This is the final presentation from the course I just completed, Regenerative Leadership. It gives a sense of how I’m working to integrate the ideas from the program with my own ongoing interests and research. If I sound a little rushed in places, it’s because the presentation was limited to ten minutes, and I was already pushing past the time.
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.