There are moments in life that feel less like choices and more like currents — forces already moving long before you become aware of them. Meeting my wife in Brazil felt like that.

By then, Brazil had already become deeply woven into my story. It was the place that first pulled me beyond the limits of the life I thought I was supposed to live. I had gone there years earlier chasing samba music, adventure, and the strange freedom of surviving on almost nothing. Brazil taught me how to trust intuition over structure. It became the doorway through which the rest of the world entered my life.

But I had no idea it would eventually become the place where I would meet the woman who would become my wife — and the mother of my son.

The first time I saw Thaís was on a beach in Brazil. Like many things in my life, it happened naturally, without plan or strategy. There was an ease to her presence that immediately stood out to me. Brazilian women often carry a kind of emotional immediacy that Americans suppress beneath layers of caution and performance. She felt deeply alive, emotionally fluent in a way I wasn't used to.

There are certain people who arrive in your life carrying an energy that feels strangely familiar, even when you've only just met them. You can't explain why you feel drawn toward them. Logic struggles to justify it. There is simply recognition. Not intellectual recognition, but something quieter and deeper — like your nervous system already knows them before your mind catches up.

That was how it felt with her.

And yet, when we parted ways the first time, it ended in rejection. Or at least that's how it felt.

Life continued carrying me forward. I returned to Hawaii, back to the land and the agroforestry projects I had become involved with, planting breadfruit trees and coco yams beside the place where I had buried my dog. At the same time, I was preparing to document another Global Youth Peace Summit in California. My life was still unfolding through movement, intuition, and strange synchronicities.

At that point in my life, I had become accustomed to impermanence. Cities changed. Relationships came and went. Friendships appeared intensely and dissolved just as quickly. Piano tuning had given me the ability to move endlessly through the world without becoming rooted anywhere for too long. Freedom had become both my identity and my protection.

Then one morning, while planting in the Hawaiian soil, my phone buzzed.

It was a message from Thaís.

"Do you want to do this with me?"

Attached was a link to something called the Camino di Assisi in Italy — a spiritual pilgrimage following the footsteps of St. Francis through the mountains of Italy.

Without understanding why, I said yes.

Sometimes the most important decisions in life happen before certainty arrives. Long before you know where something will lead, part of you already understands that saying yes matters.

The Camino di Assisi

Before flying to Europe, I stopped in California for the summit. Something profound happened there before Italy ever began. In the middle of emotional chaos and personal grief surrounding the death of my dog, I experienced one of the deepest spiritual moments of my life while sitting with Vanessa Stone overlooking the mountains. Lightning cracked through the sky as she spoke words that seemed to pierce directly through my suffering:

"Stop allowing it to define the totality."

Something inside me shifted permanently that day. It felt as though the universe itself was preparing me for what was coming next. Grief has a way of narrowing reality. It convinces you that pain is the full story. But in rare moments, life breaks through the contraction and reminds you that existence is always larger than whatever suffering currently occupies your attention.

That realization stayed with me as I boarded the plane to Italy.

When I arrived in Bologna and saw Thaís waiting in the train station, it felt strangely natural — as if we had skipped the beginning and arrived somewhere in the middle of a story already underway.

Europe has a strange ability to intensify emotion. Maybe it's the age of the architecture, the walkability, the history layered into the streets, or simply the feeling that life moves slower there. American relationships often unfold beneath the pressure of productivity and routine. In Italy, time itself seemed to soften. Even uncertainty felt romantic.

Across from the train station sat a small Airbnb apartment she had already booked. There was a modestly tuned piano inside. I remember sitting down and playing quietly while she made coffee in the kitchen. Neither of us fully knew what we were doing there together, but both of us could feel something moving beneath the surface.

Words weren't particularly useful at that stage. Presence said enough.

The Camino itself was brutal.

Unlike the famous Camino de Santiago in Spain, the Camino di Assisi cuts through steep Italian mountain terrain following the life of St. Francis. Neither of us had any real understanding of what we were getting ourselves into. On the first day I got us completely lost for hours in the countryside while our water ran low. Thaís mocked me relentlessly for it. The romantic fantasy dissolved almost immediately and we were forced to confront each other's shadow sides head-on.

Real intimacy begins where performance ends.

Travel has a way of accelerating that process. When you're exhausted, dehydrated, lost, physically uncomfortable, and emotionally exposed, there's very little space left for pretending to be idealized versions of yourselves. Pilgrimage strips people down quickly. It reveals impatience, ego, insecurity, tenderness, resilience, and fear all at once.

But pilgrimage also has a strange way of revealing whether two people can keep walking together after those illusions disappear.

And maybe that's why they call it falling in love.

Because you really do fall.

You fall out of the carefully constructed version of your life you thought you controlled. You fall out of certainty. You fall out of the illusion that you know where you're headed. Suddenly you're somewhere uncharted emotionally, spiritually, even geographically — totally unsure of what you're doing or who you're becoming.

Love is rarely a stable ascent upward like people imagine. It feels more like losing your footing entirely. You stop navigating from logic and begin moving through intuition. The structures that once organized your life no longer fully apply. The future becomes impossible to predict. Part of you resists it while another part recognizes that this loss of control is precisely what makes love transformative in the first place.

That was exactly what Italy felt like.

Not stability. Not certainty. A fall into the unknown.

Somewhere along the route, after stumbling exhausted into countryside homes, tuning old pianos for shelter, and pushing ourselves beyond our physical limits, we began discovering a rhythm together. The Camino slowly transformed from a hike into something symbolic. Every mountain became a confrontation with ourselves. Every wrong turn mirrored the confusion we carried internally. Every shared meal and moment of exhaustion became an opportunity to either separate further or move closer together.

Then something happened neither of us could explain.

At La Verna — the sanctuary where St. Francis was said to have received the wounds of Christ — we lay in a dormitory listening to Alan Watts through shared headphones late into the night. A strange spherical light began pulsing through the open window. At first I thought it was a firefly, but it grew brighter and more defined. The light circled the room, hovered over our beds, and remained there for nearly fifteen minutes. Fear dissolved into overwhelming love. We both cried uncontrollably.

"It's a gift," I kept repeating.

To this day, neither of us can fully explain what happened that night. But we both know it changed us. And perhaps more importantly, we only had each other as proof it had happened at all.

There are experiences in life that permanently alter your relationship to reality. Once they happen, you cannot fully return to who you were beforehand. Something opens. Whether you interpret it spiritually, psychologically, or symbolically almost becomes secondary to the fact that it transformed you.

That night bonded us in a way ordinary dating never could have.

Falling in Love in Italy

After Assisi, we kept moving.

Rome. The Amalfi Coast. Endless conversations. Silence that somehow said even more than words.

Italy itself felt inseparable from the experience of falling in love. The country seems designed to awaken emotional presence. The colors of the coastline, the old stone streets, the tiny cafes, the slow dinners, the Mediterranean air moving through open windows at night — it all creates a feeling that life should be lived more fully than most modern societies allow.

It didn't feel like ordinary romance. It felt more like both of our inner children had suddenly been given permission to come alive at the same time. There was no calculated "getting to know each other" phase. The experience itself had already shattered whatever protective distance normally exists between two people.

I think many people secretly long for that kind of love — not merely compatibility, but recognition. The feeling that someone else has suddenly stepped into your life carrying a frequency that reawakens forgotten parts of yourself.

That was what Italy became for us.

Not just a destination, but a threshold.

When we eventually flew back out of Bologna — me to Austin, her to Scotland — we both sensed it wasn't over. Days later she messaged me from Scotland. Then she came to Austin. For a while it felt like the universe had cleared space specifically for us. My roommates were gone for the month, leaving us alone together in a peaceful house filled with plants and sunlight. It felt innocent, almost teenage-like. As though life itself was conspiring to let us fully experience what had begun in Italy.

The Pregnancy Test

A few weeks after she returned to Brazil, I received a video call while tuning pianos in Austin.

Thaís and her sisters were laughing and celebrating. Through the blurry phone screen I realized what they were holding up:

A positive pregnancy test.

Suddenly the pilgrimage wasn't just a mystical experience anymore. It had become life itself.

Within days I broke my lease and flew to Brazil.

From there, our lives accelerated into something neither of us could have predicted: Europe during the early whispers of Covid, macrobiotic retreats in France, last-minute flights back to Texas before lockdowns, guerrilla gardening during the pandemic, and eventually the birth of our son in the same Austin hospital where I myself had been born.

What began on a beach in Brazil eventually became a family.

What Became of the Experience

People often ask whether experiences like the Camino were "real," whether the synchronicities meant anything, whether the light we saw was supernatural or psychological.

I've stopped trying to force conclusions onto experiences that were never meant to fit neatly into language.

What I know is this:

The Camino marked the end of one life and the beginning of another. Before it, my life revolved around freedom, movement, exploration, and discovery. After it, everything reorganized itself around fatherhood, responsibility, and love. The same currents that once carried me across the world through curiosity were now carrying me toward something far more grounded and permanent.

• A child.
• A home.
• A family.

Looking back now, the beach in Brazil feels impossibly distant from the small South Austin house where we brought Gabriel home during lockdowns. Yet somehow they are directly connected. One moment unfolded into the next with an intelligence far greater than anything I could have planned for myself.

That's what travel ultimately became for me. Not escape. Not adventure for its own sake. But initiation.

Italy revealed what love could become when two people stop resisting the mystery of life and allow themselves to be transformed by it. Brazil opened the doorway, but somewhere along the hills of Assisi, between exhaustion, beauty, fear, and grace, two separate lives quietly became one.