Anthony and I met at Sundance. We bonded over our mutual obsession for the Spiral Jetty, an earthwork sculpture jutting into the Great Salt Lake.

To get to the Spiral Jetty we drove in darkness to the middle of nowhere over unpaved roads. We waited for dawn in silence. Liminal moments like this are fleeting and precious.

“Hungry Ghosts” are monsters from the Buddhist hell realms. Tormented for eternity by insatiable desire, they sport tiny mouths and gigantic, distended stomachs.

In my previous life I was a bottom-up stock picker managing $2+ Billion. I also wrote a newsletter which I compiled with copy editor Crys Wood into 8 Times Up.

I am a Seth Godin superfan. I tell people to be Purple Cows, to work through The Dip, and to watch out for The Icarus Deception. I buy every book he writes, sign up for just about every workshop he does and read his daily emails without fail.

Yesterday's Atomic Essay shared a personal divorce story, and argued that writing yourself letters beats journaling. I risked pissing off die-hard journalers and being way too vulnerable.

I was nervous, but shipped anyway, and waited for feedback. I heard nothing but crickets ALL DAY. This silence gave me a vulnerability hangover and all sorts of shitty feelings, until I remembered Zenmaster Hakuin's cricket.

I learned the hard way to read the letters I write to myself. One day I stumbled on one sealed and written on my 1 year anniversary. That was 27 years later, also the day of our last marital therapy session. My brutally honest letter was freakishly prescient in its details. If I'd read it sooner I would have spared us both a lot of pain.