I love you because you are here.

A friend recently gave me the way forward  by yung pueblo. I was reading the other night, trying to clear my mind of frustration and hurt so that I could fall asleep. This passage particularly got me thinking. I actually find it takes more energy to perform and maintain superficial interactions. Going deep is easy. It's real. It requires less effort because it only requires me to be me. So, I wonder why so many of us revert to the performative behavior and superficial interactions. Isn't it tiring? It makes me tired... Is it perhaps that even though it takes more effort to perform, it poses less risk. The potential consequences of going deep are scarier than the energy it takes to remain on the surface. But why should that be? Why should it be dangerous to be real in our interactions with each other? Why have we been conditioned to think that? Or why has our society cultivated that reality? It makes me wonder about what's to be gained, or who gains, from our isolation and s...

Welcome. I want to start by sharing the story behind the title of this blog -- I love you because you are here. It is a story that has been waiting 10 years to be told. 10 years. I hadn't actually realized that much time had past until I just wrote it... in some ways it feels like it was last summer and in other ways it feels like it never really happened. In the summer of 2015, I spent some time in a South African village eight hours outside of Johannesburg and just on the outskirts of Kruger National Park. The experience was both entirely foreign and perfectly familiar. I tasted food that made me feel as though it were the first time I had ever actually eaten real food and been truly nourished by a meal. Nothing exotic -- chicken actually -- but I mean chicken. The kind that lived the life a chicken is supposed to live, a life that ended just for that meal. And vegetables, with brilliant colors, perfect flavor, and all the nutrients of untouched soil. But what was even more impac...