#68: Jordan Castro

"I couldn’t walk or stand or even crawl...My brother started blasting 'Stand Up' by Ludacris."

Jordan is the author of The Novelist (2023) and Muscle Man (out now). He works as deputy director of the Cluny Institute and serves on the board of the DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts. He lives in Maryland with his wife, Nicolette.

#68: Jordan Castro
Astrology unknown (“I’m straight”)
Maryland, USA

What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

A certain harmonious feeling, perspective, and capacity.

How would you describe your current lifestyle?

My daily life now is more or less constantly burning away all of those parts of me that resist consistency, and humility; the parts that care too much about being “cool”… and having fun…

In short, I have a job.

How do you start and end your days?

I wake up, let the dogs out, prepare Yerba mate or coffee while swinging my legs back and forth and wiggling and circling my arms and hanging from my pull-up bar and moving around, pray, sometimes meditate, drink the caffeine I made, drive or take the train to work. I’m in a group chat with some friends where we text each other what are basically examinations of conscience, related to where we’ve been selfish, resentful, dishonest, or fearful that day. The group chat is for accountability — but I’m very inconsistent with it… Some days, I do that before I pray and meditate, so I’m more conscious of things to look out for. Often, lately, I’ve just been keeping it simple, and doing the Jesus prayer dozens of times in a row, using my prayer rope.

I’ve always struggled with being “self-aware” and inactive… The problem with being “self-aware” isn’t just laziness — I used to think I wanted to “feel smart” as a way of avoiding action — and in some sense that was true — I kept doing this thing, for example, where I’d remember to pray, but then not pray, the memory of praying making me “feel like” I had already prayed. It was weird. Especially because a part of me knew that this wasn’t the case — I got none of the serenity, perspective, insight, or anything else that sometimes came with praying — but I would still remember to pray, not pray, and “feel like” I had prayed. So, I thought, what am I actually getting? I was getting an ego shot. For a lot of my life, my so-called “self-awareness” allowed me to think of myself as “the kind of person who does, or would do, [x, y and z]” without actually having to do it. I could get the ego/identity hit without actually doing anything… And this pattern applied to a lot of things...

Anyway—

My days end the same way they begin: Let the dogs out, pray… I drink Trace ‘Stress X’ Magnesium.

Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?

My friend Sam Frank told me that every man should know what it’s like to be 200 pounds at least once in his life. So this spring, I decided to bulk. My normal resting weight is something like 165, super lean. Initially, 200 pounds seemed like an impossible thing. I thought that maybe I could do it over time, like over the course of a year. But then I started eating a giant tub of Greek yogurt every day, drinking a gallon of raw milk a day, eating four meals… and snacks… and so on… And suddenly I was 185, then 195…

I got strong, but suddenly I was legitimately unhealthy… And getting out of breath… and looking ugly… So now I’m cutting, and starting to eat vegetables, and doing some cardio again…

That was my most recent “becoming more conscious of my health.” But I’ve had tons throughout my life.

The first one was when I went vegan at 14, and the second was when I stopped being vegan at 18. I became conscious again when I first got off heroin at 20, then later after I got sober again after using other drugs. I’m always becoming conscious, then forgetting, then re-learning what I already learned in new ways, with maybe a little more perspective…

Do you have a spiritual practice?

I’m an Orthodox Christian. I go to liturgy on Sundays, and occasionally to the other services throughout the week. I also talk regularly with my close friends. I call my friend Kevin basically every day on my way home from work. This is an important spiritual practice too. In the kind of individualistic-therapy-spiritual zone that’s so popular now, spiritual practices are talked about as being fundamentally one’s own — belonging to oneself, like a product. And I have some sympathy for this — I hate the dead automaton religious zone, and my favorite spiritual writers are the Christian existentialists, like Kierkegaard, for whom everything is personal — but we are fundamentally relational. The Christian view is that the ground of reality itself, Love — the trinity — is a relationship. Tertullian said that “One Christian is no Christian.” In some ways I feel like I don’t “have” a spiritual practice, as much as I’m just meagerly participating in something that’s way bigger than me — something that happened before me, will continue after me, and is happening all at once in some brain-stretching way right now and all the time... But the deeper I get into it, the newer I feel, and so I hesitate to really comment on it…

What’s your relationship to self-healing?

I haven’t been to a doctor in almost a decade… Molière said that people die of their remedies, not their ailments… When I was visiting my family in Florida, I was squatting and just totally collapsed. I couldn’t walk or stand or even crawl… My brother started blasting “Stand Up” by Ludacris… We’d just drunk ~400mg of caffeine… And it took me like 45 minutes to drag myself a few feet back inside. I lied on the hardwood floor for 2.5 days. My wife Nicolette would bring me food and drinks… And I have a picture of my wife, mom and grandma all standing there, laughing at me.

We were beginning our Hitchcock era and it was fun… we watched Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt, The Birds, Psycho and some others… The morning we had to fly home, I was able to stand using a hot-pink walker. In the airport they treated me and Nicolette like royalty. We got to cut the lines and strangers treated me kindly and with sympathy…

Do you work with any practitioners, texts, or modalities on a regular basis?

I read from the Psalter most days, and do prayers from my little red prayer book. I have a prayer rope I keep in my pocket and touch and pull and fuss with. I love the Bible. I love literature. Great literature expands perception. I actually think I want to change my definition of health: health is the ability to see things as they are — to see them in vivid detail, and in their strangeness — even after having seen them hundreds or thousands of times.

When do you feel the most nourished?

When I’m actively engaged in a difficult creative project with no deadline.

How do you reset?

When we started building the Cluny Institute, where I work now, I had to move to DC in a matter of weeks, but Nicolette had to finish her semester teaching at Sarah Lawrence, and go back and forth to Ohio to help her parents after their house burned down. While we were apart, it was hard for me not to become single-mindedly focused on work. Roughly once a month I’d become incredibly depressed. Then I’d watch TV for 11 hours and I’d wake up the next morning feeling creative and energized and like I knew exactly what I had to do.

But this obviously does not work long term…. Some other things I do: lift, sauna, get 8-hour sleep for three days in a row… pray, Celsius, eating dinner with people I love… Recently I ate a bison rib eye that was great…

Last January, Cluny hosted a 6-hour Silence event at Earth in Manhattan, me and Dean Kissick and a bunch of people who showed up just sitting there… Afterwards I felt reset for a few days.

Do you have a favorite meal?

Steak tartare, and then steak… And something fermented…

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Don’t lie.

To the person reading this?

Buy my new novel, Muscle Man.

What would you like to see or create more of in the world?

Recently, I have very few ambitions that I think of in this way. It feels too abstract… People go around trying to create “more” of something “in the world” and they just end up saying fake stuff and ruining everything... I do hope me and the people I love all live the lives we’re meant to live, and not some shadow version corrupted by cowardice, falseness, fear, or whatever else…

Jordan’s favorites

“Happy feet” toe socks
Mindfold for sleep
Broken blue light glasses
Lemonbalm tincture
L-theanine
Raw milk cheese
“Enough caffeine to kill small child or even horse”
Walking outside

Excerpt from Muscle Man

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