Most of us live with two longings at once—the wish to belong and the wish to be an individual. Cultures lean toward one or the other, but being human means carrying both, often without knowing how to reconcile them. This reflection began as my attempt to understand that tension in myself, and I found the forest holding it with a grace I’m still learning: distinct lives, shared roots, difference and connection intertwined.

This essay traces America’s long, uneven journey toward separating church and state—from the founders’ fears of religious tyranny to modern moments when those boundaries blur and the costs become visible. Through history, case studies, and today’s cultural tensions, it shows how protecting both faith and freedom has always required a careful line—and what happens when we forget why that line was drawn in the first place.

Every now and then a song drifts back into our orbit and feels less like nostalgia and more like a message we’re finally prepared to hear. Lately, Bowie’s Starman has been that for me — not as a retro glam anthem, but as a reminder of what happens when something new wants to land in a person. A vision. A truth. A project. A version of ourselves not yet fully named.

Magical beingness isn’t an escape from reality, it’s a way of entering it more fully — through attention, energy, and intention rather than pure logic alone. It holds that shift happens in the space between thinking and knowing, where presence itself becomes the spark and intuition becomes a co-author of experience. Reality, from this view, isn’t only measured, it’s felt and shaped by the subtle participation of being alive, open, and receptive to the moment while still engaging the world with grounded action.

Gayness wasn’t depicted as a spectrum of ordinary lives. It was depicted as a risk, a rumor, a moral lightning rod that invited speculation, surveillance, and judgment. So many gay men came out only to hear the world narrate them back as cautionary headlines, comic relief, tragedy, or threat. If you said you were gay in the mid-1980s, others wondered how close you stood to the virus, even when proximity was metaphorical, not medical.

I inherited the pause of Sunday at a church in Columbus, Indiana, but I chose the sacredness of it later in life. Now my Sunday church is a hammock in the pine forest, a paint-stained studio, a dance floor, or the edge of a lake — spaces I leave open so intuition can lead me back to my own higher power. Sacredness, I’ve learned, isn’t something I schedule in — it’s what I finally hear when nothing else crowds the room.

Two truths always exist at once. Real estate is no different. I help clients navigate the hope and the hesitation, the numbers and the meaning — until clarity rises in that space between.

This essay explores Asheville as a city shaped by tension — between rootedness and reinvention, modesty and ambition. It traces how history, landscape, and community have created a place both grounded and rising. Ultimately, it’s a meditation on how Asheville mirrors the contradictions and becoming within each of us.

What if the boxes we live in—our homes, our bodies, our identities—aren’t prisons but teachers? Containment Culture explores the tension between form and freedom, asking how we can inhabit structure without being confined by it.

The absurd works because it throws power off balance. It breaks the pattern. A clown handing a flower to a soldier, an artist painting a message on ice that’s melting as she works, a child sitting cross-legged in front of a line of shields — each act exposes how absurd the machinery of violence already is. It turns confrontation into a mirror, and that reflection is hard to face.

We spend so much of life staring at the two sides of every argument, choice, or self — but what if something new is forming in between? “The Unseen Third” explores how holding contradiction, rather than resolving it, can reveal a deeper pattern of wholeness and creativity.

Walt Whitman said it best: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Maybe that’s the work of being human — to stop trying to fit into one version of ourselves and instead embrace all the versions, even when they don’t agree.

The world felt simple again —
air and water,
weight and drift,
firmness and softness
finding their balance
somewhere between us.

Between solitude and partnership, there’s a third thing — something less defined, but no less real. It’s the space between being fully alone and being fully bound, where connection isn’t a structure but a living current.

They call us snowflakes — soft, fragile, easily offended.
The word drips with mockery, as if sensitivity were shameful and compassion flawed.

But perhaps the insult says more about the accuser than the accused. Those who deride fragility often reveal their own — unable to have their choices questioned without anger, their beliefs challenged without fear, their identity unsettled without collapse.

I’ve been called names similar to a Snowflake. Maybe you have too.
So let’s look closer. Let’s see what we’re really made of.

Asheville and Portland are two forks of the same energetic river, cut from the same earthy cloth — both places where artists and dreamers find belonging, where kindness lives beside contradiction. So when Portland hurts, it feels closer to home.

We live in a time when it’s easy to collapse one another into single stories — to mistake a moment for a whole person, or a headline for a whole country. In The Anatomy of Division, I explore how that instinct to label shapes not only our politics but our relationships and our sense of belonging.

Drawing from my essay Living with Contradictions, I look at what happens when we forget that people — and nations — are mosaics of opposites: kind and cruel, fearful and generous, broken and whole. Through stories of everyday life, community, and the quiet middle that rarely makes the news, I try to find what still connects us beneath the noise — the part of us that keeps showing up, helping, and hoping.

The Colors of Bravery celebrates Asheville’s spirit of authenticity, creativity, and community. Set against the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains, this reflection explores how Pride transforms the city into a living canvas — a celebration not only of identity, but of courage in all its forms. From the loud and visible to the quiet and steadfast, Troy Winterrowd honors the everyday acts of bravery that make Asheville shine: standing in one’s truth, standing beside others, and choosing love over fear.