A Different Kind of Independence Day
This Fourth of July marks more than America’s birthday: The Blueprint of Life is finally here, The Silent Aquifer is close behind, our family is about to grow, and Aurmina is celebrating all.
Me, Lisa, and Lazlo (“Latzee”) awaiting his arrival.
Tomorrow is Independence Day, and this year it carries more meaning for me than any Fourth of July I can remember.
Our nation turns 250, our son is due, Aurmina is having a holiday sale, and after eleven months of constant writing, rewriting, editing, and researching — with more than a few moments when I wondered whether I could finish at all — both books that came out of this work are now done. And as a small thank-you to everyone who has followed along, this post closes with the final chapter of The Blueprint of Life — the last piece of the story, shared here first.
On the birth front, nothing is happening yet except for a few odd cramps, but I inflated the birth tub, the midwife and doula are on call, and I have finally cracked open the “Hypnobirthing: Creating Positive Birth Experiences” manual I was supposed to have read months ago (don’t tell Lisa). Independent of my previously described post-Covid nosocomophobia (fear of hospitals), Lisa would never in a million years give birth in one, so it's all happening at home.
On the book front, the first, The Blueprint of Life: Earths Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health, has been published and is shipping. Many of you have traveled this road with me from the very beginning. You’ve read early chapters, challenged my thinking, strengthened my arguments, caught mistakes, and encouraged me when the project felt impossibly large. In many ways this community helped write the book alongside me, and I’m deeply grateful.
It began with an unusual mineral extract developed in Japan, and what I first understood as a simple study of minerals. But that research kept widening — into geology, water chemistry, agriculture, soil biology, biochemistry, and ancient wisdom — until it opened onto something far larger: whether the organizing architecture that appears everywhere in nature is best understood as accident, necessity, or evidence of a Creator. Part scientific investigation, part intellectual journey, and part personal memoir, The Blueprint of Life is, above all, an invitation to follow evidence wherever it leads — even when it leads somewhere completely unexpected.
The companion volume has also found its final identity. The book many of you have known as From Volcanoes to Vitality will now be published as The Silent Aquifer: The Unfolding Global Crisis in Food and Water — and the Mineral Solution. At sixty-two chapters and 130,000 words, it is the most comprehensive exploration I know of into water and the minerals it carries — into water’s importance to the Earth, all the waters of the Earth themselves, and how the slow alteration of their mineral chemistry underlies the crisis now unfolding across the world’s agriculture. The manuscript is entering its final production stages and should begin shipping later this month, a couple of weeks behind its companion.
The Blueprint of Life is available now in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle through both my website and Amazon (the Amazon hardcover is pending for two more days). If you’ve been following this journey on Substack and waiting for the finished work — today is the day.
The research behind both books also led somewhere I never expected when I started: to founding a company to bring the mineral extract at the center of it all — the very substance that began this entire journey in Japan — to the public. Which is why this Fourth of July ties everything together.
Aurmina Celebrates America’s 250th Birthday
To celebrate Independence Day—and America’s 250th birthday—we’re also offering 25% off single bottles of Aurmina and Primora Bio throughout the holiday weekend (the three- and six-packs are already discounted 22% and 33%, respectively).
Use coupon code: JULY4 at checkout. Thank you to everyone who has supported our work, our research, and our small company over the past year.
Finally, for everyone who has followed this journey on Substack, today’s post concludes something I’ve been sharing in pieces for many months. Below the paywall, you’ll find the final movement of the epilogue from The Blueprint of Life. Whether you’ve already purchased the book or are still deciding, I wanted everyone who has traveled this road with me to have the opportunity to read how the story ends.
Epilogue: The Line That Broke Me
What I later realized was that the conviction I felt in Montana had already begun to build months earlier, when I first heard Shimanishi’s voice in a written note I had discovered.
