🎶 Music for Intense Times 💐 4 New Paintings 🍄 Riffing on Psychedelics & Technology with Hamilton Souther

Plus, three short heartfelt reflections on our moment.

Hello, friends and could-be-friends!

I know a lot of you are Feeling Big Things. I was going to record an extra monologue about where I find hope and equanimity right now amidst the social turbulence, promise and potential and a frame that brings me peace, but then Santa Fe had an enormous snowstorm and we lost power for sixteen hours, and then the kids were home from school for two days, and, well, here we are.

I’ll get around to it eventually.

In the meantime, today is my wife’s birthday so it feels appropriate for several reasons to release the final drafts of three songs that I wrote while sheltering in place in Summer 2020, a moment with which this one seems to have a lot in common:

🎶 Three Songs for Intense Times

These are three of the first songs I wrote as a father. They landed in me with force and urgency amidst global upheaval and epochal life changes, in a tiny basement apartment in downtown Santa Fe where my wife and I waited for and then welcomed our first child, and watched her grow.

Originally released as drafts in 2021. After years of learning how to listen, I finally went back to finalize their mixes to release today, on Armistice Day. Felt appropriate.

These are songs about confinement and liberation, hope and anxiety, love and loss, joy and mystery. They haunted me, at length and vividly, and wrote themselves after almost a decade of slow currents, just one song a year. The all-at-once-ness of this inspiration was unusual, but no less than its circumstances. I hope you hear in these a record of the tragic beauty and uncanny brilliance of a time and place.

"It takes a certain ability and passion to be vulnerable to release artwork as raw and iridescent as these songs...they came as a complete surprise to me. Hearing ["Autonomous Zone"] filled me with much unexpected emotion. It made my heart hurt, if I’m gonna be honest..."
— Sandra Lam

Now available on Bandcamp • Spotify • YouTube Music

🍄 Riffing on Psychedelics & Technology with Hamilton Souther

In conversation with the master shaman of Blue Morpho Lodge in Costa Rica:

“Michael shares his experiences with AI, the history of technological advancements, and the role psychedelics have played in shaping innovation. The conversation explores themes of hallucination, perception, and how technology both reflects and reshapes our understanding of reality.”

Prepare to be surprised by a conversation that exceeds the scope of its definition.

💐 Four New Paintings & An Offering

Painting helps me enter flow and focus on the right-brained mode where I can temporarily release my aspirations, savor the aesthetic, and explore what is emerging. Then I have to “come back to reality” and figure out what I am going to do with this enormous stack of paintings…

As the holidays approach, I’m hoping to connect with folks who want to gift their friends or family members with some art. The good news is that I am now fiscally sponsored and can accept tax-deductible donations, so I’m going to try out an experiment: these paintings are no longer “for sale” but are thank-you gifts for your charitable donations to Humans On The Loop.

You can find a full list of my available original works here, along with more info on each piece. Not sure what else I can say about the four below, except that I delighted in their making.

Between these paintings are some short reflections on our moment. I hope they help.

One rule for the years to come:
Leave this world better than you found it. (1)

Today a snowstorm knocked power out across most of Santa Fe. On my way home the stoplights were all dead.

Santa Fe is a city where people routinely blow stoplights. Like, every day. Constantly.

Today was the most civil and attentive driver etiquette day I have ever seen in this city. During a snowstorm and outage.

Much like William James's comments on humanity in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, I would like to believe that what I observed today is an indication of how things might actually improve once we all realize that we can't rely on (or even defy) the centralized leadership and regulatory systems in which we have, often wrong-headedly, placed our faith in this country.

Today my silver lining was seeing "things fall apart, the center cannot hold" and it was actually SAFER and MORE COURTEOUS than every other day here.

This is my version of crisis sense-making overdrive. (2)

As hard as it is for me to admit this, none of us have moral high ground about the right decisions to make under conditions of chaos.

And we are definitely* in an age of chaos.

When you're in a riptide you drown by swimming confidently in the direction that feels like "up".

We still have to make choices. But when it comes to what is "good" on the other side of the next decade, what choices we can make now that might result in a world that looks like what we want on the other side of chaos, we have to account for how all light diffracts as it moves from air to water, or how substances change structure at their boiling point.

And so perhaps the best thing we can do, no matter what we care about, is to pay close attention, choose to learn, let ourselves be wrong about what we think the present will look like to future selves...to notice our not-knowing even as we cling to certainty. (3)

Thanks for pausing to enjoy the simple things with me!

Only three more episodes of Future Fossils to go — a talk with Jamie Curcio, a talk on myth and magic in metamodern tech philosophy, and a trialogue with Eric Wargo and J.F. Martel — before we evolve into Humans On The Loop, at which point I pick up the pace and start sharing amazing dialogues on technology, psychology, spirituality, culture, economics, and storytelling on a regular weekly schedule. (I know, how adult!) I have over twenty of them in the editing queue so far with amazing people, and cannot wait to reflect on these thoughtful dialogues with you.

And we will start live community calls for members in December. It helped a lot of us, a lot, in the Pandemic…I’m glad to find time to revive that nourishing tradition.

In parting, here is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite podcasts I saved eight years ago to whip out at the perfect moment. This is it:

"Anything you do that's going to alienate decent people who aren't necessarily signed up for your movement is a mistake."
— Chris Ryan, Tangentially Speaking Episode 213