Where You Place It

I was flying down that hill
certain I knew how to ride,
certain I knew everything,
when the hood of a car
introduced me to the ground.

Three days before, I had told my wife I wanted to leave.
I was carrying decades of screaming
fast down that hill.
The collision said: figure this out.

So I sat in a room full of strangers,
eyes closed, not touching, not speaking,
and felt something I had no name for —
a field, a belonging,
my awareness braided into theirs.

I turned to my friend Neil and said,
I wonder if there's a way
to carry this home with us.
Days later, a developer I'd met once
emailed me out of nowhere.
The universe, apparently, had been listening.

We made a symbol — two circles
leaning into each other,
wrapped in a Fibonacci spiral —
and printed it on temporary tattoos.
Nobody asked about the app.
They pressed the symbol to their skin and said,
it feels like love, it feels like a portal.

We've gifted 280,000 of them now,
always in person,
always as a small ritual of presence.

Then the clinic burned —
not in flames but in money,
hemorrhaging every week,
until my phone lit up in Costa Rica
with a photo of an eviction notice on my door.
Twenty-two years. Gone.

I moved so fast I left everything behind —
the intake forms, the paperwork, the structure
I had always leaned on.
And in that emptiness
I had no choice but to feel
what was happening in another person's body
by feeling it in my own.

I've cried more in these nine years
than in all the decades before them.
The divorce, the remarriage,
the slow, painful education
in what love actually is.

Leena came during COVID —
she was in New York, I was in Toronto,
neither of us looking.
For over a year we mostly talked on the phone,
a playful brother-and-sister kind of friendship,
before we ever stood in the same room.
When we finally hugged, we were never really apart again.
We call ourselves wholemates.

She taught me that being and doing
are equal parts of a day.
That presence is not the absence of work.
It is the work.

Here is the heart of what we built:
when you hold a wish for someone,
you hold the vision of them
already living inside their joy.
They carry the wanting.
You carry the arrival.

I can hold your wish for you
better than you can hold it for yourself —
because I am not tangled in the story of it,
the why, the fear it won't come.
I can simply hold the frequency
without the weight.

A waitress in Mexico came running down the sidewalk toward us
three months after we'd gifted her a wish:
my restaurant, she said. It's real.
In Texas, a woman named Kathy
arrived at a festival to raise funds for her nonprofit
and left with fifty thousand dollars from a stranger —
enough, she said, to feed two million more families.

My own word, one year, was freedom.
I meant money and travel and open roads.
The universe sent eviction, divorce,
the de-anchoring of everything I was gripping.
The wish always comes true.
It just doesn't always arrive
in the shape you pictured.

We give our attention away all day
and have forgotten how sacred it is —
it builds trillion-dollar companies,
it is bought and sold while we scroll,
while fear pours in
and we forget we could do something
with the device already in our hand.

During COVID, my former mother-in-law
was alone in a hospital, going through chemo,
when strangers on our app began sending her notes.
She didn't know their names.
She only knew she suddenly felt less alone.
That was the moment I understood
what we were really making.

Presence is the one gift
we all arrive on this earth carrying equally —
not money, not talent, not time —
presence.

If you have a minute today,
you have something precious.
The only question
is where you'll place it.