I’m not sure the gravity of our situation has begun sinking in for most people. Lemme pull out my megaphone emoji real quick.

📢 *Click* This thing on?

Ahem…

Yo, internauts and netizens, googlebangers and backseat surfers, gather ye round for a little doomsday pep talk/political bumpersticker christening ceremony. There won’t be any champagne smashing. There will be a good rapping over the knuckles.

Life is but a dream....
🚣🏼
When are you going to take the big leap? When are you going to say yes, fully yes, from the marrow of your bones yes, to the dreams that have been tapping on your shoulder for so long?

By fully yes, I mean not a shred of hesitation. You know you’re worthy of life’s elixir. You've worked so hard to get here. You won't allow a single negative thought to stand between you and the grail you seek.

When many people think of Reno, they think of quickie divorces, Johnny Cash, gambling, or Comedy Central cop mockumentaries. Arguably the last thing they think of is mind-body regeneration.

Well, this last weekend proved that when it comes to the alternative wellness scene, this city is really coming into its own. World-renowned health experts gathered here for the BioRegenesis Conference to talk all things holistic healing, detoxification, regenerative agriculture, marine therapy, deuterium depletion, morphogenetic fields, etc. I couldn’t believe the headliners when I first saw the list of speakers. Two of them had helped me immensely in my own healing journey.

In 2011, I wrote a song called The River Underground. Something compelled me to write these strange lyrics about a “living land.”

I never really knew what the song was about or why I gave it that title. All I knew was that it was important somehow.

None of it made any sense until 2017, when I found myself attending community events at this amazing property in the Sierra foothills and the owner told me a “river flows underground” beneath the property, partly accounting for its otherworldly energies.

2018 was an exceptionally good year for the Reid family.

My dad got inducted into the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame, an award he now shares with the likes of Mark Twain and 57 other accomplished writers who’ve taken up residence here throughout the state’s history. It’s the highest honor of his career, one we all know that he deserves, having watched him put decades of work into his craft.

I didn’t take mushrooms before attending Cirque du Soleil. But my mind still got blown entirely. Partly because of the freakish, at times dreamlike acrobatics. Partly because this happened. Halfway through the show, the clown, who took us on a kind of underworld Christmas journey, picked me and one other random guy to come up on stage for some jump rope antics. I knew he would pick me as soon as he said he needed two hapless guinea pigs from the audience.

Before you write 2018 off as a complete dumpster fire, remember there were millions of people who woke up a little bit more. You didn’t read about them in the news. They were too busy trying to put food on the table and get their kids into bed on time.

But even in their daily grind, these people made time to explore. They gathered with friends to discuss what the more beautiful world will look like. They read books and listened to podcasts and started putting their higher-consciousness plans in place.

My name is Jacob. And like the biblical figure from whom my name derives, I have wrestled with God.

I have survived a shattering engagement with one of the extremes of human existence, an unspeakable existential emergency that forced me to examine the meaning of life and my place within the greater order of things.

We’re magnetized by minerals on high. It’s why the ancients traced the heavens with their shrines, why there’s Stonehenge and Giza, remnants of the cosmic centric frame of mind. We’re charted out in constellations, each of us, every dream and disposition a culmination of the wheeling of celestial bodies. The planets pull on us in ways we cannot see.