This is the ABOUT RICH page for all my websites, but I’m not going to give you a resume of accomplishments. Instead I’m going to 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.
Why do I say “deeply? Because we are a species in deep trouble.
Why do I day “fiercely”? Because there aren’t ten easy steps for dealing with the trouble we’re in. Pep talks won’t fix it. Inspirational speeches won’t save us.
In my books I write about dark and difficult issues. Why? Because we’re living in a dark and difficult time. A scary time. A time of endings.
I want us to take a stand. To commit to taking the best possible care of ourselves and each other. To take this stand first before we start taking steps.
As a species, we’re failing ourselves. Despite our remarkable smarts, we’re carelessly incompetent and passive. We’re allowing things we should never allow. We’re the most self-destructive species evolution ever invented. When I’m in one of my down moods, I even get to thinking that…
We’d rather die than do the rigorous inner work it would take to actually save ourselves.
Look at what we put up with. You know the litany…
Our politics have gone crazy.
Tens of millions of people have lost their minds.
Major countries are being run by heartless dictators.
My country, the most powerful nation in all of history, is willfully destroying itself.
We keep starting wars which we don’t know how to stop.
Pundits talk casually about nuclear weapons being unleashed.
And there’s a very real possibility that we’ll drive ourselves into extinction sooner rather than later.
No wonder despair is in the ascendency. No wonder it’s taking over.
And I’m not talking about garden-variety despair, but about ontological despair. Which means despair at the level of our very being. And which causes people to give up on each other, on humans in general, and on…
Humanness itself.
Ordinary despair is a terrible enemy. It shuts you down so, first, you won’t feel for yourself, and then, second, you won’t fight for yourself.
But this new despair is so much worse. It’s…
A global dementor hellbent on sucking out our souls.
If you let it…
It will take from you everything that makes you a blessing to the people in your life.
Which is why I want us to declare a state of emergency. I want us to do whatever it takes to hold onto ourselves in the face of the relentless daily assault despair has become.
I grew up in a quietly fundamentalist church which followed a bleak version of Calvinism where I was taught that I was unlovable. I was told this was how God made me, so that was that, nothing to be done about it. Even if God granted me mercy and took me up into his heaven when I died, he would hold his nose as he saved me.
I lived my whole childhood deep inside despair. I know it intimately. I know how exhausting it is. I know how damaging it is.
But now as an old man, after a long journey of self-development, I know how to beat despair. At least most of the time. At least enough of the time that it doesn’t run my life anymore.
I’ve gotten to where I can now say I love myself, not as an aspirational wish, but as a matter of fact. It’s not like I’m ever going to be madly in love with myself, but still this is a long way to come for a little boy who was a virtuoso of self-hate.
I’ve finally turned myself into the kind of person I’m taken with. I feel shy about saying that, but it’s true. And there are days when I fall into affectionate communion with myself, which I don’t know how to describe any more than to name it, and to say that if anything is a state of grace, this, for me, is it.
But that journey I took, it was a strange one. In my mid-40s, I realized that my life was not working for me, even though I had studied dozens of self-help books and had spent years in different kinds of therapy trying to fix what was wrong with me. I took a hard, assessing look at myself and saw that despair was still my constant companion.
I don’t remember what day it was, or anything else about that day, but I do remember saying to myself, “Down under all this psychology fluff there’s a hard core of biology. That’s where the answer is.”
So I became obsessed with studying history and human evolution to find out what makes us tick at the deepest level. I made my way down into what I call…
The primal realm.
Which means I went down to the bottom of our operating system, the source of our behavior, and confronted it as it really is, not as I wished it to be.
And that shook me to my core. Because while our OS is the source of all the good things we do, it’s also the source of human evil. It’s generated this world we live in. A world where good is being overwhelmed by evil. A world of mass exploitation and mass violence and mass suffering.
What I stumbled into was treacherous territory where you can drown in despair…
I had come looking for hope, but this was exactly the wrong place to look.
Once I understood the hard truths about the true nature of our operating system, once I saw how evolution has turned against us and turned us into a failing species, how it’s foreclosing any chance of a future for us, I could no longer believe in hope.
So this is a story of ironic defeat. I got the opposite of what I wanted. Except down at the bottom of our operating system, down in the heart of the primal realm, I got surprised.
I started finding blessings you can’t find anywhere else…
In this darkest place, I found the deepest compassion.
Because…
We didn’t ask to be made like we are. We didn’t ask for evil to be so easy and love to be so hard. We didn’t ask to suffer like we do.
Evolution which gave us amazing advantages also hurt us badly. And this…
Made me mad, fighting mad.
I came to understand what it means to feel for myself deeply and fight for myself fiercely. I turned this duet into a daily practice, and called it…
Primal nurturance.
And it became…
My saving grace.
And this practice, the gifts it brought me, put me in a fiercely generous mood. I wanted everyone to have this. I wanted it for us as a species.
Among the many blessings in the primal realm, here’s another seminal one…
I replaced hope with fight.
Back when I was young, in my activist years, I loved hope, I counted on it, it powered me through long days of hard work. But now it was gone and I realized…
I didn’t need it anymore.
As despair rises, hope declines. And if you find hope hard to hold onto, if it disappears on you for an hour, a day, a month, or forever, please know…
You do not have to surrender to despair.
We’re told that it’s binary, you get to pick one or the other, hope or despair. But that’s not true because there’s a third option, which is to replace hope with fight.
And when you do this, you discover that your heart is bigger than despair.
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 extinction. I used to call myself those names, but not anymore. I never think of myself as a pessimist or a doomer 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.
The online marketing gurus would tell me to quit doing what I’m doing. They’d tell me it’s not worth it because taking on dark and difficult issues won’t bring me fame or fortune.
But they’re wrong, it is worth it.
I live a simple life, so I don’t need fame. If someone wants to send me a fortune, okay, send it on over. But I’m not going to spend my time chasing it. The work I’m doing is so much me I can’t not do it.
I know it’s not trendy and never will be. I know the great, great majority of people want nothing to do with what I write about. But this mission, deepening our compassion for ourselves so we will fight for ourselves like we really need to, this is deep in my heart. I don’t care what it costs me, to quit would wreck me.
The gurus say you’re supposed to rack up big numbers of followers. But I don’t want followers. I’m looking for peers, for kindreds, for company. I’m looking for people who need to go deep to be at home with themselves.
I have no idea how to save us as a species. That’s beyond me. But I do know what it’s like to live in the primal realm. I do know how to find the blessings that are here and turn them into a meaningful life in the midst of a world that’s falling apart.
These days, I love helping people take their own very personal journey down into the primal realm, and if they choose, to settle in here.
I love helping them discover…
Their deeper powers of nurturance.
I’ve been showing you the daily practice that works for me, and if it works for you, then you’re welcome to it and hooray. But if not, then I urge you to find a practice equally fierce that will work for you like you need it to. Please don’t try to face down global despair without a steadfast, effective inner sense of fight.
And finally, what I love best of all is to help people…
Take delight in their fight.
Not that you can do that every minute of every day, of course. But what if you could do it most of the time on most days?
What if snuggled down in the very heart of your fight, you found…
An adamant, sustaining, spirited YES!
–Rich Snowdon
My books – free on my websites
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.
This will be a series of deep immersions into the primal realm and especially the blessings we can find there. It’s for people who need to go deep to be at home with themslves.
I plan to have it finished and posted before the end of the summer 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.