Who Is Happy E?!

A New Year’s Note on Enigmas, Fire Horses, Echoes, and the Kind of Knowing That Moves

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By David E McCarty MD FAASM (but you can call me Dave)

31 December 2025

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“Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas.”

(“Do not go outward; return within yourself.
In the inward person dwells truth.”)

St. Augustine of Hippo, in: De vera religione (On True Religion)

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WHO ARE YOU, Happy E??

Who are you, “Happy e”??

I keep asking that, and you keep smiling back at me in your vermillion glory…not smug, not knowing, just…open?...maybe a little surprised? Your expression strikes me, like you’ve just noticed something you didn’t expect to be here, and you’re visibly delighted by it.

At first, I thought you were just a logo. A friendly lowercase letter meant to soften a serious subject. See, Sleep Medicine is not known for playfulness. It’s a world of machines and metrics, compliance reports and corrective tones. Happy e felt like a way to lower shoulders. A way to say: there’s still a person in the room.

But the longer I sit with you, the more you feel less like branding and more like a question that wandered in and decided to stay.

So let me try to ask it properly.

Who are you, Happy e?

I keep circling the same possibilities, and they keep circling back to me. Who are you, really? Why do you intrigue me so?

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Happy E: HIMSELF

Are You an Enigma?

In ancient Greece, there was once a temple at Delphi where people traveled to ask the gods what to do.

They came with fear and uncertainty, and the Temple of Apollo was a place of pilgrimage, to find direction, certainty, hope.

And carved into the stone of that temple, without explanation, was a single letter:

Ε

Just the letter. No sentence. No instructions. No clarification.

The Greeks themselves argued about it for centuries. It was ancient, even by the time Plutarch was in his prime, and even he didn’t know what it meant. He wrote a whole essay about it, trying to explain it, which I find oddly reassuring.

Plutarch didn’t really know you, either!

If the ancients couldn’t quite pin it down, maybe the problem wasn’t ignorance, maybe the problem was trying to pin something that wasn’t meant to stay still.

One interpretation was that the E stood for the Greek statement εἶ, which translates simply to the cryptic YOU ARE.

Not know thyself. That inscription was there too, in another spot. This leaned towards something simpler, more mutual.

YOU ARE.

What matters here isn’t just what the letter meant, but who was saying it.

The inscription wasn’t the god speaking to the human; it was the human speaking to the god, with the understanding of the BEING-NESS of Apollo, and the implied connectedness to the mortal realm. In other words, carried in the statement was a sense cohesion.

Standing before the mystery, the pilgrim didn’t ask for wisdom or prophecy.

They simply said: YOU ARE.. And in doing so, something subtle happened. You can’t say YOU ARE without also, implicitly, saying I AM.

At the temple of Delphi, the “E” allows that here, there is no hierarchy, no oracle download, no answer delivered from on high.

Just the simple and profound act of recognition, happening in both directions at once.

YOU ARE.

Happy e, are you that kind of enigma?

Are you an invitation into a different kind of knowing? A gateway into an awareness of self and an attunement to the universe, happening at the same time?

Isn’t that what Delphi was really doing? It wasn’t dispensing answers, it was changing posture, forcing the questioner to notice how they were asking. I’m reminded of an iconic scene in The Empire Strikes Back  (Empire, another e —Tee Hee!) Luke asks Yoda about a dark place, a tree brimming with the Dark Side of the Force…. a place heavy with something unnamed.

“What’s in there?” Luke asks.

 “Only what you take with you…” Yoda replies.

“Your weapons…” he adds cryptically, “you will not need them.”

Luke squares his shoulders, hesitates for one moment, straps on his light-saber with a grim resolve, and strides into the tree.

What a rookie move!

The scene teaches something profound, something that the Ε at the temple of Delphi hinted at—the Dark-Force-Tree-Cave doesn’t teach us anything new and it doesn’t explain itself. Instead, it reflects our intentions back to us as a cosmic echo.

Indeed: all the fear, urgency, violence and identity confusion Luke walks in with are revealed in the scene’s unsettling climax, when a dreamscape Darth Vader faces him with his light-saber drawn. When Luke strikes his blow, the Vader-helmet explodes, revealing (GASP!) Luke’s own face within.

It’s a moment of darkness not because the cave is evil, but because Luke isn’t ready yet to stand unarmed in such a place of reflection.

Luke’s Dark-Force cave, like Delphi’s Ε, adds nothing, but shows all…a gateway to what one already is…

Happy e, if you’re a gateway, is that why you’re always smiling? Is your Mona Lisa grin a reminder for us to enjoy the adventure? Could your inexhaustible glee remind us of that if a space can’t deliver hard-and-fast answers, then the vibrational energy of the entire adventure may actually matter?

Only what you take with you.

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(TRUE BLUE Empowerment makes EVERYTHING taste better!)

Are You FIVE in Disguise?

This one keeps sneaking up on me. Life-Fans, I’ve already ‘fessed up about my poetic love affair with FIVE, the human number of movement, change, and curiosity.

A–B–C–D–E.

One-Two-Three-Four...

FIVE.

Five fingers in our approach...Five Reasons to Treat…Five domains of healing.

I didn’t choose FIVE because it was mystical. I feel like it chose me because it was human. We count on our hands before we abstract. We orient ourselves bodily before we theorize.

Four is stable. Six wants structure. FIVE MOVES, the step where balance wobbles just enough to teach you how to walk.

In medicine, FIVE resists reduction. It hates to let one variable pretend to be the whole story. It insists on relationship, context, motion.

FIVE refuses to be flattened.

Happy e, are you FIVE-in-disguise?

Do you quietly smile as a way of holding complexity without squeezing it to death?

And then there are the flames.

Why do you have flames?

At first, I told myself it was just design. Energy. Motion. Something to keep the smile from getting too cute.

I’ll tell you Truth, though, Happy e: when I drew them, I was thinking of my friend Jim Hayes, may he rest in peace.

Jim Hayes was an artist with an engineer’s mind. No project was too big, if it had dreams and love attached. Jim was a born maker who built props and installations for movies and restaurants and stuff. At one point, he rebuilt a hot rod for Brian Setzer, the famous guitarist for the rockabilly band The Stray Cats.

Jim was a tall shadow in the doorway, I’ll tell you that! At 6 foot FIVE, with a bald head and a pirate’s goatee, he had blue and orange hot-rod flames tattooed on his forearms: bright, unapologetic, old-school.

His Jim-ness, showing off something he made…

But the real fire wasn’t the ink. It was the man. See, Jim carried passion like a responsibility. Love like a discipline. He showed up for people. He burned for what mattered, and he didn’t need a spiritual framework to do it. The flames on his arms weren’t symbols. They were declarations: I’m alive, and I’m not pretending otherwise.

Happy e, are your flames like that? Not danger. Not destruction. Just aliveness that refuses to be ashamed?

Turns out, this year, FIRE is on display, Happy e! Did you know that? According to the traditional Chinese Zodiac, 2026 happens to be the Year of the Fire Horse.

Happy e, this can’t be prophesy, can it? I don’t believe in stuff like that! I don’t believe that the calendar runs the show.

But it is curious, isn’t it?

Horses don’t respond well to force. Fire doesn’t either. Both are powerful. Both can be dangerous if constrained. Both move beautifully when listened to and guided.

Happy e, is the Fire-Horse-Year full of FIVE energy? Movement? Disruption that teaches? Change that refuses to be coerced?

Happy e, did you choose the Year of the Fire Horse for your grand entrance upon the world? Or am I simply noticing movement because I’m finally ready to move?

Happy e, perhaps you know the answer.

Only what you take with you.

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Empowerment…it’s DELIBULOUS!!

Or Are You an Echo?

In the official NATO radio phonetic alphabet, the letter E is spoken as “Echo.”

As in: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta…

ECHO.

An echo isn’t new information, it’s your own voice, returning to you, shaped by space, shown to you from a different angle.

You don’t hear an echo unless you speak first, a point that also seems to matter.

See, so much of what we call “knowing” arrives from outside, a top-down delivery from without: sealed, declared, downloaded. So much of what we call “healing” is an attempt to add something (a fix, a protocol, a treatment strategy) without ever asking what’s already here.

Hello! You have “Sleep Apnea”—here’s your device!

Echo-knowing works differently.

Instead of arriving from without, it returns. It says: Oh. That was me.

Which brings us back — again — to e-for-Empire.

Only what you take with you.

Happy e, are you echoing that same truth?...a subtle way of saying: the answer was never “out there”…because recognition only happens when the knower is included?

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So Who Are You, Really?

Are you an enigma carved into a temple wall? A cave that reflects what’s carried in? FIVE-energy disguised as a smiling letter? Jim’s flames, refusing to apologize for aliveness? A Fire-Horse restless with movement? An ECHO quietly saying you already know?

Maybe you’re none of these.

Maybe you’re just a mirror.

And maybe that’s enough.

Because every time I ask who you are, I end up noticing how I’m standing. What I’m carrying. Whether I’ve come armed or open.

Only what you take with you.

As this new year begins, I find myself less interested in resolutions and more interested in orientation.

How am I standing?
What am I ready to see?
Am I willing to be curious and hopeful as I go?

Happy e, I know you’re not going to answer these questions for me, you’re just going to keep smiling and flying with your flames. I’m good with that.

You just keep smiling--open, curious, alive—I know you’re waiting for me to remember that I’m already part of the conversation.

Happy New Year, Happy e! Maybe this Fire-Horse year is the time to get to know each other better…

Let’s see what echoes back.

Kind mojo,

Dave

David e McCarty MD FAASM

Boulder Colorado

31 December 2025

PS: empowerment saves! :)