Thank You Papa !

Before I begin, thank you. So many of you reached out when the news spread that Bali was not happening. Your word were genuinely moving. They meant more than you know.

I have been doing this long enough to know when something is asking me to compromise, and long enough to know what it opens when I don’t.

The trip to Bali had been months in the making. A family journey built around a festival booking, a show in Dubai on the way, Roberta and Akane’s lives rearranged around mine. Then, very late, the festival came back with an exclusivity demand that had never been part of our agreement and was never going to be. I walked away. The visa disappeared, the other bookings could not mobilize visa on time, and the whole architecture of those weeks came down with it.

For about a day, that hurt. Then something else entirely began.

A few nights before the trip was supposed to begin, I played at Primal Moves in Venice. I want to tell you what that felt like because it matters for everything else that follows.

Gus, who built and runs Primal Moves -Venice, understands something that most people in this world have forgotten. He set the room up like his dream living room. Friends/tea facilitators were stationed at the same coffee table height as me, surrounding mine like bandmates who had already taken their positions. Each of them was rooted in their place, holding it with intention. It felt like we were all in a band together, and that night the band grew. My newfound friend Samuel J joined me with his guitar and voice, and his presence added a dimension to the evening that felt completely organic, as if it had always been part of the plan. I love those moments, when someone steps in and the music just expands to hold them. Then something happened that no one could have scripted. From somewhere in the audience, a man stood and sang. No microphone, no invitation, just a voice, ancient, vast, and unmistakably Middle Eastern in its soul. His name is Hamed Nikpay, and what came out of him in that moment was nothing short of a force of nature. He apologized afterward. I told him there was nothing to apologize for. Some things simply cannot be contained, and when they cannot, that is when you know the room is truly alive.the facilitators, the music, the room itself, and the audience who showed up without agenda and became part of the offering. Nobody was there for themselves. Immense respect permeated through and through. It was a collective, completely and naturally, and you could feel it in every corner of that space.

It brought me all the way back, to the warehouse shows in Los Angeles, to Voodoo, the events I started building in the early days. One hundred-person gatherings where community was the entire point and money was never the driver. That spirit was what eventually grew into Habitas, which became what it became precisely because we never abandoned that original conviction. I have heard every version of the argument that this is simply how the industry works, values compromised over money. Voodoo, and then Habitas, were my response to that for over a decade.

When Gus and I hugged afterward and talked about the next one, I remembered exactly why I do this work. For rooms like that one. For the thing that happens when people gather without armor.

That same week, Roberta, Akane, and I spent time with our dear friends David and Laura at their ranch in Malibu. The property was once owned by Tony Duquette, the visionary American designer who spent decades transforming it into something that defies easy description, part fantasy, part sanctuary, part living artwork, a world built entirely on the conviction that beauty is a necessity and not a luxury. Walking that land, you feel it immediately. Something in you slows down and opens up.

David and Laura have made it entirely their own, and what struck me most was not the extraordinary beauty of the place but the fullness of it. The land provides. They have everything they need, grown, raised, and tended right there. It was one of those rare environments that makes you think differently about what a life can look like when it is truly rooted somewhere. INSPIRING.

We spent our time there taking it all in, talking, dreaming, and quietly beginning to imagine what it might feel like to gather people in a place like that. That conversation is still alive. There may be something coming. I will leave it there for now.

Akane had never been to San Francisco.

I had almost written that city off after the pandemic. It had felt hollowed out, abandoned, genuinely sad in the way that cities can be when the energy that animated them goes quiet. Something has shifted there, though. A new vitality has moved in, a current of possibility I could feel even on the first morning. The city was in full bloom, warm and golden and generous, the version of itself it reserves for the days when it really wants to make an impression.

Japan had been part of the original Asia trip too, Akane’s top bucket list destination, a place she has carried a deep and specific love for her whole life. Maybe having been named Akane has something to do with that. The Japan portion fell away when the trip collapsed, and I felt that loss for her. Then we arrived at our place in San Francisco and were told we would be staying in the Japanese room. You can imagine her face.

The next morning we rode our ebike through the whole city together, eventually finding our way to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, where we sat and had tea among the trees, the stone lanterns, and the quiet. It was one of those moments that feels arranged by something larger than circumstance. The trip had given her Japan after all, just not where any of us expected to find it.

There are few things in life as precise and irreplaceable as seeing a place you love through the eyes of someone experiencing it for the first time. Watching Akane take it all in made the city entirely new for me too.

We stopped in Chinatown and she found two bracelets she loved. I asked her to choose one, the way I always do, trying to teach her something about desire and discernment and the difference between wanting everything and choosing what matters. She chose the blue one. I bought the pink one without telling her.

I kept it in my jacket pocket for the entire drive to Sequoia.

I am not sure I have the right words for what the giant sequoias do to you. I will try anyway.

You stand at the base of something that was already ancient when everything you have ever known was just a seed of a possibility. These trees have been here through all of it, every war, every civilization, every version of this world that came and went while they simply kept growing, deeper into the earth and higher into the sky. Standing with Akane in their presence, forty years between us,I thought about how short a human life is and how rich it becomes when you fill it with the right things.

We talked about time. About how small our worries are in the big picture. About what the world might look like when she is my age. About what it means to put your roots somewhere and grow.

At some point during our time among the trees, she climbed onto my lap the way she has done since she was small, and we both looked up together toward the tops of the sequoias, those impossible crowns disappearing into the light. It was in that moment that I reached into my jacket pocket and put the pink bracelet in her hand.

Her eyes watered. The bracelet was just an object. What moved her was the fact that I had been carrying it across the whole journey, through every mile of that road trip, waiting for the right moment to arrive. It did and we both felt it deeply. It's funny how an eleven year old can move in and out of childish silliness and wonder, and then into profound emotion and reverence for a moment. This was most definitely the latter.

That night, we camped with the river just outside our door. Its sound came through the walls and filled the room with something I can only describe as permission, permission to stop, permission to let the mind go quiet. There is a truth in moving water that nothing else teaches quite the same way. What you see in front of you in this very moment is already gone, carried downstream, replaced by something new that will also pass. The river does not mourn any of it. It just keeps flowing, in its own course, on its own terms. Lying there that night, listening, with Akane beside me, I felt the weight and the gift of impermanence at exactly the same time. I do not remember sleeping that deeply or that well in a very long time. When I opened my eyes in the morning, Akane was already awake beside me, smiling.

Just smiling. I was too.

I have been sitting with all of this since we came home, turning it over quietly. What these two and a half weeks gave me was not something I could have planned. It arrived because I got out of the way, surrendered. I trusted something older and quieter than the noise of schedules and demands. I put my feet on the earth, looked up at something ancient, and let a river remind me of what actually matters.

I share all of this as a travel story and an invitation. I think most of us are carrying more than we need to, and moving faster than we have to, and somewhere in the rush we are missing the thing we are actually here for.

Let us put our phones down. Go somewhere without a signal. Take someone we love and show them something they have never seen. Sleep next to the sound of water. Let us be small in front of something ancient. Let the worries that feel enormous reveal themselves, slowly, as the small and temporary things they actually are.

The life we are looking for is not waiting on the other side of the next thing we are planning. It is already here, in the spaces between, in the faces of the people who love us, in the sound of a river reminding us of impermanence.

The trip that fell apart gave me something more meaningful, and it arrived in the most unexpected wrapping. Trusting my values handed me two and a half weeks of my daughter saying, unprompted and repeatedly, thank you Papa.

That is the only metric that matters to me right now.

Bali will happen. This just turned out to be the more important journey.