Hey. I’m tyler.
I am from the curd of Wisconsin.
I am from cheese and beer and Friday night ballgames the whole county showed up for.
I’m from the UW campus, four houses from my mom’s office where she was director of admissions and my dad taught biology — until he got fired for protesting. Dr. Lewke. Always certain. It cost him the job and he never once mentioned it as a loss.
They both demanded I directly participate in the formation of the world I use and want.
Build the life you want. Never a passenger.
Get in the thick of it, hands dirty, knees bloody.
Run from conformity, chase the wind. The fork on the left and the knife on the right is totally made up, pay no attention.
And then, when I did — the disappointment lingered.
I’m from bowling leagues, back alleys, 3 a.m. hunts. From a blue hand-painted rowboat on the Chippewa pushed by a crappy motor my dad would scream at to make work. From open fields where corn grows nine shades of yellow and doing what you say is as important as breathing.
I am from Mrs. K’s classroom, where I drew pictures of the world and she ripped them up, over and over. Try again, Tyler. You’re making it too big. The world is small, and YOU are personally responsible for all of it.
I am from a mother who would not rest until I understood that what’s not transformed is transferred, who crushed any belief I held that someone was coming to the rescue, and who burned her high heels on the way out of town when she left me and dad to find out what it meant to take time out for time in. She insisted I make my own way, ignore the rules, open my heart wider to you, and you, and you.
I’ve spent thirty-plus years trying to figure my way out of the mess and the beauty all this left me in.
Meditation. Therapy. Twelve steps. Mystic gurus and nutbags. Seven hundred self-help books, but who’s counting. A Buddhist temple I now preside over. A teacher I fully reject but realize I’d follow anywhere.
Net result: when somebody says the word abundance, I assume they’re dead broke until proven otherwise. It’s not that deep and it’s always that deep.
And I still wake at 1:59 in the morning, full of shame and hate and the insatiable curiosity that built my whole gorgeous life. I still get furious in traffic and play music too loud and let the judgments I was born with get too much airtime. I still long for other people’s time and space and material, certain I’m less than and everyone’s better than me. Hell bent on Tuesday, certain anything is possible. Destroyed by Thursday, positive I cannot go on.
I have autopsied the shit out of my own behavior to figure it out and I still haven’t. Fuck.
Now?
I AM ADDICTED TO THE GAP. The sacred, holy, ugly-as-fuck space between what I know and what I actually do.
Practice, work, marriage, money, the body, and a billion questions I can’t answer before breakfast. It shows up everywhere. That’s what I write about. Mostly weekly, plus whatever arrives from the mud or the majesty of the present moment.
My promise: I’m not going to tell you what to do or how to do it. I don’t know and don’t assume, and I think anyone who says otherwise is a bullshitter. My greatest allergy.
I’ve written two books I adore: Empty Empty Happy Happy, and May I Become with my teacher Bhante Sujatha. There will be more until the earth reclaims my body or I stop giving a shit. A third, I Love You, Keep Going, is finished — and when it lands I think it will sound like thunder and rain and dawn and that sunset you keep chasing. Read them, burn them, curse my name, or send me a note if you found yourself in there.
I’m a serial entrepreneur. Built businesses from scratch, learned how to walk away and let the thing keep running. There is no way out but in. So I coach at the intersection of therapy and business — the mess of a life and the mess of a company, mapped together. tylerlewke.com, if you ever want it.
I have a bulldog and a husband and an amazing daughter and an Airstream we pretend to live in, unless I’m prepping for Modernism Week under the San Jacintos or chasing silence in Joshua Tree.
It’s a life. I’ll show it to you. Take what you need, leave the rest.
I love you, keep going.
Tyler
