This is the ABOUT RICH page for all my websites. But I’m not going to give you a resume of accomplishments. Instead, I want 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 “fiercely”? Why that word?
Because look at this human world of ours. We are a species in deep trouble. You know the litany…
Heartless sociopaths are taking charge of major nations.
The majority of the human population is living under dictatorships or authoritarian regimes.
Leaders are starting wars they don’t know how to stop.
Pundits are casually speculating about the use of nuclear weapons.
The most powerful country in history is blithely destroying itself.
Tens of millions of people are losing their minds.
Lies are winning, the truth is losing.
AI is getting ready to do god knows what to us.
Brutality is trending.
Mass suffering goes on and on and on.
No wonder despair is taking over. But I’m not talking here about ordinary, garden-variety despair.
It’s not that a few bad apples are spoiling the bunch of us. We’re failing as a species. We’re not taking good care of ourselves. We’re giving up on ourselves. We’re giving up on humanness itself.
The problem is down deep in us. Our operating system is failing us. Which means we’re dealing with…
Ontological despair.
This is the deepest possible despair. It’s despair at the level of our very being. When I step back to look at the big picture, what I see is this…
Despair has become a global dementor hellbent on sucking out our souls.
And if you let it, it will take from you everything that makes you a blessing to the people in your life.
Given that we’re in terrible trouble, I want us to declare…
A state of emergency.
We need a response that goes as deep as our hurting goes. And as deep as the danger we’re in.
Pep talks won’t save us. There aren’t ten easy steps for dealing with ontological despair.
What we need is…
Primal nurturance.
Which is deepest kind of human nurturance possible.
It’s the partnership of…
Feeling deeply plus fighting fiercely.
The good news is that…
The more deeply you feel for yourself, the more fiercely you will want to fight for yourself.
But there’s a problem with going deep, because down there at the bottom of the human OS is…
Treacherous territory.
It’s where we come face to face with…
The source of human evil.
It’s where we come to understand…
Why we’re in such trouble as a species.
Which can shake us to our core and take away any sense of hope for our future.
I call this place where we have the deepest encounter with humanness…
The primal realm.
When I first decided to come here, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But having lived here now for decades, I can tell you the most important thing I’ve learned is this…
In the darkest place is where we find the deepest compassion for ourselves.
After all, we didn’t ask to be made like we are. We didn’t ask to suffer like we do. We didn’t ask for evil to be so easy and love to be so hard.
The great majority of people don’t want to go deep. They don’t want to even hear about it because it’s too scary and too hard. So primal nurturance, which is the very best in us, gets neglected. This is why the books I write about it are not trending. And that’s an understatement.
An online marketing consultant would tell me to quit and go find something more fun to do with myself.
But I’m not going to do that because…
Primal nurturance is what I love best.
It’s pulled my life together. When I get knocked down, it’s what gets me back up on my feet again. It means the world to me.
And…
It’s the gift I most want to give.
If you’re intrigued by primal nurturance, if it calls to you, then it’s in you. I didn’t invent it. I stumbled into it. I love helping people look inside to find their own version of primal nurturance…
I love helping them make it their own.
A friend told me that I’m just ahead of my time and as things continue to get worse more and more people will be needing deep primal nurturance, and will search for it. We’ll see. But in the meantime, I’m staying faithful to what’s deepest in my heart, no matter what.
The consultants, most of them, say you should build an online presence and accumulate followers, as many as you can. Keep driving for bigger numbers.
But I don’t want followers. I like finding peers, people who are…
True aficionados of primal nurturance in their own right.
I set aside an hour each day, including Saturday and Sunday, to have a free in-depth conversation with someone I don’t already know. This is one of my favorite things.
And since I’ve already said enough about myself on my sites, I’d very much like to hear about you, like…
Who you are.
What matters to you.
How you’re finding your way in this scary world.
The discoveries you’re making about nurturance.
As you can tell, I’m an intense guy, but I’m very easy to talk to.
One more thing…
Do you know how it is when someone is listening to you so well that you reach deeper and you surprise yourself with what you hear yourself saying? Let’s see if we can make that happen for you in our conversation.
If this sounds interesting, you can click here to set a time to talk.
–Rich Snowdon
PS: If you want the behind-the-scenes story about the backwards way I lucked into my discovery of primal nurturance, you can find it here. (Link coming soon.)
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.