Nothing Starts Where You Think It Starts
Here is a thing I have come to understand about life: nothing starts where you think it starts.
The thing that happened on Easter has a parent event, which has a grandparent event, which has a great-grandparent event, and so on, backwards through time, all the way to before the beginning of everything. Every moment you are living right now is the end of an infinite chain of causes. Every person in your life arrived there via a sequence of events so specific and so improbable that if you changed one single link, they vanish completely.
I went to church twice on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, and unexpectly found God sitting right next to me.
But this story doesn’t start on Easter Sunday. It doesn’t start with my birth. It starts somewhere in the infinite and it ends at my pier, watching the sun go down over the Salish Sea, feeling something I don’t have a word for yet.
I’ve written before about what it looks like to burn your life down to the studs. About ego death and what it actually costs. I wrote in Ego Death Is Torture Nobody Sees that losing your identity “feels like psychological waterboarding stretched across months.” That it is “crawling through hell with your skin torn off while the world keeps walking around you.” That nobody tells you the part where “the world keeps functioning like nothing happened and your entire identity is detonating.”
I know that now. I lived that. And what I didn’t know then and couldn’t have known, was that the chain of events that put me in that fire started long before I ever struck the match.
It is fluid it is transient it is changing
You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way
That a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing”
— INZO, “Drift Like a Cloud, Flow Like Water” (Alan Watts)
The Crisis.
The Cops.
The Chain.
6 or 7 years ago, I had a major mental health crisis. Cops were called. I fled my home in my Jeep because my psychotic paranoid delusional bipolar brain told me they were going to arrest me and I was going to jail. My ex told them what I was driving and as I pulled into the Whatcom Falls Park parking lot to escape my demons, three Bellingham Police Department units pulled in behind me. I hadn’t noticed them following me. After they carefully coached me out of my vehicle and patted me down for their safety, I handed them my keys, and they placed me in a squad car. They didn’t take me to jail. They took me to a place I know well and that knows me well: St. Joe’s hospital. Twelve hours later I was admitted to the psychiatric unit where I stayed for nine days to stabilize and have my medications adjusted.
That place is called One Central.
A few years before that crisis, I met a woman at work who was a friend of my ex’s. A woman that would remain in my orbit for many years, unknowingly becoming one of the most important people to have ever entered my life. For some very strange reason, we kept in contact for years. Nothing much. A coffee every once in a blue moon. A show with her and her partner once a year. Enough contact to recognize each other’s faces and remember each other’s names, but not enough to know much more about each other. I didn’t even know what part of town she lived in.
And her entering my life was part of a sequence of events that goes back to my birth. And beyond that if you really think about it. All the way back to the big bang, and whatever happened before that. If I hadn’t met my second ex-wife, I wouldn’t have moved to Washington and met her. If I hadn’t enlisted in the military, I wouldn’t have lived in New Mexico where I met my second wife. If my parents hadn’t met. If their parents hadn’t met. If my ancestors hadn’t moved to America. On and on. Literally to the beginning of existence and infinitely further beyond that.
“The way to become one with the universe is to trust it. That is to say, to be able to drift like a cloud and flow like water.”
That stay at One Central was an oddly coincidental part of the sequence of very specific and almost choreographed events that would change my entire life and lead to the sunset I watched at the pier on April 5, 2026, Easter Sunday.
The Men’s Group.
The Email.
The Room.
While in the unit, a mental health nurse suggested I join a men’s group called Mankind Project. This men’s group was profoundly different than any men’s group I had ever been a part of. It was very ritualistic and often discussed shadow work, which I couldn’t even begin to understand even after two years of participation. In the group I met one man who I really never got to know, but somehow ended up on his mailing list.
COVID-19 hit shortly after and Mankind Project pretty much disappeared from my life. The man I met hosted some unrelated men’s groups that I attended over the next several years. I stayed on his mailing list.
In October 2023, I got an email from the man about a new group that was meeting a few weeks later to discuss Internal Family Systems. I didn’t know anything about it but it sounded interesting, so I signed up.
In the second session I met my IFS practitioner, Jenni. A person who showed up out of nowhere and was clearly meant to be in my life. A woman who I didn’t know at the time would transform my life in ways I never imagined. I started seeing her weekly. A month later, I had the worst psychiatric crisis of my life where I told myself: “I don’t care what it takes, never again will I show up to the hospital this way.” Six weeks after that, I quit drinking and never once have repeated that psychiatric crisis pattern again.
But that wasn’t the end of the chain of events that transpired. I kept seeing her weekly and getting deeper and deeper into the parts of me that formed from experiences of my past. I eventually started thinking about everything from a parts and IFS perspective. It became my new emotional language and I didn’t even have a clue how important it was going to be a few years later.
The Bus Gets Hijacked
Fast forward to November 2025. I had uncovered many parts over the two years prior. My addiction part. My shame part. My adrenaline fight-or-flight part. Parts of me that were formed in abusive situations that had been exiled and buried deeply out of sight of my rational mind. Everywhere I looked, there were new parts that were using patterns formed in early parts of my life to protect me and most of the protection was very dysfunctional in my present adult life.
Avoidance was a part that was driving my bus and I didn’t even know it. It had been driving my bus for as long as I can consciously remember. It protected me, through zipping my mouth shut, from people hurting me. And it protected me from fears of abandonment, rejection, and loss of love. It had been protecting me since the first time one of my parents shut me up because they didn’t want to hear me cry. The words, “If you are going to cry, I’ll give you something to cry about” and the beatings that followed until I stopped crying. Even as a teenager, this continued. One time I got in an argument with my mother and she was not about to listen to what I had to say. And what I was saying wasn’t wrong, it was my truth. And when I kept repeating myself, she said “drop it” over and over. I kept repeating myself. And my stepfather decided he was done with me repeating myself, and at the age of 16, he cut down a small tree nearby and beat the living shit out of me to teach me a lesson. The lesson he taught me and I painfully learned that day, was the pattern I lived inside of that destroyed everything special to me — avoidance. And I never spoke my truth again. With anyone. Simply put, speaking my truth was absolutely dangerous.
I wrote about this in I-5 Milepost 254. 11pm. A State Trooper With A Flashlight In My Window. A Question. An Answer I Was Ready For. when I was accounting for what didn’t survive the fire:
“The avoidance was not mine. It was a survival strategy I built as a kid and never dismantled. The poor communication was not mine. It was fear of conflict pretending to be peace.”
Every single thing that killed my relationships wasn’t a character flaw. It was damage wearing a costume.
Avoidance was the death of every relationship I had. The one I obliterated in November was because I had kept my wants, needs, feelings, challenges, and struggles I was feeling in the relationship tucked away until they became unmanageably large. And rather than have a “dangerous” conversation, I just shifted the blame and kicked my partner out. I avoided again.
Five days later, I’m sitting in the rubble of an empty apartment all alone, and five parts emerged all at once. Five patterns I had been living in my whole life. Avoidance, performance, rescuing, lack of boundaries, and anxious attachment. When the five patterns came to light, I could no longer ignore them. And because I couldn’t ignore them and the consequences of them, I had to immediately stop doing them. And my ego and life as I knew how to live it immediately died in that moment.
November 17th, avoidance destroyed my long-term partnership.
November 22nd, I discovered that I was nothing without the patterns I lived in.
November 22nd, I asked myself the hardest question I have ever asked myself: “Who the fuck am I?”
I wrote about what came next in Ego Death Is Torture Nobody Sees:
“I did not gently lose myself. I destroyed a relationship and a few days later, completely destroyed an identity that was killing me and people I loved. And it detonated my entire nervous system.”
My IFS practitioner, and my therapist (who I was also led to by another crazy sequence of events) were waiting for me as I fell to the ground. They began to lift me back up and help me start the process of discovering who I am. They didn’t have the answer. It was always inside me, buried in my patterns and parts. I had to do the work to uncover my Self from the rubble sitting on top of me.
The Coffee.
The Song.
The Love.
November 26th, I met that woman who I first mentioned in this blog, for coffee. We hadn’t connected for probably 9 months. She didn’t know what had happened over the past 10 days. She vulnerably sang a song to me about love in my car as I drove her back to where we had started. That vulnerability in that moment opened up something really big inside me.
4.5 months later, she is absolutely without any doubt one of the most important people to enter my life. We are platonically in love now. Both of us sober. Both of us mirroring back to each other what co-healing has done for us. We are creating wisdom together.
I wrote about what this connection gave me in The Universe Is Waiting At Fold 103:
“My platonic love gave me that gift. From the very first afternoon. No pressure. No agenda. No hidden expectations. No escalator to force our connection into something it wasn’t ready to be. She just showed up. Exactly as herself. And let me show up exactly as myself. And the connection that grew from that foundation of nothing but honesty and warmth and mutual respect is the most solid thing I have built in my entire adult life.”
Safety through open, respectful communication without fear. Healthy boundaries, set and kept. Mutual moments of vulnerability. These were the foundation. Everything built on top of them held.
“You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.”
Two separate waves. Cresting at the same time. Shaped by the same ocean.
Collective Consciousness
I wrote a blog on Friday, The Universe Is Waiting At Fold 103, about shared wisdom. As I learn things and share them with others, they integrate it, mirror it back to me, I learn more, we learn more, and shared wisdom deepens. This shared wisdom gets passed on to other people. They integrate it, mirror it back, more people learn more, and the small nugget of wisdom I started sharing turns into what I discovered later Friday night to be what philosophers call “collective consciousness.”
I described it in that post using a paper-folding metaphor:
“Think of healing like folding a piece of paper. The first fold barely does anything. You can barely see it. Second fold, still thin. Third fold, still feels like nothing is happening. You start to wonder if you’re doing it wrong. But here is the science: you only have to fold a piece of paper in half 103 times for it to be thicker than the entire universe. Every fold doubles the growth.”
That’s what collective consciousness is. Every fold is shared. Every doubling passes forward.
My platonic love texted me on Saturday morning with some really big news. She had a profound moment of self-discovery and awareness, directly linked to wisdom we created together, and made some really big and difficult decisions with her life. She has integrated the wisdom I have about my patterns into her life. She realized she was living in those patterns and promptly stopped. What took me months to figure out and end, she figured out in weeks. That night, we were with a friend of hers who was struggling with some relationship matters, and we both shared a small tidbit about the performance patterns we had both lived in. And her friend had a moment of self-discovery and realized they were living in that pattern themselves. Months for me, weeks for my platonic love, and literally hours for her friend to figure out the same exact pattern.
Wisdom became collective consciousness. And it will continue to ripple out into the world and those around us, in unstoppable ways, forever.
My IFS practitioner, and the elders and mentors before her, brought me this wisdom. They earned it through years of learning things in more difficult and unguided ways.
Collective consciousness. A concept I knew nothing about three days ago. Now I can’t stop thinking about it.
“Collective consciousness (or conscience collective) is the set of shared beliefs, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge that operate as a unifying force within a society. Coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim, it represents a ‘group mind’ or ‘social mind’ that shapes individual behavior and maintains social solidarity, existing independently of any single person.”
I am suddenly unified with a huge number of people on this earth. A chain of knowledge that goes back to prehistoric times. Perhaps to the very beginning of existence as we know it, and far beyond that.
Then I Went to Church
On Easter Sunday, I was invited by my platonic love and my improv teacher (another crazy sequence of events that led me to her) to attend a non-denominational Easter church session at the local Center for Spiritual Living, which I will call CSL. There was a guest speaker from Nashville, Tennessee. Through a sequence of events and collective consciousness, she was at the church, sharing her wisdom. Her name was Ester Nicholson. Her session was described as:
“The Roadmap Home to Your Authentic Self speaks to the quiet longing beneath all healing work — the desire to belong without performing and to be whole without explanation. In this offering, Ester Nicholson honors both collective history and personal story while pointing to a deeper spiritual truth: the self God created was never broken, only obscured. This talk offers a gentle, grounded pathway back to that inner knowing, where identity is no longer shaped by trauma, otherness, or survival. Healing separation — within ourselves and between one another — begins with remembrance. This is not self-improvement; it is spiritual restoration and a return home.”
There is that word.
God.
I’m a very spiritual person. I am deeply connected to forces and energies around me that I cannot begin to explain or even understand. I know they are there. I feel them.
I am also agnostic.
“An agnostic is a person who believes that the existence of a higher power or ultimate reality is unknown or inherently unknowable. Agnostics typically do not commit to believing or disbelieving in a god, often taking a skeptical or noncommittal stance. The term can also mean being noncommittal or neutral about a topic. Agnosticism differs from atheism, which is the lack of belief or disbelief in a god, whereas agnosticism focuses specifically on the inability to know for certain.”
God is a concept I have struggled with my entire life. In twelve-step programs, I haven’t been able to understand them because it says “God as we understand him.” But I don’t have any real belief in God. Or disbelief in God. I’m agnostic about it. So they say “higher power,” which makes about as little sense to me as the word God.
When religious missionaries would knock on my door, proclaiming that their God is the only God and the thousands of other Gods worshipped by other religions were not truly God, I would ask them why theirs is the correct one. How they were certain. Their only answer was “faith.” Faith doesn’t work with my agnostic mind. So I couldn’t ever get into it.
I went to the church on Easter Sunday, and unexpectedly found God.
Not some supreme deity. Not a him, or a her, or a them. God as I suddenly came to understand it was sitting right next to me. On both sides of me. God was sitting in front of me and behind me. God was the child staring at me above their parent’s shoulder with deep curiosity about the guy in the chair behind her, with tears running down his face. God was Ester Nicholson singing and telling her story on the stage. God was the collective consciousness of everyone in that church, and the collective consciousness of the wisdom everyone in that church had and received from the collective consciousness of every one that has ever existed. God was every religious teaching and belief, every scientific discovery, every single piece of knowledge, all some form of wisdom that was collectively brought into our consciousness.
It brought me to tears for almost the entire sermon.
Not sadness. Ester was saying things I knew in my consciousness. She was speaking my language and I had never met her before in my life. A woman who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, from African descent, somehow had the same knowledge I did. And many other wisdoms I did not. By the end, I had integrated her consciousness into mine. And it’s now going to become the collective consciousness of those around me, and around them. Combined with wisdom that my platonic love, my daughters, and my IFS practitioner have given me and mirrored back to me.
The Workshop.
The Microphone.
The Stranger.
At the end of Ester’s presentation, she told us about a workshop that afternoon. The person, me, who actively avoided anything resembling a church for his entire life, was suddenly excited to walk back into a church two hours later to hear more. This time it was about trauma and recovery from it.
In the workshop, Ester shared some big moments of her wisdom. At one point, she passed around the microphone to us for us to share what we were learning from her and experiencing. Ester was speaking directly to the IFS parts language I speak, but using completely different words and methodology. At the end of the day, she was simply saying that the difficult emotions, what I call parts, were formed by traumas. These difficult emotions were layered upon us, without our consent, by traumatic events. These turn into trauma responses. And underneath all of the trauma responses and big emotions we have, is a pure and beautiful human being.
When the microphone got to me, I elaborated on it and said that is why I love everyone unconditionally and have compassion for everyone. Including my exes. They aren’t shitty people at the core. They just have layers of shitty trauma responses they developed to protect themselves when they were younger and those responses and big feelings are causing the problems in their current lives and the lives of the people around them. I stopped there but couldn’t help but notice several people realizing what I had said and how it resonated within them.
I said a version of this same thing in The Problem Isn’t You. It Never Was. I wrote:
“I know what it costs. I know what it takes. And I know that nobody can do it for you and nobody can make you do it. If they were capable of it, they already would have.”
The people in that room were capable of it. Every single one of them. They just didn’t have a framework yet.
My avoidance pattern, developed when my stepfather beat me into silence, was a trauma response I carried until I blew up my last relationship. And when my toxic-patterned identity collapsed five days later and I didn’t know who the fuck I was anymore, I suddenly had space for the core of myself to emerge into safety.
It didn’t emerge right away. After all, it had been terrified for all of my life about showing itself. It’s taken months for it to finally emerge and today, I am floating in what feels like ecstasy. Not just loving everyone unconditionally, but loving myself. Feeling proud of myself for the first time in my entire life. Living in the moment, to the absolute fullest. And Saturday, my platonic love felt all of that for the first time. She has been feeling it every day since. I got to witness the dramatic shift from being a victim of life’s circumstances to being in full power and control of themselves, loving their agency, autonomy, freedom, and who they are in this moment. They are mirroring back what I see in myself.
“Seeing that all life is a magnificent illusion. And there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of.”
About twenty minutes after the open mic feedback sessions, Ester asked us to find a partner for an exercise. A woman I had never met turned around to me and said, “What you said earlier makes me feel like we have something in common. Will you be my partner?”
Slightly terrified about sitting with a stranger, doing an activity that had not yet been disclosed, I said yes.
We turned our chairs toward each other and Ester gave the instructions. I volunteered to go first. My task was to look my partner in the eyes and tell her for 2.5 minutes about a trauma in my life and everything that comes up for me about it. I was to speak to her as if she was the trauma and tell her everything I thought about it.
I spoke for 2.5 minutes deeply about the trauma of my permanent mental health conditions. I told her things I have never shared about my deepest struggles with bipolar disorder. Her only job was to make eye contact and listen to me.
Then in the next 30 second task, Ester instructed the person who went first (me) to say all the ways our trauma makes us feel inside.
Anger. Sadness. Burdened. Confused. Unfair. Mistaken. Misunderstood. Unnoticed. Alone. Shame. Guilt.
All these words came out of my mouth. Tears streaming down my face while a stranger compassionately listened without saying a word, and with continuous eye contact. Tears started falling out of her eyes. Because while she didn’t know exactly what my bipolar disorder experience is for me each day, she knew what all of those feelings felt like.
In the next minute, Ester instructed our partners to tell us that they were sorry for what we had experienced and the feelings we had been carrying that were never ours to carry. My partner, with eyes that could see into my soul, no different than the woman who called herself Cherish on the pier six weeks earlier, said those words to me that nobody has ever said.
I wrote about a woman who called herself Cherish in She Called Herself Cherish, and Love Asked Nothing. She had showed up at my pier on a night I was drowning in grief, and she looked at me the same way:
“I had the most beautiful, caring, peaceful, and gentle soul I have ever seen looking straight into my eyes, like she could see the universe of all of my emotions deep inside them.”
That is what my workshop partner’s eyes did. The woman who called herself Cherish and this stranger had never met. They will never meet. But they found the same way to look at me. Because God was in both of them.
It broke something open in me. A feeling of relief and calm emerged. Those burdens I had been carrying were witnessed and I was able to release them.
We changed roles. My partner had the opportunity to share her trauma experience and her feelings. She had been abused for years by her husband. And after they separated, he alienated her child against her. He took away her most cherished feeling of motherhood. He took away her innocence and left her with deep emotional scars. Tears ran down both our faces as she spoke and I witnessed her with silence and eye contact only. I then got to speak to her and tell her how sorry I was for her trauma and the feelings she was burdened with that were never hers to carry.
In that moment, God as I now know them was in both of us, through the God in Ester and her wisdom from the collective consciousness of mankind. To say it was a spiritual moment is putting it lightly.
After the breakout session and Ester’s workshop ended, my partner and I hugged. And my partner asked if she could have coffee with me. I said absolutely. And we exchanged numbers. This absolute stranger I met on Easter, who very well could become another important part of my life, only came to be because my platonic love invited me to church that day. The platonic love that only exists because of a crazy chain of events that put us together. And on top of all that, my mental health crisis 6 or 7 years ago led me to the collective consciousness of my IFS practitioner. This led me to sobriety and making space in my life by cleaning out the patterns, substances, and people who weren’t good for me. And without this space, I wouldn’t have been able to receive the wisdom of collective consciousness, wouldn’t have been sitting in that church twice on Easter, and definitely wouldn’t have come to know God in the way I now understand them to exist.
God, As I Now Understand Them
I’m agnostic when it comes to the other thousands of Gods people worship. I’m agnostic to an all-controlling and all-knowing single deity controlling everything in our world. I’m no longer agnostic and in denial of the God of collective consciousness and the spiritual belief in the crazy sequence of events that led to the awakening I had on Easter. My blog on Friday was the start of this awakening and awareness. My platonic love’s awakening on Saturday woke up more parts of me.
Church on Easter Sunday of all days, put God as I now understand them in the chairs all around me.
I have stood at the end of my pier and screamed into the ocean. Stood at the edge of the water in the dark, with the cold hitting sideways, and let something enormous out of me. I go to that pier as often as I can. It’s my safe, special place. It’s where I take my camera. Where I take my grief. Where I take my joy. Where I take the versions of myself I’m not sure what to do with yet.
I wrote about it in The Geometry of Becoming:
“The person who stood on that gravel beach today, meticulously measuring distances with his feet, holding his camera upside down just to see what happened? I don’t recognize him from two years ago. I mean that as the best possible thing I have ever said about myself.”
That night I went back to the pier. Not to grieve. Not to scream. To watch the sunset and let the sequence sink in. The whole improbable, choreographed, infinite sequence of it.
I thought about what I wrote in I-5 Milepost 254. 11pm. A State Trooper With A Flashlight In My Window. A Question. An Answer I Was Ready For. about what actually survived the fire:
“What did not burn was me. The me that was always there underneath the wreckage. The me that is love. I just had to clear enough debris to find him.”
That’s the God I found at church on Easter. Not in the sky. In the chairs. In the eyes of a stranger who cried with me. In the song my platonic love sang to me in my car when I was nine days into the implosion and didn’t know my own name. In the nurse at One Central who suggested a men’s group. In the email I almost didn’t open. In the coffee I almost didn’t agree to.
“What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now.”
Every wave I have watched roll in from that pier. Every part that has ever grabbed my wheel. Every person who has entered and exited my orbit. Every crisis, every cop car, every psychiatric unit, every mailing list, every cup of coffee. All of it was the ocean doing what oceans do. All of it was one long, unbroken, unstoppable chain of becoming.
I drifted like a cloud. I flowed like water. And I ended up exactly here.
Can I get an Amen?
