Existential Literacy

“Feed your head.”

That line from Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit has always felt like more than a psychedelic slogan. Beneath the surreal imagery of Alice in Wonderland and altered perception is a deeper invitation: look more closely at the world you think you understand.

In this episode of The Creative Mind & Mortality, I introduce the idea of existential literacy—the capacity to live in conscious relation to impermanence. Most of us learn at some point that we are going to die, but we spend most of our lives keeping that knowledge at a safe psychological distance. The mind is built that way. But some people live closer to that awareness.

This podcast explores what happens when mortality awareness moves closer to the surface of experience—when the temporary nature of life becomes part of how we perceive beauty, relationships, creativity, and meaning. Rather than treating this awareness as a pathology, I suggest it can become a kind of literacy: a way of reading the world through the lens of impermanence.

Drawing on Ernest Becker’s work on death anxiety, existential philosophy, and my experience as an artist, I explore how creative practice can become a place where mortality awareness is metabolized rather than avoided. In the act of making, the anxious future-scanning self briefly loosens its grip, and something else takes over: attention, presence, and the strange grace of being fully alive in a moment that will not last.

In that sense, the message behind White Rabbit feels unexpectedly appropriate: Sometimes the most important thing we can do is feed the part of the mind that is willing to look more deeply at reality—even when it’s uncomfortable.

The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast

I’ve decided to begin releasing a series of podcasts alongside my published books as a way of widening the conversation. The written work will always be the spine of what I do, but I’m increasingly aware that many people who are deeply curious about these ideas simply aren’t engaging through books anymore. Rather than resist that shift, I’m choosing to work with it.

The podcast format allows me to think out loud in real time. It creates space for nuance, hesitation, and intellectual risk in a way that feels different from the fixed architecture of a printed page. These episodes draw directly from my doctoral research in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership, where I’m examining how mortality awareness shapes culture, creativity, and ethical consciousness. My work, grounded in Ernest Becker, Otto Rank, and Terror Management Theory, asks a difficult but necessary question: what happens when we stop denying death and begin metabolizing it?

This series is an extension of that inquiry. It sits at the intersection of art, psychology, and existential philosophy. It’s also practical in a quiet way. If culture functions as a defense against mortality anxiety, then creativity may be one of the few ways we can face that anxiety without collapsing into illusion or violence.

I’m not abandoning the book. I’m expanding the conversation around it.

If you’ve been following my work through Glass Bones, Rupture, or In the Shadow of Sun Mountain, this podcast offers another doorway in. If you’re new, it may be an easier entry point into ideas that are often intellectually dense but psychologically urgent.

However you engage, the aim remains the same: to look directly at what we usually avoid—and to see what kind of art, meaning, and responsibility might emerge from that honesty.

You can listen to episode 1 by clicking here, or on the image above.