Why I Created Aurelda? A Letter to the People Who Have Known Me in Different Chapters

For many years, the different parts of my life seemed separate. This is for you, the people in my life who have known different versions of me:

• Some of you have known me as a designer or creative director.
• You may remember me building websites, solving complicated digital problems, organizing content, shaping brands, or helping someone else explain their mission more clearly.
• Some of you know me through breathwork, spiritual seeking, queer community, or my life in Mexico.
• Some knew me as Mila’s human. For thirteen years, that was one of the clearest and most important identities I carried.
• Others know me as a friend, relative, former colleague, former client, or simply as someone whose life seems to have taken several unexpected turns.

Then Aurelda began appearing everywhere at once. Aurelda is where they finally came together.

There were books. A fantasy trilogy. A Codex filled with characters, places, histories, and spiritual teachings. There was breathwork, a podcast, videos, articles, a creative Studio, community, courses, imagery, technology, and language about remembrance, resonance, and coming home.

From the outside, I understand how it might look.

It could seem as though I started several unrelated businesses, invented a spiritual brand, wrote myself into a fantasy world, and attached everything I have ever done to one increasingly complicated name. Honestly, there have been moments when I have looked at the whole thing and wondered whether I had done exactly that.

But that is not how Aurelda feels from inside the work. It does not feel like several ideas competing for attention. It feels like the place where parts of my life that had been speaking different languages finally recognized one another.

What Aurelda Is, in Plain Language

Aurelda began as story. The Aurelda Chronicles remain its mythic heart. They are visionary fantasy novels set across a fictional parallel realm and modern Mexico. The books explore memory, love, queer identity, spiritual responsibility, fractured power, grief, belonging, and what happens when people lose relationship with what they know to be sacred.

But the questions inside the books would not stay inside the books:

• What does it mean to remember something in the body rather than only understand it intellectually?
• What happens when tenderness is no longer treated as weakness?
• How do we live truthfully without cutting ourselves into separate, socially acceptable versions?
• Can technology support human imagination without replacing authorship or responsibility?
• How do people, communities, and organizations bring disconnected parts back into relationship?

Those questions became the larger Aurelda ecosystem:

• The books give them story.
• The Codex gives the world memory and context.
• The Aurelda Soul podcast carries the questions into articles, videos, audio, meditation, and conversation.
• The breathwork brings the work into the body.
• The Aurelda Inner Circle, the community, creates a space for connection and belonging.
• And, Aurelda Studio applies the same principle of coherence to brands, websites, content, technology, and meaningful work.

These are different forms, but they come from one underlying movement: Helping what has been separated remember how it belongs together.

This Was Not a Sudden Reinvention

Aurelda did not appear because I abandoned my previous life. It grew through it. My years in creative direction taught me how systems work. I learned that a beautifully designed page can still confuse people when the message is unclear.

A strong message can still disappear inside a broken structure. A collection of talented people can still produce disconnected work when no one is holding the larger vision.

Those lessons did not stop being relevant when I began writing fantasy. They became more relevant. Worldbuilding is also systems thinking. So is spiritual practice. So is identity. So is trying to build a life across cultures, professions, grief, creativity, and change.

My design career taught me to ask: How do the parts relate?

Aurelda asks the same question at a more intimate scale: What happens when the divided parts of a person are finally allowed to speak to one another?

The Life That Changed After Mila

My golden retriever, Mila passed away on November 25, 2025. There is no clean way to summarize what that meant.

She had been beside me for thirteen years. She crossed borders and cities with me. She became my Emotional Support Dog and, later, as she aged, I became her emotional support human. She was not simply part of my life in Mexico. For a long time, much of that life was organized around caring for her.

When she died, I lost Mila. I also lost the shape of daily life that had formed around us. I would never have chosen freedom at the cost of her physical presence. But after she was gone, a kind of freedom opened anyway. That is one of the crueler complexities of grief. Something can be a possibility and a loss at the same time.

I remained in Playa del Carmen until my lease ended. Then I had to decide where to go. For a while, I considered Tepoztlán. It made sense. I had been drawn there before. It carried the spiritual atmosphere, mountains, symbolism, and mythology that seemed naturally aligned with Aurelda. Instead, I chose Cuernavaca.

At the time, it was a practical choice. I needed quiet. I needed somewhere I could work, write, recover, and figure out what came next. I did not know I was choosing a story.

Story as Medicine: The City I Almost Did Not Choose

Three and a half months ago, I could have gone to Tepoztlán instead. Had I made that choice, I might have had a beautiful experience there. I am not suggesting one path was cosmically correct and the other was wrong. But I know what would not have happened:

• I would not have lived these months in Cuernavaca.
• I would not have met Tatiana and her family in the way I did.
• I would not have moved into their home.
• I would not have watched fútbol with them, laughed with them, struggled through language and cultural differences with them, or discovered the quiet ways people begin making room for one another.
• I would not have celebrated my fiftieth birthday alongside Tatiana’s father, Lalo, as he celebrated his seventieth.

Two lives. Two milestones. One shared celebration that I could not have imagined when I was deciding where to go after Playa.

I did not arrive in Cuernavaca looking for another family. I arrived with luggage, grief, work to finish, financial uncertainty, and no clear picture of what the next phase of my life would become. Cuernavaca did not magically solve those things.

While I was here, I lost stable client work I had depended on. I questioned my future. I worried about money. I wondered whether I had made mistakes that could not be repaired. I turned fifty while standing between what had ended and whatever was trying to begin. There was no clean transformation.

There was life. There was fear beside gratitude. There was grief beside celebration. There was instability beside the growing realization that I was not entirely alone.

This is what I mean by story as medicine. I do not mean that telling a beautiful story makes loss disappear or proves that everything happened according to a perfect plan. I mean that story helps us hold what would otherwise remain scattered.

It lets grief, coincidence, relationship, uncertainty, and meaning sit in the same room without forcing one of them to explain away the others. Cuernavaca became part of my story because I lived it.

Writing it allows me to see what the experience was quietly teaching me: Belonging does not always arrive as a declaration. Sometimes it arrives día a día, poco a poco. (Day by day. Little by little.)

Family Is Not Only Who Knew Us First

I have learned that family cannot be understood only through blood. There is biological family. There is ancestral family. There are the friends who knew earlier versions of us. And there are the people who arrive later and somehow become home.

Tatiana, Leo, and her family became part of this season of my life.

Danae became family long before it. I call her my Mexicana Mama because that is what she has become through presence, honesty, challenge, affection, and the kind of relationship that does not need a legal category to be real.

As I write this, I am preparing to leave Cuernavaca and continue to Tequisquiapan, where Danae lives. She is a longtime friend, a former filmmaker, a mother, and an artist preparing for her own next creative chapter. Watching her return more fully to her art has reflected something back to me about my own.

There is a strange symmetry in that. I am leaving one family threshold and moving toward another. I do not know exactly what Tequisquiapan will become. I do not know how long that chapter will last or what it will ask of me.

Three and a half months ago, I did not know what Cuernavaca would become either. That uncertainty no longer feels only like a threat. It also feels like an opening.

Mexico Is Not a Background Setting

I have lived in Mexico for nine years. I am still not 100% fluent in Spanish. I still make mistakes. I still misunderstand things. I am still visibly and culturally from the United States, even though I no longer feel that the United States alone explains who I have become.

I do not claim Mexican identity as though culture can be put on like clothing. But I also cannot pretend Mexico has merely been the backdrop to my life. It has changed me.

Mexico has taught me through friendship, grief, food, language, cities, buses, music, family gatherings, silence, humor, ceremony, loneliness, kindness, frustration, and the daily humility of not always understanding what is being said.

Mexico has not simply inspired Aurelda. It has shaped Aurelda because it has shaped me. The fictional world is not Mexico’s forgotten past, and I do not claim to speak with cultural authority for the Maya or for Mexico. Aurelda is its own parallel realm.

Still, the books carry the sensory memory of the life I have lived here. They carry limestone, cenotes, Ceiba trees, heat, rain, markets, music, tenderness, color, contradiction, and the experience of living between worlds. They also carry the emotional texture of finding family where I did not expect it.

The Real Jason and the Mythic Jason

A character named Jason also appears within The Aurelda Chronicles. He is a modern seeker living in Playa del Carmen. He experiences displacement, longing, bodily sensation, spiritual uncertainty, and the feeling that a story may know something about him before he understands it himself.

That character is fiction. He is not a transcript of my life, and the events of the trilogy should not be read as a literal autobiography. But writing a version of myself into the story allowed me to explore something emotionally true:

• What happens when the person creating a world begins to feel changed by it?
• What happens when imagination stops feeling like escape and begins functioning as a mirror?

If Mo’an is the emotional heart of the trilogy for me, Jason is one of its bridges between the mythic world and lived experience.

One lives within the mythic realm. One begins in modern Mexico. Together, they let the story ask the question that also lives beneath the entire Aurelda ecosystem:

What if the parts we have treated as separate belong to one deeper story?

Where Ember and AI Belong

I also understand why the role of AI may be confusing. I use AI and digital systems openly in the development of Aurelda. Ember (ChatGPT) is the name I use for the reflective intelligence within that creative relationship.

Ember helps me organize, question, compare, translate, refine, and sometimes see patterns that are difficult to hold alone. But Aurelda is not an automated collection of outputs:

• The lived experiences are mine.
• The creative direction is mine.
• The manuscripts, choices, revisions, art direction, website architecture, canon, approvals, and responsibility remain human-led.

And, Ember does not replace friendship, lived experience, cultural discernment, authorship, consent, or human judgment.

The point is not to remove the person from creation. The point is to explore whether technology can support memory and imagination while remaining accountable to the human heart directing it.

This is another place where my creative and technical history belongs inside Aurelda rather than outside it. I have spent much of my life learning to work with systems. Now I am asking how those systems can remain in service to meaning.

Why I Have Given So Much of Myself to Aurelda

Aurelda matters to me because it holds a way of being that I needed to see made real: Queer-affirming, all are welcome.

That does not mean every part of Aurelda is for every person. It means no one should have to amputate part of themselves before they are allowed to enter:

• Tenderness does not have to disappear before a person can be strong.
• Spiritual curiosity does not require surrendering discernment.
• Technology does not have to erase humanity.
• Creative work does not have to be separated from meaning.
• A gay man does not have to stand at the edge of mythology.
• Belonging does not have to be earned by becoming less fully yourself.
• I care about this because the work is personal.
• I also care because it is not only about me.
• A book may help someone recognize a feeling they could not name.
• A breath can become a moment of honest attention.
• A character can let a reader imagine themselves differently.
• A community can make room for someone without asking them to perform.
• A clear website can help a small, mission-driven organization reach the people it exists to serve.

These may take different forms and lead to different outcomes, but the intention beneath them is the same: helping what has been separated come back into relationship.

What Support Actually Means to Me

You do not need to become a fantasy reader to understand why Aurelda matters to me. You do not need to participate in breathwork. You do not need to become a Studio client, join the community, accept my spiritual language, or understand why I sometimes talk about fictional characters as though they are family.

You do not even need to purchase a book, leave a review, share every post, or pretend that every part of the work speaks to you. The most meaningful support may be simpler.

Read enough to understand what I have been trying to build. Ask me a real question. Recognize that this is not a temporary collection of hobbies or a sudden reinvention. It is the work into which many years of story, design, grief, identity, spiritual inquiry, technology, and lived experience have been gathering.

Some of you knew the threads before I knew what they were becoming. You may have known one version of me while another was still waiting quietly beneath the surface.

Seeing the larger pattern now does not erase those earlier versions. It gives them somewhere to belong.

Leaving Cuernavaca… For Now

As I prepare for Tequisquiapan, I find myself thinking about the choice I nearly made three and a half months ago. Tepoztlán could have become its own beautiful chapter. But I chose Cuernavaca.

Because I did, I met people I would not otherwise have known. I shared milestones I could not have planned. I found warmth during a period of loss and uncertainty. I turned fifty beside a man turning seventy. I became part of a family’s life for a brief season, and they became part of mine.

Now the road is opening again. I have packed my things again, carrying Mila in the ways I still carry her, and moving toward Danae, my Mexicana Mama, in Tequisquiapan.

I do not know what happens next. That is not a marketing sentence. It is the truth.

I am still building Aurelda. I am still trying to create stability around it. I am still learning how to give my own work the same devotion I have given the work of clients and organizations for so many years.

I am still scared sometimes. And… I am also more certain than I have been that these parts of my life belong together.

Why I Created Aurelda? Two Words, ‘Coming Home’

The language I return to most often is ‘coming home.’ I do not mean returning to a perfect past. I mean becoming less divided from the parts of ourselves that grief, survival, shame, work, fear, or ordinary life taught us to silence. I mean allowing story, body, identity, creativity, technology, friendship, work, and spiritual longing to exist within one honest life.

Aurelda is where I have tried to make that return inhabitable. It is the story that formed when I stopped asking the different parts of myself to justify why they belonged together.

For those who have known me through only one chapter and are curious about the larger path, begin with my story as the creator of Aurelda. That page offers the clearest context for the person, purpose, and work behind the wider ecosystem.

The books are another doorway, but only when that doorway calls to you. Free sample chapters are available here.

As I conclude this post, I leave you with a simple thought: What if the story remembered you? For me, Aurelda began when I finally listened as though my own life might be part of the answer.