The Moth on the Wall.

Before the trip, someone from the church group helping organize it pulled me aside and said: the devil is going to try to stop you from doing this.

It went right over my head. I’m not a Christian. I don’t follow any one religion, and I don’t do dogma — I read the Stoics, the Bible, the Quran, Jung, whatever holds weight. So I nodded, and honestly, I forgot about it completely.

It would come back to me at three in the morning, standing in my living room.

The Top of the Mountain

Here’s where I was when this happened. I’d just come off one of the best years of business I’d ever had. Money was coming in hand over fist — the company was running at around $700K a month, and there was one day I made $370K in a single day. I packed my life in Calgary into storage and moved back to Mexico. Along the way I’d raised and put together around $120,000 — my own donations plus fundraising — to go build homes in El Salvador for families living in extreme poverty, most of them single mothers.

I set up my new condo in Puerto Vallarta. Unit 407 — add it up, that’s 11, a master number, and I was deep into numerology at that point, so I noticed. Beautiful view. Infinity pool. The whole picture.

I remember standing in that condo thinking: I finally made it.

And then something just felt off.

The business was back in Canada, running on a team of about twelve people — and it didn’t need me anymore. My son was about to turn 16 — he didn’t really need me anymore either. My dog was getting old, and I knew I’d have to let him go soon. And there I was, alone in a beautiful condo in paradise, asking myself what I was even for.

You’d think that’s the part of the movie where everything feels calm. It was the opposite. I couldn’t sleep for almost two weeks leading up to El Salvador. Every night, the same voice: Don’t go. Why are you doing this? Who do you think you are, flying down there to build houses? I questioned everything — the trip, the money, myself.

Two Nights Before

Two nights before the flight, I woke up in the middle of the night and walked out to the living room. Turned on the lights.

There was a huge black moth on my wall. Massive. It didn’t move. I stood there looking at it — and that’s when the warning came back to me. The one that had gone right over my head weeks earlier. Something is going to try to stop you from doing this. Standing there at 3 a.m., sleepless for twelve days straight, staring at this thing on my wall, it all clicked at once.

I never went back to sleep. I packed my bag, didn’t sleep the night before either, and got to the airport feeling genuinely psychotic in my own mind from the lack of rest.

I got on the plane anyway.

Seven, Then 222

Standing in the customs line in San Salvador, half-delirious, I caught myself making a quiet bet: what are the odds I get called to window number seven? Seven — the spiritual number. Sure enough: next up, window seven.

I got to the hotel cold, scattered, in a strange city, way underdressed for weather I hadn’t expected. They handed me the key. I went up to my floor, looked down at the card in my hand.

Room 222.

If you know, you know: 222 is the sign that you’re on the right path.

I broke down right there. Two weeks of every cell in my body telling me to turn around — and the universe checks me into room 222. In that hotel room I fell apart a little, and for the first time in fourteen days, I slept.

The Build

The build itself was three days of twelve-hour shifts in forty-degree jungle heat. Nineteen homes. The families we built for had fled the cities during the violence years ago and never gone back — they’d built huts in the jungle out of whatever they could find. No work. No work anywhere near.

Let me tell you about some of them.

One woman’s husband and father were murdered by the gangs — for protecting their house, for telling the gangs they weren’t leaving and weren’t giving it up. They killed them both. That’s why she fled.

Another woman had her two young kids kidnapped. One was returned. The other was never seen again.

One father was on dialysis. Twice a day, he made the trip to the hospital — an hour’s trek through the jungle first, then two hours each way by bus. Six hours of travel, every single day, just to stay alive. He cried telling me about it. He said he just wanted to stay alive long enough to help his family.

These people were drinking water out of a creek that filled with rainfall. Their kidneys and livers were ridden with disease from it. You could see it in their eyes.

And here’s the part I wasn’t ready for: they were happy. These people who had nothing — who had buried husbands and lost children and trekked through jungle to stay alive — had a lightness to them that I hadn’t felt in years. And I felt guilt. Real guilt. Because how could I feel anything but happiness, considering the way my life was? I had everything compared to these people.

But did I?

The Beach Blanket

The plan was to stay a month afterward and enjoy the country. I didn’t make it. Everywhere I went, I could see the poverty out of the peripherals of my eyes, and it shook me to my core. I couldn’t sit on a beach and pretend I hadn’t seen what I’d seen.

So I came back to Mexico — and I couldn’t buy anything.

I mean that literally. I couldn’t buy a beach blanket. I couldn’t place an Amazon order. Every purchase ran through the same filter: this money could go back to people who have nothing. It took me a long time before I could spend on anything without that math running in my head. I don’t have the right words for what that period was. A recalibration, maybe.

Here’s what settled out of it:

• I was born in Canada. Poverty exists there, but there’s a floor — benefits, systems, second chances. I could start a business. That’s a lottery ticket I didn’t earn. I had a hard upbringing and went through my own things — but this was a different level entirely.
• The things you own end up owning you. I’d heard the line a hundred times. Now I’d felt it.
• From that point I drastically simplified my life — down to the necessities, as close to minimalist as I could get — and made giving back part of how I operate. Here in Mexico that’s looked like school supplies and toys for a full school of about 200 kids, and supporting people hit by the hurricanes and floods in Vallarta in 2025. And I plan to do something big again — another build, another round of houses. That itch doesn’t go away.

What the Moth Was

I looked it up later. A black moth symbolizes spiritual transformation, shadow work, hidden truths. Drawn to the night, it represents intuitive guidance, overcoming personal fears, navigating the unknown. Across cultures it carries both ominous and prosperous omens — death and fortune in the same wings.

Both readings were right.

I don’t think you need a theology for this. The resistance is real, whatever you name it — devil, ego, fear, shadow. And here’s the pattern I trust now: it doesn’t show up at the trivial doors. Nobody loses two weeks of sleep over a beach vacation. The static gets loudest exactly when you’re approaching something that’s going to change you — the voice asking who do you think you are is, weirdly, the most reliable sign that you’re standing somewhere that matters.

When I got home from El Salvador, the moth was lying on my floor. Dead.

Whatever it came to deliver, it was done. So was the version of me it found on the other side of that wall.

If success has gone quiet on you — if you’re standing in your own version of the condo with the view, wondering why it feels like nothing — don’t buy something. Go give something. Stand next to someone who has nothing and watch what it does to your ledger.

The full story of the build — the families, the numbers, the photos — is in Project 1616.