I don't have it figured out.
And that's exactly why you should work with me.
Dangerous Friend.
Rebel Mystic.
I know you are not a problem to solve.
The restlessness, the disorientation, the sense that the map you've been trusting has stopped working is not a symptom of something wrong. I believe the ache that brings you here is a signal of something deepening.
I don't work to fix you, complete you, or deliver you to a better version of yourself. I work to help you make contact — with what's actually here, beneath the story you've been living, the roles you've been filling, and the performance of having it more together than you do.
That's a different kind of work. Quieter in some ways. More demanding in others.
It will ask you to get raw, take risks, and stay by our campfire.
And it will ask you to make medicine from your mess and metabolize it into something real.
I've been in the fire for a long time.
I've been in the fire for a long time.
I wanted to be a priest from the time I was small. Contact with something larger and meaningful, but seminary was where it all came apart.
Choosing to leave consciously during a period when the institution was purging those it deemed suspect. What came out of those walls with me went deeper than the loss of a vocation — it was the shattering of every structure my sense of belonging had been built upon: faith, safety, and a place in the world.
So I did what you do when everything sacred turns hostile: deconstructed all of it. Not gently. Rebuilt from rubble, and in time, one of the most formative things that ever happened.
I moved to Florida. I embraced my identity as a gay man — fully, finally — and threw myself into AIDS work on the frontlines of the crisis. Those years marked me in ways I'm still metabolizing.
I chased a romance to Europe. Sold everything. Moved to Germany. It fell apart. I came back to the States homeless for three months — not as metaphor, as fact. And then, brick by brick, I rebuilt again.
I started as an apprentice at a small design firm. Became a junior art director. Worked my way to creative director overseeing eight publications. Built my own graphic design and branding studio. Spent thirty years working in visual language — helping organizations and individuals find and hold a coherent identity in the world. That work was serious and it was mine and it taught me things about form, about how meaning is made, about what holds and what collapses, that still run through everything I do.
In that time, I also wrote. Three books alongside making brands. The interior life and the visible world, in conversation.
Buddhism was the ground I built the second half upon in practice, training, teaching. By 2009, when I met and married the love of my life, the practice became the center of everything — a tradition that held me, shaped me, gave me language for the unspeakable.
Then came 2018. A spinal injury that cracked me open in ways I hadn’t anticipated. The kind of pain that makes you ask the questions you’ve been successfully avoiding: Why am I here? What am I actually doing? What matters?
That injury was my great shell-cracking. Not because it gave me answers. Because it made the pretending impossible.
And what became impossible to pretend away was this: something in me had grown larger than the story the tradition and my training provided. Now, at the threshold of my eldering years, I find myself in a second deconstruction. Not as crisis or departure. As the next unweaving. The most honest thing I can do is follow it into the unknown rather than manage it back into familiar form.
I have come to understand my life not as a progress toward something but as a series of initiations into deeper spaces of unknowing. Each threshold has asked me to unknow what I thought I’d finally understood, to unself the identity I’d spent years assembling, to step again into the dark at the center of the question.
That is what I bring to this work. Not arrival or answers, but a practiced willingness to keep moving in the dark — and the company of someone who has learned to trust the unfolding itself.
Before you go further —
Pause here. Not to read, but to notice.
What brought you to this page? Not the story you'd tell someone — the thing underneath it. The question that doesn't have clean edges yet. The longing that's been there longer than you've been willing to name it.
The ache that isn't depression, isn't burnout, isn't ambition gone sideways — though it wears those masks. Something older. Something that knows the map has stopped working even if you can't yet say why.
That. Whatever that is. That's what this work is for.