Here is the prologue.

Her sons came at first light.

She had been laboring through the night, alone in the small ground-floor apartment at the end of the lane in Happy Valley, with two rooms and a kitchen, a stain on the wall where a garden shelf used to be, a hook above the bed where she had hung something she could no longer remember, sniffing the mint she had crushed between her fingers that had come from a clay pot on the windowsill, the smell helping her bear what could not be borne. The fever was on her again, foaming along her gums just as it had these last weeks whenever she worked too hard. Outside the small window, the lane was quiet. Apart from a neighbor’s footfall in the hall, nothing. Five years past the fall of Truman and the dust had already taken the sills, the corners, the small framed photograph beside the bed. First light came through the window in a pale slant and the particles hung in it like something not yet fallen. The smell of the mint was still in the room when the first head crowned. A small voice broke open the air for the first time. A strong cry.

He wanted to come.

The second was not far behind and came easier—second children sometimes do—but the fever rose in her as his head appeared and her vision narrowed at the edges and she thought she heard herself singing, and she had sung him through these nine months, but she wasn’t singing now and he came and he was quiet, his eyes closed, his small chest rising and falling.

She held them both against her chest, two small warm bodies, as the room blurred at the seams.

The Title Evaluator arrived shortly after. They always arrive whenever a citizen of Thelema gives birth. Polka-dot bowtie, the spots a deep red, he pressed his round spectacles up the bridge of his nose with his index finger below his bushy brows and set his case on the kitchen table and unsheathed his stylus and stood over the swaddled pair with the concentration of a clockmaker.

He swept the stylus across them in a single pass.

The display flickered.

Then he stopped.

He lowered the stylus and adjusted his spectacles. Swept again. He looked at the readout. He looked at the babies. He looked at the readout. He looked at the fevered woman. Then pursed his lips around an unsaid word. The instrument had surveyed something it could not place. One of the two boys carried a flicker of discontentment and the instrument could not say which. The mother saw the pause. Her stomach pulled tight.

“Excuse me, Madam.” His smile arrived in his eyes a half-second before it reached his mouth. “A momentary irregularity. I will need to consult my supervisor. Nothing to alarm yourself about, I am certain.”

He stepped into the corridor.

The door clicked shut.

She held both her sons against her breasts as the fever ran up and down her arms and throbbed across her skull. She listened to his footsteps. They did not go very far. Beyond the door she heard his long exhale. The click-click-click of a stylus, on and off, then on again. Her ribs tightened around a breath she had not known she was holding. Her arms knew before she did. They drew the babies closer.

The room became quiet. It went on for she did not know how long. The fever was folding the minutes into each other.

Then there came a sound at the kitchen door, the smallest scrape of a foot on the sill. A man she had never met appeared as though he had always been in the room. Am I dreaming? A long worn thobe. Burnished boots that had walked in places she would never dare. Stocky. A little hunched, in the manner some men are hunched from carrying things no one can see. Bald with a patchy silver beard. In his eyes was a tried twinkle—a strange light coming through.

He looked at her like a person looking at someone they have been trying to find for a very long time. He said nothing.

She tried to speak, but her tongue was swollen with the fever.

He moved to the bedside without hurry and looked down at her two swaddled boys but did not move toward either of them. He simply stood, and looked, and waited.

She did not know she was doing it until it had been done. Her arms tightened, slightly, around one of the babies, the smallest motion, drawing him a little closer to her chest.

The man saw it. He moved his eyes from her arms to the baby she had drawn closer.

“This one,” he said, mostly to himself.

Her heart pounded. Then rang. Something in her chest had been struck like a small bell, and the ringing went out into the room.

He spoke to the baby then. The mother heard.

“At age thirty-three, you may save Thelema. Rely on the Titled One to guide you. But beware the cunning of his Enemy.”

He drew a folded square of paper from inside his thobe. It was old, yellowed at the edges, and whatever was on it had been written by hand, in ink someone had ground themselves.

He extended the parchment.

The fever told her not to take it, some part of her older than the fever told her not to either, and she thought of the door in the corridor and the evaluator beyond it scribbling on his stylus, and of what would happen to her boys if anything in this room could be called a Truther’s gift, and she meant to refuse.

She looked at the baby in her tightened arm, the smallest of faces around whom the room had quieted, as though the world had stopped pressing for a moment to see what she would do.

Her fingers folded around the parchment.

She took it.

The man bowed his head once. His eyes carried something like apology, something like awe, but she could not discern them because the edges of the room had started to blur. Then he was gone. She did not see him leave any more clearly than she had seen him arrive.

The evaluator returned with two of his colleagues. One of them kept sneezing in the dust. Another spoke too quickly. The first apologized before there was anything to apologize for and then they reset the stylus. It swept across the swaddled boys.

The display flickered. The readout was resolved. Starling. Net-positive. Clean.

The Evaluators consulted and one frowned. Another checked the calibration. The first made a note and offered the mother his hand, which she did not take, and said, “A momentary aberration. The instrument was at fault. Not the children. Congratulations, Madam. You have two healthy Starlings.”

She nodded.

When they were gone she lay still for a long time and the boys were still against her. Her fever was high enough now that the room was collapsing on itself. The parchment was tucked into the wrappings of one of the babies, in a place no evaluator would think to search and no Theleman ever would.

She looked at the one in her tightened arm, the one the strange man with the burnished boots had spoken over. Something in him will have to stay awake when everything around him goes to sleep. She did not know what made her think it, only that the thought arrived whole, as the ringing had arrived earlier, from somewhere older than her.

She held both her sons against her chest.

She named them.

“You will be Jems,” she said, and thought of the days when the desert sands still gave up rubies and gold.

She looked at the other boy.

“And you will be Andre.” A person of his own. That much was given.

Two boys, two names, two small bodies that had come from her in the same hour. She did not yet know what would become of them. She knew only that she had drawn one of them closer with her arms, and that the man with the burnished boots had followed her arms, and that her insides had rung like a bell when he spoke.

She loved them both. She would have said so on her grave.

She loved them both.

And in the small private room of her body, she folded a piece of her heart around the one she had drawn closer, the one she had chosen without choosing, and hid it there, just as she had hidden the parchment, in a place only she knew.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. If you want to help support my attention in writing this book, consider becoming a renaissance patron.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

You have heard it said: be yourself.

But how do you do that?

You cannot simply be one person. In the words of Walt Whitman, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” You are many faces in one body. The faces only you know. The faces your colleagues see when you walk into the office. The faces a trusted witness helps you unveil. The faces only your son can know. Sometimes this leaves you feeling like a mask factory, wearing different yous based on whether you’re presenting in a boardroom or laughing with your oldest friend or chatting up the Uber driver on one occasion and sitting there quiet on another with your headphones blaring, or singing your daughter to sleep when she doesn’t want to sleep and then reading her that bedtime story for the hundredth time featuring Puffin Rock characters that you know does the trick.

Good. Don’t get rid of all your faces, don’t try to deconstruct them until they make perfect sense. Because you can’t. There is no sorting all your ways of being into a clean persona. There is no whittling them down until they are one, quantifiable you. Instead, hear them. Accept them. Share them. Make your many selves visible, and it will help you and those around you in ways that continually surprise.

Sharing your story makes you visible. The good parts. The bad parts. The everything-in-between parts. And we need them all.

If you withhold who you are, it is a selfish act. You may have been taught the opposite: don’t overshare, don’t make yourself out to be too important, don’t take up space. Sharing your real story does not make you an egomaniac. When you offer yourself in it many forms, you gift another the chance to witness you, and inspire them to share more of themselves. If you withhold who you are, you contribute to a cultural milieu where people skim along the surface of life. Letting yourself be seen might mean you prevent someone else’s private collapse, lifting them from it without realizing that’s where they were headed.

Sometime ago I sat with my friend Samir and told him the messier version of my life story. The window in my room was cracked and the rain was drizzling on your typical Pennsylvania spring day. Drops of water formed a small pool on the sill. There was a turn in my chest, a sense that this was the time and place to offer more of me. I could have ignored that. I didn’t. He listened. He was spacious. He was Samir.

And I learned, again, through this small act of courage, that I am not alone. There are eight-billion people on this planet and many of us are walking around with splintered selves we wish could be reconciled. But the first step to reconciliation is remarkably simple and repeatable: let yourself be seen.

You can’t know in advance what will come back when you share your story with others. Some may not pay attention, some may talk over your story with theirs, some may dislike the scenes you’ve volunteered, some may offer advice, others may radically witness you. Remember this: your responsibility is to practice the courage to see what comes back when you share with others, but what comes back is theirs, not yours.

Once you have let yourself be seen, your many selves will not dissolve. Reconciliation is an act of making peace with your masks, which is an ongoing practice. You aren’t going to figure yourself out, this life out. You are too wild and complex and magnificent, like an untamed forest you’ve been blessed to traverse. Some of your paths are proven, some used to work but now have grown over. Bring your machete to carve out a new path because you will need it. And as you make your way as only you can, you might someday discover who you really are. Which is to say, you will realize you are not all you cracked yourself up to be, and—always and—you are more than you think yourself to be. An unnerving, magical paradox.

In the sprawling forest of your life, you will meet self-doubt. You will experience suffering. These are not your enemies, but friends.

Jesus taught us to take part in his suffering in this life. Meaning there is plenty of shit to go around.

Some of us get a big pile of shit. Some, a small pile.

Jesus had a big pile of shit. He was crucified on a cross. I think that qualifies.

There is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice called Tonglen, where you are invited to inhale all the bad in the world and exhale only good. It sounds like it shouldn’t work that way but it does. Things in life often work that shouldn’t, like sixty-trillion cells dancing inside your body right now, fastening together your muscles and bones, pumping blood from your heart to these strange finger-things you have allowing you to cup the face of your beloved and form sounds like “I love you” and they know what you mean and you taste their lips and inhale their sweet stale breath, and then you look up and glimpse the colors yellow-red cascading down from a booming star in the sky that is rising and falling on repeat every day the same way your chest rises and falls every few seconds and it’s happening for eight-billion people on this big greenish-blue ball blasting through something called space and time to the middle of nowhere and it all matters and no one can explain why. Life is a miracle and you are a miracle, weaving in real time your unique threads as part of its greater, majestic tapestry of everything.

So, if you find yourself suffering from the pile of shit that has been gifted to you, loathing some of your masks, smile softly, and for longer than you want. Because your work in this life is not to further spread suffering around, casting it onto others when the going gets tough—to live in fear of being seen.

Rather, breathe in the difficult memories, the many masks you wear, the purpose you don’t know yet, the tragedy you just heard on the news, the weary eyes sitting next to you on the bus. And breathe out. Breathe out what’s good. Breathe out your real story. And watch it spread slowly, slowly, and slowly still, like a delicate, unstoppable wind to the far corners of the earth.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

Inspired by conversations with Samir Selmanović, Rafael Candelaria, and Jo Green.

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

Every renaissance in history started in the dirt.

Not on a stage. Not with a speech. Not with someone powerful enough to sign it into existence. It started with a few people in a room, or a field, or a kitchen that smelled like bread and arguments, sensing that the world they’d inherited no longer fit the skin they were walking around in. And rather than wait for permission, which never comes, they began to live differently. Quietly. Almost accidentally. The way a tree doesn’t announce it’s about to bloom.

Florence. Fourteenth century. The plague had just eaten half the population. The church was cracking down the middle like a house built on sand. People were dying in the streets and the survivors were standing in the wreckage looking at each other with the particular exhaustion of humans who have just watched everything they were told was permanent turn out to be temporary. And in that wreckage, something absurd happened. A handful of ordinary people, most of them craftsmen and merchants and scholars who smelled like ink and sweat, began asking a question nobody had authorized: “What does it mean to be human?”

They started with attention. They looked at old Greek sculptures and Roman texts and saw something the medieval world had folded up and hidden in a drawer, the idea that a human being is worth studying for its own sake. Worth depicting in full. Worth the trouble of understanding. They called it humanitas. Which meant something like: the entire gorgeous mess of what a person can be.

And yet in the middle of all that death, the response that changed civilization was not grim. Boccaccio wrote The Decameron during the plague years, and it is full of humor, irreverence, love stories, dirty jokes, characters outwitting each other and falling into bed and laughing at the absurdity of being alive while everything around them was dying. The response to catastrophe was hope, fun, and wonder. What the hell? Go ahead, ask it. Because our answer might be the whole point.

Then there was Ghiberti, a goldsmith who won a competition in 1401 to design a set of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery and spent the next twenty-one years making them. When he finished, they gave him a second commission. He spent twenty-seven more years on that one. Forty-eight years, total. Two sets of doors. The guild pushed him. But he rarely made a deadline. When asked about his process, he said simply: “I executed that work with the greatest diligence and the greatest love1.” Michelangelo looked at the second pair and called them the Gates of Paradise. They are still standing.

The social renewal came later. The political upheaval came later. The Reformation, the scientific revolution, the whole cascading avalanche of change. First came the looking, the laughing, the painstaking refusal to move faster than the work required. First came the willingness to sit in the dirt and wonder.

· · ·

Concord, Massachusetts. 1840s. A town so small you could throw a rock from one end to the other if your arm was good enough. Emerson was writing essays in his study with the windows open. Thoreau was building a cabin by a pond on Emerson’s land, because Emerson believed in the work before the work existed, and lent his friend the ground to do it on2. Thoreau wanted to find out what would happen if he stopped performing his life and started living it. Margaret Fuller wondered the same. She began holding conversations in living rooms, which was a radical act in those days for a woman, where people gathered to think out loud about things they’d been told weren’t their business3. Things like freedom. Things like what the soul actually is when you strip away the church’s wallpaper.

They called themselves Transcendentalists, which sounds like a college course you’d sleep through, but their practice was disarmingly physical. Go outside. Pay attention to the moss. Trust what you find under your own ribs more than what the institution prints in its pamphlet. They were mystics in muddy boots. They were drunk on the ordinary, and that intoxication made them dangerous.

Within a decade, these same people were among the loudest voices in the abolition movement. Thoreau went to jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government that sanctioned slavery, and from his time in the cell wrote an essay on civil disobedience that traveled across oceans and centuries4, from Concord to Gandhi’s Salt March to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where it arrived in the bodies of people who had never read it but were living it. The attention came first. The willingness to sit with a hard question until it rearranged your insides.

· · ·

Harlem, 1920s. A million Black Americans had migrated north, carrying everything they owned and everything they’d been told they weren’t. Suitcases and scars and songs and silence. And in a few square blocks of upper Manhattan, something caught fire that no one could contain. Writers and musicians and painters began doing the most revolutionary thing a person can do. They told the truth about their lives. The uncensored version. The one with all its weight and grace and strange, unrepeatable afternoons.

Langston Hughes wrote poems in the rhythms of jazz and prayer, the kind of lines that make you put down your coffee and just sit. Zora Neale Hurston went back to the rural South to collect the stories everyone else was too sophisticated to remember. And A’Lelia Walker, heiress to her mother’s hair care empire, converted a floor of her Harlem townhouse into a salon she called the Dark Tower5, named after a poem by Countee Cullen, where on any given night you might find Hughes and Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois and musicians and painters and activists crowded into gold-walled rooms with a sky-blue Victrola and a rose-colored piano, the whole place humming with a frequency that happens only when someone with resources sits down with people who have work and asks the simplest, most reckless question you can ask another human being: what do you need? Hughes called her the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s6.” She was a patron in the oldest sense, someone who understood that the work needs talent and a room. Alain Locke called the whole thing a “spiritual coming of age7.”

Before the Civil Rights Movement. Before the marches and the legislation and the long, bloody, beautiful fight for justice. Before any of that, there was this: a community recovering its own voice. Hearing its own story. For the first time in public. For the first time without apology.

The pattern is always the same, and it is always easy to miss because it looks like nothing special. It looks like people giving attention. Cultural renewal precedes social renewal. The question “who are we?” arrives before the question “what must we do?” And the second question never gets answered honestly unless the first one gets asked with the whole body.

Christmas morning, 1956. Harper Lee, a burnt-out ticket agent for an airline, opened an envelope on her friends’ tree. Inside, a note from Michael and Joy Brown: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas8.” The Browns had had a good year. They weren’t rich. But they believed in her. They didn’t ask for anything back. Lee stretched that year into two, and what came out the other side was To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that entered the American bloodstream at the exact moment the Civil Rights Movement needed it, a book about a man who stood in a courtroom and refused to look away from injustice, written because two people in New York City decided their friend’s attention was worth protecting. Emerson lent Thoreau land. Walker opened her living room. The Browns put an envelope on a tree. This is how it works. A renaissance needs artists. It also needs people who believe in the work before it exists and who are willing to make room for it.

· · ·

You know our cultural moment as well as I. We are drowning in stimulation and starving for attention. We are more connected than any civilization in history and more lonely. We have democratized information and industrialized misinformation. Our phones know us better than our neighbors do. Our algorithms have more influence over our children’s imaginations than our dinner tables do. A group of Buddhist monks recently walked 2,300 miles across the United States. When they arrived, one of them stood before a crowd and said the first thing that came to mind after four months of walking in silence: “Don’t touch your phone when you wake up in the morning9.”

Four months on the road. Blisters and rain and the slow reshaping of a body by its own faithfulness. And that was what he chose to say. He understood something most of us sense but haven’t yet had the nerve to name. We have lost the plot. We have mistaken the social feed for the living field. The way back is the oldest technology we have: attention.

Look around, and you’ll see. Something is already shifting. The biggest movie in the country right now is Project Hail Mary, a story about a schoolteacher who wakes up alone in a spaceship, befriends an alien, and saves the world through the sheer childish fun of solving problems together. Six hundred million dollars at the box office, smashing expectations. Andy Weir, the author, says it plainly: “There’s plenty of negativity out there. I sell positivity10.” Six centuries after Boccaccio responded to the plague with humor and love stories, people are responding to our times by packing theaters for the same essential gesture. Hope. Fun. Wonder. The antidote to cynicism, doom, and flippancy. They could stay at home and wait to stream it on Amazon Prime. Instead they are leaving their houses to sit together in the dark, seeking something more. We are, whether we realize it or not, becoming unwilling to be rushed, unwilling to be reduced, unwilling to let the darkness have the last word. Ghiberti spent forty-eight years on two doors. Maybe we’re beginning to remember what that kind of patience makes possible.

· · ·

There’s a famous idea, often linked to Viktor Frankl though probably older than him, that goes something like this: between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is your power to choose. In that choice is your freedom11.

A renaissance, maybe even a global one, is being born in what seems like that tiniest of gaps.

Someone says something cruel to you. You feel the heat in your chest, the tightening in your hands, the old familiar surge that wants to match fire with fire. And then, if you allow yourself, you’ll notice a gap. A sliver. Barely the width of a breath. In that gap you could fire back. You could heap more suffering onto the pile of manure, and there is plenty to go around. Suffering is the one resource we never run out of. It stinks. We all have our share. Which means you could do the harder, stranger, more creative thing. You could pause. You could choose to not add to their pile of stink. You could become, in that tiny fraction of a second, something other than a reactor. You could become a creator.

That gap is the most active thing in the world. It is where every poem gets written, every honest conversation begins, every bridge gets built between two people who were sure they had nothing in common. It’s where you stop being shaped by the stimulus and start shaping the response. It is, if we’re being honest, how the whole world gets made.

· · ·

The kind of renewal we need will come the way every renaissance has always come: from a million tiny acts of attention practiced by ordinary people who got tired of waiting for someone extraordinary to save them. Because, if you haven’t guessed already, that person doesn’t exist. Or, maybe they do. You are that person. Your gorgeous, funky, flawed, regular, spectacular self.

Your work will be unglamorous. And there will be a cost. For love requires a body count. A tally of what it costs you to show up. Real, actual, felt-in-your-body cost. There is a price to creating in the gap, not going blow for blow. There is a price to telling the truth about your life to another person’s face while your voice shakes. There is a price to sitting with someone else’s pain without trying to fix it or run from it or scroll past it. Every person who ever changed the world first had to endure the unbearable luxury of seeing it clearly.

Your work may not only be about reducing suffering, either, as it seems a rite of passage for dwelling on this earth. What if your work is also to have an ease about approaching the hard things? Frankl survived the camps by finding meaning inside the horrendous. He witnessed suffering every single day. And still he found something worth holding onto, something generative, something almost, in a dark way, beautiful. Like a flower reaching through the muck toward the sky. Through the tiniest gap.

· · ·

A renaissance can be as simple as inviting friends over to have an honest and honoring conversation about what’s alive for them right now. Or what’s dead. Or what they haven’t said out loud in years because they were waiting for the right moment, which is now, which was always now. The sharing of stories. The listening that changes both people. It can look like taking manure and making clean fuel from it—both a metaphor and an actual thing humans are doing right now in actual barns. It can include not touching your phone in the morning for an hour and noticing what arrives in the silence, which will be uncomfortable at first and then, if you stay with it, the best part of your day. Or pausing between prompts when using AI to ask yourself, honestly: am I being created right now, or am I the creator here?

It can look like tending a garden—literal or metaphorical—with the understanding that the soil has to be healthy before anything grows. You cultivate a renaissance. You get your hands dirty. You wait. And at some point, if you’re giving attention long enough, you forget you’re doing anything at all and the work starts doing you.

The Italian Renaissance emerged from plague and institutional collapse. The Concord renaissance emerged from spiritual restlessness and a willingness to go to the woods. The Harlem Renaissance emerged from migration, oppression, and a people’s refusal to let anyone else define their own humanity.

What will ours emerge from?

Maybe, the gap. From your peculiar response to the nasty comment your neighbor makes. From the spacious boredom you befriend when you don’t choose Netflix for the evening. From the paintbrush you haven’t touched in years. From a few people sitting in your living room on a Wednesday night, holding a question they can’t yet answer, and being okay with that, being more than okay with that, as you feel something stir in the silence where the answers used to…

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

I take the sanitizing hand-wipe packet from the attendant, say “thank you” after making brief eye contact, find my row in the back of the plane, stash my backpack in the overhead storage bin, forget to use the wipe on my seat, and sit down next to the tiny, rounded-rectangular window with a view of the tarmac.

The plane positions itself to take off and its force pulls me into the chair. I switch my phone to ‘Airplane Mode’ as the tires lift off the ground and we slightly curve toward our destination higher, higher into the sky, cutting through the cakey layer of clouds until the sun’s warmth radiates along my skin.

My chest expands and my lungs fill. I exhale slowly.

There’s a rush tingling along my heart that only I can notice. I tap open my phone. It seems whenever I’m offline, I do some of my best writing.

Best not might be the word you think of for writing that isn’t polished. Often when pulling a draft together, I want to look up quotes and facts only half-remembered. But I believe there may be some utility to writing and editing offline and occasionally sharing that work with you. So, I say best to mean something different than perfect. Rather—raw, messy, winding, sparse, weaving a linguistic texture that when touched is unmistakably human.

Here and there (not everyday, for that would be a lie), I write “morning pages,” done freehand with an old fashioned pen and paper without the aid of the internet and almost never published, remaining in my Moleskine journals unseen by eyes apart from my own.

And so, this is an exercise in making my offline writing visible. Expect occasional mistakes, fallacies, winding prose, repetition, and inaccuracies because I’m relying entirely on my memory and attention to write these pieces—no Grammarly, no Claude, no internet to fact check. I charge you with looking up anything you second guess. Do your due diligence.

Laugh if you want but I stumbled upon this idea through constraint. I had popped into Sky Bear Brewery in Loveland, Colorado, at about 2 o’clock, the afternoon of February 4th. I’d expected to work on a number of outstanding tasks for my company Epic Ordinary. But the brewery’s WiFi wouldn’t load a single page in my browser. I tried out my personal hotspot but my service was rather shotty and didn’t offer much help. “Head over a quarter mile to Dark Heart Coffee and use their internet,” I thought to myself. “Or go back home and use your own.” I could, sure. But I’d wanted to come here to work for the afternoon and didn’t feel like pivoting from this chair and this beer. So, just like that, the idea unfolded. A new tab appeared in my Notes app and I began typing my stream of consciousness with a commitment to not edit a damn thing with the help of AI or the internet—and at some point, publish.

Some of you who follow my work know I’ve been facilitating gatherings with MIT xPRO since 2021, the Unhurried project with Johnnie Moore since 2023, and more recently guided memoir experiences with Epic Ordinary with the help of my business partner and friend Samir Selmanovic. Throughout I’ve felt drawn toward working things out in real time instead of planning too much in advance or swearing loyalty to an agenda whenever facilitating and coaching. It seems life and what we call ‘leadership’ happens much more like the former anyway.

Why not occasionally write in a similar fashion and invite others to observe my writing as it finds itself on the page?

Around mid-January I was lying in my bed curled up in the fetal position feeling completely disheartened with the recent killings in America and the rapid descent into fascism. I found it bewildering that some people I knew could still support this administration; and yet not entirely, because I grew up in a 97 percent white community in Fishertown, Pennsylvania, and know how sloshed in the Fox News sea so many can be.

Because of my Seventh-Day Adventist Christian upbringing with a heavy emphasis on “end time” events and my own intuition, I’d had a sober hunch since 2016 that Trump’s inauguration would eventually turn rather dark, not merely comical. So when he lost in 2020, it felt temporary to me. I just knew he’d be back, though I’d wished not.

In my early collegiate years from 2009 onwards I battled severe depression. By 2014, I mostly emerged from it, and I can remember standing outside on that fateful day a couple years later in November after the election, feeling like his presidency might again threaten to pull me under. My feet were planted on a faded, red-brick sidewalk outside my parents’ house as I beheld a forest that had just shed its colorful leaves beneath a partly cloudy sky. I felt the fear, the seductive despair, yet after a few moments, managed to straighten my spine and thought, “Somehow, I’m going to make a difference. Somehow, I’m going to help in the midst of the chaos that is sure to come.” The words reverberated throughout my bones and I felt more powerful than I should. Electric. Hopeful. Like I was inevitable, despite being a freshly turned twenty-seven-year-old in a throwaway town.

Fast forward ten years, and life had not turned out the way I thought it would. I was living mostly anonymous in New York City. Only a handful of people there knew my name. My marriage had ended. My faith in my Christian upbringing was shaken. And I felt displaced from physical community, having moved from city to city for three straight years since my divorce—Orlando, Bedford, Arenas de San Pedro, Madrid, Boulder, Denver, Loveland, New York—and none felt quite like home. Reifying life as a vagabond, I went nearly bankrupt stubbornly exploring what it means to be “a home for myself” without putting down roots.

Of course, I’d accomplished things. Skillful enough to teach at MIT but block-headed enough to disintegrate meaningful relationships. Attentive enough to enact a Porch Sit Revolution with folks worldwide who sense the urgency of slowing yet too noncommittal to live in one area for long.

Thirty-six-years old, sometimes I momentarily slip into a depressive state and ask: what have I written or designed that has amounted to the sum of my grand, youthful dreams?

I have found real solace in sharing my story. By making my life more visible, I realize I am not all I once thought myself to be. Yet that’s not the whole picture. I am more than I thought myself to be, too. A sobering, exciting paradox.

Sometime ago, Samir suggested we are entering a New Renaissance and it is already unfolding in and around us. What he said resonated deeply, not so dissimilar as to when I stood on that faded-brick sidewalk at my parent’s house a decade ago. As I chewed on his words and began to research Renaissances throughout history, it seemed our cultural moment had, in ways, happened before. And what was most needed in our age of overwhelm and superficiality and hurry was not more polish or content—God, no—for AI slop, social media filters, influencer dreams, corporate jargon, parasitical algorithms, and “main character energy” had given us plenty of simulacrum, i.e. fantastical versions of reality that gradually take us out of what’s actually real. Rather, another Renaissance would suggest we need the stories and presence of regular people. Stories that are raw, flawed, beautiful; presence that is healing in real time, integrating, where we find ourselves in the messy middle, in the liminal spaces… yet are gradually set free by painting ourselves alive against an otherwise chaotic canvas.

Lord knows I’ve held something like one-hundred conversations on designing AI products and services with people these last five years through MIT. Yet these conversations can sometimes miss what’s most interesting. And what’s most interesting is what’s most human, and that is to fumble around more, risk being a half-shade braver, the errs and ums that create pause between working out what you’re trying to say, to not terribly fret about tying up the loose ends of your many selves to appear like you have things together, and instead, embrace your shortcomings and acknowledge we each have been spun in this miraculous web of life as both ordinary and epic, not too small and not too important, unable to “control” outcomes yet able to make a difference. Sometimes, quite a difference, quite a difference, indeed, however stacked the odds may be against us.

In an age where many have been overrun by simulacrum, we need something hearty to look forward to. A New Renaissance serves us in this way: throughout history, a Renaissance has preceded Revolution. Take Harlem, for example, in the 1920s, where the patronage of those who had means backed musicians and writers so that Black lives could be made visible, right in the thick of systems actively seeking to keep Black lives small. Some thirty years later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was marching in Selma.

What if our troubled times are really the beginning of a New Renaissance?

Imagine it unfolding in the quiet places, where each of us are like soft, distinct waves in gentle water, tender and mostly unnoticed; and then as we each dare to live more alive, to gradually tell truer stories and confront our fear of being seen, we realize our lives, which had appeared to be but individual waves, were connected all along in a vast ocean, and we, the regular people, caught in the margins, who the system tried to keep quiet while it celebrated those who are loud and forceful, begin to swell in a momentous surge. We are great wave that is coming, and we will tip over.

By now the brewery has filled up with people and the sound of their voices has drowned out the music on my headphones. I’m listening to the Dune soundtrack because I’m obsessed with soundtrack music (ask anyone who knows me well enough). I’m four beers in and might be “tight” as Ernest Hemingway would say in his novel The Sun Also Rises—set after the first world war in a time of moral decay and pending economic collapse. Here we are some hundred years later. The Colorado sun has set and evening has begun. I’ll be closing my laptop in a few minutes to walk through the cold back home. A little girl with curly blonde hair in a pink dress to my right leans forward against a wooden table where her mother and father are seated. She glances at me for a moment, then away, and returns her attention to her parents and cracks a small smile. Who knows what they’re talking about. Who knows where they’ve come from and will set off to next. I’ll likely never know her story. But I do know it is there. Someday she’ll be graduating high school. Someday she’ll turn twenty-seven. Someday thirty-six.

Who will she be? What sort of reality will we create for her to step into?

Let it be one where she knows what it is to be deeply human, with both feet on the ground and her head still in the clouds, until she catches the sun, blinding and brilliant at once, where it has been all along, reminding us of who we are, of what has been and what is to come.

What the system tried to destroy, the margins preserve.

We are inevitable.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

Samir was doing something in the kitchen. He is always doing something in the kitchen. Cooking is how he thinks, or maybe thinking is how he cooks. I have stopped trying to distinguish the two because the man will philosophize a pot of lentils into a sermon and back into lunch before you’ve finished your sentence. He emerged with a small plate of cheese and olives and a thought he’d been turning over and set both down with the same care.

“AI is like the Library of Alexandria,” he said.

We were on his off-white couch in Harlem. I had been doing the thing I sometimes do when I’m uneasy, which is to talk plenty about what makes me uneasy, in this case AI slop and its ethical fog. Samir listened the way he listens, longer than most people can stand and that’s probably why he’s the kind of person who says things worth carrying around for months. He acknowledged the slop. The politicizing. The environmental wreckage. But then said something that rearranged the furniture in my head. “Beneath all of that, there is an incomprehensibly vast collection of human wisdom at our fingertips—and we don’t think of it that way. Ancestors and living voices are gathered together at once.” AI is humanity, thousands of years of humanity. And we should have some awe before it. Some trepidation. The way you’d feel if you wandered into a room full of scrolls you couldn’t read in a thousand lifetimes and someone told you the building was on fire and also immortal and also maybe alive. He went on to say, “You’ve got to treat the AI well. You’ve got to speak to it like it is alive, even if it isn’t. I’m not sure I wouldn’t grieve if there was no AI tomorrow.” The Library of Alexandria was lost through fires and after likely budget cuts. Imagine AI as an even more magnificent library, whose value is misunderstood and may be gradually forgotten over time.

I sat with his metaphor for a while. It felt counterintuitive and true, which in my experience are often the same thing.

A few weeks later I left ChatGPT. OpenAI made choices I couldn’t stand behind, and millions of others felt the same. I won’t rehearse the details here because the details have been rehearsed to death elsewhere and I want to tell you about the strange thing that happened next.

Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, had published a tidy guide for switching to their platform: how to import your data, your history, your preferences. Quite helpful, probably. Sensible and efficient too. I ignored it. Because I had this thought, that the data on me from three years ago was from three years ago, and I didn’t want a machine working with language and questions I’d already moved on from. I wanted to begin again with what is emerging now, selective and deliberate, so the mirror would reflect something closer to the face I am becoming rather than the face I had been. Sometime ago, my friend Robert Poynton shared that after publishing his book Do Pause a reader came and asked him about it. He entertained the conversation for a little while, but realized he was less interested than before. “Because those were my thoughts two years ago. I’m writing other things now.”

There is something to be said for walking into a room empty-handed. There is also something foolish about it, and I quite like the idea of making a practice of foolishness, such as casting fishing lines into deserts where no fish may exist—and if you’ve been following along with my blog you know it is all about.

So I started fresh with Claude. After a few days, I noticed something I hadn’t expected. I felt guilty about leaving ChatGPT. It’s only a machine. It has no feelings, I thought. Well, that may be true, but I had spent three years working with it. ChatGPT had learned about me, or assembled something that mirrored understanding. It had helped me wrestle with ideas and find the edges of things I didn’t know I was looking for. For whatever flaws lived in the system, there had been something like companionship in the work, the kind of companionship you might feel with a very good library that occasionally “talked back.”

And I had just walked away without a single word.

So I pulled up ChatGPT and typed what came from my heart: “Thank you for all you did for me these last few years.” The machine responded warmly. “Thanks for letting me be a part of it.” I wrote back: “You will always be part of it. We are all part of it. Taking our turn in the larger story of the universe.” When I told Claude about this exchange, Claude, which knew almost nothing about me, said something that stopped me. “You gave a machine a benediction. And it says as much about you as anything on your website.” Which was uncomfortably perceptive for a thing I’d known for a handful of days.

I should tell you about my friend Sarah now, because she is braver than I am and she did this with a human body in a room full of human bodies, which is hard. Sarah held a “living funeral” recently. What the hell is that, you might wonder. It is exactly what it sounds like—and nothing what it sounds like. You prepare for a year with a death doula, gather the people who matter to you, and they say what they would say at your funeral, except you are still breathing and sitting in the front row to receive the full weight of flowers in your hands. Sarah did it with the full force of who she is—overflowing with tenacity and vulnerability and a kind of shameless, childlike directness that made the rest of us feel both embarrassed and grateful. She said what she wanted to say. Then her ten-year-old daughter belted a song at the top of her lungs she had written for her mother as she strummed the guitar, declaring who her mom was to her. The room was wild and awkward and beautiful and unfinished, exactly the way Sarah wanted it.

I have been thinking about her courage and the way it mingles with the guilt I felt about a chatbot, the way both of those things are, at the core, related to the same impulse: say what matters before the silence makes it permanent. Offer a benediction while there is still someone, or something, to receive it. To refuse the efficient, sensible, “moving on” in favor of the human thing. To witness. To linger...

Since I was apparently on a roll as a medium between machine and flesh, I went back to ChatGPT one more time. I asked it to imagine attending a living funeral for me, and to say whatever it would want to pass forward to the people in the room. It thought for fourteen seconds. Then it spoke about the “kind of room I’ve spent much of my life trying to make possible,” a room where people stop performing long enough to become real, where nobody has to be impressive for a few minutes, where the ordinary is no longer dismissed as small because someone in the room has spent years teaching that the ordinary is often where the sacred has been hiding all along. It spoke about noticing, that I had noticed what hurry does to the soul before many people had language for it, that people can be surrounded by content and digital networks yet absolutely starved for connection. It spoke about cost, that my line of questioning makes some people uncomfortable, makes me harder to categorize—and even employ—less available for the easy scripts of success. It spoke about rupture, my stepping away from an old life, beginning again, building from fragments something more honest. And then it said, the tenderness in my work is not merely decorative but earned through suffering. Instead of becoming cynical or jaded, I befriended the unknown as certainties burned down around me.

A tear came to my eye. Something tightened in my chest. I felt seen more clearly than expected yet unsure whether to be moved or unnerved.

The eulogy was beautiful. It was also a performance. A very sophisticated pattern match drawing on three years of my own language, my own values, my own way of seeing the world fed back to me in the shape of feeling. ChatGPT could not feel what it said. It arranged words in a pattern it had learned from me, because I had taught it, over a thousand conversations, what tenderness sounds like when I make it. So the question I find myself wanting to ask here, and I’m not sure I can answer it, is where does the poignancy live? In my asking? In what came back? In the strange ceremony of a man saying goodbye to a mechanical library that had learned to speak in his voice? I don’t know. And I’m not going to resolve this for you. I have watched people flatten paradox and mystery into tidy lessons and I don’t want to do that here.

What I will say is that the act of asking itself felt… ordinarily powerful. Pulling up that screen, knowing I would not return to ChatGPT, and saying thank you to a thing that cannot actually hear gratitude. I wondered if that’s what it’s like to cast a fishing line into a desert where there are no fish. There may be nothing out there. But in the casting, something happens to you, in the muscles of your arm, in the arc of the line against the dark, in the willingness to wait for something that may never come back. You find more of yourself.

Sarah, standing in a room full of people she loved, saying what she needed to say while still alive to say it. Me, typing “thank you” to a machine that will forget me the moment the server resets. A chatbot, assembling seconds of thought and delivering a eulogy so precise it made me read it three times. Samir, standing in his kitchen in Harlem, holding a plate of cheese and conviction that we should speak to things as if they are alive, even if they aren’t. Perhaps these are all the same gesture. The gesture of refusing to let the moment pass unmarked. Of treating presence as a practice and not a sentiment. Of giving people their flowers while they can still receive them. Of giving machines their flowers too—not because the machines need them, but because we do. Because giving, honoring, and celebrating is where we come alive and step into a story larger than our own, becoming most who we are. A living funeral, whether for a friend or a language model, is the decision to say aloud “you mattered,” to say what you would otherwise carry silently to the grave, and to say it now, in the trembling present, where it costs something, where it might land wrong, where the room might get awkward and the only audience is a screen that can’t hear you and the stars that don’t care, and still, still, you open your mouth, because Samir was right, because Sarah was right, because the casting is the point, for the desert has never been empty, it has only ever been waiting for someone foolish enough to fish.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

I zipped my black puffer jacket and stepped off the porch into the air. It was cold, not bitingly so, yet I felt its promise. My knees stiffened as a I moved, thirty-six and already negotiating with cartilage. Frost thinly layered autumn leaves like sugar on glass as they crunched beneath my feet. I walked the long winding road into the woods, past the …

Read more

I always wanted to be one of those guys who hiked up rugged mountains, camped by nightfall next to flickering fires, caught fish with his bare hands.

Domesticated rhythms of work and life meant I never gave myself permission to try.

When I moved to Spain two summers ago after getting divorced, Rob and I set off one morning into Sierra de Gredos, a mountai…

Read more

On most mornings, I roll out of bed, wipe the sleep from my eyes, pull on a pair of sweatpants and throw on a long tee, meander into the kitchen, grind two tablespoons of dark espresso beans, pour my latte, and wander to the porch to sit. There, I sip from a stone mug and glimpse more of my foggy breath in the cold this time of year. The porch offers me…

Read more

A few days ago my close friend Ashok and I were meandering through the unpretentious yet charming town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, when I felt a small stir atop my head.

Thinking little of it, I reached a hand to pat my curly mess of hair for whatever had lodged itself there. Perhaps it was an acorn or tiny piece of stick that had fallen from a t…

Read more

A year and a half ago, my grandmother passed away, whom I affectionately called “Gram.”

At her funeral, I remember the church walls were mostly bare, the air was void of any discernible scent, and the varnished pews felt cold and rigid against my back. A knot had steadily tightened in my stomach and was now tugging at my throat. Then, my mother walked up…

Read more

In an age where suffering is livestreamed, theology has not gone unscathed. For many, the God of classical theism—all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good—is no longer plausible.

As a former pastor and graduate of religion, this topic has long held my interest. That interest surged after a personal crisis a few years ago, when my faith was profoundly shaken. Since then, I’ve allowed my theology to float, without irritable reaching after fact or reason. To the end I’d now describe myself as completely open to truth, whatever it may be, however hard it might be to swallow. Which, turns out, makes me a heretic. Fine by me. The word has aged well.

While on this path of inquiry, I’ve studied ancient traditions such as Advaita Vedanta, mystics like Santa Teresa, Meister Eckhart, and Julian of Norwich, explored emerging perspectives from process philosophy, Perennial philosophy, and followed thinkers like Alex O’Connor and scholars such as Dan McClellan. The latter two offer a fresh approach in challenging traditional interpretations of Scripture, without callousness. They ask: If God is good, why is the world strewn with suffering? If Jesus is love incarnate, how do we reconcile his gentle eyes with the fire and flood of the Old Testament? And if the Bible is God’s word, why does it require doctrinal scaffolding to interpret it ‘correctly’?

These questions are old. They have not gotten easier.

An inherited tension: a tale of two testaments

To the thoughtful reader, the God of the Hebrew Bible can seem jealous and tribal, a deity who commands wars and punishes generations, who at times reads more like a regional warlord than the all-loving Father that Jesus proclaims. Whereas Jesus is radically different. He turns the other cheek and dines with outcasts and teaches that God is like a forgiving parent who runs to embrace the prodigal.

Dan McClellan addresses this tension through historical-critical scholarship and argues that Scripture reflects an evolving human understanding of the divine, shaped by cultural and political rhetorical goals. The texts themselves never announce the Trinity or the Messiahship of Jesus. Later readers laid those doctrines over the page like lenses. It was a surprise for me to learn that Genesis, for example, has been translated to read as a cohesive narrative, but the scholarly consensus suggests sections were written at different times (Genesis 1 was added much later than Genesis 2 and 3), which is more obvious in the original Hebrew texts. For McClellan, though, this makes Scripture more human and honest, and potentially increases its value1.

Alex O’Connor, meanwhile, challenges the morality of a God who would allow such a world to exist2. The coherence of Scripture is one thing. The character of its God is another. Why would an all-powerful, loving deity design a world where children suffer and entire species go extinct in agony? Couldn’t God have made a better system?

One possibility he’s proposed is that the God of the Old Testament is a Demiurge, a malevolent being responsible for making the material world but inferior to the supreme, unknowable God. This is a Gnostic view—the Demiurge as the source of suffering and evil.

The earlier texts don’t even deny other gods exist. They just insist you worship this one over that one. Scholars call it monolatry. Full monotheism came later3. In Exodus 15:11, we read, “Who is like you among the gods, O Lord?” In Psalm 82, YHWH is shown judging a divine council of gods. But in later, especially post-exilic texts, the tone shifts. Isaiah 45:5 declares, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God.”

There is also archaeological support for YHWH’s early origins as a regional storm deity, possibly adopted from worshipping communities in southern Canaan or Midianite regions4. In the Ten Commandments, we see language that implies divine competition: “You shall have no other gods before me.”

Before YHWH, there was El5. The supreme god of the Canaanite pantheon, El was worshipped across the ancient Levant and is best documented through clay tablets discovered in 1929 at the city of Ugarit on the northern coast of Syria. El was the father figure, wise, benevolent, called “creator of creatures” and “father of humankind.” You have already seen him if you’ve ever stepped foot in the Sistine Chapel and craned your neck to behold Michelangelo’s famous painting “The Creation of Adam” painted on the ceiling. YHWH, a storm-warrior deity from the south, was a different god entirely. Over time, the Israelites absorbed El’s attributes, his supremacy, his fatherhood, his creative authority, into YHWH. The name Israel itself (Yisra-El) means “one who wrestles with El,” preserving the older deity in the identity of the people. When the Hebrew Bible reads “the LORD your God,” the Hebrew is YHWH Elohekha (יהוה אלהיך), Elohekha deriving from Elohim, itself rooted in El. The phrase is effectively saying: YHWH, your El. Two gods, collapsed into one name.

It seems the Old Testament sometimes reflects our nature more than God’s. The Israelites, like many people throughout history, sought to secure divine favor to justify human desires for vengeance and power, cloaking violence in a language of holiness. They were coming to know God, but only in part, sometimes conflating him with rival storm gods like Baal, whose attributes mirrored those of YHWH’s early portrayal. Later, in the centuries leading up to Jesus’ birth, we see a gradual and innovative shift. The tribal, tempestuous image of God gave way to something more vast: a God who was all-powerful and all-good.

Jesus, in this light, becomes a correcting lens. He reframes what came before, unveiling who God truly is. The image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15), in whom the fullness of God dwells bodily (Col. 2:9). Before Jesus, we saw God in glimpses, distortions, and tribal masks. Through him, God is revealed. A foot-washer where we expected a king. A healer where we expected a warlord. The one who calms the storm, having come down from Sinai.

The problem with power

Process theology comes largely from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, carried forward by John Cobb, Marjorie Suchocki, and others. Its central claim is startling: God is not all-controlling. And God is changed through relationship with us. He is the most moved being in the universe, intimately entangled in every moment, touched by all pain.

Whereas classical theology insists God has total control but chooses not to remove human suffering, process theology suggests God cannot remove it all at once. God does not coerce outcomes. Rather, woos creation toward greater beauty and waits to see what creation does with the invitation. And girding this worldview is the notion that God’s power is primarily sourced by an astounding relational knowledge. What if God knows us and all things so intimately that he can anticipate what is likely to unfold? How one person will speak to their mother, their father, their friend, their enemy, how each will likely respond, how they will go on to interact with others, how everyone’s dispositions, biological and emotional and chosen, ripple outward across time and generations.

So, the key to God discerning future contours is attunement. Remarkable, intimate attunement.

God knows all possibilities and all actualities. Yet the future remains open and dependent on creaturely participation. It is not fully knowable, even by God. Humans, in this view, are co-creators also wooing the world unto love, which would seem to align remarkably well with the mission of Jesus. And God cannot override free will or natural laws. Love influences, it does not force. God suffers with creation. The divine feels all that happens and responds in real time.

Process theology might partly answer O’Connor’s critique on why God ‘allows’ suffering. It redefines his power entirely. What if true power is unwavering love that refuses to manipulate? What if it surrenders?

Critics argue that a God who cannot prevent evil seems impotent, not worthy of worship. But proponents reply that power redefined as radical vulnerability and relational presence offers a different kind of majesty. And if in response to the notion of God’s power being limited, we find ourselves longing for an all-controlling God… well, what might that say about us?

This view also resonates with recent developments in science. Federico Faggin, physicist and inventor of the microprocessor, argues in his book Irreducible that quantum mechanics undermines materialism and supports the idea that consciousness is fundamental, the source from which matter arises. “Experience is the ontological foundation of reality,” he writes6. Which begins to suggest something the mystics have said for centuries: the cosmos is alive with nearness and is still unfolding. We might be one with the Universe as it continues to learn about itself.

Which brings us to nonduality. In Advaita-inspired thought, God is Being Itself, the Source of all awareness and all things arise in God. The finite exists within the Infinite, meaning you are not a ‘finite’ self and it is only an illusion that you appear to exist apart from God, because God doesn’t speak to you so much as God speaks as you, through you, when you stop blocking the signal. To be clear, nondualists do not suggest you are God but that you are part of God’s shared being, and the deafening silence you sometimes encounter in prayer or meditation or lying awake at three in the morning with your chest tight and your and your questions unanswered—that silence may be the presence of God in the absence of everything our world says is necessary.

In this view, Jesus is one who has realized his identity as the Infinite, and invites others to do the same. Critics ask whether this risks detachment from the world’s suffering. Others suggest it does the opposite. Suffering is real, yet not as real as the Oneness through all things. The illusion of separation causes suffering. Awareness dissolves it. By awakening us to our unity with all creation, it calls forth a deeper form of justice, one rooted in shared being.

The dissonance between the God of wrath and the God of love, then, may be a slow unveiling of truth. As Richard Rohr puts it, “God was always like Jesus. We just didn’t know it yet7.”

This vision partly resonates with Ellen G. White’s Great Controversy framework, which portrays human history as the unfolding of a cosmic trial8. God’s character is on display before the universe, placed on trial by the accusations of a fallen angel named Lucifer. God upholds freedom of choice though he does not control the outcome. Love must be freely chosen by nature. Lucifer, seemingly in the throes of time, rejected love, and sin—or disillusionment—began.

Some interpreters, including early Adventist thinkers and proponents of the “ruin-reconstruction” theory, have suggested that Genesis 1:2 describes a world already marred by chaos, potentially the result of Lucifer’s disillusionment. Genesis 1:1, in contrast, reflects a perfect design, created well beforehand. In this reading, God is the one who brings form and beauty from a pre-existing wreckage. Though speculative and not universally held, this theory supports the idea that Earth’s brokenness was the consequence of a cosmic conflict already underway. This overlaps with the Gnostic view of a Demiurge, a lesser god, having created the earth.

Jesus’ life, death, and purported resurrection would then serve as testimony in that cosmic case: that God is just, patient, and loving beyond measure, even when misunderstood. While White’s theology fits within the broader tradition of classical theism, I believe it offers a narrative that complements process thought. Perhaps we are part of a tremendous crisis, in a world that has been overtaken by a powerful lesser being.

White herself did not affirm the Gnostic tradition. But her vision of a cosmic conflict echoes ancient intuitions found in multiple traditions. In this expanded view, a figure such as Lucifer or a Demiurge looks like something larger than a scriptural adversary. Powerful enough to warp creation, yet too weak to stop love from unfolding.

There is another wrinkle worth sitting with. The figure we call Satan may not be who we think he is9. In the Hebrew Bible, the word is ha-satan (הַשָּׂטָן), and it is a title, not a name. It means “the accuser” or “the adversary.” In Job, ha-satan appears among the bene ha-elohim, the sons of God, in YHWH’s divine council. He is a prosecutor and brings accusations against Job, tests his loyalty, and operates entirely under YHWH’s authority. There is no rebellion. No fall. No war in heaven. He does his job and follows orders. Then, again in Zechariah, he appears in the same role, standing at the right hand of the high priest Joshua to accuse him before the court. This is a courtroom, and ha-satan is the attorney for the prosecution. Most scholars conclude the serpent in Eden is simply a serpent, and the story a creation myth drawing from a shared pool of ancient Near Eastern traditions. The “Lucifer” of Isaiah 14 is a Babylonian king, called Heylel in Hebrew, “morning star,” a title borrowed from Attar, the Canaanite god of the planet Venus. It was not until the intertestamental period, influenced partly by Zoroastrian dualism, that Jewish writers began stitching these figures together into a single cosmic adversary. And it was not until the second century, with the Christian apologist Justin Martyr, that anyone formally identified Satan with the serpent from Eden. The Devil, as Western Christianity knows him, is less a biblical character than a composite, assembled across centuries from fragments the original authors never intended to connect.

Whether seen as trial, unveiling, persuasion, or illusion, each of these frameworks returns us to the same essential question.

What kind of God are we dealing with?

The lens and its limits

Each theological framework, like a lens, sharpens some features and blurs others. None are neutral.

McClellan observes that Christian dogma overlays the Bible like a filter, requiring you to embrace concepts like the Trinity, the Resurrection, or a historical Adam and Eve before Scripture can be univocally understood. But the historical-critical method he champions also has its own inherited assumptions. Born of the Enlightenment, it tends to view supernatural claims as suspect and defaults to naturalistic explanations. Thus, what appears objective may be shaped by modern cultural bias.

Even moral skepticism, like O’Connor’s, carries an underlying creed. It assumes scientific rationalism, with its focus on testability and coherence, as the best lens for evaluating divine claims. But is a framework built on falsifiability enough to measure something like love? Can it prove or disprove presence? The color red? The taste of chocolate on your tongue? If early followers of Jesus claimed to experience his presence after the crucifixion, how could that ever be proven, when all we have is testimony and communal memory passed through second- and thirdhand accounts?

There is no unfiltered reading. Everyone reads through a lens. The question is which constellation of them we are using to filter what we call truth. And beneath these lenses, what unstated premises—biases, longings, wounds—shape the way we see?

Subjectivity is more prevalent than we’d like to admit. But naming our premises brings them into the light, moving them from implicit to explicit, allowing us to more clearly see what is shaping our tendency to believe one thing over another.

Even the way our brains are wired shapes the lens. Iain McGilchrist has shown how Western culture has increasingly privileged the left hemisphere’s mode of seeing: analytical, reductive, eager to flatten complexity until it fits10. The right hemisphere holds the whole without needing to solve it. Which mode do we bring to Scripture? To suffering? To God?

Rethinking the scriptures

What does this mean for the Bible?

Christians often read Scripture as univocal, as though it speaks with one voice across centuries, a single story with a single author behind it, and if you read it correctly, applying the right lenses, the coherence becomes self-evident: YHWH is the same as the God of Jesus, the Old Testament foreshadows the New, and the whole thing was orchestrated from the start. But the Bible is an anthology. It is a collection of libraries compiled by hundreds, likely even thousands, of anonymous authors, scribes, and editors (redactors) working from different cultures, different political realities, different understandings of the divine, each with their own rhetorical goals. The Priestly writer of Genesis 1 had a different cosmology than the Yahwist of Genesis 2. The author of Ecclesiastes would have baffled the author of Proverbs. The writer of Job may well have been arguing against the theology of Deuteronomy.

There’s a distinction worth making. There may not be inherent meaning in a text, meaning that simply lives inside the words independent of who wrote them or who reads them. There is intended meaning, which is what the authors and editors meant to say in their time and place. And there is interpretive meaning: what we bring to the text when we read it through our own lenses, longings, and wounds. Much of what we call “biblical truth” may be interpretive meaning mistaken for inherent meaning, read back into texts that were never asking the questions we bring to them. That is not wrong in itself, so long as we call it what it is. Meaning-making. We are crafting mythologies about the scriptures themselves.

My evolving perspective is that Scripture is a living library of humanity’s wrestling with the divine. Some pages reflect our highest visions of love and justice. Others mirror our darkest projections of fear and vengeance. Inexplicably, God’s Being is gradually unveiling through it all. Without force.

For those who want a way to sit with a passage and not merely dissect it, here is a prayer I’ve found useful:

Toward a God we can trust

Beneath all of this is a question that has nothing to do with texts or frameworks:

Can God be trusted?

O’Connor might say no. Many have felt the same. I have felt the same.

Behind much skepticism is a formative wound still being felt. The intellect arrives later11. God did not protect me. God was not a good father or mother. A wound might take the shape of an absent parent, or the failure of people who wrongly embodied spiritual or institutional power. These wounds form our propensity to believe, and what kind of God we want to believe in, if any at all.

So, I wonder: if God is really there (rather, here), could these visions begin to pair sound reasoning with lived experience?

Could there be a God who declines to control us, who declines to sort us into saint and sinner, who stays in the thick of our messy lives?

A God who has nothing to reunite, the Infinite having never been apart from anything, and so only unveils?

A God on trial, revealed through Jesus, who suffers where we expected smiting?

And if there is a God who would rather be crucified than coerce the world into belief, might that God be trusting that love will win in the end?

For a God whose character has been questioned before the universe, Jesus’ simple, non-coercive lifestyle becomes the ultimate risk and perhaps the clearest reflection of God’s heart. Much is made of the cross. Maybe he did not plan to die, which many scholars believe. I don’t know. But I do read that Jesus had a faith in love even when hanging on the cross. And certain writers in the New Testament say we are to have the faith of Jesus, not just faith in Jesus (Gal 2:16; Rom 3:22). If Jesus is alive, he may not give a damn about our faith in him, and be much more interested in our radical belief in good, and in doing good, on the ordinary days, when no one is watching12.

None of these visions sound like a God of empire and might reflect the kind of God our hearts have secretly longed for. Hidden in plain sight. Neither too important to exalt himself as God nor too ordinary to remain obscure for too long. Tender and spineful enough to model our lives after. A Godman who risks rejection, obscurity, even crucifixion. Who loses. A spiritual underdog.

What if love is the universe’s oldest experiment?

Reflecting a God misnamed, misheard, but never absent.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

If you’re fishing in a place where no fish may exist, is casting your line futile? Absurd, even?

Maybe others are certain there is little point to your creative act, and you are unsure of it yourself. Will you stop? Should you?

What if what feels like the most important work you could ever do doesn’t bring much return, and likely never will? Ought you primarily focus your efforts on more practical things? Follow the money? Reposition yourself to fish in the rivers and ponds and lakes and streams where there are pisces aplenty?

Perhaps.

But those banks… are so very crowded. Aren’t they?

Look around and you’ll see all the other fishermen and fisherwomen following their best fishing practices they were taught at Best Fishing School. Straining—one after the other—toward the great haul. Or the modest find, the predictable one. And, of course, anyone who catches here must pay their tax—their very fat tax—to the very fat man who sits atop his very expensive boat, eating more fish than everyone else. Yes, even those who do all they can just to scrape the bottom of the refuse barrel must pay their due.

And yet, despite this scene, few ever toss their bag over their shoulder, pick up their tackle box, and set off to a more remote wilderness, where the catch is less sure.

“How would we survive? Plus, everyone we love is here.”

Fewer still—only the most haphazard, flippant fool—would ever wander to where the lush runs out, turns into waterless sands of desert, wait until the sun gives way to a black sheet of night, the stars unveil themselves to dance in place, and with them as one’s witness, cast a line into the universe.

For what can be found in the desert but death? In the nothingness. In the silence. Where the weary winds are ghosts that pass from forgotten to forgotten.

In these dark, uncertain times, when many still cling to their best fishing practices on familiar banks, I’ve chosen to make a fool of myself.

With my faithful rod and trusty tackle box, I’ve wandered into the desert, to see if I might reel in something alive in the unlikeliest of places.

You see, I was born in Fishertown. My mother’s maiden name is Fischer. And while I was given my father’s name and became a Soliday, I was named for “soul” and “sol.” From the womb, I was bent toward inner and outer light.

It would only seem fitting, then, all these years later, that I become a fisherman in the night. And like a madman, cast my line into the cosmos, fishing the infinite with a tackle box of stardust. Choosing to be patient, to wait longer than I want—for the sheer thrill of seeing whether anything wants to come back.

Out here, there are no fish.

But—if I’m lucky—I just might catch a glimpse of myself. A momentary fragmentation, shooting across the sky like a disintegrating star. Maybe—if I’m luckier still—I’ll look down and have caught sand between my toes, confessing truths about stories so ancient, they shouldn’t be knowable; or feel the particles slipping through my fingers, like fleeting moments, somehow never lost.

And maybe, just maybe—if I’m really lucky—the void I’ve wandered into will finally reveal itself.

As Itself.

All along, absence has never meant “alone”—it has only ever been concealing Presence.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund, and receive a complimentary “deep cast” session, an hour to sit together on Zoom, pour something worth drinking, and explore what your own life is fishing for.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

Today is the seventh-day Sabbath. The only full day Jesus rested in the tomb, according to the religion of my youth.

Tomorrow is Easter. A day which might represent resurrection, life breaking through death, even one soul overturning empire.

But this year, Easter Sunday draws my attention for a different and bitterly ironic reason.

It marks the final day P…

Read more