THE GENTLEMAN PIRATE
A Gentleman Pirate is a captain who sails between worlds of order and chaos with both refinement and rebellion. He leverages rules—useful and not always sacred—and reads his phenomenological compass to navigate life through direct experience, presence, and purpose. He defends dignity, imagination, and aliveness. His elegance is not conformity but courage—the willingness to stand apart, to live visibly, and to create new possibilities. And he embodies paradox: both rogue and refined, both outlaw and protector, both disruptor of convention and cultivator of sulturic vibrancy.
SACRED
REBELLION
ELEGANT
DEVOTION
LIVING
IN THE
SHIVER
LIVING the ATELIER
I remember when someone asked me, “What will you be when you grow up?” and I answered with fire in my chest, “A pirate captain, a monk, and an explorer of hidden worlds."
Then came the classrooms, the protocols, the job titles. I didn't trade in my compass, though. I became an English teacher at an all-boys Jesuit high school where I learned about the badassery of Jesuit teachings in classrooms, basketball courts, and Kairos retreats. Then I became a world-class Haberdasher where I built people and wardrobes for top-tier CEOs who acted and lived as wealthy Gentleman Pirates themselves. Then I became a Doctoral student who studied the "purest form of insubordination" also known as curiosity. And finally, I became an budding entrepreneur, and it took me 8 years of trial and error before I understood the work and dedication it takes (i.e., a commitment to iteration) to build a purposeful project from the ground up. In other words, I learned the hard way that the life of a Gentleman Pirate ain't easy...and...it's worth it.
As a result, I've lived a life intentionally confronting my own map of sea monsters, saints, and mystery.
Spill the Water, my Atelier (open podium) is the next iteration of my journey where I invite men and women who also want to build a character known as a grounded (centered) badass who lives with and for collective vibrancy. In other words, this is a space for men and women courageous enough to build a life meant to be navigated like open water: lived as art, studied through experience, steered by captain and guided by aliveness.
Welcome to SPILL THE WATER. Welcome to my Holy Work — a June-inspired outpost at the edge of the known maps of being human. Here you get to learn and live with elegance and defiance, in devotion to aliveness itself while leveraging the wind, the questions, and the courage to sail upon the waters of vibrant being.
More About Spill the Water
Spill the Water is an acting school. It is also an academic metaphor and mission that basically means, "Don't be afraid to fuck up. The texture of trying is what we're after here." As it exists today, it is also a conversation and storytelling container where men and women get to:
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Build and share stories that matter to them (not your boss, not your mom, not your partner)
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Learn to explore the edges of aliveness
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Turn their curiosities into maps/stories to help listeners navigate their own sense of vibrancy
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Practice being messy and human in an age where machines are getting weirdly good at everything else
Think of this space as a garage where people come together to tinker, except instead of fixing cars, we're building stories and conversations that feel like shooting the shit with an old friend, drinking beers with the old man, sitting on your favorite couch, playing ping-pong with a good friend, holding your one-hour-old Godson in your arms, hugging a friend, shaking hands with someone you respect, making the team, playing for a coach who knows how to win well, shooting pool at the bar, etc. etc.
KAIROS (God's Time)
This project is about listening, forgiveness, obstacles, Holy Work, and companionship.
ITERATION (Learning METHOD)
"How do we keep showing up without burning out?"
Sustainable creativity isn't about grinding until you hate what you love. It's about finding rhythms that actually work with your mind, body, and spirit instead of against them.
Iteration is how we learn to build stories that infuse our vibrancy into our day-to-day lives without destroying ourselves in the process.
And iteration (i.e., falling in love with the reset button) is the method we use to build/uncover/remember the compass of aliveness itself.
ATELIER (Open Podium)
The Atelier is a Kairos Capstone. It is a snapshot, like a Poloroid picture, of an aspect in your life as a Gentleman Pirate on a given day.
The Atelier is your Open Podium.
You will be practicing your storytelling skills over and over until you're ready for a 10-minute performance.
Though you'll have many, many performances and iterations of those performances, only you will know when the story is done and ready to be tattooed into the ether.
Ateliers are recorded and shared (via audio only) to help inspire anyone to connect to and uncover their own texture and flavor of what it means to be a Gentleman Pirate.
Mission. Vision. Values.
Spill the Water
"Learning to wear my own life as a work of fiction." - Six Igsby
"She wanted to build something alive; not fixed; not flawless. Responsive. A place that could change shape when the light did. The house had no address, only coordinates that shifted ever so slightly each day. Those who came had to follow the sun themselves to find it. And that was the point." - Tilly
"I want to learn how to be a human being in a world I do not understand." - Alfie
"My focal interest is in the capacity to surpass the given and look at things as if they could be otherwise." - Maxine Greene
"I loved being a student. I loved learning. School was the place of ecstasy--pleasure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conformm to someone else's image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself." - bell hooks
"We go to films, plays, concerts; read history; and visit galleries and museums to have experiences that only such activities are likely to make possible. The experience, when successful, is mind altering. We come away refreshed, feeling better, sometimes even nourished by our break from routine and the forms of consciousness that dominate it." - Elliot Eisner
First, this isn't about single-sex containers. It's about creating an environment that has the texture of "guys being guys" because we're creating a container where you can:
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Fail spectacularly without making it a value negative
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Get genuinely excited about something without having to explain why
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Talk about the stuff that matters while translating it into "nourishing" stories
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Be competitive AND collaborative without someone taking it personally
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Build things with your hands AND your heart
This school is not anti-anyone. It's just pro-creating spaces where specific kinds of magic can happen. And this particular magic happens when guys who want more from life get together and start building.
Why "Gentleman" Pirate?
A Shrine of Ateliers
The Core
In a world where everything we've known is shifting, storytelling become acts of forgiveness, hope, and love — preserving what's most beautiful about being human while embracing what's most promising about our technological future.
Spill the Water is for anyone who believes that storytelling can be about the evolution of the storyteller, not just sharing information in a way that makes us special.
Spill the Water is about creating a "Hat Store" of ideas where storytelling becomes the path through and around the collective challenges we cannot solve on our own (optimized learning in ecosystems).
It's a place where wisdom and technology kiss, and a place to leverage presence, ai, aliveness, and to experience God in all things.
So, yeah. There ya have it.
To all that has happened, thank You.
To all that will happen, Yes.
Amen.