Quan Tracy Cherry: Rippling Into The Unknown of 2026

Quan Tracy Cherry: Master of Soul/Ego Balance

As I sit down to write, Fire and Rain starts playing in the background and I briefly wonder if Quan would have liked it (maybe?!). I start to dismiss it as a coincidence as I glance at the time – 10:25. Quan’s birthday. I feel my body lean into a genuine smile for the first time today and take a deep breath. This is how he communicates with me now that he has left the physical world and joined what I like to call God (more on that statement in a minute).

Quan Tracy Cherry departed on October 6, 2025. If I had to guess, it was around 6:30am  – the same time I woke up from a surprisingly vivid dream: I was with someone (I don’t know who), enjoying the fresh air on a mountainside, and we eventually walked inside our cabin. I took off my gear and turned around to find the person nuzzling two bear cubs and became alarmed. I asked, “Where did those come from?” as a shadow darkened the doorway. It was the Mama Bear, and she was not happy.

I laid on the floor trying not to breathe – and trying not to show fear – as the bear came up and sniffed every inch of my body, slowly and methodically. It was terrifying, but also rhythmic, and I woke up before she had completely finished, feeling like she was going to let me go. A few hours later I received a phone call that changed the landscape of my work—and, as it turns out, my life—without a shred of warning. I nearly refused to hear what Quan’s neighbor was trying to tell me, and I can still feel a ring of denial around my full acceptance that he’s gone.

I had spent 90 minutes on the phone with him the day before, and for the last hour we were both trying to get off the phone, but we kept bringing up “one more thing” just for fun. We were both working in our respective gardens, enjoying the sunshine and reflecting on the change in season. It was his first summer tending a garden, and after we got off the phone he sent me pictures of the zinnias he had grown from my seeds – the last thing he mentioned before we hung up. He went on to have an amazingly magical day, and it didn’t seem to anyone that even he knew what was on the horizon for the next morning.

I would later learn that he had died in the same position I had experienced in my dream – trying not to be afraid while not breathing freely. I also learned that I wasn’t the only one who had a strange dream or moment with him that morning. He made the rounds, and one person actually had a dream about being in his living room smoking and drinking – which was the exact scene that unfolded later that day. And those are only the major coincidences that I know about. We can be sure these threads are endless.

Case in point: we had been working with an animal tarot deck for the past several years, and we even had a couple of readings with its author as we created Our Raw Material. After my dream, I looked up The Bear card and read about the Queen of Pentacles. It wasn’t a card or symbol I was used to, so I was curious about why a Bear was showing up – without yet knowing that there would be a much bigger meaning attached than what I was initially looking for (and not finding).

When I went to his house later and looked in HIS animal tarot book, I found that he had marked the page with an old calendar slip (April 23, 2025, for those who wonder). He had listed these words: mentor, break free, divine answers from the cosmos; master finding spiritual winds, wide wings; hearing, smell, sight, touch, taste. It felt like a direct message about what he had experienced.

The description of the Bear as Queen of Pentacles says this: This Queen’s gift is that she never leaves anyone with a heavy heart. Her words and warmth act like a salve on a weary soul. Where once everything looked impossible, the Queen provides a sense of security – a glimmer of hope that sparks within. 

Essential Quan, indeed.

There was one more bizarre correlation that he’s nudging me to mention right now. We record a weekly video for ORM, and the previous week I had doubled up because we were teaching a class and I was trying to get ahead of the work. It was the Ignorance Week video, and on camera I posed the question: “What will I not have known between now and next week that will affect recording it early?”

Quan laughed when I told him my quandary, suggesting I might be reading too much into recording Ignorance early. I’m not a fan of “I told you so,” but I wish he were here so I could say it to his face. OMG, I miss that beautiful face. Side note: when I opened to The Bear page, the first word I saw was quandary. Right in the middle of the page – Boom!

We have always talked about life and death, along with other subjects that get a little heavy for casual conversation. We went straight to the deep end and were happy treading water for as long as it took to hear each other out. Over the past few years, we had been specifically exploring the communication that exists between humans and spirit – in connection with nature. We created a company that developed and tested a “thought practice” called Our Raw Material. 

Our intention remains the same: to help humanity find better ways to self-represent in a world that feels increasingly difficult to affect. We began this work in early 2020, and in many ways it felt like we were just finding our footing in the fall of 2025. We were excited beyond belief. Quite literally.

The first line of Fire and Rain is, “Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone…” and even though that truth has now landed, I was unprepared for it that Monday morning. His timing was astrologically impeccable. It was the first day of ORM Food Week up against a Harvest Supermoon in Aries. A not-so-subtle nod to our human need for nourishment – emotional, spiritual, mental and physical.

The shock of losing Quan knocked me to my knees, but the “coincidences” that crept into my awareness that day sustained me in my grief and kept me tied to his spirit in a way that still feels like communication, even if it isn’t as direct as it once was. That is debatable, of course, and I can feel him smiling at this statement. He didn’t always make full sense to me, and I often needed background context to understand the true meaning of some of his riffs. I’ve felt that same sensation – of almost getting it – every day since and I welcome it.

One poignant story from the day he died: I went to his house and found a woman sitting outside on his front steps whom I didn’t know. As I approached her, I heard him say, “You need to offer this woman some energy work right now.”  Normally I would not respond to something like that because it’s energetically inappropriate in many ways. But these were special circumstances, and it was his actual voice. Insisting.

So I said to her, “Quan is asking me to offer you some energy work,” and as she looked up at me, I knew this was the right move. Her tears came instantly, and they were clearly healing. As I learned her story, I was grateful that I had listened to him and overridden my natural instinct to avoid imposing my energy work on others. The energy work itself is a beautiful story on its own, but it’s hers to tell, not mine.

I low-key knew I would find a way to write about Quan over the holidays, but nothing had really landed until yesterday. I woke up this morning feeling melancholy, carrying the weight of finding the right words. I had just finished editing a piece I’ve been working on since August, and my focus on it had been intensely distracting from everything else. 

In that moment of awareness, I wanted so badly to call him. I was starting to feel sad when my phone lit up with a call from his sister, Angela. I shared the importance of her timing, and she told me she had called because she just wanted to feel her brother – somehow, some way. I give him full credit for connecting us in that moment so we could share the same heartfelt truth: we will always miss him. A Quantastic moment.

So the time has come to honor Quan Tracy Cherry for his most profound work: his own spiritual understanding and connection, and what it continues to mean for the rest of us. In his last few years, our friend Quan became a master of soul/ego balance and a true example of living in Wholeness. He grew quieter and more internal as he understood the depth of his ability – and eventual responsibility – to affect others by lifting spirit wherever he could, starting with his own. I have known him for a very long time, but the man who left this world to join forces with God had traveled a long journey from the Jehovah’s Witness beliefs that first mentored his spirit. 

I met Quan in his first KC office. My friend Brenda and I had both heard him on the same radio program and called each other saying, “Let’s go see this guy!” We arrived a few minutes late, and as we crested the top of the stairs, he greeted us. Brenda began with, “Sorry we’re late,” and his first words to us were, “You must be Brenda.” That was the start of a beautiful friendship – stormy at times, cloudy and windy and blustery, but solid. The three of us trusted each other to be exactly who we were, and eventually we learned to appreciate one another at that base level. In Wholeness.

The steady drumbeat of our heart connections holds humanity, the earth, and all of its inhabitants together in shared energy and relationship. Quan, Brenda, and I call that God. While we might not get religious about the concept, we choose to live it every single day—profoundly connected to each other in ways that bypass the normal and expected, allowing us to see what happens outside of our Official Line of Consciousness (OLOC). The Intention Realm. The Ideal Playground. A space where we remember ourselves as one with God and linger long enough to communicate with Quan—and with anyone else we choose to call upon—through vibrational vulnerability, beyond voice and written word.

I anticipate more symbols and coincidences, and I look forward to noticing what I’m thinking or saying every time the clock strikes 10:25. Or 5:15, the time Quan and I used to mark communication from my dad. There have been many losses this year, and what keeps me Whole is knowing that my dad and Quan are holding court with all of their favorites, immersed in the everlasting love and light of God – and encouraging us to wake up and remember that we are too.

For now, I’ll settle for sharing one of his most prolific lines, which always preceded something that amazed him: “You couldn’t have told me…”   Whatever it was, he was endlessly curious about how things come together outside of awareness. The joy that radiated from him in those moments felt like an invitation for all of us to pause, take a breath, and check in on how we really feel – ego and soul.

You couldn’t have told me that I would be facing 2026 without his wit and wisdom sitting next to me in the physical, but you can be sure that I will be drawing on that gorgeously contagious energy every chance I get.