Meet Ethan Maurice | Writer, Photographer, & Creative at Large

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ethan Maurice and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ethan, how do you think about risk?
At the age of sixteen, I had a near-death experience that forever altered my relationship with risk.

In our culture, we mostly think about risk in the form of fears about the future: we fear poverty, being alone, disappointing our parents, having low-social standing, and other variations of things not working out in the cultural definition of well in the long run.

My brush with death made living for a time many decades in the future seem, frankly, stupid. I knew it deep in my bones: life is precious, life is fragile, and life could end at any moment. Why would I waste the present hedging against risks decades down the line that I may not even be around to face?

My dance with death made my thinking about risk do a 180-degree flip: the greatest risk, it seemed to me, was playing it safe and putting off the living of life for later… there might not be a later.

This flip of risk changed everything. Risk was no longer a reason not to follow my heart, my intuition, and do the things I deep down felt were best to do — risk was the reason to do those things. If I didn’t act on the things that mattered most now, they ran the risk of never happening. As for most people, risk had always been the brakes on my life (the reason to settle, to hedge one’s bets, to play it safe). After coming so close to death, risk paradoxically became the gas.

Risk has been the impetus of my farthest outgambles, moments of most aliveness, and greatest accomplishments: I pedaled a bicycle across the United States raising $96,000 for the children’s hospital that saved my life, wandered the globe for the bulk of five years reading books and writing a blog aimed at enabling others to live their best lives, and worked seasonal jobs I was deeply interested in and legitimately loved to financially support myself (deckhand on a cruise ship, innkeeper and bartender of a lodge a mile outside Yellowstone National Park).

Today, fourteen years after that mosquito bite almost ended me, that white-hot sense of risk, that “now or never” seems to have cooled in me to some degree. I still know I could die today, it just feels a bit less likely to happen today than it did fresh out of the hospital. Perhaps I now see the truth in clearer view: nobody knows how much time they have left.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I aspire to be a “creative wizard” and work in a variety of creative mediums: writing, story, culture, photography, videography, web design, graphic design, and search engine optimization to name the most prominent ones.

I have a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Science. It wasn’t until the summer before my senior year of college when I pedaled a bicycle across the United States to raise money for Phoenix Children’s Hospital (where doctors and nurses saved me from an extremely rare brain infection at sixteen) that I seriously touched any creative tools. In fundraising and undertaking this great journey by bicycle, I decided to take photographs, a bit of video, and keep a daily blog. Things just went really well. We raised over $96,000 for the hospital, we were on the local news over a dozen times, and my words and photographs were printed in newspapers and magazines. I couldn’t believe the power my recovery story, shared through these creative mediums, could have.

Two years after the conclusion of our cross-country bike ride, I started a travel blog based on themes of shoestring-cheapness, adventure, and the zest for life. Now bearing my name, the blog has grown over the past six years to cover a variety of topics from philosophy and books to habits and spirituality. Having this breadth of travel experiences, reading books, writing articles, taking photographs, and trying to grow the blog’s reach — this was my real education.

After being sidelined from flight school by the coronavirus pandemic, I used all these creative skills to build two real estate photography businesses with a friend (and payoff the debt I amassed learning to fly airplanes). I built a website, wrote the copy, worked the SEO, took photographs of houses, and told a story about our business. Today, but three years in, we’ve shot thousands of houses and financially support well over a dozen camera-wielding creatives in the Phoenix and Denver areas.

In the long run, I aim to grow the real estate photography business, to write books, to experiment with culture in various forms of community, to attempt to live life as a form of art, and to let the creative force of the universe flow through me, following intuition and interest wherever they may lead.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
My business partner and I run two real estate photography companies: Desert Lens in Phoenix, AZ, and Denver Lens in Denver, CO. I hold down the Phoenix location and he holds down the Denver one. However, I fly in and visit Denver at least three or four times a year. When I do, I take the train from the airport to Union Station in the heart of downtown Denver.

It is Union Station that I will singularly recommend. Go sit in the striking, ornate, gargantuan main room of that historic 1880s building with ceilings a hundred feet high. Grab a coffee and work on a laptop, read a book, or make some art in there for a few hours. I promise you will not be disappointed.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’d like to dedicate these words to my heroes, the people whose work and lives inspire my own. Alan Watts, Jack Gilbert, Joseph Campbell, Robert Pirsig, Elizabeth Gilbert, John Frusciante, Rick Rubin, my parents, and the 1999 animated movie character Tarzan, to name a few. For their contributions, guidance, and inspiration, I have deep reverence and gratitude.

Website: https://ethanmaurice.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ethan.maurice/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethan-maurice-b90536254

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ethanmaurice

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxOMAt1ZGm-S8DZl3QucoNg

Other: Denver Lens Real Estate Photography: https://denverlens.net/