It began with tears.

In some ways, that’s a total lie. A hook at the start of an essay. Because the ideas actually began swimming about like drunk tadpoles in my psyche when I was really little, enchanted by the world and believing it was built of enchantment.

Fast forward through a childhood spent in a wood we called Narnia, at dance camps and art classes and spelunking trips and wildflower wanders, a family of belonging and love, and I believed even more.

And then I did that thing most of us do: banged up against grownup-hood and the gottadoes in life and my belief faded like an old photograph.

Spillian was, as much as anything, born out of a desire to see if I could actually find a way to build that enchantment again. To experiment with the intersections of play and lightness, of beauty, of history and possibility, and deep explorations in all of that about how we can make meaning in our lives in ways that open our magic.

So that part, while it included tears, certainly didn’t start with them.

The tears came a couple of years ago, when I was groping to explain this idea I had. I wanted to bring what we’ve discovered at Spillian, what we’ve co-created with the people who have come there over the last decade since we opened out to more people than we could possibly house on site. About kindness and belonging, and adventure and learning to ride the edges of certainty into the infinite possibilities of imagination.

I had so many ideas.

Tea. Crackers. Both created with wedding couples and beloved friends and served many times at Spillian. Quest books inviting people into making meaning as they explored and reveled in their lives. Games to carry people into big moments with ridiculous delight and moments of realizing how utterly, madly, deeply they loved one another. Gatherings. Beautiful strange little objects. Workshops. Rituals. Stories. Things that could carry some piece of what we had discovered there out into the wider world.

And in my mind, they were all connected. Obviously connected; just different expressions of the same underlying thing.

I was in a mastermind with some very smart women, genuinely good at marketing and business and social media, and truly kind. The kind of people who help make things legible to the world. And I was trying so hard to explain what I wanted to build.

I was on a video call, maundering on about all of these ideas and losing steam into utterly incomprehensibility as I watched their eyes get wider and they rocked back in their chairs.

And finally Katie said, kindly and reasonably, with only a hint of exasperation (I was not dubbed Meandering Melander in college for nothing, so she was long-suffering), “Leigh. You can’t do all of this. You need to pick one thing and do it well.”

Which, from a normal business perspective, was completely sane advice.

That’s when the tears came. Full on. Because that was the part I couldn’t explain yet.

I wasn’t trying to create a bunch of randomly adjacent products. I was trying to figure out whether something deeper could travel across forms. Whether the essence of what mattered to us at Spillian — imagination and hospitality and meaning and reveling and curiosity and belonging — could somehow live inside objects and stories and experiences out in the world beyond the physical place itself, and actually give people juice in their lives.

Not as branding or as aesthetics. And truly not as “lifestyle.”

As whatness.

My friend Bob Walter, who was Joseph Campbell’s editor and co-founded the Joseph Campbell Foundation, has offered for many years (at both Esalen and a couple of times at Spillian) a richly irreverent and reverent ‘playshop’ exploring a mythic arc of our lives. Each year he frames an impossible collection of flotsam as invitations into this journey with a quote from James Joyce that Campbell had relished.

“Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”

Joyce uses the word quiddity — the essential nature of a thing, its “whatness” — and I have loved that word for years because it feels so much more alive to me than identity or category or market positioning. When I first encountered it, it felt less like discovering a new idea than finding language for something I had already been trying to touch. The quiddity of a thing is the thing underneath the thing. The spark itself.

And this, fumblingly and imperfectly, was what I was trying to build:

A living ecosystem of offerings that somehow carried related whatness.

And maybe a bit of enchantment.

Image by Wolf Mountain Productions at Marin Gardner & Alex Hoekstra’s Spillian wedding. Where one of the coming ecosystem objects was born.