Since the beginning of recorded history, and assuredly even earlier, humans have sought to know the origins of the universe and also to know their proper place within it. To stare up at the night sky with one’s mouth agape in wonder is to be united with the earliest kin of our kind.  The experience of wonder transcends all eras, all races, and all nationalities.  It strikes to the core of what it means to be human.  Aristotle said, “All men by nature desire to know.”  To ask questions may even be a defining characteristic of what it means to be human.  Not to obtain answers, but to seek them.  To be sensitive to the mystery of the unanswered question has a binding force within human nature that links us to the first questing cave man and woman.  Whether it be through the anxiety generated by not knowing from where our next meal will emerge or what future might be hidden among the stars, we are tied to our forebears by a restless spirit that travels from question to question throughout its life.

It is not so much the answers we come upon, but the questions we continually pursue that define our reality.  And it is not through the sameness of our answers but through the persistence of our questioning that we as humans spring from one root.  This root may be called the root of mystery.  Within it lies the compelling drive to re-tell our stories, to make sense out of history, and to fashion a redemptive future.  And beneath this drive lies something even more primordial.   It is the sheer desire to make meaning.  We know it when we find ourselves subdued and humbled beneath a billion stars and still unable to keep the question why from trembling across our lips.  In such moments we embrace in utter identity our very earliest barefoot brothers and sisters on the frigid Steppe of Asia and the sweltering plains of Africa.  We breathe with their breath, arisen from a mystery too deep ever to fathom and too powerful not to live from continually.  Our ceaseless questioning is our living from this thing.  All the books in all the libraries of the world may be seen not as compendiums of answers so much as storehouses of questions so as to ensure that the mystery never dries up.  More precisely, our books help us prove to ourselves that we were ever faithful to its root we spring from, by never ceasing to inquire.

In his Confessions, Leo Tolstoy asked, “What am I, and what is the universe?” He said of philosophy and metaphysics, “Though all the mental work is directed just to my question, there is no answer, but instead of an answer one gets the same question, only in a complex form.” Thus, every proposed answer spawns new questions of greater and greater complexity.  This is its careful faithfulness to the original mystery.  In these meager writings, then, I do not propose to provide you with any ultimate answers to the most fundamental and irresistible questions about the universe.  But I do hope to have crafted answers that splinter in your mind—as they have in mine—into a firestorm of new questions that sparkle with radiance and immediacy and a sense of being drawn into greater intimacy with the mystery of being.  I do hope also to foster in you through these writings a sense of kinship and deep compassion for all humankind.  May you be awakened by them to a deeper sense of the commonality of our striving.  May that which is unfound in our quests and struggles remind us that what unites us comes before knowing and that unknowing is the source both of tolerance and of human integrity.

⊕        ⊕        ⊕

Feel free to browse the writings that are provided here.  You may click on the About tab for a brief overview.  Then you may click on the other tabs to access writings from the time periods specified.  The Map tab provides a quick way to navigate through the entire site.  This site is currently under construction, so you may wish to bookmark it and check back as its content increases.

Thank you for visiting and especially for any time you take to further your own wisdom, compassion, and awakening.

Namaste.

   Please Note:  This site is optimized for viewing with Google Chrome.