On Being Here
On Being Here is where I gather some of these observations. In writing, in photographs, and in the questions I keep finding myself inside. There is no particular order to any of it. Begin wherever something catches.
I write because I keep noticing things.
The ways we become ourselves. The things our bodies know before we do. What happens between people, and what happens inside us because of the worlds we belong to. Questions of spirit, attachment, making, suffering, beauty, difference, and being alive.
Writing gives me somewhere to stay with what I notice. To turn it over, follow it further, and see what else might be living inside it. I don't always arrive somewhere. Sometimes the question becoming more interesting is enough.
A few questions I keep finding myself inside.
What if the body has been participating all along?
Postures of Being follows the body as more than a place where experience happens. It considers posture, sensation, protection, attachment, attention, and the ways a life becomes physically organized around what it has learned.
For anyone curious about the distance—and conversation—between what we know and how we actually live.
There are many ways to leave ourselves. What brings us back?
Instructions for Returning is concerned with return: to the body, to discernment, to presence, to the ordinary material world beneath all of our interpretation.
These essays consider what becomes possible when we stop asking ourselves to transcend being human and become more interested in inhabiting it.
What does it take to belong without becoming the same?
Sovereign Belonging begins with the possibility that difference is not an obstacle to intimacy but one of its conditions.
These essays move through relationship, self-possession, diversity, communication, conflict, love, and the ongoing practice of remaining a distinct person while allowing ourselves to be changed by contact with others.
And what if the problem isn't always located inside the person?
Mental Health Under Empire examines the stories we have inherited about suffering—and what those stories ask us to believe about ourselves.
Through essays on diagnosis, adaptation, coercion, institutions, self-trust, and the authority we give away, this collection asks what changes when we become curious about the worlds people have survived alongside the symptoms they developed within them.
Making may have more in common with growing than we think.
Creation as Ecology looks at creativity as a material process: soil, decomposition, roots, seasons, constraint, relationship, emergence.
Rather than asking how to become more productive or certain, these essays observe what the living world already knows about bringing something into existence—and what humans might remember by paying attention.
A group is also a living thing.
The Coherence Library turns the scale outward, toward what happens between people.
These essays consider belonging, scarcity, nervous systems, attention, leadership, organizational life, and the invisible conditions that determine what a group is able to create together. They are observations toward a different question: not only How is each person doing? but What kind of system are we becoming together?
What if protecting ourselves is not the same thing as leaving each other?
Ecological Codependence considers what happens when we become sturdy enough in our own company to need, love, and be changed by other people without asking them to become our ground.
These essays move through self-trust, attachment, boundaries, difference, solitude, responsibility, and participation—and toward the possibility that knowing our own sovereignty might not take us away from relationship, but allow us to enter it more fully.
I photograph because I keep looking.
The things we make. The things that grow without us. The ways bodies arrange themselves around one another. Evidence of ritual, attention, beauty, decay, scale, and time.
Photography gives me somewhere to put what I notice before I know what I think about it. Sometimes the looking is enough.
A few things that have caught me lately.
