April 2026. I landed in New Orleans and ordered my first-ever shrimp po’boy in the French Quarter, and boy was I sorry for every year I’d gone without one. I scarfed it down. Samir looked at me, amused. So did his daughters Ena and Leta and wife Vesna and sister-in-law Jasminka and the others at our side of the table, their fingers pointing at the rémoulade in my beard. I did not care. My stomach went from growling to stuffed inside three minutes and now I had the hiccups.

Three days there.

On the first we took a boat along the bayou and watched eight-foot alligators lurk like logs in the swamp. One three-footer lounged on an actual log next to a snapping turtle, like two buddies on a bench outside the corner store. Raccoons emerged from the forest at the edge of the swamp. Dozens of them, a boarding party with bad intentions. They wanted what our captain would throw them, some small sweet, and each of them picked it up with their paws—tiny, nimble human-like hands—and ate the way I ate the po’boy and then stood waiting for more. A few gators were maybe twenty yards off. One of them floated closer and two raccoons gripped the side of a tree and climbed fast. Not high. They knew their escape route. They knew how close to come for the sweet and how high to climb until it was safe to come back down.

The second day the thirty of us gathered in the lounge of The Revelry for a Soul Cabaret of our own making. Dunja had printed sheets of music, and we split into sections like it was high-school choir and we all sang, badly, and it was better for sounding bad. Nate got up and strummed his guitar, “My Croatian Man,” tune and lyrics his own, written for Samir on his sixtieth birthday, and we howled and Vesna choked on her tears and we rose to our feet at the last chord. Ralf, seventy-three years old, pulled up a chair in front of us and sat down, slow, and said aloud the thing he was most afraid to say:

“One day I will learn who I am, and realize I’m not all that.”

When he dies, he wants his ashes scattered between East 9th and East 10th Streets in New York, outside Charlie Parker’s apartment, and he charged us with making it happen, whether or not his family wants it.

Later that night we went down Frenchmen Street and ducked into a bar where the sound pouring into the night was too good to pass up. Jump blues. Their frontman looked like Jack Black’s cousin, and his eyes went wide when Ralf started to boogie to his voice and his little trumpet, to the electric guitar and drums and piano, the way a man boogies who has stopped caring what anyone else thinks. And yet I know Ralf cared, and he is better for having cared.

The last night we put on our best clothes and made our way to the wine room on the second floor of the Calcasieu. Al and Leta and Sarah emceed us through the slide show, featuring pictures of sixteen-year-old Samir all the way to sixty. We played trivia to see who knew the most about the man in the room whom this event was for. And I did not win—of course not—and his daughters did not win, and not even Vesna. His niece Alyssa did. And then Samir stood and came to the front of the room in his light blue seersucker suit, and he was about to give a toast, and it was going to be good because it was Samir, and everyone knew that at once and was quiet the way a classroom goes quiet when the teacher stands.

And what he did was say nothing of himself.

For the next ten minutes, Samir looked at each person in the room, all thirty of us, one by one, and shared a sentence written only for that person. “Here is what I learned from you.” He went around the room. “Al, from you I have heard it is better to be crazy than fearful.”

“Sarah, you have taught me how to be brave. When the apocalypse hits and I climb out of the rubble, if only one other human is left alive, I hope to God it is you, because you know how to take on the world.”

“Ralf, you have shown me nothing is too small, nothing is too big, and no one is too much.”

What he said made his daughter Leta cry. Ena cry. Alyssa, who knew him best, cry.

When he came to me, I wondered what he would say given he had known me less than a year.

“Jordan, from you I hear that if a person is patient, they will find the other world in this world.”

Samir blessed every person in that room with his words except one, and then he folded his paper and stuffed it in the lining of his jacket and looked at Vesna, because for her he had no words of his own.

And then “I’m Your Man” by Leonard Cohen came over the speakers and Samir took Vesna by the hand and he led her up front, and she was timid, and he was not, and he danced around her, “if you want a lover,” and then he was on the floor, “if you want to strike me down in anger,” and then he was on his feet again with his fists punching the air, “I will step into the ring for you,” and then he was right against her with an imaginary stethoscope in his ears, listening to her heart, “I’ll examine every inch of you,” and then he was on a chair and down off it and our eyes were on him and Vesna’s hands covered her face.

Until he stood before her, shirt undone and slipping off his shoulders. Along the top of his back were the words HER MAN scrawled large in black marker.

After that the room was fuller than full and my heart nearly thumped through my chest and wanted out, out, out and so I went out, went to the bathroom and the tears were coming now and I knew why and it wasn’t what Samir said, wasn’t the words although they felt good, it was what was in that room, thirty flesh-and-blood humans with the love leaking out of their pores into the air so thick it soaked my insides, and the last time I was in a room like that was with my wife and her family back when I was still married, and here I was again, three years later, where a different community had found me, and I did not think I would ever feel held in that way again, and all I could do was weep and say “thank you” as I stood over the toilet taking a piss, and the fan hummed, and the laughter came muffled through the door.

After a while I zipped my pants. I knew my way up the tree. I knew my way back down.

Vesna and Samir had gone on talking, and there was a smile in their eyes, a smile that passed to Rod and Allie and Kareen and Tanja and Sam and every soul in that room, and I stood by the door and watched, and I felt the world grow.

If you read this and wondered what sentence someone might write only for you, come find out. Samir and I are hosting Harvest Your Story, ninety minutes on Zoom, free, twenty seats. The gathering is on Monday, October 19, at noon Eastern.

Reserve your seat

Once upon a time, I was gonna be somebody.

Fast and Furious posters covered my wall. Steelers jerseys hung in the closet. Assassin’s Creed and Madden NFL 08 stacked next to the PlayStation. A leather-bound Bible lay open on the desk, words highlighted, margins scribbled in my ink.

“Wassup, Soli,” Mark said, coming through the door. A couple inches taller than me, dirty blonde hair, and all the girls loved him. Mark was planning to become a cop someday.

We went off to do something and I cannot remember what. Hang out with one of those girls, probably. Grab food at Sheetz. Show up unannounced at Andrew’s house. Likely all three.

I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I knew it was going to be great. That was the sum of my plans.

At high school graduation in a ninety-seven percent white town in Pennsylvania, after Mark and I threw our hats up with the rest of the class, my physics teacher pulled me aside. Mr. Oldham knelt down in the grass to get level with me, which is what men of that generation did when they meant something.

“You can do anything you want to,” he said.

I carried that sentence to Pittsburgh like evidence that I had already arrived.

There, forty thousand students moved through a campus built for them, and I found the smallest available life inside it. A warped door. A screen. The blinds down in the afternoon because I had no use for the afternoon. That first semester I earned a 0.89 GPA. In case you are wondering, on a scale of 0 to 4.0, that is not very good.

I had stopped going to class. PlayStation was my reprieve. From what, I did not yet know.

One gray afternoon I peeled myself off the screen, put my shoulder to the door, and went down the hill at the pace of a man with nowhere to be. Hundreds of concrete steps. A cold rail under my hand the entire way. Thirty minutes to reach Forbes Avenue.

Inside the Starbucks, my English Composition professor waited—a lanky graduate student who had taught us in a musty classroom inside the Cathedral of Learning. He bought me a coffee. We sat by the window, next to the street I had just walked down.

He slid my essay across the table.

“It’s good,” he said. “It can be better. I see something in you. You can write.”

I was eighteen years old. And that was eighteen years ago.

Five summers later I came home for a weekend and met Mark at a bar. He had the haircut now, and guns for arms and one at his side. He had made good on the plan. Above the taps a television had been running the same footage for weeks, a verdict out of Florida, crowds filling streets in cities neither of us had visited. Trayvon Martin was dead.

“But, ya know,” Mark said. “All lives matter.”

I turned my glass a quarter turn on the wood. I said something about how it was complicated. I wanted the night to stay good.

It stayed good. Inside I was not good.

My first job out of university was teaching English at a court-adjudicated high school, meaning the students arrived by order of a judge.

The floor was waxed linoleum the color of weak tea. The windows were glass and some of that glass was broken.

There was a boy, fourteen. Thin, and he would holler “Ay Slickback” at me, on account of the gel in my hair. One day he got loud during an argument, and then louder, and then a supervisor crossed the room in three steps and took him down and put his full weight on him, a knee, a shoulder, two hundred fifty pounds of grown man, and the boy’s cheek went flat against the wax and his eyes traveled the row of desks looking for an adult.

They found me.

I was the adult.

I was standing at the whiteboard with a dry-erase marker in my hand.

It happened often there. It was policy, or close enough to policy that nobody bothered writing it down.

I could do anything I wanted to. And nothing in me was the size of what was in front of me.

I lasted another month. Then I left, and started writing a novel about a boy the system wants gone.

I wrote it in New Brunswick and in Orlando and in a village in Spain where the cathedral rang its bells every fifteen minutes, and at a desk in Colorado with a small dog asleep in my lap, through a marriage and out the far side of it, through money I did not have and the jobs I took in order to have it, four hundred evenings and then four hundred more, until the boy in the book had a name and a town and a mouth that got him into trouble, and people at the margins who kept him after the center let go.

The draft is finished1. A small circle of people have read it. A few hundred pages. It weighs about a pound.

I do not know the name of the boy on the floor. He would be near thirty now.

I haven’t talked to Mark in years. He is still a cop, and from what I hear a good one. I know what I should have said at that bar. I have had thirteen years to work it out.

Brother, I just want you to sit with why they had to say it at all.

Mr. Oldham told me I could do anything2. He knelt in the grass to say it, and he meant every word of it, and he was wrong. Anything turns out to be a synonym for nothing. I reached for the console.

The other man bought a coffee and told me to write the next draft.

Once upon a time, I was gonna be somebody.

I became a man who writes it down. Slowly. Too late for the boy on the floor.

It’s good. It can be better.

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

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 …

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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