever happens, I’m not going to be in the middle of it. We still have a place in Tacoma, but I’m not off Broadway anymore and my immersion in the music scene is virtually nonexistent. Seattle has moved on, and it’s moved on without me. I haven’t hung out with someone in a band in a decade.

Still, I did see Dave Matthews jogging not long ago and startled him when he passed. I slowed down to stare and inadvertently exclaimed “Hey!” as he tried to live his life.

Like these stories? Read these books.

The Hero’s Journey: Narrative therapy to write yourself out of a dark black hole.

This is not about me, it’s about you, but I will start with a bit of a personal history.

I’m someone who writes compulsively, even when I don’t have a conscious reason. Why? I don’t know. I just do.

But I’ve known for a while that writing does help me think, in particular when life is hard or complicated or miserable. When I went through a period of struggle with the religion I was raised with, writing a memoir was the path that eventually showed me the way out. After my father’s death, months of journaling was how I sorted out what life would look like after he’d passed. Then after the 2016 election when the US stopped making sense to me, I spent months putting thoughts and emotions into a blog until I had a new understanding of what my country was about.

Putting the world into a coherent order - into a story, I guess you could say - is a compulsive need for me. It makes things seem like they're under control. It makes you feel like you have a plan.

In short, it’s therapeutic.

What does writing your story do? Writing as self-therapy.

When I trained as a psychiatric nurse, and started working with people in crisis, I learned that I’m not the only one who thinks this way. I’m not the only one who does best when I’m able to organize my life into a story that makes sense to me. It’s a pretty darn universal need, actually.

In fact, storytelling is the way that humans think. Being able to organize your experience into a coherent story is exactly the same thing as being able to find sense and meaning in it.

Writing your story helps you decide what steps that you need to take next, allows you to share your experience in a way that others will intuitively understand, and gives you a concise, powerful tool to connect and affect change in your community. It allows you to integrate difficult events into your larger experience, and it allows you to parse out the meaning and significance of the things you go through. It’s a simple kind of magic.

And as I more or less sorted out on my own, it turns out that writing is particularly useful for people who are learning to cope with difficult, complicated or traumatic experiences. There’s a whole area of counseling called ,Narrative Therapy devoted to this dynamic. It’s been used to support soldiers returning from war, victims of family violence, and people who’ve experienced childhood trauma, but you don’t have to have gone through ‘Nam to benefit from the process. Writing your story is useful for anyone who’s processing troubling experiences.

We’ll get into a bit of why this is shortly, but first let’s quickly talk about a story structure called The Hero’s Journey.

The optimal way to write your story: The Hero’s Journey

There are a lot of different ways that you could shape your story, but there is a particular, simple, familiar type of story structure that it helps to use as a template when you’re processing something hard, according to a good number of Narrative Therapists and researchers.

It’s called The Hero’s Journey.

It goes something like this, in my own gross simplification:

A person is living their normal life. An event occurs that pulls them into a challenge. That is, something bad or hard happens. They face down the difficult task, and identify internal and external resources to overcome it. Friends and mentors help. Eventually they make it through. Afterwards, they “go back home” - they go back to reality changed by this experience and its aftermath.

You may have heard of it. You definitely know of examples that follow the structure. Harry Potter. Star Wars. Finding Nemo. The Little Mermaid. Black Panther. Thousands more.

Joseph Campbell, who originally came up with the structure in his book The Hero With 1000 Faces, identified it in a variety of classic myths and stories, and called it “a vast and amazingly constant statement of the basic truths by which man has lived throughout the millennia of his residence on the planet."

It’s bold to suggest that you’ve identified a Universal Truth but it’s hard to deny that Campbell was on to something.

In any case, the great news is that this structure is simple, familiar, and easy to learn. Anyone can use it to shape their own story, which means that anyone can use it to process life's challenges. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first, a bit more background.

What’s going on here? The Hero’s Journey narrative as a self-therapy hack.

I think that the Hero’s Journey is such a common and useful structure because, stated simply, it is a model that describes each step in the universal human process of overcoming challenges. You’re just living your life. Something unusual and difficult happens forcing you to deal with a problem. You figure out how to deal with it, usually with some help from your friends and mentors, using some of your own skills and building new ones along the way. You make it through - whatever that means. Then you cope with life afterwards and integrate what you learned from the experience, a changed person.

Simple right? A familiar template for human experience. I’m almost sure that you can immediately identify a dozen personal examples of problems you’ve dealt with that you could fit into this model. Even getting out of bed and confronting the problem of a boring day with nothing to do requires you to move through the process above. Also having your leg blown off by a landmine. Or losing a loved one in a car accident. Or being falsely imprisoned. Or figuring out how to cope after you lose the big game.

If the Hero's Journey is simple and familiar, why do you need to think about it?

The thing is, when you’re trying to manage a real problem, or dealing with the aftermath of some kind of trauma - a car crash, the death of someone you love, a major public humiliation - it’s not guaranteed at all that you will move through all of the steps of the Hero’s Journey naturally. Or at least you won’t necessarily immediately recognize that you have.

In other words, just because you have a problem, it doesn’t mean that you will actually solve it.

A key driver of mental distress is that people get stuck on the bit where something bad happens. They continuously ruminate on it. They worry that it’s going to happen again. They feel like their life is ruined as a result. They contemplate suicide because they can’t imagine living with the aftermath of the bad thing. The wallow in the shame of it all. Sometimes they get stuck in coping patterns to deal with their stuck-ness that cause more bad things to happen, compounding their issues.

Those kinds of unresolved experiences can suck you into a black hole.

Or more accurately, not knowing how to think about those types of experiences can suck you into a black hole. Failed coping can turn one problem into a lifetime of other problems.

The bad news? Those kinds of experiences will come up eventually for everyone. While some

people are definitely presented with more than their fair share of life’s struggles, all of us at some point will deal with something terrible.

The good news? These are the kinds of situations where being intentional about writing your story through the Hero’s Journey structure helps. Wiring your brain to put your problems through the grinder of the Hero’s Journey helps you to get your shit straight in the short term, and to build resilience across the long term.

The other good news? Anyone can do this, with any problem.

You may want to know how to do this at this point, but first this:

Why Has Narrative Therapy landed on the Hero’s Journey?

A lot of reasons, but I’ll list a few simple ones.

The Hero’s Journey structure externalizes the problem. It recognizes that any problem to deal with - while you may well contribute to it - is not an essential part of who you are. Or, at least, it’s a problem that you have internal and external resources to manage. It forces you to identify your own coping skills and the people who can help you. Those are essential parts of the story - right? How you make it through, and who and what helps? It has a “make it through” step which identifies that a problem - or at least a problem in its current iteration - is not forever. Or your way of coping with the problem or thinking about the problem is not forever. Transformation is possible - both personal and situational. It forces you to think about what it means to “come back home.” How do you get back to life reckoning with this difficult experience? What does it look like to get back to normal? Where does this problem fit in your life now? How are you changed, and how have you grown? Finally, the Hero’s Journey is perhaps the most common structure that humans use - normally unintentionally - to tell stories. Having your own experience in this form gives you a way to share it with other people in a way that they’ll understand. Sharing with other people in a way that they’ll understand is, itself, crucial for healing.

When you go through a bad experience - even a very bad experience - and shape it in to the Hero’s Journey on paper, and in your mind, it naturally helps you deal with it more healthily. It doesn’t erase the problem, but it naturally shapes it into something productive.

How can you do this? How can you write your own Hero’s Journey?

Okay, so, after all of that, here’s Hero’s Journey 101.

If you have gone through an experience that is still troubling you, or are trying to figure out how to manage a situation and its aftermath, you can plug your challenge into the Hero’s Journey template as a way to begin to process it and make sure that it’s something you manage and grow from rather than something that gets you stuck.

How? It’s not easy, but it is simple.

Here it is: the exercise:

Step 1: Identify your problem.

Step 2: Go somewhere that you can focus.

Step 3: Write out the answers to the following questions, as thoroughly as you can.

What were you doing before the event occurred? How did you get drawn in to the experience? What were the key challenges that you faced: Physical, emotional, personal, spiritual? How did you overcome them? What internal tools did you use? Who helped? What else helped? Describe the moment when you knew the challenge had passed. What has life looked like after the experience? How is it impacting you now? How have you grown?

That’s it.

That’s the whole process.

After you’ve answered those questions, you’ve essentially written your story. If you want to share it with other people, you might take some time cleaning it up, connecting the dots, and inserting some flowery language, but if you can answer all of those questions and put the information in a coherent order, you have the structure and material of your Hero’s Journey. It’s a struggle you’ve faced, and the path you found (or are finding) through it.

The good thing is that you can potentially complete a first draft of your story in thirty minutes. The more complicated thing is that if you really want to dig in, you could spend years turning all of this into a memoir. This process is, in fact, how a lot of people write memoirs. Don't let that turn you off though. Memoirs are great.

Some pro tips:

Writing your story can be painful and infuriating if your emotions are still raw from the experience that you’re writing about. Remember that you don’t have to do this now if you don’t want. More insight is likely to come later when things don’t feel so fresh anyway.

Also, if you’re dealing with a situation that’s still active, those last two questions might not seem answerable. In this case, it’s valuable to allow your imagination to guide you. If it feels like the problem is still active, ask yourself what it would mean for the challenge to pass, and how it will look and feel when it does. It’s good to examine different possibilities.

(“Getting through,” by the way, might not mean that the problem has gone away. It might just mean that you’ve learned how to live with it or grow from it.)

Then, ask yourself what your life will look like afterwards. How do you want your life to look afterwards and how can you make sure you get there? Again, consider different possibilities and paths.

If you’re someone who gets down on yourself easily, resist the temptation towards negative spins. It’s important to identify the problem, the role that you played in it, and the significant impact that it has had on your life, but it’s also important to recognize the points of strength which will get you through. All humans have them, including you.

You’re a hero. It’s fine. Accept it.

By moving through this process, you’ve just turned your problem into a story. You’ve just proven that it is just one part of who you are, and that it’s a part of your experience that you’ve managed (maybe well, maybe not) and that you will grow from and move through in some way in the future. You’ve identified your own strengths and your own agency in the face of difficult circumstances, and you’ve identified the people who are important to you. You still have crap to deal with, but you’ve leveled up. You’ve asserted a degree of control over your experience.

If you have written before, you’ll know that no story is ever finished. This is particularly true with very bad experiences. If you write the story of this same event again tomorrow, you will almost definitely write it differently. This is a good thing and a good exercise to repeat. You may look at the same event dozens of times, or the same problem from dozens of angles. We all go through bad experiences that shape us. Writing their story doesn’t make them not bad, but it does help you to chart a path through and to identify the variety of ways that you can grow as a result.

It’s also, by the way, a great exercise to share with other people. Publicly, anonymously on Reddit, with the people you’re closest to, or with your cat. Sharing isn’t essential but it can be a big part of the impact and can make a story seem more real, somehow.

And yeah, whatever, that is the advice that I’ll conclude this tutorial with.

Write your story and go tell your cat about how you’re a hero.

—

If you do this exercise, and want to do something with your story, or talk to someone about it, let me know. I’m happy to talk to you about it - wearing either my mental health nurse hat or my writer hat.

Also, if you have questions or feedback about this process, I’d also love to talk about that. I’m learning still myself, and I’d love to hear how these things are landing. Does it help? Does it make sense? Is it crap? Let me know. Shoot me a message on the About page.

This is another very helpful article about Narrative Therapy and The Hero's Journey, written by a trauma counselor.

Or, if you're keen for a funny, painful book-length example of what processing through a Hero's Journey looks like in practice, I Hope I Was Wrong About Eternal Damnation was the product of my own narrative therapy process, even if I didn't realize it when I was writing.

The Old Dogs of Olympus

In Greek mythology, there were a lot of monsters, heroes, and deities, but the most important were the 12 gods of the Pantheon who congregated on Mt. Olympus. Zeus was the king of the gods, and he was the first to colonize the peak, but a dozen others also eventually set up their thrones there: Artemis, Apollo, Athena, Poseidon, Aphrodite, the whole crew. I don’t know exactly why Zeus chose Olympus, but it is the highest mountain in Greece so one could assume that it’s a great spot to hole up, reign over your kingdom, and hurl an occasional lightning bolt when your enemies piss you off.

The thing is, Olympus wasn’t just some imaginary heavenly kingdom - it’s an actual mountain, sitting, waiting to be climbed by anyone who wants to see for themselves what the gods’ throne room looks like. Some academics question whether the ancients themselves ever made it to the summit, but personally, I’d guess that they probably did. There are stories from antiquity about pilgrimages up the mountain, and there’s archeological evidence that humans were near the peak as early as 500 BC. If the Greeks built the Parthenon in Athens without modern technology, surely they could have figured out how to get to the top of Olympus. It’s not an easy trip, sure, but it’s also not terribly difficult as far as mountaineering goes. These days, there’s a route to the main summit, Mytikas, which thousands of people follow every year. The ancients didn’t have the modern infrastructure, but in the thousands of years that the Olympians were worshiped, surely the legendary throne room of the gods would’ve drawn at least a few brave pilgrims?

—

It’s been a long time since anyone worshiped the Greek Pantheon - the last cult probably died out in the 8th century AD - but Mt. Olympus itself is still there, proud as ever, just an hour’s commute from Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city.

My own pilgrimage to Olympus was only lightly planned, and I arrived through a roundabout series of events. Shortly after the world began to emerge from the Covid lockdowns, my wife Angel and I were invited to a friend’s wedding in Athens. It was our first time traveling in years, so we decided to take some time to explore Greece prior to the event. Looking for places to visit other than insanely popular tourist spots like Santorini and Mykonos, we decided to base ourselves in Thessaloniki for a few days at the beginning of our trip. When I was doing some research about outdoor activities in the area, I made the connection that Olympus National Park was just a short distance away, and you could get to the summit on an overnight hike.

Angel had things to do in the city, so the day after we arrived, I was on my own, jet lagged on a train to a town called Litochoro at Olympus’s base. From there I would catch a taxi to Prionia, the highest point that you can reach by car, and I would start my ascent.

Emerging from a period of lockdown, disease and despair, an old school pilgrimage to the top of a holy mountain seemed like a great way to shake off the dust of the previous two years. Even if I only ended up there because it was convenient, and even if I wasn’t seeking any explicit wisdom from the gods, a place like that intrigues you. It’s a bit like a haunted house at night or the alter call at a faith healer’s service. There’s a pull to it, and an expectation that you’re going to find something important, or at least interesting, even if the official line is a bit dubious.

You can see the peak from Prionia, but only in the distance. The town itself, if you can call it that, is really just a parking lot, a surprisingly decent cafe, a public restroom and a Greek Orthodox monastery. My taxi arrived at mid-day and dropped me off in a crowd of milling tourists, busloads of Americans and Brits stopping to use the restroom, walk a quarter mile to a frankly uninspiring waterfall, and say that they’d stood on Mt. Olympus.

This was my first time climbing to a throne room of the gods so I had packed cautiously, despite reports that the refuge where I’d be staying was a proper hostel. I’d booked online and I’d read that there was WiFi. a credit card machine, cooked dinner, and beer. Still, it’s hard to get over the American impulse to carry your tent, sleeping bag and gear when you’re headed to the mountains. I headed in overpacked but well prepared if I got stuck out in a storm or an attack by the Titans.

It was late May, the sun was shining, the air was warm and dry. and I had already been enchanted by Greece. It was only day two of our trip but I was already in love with the country’s beauty, its delicious food and its organized chaos. Our first dinner had been a perfect pile of spiced meat, and breakfast had been a revelatory orange cake, soaked in some blend of syrup and cocaine, I’d guess, given the dopamine rush that it triggered. When I’d arrived at the transportation office in Thessaloniki to purchase my ticket that morning, the attendant had told me confidently that I’d already missed my train, despite being 20 minutes early. When I arrived in Litochoro, the first taxi driver I approached told me that Prionia was much too far from the station so it was impossible to get a ride there. I knew that neither was remotely true so somehow the misinformation came off as charming and provided me with a couple of quick victories over adversity before I’d even started my climb.

It was an easy day to enjoy - this first overseas outing in years - and the initial stage of the hike felt idyllic. It was only a few hours from Prionia to the refuge so I moved along leisurely, the mountain’s palette of warm greens, browns and grays triggering memories of the Pacific Crest Trail through the Trinity Alps in Northern California. By the time I passed a line of mules and their singing shepherd a mile from the refuge, I would’ve been an easy convert to the religion of the Greek Pantheon, despite the fly-swarmed piles of mule poo that littered the route the rest of the way.

I arrived at the refuge by mid-afternoon, Spilios Agapitos. It was just as advertised - 100 beds distributed through multiple structures of gray stone and dark wood perched on a hillside, with forest and peaks all around. I swiped my credit card, ordered a Mythos lager and sat down on a bench with a view of the valley below. After years in a bubble, it felt surreal to be surrounded by travelers again. We were still in Greece, but as is often the case in hostels, most people who’d arrived before me seemed to be speaking Germanic languages - Dutch and Deutsch and a smattering of accented English, although I didn’t recognize any other native English speakers until I heard an Australian shouting and cursing later in the evening, as Australians do.

It was a bit surprising because we were well into the mountains, but like so many other hostels around the world, there were also a couple of dogs who seemed to be making a living by begging scraps off of travelers. Jetlag, beer and a day in the sun were catching up with me, so I was happy to socialize mainly with them through the afternoon. I had the house spaghetti for dinner, shared a meatball with a brown mutt with sad eyes, and was asleep in bed by 7 pm.

—

In the darkness of the bunkroom, I was wide awake from midnight until 2, and then again at 4. I passed some time reading until 5 when I decided that I should start climbing at first light. My plan was to work my way to the summit, and then follow the downhill trail all the way back to Litochoro rather than catching the taxi from Prionia. Leaving early would give me plenty of time to make the 15 mile round trip before the train back to Thessaloniki in the afternoon.

After the refuge, there are only a couple of miles to the top of Olympus but it’s not a quick hike. You pass above tree line shortly after the refuge, into spectacular open views of snowfields and scree and peaks all around, but also full exposure to sun and the elements. The previously well-graded trail shifts to a steep uphill grind before eventually developing into a scramble at Mytikas, where the hostel highly recommended that climbers wear helmets. It’s not a roped or technical climb, but it’s a steep and exposed route where rockfall is common and a fall could be fatal.

Thirty minutes into the climb, as the sun was still rising, I recognized the silhouette of my friend ahead on the trail, the brown mutt from the refuge.

“Good on ‘er,” I thought. Out for her daily constitutional.

She carried on ahead, staying within sight, occasionally looking back towards me.

The view behind me was broad and open, all vast snow fields and jagged grey rock. If the first segment of trail had reminded me of the Trinity Alps, here there were shades of the High Sierra, with bare peaks jutting out of forests of scrubby pine for miles.

After a few more minutes of hiking, I noticed another pair of dogs making their way towards me from the direction of the refuge - both shepherd’s builds, that standard mean size that all street dogs seem to regress to, white with black spots. They gradually made their way to me and fell in behind at a lazy trot, barely panting while I struggled along.

The trail developed into a path through scree up a steep incline, until we made it to a small flat ledge where a couple of hikers were resting, accompanied by another dog with colorings reminiscent of an Australian Shepherd, long white and blue fur, appearing clean, relaxed and well-groomed given the environment here near the summit of Olympus.

I dropped my back, put my feet up and caught my breath. Olympus isn’t the tallest mountain in the world, but by that point we were above 9000 feet which is enough altitude to affect you when you’ve come from sea level.

“These dogs must do this every day, huh? If they’re begging for scraps they’re earning it.”

I ate a chocolate-covered wafer cookie, drank some water and carried on. The brown mutt stayed behind with the other hikers, and the three shepherds and I took our place at the head of the day’s climbing pack. The sun was shining, we were surrounded by a panorama of Olympian peaks, and there was no one else between us and the summit.

—

In Greek mythology, wolves are most often associated with Apollo and Artemis, both of whom are Pantheon gods whose thrones were believed to be close by, here on Olympus. The two were siblings, born to Zeus and Hera, a goddess who herself had the ability to shape shift into a wolf. Artemis and Apollo were largely benevolent gods, and Apollo’s wolves in particular were seen as the good guys, whose job it was to ward off evil.

Wolves are also associated with a guy named Lycaon, which gives a less positive impression. Lycaon was a wiley king who tried to trick Zeus into eating a roast baby to test whether he was all-knowing. Zeus transformed into a man-wolf when he sorted it out. That’s a strange way to behave, and it does make you wonder whether these Greek dogs are friends or foes?

Those mixed feelings matched up to my own previous impressions about the types of dogs you encounter when you’re traveling. Generally speaking, in my experience dog temperaments tend to match to the culture of their country of origin. In a place like New Zealand, for instance, which is one of the friendliest places in the world, you’d be hard pressed to convince a dog to bite you even if you put your hand in its mouth and yanked on its tail. In inner city Lima, Peru, on the other hand, I once stayed in a house whose neighbors kept a guard dog on the unfinished second floor that I saw eating glass. When we’d walk past the house, it would leap into the air in a frenzy, smashing window panes with it’s face, then chewing the remaining shards from the frame with its teeth.

I hadn’t been in Greece long enough to make judgements, but so far these dogs seemed fine. The previous night they’d been harmless enough at the hostel - friendly and begging politely. They didn’t look much like wolves. They were cute, even, although petting them did leave my hands smelling a bit musky, like earth, sulfur and compost. Here, with just us and the mountain ahead, it started to feel like we were forming a relationship.

The steep climb tops out at a crossroads on a ridge called Skala, where hikers have a choice to turn left towards a secondary peak called Skolio, which is a much easier walk, or right towards Mytikas and, one can assume, the glorious throne of Zeus. While I was admiring the scenery, two of the three remaining dogs trotted off to the left towards Skolio. I turned right on the trail towards Mytikas, a lone white companion following behind.

Your vision towards Mytikas is blocked through most of the climb, but on the ridge at Skala, the wind picks up and you reach the edge of a precipitous cliff with panoramic views of crags, valleys, and a scattering of the 52 sub-peaks of Olympus. The day was clear and beautiful, but to be honest, the view ahead was ominous. From the ridge, the peak that’s said to house Zeus’ throne looked worthy of the distinction. It was a thousand feet of sheer cliff rising from the valley below. The route to the top was visible in the distance, crawling along a razors edge of jagged rock that dropped off into an abyss on either side. It’s only a quarter mile from Skala to the summit, but it looked like an exposed scramble the entire way.

Now I was on my own on the ridge with just the dogs of Olympus. I could see two of them in the distance looking on from the trail to Skolio while I started to downclimb on the route towards Mytikas. I looked back at my lone remaining companion perched on a ledge above me. She might have seemed feral and dirty if she were on the streets in Thessaloniki but here in the mountains she was a graceful messenger of the gods.

She held intense eye contact for a moment, eyes dark and wise, then blinked and turned back. I hesitated while I watched her work her way back towards Skolio, hopping confidently across rocks and scree.

The idea that gods inhabit the tops of mountains isn’t by any means unique to the Greeks. Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus all have similar stories. In Maori culture, there’s an understanding that you shouldn’t go to the top of these kinds of places without a clear purpose, or maybe even at all, because they’re sacred - Wahi Tapu. To stand on the top of a mountain is to stand on the head of an ancestor. I hadn’t brought a helmet to cover my own head, despite lugging loads of unnecessary gear to the refuge. I imagined descending Mytikas through the line of other hikers who were working their way up Olympus behind me. I imagined rockfall, thunder and lightning crashing down around me for effect.

I’d come to climb to the true summit, but in that moment something felt poetic about abandoning that plan to follow the dogs’ lead to Skolio. If the ancients didn’t make it to the top of Mytikas (and who’s to say?), maybe neither should I? Besides, I was here in this rare situation, on my own, communing with these modern descendants of Apollo’s wolves. I shouldn’t take that experience for granted, and I should recognize their presence as the omen that it is. They were there trying to help me, warding off evil.

Also, let’s be honest, I’m afraid of heights and I was sketched out by the route.

“Screw it,” I mumbled to myself. I decided to follow the dogs.

I abandoned the path towards the razors edge, scrambled back up the rock, and chased the shepherd until we joined with the others back at the crossroads. It wasn’t a long walk to Skolio and the dogs trotted alongside, allowing me to photograph them posing on the edge of cliffs and gazing out over their kingdom. When we arrived at the summit cairn at Skolio they laid down and I sat with them, looking out over Mytikas, feeling content that this was the vantage point from where I’d view it. For a moment I felt like Apollo, god of wolves, expressing my respect for my father Zeus with my pack of wolf familiar.

To celebrate reaching a summit, even if it wasn’t Mytikas, I dug through my pack and pulled out a few snacks - gummies and a sandwich, just like Apollo, I’d imagine.

Recognizing the rustling, the dogs stood and began to creep towards me, two ahead and one behind. I was sitting, vulnerable, so our faces were at about the same height. While they’d been protectors a moment ago, their affect had shifted. They were snapping at each other now, jostling for position, growling, hair raised on their shoulders. Looking in my eyes once again, the beautiful shepherd raised her upper lip, bearing her teeth. I’d previously read her dark eyes as wise. Now all they communicated was menace.

I threw a hunk of sandwich over their heads as a tribute while I scrambled to my feet. The dogs turned away, jostling over the food and suddenly disinterested in me. Our friendship was over and my moment as god of the wolves had passed.

I started back down the hill, my hands shaking. After they’d finished their snack, the old dogs of Olympus kept their station, patrolling the ridge at Skala as other climbers made their way up the trail with helmets and sandwiches of their own.

—

Off the ridge, out of view of Mytikas, the visions of thunder and lightning, rockfall and angry wolves passed from my mind. The hike down was all nice views and a fast descent, passing lines of walkers complaining about the climb. I was at the refuge by 930, less than an hour after I left the dogs at Skolio. I gathered my things, ordered a coffee and made it back to the cafe in Prionia by noon.

On the Pacific Crest Trail I made a firm commitment to always eat restaurant food when it is an option on a hike, so at Prionia I had some fries and a cappuccino. After I drank the first I ordered another. As I was sitting, listening to the accents around me and once again absorbing the strange feeling of being back in an international environment, I noticed the brown mutt from the refuge, miles from home. She was lying splayed on her stomach under an Israeli couple’s table, head on the ground, relaxed. She didn’t even raise her head to acknowledge me.

From Prionia the trail to Litochoro is only 7 miles, mostly downhill. I left the brown mutt and the cafe, and I headed away.

This section of trail traces along a river and passes a series of waterfalls, as well as the monastery of St. Dionysios and several shrines. Greece is one of the most actively religious Christian nations in the world and Orthodox infrastructure has long since replaced anything dedicated to the old gods, here at the base of their mountain. I passed a lone monk dressed in a full black robe and a skull cap, with a long white beard, impressive as Zeus. He blessed me in English.

The trail is beautiful but it punishes you at the end, and in the final 5 kilometers prior to Litochoro it shifts from a steady, pleasant downhill to a series of steep ups and downs. My pace slowed and the type of weather I’d been worried about on the summit began to close in. The sky turned dark and I could see flashes of lightning back towards the mountain. Thirty minutes walk from town, hail started to fall and I had to shelter under a grove of trees.

Is there any reason the ancients picked Mt. Olympus? Nobody’s worshiped the Pantheon gods for millenia, but is there anything to the old myths?

Huddled under a tree at the mountain’s base, pelted by hail, looking back at lightning crashing around the summit, I thought about those kinds of questions.

The thing is that it’s hard to provide anything but a subjective answer, and the question itself is a bit silly. You might as well ask if those were actually Apollo’s wolves.

Of course not, but who cares?

The fact is that even if gods do come and go, Olympus is still there.

It’s as impressive as ever, with its old dogs watching over.

---

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Everything I need to know about New Zealand’s pandemic response I learned in a bar in 2018

New Zealand has always been known for its pretty face, but during the Covid pandemic the country's personality finally started to get the recognition it deserves because its public health response was among the best in the world. Photos of Kiwis packing into unmasked concerts and rugby matches circulated across the locked-down planet because their border management prevented the virus from getting a foothold until literally 95% of the population had been vaccinated. New Zealand’s excess death rate actually went down in 2020 as the pandemic raged, and to this day the country has among the lowest Covid mortality rates in the English speaking world.

You can talk about luck and geographic isolation and social cohesion and Jacinda Ardern’s communication style, but personally I learned everything I need to know about why things shook out as they did in a bar in Wellington in 2018, a year before the pandemic.

The bar was called Hashigo Zake, which is a Japanese phrase that translates roughly to “pub crawl” but literally means “Liquor ladder,” which is better, isn’t it? To get there, my wife Angel and I entered through a nondescript door tucked among the downtown high rises, and walked down a narrow stairwell to the literal (if not quite figurative) underground bar. The space was ebony paint and stained wood and dim lights, which matched the standard Wellington weather outside - windy, grey and raining. I shouldn’t dwell on the dark though because I don’t want to accidentally set a noir atmosphere. It was a fun night. Angel and I were touring for a couple of months, meeting a friend who happened to be in town for a work training. Ben, let’s call him. (I’ve changed all of the names in this story - not because I have anything bad to say about anyone, but because it seems like the polite thing to do.) We knew Ben from a church we’d attended years before in a university town called Dunedin, when we were passing out of our evangelical phase. That’s a different story, but we hadn’t seen him in years.

At 7 pm, the bar was full of Wellington hipsters in full regalia - the town is the try-hard casual Portland of the South Pacific - but when Ben sat down, he was objectively the best looking person in the room, even in jeans and a plain t-shirt straight out of a day of boring work meetings. Ben is a gorgeous human being, personally, yeah, but I’m talking about his physical looks at the moment. Smooth caramel skin and dark hair and eyes. A square jaw and an easy smile. A rock climber’s tall, triangular frame, narrow waist, bulging biceps with veiny, toned forearms. When he and his wife visited us in Seattle in the early 2000s, we lived in the center of a historically gay neighborhood, and Ben literally turned heads, men gasping and clutching their chests when he walked by. He’s Maori and Pakeha - a blend of Polynesian and European genetics that proves objectively that eugenics was a terrible idea.

I’m not trying to do a Paul Gauguin thing and fetishize Polynesian bodies. I just want to explain why it seemed normal when I immediately noticed that Ben was being ogled. We were sitting with our craft IPAs or Pilsners or whatever, and Ben’s back was turned to the room when two men sat down at a table across the way - a tall, handsome redhead and a young, fit man of Asian descent, both well-dressed and appearing affluent. The redhead noticed Ben and stared, smiling and whispering to the man who I assumed to be his partner.

It seemed forward when the men stood and approached our table, but Ben has that effect.

“Ben, I think you’re going to get hit on again.”

“Huh? What?”

Ben turned. His eyes lit up, a smile spread across his face, and I imagine that the guys’ hearts fluttered.

“Hey! Chris! Yang! What are you doing here?!”

“We live here! What are you doing here?!”

The three hugged, slapping each others backs in that funny way that you do with old friends, and explained that Chris was Ben’s brother in law. Yang was Chris’s partner and they’d all known each other for years.

We invited them to join us and we started to acquaint ourselves. We explained that we were visiting from the States and spending a few months exploring the North Island. Chris explained his job, as you do when you meet people for the first time, but I have to admit that I don’t remember what he did. It’s nothing against him, really, it’s just that Yang’s work stories far overshadowed his own.

“I’m a scientist,” Yang said, “I guess I have a pretty cool job. I make sure that New Zealand’s kilogram doesn’t gain or lose any weight.”

Yang explained that somewhere deep within the bowels of a nondescript government building in Wellington, there is a lump of metal in a jar that weighs exactly one kilogram. It’s kept in a vacuum and is rarely handled to prevent skin oils or friction from causing any change in the mass of the lump. It’s used to standardize national weights and measures, and every so often, the metal is transported to France to be compared against the universal kilogram standard - another lump that provides the model for all of the others - “Le Grand K,” it’s called. If New Zealand’s version is not exactly the same as France’s, down to the molecule, the consequences for the economy, science and the entire society would be dire, so microscopic adjustments have to be made. Yang explained that this is how things have worked for centuries, and every country in the world has its own metal kilogram standard.

We didn’t learn this until later, but by coincidence, just before we met Yang, the international bodies that determine these sorts of things had voted to change the objective standard from The Grand K to a mathematical constant because no matter how hard the world’s top scientists try, The Grand K slowly but inevitably changes mass by small amounts, necessitating complicated adjustments around the entire world. It’s a little sad really, to think that the kilogram is no longer a literal thing. I’ve wondered what came of Yang’s job but I’m sure he’s found something productive to do.

—

This all would have been just an interesting coincidence, but the next day we’d also arranged a reunion with another friend - Sara, we’ll call her - in another downtown beer bar, Golding’s Free Dive. If you’re interested. Hashigo Zake has a better beer selection, but Golding’s felt more relaxed. It’s more of a bohemian open air warehouse than an underground hipster hideout. They served pizza, but not cocktails.

We’d also met Sara in Dunedin years prior, through work, and had loosely kept in touch with each other online. Somewhat coincidentally, like Ben, she’d visited us in Seattle in the mid ‘00s and wandered the same neighborhood. We collectively turned far fewer gay heads than we had with Ben, which isn't any sort of criticism. Since we had seen her last, Sara had spent a year in Edinburgh before building a career and life in Wellington, all of us moving through those changes that you do when you transition from young adulthood into early middle age. Sara was always hip, smart, and funny. The type of person who lives an understated, interesting life, which is very much archetypal for Kiwis.

“So what are you even up to these days, Sara?”

“Ah, just boring stuff. I have a cat. I’ve been dabbling in stand up and improv, but mostly just casually. I work for the government and do administrative work. Nothing exciting. Probably the most interesting thing to know is that my boss is the person who is in charge of making sure that New Zealand’s minutes and seconds stay the right length - they don’t get any longer or shorter.”

New Zealand has a population about the same size as the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, but it can feel even smaller than that at times.

“Wait, what? I don’t know what’s going on, but last night we met the guy in charge of making sure the kilograms don’t gain weight!”

Sara threw her hands up, “No! Yang?! I love him! We get coffee all the time! He’s my favorite person at work! How did you meet Yang?!”

I explained, “Well, we were meeting up with our friend Ben who just happened to be in town, and Yang and his partner approached us in a bar, and it turns out they’re related.”

“Wait - Ben? It wasn’t Ben Kingi from Dunedin by chance was it?”

“Yeah, wait, what?!”

“He was my roommate in university! I haven’t seen him in years! We used to call him 'Hot Ben!' How’s he doing?!”

—

After the excitement of unexpected connections died down, we spent a few hours drinking and offering up material for Sara’s stand up routine. We said our goodbyes, and Angel and I continued on our way north, doing some hiking on Te Araroa, the country’s long trail, before hitching a ride to Napier on the East Coast of the North Island.

The next year, the pandemic hit, and New Zealand’s leadership, just a few blocks from where they kept The Official Kilogram, decided to shut down the borders for what would be more than two full years. Ben, for his part, signed up to do frontline screening and education at the ports in Dunedin to ensure Covid didn’t slip into the country through shipping channels. A real hero, that guy.

We talked to Sara again mid-pandemic, asking how she was holding up. She said that she’d changed jobs, and didn’t love it, but did occasionally see Ashley Bloomfield around the office.

“He’s really a nice guy! It’s hard not to fangirl around him.”

In New Zealand during the pandemic, Jacinda Ardern was the Prime Minister and the face of steady leadership, but Ashley Bloomfield was the country’s Anthony Fauci - the stalwart, mildly boring infectious disease specialist who spoke to the country daily, explaining what was happening and reassuring the population that the government would prevent suffering and death in whatever way that it could.

Across the next two years, Bloomfield and Ardern masterfully managed a closed border and small outbreaks and prevented both mass sickness and economic collapse. An election was held in late 2020 and their party was re-elected in a historic landslide by a country that was almost entirely on the same page. New Zealand’s efforts effectively prevented Covid from spreading in the country for a year and a half, until the Delta strain broke the defenses in late 2021. By the time that transmission was widespread, 95% of the population had been immunized and the worst of the pandemic was avoided.

—

In my own country, the United States, people hate each other, but only in a weird theoretical way, because we don’t actually know one another. We shout about a lot of things that we don’t understand. The evangelicals in the South are too far removed from the government workers in the Capitol to have any meaningful relationship - let alone to have been roommates in university. We don’t trust our government, and it seems like a strange sideshow operating in a foreign culture, run by vapid celebrities whose lives none of us can relate to. The result during the pandemic was a fractured and traumatic response, with preventable death rates among the worst in the entire world, despite our financial resources.

You don’t want to take anything away from New Zealand’s leadership, because the pandemic response was impeccable, but you also get the sense that the differences are not just about government. As everything was shaking out, watching New Zealand succeed while many places failed, I couldn’t help but think back on those bar connections.

Everyone knows everyone in New Zealand, and if they don’t, their mate does. Your comedian friend, who used to be roommates with your evangelical Maori buddy, knows the gay scientist in the bar who makes sure your kilograms don’t get out of whack. Both of them are right there where the decisions are being made, and can vouch for the people doing it. If you need to get a message to the Prime Minister, you probably can, and when you do she’ll probably sort out that you’re related by marriage a generation back, and ask you to say “Hi” to your uncle Hamish.

Those kinds of connections color things. It’s easy enough to trust your neighbor - and by extension your leaders - if they're probably also your cousin. At the same time, national tragedies are really worrying because everyone affected could be someone you know. It makes the world seem a lot smaller, and the things that happen in it a lot more consequential.

I’m sure the residents of Aotearoa have plenty of complaints about their country, but as an outsider I’d venture to say that things are different in places like that. Better, even. While being small and sparsely populated may not be a trait the country has cultivated intentionally, Kiwis should take pride in the fact that their tightly knit culture has made them more than just a pretty face. The pandemic numbers gave them the receipts to prove it.

---

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Three poems written on a run.

1.

Walk into the woods

Lie down next to a stream

Close your eyes

And think about

Instagram

Pisses you off, huh?

2.

It’s impossible to feel unpretentious

While writing a poem

3.

Nothing makes you feel invincible except running 100 miles.

Sometimes you need to feel that way

So much that you run 100 miles.

What does it feel like to actually live your dreams?

I guess it depends on what type of person you are, and what dreams we’re talking about.

I think for a certain type of person, with a certain type of relationships and experiences, it can feel like The Alchemist:

"And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

For the rest of us, it can feel like you’re finally expressing the truth and beauty that you were put on this earth to create, and no one cares but your long-suffering wife. It can feel like a hard truth that your dreams are just another charge of the sun’s energy disappearing into a universe doomed by entropy, significant like a cow’s fart. That's how the universe is really conspiring.

For a certain type of dream, it can feel like an adventure as big as The Odyssey or The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which no one else will ever know about.

A lot of times it’s an unusual flavor of embarrassing. Imagine you were given the chance, right now, to bat last in the World Series. Bases are loaded, bottom of the 9th, two outs, you’re down by one. Is that really a dream? Imagine how that is likely to play out - how people will talk about you afterwards.

It feels like you’ll never really get the recognition you deserve, and it feels embarrassing that you think you deserve recognition. But it feels like in order to succeed you have to convince yourself that you deserve recognition. You at least have to think that you can help.

I'm being dramatic though. Most times it’s more basic than that. It feels like working hard at something and finding out that somebody appreciates it.

We all have our people, and pursuing your dreams a lot of times just feels like doing what we can to make their lives better, expressing something that they think is important, and encouraging them that life’s fine. Good even. It feels like telling a good joke at a party and a few people laughing, or baking a pie that your coworker talks about for weeks afterwards. It can feel like encouraging a friend going through a divorce that things will get better, and seeing them through until it does.

A lot of times it feels like any other job.

A lot of times it feels like counting down the days on vacation until you have to go back to work.

I don’t know if at some point it eventually feels genuinely fulfilling.

I think it probably does.

As always, thanks for reading. For lots more, jump to Books

A Dog Catches its Tail

At this stage, the crowd can’t be stopped.

And at this stage, Dan from accounting is nothing if not part of the crowd.

With tattoos where his eyebrows used to be, there’s really no going back.

LIVE FREE OR DIE.

Dan is a good guy with a gun, an AR-15 slung across his back. He’ll only use it if he has to and it hasn’t come to that, yet. The seven policemen that were guarding the Capitol were firing into the crowd but they’ve pulled up now that the patriots have made their way through the doors. The crowd surges forward and he’s pushed to the front. His eyes lock with a cop.

The cop is the one who’s scared, not Dan.

Dan is raging in a way that he hasn’t since he was a teenager. “We’re doing this for you!”

His Louisville Slugger slams into the officer’s stomach with a “whomp.” The officer falls, and the crowd surges over. Dan finds himself pushed against a wall in what feels like a tide of Freedom! Democracy! Justice!

Lining the Capitol halls are paintings of men who Dan knows to be traitors. The crowd has forced his face against Carter, but there’s also Clinton, Obama. One by one he tears them from the wall, and tosses them into the wood chipper that is the teeming mass of protest.

This feels like 1776.

Or Limp Bizkit at Woodstock ‘99.

It finally feels like the Spirit of America is alive again. Things have gone too far and finally, finally something is happening.

Victor Brumley has been fighting for people like Dan in a way that no one has before. Now Dan is fighting for Brumley.

Dan roars, and the crowd surges again, lifting him from his feet.

Dan tumbles into a nondescript office, riding the tide of surging patriots, his body crashing to the ground as the mass of bodies forces the door shut behind him. The shouting and explosions are muffled behind the door. It’s sturdy, like Dan thinks of himself. Solid American Oak.

Suddenly still, disoriented and shaken Dan feels alone, separated from the mass that drove him here.

But he’s not.

He hears whimpering, and from his low vantage point he can see a form huddled below the room’s only desk.

—

From New Jersey Democrat Lannie Chandler’s perspective, Dan is a man sweating and shirtless, American flag painted upside down across the face like warpaint. White New Balance sneakers like the President wears. A gun slung over his shoulder and a tactical belt holding up khakis. A frame that she’d describe as doughy, and the aesthetics of a professional wrestler. For her this is the picture of terror. Her internet harassers incarnate, here in the one place where she was meant to be safe as the Speaker of the House.

Their eyes meet in the space between the desk and the floor.

—

Dan paces. He posted on the president’s wall 30 minutes ago.

@presidentbrumley I have the speaker. I repeat. I have the speaker.

@presidentbrumley this is not a troll! I have the speaker!

His posts may have been lost in the storm so Dan started with direct messaging.

The target has been obtained. Sent 12 minutes ago. Unread.

Mission accomplished! Sent 6 minutes ago. Unread.

I’m not sure if you got this. Please reply. Sent 3 minutes ago. Unread.

At times like this a man could grow anxious, accidentally kidnapping the third most powerful political figure in the United States. But whatever happens, Dan is happy that Victor Brumley finally gave normal people like himself something to fight for. Something to live for.

He has the gun trained on her but there’s nowhere to go. He puffs his chest, glares at her. He’s keeping himself between the Speaker and the door.

The Eagle has landed! Sent 1 minute ago. Read just now.

Read!

Dan’s heart races.

Wait, what?! Blocked??!!

—

The president’s phone is buzzing and his television is blaring. It’s been an exciting day, but his 12 year old son Stryker won’t shut up about calling off the crowd.

“Dad! Police are dying!”

Dammit! What does this kid even know about politics?! Who does he think he is?!

“Stryker, shut up! Go play in your room! I’m this president, not you!”

These phone alerts are driving me crazy!

Brumley posts on his public profile: “I’m the president, not you!”

Block block block.

At least the Spark News pundits are clear about what’s happening. Cassidy Blake is practically shouting on screen. “Patriots have been pushed too far! This is what happens when you undermine democracy. You hate to see it, but I can’t say that I’m surprised it’s come to this!”

Brumley is on a first name basis with Cassidy. He’s always thought she’s hot. “That’s right,” he mutters, “This is what happens when you mess with Victor Brumley.”

Cassidy stops suddenly, lifts her hand to her ear, cocks her head to the left, shifts to a measured tone.

“Excuse me everyone, this just in. This is big news. Spark has just received word that someone has been posting to Brumley’s wall that they have the Speaker of the House. We are yet to confirm but there have been at least five posts making this claim!”

Brumley looks down at his alerts.

—

Dan feels a buzz. A direct message from @presidentbrumley!

“Listen very carefully…”

—

At 12:15 PM, America turns on their television to a Spark News exclusive and the shocking scene of the Speaker of the House in her signature blue dress on her knees, cowering. The man behind her is a nightmare version of the Macho Man Randy Savage. Shirtless. Dad bod. Farmers tan. AR-15. War paint and facial tattoos. A red, white, and blue Brumley flag is draped behind them.

The Speaker begins to read from her phone - hand trembling and voice quivering.

“With the downfall of democracy perpetrated by the losers in our country, such as myself, Lannie Chandler, it’s time for patriots to act. There’s never been a more important time to be healthy and ready to fight.

And there’s no better way to stay healthy and strong than with a daily supply of Brumley Vitamin Supplements. Order online now with code REVOLUTION1776 and you will receive a 25% discount on all orders over $100. All proceeds will directly benefit the Brumley Fight for America legal defense fund.”

The camera is trained on the Speaker’s face. She’s shaking and tearful. It’s a humiliating posture that will cost her the next primary. In the background Dan is strong, stone faced, his eyes wide behind the red, white and blue makeup. Sweat runs into his eyes, “LIVE FREE OR DIE” offering no barrier where his eyebrows used to be.

Both stare silently into the camera while a banner drifts across the screen: BREAKING NEWS! “Brumley says fight for America at www.brumleysupplements.com. Code: REVOLUTION1776.”

Years later, even Brumley’s lawyers couldn’t say for certain whether they saw Dan’s facade crack in the last moment before the screen cut to black.

---

For more grand adventure, existential despair and good plain fun, I hope you'll check out my books .

You’ll be pleased to know that this is the year when we all come to terms with death.

I know you’re excited, because we’ve decided to abandon the delusion that it won’t happen to us!

In a few days, we’ll stop pretending exercise or kale or trust funds or collagen injections will prevent us from eventually rotting back into the Earth.

It’s going to be great!

This year we’ll admit that no matter where we put our faith, we aren’t certain of anything Beyond.

We might hold out hope, but still,

We’ll admit that this strange experience of self-awareness will simply disappear into the ether! Someday, “we” will simply cease to exist!

What a relief!

We’re all going to accept that, within a few decades, our lives are unlikely to be remembered even by our direct descendants.

Won’t that be awesome?!

We’ll jump into the void shouting “Cannonball!” and spend the rest of our conscious days in

blissful acceptance of our inevitable end.

You’ll be happy to know that today, we’ll finally be able to pursue truth, beauty and life.

We’ll finally come together to make life as long as possible

And as good as possible

For as many people as possible

Freed by the deep personal faith that we’re all going to die.

New Zealand Is a Force That Makes Us Dirtbags

My upbringing in Ohio had the features of an idyllic rural dream - the type of experience that could make a young boy fall in love with the outdoors and nature. We lived on four acres on the outskirts of a small farming community, on the very northwestern edges of the Appalachian foothills. Being a child there meant doing country things like looking for frogs in the crick, and getting into trouble for sneaking into the neighbor’s field to dig holes. (The owner prowled his property with a shot gun because he was paranoid about trespassers.) My uncle was our Boy Scout leader, and took us camping in southern Ohio’s State parks and canoeing on the muddy Great Miami River.

Growing up was collecting bugs and building forts in hay bales, but it was also a local economy that had transitioned from farming to manufacturing, and was beginning to become a school to minimum wage pipeline, with Walmart, fast food and customer service providing the bulk of the new local employment opportunities. Monsanto was purchasing the old family farms, and the factories were closing. It was a culture defined by a classic protestant work ethic, which had served it well when there were options for private ownership of productive land, or long term, well-paid manufacturing jobs. By the mid-90s, the same ethic was being channeled into jobs with little opportunity for advancement and no long-term possibility of escape. The Midwest was becoming a machine to make money for people who didn’t live there, my neighbors grist to somebody else’s mill.

My parents were both the owners of small family businesses that closed out of economic necessity in the early 2000’s, and even as a child I could see a future full of pitfalls. I played outside a lot, but I was also a bookish nerd. I spent hours sitting on the type of heated waterbed that everyone inexplicably purchased during a certain pre-millennial era, reading fantasy novels and doing my homework. I liked to learn as a kid, and I recognized, at least vaguely, that pouring energy into education was a lifeline that I needed to grab onto if I wanted to survive.

Through high school and college, academics became the center of my identity and the place where I directed my own protestant work ethic. You work those customer service jobs after class and on breaks, with a view towards educating yourself enough that you won’t be stuck doing them your entire life.

I’d fallen in with a girl though, and during our third year of college, she signed up for an exchange in Australia and bought me a ticket to visit while she was there. She paid with literal blood money, saving up $40 at a time from plasma donations. I felt that I couldn’t spare the time because for some stupid reason I thought I needed to spend my summer working at a grocery store, but I also couldn’t argue. The trip was white sand beaches patrolled by saltwater crocs and Great White sharks, Steve Irwin in person at the Australia Zoo, Argentinian backpackers on a dingo infested island, and a vision of a bigger world than we’d realized existed.

In the aftermath of that trip, we decided to travel more, but rather than taking time off to do so, we worked for a year in Louisville, Kentucky to save money, then moved to New Zealand where I would channel my anxiety into higher education - a Master’s Degree, something that seemed outside of the scope of possibility when I was growing up.

Our time in New Zealand was the peak of my bookish nerdiness. Even during breaks, I worked on research projects and tried (unsuccessfully) to teach myself German so I could read the great philosophers. By the time I was finished with my degree, I’d burnt myself out on academics and scrapped previous plans to continue on to a PhD and a career as a Religious Studies professor.

However, while my values were pushing me towards their inevitable conclusion, New Zealand was also teaching subconscious lessons about what is important in life. Experiences there shaped me, even if they were seeds that wouldn’t fully germinate until years later, after I’d burned myself out again and again.

Utopia isn’t real but there is a better world somewhere.

We arrived in New Zealand with next to no money and we purchased a $500 yellow 1985 Ford Laser sedan. It was the cheapest, oldest car we’d ever owned, but we didn’t stand out from our neighbors. Kiwis keep old cars in good repair because it is cheaper and easier than buying new. We drove our Laser to Milford Sound, snow-capped mountains soaring directly from the sea, perhaps the most beautiful place in the entire world. We camped in the rain using borrowed gear, which we hung out the windows to dry on our way home. The Laser never broke down on us, and we sold it two years later for a few hundred less than we’d paid. You’re sad to see that type of car go.

We lived in a town called Dunedin, on the southern end of the South Island. The latitude is similar to Seattle and Portland and Vladivostok, and the weather reflects it. The houses and businesses are covered in moss, not insulated properly because the people there are Scottish. Most of the year things are cold and damp, inside and out. Electricity is expensive, so people put on a wool jumper rather than turning on the heat. Wool jumpers are expensive too, so they wear the same one every day. Nobody cares. No one mentions the fact that you wore the same thing yesterday. Life is fine in that same wool jumper.

Our first apartment in Dunedin was the worst place I ever hope to live. The carpet had been eaten by moths years prior to us moving in. The floral wallpaper didn’t match the carpet, the other walls were painted cinder block, and we furnished the place buying dead peoples’ things from the local auction. A whole lot of people in Dunedin lived in places like this. Our place was nicer than most other students’ because we had a full time income to survive on. People recognized that the places were shitty, but it wasn’t a thing. It was a shared joke. We all lived in shitty places and we managed to enjoy it. It just seemed normal because that’s what Dunedin was like in 2003.

There was a bald, rotund Kiwi gentleman, no one’s vision of an athlete, who told us that “if you can walk, you can tramp.” I’d had a few brief backpacking trips in high school, but otherwise we’d never done any real multi-day hikes. We borrowed some gear and headed for the Rakiura Track, a loop on Stewart Island off the southern coast of the South Island. He was right. We could tramp, as could the hobbling man with a knee injury who we shared the track with - our first Great Walk. “I won’t get there fast,” he said, “but I’ll get there.” In New Zealand we sorted out that most everyone tramps, and so did we. Angel’s favorite hiking partner in Dunedin was a seasoned woman in her late 70s who, after we moved away, sent us a postcard about a heli-tramping excursion. She took a flight with a group of friends to the top of a remote, snowy pass in the Southern Alps. She walked out herself, but some of the “oldies” caught the chopper back.

New Zealand’s gross domestic product per capita is about two-thirds that of the United States, so there are a lot fewer resources to spread around. It is harder to make a lot of money there than it is for us at home, and it’s a relatively expensive place to live. A third less cash doesn’t translate to a third worse life though.

Blame it on Gauguin or Rousseau - there’s a popular ideal about the Pacific. It’s meant to be a place where life consists of laying on the beach, catching fish from the ocean, and pulling fruit from the trees. You’re meant to be able to sleep in a hut and live a good life without much proper work at all. This isn’t a reality, but there is something of that vision in the New Zealand Dream. In the New Zealand Dream, people don’t have to work all the time, and they don’t need a lot in order to be happy. She’ll be right, because they’ve organized their society in order to help the population achieve those goals.

Kiwis believe in time off, instinctually at their very core. There is a government mandate that all workers, whether full or part time, be provided with four weeks annual vacation, plus an additional eleven public holidays. You may not believe this, but it’s true - Kiwis, regardless of income, receive six weeks paid vacation a year. When they are working, it is not normal to have more than one job, or to work more than forty hours a week. Kiwis aren’t the richest people in the world, but their society is organized in order to provide them with a lot of time to lie on the beach eating fruit, and catching fish. At her first job, Angel received a lecture from her HR department because she hadn’t taken enough time off that year. When she requested six weeks to go to Indonesia for tsunami relief, they didn’t bat an eye. There’s a cultural recognition that there are things in life more important than your job.

I took workaholic values to New Zealand, but the lessons that you learn are that the important thing isn’t money, it’s time. The outdoors is for everyone. Fancy things don’t matter if you don’t let them. You can put together a good society and a good life without much. Human happiness is more important than wealth or status, and an enjoyable life should be a human right. Time off matters, and a beautiful beach is pretty much all you need. If you can walk, you can tramp.

You can go home again, but you’ll want to change it.

We moved back to the United States after two years of absorbing those values. It was difficult to feel at home in our own culture, but across a decade we immersed ourselves in a more American way of life. We worked two jobs each, or worked one job while rotating studying at university. Our lives until 35 were work and a mortgage and education. It was financially productive. We paid down debt and built up a nest egg. We did still manage to get outside, the hard way. Fueled by America-induced anxiety, we became ultra-marathon runners, and regularly covered mountain distances in a day that normal humans hike across four.

Somewhere though, in the back of our minds, we had a nagging sense that there is a better way. We had experienced it once, and knew we had to figure out how to get it back. I worked in a warehouse for two years, putting bottles in boxes. I listened to a lot of BB King and really felt it when he said that “there has just got to be a better world somewhere,” thinking of New Zealand.

In 2015, at the front end of a fantastic mid-life crisis, we quit our jobs and traveled for a year and a half. We went on a much longer tramp than the Rakiura, and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. My father passed away, and we vowed not to let our jobs eat the rest of our lives.

We started the process of hacking the system in America. We took part time and per diem work as nurses, and temporary contracts. We started side businesses to make small amounts of extra money. We set up a sustainable strategy for taking long periods of time off from work when we wanted to. We backed our way into a dirtbag dream life because we wanted to recover the feelings we’d had in New Zealand.

For those who have eyes to see, New Zealand can show you what’s important and what’s not. Once you have a taste of a better world, even if you leave, you’ll never quite be able to go back. It’ll sink in and work its way out eventually, whether you like it or not.

For more stories about how travel and the outdoors can change your life, check out The Dirtbag's Guide to Life .

Leaving religion, playing outside: What's with the post-religious dirtbags sliding into my DMs?

Listen, I know this is strangely specific, but I keep running in to people who have left their religion and latched on to the outdoors and adventure in the aftermath.

My first inkling that this might be a trend was when I came across Andy Neal, the host of The Hiker Podcast, and realized that we share a similar background as former ministers turned outdoor media people. I reached out to him and he was gracious enough to have me on his show to talk about it. It was nice therapy for me, but I wasn't sure how many people would identify.

It turns out that there were a lot. I won't out anyone because I haven't sought permission, but since I released I Hope I Was Wrong About Eternal Damnation, about a dozen people have contacted me to say that they can relate to the experience of leaving behind strict, exclusive religions and immersing themselves in the outdoors immediately after. You wouldn't think that there would be a lot of overlap between the audience for The Dirtbag's Guide to Life and a memoir about losing faith, but it turns out that there is.

This may be really niche, but it seems like it's worth thinking about. What's the deal? Why do people latch on to the outdoors after leaving religion? Specifically, what does the outdoors do for the post-religious pilgrim?

I've done my own research, and here are exactly four of my thoughts:

1) The Outdoors as a place where you can have agency.

"Losing faith" is an inadequate and unnecessarily negative expression to describe what actually happens when someone leaves behind a religion. Religious transition is often about rejecting a set of beliefs, but it is also about stepping out of a system of authority. Religions are comprehensive systems of leadership and decision making that guide you on how to live and organize your life. That can be a useful tool at some points in life, but it can also lead to a type of dependence that holds you back from becoming an emotionally healthy adult. Strict religions can make you feel like you won't be able to exist without God or the guru giving direction to your life. As a result, leaving religion can feel like falling out of your nest, but it can also be a hugely empowering process of stepping into independence and following truth wherever it leads you.

The literal wilderness is a perfect arena for establishing a sense of agency when you've stepped into a figurative wilderness out of the structure of a strict religion. Goal driven activities like outdoor sports provide a concrete and reliable way to improve your health and self-worth, and can provide a powerful sense of control during a life transition that can otherwise feel like becoming unmoored.

Personally, it was trail running that sucked me in. The stepwise process of training for longer and longer distances, and spending increasing amounts of time and energy sorting out how to run 50k, then 50 miles, then 100 miles made me feel like I could accomplish anything at a time when I was learning to live without the reassuring authority structure of religion. I dove into trail running immediately after I left the church, and it helped me to establish confidence that I would be fine on my own. I could improve my situation, become a healthier person, and accomplish things that I'd previously believed were impossible. It was a powerful antidote to the poison of losing the structure that had previously given life direction and meaning.

Hiking, paddling, world travel, and other adventure activities can provide the same path. They lend themselves to health, growth, and the sense of individual control and mastery that the post-religious are often desperate for.

2) Spending time outdoors is therapeutic.

I won't take a lot of time on this one because the point is so common as to almost be cliche (and we talked about it a lot on The Hiker Podcast), but it's worth mentioning.

The process of leaving religion screws with both your head and your heart. After leaving, it can take years to figure out what you believe about the world, and how to navigate the emotions attached to leaving behind your community, your worldview, and your way of life. Going outside doesn't replace the value of talk therapy for sorting your head out, but it is emotionally therapeutic. Where losing faith can be anxiety provoking and depression inducing, going outside is consistently a good thing for your mental health. If exercise is involved it can channel anxiety into something productive and can turn negative emotions into positive ones, but even just sitting outside helps. ,Forest bathing makes you happier and at ease.

Everyone everywhere in urban modern society should spend more time outside. When you’re pushed to your brink, it becomes both more important and more obvious that the simple act of going outside makes you feel better.

3) Leaving faith screws up your community. The outdoors gives it back.

Leaving religion also means losing a significant part of your community. While people tend to think of religion as a system of beliefs, it is most importantly a system of community - a means of connection with other people. For a lot of religious people, it's their primary or even only means of connection with other people. When you lose that, you lose your grounding and your sense of place in the world.

This can be disorienting, but it can also open you up to new possibilities. There’s a strong instinct to literally run away when you leave religion, to get away from the pain of the impact on your relationships to friends and family. While it's easy to view this in negative terms as avoidance, the flight instinct isn’t always unhealthy. For a lot of people, it helps them to recognize that they have the opportunity to make something different of their life. When I left evangelicalism in my early 20s, the flight instinct helped Angel and I feel comfortable with leaving the Midwestern United States and moving to New Zealand - a choice that changed the rest of our life for the better. This sort of instinct has driven many a thru-hike, Camino, bike tour of South America, and life changing round-the-world tour.

Beyond that though, the outdoors is itself a path towards connection. While it's easy to think of the outdoors and adventure like the previous paragraph implies - as an escape from other humans - that’s a thorough misrepresentation of what it actually is. The outdoors is, in large part, a community. You can’t learn to hike, camp, trail run, travel, paddle, open water swim, mountain bike, or travel internationally without consulting someone else. Once you have learned, you would be hard pressed to actually do the activity on your own. Most of us - even introverts - eventually bunch up into packs, and the shared struggle of the activity bonds you to each other in a powerful way. The outdoors has its own culture, history and saints, and it helps you locate yourself within a larger story and community.

As someone who spent the first 12 years of my career as a minister working to build up the religious community, this fact has been a lifeline. When I quit religion entirely in 2010, I started devoting my time to the people I was meeting outside. This started first with my old blog, A Little Runny, devoted to the Washington trail running crowd. Then, Angel and I started the storytelling event series and podcast Boldly Went in 2017 as a way to help connect outdoorists of all types. I wrote The Dirtbag's Guide to Life as a sort of (ahem) bible for the outdoor community because Angel and I saw that it needed one. Now, writing for the travel, outdoors and adventure communities is the core outlet for the instincts I honed across 30 years of religious life. As such, it's a key place where I feel like I give back to the world.

4) Religion primes you for an experience of transcendence that the outdoors also delivers.

There is a spirituality to the outdoors that is easy to grasp for the formerly religious.

The experience of transcendence is fundamental to religion, and they all have systems for helping people feel connected to bigger things. Whether it's snake handling, rolling in the aisles, quiet contemplation, self-flagellation, or daily prayer, all are means of feeling connected to God or ultimate reality.

The feeling of connection to something bigger is a universal human experience though, and religion doesn’t have the marked cornered. It’s a reason that fundamentalist Christians demonize things like secular music, hallucinogens and yoga classes. They provide pathways to transcendence outside of religion.

For a lot of us, the outdoors provides an even more reliable pathway towards this sort of grand connection than shavasana, cannabis or Coachella. Standing on a mountain pass at the mercy of nature’s whims. The endorphins that come with the hard work of a long slog into the wind. Sleeping on a remote beach free of social encumbrances. All of these inspire a sense of transcendence. The outdoors is a place where you realize your connection to bigger, more ancient things, and as a friend said, once you’ve found it there, it’s hard to go back to seeking God in a building.

In summary, the outdoors provides exactly what the post-religious wanderer is looking for.

Religion hooks people because it provides for a lot of basic human needs. When you leave religion, you lose your means of meeting those needs. That can shatter a person. A lot of people, in my experience, find the outdoors to be a place where they can find an alternative path to a meaningful, healthy life.

This isn't a comprehensive list, but the outdoors provides you with a sense of agency and independence, a means of managing you emotions, a pathway towards community, and a reliable means towards an experience of transcendence. For the post-religious, these are often exactly what we need, particularly in the immediate aftermath of losing faith.

So, for the post-religious, you might even say that the outdoors provides a path to salvation.

For a deeper dive into the process of leaving religion and/or finding salvation in the outdoors, I hope you'll check out my books .