About ThisIsReal
This started as a small weekly newsletter.
Mindy and I wrote it together. It was simple: a note about something we were learning, something we were practicing, something we were trying to live more honestly.
Then life shifted.
Mindy took a full-time job for the first time in more than twenty years. She spent those years homeschooling our kids, which was one of the greatest gifts she’s given our family and one of the joys of our life together. Now she’s stepping into a new season.
Alongside her work, she’s joined The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality and is part of the 2026 training cohort. She’s building something beautiful there—facilitating conversations, exploring spiritual practice outside traditional religion, and hosting a book club for members of the center.
Her Bodhicitta Book Club here locally continues as well.
The work Mindy is doing right now is exactly the work she should be doing.
If you want to support that path, a subscription here is one meaningful way to do it.
A standard subscription buys us a monthly coffee date.
A founding subscription buys our favorite kind of evening: dancing in one of our favorite venues in Salt Lake City, tacos at one of our late-night spots, and a simple dinner for the kids at home.
Nothing fancy. Just time together.
What I’m doing here
Over the past couple of years, something unexpected happened.
I fell in love with writing.
Not the polished kind. The kind where you sit with something long enough for the truth underneath it to surface.
This space is where I experiment with that.
Sometimes it looks like essays about relationships, embodiment, grief, or the strange stories we tell ourselves to stay safe.
And sometimes—paradoxically—it looks like fables.
Because the clearest way to write about reality is often sideways.
Stories let us approach things we might resist if they were said directly. They create enough space for recognition before explanation rushes in.
So this Substack holds that work: essays, fables, fragments, and occasional artifacts from larger projects.
Subscriptions here support the writing itself.
One of those projects is a literary memoir I’m working on—an exploration of the season when an old protector strategy becomes visible, thanked, and slowly retired. It’s a craft-forward book built around scenes, body experience, and lived practice rather than theory.
Some of the writing here connects to that work.
Some of it simply belongs to the moment it was written.
The spirit of this place
ThisIsReal.Us has always been about a simple question:
What becomes possible when we stop performing and start telling the truth?
Truth about love.
Truth about fear.
Truth about the stories we inherited and the ones we’re learning to set down.
You won’t find a content machine here.
You won’t find a program or a system.
Just writing.
And the slow practice of staying present to a life that keeps changing.
Subscribe
Subscribing simply means you’ll receive new writing in your inbox.
Paid subscriptions help support:
Mindy’s work facilitating book-based conversations and spiritual exploration
the time it takes to write slowly and carefully
and the small rituals that keep our relationship grounded while the work deepens
Read freely.
Support only if it feels right.
— david / gonzo
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