My
Journey
Across careers, continents, ancient places, and conversations, I have followed one enduring question: What does it mean to be human?
I did not begin this journey with a theory of human nature. I began with curiosity—and, over time, a growing awareness that the questions I was asking about the world were also questions I was asking about myself.
As a boy, I was drawn to my father's 54-volume Great Books of the Western World. Those volumes stood for something I could not yet name: the possibility of joining a conversation that had been unfolding long before I arrived. I own that set today. Its pages still remind me that the most important questions rarely yield to a single answer.
Much of my adult life has been spent discovering how the worlds of action and reflection, reason and intuition, independence and belonging might inform one another.
The outer journey
I served as a Marine Corps officer and later spent more than two decades with Motorola's Semiconductor Sector. Along the way came senior-level responsibilities, entrepreneurial work, and the practical challenges of leading people through uncertainty and change.
Those years taught me about responsibility, discipline, and results. They also taught me that an accomplished life and an examined life are not necessarily the same thing.
As the years passed, a different kind of inquiry became increasingly important: not only what I was doing, but who I was becoming in the process.
The power of conversation
For a decade, I led a men’s fellowship and led retreats in the U.S. and Kenya. Those experiences deepened my appreciation for listening, compassion, and the ways genuine conversation can change our understanding of ourselves and one another. I explore that part of my journey more fully on the Men’s Work page.
“The more I explored the world beyond me, the more I found myself returning to the world within.”
Looking back across millennia
My travels to Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, and Sayburç in southeastern Türkiye have been especially meaningful. Standing among stones shaped by people thousands of years before recorded history, I felt the distance between their world and mine grow strangely smaller.
What did these places mean to those who built them? What moved people to gather, carve, imagine, and create symbols? We cannot know all their intentions. Yet the questions these places evoke—about community, mortality, mystery, and belonging—remain very much our own.
I returned to the region after years of study, not simply to collect another destination, but to see what had changed in my understanding.
From Athens to Egypt, and beyond
Other journeys have taken me to Athens, to the ancient remains of Egypt, and into the stories and questions preserved in art, architecture, and texts.
These travels have strengthened a conviction that the past is not merely behind us. Its questions live within our language, symbols, institutions, and imagination.
Reading Jung, Joseph Campbell, and other explorers of myth and psyche alongside the classics has deepened the conversation. So has returning to the experiences of ordinary life—with its commitments, contradictions, and unfinished work.
The mandala within
For years I have drawn and studied circles, crosses, and the relationships that arise when apparently opposing parts of life are held together. The mandala became more than an image to me. It became a way to notice patterns in experience without rushing to resolve their tensions.
These explorations, conversations, and travels eventually found their way into The Mandala Within: A Guide for Intuitive and Logical Minds. The book is an invitation to honor our capacity for both intuition and reason, and to see wholeness not as uniformity, but as the relationship among differentiated parts.
That same inquiry continues through Q-Cross™, a thinking companion that begins with a person's own questions and helps reveal the relationships emerging from them.
Still curious. Still becoming.
I have learned that inquiry does not end when an answer appears. It deepens when we recognize how much more there is to see—in ourselves, in one another, and in the world we share.