Time and time again without reason.

I suffer through self-inflicted wounds,

And try blaming the season.

I feel so affected by shame and guilt,

But do nothing to reconcile holy perspectives.

I beckoned perception itself to return me to light,

Instead, perception itself begged the question:

“How long until a fatal collapse brings you further from spirit?

This dogma of life without fear can make anyone fear it.”

See you tether yourself to this plane,

But feel idle in motion.

Because life without fear is mistaken for peace,

Until peace ends up broken.

“So forgive me for asking,” says perception, unmasking my blue-colored soul,

“You say that you’re fragile, but turn ashes to castles, brick by brick,
wall to wall…

Yet your eyes look so cold, and your heart loses rhythm;

Turning beauty to stone.

Have you forgotten that life without fear is for those
who stopped dreaming,

For those who don’t roam?

Just give me a chance, and I’ll show you through grace,

That this life is divine…

That there’s greatness in courage,

There’s wisdom in healing, through love and through time.

And if ever you feel that it’s simply not worth it

To tread through the fire,

Surrender your worries, embrace all your fears –

Live your life with desire.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

For the last year or so (sometimes it feels like all my life) I’ve been in a fairly deep and complex battle with depression. This week my sleep cycle and nervous system finally returned to normal.

I hit 16 days with no nicotine and THC; the former I’d kicked years ago before it crept back in around 1/19/25, the latter I’d been in an unhealthy relationship with for about a decade or more.

I felt my body alive again and endorphins pumping with daily exercise for the first time in months. I felt my nervous system begin to regulate with daily meditation and morning rituals standing tall over toxic habits.

It all came with paying close attention to what’s been going into my body between clean food / proper supplements, how I’ve chosen to engage my mind, and how I’ve evolved the curation of my daily schedule.

But today I woke up feeling that depression set in again. The feeling that the foundations were crumbling spread like a plague, and the addiction that exists in my bad habits surfaced yet again. It’s not that I caved to them, it’s that I stayed in bed doom-scrolling for hours, my brain felt foggy again, I couldn’t really put my finger on why.

I tunneled deep into the false reality that the productivity and positivity alike were just part of a ‘pink-cloud’ that was now gone with the wind. From the bed, I called my dearest sister, and she quickly helped stop the spiral, turning it into a moment of learning.

“Just start your day. It’s okay, you messed up, you did things that you already know will start everything off negatively. Do something positive now. Change it.”

So I got up, drank my ‘daily-driver’ (passion fruit, spinach, OJ, collagen peptides, protein, and water), and wrote my first poem of 2026. Sometimes all we need is for someone close to remind us that everything is okay; time is not finite.

It was easy for me to attack my own psyche and forget the simple things that led to my first week of true bliss-through-control in what feels like ages. It would’ve frankly been much easier to take action — to do the things I knew made me feel that sense of simultaneous relief and power.

Recovery is Schrödinger’s cat. The progress and the depression coexist until you choose which one to look at. Today I chose to let the cat roam.

If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate your time. Sharing my thoughts in a public forum is something I meant to do outside of generic social media for a long time. It was a goal from 2025 that I abandoned, largely because I put too much pressure on planning what story to start with. Nothing ever met my standards, and I let the initial spark vanish.

As I write this in the moment, I’ve chosen to embrace the moment, and start with the simple act of actually starting. Today’s entry has taught me volumes about letting go, the perils of perfectionism, and the beauty of action.

With the amount of AI tools I use in my professional career, writing from the heart is one of the few practices that still organically brings me closer to my spirit and allows me to feel whole.

My only hope with what I share on this page now and moving forward is that the raw honesty translates from my mind to yours, through all the peaks and pauses.

Days ago, I lay on a gurney — too scared to fall asleep —
praying that I still could…

Wondering if I’d ever share another smile with a stranger,
or laughter with a loved one.

The dichotomy of solace and depression turned to juxtaposition;

I struggled to fathom how my longing for death and fear of it
could suddenly converge.

At this impasse, longing gently bowed before fear,
and motioned toward the road ahead,

“Perhaps if you embrace yourself, you’ll find equanimity along the path.”

When I traded the Rocky Mountains for the Concrete Jungle,
turbulence overcame serenity.

Somehow in a city of millions —
with friends and family at every corner —

I felt more isolated than when I’d wander
from pasture to peak, completely alone.

Maybe that serenity I found in silence
hadn’t been tested amongst overwhelming noise.

Even though I’d grown up minutes away from that noise,
as I adjusted to living inside of it, its currents suddenly felt unfamiliar.

I lost myself — just as I thought I’d found myself —
drowning in them.

Just as my mind finally learned to match their pace,
my body shut down.

Just as the seeds I’d planted bloomed into their beauty,
their petals began to wilt.

Now I’m enamored with a lingering question,

Do blooming roses ever find themselves longing for death
amidst the uncertainty of storms,

or do they embrace the fear of death
to savor every living moment?

It seems God placed me at death’s door to remind me:

to savor every living moment,
to stop and smell the roses.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I can’t blame that only on the predicament I found myself in over the last few weeks, since it largely stems from the same problem I described in my last post — setting my standards too high & overthinking, ultimately crushing my desire to write.

That being said, I’ve been bouncing from near-death to near-death, grappling with the stability of my youth and the fragility of mortality amidst a barrage of medications and life-saving emergency procedures.

For the first time since I ended up with these pulmonary and subclavian embolisms, I decided to take a walk in the park and write in my notebook. I feel like a few muses had planted the poem I’ve shared above into my head after the first trip to the hospital, but something about the idea felt like it hadn’t matured enough to write down.

As I found myself back at yet another hospital over the weekend — in a far worse condition than the first time — the motifs and imagery I’d been juggling in my head finally had enough time to marinate and grow.

It’s interesting how much my meditation practice and recent triumph over depression have made it easier to deal with the circumstances I find myself in. In spite of all the chaos, I don’t think a smile has ever left my face for longer than a few seconds, even in the darkest moments.

Hundreds of people have asked me how I’m feeling, and my response remains the same each time:

“Physically, up and down, but my spirits are high.”

Now more than ever it’s clear to me that life is just an endless series of peaks and pauses.

Home has been many places, many friendships, a few lovers, and God.

Home is only stable when it wants to be.

Home is only noble when it wants to be.

When it decides the time is right,
home reminds you that it never existed in the first place.

Home is an sensation.

Home is arbitrary,
simply because you can, ‘be at home,’
but feel like a stranger — or prisoner — inside of it.

For some, home is comfort,
so they say, “I’m coming back home.”

A comedy of errors — born from ungrounded desire.

To go back to a feeling that once was but no longer is.
Why don’t we say, “I’m going forward, home.”
Perhaps we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be nomads.

Home shouldn’t have to be a memory.

Home shouldn’t have to be nostalgic.

Home should be an idea that you can carry,
whether it’s rooted in your subconscious,
or at the forefront of your mind.

I’m supposed to be back home in Denver,
but I’m looking forward.

Staring at the Rockies from my favorite park bench —
a park I’ve never cared to learn the name of —
hoping to find my home somewhere else.

In the realm of writing, I used to hate the process of editing. As I grew to understand it, that hate became a craving.

So, for the last few weeks I’d been meaning to publish a piece that I’d written in the past. I wanted to evolve or complete something ‘old’, rather than plant fresh seeds. I’d been waiting to act on a spark, the same way I did when publishing my previous pieces, Perception and Roses.

Over the years I’ve learned to not fight my muses, but rather to flow with them. As a man with a plethora of creative mediums very close to home, I used to struggle — and often still do — trying to understand how to balance them. The more I’ve grown, the more I’ve resonated with the understanding that for a Swiss army knife, sometimes the overarching artistic pursuit isn’t meant to be a balancing act. Oftentimes it’s meant to be impulsive, without precedent or reason.

Even so, I still chase these impulses and find myself attempting to curate invitations to them, though more and more I resolve to allow them to exist on their own terms. After reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, my understanding of the artistic pursuit crystallized into a modus operandi.

Now I know that when I fight my muses, my desire for a certain outcome can supersede the most beautiful part of the ‘creative act’: uncertainty.

I woke up today with no particular urge to write. Suddenly impulse arrived. With an empty calendar and clear conscience, this ‘creative act’ had begun.

After spending years bouncing from city to city, I’d landed in Denver — and for a while, it felt like home. Then a business-trip visiting a client in Maui turned to a full-time job, and became a catalyst for a year-long vision quest that fluctuated on a spectrum of self-discovery and escapism. When I returned, the feeling that Denver was home had faded.

Within minutes of my arrival, I rolled a spliff, grabbed my notebook, and drove to Westlands Park. After making one lap around the park, I sat down on a memorial bench and stared into the mountains, unknowingly engaged in an open-eye meditation; to that point I’d only ever practiced closed-eye.

In the early Fall, smoke from the nationwide forest fires still fogs the view of the front range visible from Denver. In Winter, the view clears up; all the details, all the foliage, every crevasse. Each inhale reminded me just how much I’d grown to love the grounds I was standing on, but each exhale exposed the uncertainty of my concept of home — layer after layer.

Perhaps this was a lifelong issue. Growing up in a broken home, I never really felt like I had a permanent one. The first time I’d come close to feeling home was in a meditation at the summit of Carpenter Peak, but that spatial association with warmth, familiarity, and belonging was co-opted by the ridgelines of Haleakalā.

Just as I began sketching the mountains, the urge to write took over. My muses informed me that this should be a moment of reflection; one where I was meant to look back and capture thoughts, memories, prose... It wasn’t meant to be spent visually capturing the vastness of God’s ‘creative act’ in front of me. In this particular moment, I couldn’t forge ahead without first sitting with what was behind me. 2024 had to close its doors before I could look forward to 2025.

Last week, my time in Colorado came to an end. I drew the curtain on a broader journey; a six-year trek from New Jersey to Los Angeles, and ultimately to Denver. I’ve finally completed my move to New York City, which I spent my entire life fantasizing about calling home. However, a recent trip to San Francisco — another business-trip (a pattern is brewing) — made me realize that yet another westward journey is around the corner.

I love New York City, but there are no real mountains nearby. Some native east-coasters will complain about this sentiment and retort with comments about the Appalachian Mountains. Dearest east-coasters, those are not mountains, those are hills. Don’t play yourselves. The culture of this city and the relationships I have nestled inside of it currently have my heart, but my yearning for accessible nature (especially mountains) close to home will inevitably overtake my lust for the luxuries of a cultural oasis.

In the photos I’ve uploaded above there’s one little note that got cut off; my final note after writing the poem, and an all-encompassing send-off.

“Keep looking at the mountains (they’re supposed to be home).

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