This is the “About Rich” page for all six of my websites.
But I’m not going to list accomplishments I’ve achieved out in the world. I only have a few of those and they’re not what I care about most anymore.
Instead, I’m going to show you who I am by telling you…
What’s deepest in my heart.
And here it is…
The more deeply we feel for ourselves, the more fiercely we will fight for ourselves.
This is the theme that runs through everything in my life now.
But it’s more than a theme…
It’s my guiding light.
It’s there inside every important decision I make. I count on it. I couldn’t do without it.
I love the alchemy of it, how feeling deeply turns into fighting fiercely.
Let me show you what I mean with two examples. First, I’ll take you back into my childhood where there’s a surprise. Then I’ll take you down into the depths of the human operating system where there’s an even bigger surprise.
I grew up in a church that followed a bleak version of Calvinism, where all the adults I knew taught me…
I was unlovable.
They really meant it. They taught me this lesson over and over until it was in my bones and there was nothing I believed more deeply than this.
This lesson made me turn against myself. It did damage that lasted long into my adult years.
As a child I had two responses. The first was…
I hate being unlovable.
I never said this out loud and never let myself even think it. It was unconscious, but very much there.
Then my second response went beyond the purely personal…
What’s being done to me is wrong.
This shouldn’t be happening to me, but it also shouldn’t happen to the other kids in my church, or to any kid anywhere ever.
And there’s the surprise…
I was a little boy but I was taking a big moral stand.
Taking it silently, but taking it. And without even knowing what moral meant or what a stand was.
Again, this was unconscious, but it was deep in me.
Of course I’m not the only one who took such a stand as a kid. I’m just one example of the secret inner world of children.
And there’s more. What was happening to me made me mad…
Fighting mad.
This fight was very much alive in me, buried, but alive. It wanted out, but it wasn’t safe for it to come out. There was no way my family or my church would have tolerated a fighting version of me.
In my college years, though, it did start coming out, and I’ve been an activist ever since, working to make a more loving and sustainable world. My activism comes directly from my early sense of injustice and the protest that was there inside me, suppressed, but ready to go.
Truth is…
I’ve spent my life answering my childhood.
And maybe that’s a little bit sad, or a lot sad, but it’s paid off. Here in my old age, I’m finally able to say…
I love myself.
Not as an aspirational wish, but…
As a matter of fact.
Not every day, but lots of days. And this is a very long way to come from that little boy who despised himself.
Having this victory puts me in a generous mood, and I want a deep, abiding self-love for everyone. And…
I want it for us as a species.
We’re in terrible trouble. We’re failing to take care of ourselves. We’re scaring ourselves.
Look what’s happening…
Our politics have gone crazy.
Tens of millions of people have lost their minds.
Voters have put heartless sociopaths in charge of us.
Mass suffering persists.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg because…
Climate change is barreling ahead.
Inequality keeps getting worse.
Wars are still erupting.
Genocide happens and doesn’t get stopped.
Add all these things up and you can see why…
It’s getting harder and harder to hold onto hope.
And so despair is in the ascendency. It’s spreading everywhere. When I step back and look at the big picture, what I see is that despair has turned into…
A global dementor hellbent on sucking out our souls.
It wants to take from us everything that makes us a blessing to the people in our lives.
So, what to do? The most popular option is to…
Play defense.
To shut down our feelings. To pretend that despair isn’t getting to us, or getting inside us. And to deny how bad things are in an attempt to protect ourselves.
And we humans are good at denial. It’s served us well in so many ways over the course of our history. It’s kept us trucking when reality was so scary that if we faced it head on, we would have imploded.
But there’s another option, which is to…
Play offense.
Which begins with…
Feeling for ourselves.
Sounds easy enough, but it’s not, because I’m talking about feeling just how scared we really are, and how helpless we feel, and how urgent is our need.
I’m talking about…
Going down as deep as our feelings can go.
Down to the bottom of the human operating system which is there inside each of us and runs us. And when we come face to face with that OS, we’re confronting the very source of human evil. And that’s so terrible it could make a person give in and give up and surrender to despair.
But now here’s the surprise…
Down there in the darkest place is where I found the deepest compassion for us.
We didn’t ask to be made like we are. We didn’t ask for evil to be so easy and love so hard…
Evolution did that to us.
Recognizing this injustice means we can take a stand for ourselves. And fight for ourselves.
And we need to fight fiercely because we’re up against a frightening reality out there in the world around us, and we’re up against a distressing reality inside us in the form of our OS.
I’ve learned that if I’m going to feel deeply, I’d better bring my fiercest fight along with me on that journey. Because if you just feel all the hard truths and don’t know what to do with them, you’re going to crash.
When I talk about about fighting for yourself, I mean something special. This is not a selfish thing, because you’re also fighting for…
The people you care about.
How you want people to treat each other everywhere.
What you believe in.
How you wish the world could be.
You’re fighting to…
Take the best in us and make it better.
And to do this, I find I need my fight to be something special. I need it to have…
A vulnerable heart.
I need it to be nurturing instead of punishing. And here’s what I’ve come to understand…
My fight can only be as fierce as my tenderness runs deep.
This feel-and-fight practice is not pretty-pretty. It’s gutsy. It’s challenging. And some days it’s too hard. So, do I have a love/hate relationship with it? No, I have…
A love/omg relationship with it.
It asks a lot of us, really a lot, omg does it ever. But then…
It gives back way more than it asks.
I don’t see how anyone could call us a loveable species. We do so much evil. There are days when I watch the news and I think we’re a disgusting species, and I’m done with us, just done, and I shut down.
But I take a minute and take a breath and feel my way deeper down, and then I know us to be…
A heartbreaking species.
Which makes me hurt for us. And then makes me mad, fighting mad.
I want this species of ours to fight for itself, I want it to able to love itself, but I don’t believe we can get there. I don’t believe we can have that.
Still, I’m not going to stop wanting that for us, and I’m not going to stop working in that direction, because for me it’s a matter of identity. I’m not a despair-person…
I’m a fight-person.
And so my wish for us is this. As the crises we’re facing multiply and magnify, as they come at us all at once…
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.
I write about dark and difficult issues, but I bring nurturance to them. And sometimes delight.
How so? I take delight in sabotaging despair. I take delight in opposing the evil parts of the human operating system. I take delight in helping people fight for themselves and in doing so, deepen their self-love.
We need better.
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 starting about November 1, 2025. It will then serve as the foundation from which I’ll launch my Substack starting in the late autumn or early winter of 2025.
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.
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COACHING
In the coaching I do, you get to
feel for yourself then fight for yourself.
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CONTACT and COMMENTS
I’d love to hear from you. I really would.
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