This is the “About” page for all six of my websites.
But I’m not going to give you a resume of accomplishments. Instead, I’ll show you who I am by telling you what’s deepest in my heart, and it’s this…
I want better for us.
I want us to…
Feel for ourselves deeply.
Deeper than ever before.
And then…
Fight for ourselves as fiercely as we really need to.
We’re living in a scary time. Our politics have gone crazy, tens of millions of people have lost their minds, the most powerful nation in the history of the world is destroying itself, and we’re facing the very real possibility of extinction of humankind.
I look at this world of ours and what I see is despair in the ascendency. It’s gaining momentum. It’s taking over. To the point where…
Despair has become a global dementor, hellbent on sucking out our souls.
And in response, I want us to defend ourselves. Fiercely. Because despair is a terrible enemy. If you let it…
It will take from you everything that makes you a blessing to the people in your lives.
As despair rises, hope declines. Which means it’s getting harder and harder to hold onto.
But if hope disappears on you, for an hour, a day, a month, or forever, you do not have to give up and give in…
You do not have to surrender to despair.
We’re told that it’s binary, you get hope or you get despair, one or the other. But that’s not true because there’s a third option, which is to…
Replace hope with fight.
And when you do that, you discover that your heart is bigger than despair. You realize that…
Who you are matters more than your fate.
You find out that no matter how doomed the world, no matter how close death comes, you don’t ever have to stop caring, because…
Love does not depend on hope.
And…
Action does not depend on hope.
I remember the last time I saw a two year old discovering “no.” Her determined pout and tough-guy posture made me want to take a step back. And yet there was this self-delighted hint of a smile that played across her lips from the beginning of her n-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o through to the end. She made the most of the moment. Her refusal was a stubborn self-affirmation coming from some place inside herself she didn’t understand and didn’t need to understand.
In moments now when despair swamps me, I hear a voice inside which plants its feet and stands its ground and says…
“Despair is not me. I do not choose for the world to be the way it is. If I were the Creator, hope would be real and love would be winning. That’s who I am. That person.”
Sometimes people call us names, those of us who believe that collapse is coming followed by the very real possibility of extinction. I used to call myself those names, but not anymore. I never think of myself as a pessimist, a cynic, or a naysayer, even though I have such a dark view of the future…
I’m not a nihilist—I’m a fighter.
At least in my own way. At least on my best days. And even on days when I can’t find my fight…
I still wish to be a fighter.
We humans are developmental beings, and that means we don’t have to stay stuck. We can move forward. We can make progress. Instead of just inching along trying to do better at the conventional version of love, we can do something remarkable…
We can upgrade love.
We can take a leap…
We can make of love something way better than the default evolution has given us.
We can make our love more powerful so we can deepen our nurturance and take better care of ourselves and each other.
I like that word “nurturance” because…
Nurturance is love in action.
It’s the practical implementation of the emotion of love.
This is a sweet partnership…
Upgrading love to deepen nurturance.
I’m crazy about it.
Okay, but now a warning, this deepening is the most challenging thing we humans could ever do. If we want to do better at love and nurturance, we need to go down to the bottom of the human operating system, we need to study the history of human evolution, we need to see how we are made, we need to understand the genesis of human behavior, because if we don’t, we can’t fix what’s going wrong.
But there’s a problem with going deep. Down there at the bottom of the human OS is…
Treacherous territory.
It’s where we come face to face with…
The source of human evil.
It’s where we come to understand…
Why we’re in such terrible trouble as a species.
Which can shake us to our core and take away any sense of hope for our future.
And this is why I’ve written two books about love…
Love with Fight in its Heart: Finding grace here at the end of the human story
Asking More of Love Than We’ve Ever Asked of It
I want to help people who choose to go deep. I help them to take fiercely good care of themselves every step of the way.
I call this place where we have our most fundamental encounter with our humanness…
The primal realm.
When I first decided to come here, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But having lived here now for decades, I can tell you the most important thing I’ve learned is this…
In the darkest place is where we find the deepest compassion for ourselves.
After all, we didn’t ask to be made like we are. We didn’t ask to suffer like we do. We didn’t ask for evil to be so easy and love to be so hard.
I’ve found that having gotten to the deepest compassion, I feel for myself more deeply than ever.
And it makes me mad, fighting mad, that evolution has set us up for so much failure and so much sorrow.
And yes, there is pervasive sorrow in the primal realm, but…
Sorrow is a living thing whereas despair is not.
So I’ve come to embrace it. I like happiness. I like how it buoys me up. I’ll take it whenever I can get it. But I need my sorrow because it keeps me grounded. It keeps my heart open.
You know how the self-help gurus tell us we should love ourselves, totally, every bit of us, leaving nothing out. Well…
I can’t do that.
When I look at the human operating system, which is in me as it is in everyone, and I see the evil it does in the world, there’s no way I can love it. I refuse to love it. It’s part of me but I oppose it.
So instead, I pick the parts of me I believe in and care about and feel at home with. I bundle them together, and this is the half of myself, the personal half, not evolution’s half, that I choose to love. I call this…
Whole-hearted half-love.
I grew up in a quietly fundamental Calvinist church where I was taught that I was unlovable. Everyone was in on this, the minister, my Sunday-school teachers, and my parents. They said this was God’s decree. And so as a child there was nothing I believed more deeply than this.
As you can guess, this belief, which stayed with me long into my adult years, did me serious, ongoing damage. It made relationships very difficult, often impossible, because if I was unlovable then why would anyone ever want to know me, let alone care about me.
But now in my old age, having learned how to feel for myself and fight for myself, there are moments when I can say I love myself, and say it not as an aspirational wish, but as…
A simple matter of fact.
I’ve come to this late in life, but for a boy who at a young age became a virtuoso of self-hate, getting to self-love at all is a very long way to come. To be tender with myself, to know that I’m not impossible, this is enough and I’m at peace.
Years of inner work has finally paid off. It’s made of me the kind of person I find myself drawn to. I feel shy about saying this, but it’s true.
It’s not like I’m ever going to be madly in love with myself. But after decades of wishing I could be someone else, I now like being me despite all my limitations.
Sometimes I notice I’m even a bit taken with myself. And every once in a while, in that deepest place in my heart…
I fall into affectionate communion with myself.
Which I don’t know how to talk about more than to name it and to affirm that if anything is a state of grace, this, for me, is it.
And I notice the more I develop self-love, the more generous I feel and the more I want it for everybody.
I want it especially for people who work hard every day to make a better world. For twenty years I’ve coached nonprofit leaders and activists on their toughest issues. But what I love best is helping them feel for themselves, deeply, and then fight for themselves, fiercely.
As part of this mission of mine, I wrote two books…
Advocating for Activists: Through forthright, nurturing relationship conversations
Deep Self-Care (not your typical advice)
These days I do coaching on all the issues I talk about on my websites. And a few years ago I added something new into the mix. I call it…
Primal play.
One day I happened on a book by a play therapist. He works with kids traumatized by sexual or physical abuse, or serious neglect, or because they’re living in severely dysfunctional families. He tells stories of kids using their own powers of play to break the spell of trauma and make progress. I love these stories. I just love them.
One day I got to thinking, here I am working on dark and difficult issues, what if I try some of the strategies and spirit of intensive play therapy in my writing and coaching?
So I tried that and became an instant, happy convert, and primal play became a daily part of my life. It was like a puppy who wouldn’t leave me alone—Come on, let’s have some fun!
I’m sure you’ve heard this advice…
Go back and recapture your childhood sense of play.
It’s well meaning, but there are two problems with it. First, lots of us did not have playful childhoods. So going back there doesn’t help.
Second, I want us to do better than going back. Here’s what I mean…
Play is the superpower of human development.
The key word in that sentence is “development.” Play is developmental. Children use play to make progress and grow their abilities.
But as adults we can do something special…
We can develop play itself.
Just like with love, we can upgrade it. And we can take it deeper. Whatever level of play we experienced as kids, we can make something more of it and make it what we need it to be.
As adults, because of our years of life experience and because of our (hopefully) greater maturity…
We can grow our powers of play.
And keep growing them.
That means we can use play strategies to deal with the most challenging issues in our lives no matter what our age.
Primal play is a sweet partnership of…
Serious work and serious fun.
And this matters to me because even though fighting for ourselves is a very serious business, I want for us to…
Take delight in our fight.
First, just because. But also because…
The spirit of play is kryptonite to despair.
One final thing about living in the primal realm. There can be a degree of loneliness to it. It’s not trendy. And I understand why. It asks a lot of you, an awful lot. But then…
It gives back way more than what it asks.
Still, it’s not for everybody. Actually it’s not something most people want to do. And if you’re someone who has a strong grip on hope and it’s working for you, and if your life is sailing along just fine, then I want to say to you, no need to mess with success. Stay the course.
My writing and coaching are for people for whom the conventional world is not working. I’m focused on people who need to go deep to be at home with themselves, who need to venture into the primal realm to be true to themselves, but who find that to be daunting, and want some help with it.
And because the work I do is not popular, there have been many days when I’ve told myself I should give it up and go do something more fun.
But there hasn’t been even one day when I’ve actually done that, because who you see here, this guy who is into deepening nurturance, who is into the partnership of feeling and fighting, this is who I am. This work I do is what matters to me, it’s what I believe in, so I can’t not do this.
A friend said, “You’re ahead of your time.” I don’t know if this is true. I hope it is. But no matter what, I’m going to keep on being me. I’m going to keep wanting for better for us, all of us. And I’m going to keep working for that.
And finally, by way of a benediction for humankind, I have a wish for us.
As the crises we’re facing deepen and darken…
May we be scared not out of our minds but deeper into our hearts.
–Rich Snowdon
My books
Up next is a quick description of each of my books. Who I am in my writing is very much who I am in the real world, except in person I’m a lot more playful.
It’s often said that love is the answer, but love as we know it is not enough. It’s not saving us. Hate is out of control and dominating our world. So what can we do?
The good news is that we humans are developmental beings. Which means human love is developmental. Which means it can change. So we don’t have to settle for the conventional version of love. Instead….
We get to make of our love something way better than the default evolution gave us.
The bad news? This is the biggest challenge we could ever take on.
Yet in taking it on we’re growing ourselves, we’re experiencing a new depth of meaning, and we’re bringing new life to our relationships with family and friends.
And day by day as we continue to upgrade love, we’ll find we’re loving ourselves more deeply and then still more deeply.
This was my first book. It took me twenty years to write, first, because I had to teach myself how to write. And second, I had so much personal work to do, so much growing up to do, to be able to get to the answers I wanted.
This book began in fear. I was so scared about the future I saw coming. And the more I looked at it, and the more I studied the history of human evolution, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with us so maybe we could fix it, the more scared I got, until one day I noticed hope had disappeared on me.
We’re told that life is binary, you either get hope or despair, one or the other, take your pick. But I found there’s a third way, which is to fight for ourselves with everything we’ve got.
And I discovered that love does not depend on hope. And action does not depend on hope. And that…
We get to keep living by what’s deepest in our hearts no matter what.
It’s not fair! What evolution has done to us. How it made us winners, giving us dominion over the earth, but now has turned against us, and has pushed us right up to the very edge of extinction.
Matt Bird, in his book on writing novels and screenplays, says if you want people to have empathy for a character, show her suffering some kind of injustice. Well, we humans are suffering injustice at the hands of evolution. And so…
We get to feel for ourselves.
I’ve written a lot about fighting for ourselves. This book, though, focuses on holding ourselves in our hearts with compassion. Because this is the source of sustained fight. It’s what we need first.
This will be a short book. I’ll be posting chapters sometime during the Spring of 2026.
First, let’s start with the truth about politics. Most people hate it and for good reason. It can be so hateful and hurtful and even brutal. But this is a problem because politics is how we do our collective moral decision-making. It’s how we decide to take care of each other. Or not. It’s how we decide to save ourselves. Or not.
If our politics fail, our species will fail, and right now it’s failing.
So does this mean that activists should start working even harder than they’re already working. Not so. What we need is more people to join us and become activists. And they won’t join us if they look at activists and see beaten-down burnouts.
Instead…
We need to do our activism in a way that makes people envy us.
And makes them want the kind of deep meaning and lasting friendships we’ve got going for us when we’re at our best. We need people to look at us and see that activism is a good way to live, and that it can be the adventure of a life time.
Second, we need our activism to go deeper. We need it to take the human operating system into account, because this is the source of human behavior. It’s the source of what’s going wrong.
But down there in the realm of our OS is treacherous territory, so if you’re going to do deep activism, then please, please do deep self-care every step of the way. Which is what this book is about.
I spent the first two decades of my activism wrecking myself. I accomplished some good things, but I paid too big a price personally. I was what I call a sacrificial-savior activist. Looking back, I can see that I would have done much better work if I had taken much better care of myself.
Later, I spent twenty years coaching nonprofit leaders on their toughest issues. And it made me mad, because I kept seeing good people with good hearts sacrificing themselves and hurting themselves and hurting their families, and sometimes losing their families. And really, if this is what it takes to save the world, then to hell with salvation.
I started writing this book to show leaders how they could get out of the default Sacrificial-Savior Operating System and take up what I call the Deep-Nurturance OS.
There were many books and workshops on the how-tos of nonprofit activism. Lots and lots of how-tos. But very little on developing strong and sustainable personal relationships, on how to be strong together under stress and under attack.
And that’s why the focus of this book is on…
Forthright, nurturing relationship conversations.
By the way, I’ve included 50+ stories in this book, lots of them in dialogue form, and many with a playful spirit. I think of this as my “storybook.”
If you’re super busy or maybe just in a mood, you can skim through the chapters to find the stories and just read them. You can get a lot from doing that because the stories are the heart and soul of the book.
In my early years as a writer, I read all the quotes by famous authors who said writing is hard, always hard, even torture. I felt like I was on the right track because I was struggling with my writing. So those quotes hit home.
But at the same time, I had a friend got up early every morning and powered through her memoir for hours, having the time of her life. I wanted that.
And I did have some moments when a kind of magic entered the room and for a little while I was in the flow and writing came easily. I wanted more of that.
Then I came upon a book about play therapy by a guy working with kids who had been traumatized by sexual abuse, physical assault, or severe neglect. He didn’t stay on the surface with these kids, he went deep into their hurting to find healing. He told lots of stories of kids feeling for themselves then fighting for themselves and doing better.
I loved those stories. I just loved them.
I called this primal-play therapy. And I decided to bring primal play over into my writing. And so I did and it worked and I loved it.
Now, more days than not…
Primal play shows up like a puppy who won’t leave me alone: “Come on, get down with me, let’s have some fun.”
I write about dark and difficult issues, and I figure if primal play works for me, then maybe it will work for other nonfiction writers taking on tough issues. And for fiction writers doing deep dives into the human psyche.
And if it works for us, then maybe it’ll work for all kinds of writers. So in that spirit, here’s my short book about primal play.
LET’S TALK
I’m inviting you to
a free hour of in-depth conversation with me.
Read more.
COACHING
In the coaching I do, you get to
feel for yourself then fight for yourself.
Read more.
CONTACT and COMMENTS
I’d love to hear from you. I really would.
Read more.