CHAPTER ONE
The Visitation
—
I still remember the flannel pajamas.
It was a dark, starry night in rural Ohio, and I was eight years old, lying awake in my bed.
I was tucked beneath the covers, staring out the window on the second floor of my childhood home, watching planes go by in the dark.
Thinking the way I often did as a child.
About the meaning of being here. About the Universe. About the future.
As if some part of me had already begun listening for a life I had not yet lived but could feel coming through toward me.
Already sensing a timeline I did not know yet.
And yet I could feel it.
The way a child sometimes feels the presence of something they don't have a word for yet.
Then something seemed to change.
Not necessarily in the room at first.
But instead, it started in me.
A feeling took over my body.
Frightened is not the right word for it.
Startled, maybe.
Bewildered.
But beneath that sensation, there was another layer of experience that's hard to describe.
It was a strange kind of alertness.
That eerie feeling you have when your whole body is fully present and vibrating with goosebumps, as if it knows something your conscious mind has yet to comprehend.
I remember feeling very still, frozen in a kind of electric awe.
As if some part of me knew that ordinary reality was about to crack open, and the world I thought I knew would never be the same.
I saw the colors first.
A dark blue light, smoky and glowing, wrapped in a pale white outline.
It was like looking into the rippling waves of a lake as they slow down — and then you begin to notice your reflection looking back. Dynamic and moving.
Slowly, the shape of the reflection emerged in the darkness.
It was a clear figure.
A man.
Or something in the form of a man.
His body was not solid in the way a body is solid. Slightly liquid, maybe, but luminous. Translucent. Dark blue — physically very much there, but still non-physical.
I suppose the eeriest part was not his form but the fact that he was looking directly at me, as if deliberately trying to speak to me.
Not casually.
He was fixed on me with an intimacy I could feel before I had precedent for it at the time.
Now I know how this all sounds. A child in the dark imagining figures of light. Any rational adult would call it a dream, or at best a kind of hallucination.
Yet I remember very clearly that, at the time, I was not confused about the difference between dreaming and waking.
In fact, in many ways, this moment had felt more real than most of life. I knew people did not appear in bedrooms out of thin air, made of light. I knew closets did not open into other worlds.
The part that disturbed me for so long was that I very clearly, unmistakably knew I was in fact awake.
This was indeed happening.
There I was, eight years old, and a stranger made of blue light was in my room, attempting to have a conversation with me. Strange, yes. And still, it was happening.
There was something familiar about him — but not familiar enough to trust right away. Maybe familiar enough to want to, someday, under the right conditions.
Something comforting, but too impossible to receive on first meeting.
Something loving, but too intimate to grasp in the moment.
The next few moments felt like he was imparting information to me, though I don't remember hearing any words. Maybe there were none. In hindsight, it was more like a frequency.
A feeling.
As if whatever passed between us was older than human language.
Something ancient.
Something primordial.
As he sat near me at the edge of the bed, continuing on with his transmission, my little heart began to rush. Not because I was afraid, but because of the closeness I felt.
He was close enough in space that I could feel his attention on me — like a hand placed gently over the heart.
I did not know exactly what he wanted.
I only knew he had come a long way, specifically for me.
And though I didn't fully understand it yet — I could tell he was okay with that.
His presence accepted me, whether I understood him or not. In many ways, it was just as important for him as it was for me.
Then, after a while, he began to fade.
The blue thinned.
The white dissolved.
The fog was gone.
His form loosened back into the darkness, and then he disappeared through the closet, or into it, or beyond whatever the closet had become.
And the moment very clearly released me. As if it was complete.
Yet the feeling of shock remained in me.
I remember this next part very clearly.
Still certain that what had just happened was real — and that whatever it was had finished — I ran from the room to find my mother.
She was in the bath. The moment she saw my face, she knew something had happened.
I was not the kind of child who was easily frightened. I was a wild boy — independent, uncaged, and more likely to explore the dark with a flashlight and a knife than hide from it.
But that night, my temperament was different. I remember my mom taking it seriously, as if she intuitively knew what I had seen. Together, we searched the house.
Room by room.
Every closet.
Top to bottom.
There was no man.
Of course there was no man.
And yet I had seen him. Sat with him. A part of me had seen into his intimate inner world, and he into mine.
Eventually, I had to go back to bed, so I did. Not exactly shaken, but clearly changed.
The feeling had already begun to give way to a deeper awe. A sense of calm spread over my body and enveloped me in a warm blanket of acceptance.
The world had become larger than it had been before. Brighter. The possibilities seemed to open up.
Clearly, something had entered my life that I had no category for. Clearly, I felt that there was more going on in this world than was being told to me.
Or perhaps it wasn't that I had no words.
Perhaps I feared they wouldn't be received by those that mattered.
So I did what children do with things too vast to understand.
I filed it away somewhere.
The house became the house again.
The closet became the closet.
The stars became stars.
And for twenty-five years, I hardly thought about it. Until one night the memory came back to me and it all started to make a little more sense.
—
Twenty-five years later, I found myself sitting on a meditation cushion in Malibu, at the edge of a life I could no longer keep pretending was mine.
My marriage was ending, though I could not fully admit that to myself just yet.
I was suspended in that awful limbo state, seemingly too frozen to make a decision — the place where some deeper part of you already knows the truth, but the mind keeps bargaining with the consequences.
There were children.
There was love.
There was history.
There was shame.
There was the fear of making the wrong choice. The fear of losing everything I thought I was. The fear of becoming the man who left.
A fear of a decision you cannot come back from.
Even though deep down I had already chosen.
But underneath all of that was something older. A grief that did not begin in that marriage, though I did not know it at the time.
A grief that had been lying dormant, waiting for me.
Almost like a hunter lying in wait for his prey.
That night, I found myself desperate. Seeking guidance.
So, never having done it before, I booked a private Kambo ceremony with a woman I had found through a friend.
We sat in the room, reading each other's eyes, and I could feel her gaze staring through my soul.
Her voice carried a kind of soft but firm German accent, and there was something in it that lulled me beneath the surface of myself.
Not forcefully.
Precisely.
As if she knew exactly where the trapdoor to my soul was.
We were about to take part in a ceremony in her home on that cold Malibu evening beneath an enlarged full moon. There were crystals and cards around the room, the kinds of things the rational mind loves to dismiss until the heart is too broken to care what looks rational anymore.
But nothing about the room felt forced. Instead, it felt warm.
Grounded. Inviting. Having yet to take any medicine, I remained fully sober and alert.
And for the first time in a while, I felt safe enough to be held.
So I cried.
Deeply.
Not the kind of crying that comes from one thought or one event. This was an older grief coming through. Full-body crying. The kind that rises when a dam inside you finally opens and all of the pent-up water rushes through.
I struggled to catch my breath.
My lungs felt full of the fluids of grief.
Then she said:
Go and find your inner child.
And the moment she said it, I felt it. That same spooky kind of feeling.
The same feeling from that night in Ohio. The stillness.
The electrical charge.
The ancient knowing.
Something important is about to happen. My breath caught.
A memory I had not accessed in almost 25 years began to surface.
A boy staring into the dark, trying to understand why he felt alone.
Only to have the answer to his question arrive in the form of the medicine he needed.
The tears paused.
Everything in me became sharply present. And then I saw him.
The boy.
Me.
Eight years old. His small body lying in his bed.
Open and vulnerable.
As if waiting for me.
Only this time, I was very clear I was not seeing through his eyes. I was looking directly at him.
My focus was fully present. Not held in control, or something manufactured. It was soft. Genuine. Authentic and loving. A deep, fierce tenderness.
It was a love without needing an exchange.
Without condition.
Pure and present.
It reminded me of the moment my first daughter was placed in my arms, in all her gooeyness and glory, and I looked into her sweet eyes for the first time. That instant when your heart becomes larger than your body and you understand, without needing to think about it, that you would reorganize reality itself to protect this being.
But this was different.
Because this was not my daughter.
This was me.
My son.
In some way, it was like waking up after years of amnesia to find a long-lost child without ever remembering I had lost him.
Like walking through life with a hollow ache so familiar I had mistaken it for myself, only to discover the ache had a face.
Had a body.
Had pajamas.
A room in Ohio.
A boy staring into the dark, trying to understand why a man made of blue light had come to him.
And while I struggled to speak words out loud through the tears, I did in fact tell him something. Something really important. Something that he, or I, or both of us needed to hear.
And so a memory I had forgotten for decades now returned with a deep and cathartic rapture that fused the cracks in my soul.
And with that fusing came a frequency I had buried so far down I had completely forgotten it ever existed.
Then the recognition continued to unfold.
Not as a concept or as a metaphor.
Not as something I devised afterward to make meaning from the strange events.
It arrived whole. Fully sober. Crystal clear.
I was that man.
I have always been the masculine light being who had visited the eight-year-old boy version of myself in rural Ohio — the one who transcended time and space in order to sit near him in the dark and whisper. The one whose presence felt familiar and terrifying and profoundly loving —
It was always only me.
For twenty-five years I had been afraid of a shadow somewhere in the dark. I had simply never guessed that the shadow was my own — the self that had abandoned me, or that I myself had abandoned, waiting all that time to be found.
Twenty-five years later, under a full moon in Malibu, with the kind of grief that feels like a death and a soft German voice guiding me inward, I found my way back to the true essence I had always been.
Across time.
Across memory.
Across the dream that is life.
Across whatever distance exists between the self we abandon and the self who comes back. I had contacted him.
He had contacted me.
Or perhaps love had reached both of us at once, through the distance.
The boy I was had been visited by the man I was becoming.
And the recognition itself — I was that man — was the moment those two halves of me united at that bridge.
And so I have been working with this moment ever since.
The rest of this book is what I've come to understand.
