I don't have it figured out.
And that's exactly why you should work with me.
Dangerous Friend & Rebel Mystic.
I do not come to this work as someone who has escaped the fire.
I come as someone shaped by it — by spiritual rupture, creative discipline, illness, grief, devotion, deconstruction, rebuilding, and the long practice of making meaning without pretending the mystery has been solved.
That is the ground I work from.
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 together.
That's a different kind of work.
Quieter in some ways. More demanding in others.
It will ask you to make medicine from your mess — and metabolize it into something real.
As old forms break, the deeper question asks to be lived.
As old forms break, the deeper question asks to be lived.
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 award-winning regional publications. Built my own graphic design and branding studio. Finally met and created a life with my husband. Spent three decades 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.
My spinal injury cracked what remained open. Then came the 100 Days with Peleg Top that began to metabolize both — the burnout and the questions the injury had made unavoidable.
Why am I here? What am I actually doing? What matters?
What started as a creative intensive became the threshold where vocation shifted: from helping people make their organizations visible, to helping them make themselves visible. Three books followed. A growing body of fine art — mixed media, collage, the interior life finally finding its own form. Coaching and spiritual direction stopped being parallel interests and became the work itself.
The Buddhist practice that had run alongside all of this since 1991 deepened in parallel — through vows, ordinations, and decades of training. When the time came to step into the teaching mantle, I found it was no longer what I wanted — nor what fit the ongoing deepening of my own spiritual life. The tradition had given me more than I can name. And the most honest response to that gift was not to keep wearing a robe that no longer fit — however much I honored what it represented.
And now, in 2026, a second deconstruction is underway. Not of something broken, but of something that has simply grown larger than the story that once held it. The questions arising are larger than any single tradition can hold — and the most honest thing I can do is follow them rather than the container.
I am again listening for what is larger than the story that once held me. That sitting with silence is itself the practice now.
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 had finally understood, to unself the identity I had spent years assembling, to step again into the dark at the center of the question.
What I bring to this work is neither arrival, nor answers — but rather a practiced willingness to keep moving in the dark and the company of someone who has learned to trust the unfolding itself.
You've read this far —
If you are looking for a polished guru, I am the wrong person.
If you are looking for someone who can:
• sit with you in the places where certainty fails,
• help you hear the question underneath the question, and
• walk with you as your life begins to take a truer form