Within each of us, there lives an innate desire to move beyond the self, into something greater. It’s part of the human condition, a constant and universal longing. Call it the search for meaning.
Is this longing spiritual, or is it psychological? That’s a separate question, one that everyone must ultimately answer for themselves. Yet whatever its nature, the longing itself is both unmistakable and unavoidable. Everywhere we turn, we see the fruits of our inherent desire to transcend the self.
When we look at our children, we see our own hopes and legacies reflected in their eyes. When we appreciate a work of art, we bear witness to the artist’s attempt to reach for something greater. Our civilizations and societies, our businesses and institutions, our religions and charities: the desire to move beyond the self breathes within them all. From the world’s tallest building to the commemorative plaque on your local park bench, the search for meaning takes form.
My own quest for transcendence started not with mysticism and monasteries, but with systems and politics, a young political science student convinced that civic action could repair the world. While most of my classmates focused on the federal and international levels, I dove into the local by studying municipal politics — the hidden machinery that holds cities together. My school was in Chicago, with the Sears (Willis) Tower looming over the campus, so my municipal politics courses were all Chicago-centric, examining the broader subject with a Chicagoan’s lens.
The head of my school’s political science department was a former city alderman, whose decades of fighting city hall — from both within and without — had transformed him into something of a Chicago legend. Let’s name him the Professor. As a reform politician, he was in constant opposition to the city’s corrupt political machine, a thankless and often fruitless job that had left its mark upon him.
By then, fighting Chicago corruption had become one of my primary goals — my way of transcending the self — so the Professor took me under wing as his (one and only) undergraduate research assistant. I did that for a year, and then the Professor went a step further by securing me an internship with a sitting alderman: another reformer, who in no time after his first election had become the biggest thorn in then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s side.
For a year, I worked unpaid in the Alderman’s office, helping his constituents with their city service requests. There were days when I didn’t have money for the bus ride home, but I didn’t care. This was a rare opportunity for someone like me — someone with no real political connections — and I was not only learning so much, but also experiencing it firsthand.
And after that year, with my college graduation imminent, the Alderman handed me another gift: a full-time position on his staff, a place on the front lines of the fight against Chicago corruption. This was 2009, right after the global financial meltdown, and I was the only political science student I knew who had secured an actual job in politics. Fool that I was, I thought that I was living the dream, and that I knew exactly where my life was heading.
When I joined the Alderman’s staff, I thought I was smart. By the time I left, I had realized how wrong that was. This was a baptism by fire — in many ways, some of which would not become clear to me until years later.
To understand this moment in the story, one must first understand the Alderman’s Ward itself, the district of Chicago that he represented. The Ward was a microcosm of the city as a whole. Everything that Chicago contained, the Ward contained too. It stretched from lakefront high rises to West side ghettoes. Some of the wealthiest and safest neighborhoods were in the Ward, as were some of the poorest and most dangerous, including the city’s most notorious heroin corner. I walked down streets that most people only heard about in headlines, and I did it in a full suit, though to be fair, I had little to fear, as everyone knew I was the Alderman’s guy, and no one wanted the kind of trouble that came from harming someone like me.
“It’s not the adults you need to watch out for,” the Alderman told me once. “It’s these shorties, the kids that the bangers are grooming. They’ll put a bullet in someone for no reason at all, without a single thought about the consequences.”
The downtown business district was in the Ward, including the Sears Tower. Soldier’s Field, the home of the Bears, and the United Center, that of the Bulls and Blackhawks, were in the Ward too. From the gleaming new construction of the West Loop to the historic brownstones of Bronzeville: the Ward encompassed it all.
Even Mayor Daley’s house was in the Ward. The Mayor hated the Alderman, yet the Alderman was the Mayor’s alderman. I can’t even begin to describe the drama that this caused.
Every single day, my job bordered on the impossible. In the morning, I sat in meetings with billionaires; by the afternoon, I was helping constituents who were in danger of eviction; and by evening, I navigated the social rituals of the city’s intellectual elite. The Alderman was bent on improving and beautifying the Ward, so there was a never-ending list of minute details to tend. Between his every thought and the city employee who could bring it to life, there was me, taking notes and making calls. I worked sixty, seventy, eighty hours per week, for little pay. And I was the youngest person in city hall with my job; everyone else in a role like mine was at least five years older, not to mention connected to the machine in some way. As a relative nobody — the somebody nobody brought, to use an old Chicago phrase — many of the connected resented being forced to deal with me.
For everything I did right, I did one or two things wrong, most often by saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. I must have set a record for forced apologies. Intellect, grit, and relentless effort served me well, but youth and inexperience betrayed me constantly. All I cared about was getting things done, and at the time, I did not understand how many people around me were playing different games.
Above all that, there was the daily, face-to-face confrontation with pervasive and insidious corruption. For two years straight, I walked on eggshells while looking over my shoulder.
All of this unfolded against a wider backdrop. From my political science undergraduate studies, through my time in the Alderman’s office, there raged the War in Iraq, the global financial crisis, and more. And my eyes were opening in ways that I did not yet believe, for nothing that I witnessed firsthand, and little that was happening in the world, could be reconciled with the things that I had been taught since childhood.
After the Alderman won re-election, I was burnt out, and he not only knew it, but expected it. Save one, none of his staffers stayed with him long-term, by design. He and I agreed that it was time for me to move on, and by then, I wanted nothing more to do with jobs in Chicago politics.
Whatever Chicago politics had to teach me, I had learned it. But what was next? The answer came to me without effort: law school.
The moment I set foot in law school, I knew I was in the right place for me. Call it intuition, call it alignment, call it whatever you like. I walked through those doors with a bone deep certainty that I had made the right decision. And it wasn’t just a knowing, either, but a feeling too: a coherence of mind, heart, and gut, all three oriented in the same direction and filled with a sense of purpose.
Years later, I would learn a word for what I had experienced in those first days of law school. The Greeks called it agape. By any name, I felt a profound affection for life itself, one unlike anything I had known before.
Law school is, of course, a highly rational environment, and the law a relentlessly logical subject. Yet for me, it was also where I started to discover the limits of rationality. This dichotomy was not lost on me. Reason had carried me to its frontiers, yet when I arrived there, I found further horizons.
I dove into my studies headfirst and enjoyed the work so much that I found it difficult to put down. Legal theory came to me easily, naturally. What fascinated me most was not the law itself, but the architecture beneath it. And my hard work paid off. I graduated summa cum laude, externed with a federal appeals court judge, won awards in five different subjects, and built a reputation among my peers as an authority on constitutional law. More than anything else, law school showed me my own capabilities.
Chicago was still with me, as my law school was in the city too, though my relationship with it had changed. During my years in politics, I had come to know Chicago through its conflicts and contradictions. Law school revealed another side. Surrounded by downtown skyscrapers, immersed in the study of law and institutions, I began to see Chicago not as a battleground of competing interests, but as one of humanity’s great collaborative achievements, a living expression of countless systems, ideas, and ambitions brought together into a functioning whole. The corruption was still there, but I made the conscious decision to look past it and focus on the good.
In the midst of all that, somehow, someway, I also wrote my first novel. Looking back, I know that was not a coincidence. Law school taught me to be a better thinker, reader, and writer, and those same skills found their way onto the page. My fiction became another avenue for exploring the questions that had led me to law and politics — one that sought the answers through characters rather than institutions, through story rather than policy, through lived experience rather than abstract analysis. In that novel, I wrote “Take Root, Take Wing” for the first time, though I would spend years discovering what it truly meant.
The day after I finished the first draft, I began studying for the bar exam. By then, I sensed the tension between the life in front of me and the one that was calling to me.
As much as I enjoyed law school, I could never picture myself being an actual lawyer. Every attempt to imagine that future felt incomplete, like it was missing some essential piece. While most of my classmates saw the law as the beginning of a career, I experienced it as part of a larger search, and the ultimate destination remained unclear.
Though my instincts knew which path I would eventually take, I did not choose one or the other lightly. After I took the bar, a period of indecision followed.
This indecision wasn’t about fear, nor was it about an inability to make the decision itself. Rather, it was about duty and responsibility: to my family, to myself, and to my own achievements. Ever since childhood, my family had told me that I “should” be a lawyer — not because I liked to argue, but because of the way I articulated arguments. When I finally chose to go to law school, after my period in politics, I had reached a place where the decision felt like one I was making for me, rather than for them. But leaving Chicago and all that it held for me was another matter, and I did not disappoint my family’s expectations recklessly. I was not only the eldest child in my immediate family, but also the eldest grandchild in my extended one.
Beyond that, after what law school had shown me about myself and my capabilities, I hesitated to move past it all. Didn’t I owe myself the prestigious and lucrative career in law? And what about the search for something greater than myself? Given my talents, wouldn’t I be serving that by staying home and working as a lawyer? Couldn’t I do so much good from that position?
Thus, I gave law and politics one last chance, in two different ways. The first came after I took the bar, while I was waiting for the results. By then, the Alderman was running for Mayor — not against Daley, who had reigned over Chicago for more than two decades before retiring, but against his unpopular successor, Rahm Emanuel.
Our campaign was a mere protest, but my job was as serious as could be. As Deputy Campaign Manager, I coordinated a city-wide get-out-the-vote effort in concert with allied candidates in the down-ballot, aldermanic races. Again, I was working eighty hours per week for little pay, sometimes sleeping at the office. The law school debt collectors had started calling. Worst of all, this work exposed me far more than I wanted. Rahm Emanuel knew who I was, and that was not a good thing.
As predicted, we lost. From there, both me and the Alderman were out of jobs.
The second way I gave law and politics one last chance was by simply practicing law. With the campaign now behind me, and my bar admission in hand, I gave litigation a moment in the sun, though my heart was never in it. By then, I was deep into editing my novel, and I felt myself being pulled in another direction. No longer was this a calling. Now, it was an incessant tug and a loud voice: “leap into the unknown.”
I had every reason to stay, but I knew that I had to go, even though I had no idea what would happen when I got there. The direction was clear, but in the darkest moments, my destination appeared to be an abyss.
When I told everyone that I was moving to California, they all thought that I was crazy. Family and friends, peers and colleagues, admirers and adversaries: all of them were united in their belief that I had lost the plot. I don’t blame them. How do you tell people something like this without sounding stupid? This wasn’t the typical tale of “young person moves to Hollywood with dreams of being a star.” Speaking with my parents and siblings, I could feel their disappointment and their fear. The only person who understood was the woman I was dating at the time, and she understood even though my decision meant that I was leaving her too.
I booked my one-way ticket to the City of Angels for February 2nd, 2016. With me, I brought only my laptop and a suitcase full of clothes. On the other end of my flight, all that awaited me was a couch to sleep on and a month to sleep there.
I landed in California as two different people at once. On paper, my circumstances appeared precarious, if not dire. I had no real plan and only the vaguest idea of what I wanted, brought into the unfamiliar labyrinth of Los Angeles — a place I had never even visited before — by the instinct to follow something that I couldn’t even name. The one and only “friend” that I had there kept me waiting at the airport for ninety minutes before he picked me up, and the first thing he did was crack a joke about how my suitcase was bigger than what I needed for my stay. On paper, I walked on quicksand; one false step, and I’d be gobbled up.
But one would never know any of that to see or talk to me. When my plane departed O’Hare, there were two empty seats on the flight. Both were next to me, so I had a whole row to myself. I took that as a good sign: space to stretch, room to breathe. I was so happy to be in California, alive in ways I had never experienced before. When I started law school, I knew that I was in the right place. A similar thing happened when I landed at LAX. However my circumstances might look from the outside, I was positive that I was on the right path for me, and that I would work everything out.
For the first two months, I immersed myself in Los Angeles, all but leaping at everything and everyone the city had to offer. From street tacos and dingy bars in Echo Park to Korean barbeque and karaoke in K-Town, from parties in the Hollywood Hills to open mics on Sunset Boulevard, from warehouse raves in parts of town I don’t remember to trendy affairs in West Hollywood, I sought it all, caught up in a whirlwind. I had downloaded Tinder and Bumble for the first time in my life, chatting with countless women and meeting up with most of them, so the dates I went on led me across the city, to every manner of experience.
Those two months were like one never-ending party — a grand old time, though I didn’t feel as if I had truly landed in California yet. But then I found someplace that suited me far better than Los Angeles did, and I moved there at once. In Newport Beach, my California journey began in earnest. The big city had defined my former life of school, politics, and law. In California, I craved something slower, more open, and ultimately more polished. In South Orange County, I found it.
The next two years were a period of stark polarity, of bright light and foreboding darkness. I had secured a good job with a small business, family owned and operated. They just wanted someone educated and professional on staff to make sure nothing fell through the cracks, and they paid well, even though there was little work for me to do. That job was a blessing, as it provided me with freedom to live on my terms.
My days were for the light, filled with meditation, journaling, and time in nature as I reexamined and rediscovered my own sense of self while simultaneously looking beyond it. One eye was fixed inward while the other stayed on the horizon that I had discovered during law school, past the frontier of reason. There was a lot of prayer too. When I went to the beach, two or three times per week and always by myself, I wasn’t just enjoying the sand and waves, but also talking to God and whoever else might be listening.
Nights were for the dark. The Southern California debauchery caught me. By night, I partied, I drank too much, I experimented with drugs, I lived large at choice restaurants, and I developed a weakness for the ladies of Newport and Laguna, many of whom wanted a taste of the Italian lawyer from Chicago. The best and longest of these flings was with the former Miss Newport Beach, of the actual beauty pageant. With her, I gained a backstage pass to South OC.
But where was it all headed? By any conventional measure, I had everything I could ask for, but it wasn’t enough. How could it be, when the longing for something greater was still there, unchanged? As much as I was enjoying myself, and as much as I valued the inner work, my ultimate destination remained as elusive as it had been when I first left Chicago, my trajectory hazy at best. Even more confusing, while one part of me evolved in the light, another part unraveled in the dark.
After my first year in Newport Beach, everything shifted. The need to move forward hit me like a brick. All at once, I stopped going out at night and started barricading myself at home. I lost my job, because the business owners realized that they didn’t really need me, yet I was fortunate enough to know a few attorneys back in Chicago who were willing to give me remote contract work. That kept me alive, though it also chained me to my desk.
Then and there, the California polarity intensified. At home, all alone, I went from drinking too much to drowning myself in alcohol, with no reason to stop and no one to tell me to slow down. Three whole days vanished in a true bender. At my lowest, I could feel myself slipping towards a place that I did not want to go. But at the same time, something downright magical happened. I started writing my second novel.
The act of writing the second novel was nothing like the first. I no longer try to rationalize or even understand it. Something profound happened to me then — something as unnerving as it was awe inspiring. No words can do it justice, though I can at least describe the basic experience. The book wrote itself. It just flew out of me, and I never had to stop and think about where the story was going next. And as I typed away, in my mind, I watched the story unfold as I wrote it, all coming through the eyes of the characters I was writing. In my mind, I lived the characters’ lives.
As I wrote the second novel, I was aware that something strange was happening, yet I did not have the faintest idea of what it was. There were moments when it terrified me, locked away at home as I was, with only the characters for company. But no matter what, I kept returning to my keyboard, and whenever I did, the story flowed once more, unabated, as if I had never left my writing chair.
By the end of my second year in Newport Beach, the second novel was complete and edited, and I knew that my time in California was done. There was no reason for me to stay, and every reason to leave, lest I lose myself at the bottom of a bottle. But where to go next? The same pull that had brought me there was now leading me elsewhere, but once again, the destination was unclear, so I languished for a while, restless in ways I had never known before, all the more so because I understood that even as one part of my life was ascending, another was quickly and quietly self-destructing. The polarity had become not only unsustainable, but also intolerable.
Then something happened that forced me to leave — that left me no choice but to leave. One November night, I woke up at three in the morning to a sound out of place. From above, I could hear crackling, though to my eyes, nothing appeared to be amiss. So I followed the sound, stepped outside, and looked up.
From the attic vents, flames were pouring out, hot and hungry. The house was on fire, the blaze so big that I knew on sight it had been roaring for some time.
I escaped that burning building with my wallet, my passport, and the pajamas on my back. There was no time to grab my phone or put socks on my feet.
The next hours passed in a daze, though I remember being questioned by the Marshall about the cause of the fire. I trembled while we spoke, in shock as I struggled to summon the words. And I remember borrowing his phone to call my dad.
“Dad,” I began in a voice that I had never heard come from my mouth before. “I need you to put me on the next flight to Chicago.”
The daze continued, the world around me surreal. I felt numb and detached from my own body, as if I was watching myself act, rather than actually acting. By then, the shock had subsided, and I proceeded with a sort of cold precision, moving mechanically from one thing to the next. I checked into a hotel to shower and then put on the same clothes. I went to Macy’s to buy a few fresh outfits before my flight, and I borrowed a phone from the woman behind the counter to confirm that I had a ticket waiting for me at the airport.
All the while, a terrifying certainty gnawed at me from the back of my mind, unconfronted yet inescapable. The fire had been my fault, caused by my own negligence. As the California light had reached its peak, culminating in my second novel, so too the darkness reached the depths of self-immolation. The light and the dark were not independent of each other, but woven together. Newport Beach was a crucible, and the novel was what came out of it.
What followed my return to Chicago felt like the lowest period of my adult life. For three months, I slept on my brother’s couch, slowly wearing out my welcome. I fielded phone calls about the fire from insurance company representatives and investigators, each occurrence more humbling and more worrying than the last. Would they find some way to sue me?
At the same time, being back in Chicago felt like a betrayal to myself, to my novels, and to everything I had done in California, including the decision to move there in the first place. At that point, everyone around me believed that I had simply spent two years partying in Orange County, and now I was back with my tail between my legs, ready to re-settle into Chicago and go to work as a lawyer.
I knew I couldn’t do that, though part of me wanted nothing more, craving the comfort and simplicity of home and a stable career. The fire had shaken me to the point of extreme doubt — self-doubt, to a degree far surpassing any I had known before.
I knew I couldn’t stay, not only because I didn’t have it in me to betray my chosen path in that way, but also because, when I returned to Chicago, something strange occurred. Those irrational forces that had been guiding me for years now, unseen and unnamed, amped up to another level. And once more, they were pointing somewhere specific: to the desert, to Las Vegas.
When I left Chicago the first time, for California, my family was disappointed and a little afraid. When I left the second time, they thought I was toast — that I was moving to Las Vegas to wash up. That was when they started to speak openly about wasted potential.
Once again, I did not and could not blame them. I was aware of how my path must look from the outside. It hurt me to hurt them, but I simply could not do anything other than what I did. Those few months back in Chicago, only two things brought me any measure of peace: the irrational forces, and re-reading the novel that I had written in California.
Arriving in Las Vegas, one of the first things I did was buy myself a new, cheap watch. I had lost my old one in the fire, a beautiful and expensive piece that my dad had bought me after my first semester of law school. I didn’t realize it yet, but the old watch had come to symbolize my former life in law and politics. The new one represented the fire, Las Vegas, and what came after them.
I wasn’t in a position to understand it yet, but that fire would turn out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. To this day, I still possess the clothes from the Orange County Macy’s, though most are weathered past the point of wearing.
In Las Vegas, I was a hermit. I could see the Luxor pyramid pillar of light from my front porch, but I did not visit the Strip once. I didn’t drink a drop, didn’t sleep with a single woman, didn’t allow myself any fun. Instead, I read, I wrote, I dove further into myself, and I took the most humbling job I could find, stocking shelves at a Sprouts from midnight to six in the morning.
There I was, an attorney who had written two novels and prowled Chicago’s halls of power, working the graveyard shift at a grocery store. But I found peace in the rhythm of the labor, moving things in my mind, heart, and body that I still didn’t understand. I was aware, however, that at that grocery store and in that desert, I was not only recalibrating myself, but also proving something to myself. This was a different kind of trial, one far less glamorous and exciting than taking the leap of faith from Chicago to California, yet ultimately more rewarding. Temptation was on my doorstep — literally Sin City, with its shiny beacon of manufactured light — yet I resisted it and proceeded down the path that I had chosen for myself years before, even though it had cost me everything.
After a year in Las Vegas, I found myself in now-familiar circumstances. I knew that I was done there, that I had proved what I needed to prove: my commitment to my path, even when it stripped me of everything, and my ability to master myself. Leaping into the unknown was easier when it led me to pristine Orange County beaches. Diving into the barren desert to stock shelves at a grocery store while wracked by guilt, that was hard, but I did not flinch.
Yet again, I was unsure where to go next. This time, however, I experienced that uncertainty in a different way, free of stress. I had learned to trust in not only myself, but also in things greater than myself. More importantly, I had become comfortable not knowing my ultimate destination. Direction was enough.
Then one day, an idea came to me, with inspiration striking like a bolt of lightning. From Las Vegas, I embarked upon a road trip across the American West, trusting that my next home would reveal itself along the way.
What began as a road trip in search of adventure and a new home soon transformed into something else. The unnamed and unseen forces had guided me for years now, from law school to Las Vegas, steadily becoming louder, clearer, more pronounced.
On the road, they no longer guided me. They took the wheel. And by the end, I realized that I was not on a road trip, but on a pilgrimage.
The pilgrimage is difficult to describe. So much happened, both within and without. The most important experiences are also the ones that I cannot adequately convey. I don’t even fully understand them myself. More than that, some things are too personal, too internal, to survive translation into language. The outward events, remarkable though they were, cannot truly communicate what was happening within me.
What I can say is this: the pilgrimage began to change my relationship with reality itself. At first, the change was subtle. A conversation here. A coincidence there. A chance encounter that felt just a little too well-timed. Individually, each event could be explained away. Collectively, they became impossible to ignore. The cumulative effect was greater than the sum of its parts.
As the days passed, those moments accumulated into a pattern. The world felt less random than it once had. Meaning emerged from all around me, engulfing me in what soon became an absolute certainty that I was in the grips of something far greater than myself.
Three times, I met people who attempted to dissuade me from my path. The first was a gorgeous woman from the Netherlands. We met on a trail in Mount Zion National Park, Utah, my very first stop after departing Las Vegas. In no time at all, on her own initiative, she made it abundantly clear that she would love to go back to town and have a drink with me — but only if we left the park then and there, as she was tired of hiking. I was tempted, but my gut was telling me no, so I said goodbye to her instead.
That was the trial of desire. If I had said yes to her, the pilgrimage would have ended before it had truly begun — before it even became a pilgrimage. Right after we said farewell, I reached the Big Bend, a majestic, mountainous curvature that changed the trail’s direction. The symbolism in that was not lost on me at the time.
Two days later, the second person who attempted to dissuade me from my path was a kindly old man in Grand Junction, Colorado. I told him of my intent to press on to Gunnison, and he assured me that was unwise. The road through the Rocky Mountains was perilous, especially for people unfamiliar with the drive. Gunnison was so cold, my coat would never serve. If it snowed, I could be trapped there. And there was no good reason to visit Gunnison anyway, so why take the risk?
That was the trial of fear. Again, the symbolism of the place — literally named Grand Junction — was not lost on me. By then, my rational mind was screaming at me to turn back, towards safety. Las Vegas was still a short and easy drive away, but if I continued into the thick of the Rockies, then I was truly committed to the road and the uncertainty ahead. Grand Junction was, for me, where the road trip became the pilgrimage, not so much a fork in the road as a joining of two.
The third attempt at dissuasion came almost two weeks after the second, as I approached my last stop. This time, I expected it, as something I had learned earlier in the trip informed me that there was one final trial to face. I was driving up Arizona route 179, into Sedona, when my mom called me. She was so intent on keeping me from Sedona, searching far and wide for any reason to convince me, that I could only laugh at the third trial’s futility while simultaneously basking in the grandeur of the Red Rock panorama. At that point, after two weeks on the road, after already realizing that the trip was in fact a pilgrimage, I was so deep in what psychologists and mystics alike call a flow state that the road and my experiences on it were all that existed for me. Everything else belonged to some other world, a world that I only vaguely recalled.
That was the trial of guilt. After I hung up the phone, I immersed myself in Sedona.
At every stop along the journey, and on every stretch of road between them, I experienced the limits of reason firsthand, in ways that could not be dismissed or denied. But what happened to me in Sedona was on its own level, an apex above the rest. This was the single most personal and internal moment of my life, and it belongs only to me. What matters here and now is not the particulars of the story, but their effect. By the end of the night, there was no going back.
The only other thing to be said about Sedona: it was a clear-headed, sober experience. I know that a lot of people go there to take psychedelics. For me, there was none of that.
California and the fire were my Phoenix bursting into flames. Las Vegas was gestation. On the road, during the pilgrimage, I was reborn, forever changed. And there in Sedona, I crossed a threshold that I had been moving towards ever since I left Chicago.
Coming down from the pilgrimage and the proverbial mountaintop moments in Sedona was neither quick nor easy. After an experience like that, returning to the world is a trial of its own sort.
When I first hit the road, I felt certain that my next home would reveal itself along the way. And so it did, about halfway through the pilgrimage. When I stopped in Boulder, Colorado, the inexpensive watch that I had purchased in Las Vegas — after losing the one from my father in the fire — stopped working. For me, in Boulder, time stopped. That was how I knew I had found my next home.
The old watch represented my life in law and politics. The cheap one represented California, the fire, gestation in Las Vegas, and the pilgrimage. When it stopped, I was reborn. To this day, I no longer wear a watch, though I do I feel myself getting ready for a new one.
Boulder was my second childhood, where I learned how to live all over again — where I started to integrate the pilgrimage and move forward reborn. As I said, it was not easy. On one hand, life’s daily necessities felt not only mundane, but entirely inconsequential. On the other, I started reading everything I could about the many schools of mystery, searching the spiritual, the metaphysical, and the philosophical for answers about what had happened to me during the pilgrimage, but all I found was a labyrinth of new questions.
Nevertheless, life continued, and I had no choice but to carry on. The Rocky Mountains helped me, with their roots and their serenity. Spending time alone in nature revealed more than any book did.
Better still, the type of things that I had experienced on the road followed me to Boulder. They were more pronounced during the pilgrimage, but they never stopped, and they helped guide me through the period of integration. To this very day, they persist.
Then, after a year and a half in Boulder, the world came crashing back with violence, in the form of COVID. At that time, I was once again a borderline hermit, with no true friends or family anywhere near Boulder. As cities and states started locking down, I knew that I needed to go back to my family and help them weather the storm, all of us together.
This time, returning to Chicago did not at all feel like I was betraying myself, my chosen path, my new life. I wasn’t going there. It was coming to me. No longer was it the site of my old life, but a continuation of my new one.
Soon after I settled into a new apartment, back in Chicago yet detached from it, I met a woman, and we started dating. My friends and family wondered how I could find a new relationship during a pandemic, but I didn’t feel the need to explain.
And four months after we met, we were pregnant.
She called me to give me the news. I told her to come over right away. By the time she arrived, my heart was bursting as I literally skipped around my apartment while singing “I’m going to be a father. I’m going to be a father.”
The next nine months were a blur, and I floated through them. There, inside her womb, were my new roots, the foundation of my life reborn. Integrating in Boulder had helped to prepare me for this moment, but for grounding after the pilgrimage, for returning to the world, everything paled in comparison to the birth of my son. I knew that, with those new roots, as a father, I would soar.
On September 1st, 2021, at 2:14 p.m., Gabriel was born. We did a homebirth, with a big birthing pool. His head came out first, of course, and as I looked at him, with his body still inside his mother, time froze. I stopped breathing. My mind went numb. All I could do was stare.
Then, the next thing I knew, there was a baby in the water. I picked him up and handed him to his mother. The first thing she said was “This is the best day of my life.”
He didn’t cry. He let out a single little wail, then nestled into his mother’s arms. For the next two hours, with the three of us in bed together, he nursed in peace. Then he fell asleep.
All the things I had witnessed during my long travels, all the things I had experienced during the pilgrimage, yet here was the most mystical and meaningful one. There’s no magic to transcendence.
After Gabriel was born, his mother and I settled on our new home, the place we wanted him to grow up. We celebrated his first birthday in Sedona. Here we remain. He’s almost five now, and he spends his days hiking the Red Rocks or splashing in Oak Creek. I’m writing my third novel, and I intend to work on publishing them soon. Fatherhood can be difficult and messy, but through it, I transcend myself and find meaning.
If I had never left Chicago, if I had remained there and gone to work as a lawyer, then Gabriel would have never been born. I can’t say that we’re going to stay here in Sedona for the rest of our lives, but we’ve taken root. And from these roots, we take wing.