Dear Seeker,
I’m sitting here thinking about where you are right now as you read this. Maybe you’re holding a cup of coffee that went lukewarm twenty minutes ago. Maybe you’re still under the covers, watching the morning light creep across the ceiling. Or maybe you’re just sitting with that quiet, heavy thought that sneaks up on us—the realization that you’ve made it all the way to this exact age, and you still don’t have things nearly as figured out as you thought you would by now.
I want to tell you something: I feel that way almost every single day.
Here’s something I’ve been asking myself this week:
How can I stay as open as possible to the Mystery, to the beauty and full-on castastrophe of living in a human body?
I’m wise enough to know now that other humans don’t have the all the answers. I mean, you might glean a helpful tidbit or two from your favorite teacher or guru. But asking a fellow human for advice is a little like being a grain of sand asking another grain of sand for advice on how to be a better grain of sand. I also don’t think the big answers come from reading more books or thinking harder. . I think it comes from learning how to see and stay present with what’s really going on, both out there in the world and in here, inside our human bodies and hearts. (The mind is sometimes helpful, but it’s important to remember that the mind sometimes lies and must be taken with a grain of salt.). All this said, yes, books, films, conversations, and sacred texts, can teach us a things,, when taken in with discernement. All the time I’m reminded that the world is stranger than it first appears and that, if we’re lucky, we can spend an entire lifetime learning how to see its wild majesty a little more clearly.
Here are a few things that have been walking beside me this week.
Learning how to pay attention with The Snow Leopard
It’s been nearly thirty years since I first read Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. I was an editor at Outside magazine in those days, and like so many young adventure writers, I was captivated by his ability to weave together travel, natural history, Buddhism, grief, and exquisite reporting into something that transcended ordinary travel narrative. I’m listening to it now on Audible, read by Matthiessen himself near the end of his life, when he was 86. He recorded it in Boulder with audio producer Mickey Houlihan, and hearing his aging, cracking voice adds an entirely new dimension to the book. Every rasp and pause in his tone transmits decades of living.
When I first encountered The Snow Leopard, I thought it was a story about an expedition into the Himalaya in search of one of the world’s most elusive animals. But listening to it this week, I hear a different book entirely. The title is deceiving. The snow leopard seems almost incidental. The real journey is into attention itself. Matthiessen walks through monasteries, over high passes, and across landscapes that most of us will never see. His descritptions are spare yet eloquent. But what moves me most is his clarity of seeing. He moves through with patience. He notices. He waits—and then notices. He wonders. The way Matthiessen describes this journey strikes me now as a profoundly spiritual way to travel through life. As in life, there is no certainty in this book. It implores us to remain curious even when we think we fully understand.
When writing craft becomes spiritual advice (Storycraft)
As someone who teaches memoir, narrative nonfiction, and travel writing, I’m constantly reading craft books, and one I return to over and over is Jack Hart’s Storycraft. I’ve recommended this book to countless students because it demystifies storytelling while also celebrating storytelling and writing’s magic. His chapters on scene construction, action, pacing, and narrative movement are among the clearest I’ve ever read.
Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that good writing advice almost always doubles as spiritual advice. Hart reminds writers that stories live in concrete moments. Our bodies move through physical space and real time. We have difficult conversations. We face struggles in making choices in how we graapple with reality. We don’t experience life as concepts. We live it. Life arrives as mornings, roads, meals, heartbreaks, hubs, airports, deserts, rivers, and mountains. If we want to tell the truth about our lives on the page, we have to begin with action and physical reality.
Putting ourselves in motion—on the page and in life
In keeping with the lessons of Storycraft, I tell my writing students that readers want to accompany you—they don’t only want to know what you thought or felt, they want to walk beside you. Let them see you crossing the border, climbing the trail, sitting in the café, standing beside a hospital bed, driving across Kansas, wandering through Jerusalem, or watching waves roll into a beach. Yes, readers love reflections and insights. But we need lived experience.
I’ve come to believe that this is just as true beyond the page. We spend so much time looking for transcendent experiences that we forget the sacred usually meets us in the ordinary world, but only we are paying close attention. We don’t discover who we are while sitting still trying think our way out of a paper bag. We discover ourselves by living, doing, mucking it up and letting the chips fall where they may. We find ourselves by traveling, by making mistakes, by falling in love, by grieving, by apologizing, and by beginning again. In some ways, the outer journey is the inner journey. And, maybe, the vice versa is true.
Catching the spark in No Direction Home
That kind of immersion into life itself is what keeps bringing me back to Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched it. Sure, I can watch and listen to Dylan any day of the week—I’m a lifelong fan. But I also return to this documentary because it asks questions that get more urgent as I age. What does it mean to devote yourself completely to a calling? What happens when someone gives themselves over to a creative life with an intensity that’s almost frightenting?
There’s a clip I replay over and over. Sometimes, in the morning, while I’m drinking coffee or shaving, I put the movie on just to watch this particular three- or four-minute clip. Legendary record producer Bob Johnston reflects on those electric sessions in the mid-1960s. He’s in awe of Dylan’s otherworldly intensity and creative drive, Johnston once remarked: “I don’t think Dylan has a lot to do with it [his music]. I think God, instead of touching him on the shoulder, he kicked him in the ass.” Then, a few minutes later he revisits the idea that Dylan is divinely inspired: “He can’t help what he’s doing. I mean, he’s got the Holy Spirit about him. You can look at him and tell that.”
Johnson’s wild laugh when he says these words gives me goosebumps. Why? Because I believe we all “got the Holy Spirit” about us when we create, if only we allow it to move through us. I think the work of seeking is less about is more about listening carefully to the holy spirit moving through us. We must learn to feel—really feel—that God, Universe, the Mystery is kicking us in the ass all the damn time.
Seeing with larger eyes through the Bhagavad Gita
I read from the Bhagavad Gita almost every day. I’ve been doing this for a decade. Most of the time, I play Sanskrit chanting of the Gita in the background to deepen my mood and attention, even though I don’t read or understand Sanskit. This week I found myself returning to Chapter 11, one of the most extraordinary passages in the book—and all of literature. Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal his true form, his Big Form. Krishna gives him what the text calls “divine sight.” Suddenly, Arjuna can see the whole of reality at once: galaxies, gods, birth, death, destruction, and creation, all unfolding simultaneously within the infinite body of the Divine.
It’s an overwhelming experience for Arujuna. Hell, it’s overwhelming to read and feel. This week, when I listned to it, I didn’t think about the cosmic spectacle of the chapter, but the opposite. I was reminded of how small our ordinary way of seeing really is. We spend so much of our energy worrying about outcomes, trying to control the future, believing that everything depends entirely upon our little, fragile efforts. Then a text like the Gita kicks us in the ass and reminds us that we belong to something unimaginably vast. We always have. Seeking, at least for me, isn’t about escaping this world or collecting spiritual experiences like trophies. It’s about learning to see this vastness of the world with more patient eyes, When I tap into this way of seeing, my trust in myself and the universe grows. This chapter never ceases to fill me with humility, wonder, and devotion.
That’s all for this weekend. If something I said resonates with you, please let me know in the comments section.
“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.”
Learning to see. It’s everything.
Yes! Jack Hart's Storycraft!!! You had me read it! As someone new and naive to writing, his book was perfect to put me on the right path. And of course, you too, Brad. FYI my book is expected to self-publish in a month or so. (You know you want to read it.)