Further down the road.
February 2026
There’s a kind of invitation that arrives like a gentle hand on the shoulder. Not asking you to begin, more like a subtle insistence to keeping going—further.
Further. That particular word has always held a charge. The name of counterculture hero Ken Kesey’s rambling bus in the sixties, which carried the larkish Merry Pranksters across America, ‘Furthur’ never pointed toward a destination. It was a call to go beyond yourself.
The misspelling has its own medicine too. ‘Furthur’ was painted on the sign at the front of the bus as a one-word poem, an incantation to keep going whenever it broke down. It was like a wink from the road itself, suggesting that whatever we’ve already seen, whatever we think we know, there’s always another bend in the road, another layer under the story.
The driver of the bus was Neal Cassady. With all the mad storytelling, the laughter and the swerving freedom, he might be remembered as ‘Furthur’ personified. A wild-eyed messenger between worlds.
Look him up on YouTube and you’ll be greeted by nothing but incoherent streams of consciousness. Yes, he was a human doorway swinging off its hinges, but the deeper symbol here isn’t merely the spectacle of the man, it’s the role he played.
Cassady didn’t offer a map, he just made sure the wheels kept turning and the night kept unfolding. For all his chaos, he offered the gift of motion—of going further.
There is distinctive trickster energy in that, the archetypal figure who loosens what has become too tight. Trickster doesn’t arrive to decorate the altar, he arrives to make sure it doesn’t become a prison.
In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde writes that trickster “disturbs the established categories and opens the road to possible new worlds”.
Trickster is everybody and nobody. He is nowhere and now here. He refuses a fixed address and just keeps the traffic flowing.
Nobody owns the road. Yet while the road needs a driver, the driver must not become the road. He must simply hold the vehicle steady so that everyone can have their own personal encounter with the journey.
This is where the idea Cassady embodied begins to matter again, because the modern temptation is not only conformity, it’s stagnation, and the quiet deadening that comes from inherited scripts, doom-scrolling for aliveness—and calling it all “fine”.
Since 2017, I’ve been offering a program for men that has come to be known as The Way. As each man who has travelled this path understands, it’s a journey that never ends. There’s no badge you earn and pin to your jacket. If anything, it’s simply a practice of returning.
Returning to the body. Returning to the soul’s own language.
Some of these men have now committed to join me again in going ‘Further’. Not a literal psychedelic travelling carnival, more like a bus carrying us over a threshold where we can see our old life falling away in the rear-view mirror—because we’re ready to meet it from a truer angle.
Further as in deeper. Further as in less talking about it, more becoming it. Like a kind of sacred unsettling that helps a man shed what’s numbing him and reclaim what makes him real.
Further names a different posture—a refusal to let the soul’s journey end at the edge of convenience.
Sometimes that looks like a hard conversation. Sometimes it’s grief arriving at the door. Sometimes it’s laughter returning after a long exile. In a culture that trains people to perform competence while privately drowning, sometimes it’s a simple moment of recognition that says “I’m not alone in this. I never was”.
Further is about encouraging presence over performance and cultivating honest inquiry rather than rewarding certainty.
It’s about pointing at a direction beyond the compass.
Today marks the day the road took Cassady back. Walking down railway tracks late one cold and rainy night after a party in Mexico, he collapsed, only to be found close to death the next morning. He didn’t make it.
It was February 4, 1968.
Endless motion, it seems, is double-edged, and can also become the kind of hunger that forgets how to come in from the weather.
So as we bow to our borrowed helmsman-in-the-shadows, the invitation offered by Further is to remember that a road exists inside every human life that is wild and unsealed—and that it’s possible, even now, to travel along it in good company toward something resembling the truth.
And there’s also a time to shelter from the rain.
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