There was a moment on a dark dance floor, past midnight, when I stood at the edge of a woman's gravity and heard the sentence that had been running my life surface in full:
I don't feel like I deserve her attention.
For years I'd have called that a tender thing — a Water thing, too much feeling, not enough armor. Standing there, I saw it was the opposite. I felt everything: attraction, resonance, the pull of her. The feeling wasn't the problem; the problem was that I wouldn't move. Water had arrived in abundance. What hadn't was Fire — not the loud kind, not the swagger of the men taking the floor that night, but the clean version: directness, initiation, the nerve to step forward and be seen wanting.
And narrating all of it, as always, was the energy that runs me hardest: Air — the interpreter, the meaning-maker, the part of me that can stand at the edge of a beautiful thing and build a whole philosophy about it instead of walking in.
I drove four and a half hours into the woods of Western Massachusetts to call in Water. Water came — but it spent the weekend showing me Fire, and together the two did something I hadn't expected: they got quiet enough, often enough, to hush the Air.
Let me take you back to the FedEx counter.
A little context first
To understand why a last-minute deck of hand-cut cards mattered, you need a little of where I come from.
In my early twenties I found a teacher — he passed last year — and a community built around one commitment: that we wake up together, not alone. The practice was meditation and collective inquiry, years of talking our way past the small self toward the awareness underneath — much of it in Western Massachusetts, which is part of why going back felt like a homecoming. I've also spent years in the body's traditions, training as an uchideshi in an aikido dojo in Japan, a discipline built entirely on presence and flow.
A year ago I admitted I was living too much in my head, and returned to something I'd circled for over a decade without claiming: ecstatic dance. Dance does what inquiry can't — it gets you out of the mind and into the body, where you stop talking about transcendence and simply do it.
The decision, and the cards
My friend and I almost didn't go — back and forth until the last minute over the drive, the time, whether it was worth it. As an early Tesla adopter with free energy for life, the road has never really cost me anything; and underneath the logistics was something steadier: a strong Philadelphia community would be there, and I've been setting a real intention to build relationships in this city. I wanted a blast with good-hearted, grounded people I actually want in my life.
The moment I committed, I knew what I'd bring. I'd been building a framework — five energies: Aether, Fire, Air, Water, Earth — finally giving the elements that thread through the traditions I'd studied a function in the self. I'd never offered it to anyone. So at three that afternoon I printed a deck at FedEx and sliced each card by hand, because I wanted them to land right. Not perfectly prepared. Committed. It was my friend's birthday; we filled the car at Whole Foods and drove north into the dark, each naming what we were calling in — she wanted more fire, I wanted more water.
The navigation begins
We arrived to pitch black and no plan, hesitating over a campsite right on the water in Tolland State Park. So I pulled out the Compass — a tool inside Aetherium, rooted in the I Ching, the ancient Book of Changes — and read it. The pattern that came back was Reserve. I took it plainly: snag the site, even without her confirmation. So we did — pitched the tent under our own floodlights (you can never have enough light), and I cooked chicken ramen at a picnic table, because you don't let a birthday pass without something warm. In the morning the lake smiled at us through the tent flap, and we meditated beside it before we moved.
This is how Aetherium works — less by asking than by answering. You name your intention, who you are, and what the situation actually is; then you witness what's arising and move with it. The Compass lives on the back of every card I handed out that weekend — the first doorway in.
The water ceremony, the mural, the painting
A woman opened the festival with her first live performance, a voice so clear it called the whole field into one body. The intention I'd named in the car was already working in me — call in more water, call in flow, the emotional depth I usually armor over with fire. I didn't need a card to tell me what I'd come for; the weekend was about to spend itself answering.
My brothers from Philadelphia were anchoring a collective mural they'd built over days — men who treat community as something you commit to. I leaned in, painted three sevens into the upper-left triangle — community, the sacred spiral — and watched it climb into the spine of a cosmic face. Dropping into the work, I connected with two community builders and pulled a card for each — the first cards I offered all weekend. Both recognized themselves in what they drew, and that gave me the confidence to keep handing them out.
On that same canvas, a woman and I painted side by side, and the difference was the point: my strokes thick and declarative, hers fine and precise — a masculine hand and a feminine one, neither trying to become the other, making something together more alive than either would have alone.
Rumi in the trees
We went down into the forest, to the sacred amphitheater, where a teacher I've carried for years was waiting — Rumi. I've been drawn to oracles across traditions — Delphi, the Book of Changes, the Sufi poets — but the one deck I've truly kept is Rumi's. I once sat inside his dervish ceremony in Cappadocia, and it moved me so deeply my daughter carries a name from it — Ayla, the halo around the moon. Now a woman read him aloud to a hundred people, sun coming sideways through the trees, the whole amphitheater tipping into worship.
For those minutes I wasn't interpreting anything. My Air had gone quiet and I was simply in it — a stillness that would turn out to be the prize of the whole weekend, the thing I'd keep stumbling back into by accident.
Midway through, a pull took me down to the beach, where a gospel group rehearsed Hallelujah, then Happy — joy with nothing attached. I met three travelers up from New York who hadn't quite registered they'd left the state, which is what made the next part funny: someone announced that under New York law women could go topless but men couldn't go bottomless, and the four of us cracked up — New Yorkers read New York's rules in a Massachusetts forest none of us had remembered leaving. One of them pulled Aether, and suddenly I had the language to say what I'm building, out loud, in the sun.
The trip back up was its own comedy. I caught a golf-cart ride from the fellow who'd made the announcement, and somewhere in it the line landed for real — men aren't allowed to go bottomless — which, oddly, was the reassurance I needed for when my turn came to enter the water. He brought me back to catch the end of the reading, where I slid in next to a buddy — another stick-wielder, a rhythm-setter — whose presence dropped me deeper still.
The baptism
When the reading ended, one of the festival organizers called us all down to the water — come down together. Almost a baptism, and for me exactly what I'd asked for: to shed a layer of the self-consciousness that keeps me one step outside my own body.
We took a different path this time, winding along the water, my friend at my side. I carried my jō to the docks — the staff I'd trained with as an uchideshi in Japan — and danced on the boards, spinning it through the air, riding the give of the unstable planks. Weapons work as worship. Then I stripped down and swam in my underwear in the cold lake with the whole festival around me, and it was easy — and the easiness was the point. No analysis. Just water on skin.
When I climbed out, a woman stood before me in her radiance — fully naked, at home in her own beauty, unhurried, unashamed. What I chose, in that closeness, was to stay with her eyes — to meet her, her presence and aliveness, and not reduce her to her body. Beholding instead of taking. I walked the grounds after bare-chested, tattoos out, the scarf I'd used as a towel still around my neck — empowering, to move through the crowd and simply be seen, willing to be seen fully, the old self-consciousness walking beside me instead of sending me home.
The boys with swords, the storm, the service
Back on the beach I found kids play-fighting with toy swords and stepped in with my jō — no calculating whether I belonged. We sparred until I took their swords, laughing. Not the only circle I entered fully that weekend, but one with an easy playfulness, the kind that drops you straight into flow.
The beach energy was infectious — a DJ, a section of horns, the whole shoreline swept into one sea of motion — until thunder shut the party down. My friend and I threw a frisbee as the first weather moved through, then climbed to camp to make dinner under an incredible sunset, the kind of light that feels like a gift after rain. We headed back up for the headline set — and that was when the real storm rolled in, lightning and rain that washed the performance out and scattered everyone. It pushed me, separated from my friend, into a kids' tent that became its own world. I'd hauled a box of Oreos up for the main event, so I passed cookies around — adults and kids both, and later out on the field once the rain let up. While we waited out the thunder, two women and I got talking, and I pulled a card for each. Both landed. The pattern kept proving itself: every draw resonating, every stranger recognizing themselves.
Into the dark
The kids' tent had given me something real, but none of us in there were making music, and the night wanted a new center of gravity. So the bonfire took over; when it cleared, the drummers built it up and I circled it with my staff and a red light.
Back at the mural I ran into two people doing real culture-shifting work in sex-positive and men's spaces — she pulled Aether, he pulled Water. Only later, on the videos, did I realize they'd just come offstage from a tent set of their own, a music bonanza I'd missed. They pointed me toward the Barefoot Ballroom. At the fork my friend chose camp, so I walked alone, fell into step beside another wanderer, and we watched an illuminated figure with wide-flung wings move through the blackness under a string of lights. A threshold. Come.
Midnight to five
Shoes off at the door. I stripped down to my Japanese jacket — the one outfit change I made all weekend, bought in Tokyo and boxed in storage for over a year, now back on my body and ready to be fully expressive. That and a red headlamp, and I walked into a sea of ecstatic motion. Behind the DJ a display pulsed a portal pulling the eye inward; outside, an illuminated fractal lattice. Both did the same merciful thing — gave my mind one point to rest on so it would stop running.
Which is where the sentence found me. I don't feel like I deserve her attention. I want to slow all the way down here, because this is the hinge of the weekend. Every old reflex fired at the edge of that floor — the eye-contact arithmetic, the is she receptive, do I lead loop — and under it that quiet verdict about deserving. I'd always filed it under tenderness. Now I saw it differently: not too much feeling, but feeling with no action behind it. The Water was overflowing. The Fire wouldn't strike.
And the good-boy reflex I'd worn like a virtue — careful, respectful, never presuming — turned its other face to me. Not fear; subtler than fear, which made it durable. I'd become so committed to being respectful that I'd lost access to directness and stopped noticing the trade. I'd collapsed two things into one: not imposing on someone, and not initiating with them. The first is a kindness. The second is just absence — and for years I'd called the absence a virtue.
So I worked it the only way that floor allows: through the body, past words. I spun through the center of the room until self-consciousness turned into play and my breath dropped into my belly. And then it happened — two women scooped up my energy, and I was lost inside the current of the three of us, both fully expressive, both open to meeting me there. Touch and whirl and return, three bodies and one feeling. It opened into something close to transcendent — the dissolving of the separate self every tradition I've studied points toward, arriving not through inquiry but through movement. The peak, and the cleanest Air-silence of the weekend: I wasn't watching myself dance, I was just dancing. The Water I'd called in — and, for once, Fire moving with it instead of behind it.
Outside, the fire dancers were going — four or more, captivating in the way they wielded their flow props. One spun an illuminated hoop with a sphere of flame at its center, leaning all the way back to the ground. I felt desire and admiration, but also recognition: she was embodying something I keep circling — not because the fire isn't mine, it is, but because stepping into the ring is a decision, and I don't always make it. The fire was mine to bring; what I was still learning was the nerve to step in and trust my whole self. Not a logistics problem. A decision.
Back inside, trying to find the flow again, a woman with dreads kept passing near me, whipping them across my face like a message I hadn't asked for. Get here. Get present. Step into the ring. I read it instantly and still didn't move. I watched bolder men sweep into the spaces I'd hesitated in, and suspected something less flattering than consciousness underneath: that I'd confused withholding with virtue and called my hesitation respect. I wrote the line on the inside of myself, still testing whether it's true: hesitation costs connection.
Outside the ballroom I passed cards to people I'd met, and the draws kept landing where they needed to — the community builders pulled Aether, the grounded ones Earth, the most emotionally open Water. Almost everyone landed in the energy they were already living. Deep in the night, in a warm tent laid with rugs, two women and I fell into a long, heart-centered conversation, and both, independently, drew Fire — Fire arriving in my hands twice in one tent after a weekend of calling in Water. There was a clear pull, an interest in going deeper. Then the dance floor called them, I got psyched out, and I let the invitation pass. Another open door I didn't walk through. The weekend had heard my intention and answered it sideways.
Day two: the crescendo
I slept five hours and woke into the second day. A vendor had a mandala necklace — a traditional tantric mandala from Tibet, intricate, green and gold. I've been inside that Buddhist lineage for decades, and to hold an artifact symbolizing its whole approach to fully embracing life felt significant. The instant I saw it I also saw the future of what I'm building — a wearable mandala that reads your five energies, the lit ones glowing on the reverse — and I wore it the rest of the festival like a prototype of my next chapter.
Right after, an Indian rap and hip-hop group caught me completely — a warm-up for the set I'd been waiting for. The crescendo was the Rasta set, rhythm and soul pulling the whole field into one body. I'd given the band a Fire card during their sound check — already calling in fire for what was coming, the way fire and Rasta have always belonged to each other. Seeing a dancer I'd noticed all weekend give herself completely to her own flow gave me permission to find mine. I didn't quite dance with the fire-dancer from the night before; we circled each other with our flow props, but it didn't fully land — and I know now why. Fire was still hesitant.
So I went back into my own flow with the staff and lost myself in the crowd. And that's when I saw her: a woman in a red bikini, radiant, her whole body alive — the exact watery aliveness I'd been calling in for thirty-three hours. We tracked each other across the floor, fell into a flow together out in the field under the open sky, and it finally moved me to step out and thank her for what she was bringing. I let myself behold her — her radiance, her bare skin and the jewelry catching light, all of it right there — desire and sensuality and a kind of bright hope at once, and I let myself feel all of it without looking away and without grabbing for it.
She pulled a Water card — drawn at random by the person who embodied it most. We held hands; sweetness and heat, a small cocoon of a moment. And here's the paradox I have to be honest about: Water had arrived, connection had arrived, she was right there — and I still didn't take the next step. I fumbled the exchange, tried to pass an Instagram with no reception, no way to find her again. Even at the peak of everything I'd asked for, the Fire stalled at the threshold. Water can bring you to the door. Only Fire walks through it.
But the cocoon isn't the point. The point is what came next: I stepped outside the moment and witnessed myself — usually my Air's oldest trick, narrating instead of living. This time was different. I wasn't analyzing; I was simply seeing a man who had, imperfectly, shown up: hesitant at the threshold, then alive in the thick of it, awake now and watching himself live.
The way out
I almost left without my water bottle — of course it was the water bottle — and going back gave me one last round of the field. I gave my final cards to the people who'd anchored the weekend: the men from home, the traveler who'd carried soil from the other side of the world into our mural, the organizers who held the space. The last person I met was a quiet artist whose smile never seemed to leave her face — a small, easy connection to close on.
Then the long drive home, debriefing the whole arc with my friend — a woman who shares my values and my appetite for exploration. Some of the best of the weekend was simply that: her company in the car, two friends making sense of what they'd seen. We made a salmon salad at a supercharger, because the life I'm building runs on free energy and exploratory living, and I wanted to taste that on the way back.
What the forest was for
I went looking for Water, and Water came easily, because Water was never my deficit. What the weekend did was hold a mirror to my Fire — and show me that the places I'd been proud of softening were, more often, places I was quietly withholding. Not the predatory fire of the men taking the floor. The clean kind. Directness. Initiation. The nerve to step through a door that's already open.
But here's what surprised me most, and it took the whole drive home to see: Water wasn't the opposite of Fire — Water was what made Fire safe enough to trust. The weekend wasn't teaching me Fire instead of Water; it was teaching me Fire through Water. The feeling I'd spent so long armoring against turned out to be the exact thing that could let me move without becoming one of those men I'd never want to be. Soft and direct at once. What I'm really after isn't one at the expense of the other — it's the balance among the energies, the place where each can answer for the rest.
And underneath both, the real revelation: how much of my life is run by Air — the frameworks, the interpretation, the standing one step outside every experience so I can understand it instead of live it. Air is a gift; it's how I build, how I made these cards, how I'm writing to you now. But Air can understand life; it cannot live it. The lake, the swim, the storm, the sword circle, the held hands, the three-body flow — every one was powerful precisely because it shut the interpreter up and dropped me into the thing itself. The same work I learned years ago in circles of inquiry — get the small self out of the way; touch the one underneath — except my teacher taught it through words, and the dance floor taught it through the body.
That's the practice. Not more Water. Not more Fire. Just enough of both, often enough, that the Air goes quiet — not forever, I don't think it's meant to — but long enough to remember what it feels like to be fully alive.
And beneath even that, somewhere on the drive home, I found the question all of it had really been asking. Not how to call in Water, or trust my Fire, or quiet my Air. Just: how do I fully enter relationship? Not only romance — though romance is the loudest signal — but relationship in the wider sense: friendship, collaboration, play, sensuality, community. The plain willingness to meet another person fully and let something real form in the space between. Every doorway that weekend was a version of it, each one a different invitation, a different mirror.
So I don't think I was ever looking for a particular person. I was looking for a deeper capacity for connection itself. The women in this story weren't interchangeable figures orbiting one desire; each carried something distinct, and some of the truest connection of the weekend wasn't romantic at all — it was the friendship in the front seat on the way home. What stayed with me wasn't what might have happened with any one of them, but the recognition that life keeps offering connection in a thousand forms, and my work isn't to control where they lead. Some I stepped into, some I hesitated around, some are still unfinished — and that's all right, because the invitation doesn't close. My only work is to show up fully enough to meet it when it comes.
Water opened me. Fire asked me to participate. Air, for once, stopped narrating. And relationship was what appeared in the space that remained.
This is the work
This post isn't content about the work. This post is the work. Experience, reflect, extract, share. The five energies are the map: Aether your intention, Fire your will, Air your mind, Water your heart, Earth your body. Your mandala is your portrait. I spent thirty-three hours watching strangers pull the exact energy they were living, or the one calling them forward — and learning, in my own body, which of mine I trust and which I'm still learning to pick up.
East meets West, ancient meets future: Zen and Vedanta and Sufism and aikido and the dance floor all point at the same thing — that we come awake not in the mind but in the body, in relationship, in the willingness to show up fully and let something real emerge. Dance Beyond showed me what that looks like when a whole field of people does it together.
To everyone I met in those woods — you know who you are: I saw you. I'm here, present and open, building something I want you inside of. You're the proof this matters, and the invitation between us stays open.
I've spent so long building these cards, this framework, and eventually Aetherium itself because I don't think I'm unique in any of this. We all carry a pattern we can name in hindsight and miss completely while living inside it. Mine is Air — the interpreter that would rather understand a moment than enter it. Yours might be something else. The hard part isn't fixing the pattern; it's seeing it at all. That's what I built the rest of the system to do.
Discover your five energies. Take the fifty-question self-discovery and generate your personalized mandala. See yourself clearly. Move with intention. Join the practice.
Aetherium — a navigation system for life backed by intentional intelligence.