The Engineer Returns

On code, desire, and the contraction that runs through both.

For the first time in a long time, I am building things.

Not writing about building. Not coaching someone else through their creation. Actually building — sitting at my desk with terminal windows open, watching ideas become form.

It’s been three weeks since my last long-form writing. In that time, I’ve been deep in Claude Code. Building a dashboard that turns my ChatGPT conversations into shareable notes and extracts short-form content from my long posts, letting me orchestrate my creative flow rather than get mired in details. Embedding AI directly into Obsidian so it’s part of how I write and think. Updating Emacs files I hadn’t touched in years. Configuring terminals. Learning tmux.

These tools are sexy. The architecture underneath is sexy. The precision is sexy.

And the fact that I relate to them this way — that’s the real tell. This much pleasure moving through code. This much aliveness. This much desire flowing in a direction I’d closed off years ago.

When I showed Kiki the dashboard I was building, she lit up. Not just with interest — with turn-on. She could feel my excitement radiating through me. Something is waking up.

The sexy dashboard tool I’m building for myself to support my creative expression.

Part of me kept saying this was a detour. Get back to the real work. Design the pilot program for the school. Do the market research.

But something deeper knows better. This is where aliveness is pulling me.

And yet — as I go deeper into building, something familiar surfaces.

Facing an architecture decision, I feel it start.

The twist.

The Vortex That Made Me Leave

Something in my chest begins to torque — a slow tightening, like a wet cloth being wrung. My awareness narrows to a point. A tunnel forms. Energy rises into my head, and I feel myself getting pulled into a kind of vortex — my whole being funneled toward the problem, away from the body, into almost a neurotic fixation to find the solution.

I’m working on the dashboard and am inside an architectural decision that just got complex. Somewhere in my system, an ancient pattern is firing. It’s something distant from curiosity or play, something that learned long ago how to survive difficulty.

In little moments as I’ve worked with Claude Code, my awareness and presence have been hijacked like this — not often, but enough to notice, enough to recognize. It’s a more subtle version of something that used to happen much more intensely.

This is the pattern that made me a brilliant engineer.

And this is the pattern that made me leave.

I abandoned the engineering startup world nearly a decade ago. Not because I couldn’t do it — I was good, sometimes very good — but because the doing of it would at times become a kind of neurotic contortion. Every hard problem activated the same sequence: contract, fixate, pull energy up into the head, override sensation, find relief only when I made it to the other side.

By the time I reached the other side of a difficult project, I’d feel exhausted — the particular exhaustion of having dug myself out of a vortex. There was relief, but only a fleeting sense of accomplishment or fulfillment. And during those portals of fixation, I’d feel disconnected from life, from the people around me. Like I’d tunneled so far into the problem that I’d left the world behind.

When I stepped into the world of sexuality and spirituality, everything changed. The body was no longer an obstacle to override. It was the instrument. I started orienting toward enjoyment, spaciousness, pleasure. I started unraveling the ways I would power through things. My system finally had permission to expand instead of tighten, to feel instead of figure, to let life move me rather than demand I dominate it.

It gave me space to breathe.

I would still encounter the twisting sometimes — hard logistical problems, a complex travel schedule during our nomadic year — but at least it wasn’t the omnipresent experience governing my life’s work. It felt like a new way of relating to life that I was tapping into.

And yet, even in those years, whenever excitement arose around coding or building something, I’d feel this texture start — the tunnel forming, the awareness narrowing — and I’d give up. I could do the work. But being inside that contracted state felt so uncomfortable that I didn’t want to stay. It felt like I’d have to power through the discomfort to find relief on the other side. And I wasn’t willing to pay that price anymore.

I thought I was done with engineering.

I thought that part of me had been retired, filed away as a former identity that no longer fit the man I was becoming.

I was wrong.

Reclaiming Creative Sovereignty

In the past three weeks, I can feel my engineering self, my builder self, coming back online.

I found myself nerding out on my terminal setup again — the command-line interface where I write code, the text editor configurations I use to build things. Customizations I hadn’t touched in ages — not because I needed to, but because I wanted to.

Here’s what I’m starting to understand:

It’s not exactly true that this work with AI has nothing to do with the school I’m building.

I’ll need it to support my writing and content distribution. It’s more that it doesn’t feel like the most important thing to be working on. And yet — this is where life force is taking me.

Over the past year, I’ve learned to trust where life force moves. To trust that there’s intelligence behind it rather than assuming I know better. To see my second-guessing as a pattern running, not my higher Self guiding.

The mind says: This is a detour. Get back to what matters.
The body says: This is what matters. Stay.

I’ve learned to trust the body.

And that recognition is what brings me to the deeper layer.

This isn’t really about the tool I’m building. It’s partly about AI — yes, AI is changing the world, changing how creation works. But the deeper thread is something else entirely.

AI lets me build Edmond-shaped tools for everything I do. Not generic solutions. Not someone else’s workflow. Tools that wrap around exactly how I think, how I create, how I move.

I’d forgotten how much I love this — clean architecture, elegant systems, the satisfaction of precision that does exactly what it needs to do.

This is an intimacy with my own creative energy that I didn’t expect. Tuning into my own desire with exquisite attention. What do I actually want? How do I actually work? What would feel good to use, day after day? And then building precisely that. Feeling my way toward the shape of what fits. Refusing to settle.

This is about cultivating a secure attachment to my own desire and how it wants to move through me.

If I’m to fully trust life force as it guides me in building this school, it may take me places that bring up this pattern — the vortex, the contraction, the pull to leave my body. And so I need to face it now. Not so I can avoid it, but so I’m not unconsciously steering away from what would be most in service to the school, to myself, to the people I’ll work with.

There’s a very specific initiation happening. I can wish something, and reality reorganizes. It’s grounded, almost ordinary — landing in the bones rather than spinning in the head. It’s unlearning to shoot down my own ideas because of what the rest of the world thinks is possible or reasonable. It’s an orientation I want my daughter Ember to have as she dreams her own worlds.

What I’m empowering isn’t “AI-assisted productivity.” I’m empowering my sense that ideas are allowed to become real. That I can enjoy bringing complex things into form.

This is what it looks like when creative energy stops bracing against the world and starts assuming it is welcome.

Desire Wears the Same Clothes

There’s one more piece — one that directly relates to the school I’m building and the couples work I’m here to do.

I noticed, in the days after, a pattern I hadn’t connected before. It shows up differently, but it wears the same clothes.

Sometimes I want Kiki. The desire is real — heat in the body, pull toward her, longing. And then a twist begins. Not in the chest exactly, but somewhere close by. Awareness narrows. I start solving: how do I initiate sex? How do I approach? What’s the right way to bridge the distance between wanting and having?

And in the solving, I leave.

By the time I’ve figured out whether and how to act, I’m no longer in my desire. I’m circling it, managing it. The heat that was real ten seconds ago has become a problem to resolve rather than a sensation of life force to follow.

It’s the same pattern.

In engineering: desire meets complexity. Complexity triggers contraction. Awareness leaves the body. Solving replaces feeling.

In intimacy: desire meets uncertainty. Uncertainty triggers contraction. Awareness leaves the body. Solving replaces feeling.

The textures are different. The form is identical.

Sexual energy and creative energy are the same river. And both are asking the same question: Can I hold desire in my body without collapsing into contraction? Can I stay open as life moves through me?

What the AI journey has shown me is that both domains — creation and intimacy — are asking the same question: How much desire can I hold in my body without collapsing into patterns of problem-solving?

During my Grinberg session with Lilliebrook last week, I started feeling heat — not warmth, but fire. A fierce burn rising from my belly, pooling in my pelvis, radiating into my genitals. She named it: fire energy.

Sexual fire often returns when energy is allowed to flow in the body. I can feel how my decision to leave my engineering self behind in the past also meant losing access to enormous life force. And now, as I’m learning more and more to meet complexity without abandoning my body, that life force is descending — into the belly, into the pelvis, into creation.

I’m curious—have you felt this? A part of your aliveness returning when you stopped exiling it? I’d love to hear.

Learning to Stay

This isn’t a return to who I was. It’s an integration.

I’m learning to stay.

Stay in the body as the twist wants to pull me out. Stay with desire as it moves — whether toward creation or toward my partner. Stay open when everything in me wants to solve my way to safety.

The parts of me I exiled — the maker, the builder, the one who finds joy in bringing form into being — are being welcomed back. They’re being held and met with a capacity I didn’t have before.

And the fire that’s burning now, the sexual heat that rose unbidden, the aliveness that courses through when I sit down to create — these are not separate from my work on intimacy, partnership, and sacred sexuality. They are the same river.

This is the preparation: the capacity to stay.

The school I’m building will ask this of me again and again — to meet complexity without leaving my body, to hold desire without collapsing into control, to trust life force even when my mind insists it knows better.

It was never about choosing between worlds.

It was about learning to stay fully, without leaving, and letting life move where it wants to move.

I’m following aliveness. And aliveness is bringing me home.