Who We Are

Primal Nature was born out of a lifetime of study and experimentation, a restless search for some way to live as fully, as richly, as deeply as possible.

I, like most people in the so-called developed world, was born at once free and lost; able to go almost anywhere and do almost anything, but devoid of a meaningful rubric with which to guide my endeavors. I spent my early life exploring the world somewhat chaotically and haphazardly, without any deep sense of what I was really doing or where I was really going.

Whether we’ve decided to dedicate ourselves to achieving material wealth, spiritual enlightenment, social status, sensual pleasure, or anything else, experience has shown me that there inevitably comes a time when we realize that the rules of the game we’ve constructed are not so reliable after all; the trophy we seek may be shiny, but it is not enough; the entire sport is nothing but a farce.

When we compulsively cling to our patterns of thought and emotion, our fears, our desires — the existential scars we tend to confuse for our true selves — sooner or later life begins to lose its value, its meaning; one day we inevitably begin to feel listless, hollow, or sick.

If we’re lucky enough to see this early on in our lives, it can be quite tempting to feel smug. “The enlightened man goes amongst men as among animals,” said Nietzsche, without any hint of disapproval. “The higher we soar, the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly.” This type of strident pseudo-spiritual egotism is, if anything, only more rampant today than it was in his time. But simple realization — which we conveniently confuse for enlightenment — is not enough. After all, this is not an easy problem to solve. You can abandon the corporate world and dive into the spiritual one, or vice versa, but the truth is that every time we think we’ve seen beyond our limitations, found an answer, or discovered a meaning with which to really structure our lives, if we stay honest and keep searching, we eventually realize that we’ve simply put ourselves into a subtler game, a more intricately constructed box. The myth of Sisyphus seems an appropriate metaphor.

Which is to say that Primal Nature was not created to peddle magic solutions, because there are no magic solutions. Life is difficult and complex, and in one way or another always will be. But when we accept that fact, our search for purpose and richness and depth does not cease; rather, it changes in tone. Instead of a desperate rush to reach an elusive end goal, it becomes a calm, steady, and profoundly powerful way of being. Sisyphus may never reach the top, but he only gets stronger and wiser the more he keeps trying. Once we truly accept that there are no magic solutions we can begin to consider the possibility that there may be no magic problems to solve either.

So Primal Nature was created simply because my personal process of searching has reached an inflection point, a transition; as with any passion that grows and blossoms, there comes a time – when it is solid enough to inspire or guide – that in order to expand further, it has to be shared. Like a tree, I have been digging my roots deeper, raising my branches higher; feeding myself until I burst with energy. The season has come in which I am ready to share the fruits of my labor.

At Primal Nature we are dedicated to bringing people together to delve jointly into the profundities of human existence and explore the frontiers of experience that hover always just beyond the horizon.  

Our actions are guided by a single principal that is both simple and exacting: the truest measure of the quality of the life that I live is the amount of love that I can bring into the world. In the words of Kahlil Gibran, “work is love made visible.”