Welcome to Embark
Writing for people trying to live an outdoor life in a modern world.
Over 600 of you have subscribed to this publication in very short order. That’s just bonkers.
I mean, can you imagine 600 people in front of you? Having them over for dinner? You’d be a ball of nerves. You’d think you were blessed beyond measure, and you’d want to earn that blessing. Where would they sit? You’d take your hosting very seriously.
Which is a long windup to say, I’m glad you’re here. I don’t take it lightly.
I figure it’s time to introduce this humble effort formally.
Many of you know I’ve been writing long-form essays for Onward’s Dispatch. I’ve been a working journalist, author, editor, and publisher for many years, but the feedback to the newsletter essays has been different, at turns touching and galvanizing.
I think it’s because that newer storytelling has been more personal, story-driven, and focused as much on the mistakes and anxieties of building something new as the triumphs and easily grasped lessons.
I’ve created this new space to go deeper—deeper into our work at Onward, but also into themes that I think are vital and under explored but have popped up again and again for me as a writer, adventurer, entrepreneur, and nonprofit ringleader — to say nothing of father and husband.
In new posts delivered unobtrusively to your inbox and on the Substack app for as long as you’ll have me, I’ll tell stories and share hard won thoughts—mine and others’—on a deceptively simple but inexhaustibly rich topic: How to begin, to respond to life’s invitations, in a world that seems to leave increasingly less space for original endeavor.
I learned a long time ago that storytelling is the best way to mine rich veins, and so here you’ll find stories about a magical WWII boat that’s become a quirky home for my family, a community nonprofit finding its legs, a narrative nonfiction magazine that’s been publishing for over five years and has allowed me to work with hundreds of wonderful writers, a nascent farmstead we’ve been developing, and the myriad humiliations and occasional successes along the way.
Using a little persuasion, but primarily through narrative, we’ll explore the glimpsed revelation that in order for reality to delight and surprise us we must set out, must boldly begin, and must then be tossed about and accept what comes.
Begin what?
Fair question.
Big things, certainly: new paths and directions, the grand undertakings. But small things too, the delights of life that become astonishingly abundant when we unhitch ourselves from routine and wrestle our moments from the crushing obsession with time and goals and trajectory.
As Walt Whitman warns:
“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves … how worn and dusty, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”
Beginnings shake us out of the ruts of tradition and conformity, and they are emotional terrain, exciting and lonely at turns.
Oddly, this culture of ours offers curiously few guideposts. Rare are the midwives of new endeavor. The literature of beginning is also paltry, confined to technical manuals on topics like business and fitness or the more saccharine end of an inspirational spectrum. Occasional works of fiction take a direct swipe at the art of beginning (Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, that little gem of a book, comes to mind).
I collect my teachers wherever I can find them. As we explore this landscape together, mostly through story, I’ll introduce plenty of rascals, radicals, and roamers who have served me as guides, helped me find my bearings, and then re-find them when I invariably get lost.
Finally, stillness.
That may seem weird in a publication that’s all about setting out, this nod to stillness.
One of the great discoveries of my life, and perhaps yours too, has been the unfolding cycle, a path out of stillness and into action that, if managed skillfully, playfully, can return us to a deeper, more satisfying stillness.
To begin properly in this age of overt striving and with our mania for results involves deprogramming, reclaiming our time. It takes a Zen step off the escalator to realize there’s nowhere to get, that we’re here already, so let’s have some fun in this one precious carnival of life.
In the process, life both confronts and seems to cheer us — it smiles, although sometimes devilishly. Our task is to learn to smile back, to play sportingly and with some rascality, not to get too competitive or fixated, which is where we lose the flavor. A bad sport is inflexible and acts out of accordance with the flow of being, a good one rides the waves of opportunity and setback and doesn’t mind a little foam.
Mostly, this is an invitation to journey. It is a humble call from a cozy dockside berth in LA to embark. That is the directest way I know to wear away the superficial parts of ourselves and taste a deeper union with what is.
Thanks for joining me on this ride.
Onward,
Greg
P.S. If you’re interested in exploring, I recommend the post below.