The Knife and the Heart
A letter about dreams, seekers, and the strange clarity of cutting away.
Welcome.
Seeking: Letters to the Restless is for those of you who are hungry for something real—and exhausted by all the pre-packaged answers that never quite match your lived experience. You don’t need a system to be here. You don’t need to call yourself anything. You don’t need clarity or certainty. You just need to have touched something—once—that shimmered. Something that made the world feel charged. Sacred, even for a second.
This space is for people who live with questions. People who’ve known grief, beauty, ache—and who still want to keep their eyes and hearts open. You don’t have to believe in anything to belong here. Spiritual life doesn’t begin with belief. It begins with breath. With body. With the Mystery that runs through it all.
Dear Seekers,
I was out back watching Tommy hover over the koi pond—he does this sometimes, like he’s either planning to eat the fish or negotiating with them in some kind of cross-species telepathic conference—when the dream came back again. It always does. Maybe twice a month. It doesn’t arrive with a flash or some heavy meaning. Just a quiet knock on the door of my awareness.
I think I’ll be walking around this dream for the rest of my life.
The dream goes like this:
I’m inside a dim cabin, the kind at the summer camp where I worked in Maine during college. The outside world is in full, blazing color—green grass, dark pine, a blue lake under a blue sky. There's even an American flag flapping from a pole
in the center of the field. Inside the cabin it’s gray, dreary, like an old black-and-white sitcom with no laugh track.
There’s a knock. A person enters—genderless, unfamiliar—and gestures for me to follow. I do.
We walk to the next cabin. On the floor lies a body, apparently dead. I walk closer. It’s me.
The person—she, I keep wanting to say, though it’s not exactly clear—raises a large butcher knife and carves open my chest. Calmly. Almost tenderly. She reaches in, rummages around, and then pulls out a large, pulsing, blood-slick human heart. Too large, maybe, for one man.
She holds it out to me. It’s still beating.
I look at her. She nods. I nod back.
She says, simply, “I have to take this up to the Administration.”
Then she walks out, up the hill, toward a building I can’t quite see.
Now I’m sitting in a Santa Fe café, the same one I used to write in when I lived here, and I’m trying to finish this piece. I’m still thinking about that dream again. I’m not decoding it. Dreams don’t work like crossword puzzles. They’re
The person—she, I keep wanting to say, though it’s not exactly clear—raises a large butcher knife and carves open my chest. Calmly. Almost tenderly. She reaches in, rummages around, and then pulls out a large, pulsing, blood-slick human heart. Too large, maybe, for one man.
She holds it out to me. It’s still beating.
I look at her. She nods. I nod back.
She says, simply, “I have to take this up to the Administration.”
Then she walks out, up the hill, toward a building I can’t quite see.
more like sculptures you walk around, noticing how light hits from different angles. I try to stay with the knife.
And I find myself thinking about the lifetime of spiritual seeking. The books, the teachers, the temples. The heartbreak and hope of wanting something deeper. The ache to feel connected in a cosmos that often feels so cold. The longing for truth. Or at least a good story that points in its direction.
I’ve sat with wise teachers who changed my life. I’ve also handed money to people I now wish I hadn’t. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes, especially when I was raw and looking.
I’ve had real, unmistakable encounters. Moments with God—yes, that word still works for me—moments when I touched something bottomless and walked away changed.
I think of the yogi in the cave. He was a hundred years old and had lived alone on a Himalayan mountaintop for twenty-five years. I spent two afternoons with him—chanting, asking questions, receiving spiritual teachings I’m still digesting. Before I left, he gave me a blessing: a sudden slap on the crown of my head. The next morning, I entered a twelve-hour mystical state. The veil dropped. God was everywhere.
I think of Chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna reveals his true cosmic form to Arjuna. I’ve tasted that.
Those moments cracked me open. They’re why I write this newsletter. To pass
along what I found. Or maybe what found me.
These days I look more carefully at hierarchy. At control. At systems built by men to contain something wild and alive. Systems that claim the truth lives in their hands alone.
Religion began with mystics. People who touched the fire. Over time, it became a way to manage fear. A way to sell salvation, gatekeep grace, and shame people out of their own knowing.
Still, I come back to the teachings. The values those mystics lived out still matter. Mercy. Compassion. Stillness. Right relationship. We’re starving for those.
So I’m sitting in this in-between place. This café. This season of life. This moment of transition.
And the dream returns again: the knife, the incision, the dripping heart.
I’ll let you interpret the heart. You probably already know.
But the knife? That’s my work right now.
Cutting away what no longer belongs.
Opening the heart. Not to be wounded—just to be real.
Until next time,
Brad
If this letter stirred something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if you’re walking through your own dream, your own seeking, your own reckoning with the knife and the heart—I hope you know you’re not alone.
P.S. If you’re ready to explore your story more deeply, I’m teaching a one-day memoir writing workshop in mid-August. It’s three hours on Zoom, followed by a one-hour follow-up session a week later to help you integrate and continue the work. The class is called:
One Powerful Session. One Inspired Follow-Up. A Lifetime of Writing Tools.
We’ll explore memory, meaning, soul, and voice—and begin shaping the raw material of your life into story.
You can read more and sign up here:
https://bradwetzler.com/one-powerful-session-one-inspired-follow-up-a-lifetime-of-writing-tools/
I’d love to write alongside you.
If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.
Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:
“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”
Powerful Dream, writing, and invitation. I studied with Brugh Joy, who was a master at interpreting dreams, especially those with shadow material; this type of material is often kept private by most people. He taught me to take every part of the dream and own it, be it, give it a voice, See every part in the dream as an extension of me. So the question I would ask is if you are the knife, tell me who you are and what your purpose is?