The Original Wave | My next chapter starts where coffee began

“Coffee is the common man’s gold, and like gold, it brings to every person the sense of luxury and nobility.”

Shaykh Abdul Qadir Al Jaziri, 1587

Something has been stirring for some time now. A quiet return, or perhaps a continuation. After years of working to restore Yemen coffee to its rightful status, I’ve long had the itch, a whisper that’s slowly grown to a scream, that something deeper is pleading desperately to evolve. Something bigger than a single origin. And not outwardly toward scale or expansion, but inwardly, toward so much more.

Soon, in collaboration with Dave Eggers’ Art + Water, this will take on a physical form. I won’t say much about it yet, except that it will be a space shaped by the same questions that have animated everything I’ve ever done: What does it mean to make something with care? To create something that carries the weight of transmission, beauty, craft and memory?

What follows is my attempt to describe the heart of that question. What I’ve come to call the Original Wave.

There was a time in history when trade was inseparable from craft, and craft was inseparable from transmission. It didn’t matter what you did, who you were, or where you stood on the social ladder — your employer was your teacher, the person who paid you was also the one who passed down the knowledge they themselves had inherited. That lineage stretched back through centuries, linking master to apprentice, teacher to student, hand to hand, until it reached the earliest, most rudimentary forms of the craft itself.

It didn’t matter whether you were a farmer, a trader, a king, a scholar, a leatherworker, or a cook. In most traditional societies, work was never merely work. The trades were imbued with spiritual significance. It was understood instinctively that when human beings create, no matter what they create, their labor must carry a kind of metaphysical weight. To fashion something in the material world is to mirror the act of divine creation, and to take part in a chain of meaning that runs deeper than the immediate utility of the thing being made. Whether we treat that responsibility with care is up to us. 

Why is it so mesmerizing for modern people to walk down a cobblestone street in Paris, or Fez, or Sana’a, or Kyoto? What is it about those places that stirs something in us? It’s simple. The people who built those cities, who raised those walls and carved those doors, lived in a world where their work meant something. Those cities were not designed for efficiency or profit; they were expressions of everything it means to be human. Every tile, every arch, every hand-wrought hinge was a prayer rendered in matter. 

Human beings, by the innermost mystery of our nature, must create meaning. We must ask why and how. We absolutely must infuse our hours with purpose. Without that, frankly, we lose our desire to live.

When I began working in coffee, my fascination didn’t start with flavor, it began with history. I was drawn first to the ports: the Port of Mokha and the Port of San Francisco. Then, the legendary coffeehouses and coffee gatherings of Cairo, Sana’a, Paris, London, Boston, and San Francisco. These were not simply places to drink coffee. They were spaces where people gathered to speak, to think, to learn, to remember. The Godfather was penned in Café Trieste in San Francisco. The Enlightenment brewed in the coffeehouses of London and Paris. The over-caffeinated patriots of Boston, gathered at the Green Dragon Café, came up with the ridiculous idea to throw the Empire’s tea into the harbor. In Sana’a, the great spiritual masters found illumination, staying up through the night sustained by their clinking cups of sunshine. And the list goes on — you’d be hard-pressed to find a single political, intellectual, spiritual, or artistic movement in the last four hundred years that didn’t have a hot brew somewhere nearby.  

My fascination with coffee was never about the beverage alone; it was about what the beverage made possible. Coffee, for me, is not an end but a means, though the means (the cup, the beans, the fruit) are also an end in themselves and matter deeply.

In fact, coffee must be treated as an end to a degree, because we must offer something excellent. And isn’t that what coffee’s true essence demands of us? To understand coffee is to understand the necessity of excellence. People like Ali ibn Umar Al-Shadhili, Jacob Boot, Alfred Peet, Erna Knutsen, Aida Batlle, and James Freeman, understood this. They understood coffee as a means to something higher, and in concordance with that, you must handle it with care. Excellence, for people like them, is not an aesthetic choice, it’s a matter of life and death.

This is the lineage I'm most interested in. This is the bequeathal I hold closest to my chest. That coffee is both substance and symbol, a sacred means of connection and reflection. Others, like the captains of industry who stole, enslaved and colonized in order to build their mega-farms, their chains of chains, their empires of emptiness, missed this entirely. They saw coffee only as a product, not as a practice, and in doing so they exorcized it of its soul.

Much of my writing returns to this wound; the loss of craft, the loss of meaning. Nearly everything I think about, every blog I’ve written, traces back to that point. Three of those blogs articulate it most clearly. The first, The Spiritual Death of the Café, argues that cafés must once again become cultural and creative centers, not sterile retail spaces but living rooms for a neighborhood’s imagination. They must take their communities seriously, and engage the energy that already surrounds them, and in doing so become spaces for the elevation and nurturing of those precious people and their ideas.

The second, Wakanda Forever, explores the question of how people in the Global South are reclaiming industries and crafts that were taken and deformed by colonialism. And the third, Moroccan Disneyland, looks at the city of Chefchaouen, where the downward spiral of meaninglessness produced by “Instagrammable” experiences has begun to infect the real world. 

Across these essays, I am asking a simple but difficult question: Who do we want to be? When was the last time we, as a culture or as individuals, looked in the mirror and asked whether the direction we’re moving in is one we can genuinely be proud of? 

One of the great myths of the modern era is the myth of progress, a sort of modern religious doctrine that posits that history moves forward in an ascending curve toward betterment. It is, as several philosophers have argued, among the most dangerous ideas of modernity. Civilizations before ours saw themselves as descending from a golden age or moving through recurring cycles, rising and falling like the seasons. 

The modern dogma of progress allows us to speed forward without reflection, to press the accelerator without looking in the rearview mirror. It reassures us that whatever we do, things will inevitably get better. And not just technologically, but morally, politically, spiritually. But this is fiction. History does not guarantee redemption. Progress in one dimension often conceals decline in another. It is the duty of every generation to pause and ask: What have we lost, and what can we restore? What wounds have been inflicted, and how do we begin to mend them?

This is the Original Wave of coffee. It is the attempt to gather, to drink, to connect, to transmit, and through that to explore, to summon, and to tread the path of human potential. It is the recognition that coffee, at its best, is a vessel for meaning — that when we honor it, we are honoring the capacity within ourselves to make the ordinary sacred.

Early space concept rendering, not buildout plan.

Some of you may have heard now that I'll be opening my first cafe with Dave Eggers inside Art+ Water. It will be a space dedicated to the renewal of craft, learning, and transmission. The café we'll be shaping there will be, in truth, not a new idea at all. It is an old one remembered, a place where coffee returns to its original purpose.

For now, I’ll leave it at that. Something is coming, slowly, carefully, as it should. And if you’d like to follow where it leads, stay close.