Six
Maestro, Captain, Producer
Favorite Youtube Channel:
Mind the Game
Favorite Literary Characters:
Calvin and Hobbes
Inspirational Quote:
"Making people smile is a higher art than making people laugh." - Norm MacDonald
My Six-Year Self:
I live a quiet life near the water and good friends. I cook food that nourishes the mind, heart, and spirit, and the content I put into the world does the same.
Six, Ed.D., M.A.
Six is a captivating paradox. He is a master storyteller and inspired learner whose natural state seems impossible: grumpy and grinning at the same time.
For decades, he turned his career into a living laboratory for human potential. As an English teacher at a Jesuit high school, he sharpened minds in A.P. English Composition and Creative Non-Fiction. As a basketball coach, he guided teams to multiple state championships. And as a director of nine Kairos retreats, he shepherded young men and women through transformative inner and spiritual journeys.
Across these worlds of mentorship and experiences, a single understanding crystallized for Six: good stories cause movement, and good storytelling is an iterative art and a cycle of experience → reflection → action → adjustment → repetition. It is a simple, patient discipline that turns dancing or singing, falling, getting back up, and starting again into an inevitable masterpiece.
Connection Points for Curiosity
In his doctoral work, Six explored the often-overlooked relationship between curiosity and the invisible boundaries that limit our connection to aliveness. His research uncovered six fundamental ways humans plug into the energies of exploration:
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Observing
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Hunting
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Adjusting
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Storytelling
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Playing
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Coddiwompling
He argues that our culture typically champions only three.
Where Six Stands Today
Today, Six thrives in intimate environments, inviting those who join him to see themselves not as students, but as people devoted to the craft of becoming vibrant storytellers.
Six calls the entirety of this storytelling journey Coddiwompling. It is a term he learned from an Irish woman, and it means "traveling with purpose toward a vague destination."
Coddiwompling is at the heart of Spill the Water, and it functions in the curriculum as iteration, as a learning model designed for intentional, try-and-adjust-and-try-again activities and then crafting stories from what we've uncovered.
That sounds more like surfing, tho. Hmm. How cool would it be to start a podcast that felt like surfing? How cool would it be to send out positive vibes and prayers for a living? I think really cool.
three
short
stories
1990 (7 years old)
2012 (29 years old)
November 2022 (39 years old)
I was playing a game with my friend Ben, and I cheated. He told on me, and his father lectured me about fairness. A few days later, we were playing the same game and Ben cheated. I told on him, and his father lectured me about tattling.
I was earning my Master's in English. In an Argumentation class, a professor gave my essay an F, claiming "good arguments split the room." I countered that good arguments win the room. He let me revise the paper. I rewrote it, arguing that his understanding of argumentation was stupid. When I defended this to the disciplinary board, I informed them that I had followed his instructions exactly, and pointed to the result: both papers had evidently split the room! They didn't expel me, but they assigned me a new professor.
I hired two life coaches because I was beaten, exhausted, and resigned. I wasn't suicidal, but I thought about it a lot. Together, they helped me delineate me from my thoughts, emotions, and history, and they helped me build new habits for changing my relationship to reality. Did my life magically get better? No. It got better one painfully slow step at a time. Is my life perfect? Absolutely not. But I laugh a lot more, I smile a lot more, and I eat food and converse with people that makes my mind, body, and spirit feel infused with a humbling dance alongside the agonies and ecstasies of being human.
iteration
at
play
Setlist 2
Janurary 4, 2026
Jimi Thing + Six Speak + Two Step
Mission: To promote "stories about aliveness" not as a remedy for depression, rather, as a supplemental activity that's nourishing for the human spirit.
Goal: Iterate a DMB concert until I'm on the stage with Dave and Tim or the DMB. This is a learning experiment. A proof of concept that if one is willing to try and try again, almost anything is possible.
Setlist 1
Janurary 2, 2026
Warehouse + Big-Eyed Fish
Mission: To promote "stories about aliveness" not as a remedy for depression, rather, as a supplemental activity that's nourishing for the human spirit.
Goal: Iterate a DMB concert until I'm on the stage with Dave and Tim or the DMB. This is a learning experiment. A proof of concept that if one is willing to try and try again, almost anything is possible.