ABOUT LIFE For most of my years I thought life was about me.  I asked questions that came from that perspective.  What do I want? Where do I want to live? Who do I want to be with? What is my deepest desire? How do I want to serve?  I was missing the mark.  I am no longer consumed by a perspective that life is about me. I can fall temporarily into that trap for sure. I do not dwell there for long.  My questions have changed as has my vantage point. Life isn’t bout me. I am about life.  I am about life.  What does life want from me? Where has my path led me to live, and how may I be content here? Who is

GUIDING PULLBACK I have long been criticized for what others deem to be a certain level of aloofness. I have been accused of withholding, and even pullback. Caring people have told me that they perceive in me a tendency to isolate.  Guilty as charged.  What others have called aloofness is for me an earned level of discernment. What some would deem to be withholding is for me a healthy set of boundaries. If I am pulling back there is almost always good cause.  I have done enough inner work in my life to be on alert for my own triggering, distortions, and projections. I am keen on staying alert to those, and to wakefully dealing with them. I also lived years of my life trusting and disclosing

REPENT! It seemed I had waited my entire life to escape the too-tightness of my midwestern upbringing. Conservative, religious, simple, confining I wanted out of Ohio and into New York City! I knew it was the place I would finally fit in. I knew possibility would be beckoning on every corner. I viscerally longed to get to the place where I could finally and fully be the real me.  And so, I talked my mother into letting me go to New York on an opera tour my sophomore year of college. She rightly suspected my motives as I had no previous interest in opera whatsoever. Shortly after landing into LaGuardia a couple like-spirited friends and I headed into Times Square to sell the opera passes and acquire