I​​​​have clinically died three times that I know of, had several other near-death experiences, and survived enough major accidents that this has become one of the things people most want to ask me about.

Fair.

It is a very strange story.

Parts of it are already out in the world. You can find some of the receipts in Press, some of what I have made of it in Musings, and the abbreviated version of how I got from there to here in Who Am I?

The considerably less abbreviated version is becoming something bigger—a book, a screen project, and a few other things currently cooking.

So rather than tell the same story again here, consider this the temporary headquarters of the Not Done Existing Club.

Membership requirements are still being worked out.

Being alive appears helpful.

What I know so far is that coming back—more than once—changed the questions I was asking.

About healing. About consciousness. About the brain and the body. About science and the things science has not explained yet. About what we do with the parts of ourselves we would rather cut out of the story. 

And about what happens when surviving is no longer the assignment.

Somewhere along the way, all of those questions started becoming something else.

I call it the #Merge™.

T​​​here is a dark and a light in every one of us, and another one running between us, and most of what goes wrong in a life or a company or a country is what happens when we refuse to look at either.

The mark is a heart, half white and half black, with a burst of light where the two meet. That is the whole idea. The light shows up at the seam.

Every tradition I have read has a version of this. The heart weighed against a feather. The self at peace on the far side of the self that accuses. The block that is whole before anyone carves it.

Kinsugi: The bowl mended in gold, where the break becomes the most valuable part of the object. None of them are the same, and I am not going to flatten them into one sentence because they rhyme. What they share is a direction. Through, rather than around.

From my lens, that is the work. Not becoming less contradictory. Becoming less divided by the contradiction. The people I have been told are monsters have the same seam I do. So does everyone who has been kind to me. That is not me being generous. It is me having looked.

I have had to do this in public, badly, more than once. Perhaps that is why I am comfortable asking anyone else to try. This is not a movement I plan to announce. It is already happening, in rooms nobody photographs, and you are welcome in it whenever you are ready. ♦