Some places feel ancient
because they don’t notice you.
Standing at the base of this kapok,
scale stops working.
The forest doesn’t recede.
You do.
Underground taught me
that depth isn’t about going down.
It’s about learning how small you are
without disappearing.
How to listen
without needing an answer back.
Some things hold
when placed just right.
But upholstery here
won’t last the night.
Rest if you need,
float light as air.
But some comforts
aren’t meant to share.
What works at home
and what works out here
are often as distant
as far from near.
Some weight is worth
it’s weight in gold.
But what’s left behind
will soon grow mold.
30°F this morning, coffee going lukewarm in my hands as I sit outside and watch light snowfall drift through dull gray. Soft enough to hide everything except the lines that keep the lights on.
My body does the same thing.
Breath gets deeper, shoulders drop,
skin tightens against the air,
and suddenly the system is online again.
Funny how the body knows what to do
long before the mind catches up.
The grid hums, even when you can’t see it.
Nothing profound.
Just cold air doing what cold air does:
clearing the static,
one breath, one quiet charge at a time.
I don’t need Thanksgiving to “celebrate food.”
My metabolism already celebrates
every two hours like it’s Coachella.
But the day isn’t really about food.
It’s about the people you walk with.
The ones who strut beside you
through bad lighting,
awkward terrain,
and whatever posture this is
that we’re all apparently doing to survive.
The ones who steady you
when the trail gets stupid,
when the map dissolves,
or when the direction changes
for the fifth time.
If you’re here,
you’re part of my people.
Thanks for that.
I hope today gives you
something nourishing…
food, presence, connection,
and company that makes the world
feel a little less ridiculous.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Pass the carbs.
Again.
But when I look at the people around me
the ones who carry grief,
hold silence,
ask hard questions,
stay through the night,
show up to the work,
and do quiet labor no one celebrates
I see a different kind of descent.
A different kind of courage.
For the people who go deep
in ways no one else notices,
I see you.
You’ve gone underground too.
You’ve walked your own dark.
You’ve found your own way back.
And I’m grateful for you.
Sometimes the world hands you
a strange kind of cornucopia.
An old bucket, caved in.
November leaves, collapsing into themselves.
And somehow, a spill of new green
feeding on everything that’s finished its job.
Many creatures were harmed in the making of this book.
A squirrel.
Some trees.
A boy.
An ego.
And people and places the ego met along the way.
I used to think the point of retelling mistakes was atonement.
Proof that I’d learned something. But that’s too clean.
The truth is messier: I keep learning, sometimes by repeating,
sometimes by watching others almost repeat.
It’s easy to see the scars you leave on bark or stone.
Harder to see the ones you leave in people.
Harder still to trace the quiet collapses inside yourself.
The knots you tie wrong, the warnings you wave off because the sky still looks clear.
That’s the quiet damage this book tracks.
Not to shame, but to signal.
Every mistake left a marker:
a rope fray,
a blackened branch,
a story I had to earn the right to tell.
Each one taught the same lesson in different words: awareness has weight, and we carry it whether we want to or not.
I don’t write to confess. I write to remember how easily care becomes carelessness, and how much practice it takes to keep the two apart.
Maybe that’s what the wild is really for.
Not redemption.
Not conquest.
Calibration.
A place to test your systems, tighten your knots,
and return just a little more aware of what you touch.
The house is quieter than it used to be. Not just “between trips” quiet – holiday-coming, empty-nest quiet. The kind of quiet where even the coffee seems to whisper, so what now?
I’m on the couch, shifting between drawing with dots and writing with thoughts, the rope bag by the door like a dog that heard the word outside. Tweedy’s new triple album is pulling at strings. A little ache where the noise used to live.
I shared a piece this week that isn’t “sticky.” That’s fine. Reflections on responsibility don’t spike the algorithm.
Some things just won’t trend. At least not today. I didn’t write Underground Echoes to win speed. I wrote it to hold still, to carry what’s mine, and to come back a little better.
It’s not a how-to. It’s not a list of exploits.
It’s a mapped descent and what it changed.
Out there, awe = fear + wonder. In here, it’s just a lamp, a pen, and a breath I’m trying not to rush.
Light moves differently underground, but it starts in rooms like this – quiet, ordinary, and waiting to find its way through rock.
For now, this is me… somewhere between playing with string in the dirt and chillin’ in a snow fort.
The cover lands Wednesday.
There’s a crack I haven’t entered,
A cavern left unseen.
A summit still untouched,
And many more between.
I don’t know where I’m going,
Or what I hope to do.
But I could choose a place,
And maybe make it new.
I might go all alone,
Or ask someone to come.
Still unsure of where I’m heading,
But maybe that’s not wrong.
There’s movement in the waiting,
And truth in standing still.
The map won’t bring the answer.
But turning the handle will.
Some things drift
until they settle.
Some things rest
until dislodged.
Moss holds
what it can.
Current moves
what it must.
Here a spring joins a river.
Where underground meets surface.
Where the hidden below becomes part of the flow.
