The Golden Monkey — How It All Began

From the fire, through the stillness, into the gold.

A Saturn return story. A confession. A love letter to a threshold child. And the raw origin story of the Golden Monkey…

I’m barefoot, as usual.

That detail matters. It’s not an affectation. Somewhere along the way I stopped being able to tolerate anything between my feet and the earth — between my body and whatever this land is actually saying to me, when I am quiet enough to hear it.

I live on an organic banana farm. Occasionally you’ll find me running through the rows, decapitating old banana plants with a cane knife, half imagining I’m on some ancient battlefield, while of course chanting “Hare Krishna” with a big smile on my face — a strange mix of work and play.

The cosmos… I used to take it very seriously. Now I’m learning to see it as lila — divine play. I still care deeply, although I don’t grip it the same way. I’m learning not to take myself so seriously either. Something in me knows this physical life is fleeting… and at the same time, the soul moving through it is untouched and eternal.

But this isn’t really a story about the farm.

This is the story of how the Golden Monkey actually came to be. Not the tidy version. The real one — with the fire and the loss and the nine months and the child who never arrived, the void that became a community and the stillness that became a nova.

If that sounds like a lot, it is. Stay with me…

There was a woman.

She was an Oak Tree.

You’ll know the type if you’ve loved one — or been one. Fierce, strong, immovable on the surface. Roots sunk deep into painful beginnings, where strength becomes armor. She had weathered storms that would have felled most people. Magnificent… and defended. Carrying her past the way old trees carry lightning scars — healed over, but written into the grain.

And trust… didn’t come easily.

Not because she didn’t want it, but because something in her couldn’t quite rest in it. A reaching for closeness, followed by a pulling away. A quiet testing. A doubt that didn’t always match what was actually happening.

I felt it in the small moments. A glance. A question. A shift in the air when I stepped out of the room. Something simple, held against something unseen. I met it with openness. With reassurance. With transparency. But it wasn’t something that could be solved on the surface. It was deeper than that.

One night early on in the peace, when things were still fresh and exciting
We were dreaming out loud together. Frantic messages back and forth.

She was helping me give shape to something I’d been feeling into for a while. An offering rooted in alchemy. Built around fasting. Playful, but real. Something that needed a name.

She said it first…

“The Golden Monkey”

It landed immediately. We both felt it. It never became anything other than what it was from that first moment — an archetype. My playful nickname. Something that was mine, that she handed to me, that I didn’t fully understand yet.

That’s how it begins. Not on the farm alone. In the crucible of a relationship that was beautiful and painful in equal measure, with a woman who tried to find safety in a man, and couldn’t. Like an abandoned wolf pup who survived but never learned what safety and trust were, not because of any failure of will, but because of what came before. Before me. Before us.

We shared much of the early fasting journey together. Nine months of full moons and deep parasite cleansing and the kind of inner work that strips you right down. She was woven into the beginning of this thing.

The Prophecy

A young girl said something to her once, in that particular way that children sometimes speak, as though they’re reading from something you can’t see.

“The truth lies in the nest, you’ll see.
There’s a golden egg. It’ll hatch, for joy.”

The Oak Tree whispered this to me night we first met. I held it. Filed it somewhere in the body, the way you do with things that feel important before you know why.

The golden egg did come to exist. Seeded in the Oak — quite literally.

Already named by the Oak Tree herself, before the seed was even planted. A threshold child who would never meet us in the flesh. She had already made her decision before we even knew there was a decision to be made.

I was powerless. I want to say that plainly. I found out only days before it would occur, a thousand miles now between us. A painful, yet wise decision she made alone — against my will, only now can I fully appreciate and understand why. Now I can hold the grief of that and the understanding of it at the same time. It took a while to get there. What I thought was fate became destiny.

That soul touched both of our lives. Taught us something only the two of us can truly know from within. It was written in the stars — and I mean that not as a comfort but as a fact.

The golden egg hatched. Just not the way either of us expected.

The Nine Months

After our separation — two people who had become genuinely toxic to each other, through no great wickedness on either side, just the particular damage of an attachment that couldn’t hold its own weight — I made the decision to part. Little did I know at the time, the seed was already planted... That came later, when it was already too late.

What I had was a void.

I had this fasting practice — radical, full-moon, deep-cleansing, utterly serious. I had begun it before her, but we had shared it. And now I was alone with it, and the grief, and a monkey mind that would not be quiet, and a farm, and bare feet, and the specific howling emptiness that follows the end of something that really mattered.

“I started the fasting community to fill the void.”

I need to say that honestly. It wasn’t a fully formed offering. It was a man who needed to keep going and knew he couldn’t do it alone. I needed witnesses. I needed to be held by something, even if that something was the simple social contract of I said I would do this and other people are watching. That’s how Golden Monkey Life was born in its first form. Not in inspiration. In survival.

The Classroom Goes Quiet

The community was real. The fasting was real. The full moons were real. People came, and then it thinned. People moved on. The classroom went quiet.

I sat with the quiet. No audience. No curriculum. No one to hold accountable and no one to hold me. Just the farm and the soil and the bare feet and the monkey mind, finally, completely, magnificently alone with itself.

This is the part I couldn’t have planned. This is the part that was given, not achieved. The monkey mind became a nova. A slow dawn. A gradual brightening. A slow rising like the morning sun. A steady, inexplicable, irreversible expansion of golden light from within. Where there had been discipline, there was now devotion. Where there had been war on the body and white-knuckled fasting through grief, there was — and I don’t have a better word for this — evernew joy!

Sourceless. Inexhaustible. Present.

The young girl’s prophecy completed itself.
The golden egg hatched and it hatched for joy!

What I Know Now

I am a different animal than the one who started a fasting community to survive a heartbreak. I still fast. More gently now. The pendulum swung hard for a long time — I was waging war on my body while calling it purification. I needed the fire. But the fire was never the destination. The fire was the preparation.

Looking back, I can see what it was. My Saturn return. Not something I read about. Not something symbolic. Something that moved through my life with weight. With pressure. With consequence.

It stripped things back. Illusions. Roles. The ways I thought love was meant to be.
It asked me to stand in what was real… not what I wanted to be real.

And it didn’t ask gently.

The Golden Monkey is the alchemical symbol at the heart of all of this. The monkey mind — the pain and suffering, restlessness, seeking, a hunger for philosophical bananas — transmuted into golden awareness. Not by conquering it. Not by starving it into submission. By loving it into radiance.

One more thing… lightly, because it deserves its own transmission someday. The very week the Oak Tree and I parted — in the wreckage, barefoot, hollowed out — a book found its way into my hands. The Bhagavad Gita. I hadn’t sought it. It simply arrived, the way the right things arrive when you’ve finally been emptied enough to receive them.

I fell in love with Krishna.

That’s the only way I know how to say it. Not as metaphor. As the simple truth of what happened. And in that falling — in the devotional path of Bhakti that quietly opened beneath my feet — I found the name for what the nova actually was. Not discipline. Not achievement. Not even healing.

Love, as a way of being.

I didn’t make The Golden Monkey Life. It was grown through me — by everything that happened, including the things that broke me open wide enough for the light to get in.

This is the first transmission.

The real origin story — raw, straight from the heart, unbranded, barefoot on the earth where it all began. If it found you, it found you for a reason.

“Welcome to The Golden Monkey Life!” — Joel.