From Separation to Reunion: How Travel, Nature, Connection and Intuition Helped Me Find a More Beautiful World

When I was a kid, I remember feeling quite skeptical of the concept of “growing up”.

I remember learning about what happens after college graduation – toiling in an office for at least forty hours a week for at least forty more years – and feeling simultaneously shocked and aghast.

Really? My indignant five year old self wanted to ask. After all the progress of human civilization you couldn’t come up with anything better than this? 

I was also wary of how boring people’s interactions with each other seemed to become once they turned into adults. Our social lives were thrilling, ever-changing adventures spun from the infinite depths of collective kid imagination. Our days consisted of saving the world from evil Digimon (usually an unsuspecting parent or sibling), surviving in the brutal wilderness (aka pretending to eat cheese sandwiches aka dandelions between leaves in a patch of grass at our school), and assembling glorious inter-species bug conventions (a hole in the dirt that we filled with beetles and rolly-pollys).

Adult social lives, on the other hand, seemed to consist entirely of sitting in one place while talking to each other about mundane, corporeal things like movies or sports or investments or investment in sports movies. There seemed to be a lot less laughter and a lot less movement and a lot less creation.

But I shrugged this wariness off and decided to go with the flow.  Not much else you can do. That’s just how things work. And year by year, I slowly felt myself starting to change.

I felt the boundlessness of my mind squeeze into rigid structures as adults attempted to integrate us into their world through algebra lessons and memorization of U.S. capitals and hierarchy and discipline.  I felt my connection to nature fade as I swapped crawling around outside in the dirt for sitting inside complaining about teachers. And I felt myself living less and less fully in the present as homework and grades and especially AP Chemistry took me more and more into worrying about the future and obsessing over the past. And it didn’t feel right. And I still failed the Chem test.

Upon my admission into “the real world” after college graduation, the adultification process and feeling of wrongness intensified. Even though I worked at mission-driven, social change organizations, I still found myself spending all my time reading hundreds of emails and articles at a computer in an office in the middle of a downtown concrete jungle. A box. Then I got into a smaller box, my car, and drove in traffic to a bigger box, my apartment, and got on the computer again to scroll through my Facebook newsfeed and Instagram in a sort of feelingless auto-pilot mode. And then again and again.

Be grateful you have a job, doing something at least marginally good at that, I said, not actually aloud because that would be weird. But it still felt wrong. It felt wrong and unnatural. The restrained way adults acted at work, where they censored their speech and scripted their conversations into minute-by-minute agendas and separated their time into 1-hour Google Calendar blocks, stretching out months in advance. The strange way we acted even outside of work, consuming a million of the most mundane-yet-painstakingly-produced details of other people’s lives, most of whom we didn’t even care about, on a smartphone glued to our hands. Living in boxes with fake light and fake air.

Life is supposed to be better than this, I couldn’t stop thinking. Life is supposed to be more alive than this. 

I dated a dude for a while during this time, a nice guy who also made approximately $650,000 a year as a partner at a big tax firm. I wanted to see what life was like for someone who could pretty much buy anything his heart desired, how the 1% lived – this elite, utmost privileged group that our society loves to demonize and worship at the same time. There was a part of me that wondered, as many of us probably have at some point: hey, wouldn’t life be awesome if I was a millionaire?

We went to the fanciest sushi restaurants in all of LA, flew first-class across the country, saw Beyonce and Sia and the AMAs, hung out at his luxury apartment in downtown ($5k/mo for a one bedroom), and drove around in his Tesla, or rather, had his Tesla drive us. And I found out that those luxurious spaces that only the wealthiest have access to, that most of us only dream about, were in reality, even more cold and alienating and empty than regular places (except for the Beyonce concert, that was lit). People weren’t nice to each other. They pretty much ignored one another. They didn’t seem happy. He wasn’t happy either. He worked for 70+ hours a week at a company that didn’t even pretend to care about him, that tossed aside his very humanity in the name of profit. How seriously wrong are things when the people at the very top, whose desires and dreams everyone else suffers for, are still suffering themselves?

And the suffering knew no end. Eviction and deportation and mass incarceration. Environmental degradation and shootings. Then Trump. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that all these things were connected: our corrupt political system, our addiction to technology, our rigid structures, our alienation from nature, our lost imagination, our empty consumption, our unwillingness to take care of each other.

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that in order to change things, I had to start with myself.

And you know what happened next – I got fired and embarked on a nearly six-month journey of discovery to figure out what the alternative to all of this shittiness was. To see what I wanted for myself and for the world, instead of just resisting what I didn’t want. I looked to my childhood self for wisdom and knew instinctively that the answers lay in nature, in creating beautiful things with other people, in living in the present.

So I took a leap and immersed myself in all of it. And went off to Thailand and the Philippines for two months, with a backpack, no companions, and no plan.

And I finally got to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the more beautiful world out there.

The Beautiful World 

Do you know what happens when you live a large portion of your life outside, fully immersed in nature?

When you step outside and stay there, you wake up to see the sun rise, a creeping pink and purple spreading across the dawn, a steady warming of the landscape until a dazzling beam appears over the mountain. You see its progress across the sky and how the shadows on trees and rocks constantly change and how the clouds shift textures and make fantastical shapes. How captivating the glow of light softly filtering through trees is. You feel wind on your skin and how the sun on your face seems to regenerate your energy and how the temperature drops in the shade and how pleasant that feels. You cut lemongrass and brew it in a pot for tea and you pick a few leaves of spinach and dust off the dirt and chew them and marvel at the cycle of life, how miraculous it is that you can just plant something in soil and water it and the suns grows it and then it’s your food.

You realize that every single sunset is completely different, and each one is its own miracle of pink and yellow and blue and sometimes purple seamlessly fading into each other and growing darker and darker until a blanket of brilliant white lights envelops the black canvas of the sky and a streak of dust spreads over it and you even realize how the moon rises after a while and casts shadows of its own and sometimes it’s a globe and sometimes it’s a sliver and sometimes it’s not there at all. And you hear a thousand crickets and owls and it’s a lull that sounds so right, so natural, that comforts you as you go to sleep.

And it’s so beautiful, and so stimulating, that you become completely and utterly present.

You become fully immersed in every moment, each one magical, ever-changing.

You live by the sun instead of the clock.

Your thoughts evaporate and you can feel your body and you can finally breathe.

And you are free.

And after a while, you realize something that most of humanity forgot – that we are inseparable from nature, that we are meant to live in it, that our very aliveness depends on it. If you take care of the land, the land provides everything you need for a happy life. 

And when you take away the physical and digital and mental walls between people, you sit in a circle on the dirt together and you tell stories. You talk about your dreams. When you trade time instead of money, your natural generosity blooms and life is just about sharing gifts – yoga, songs, acrobatics, cuisines. You create beautiful things together, planting seeds and building houses and singing harmonies. You become profoundly better at listening to each other.

And with the help of meditation, indigenous wisdom and maybe a bit of psychedelics (okay, definitely some psychedelics) you realize something else that most of humanity forgot – that we are not separate individuals, but rather all interconnected in a greater consciousness. That our sense of who we are – our job, our name, where we come from and what we’ve done – is all just stuff we’ve made up in our minds. That we are not a being in an environment but rather we are the environment.

And that means that hurting someone else means hurting yourself as well. Another person, an insect, a plant. It means that love is not just a nice ideal, but it’s our very nature – that selfishness actually destroys our souls, and giving and caring is what makes us alive.

We are not separate from each other. Our water, air, soil, forests, birds, wolves, ants, and people are all connected.

Bringing It Back 

So how it is being back? How are you different? What will you do next? People like to ask me.

When I got back to the U.S., everything here started to make a lot more sense to me. I had understood before that our country was founded on genocide and slavery, on white supremacy and capitalism, and that these systems shaped our laws and schools and economy. But what I hadn’t grasped was the larger worldview that birthed these systems: the belief that we are separate.

We live in a society shaped by a belief that I am separate from you and we are separate from nature, and nothing apart from humans possesses consciousness, and the universe is a dead and hostile place, and the purpose of life is to survive and reproduce. That our nature is fundamentally selfish – we are ruthless maximizers of rational self-interest and my interests are opposed to yours. And we must compete for scarce resources. To protect ourselves and thrive in this hostile universe, we must exert as much control as possible, conquering nature with our technology, mechanizing leisure, and eventually achieve our ultimate destiny of transcending disease and even death to leave the natural world behind altogether.

I lived in and believed in this story my entire life, even though I intuitively felt the wrongness of it. Now I believe a different one: the indigenous worldview of interconnectedness. The worldview that our identity comes from our connections rather than our individual achievement. That time is cyclical, not linear. And we are all one consciousness and our happiness and liberation lies in helping and loving nature and each other.

I’ve seen firsthand how much more beautiful the world of interbeing is, but I’m still stuck in this one.

How do I bridge the space between the world of separation and the world of connection?

It’s really hard. When I got back to the States, I saw separation everywhere I looked. The streets and sidewalks all wide, unnatural concrete and pavement slabs instead of dirt, the storefronts isolated and walled off instead of open-air, the cars separating people stuck in traffic instead of walking outside, the sterilized, hyper-clean yoga studios, people in restaurants eating dishes with ingredients of completely unknown origin while looking at phones instead of each other and exchanging money with a faceless server. It’s enormously hard to resist the inertia of all of it, to not get sucked into social media and stay inside and lose myself in thoughts and worries about the future.

But I took a few small steps, and I continue to take more every day.

I gave away the majority of my clothes and any possessions I didn’t think were necessary to my happiness and well-being. It’s amazing how living out of a backpack for two months can make you appreciate the freedom of a life unburdened by stuff, and how little we actually need to be happy. I also stopped wearing makeup for the most part and try not to look in the mirror that often. It makes life way chiller.

I also finally stopped using social media like a drug, deleting my Facebook and Instagram apps on my phone and starting to use them intentionally instead of scrolling mindlessly through posts. If I post anything I ask myself what my motivation behind it is – is it to make people jealous of how my great my life is, or is it to inspire and connect with them? I keep reminding myself of how much more beautiful the world outside of the digital realm is, and that always helps me put the phone down.

I started getting to know the nature in our own country, taking camping trips to Joshua Tree and road trips to the national parks of Utah and Arizona. I’m learning how beautiful the desert is, how much fun it is to climb on rocks, and how even just one weekend in nature can heal and rejuvenate my soul (and mushrooms can do that too. Mushrooms are great). I’m running at the beach and try to catch the sunset every day. And I’m volunteering at community gardening projects and want to start growing stuff at my own place.

I started to seek out and learn from Indigenous writers, artists, and activists, learning about thousands of years of knowledge of how to live in harmony with each other and solve conflicts peacefully and act for the good for the community and Mother Earth. To see ourselves as the result of seven generations behind us, and our actions as affecting seven generations in front of us. I’m marveling at how long I’ve lived without knowing any of this; of how colonized I’ve been without even realizing it.

When I hang out with my friends and family, I try to think of ways we can create together like we did when we were kids – making up music, art, stories, games. I view enjoying people’s company as being completely present with them in our surroundings and making magic happen in the moment, and not just spending all of our time talking about what’s happening in our lives. I try to listen better, letting their words fill my senses so there’s no room for my own thoughts to override them. And I think about what gifts I can give them; how I can increase the joy in their life.

I try to stretch and feel my breath throughout the day, to ground myself in my body. And I try to notice the negative thoughts that bubble up into my brain, the quick judgements I make of people, and I attempt to convert those into love, reminding myself that we are the same. I aspire to have all of my actions come from a place of love.

And I imagine how beautiful our movement would be if the goal of all of our work was to build love. If we stopped polarizing issues between “us” and “them” and saw the humanity in everyone – even Trump supporters – and put our attention on changing the system, not fighting and taking down the bad guys. If we stopped measuring change by critical mass and instead measured it by critical connections; by going deeper, not wider.

I imagine what would happen if we all realized our egos aren’t real, that our self-promotion and narcissism gets in the way of our happiness, and that inner peace comes from letting go of judgement and negativity. If we realized how ludicrous the idea of private property and possessions are in a world of interbeing. And what would happen if we started to reclaim our connection to nature, if we all grew our own food and used our gifts of human advancement to help nature thrive and make the places we live more beautiful. If we designed our buildings, laws, homes, schools from the values of love and connection instead of efficiency and control.

After I got back, I started scrolling through jobs on the Internet, but none of them appealed to me in any way – too transactional, too rigid, too unimaginative. I fought the urge to go into scarcity mode and trusted that things would happen as they were meant to, knowing that I had a safety net of unemployment money (perks of getting fired) and also very nice parents that let me crash with them (thank you parents <3). And one day, I found a posting for a non-profit job with this description:

We are seeking a campaign manager for our “Local Peace Economy” initiative. This campaign is focused on creating spaces, tools and opportunities for people and communities to reflect on and take action in divesting from extractive, violent and war-centric economies and instead build relational, local, peace-based economies.

Intrigued, I decided to apply. They asked me to submit a cover letter and an essay on “the world I envision and a strategy to get there.” I wrote about pretty much everything I said here, describing a world where we have shed our false sense of separation to embrace our interconnectedness to nature and each other, a world where we exist fully in the present, where life is about expressing our gifts and creating beauty. Where borders and bars don’t exist and we grow our food and raise our kids and meet all of our needs in community, exchanging things instead of money. And that transformation starts with each of us and radiates out through the strength of our connections to each other.

I sounded like a total hippie, basically. And that was why they decided to hire me, and now I have a full-time job in Venice helping people go through this exact process – the journey from separation to reunion.

It’s kind of hard to believe that this is my actual job now. That listening to my intuition all those months ago led me to this moment. Definitely surreal. In the words of adrienne maree brown, “what we put our attention to grows”, and I guess this is solid evidence of the power of manifestation. And a testament to all of the people who helped me get here; whose lighting of the path ahead was the reason I was able to walk it.

I’m not sure yet where I want to take this work, but I think sharing my own story and listening to others is a big part of it. And so if you’re interested in getting together and talking about this stuff let’s make it happen!

My five year old self would be proud.

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note: much love to the author Charles Eisenstein, whose writings have helped me immensely in articulating these concepts – check out his book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, it’s free online in the true spirit of the gift. 

Grace Lee Boggs’ book The Next American Revolution is also amazing and so is adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. There are so many dope people and groups already doing this work, and I’m excited to join them in building this new beautiful world.