If you know my writing, you know I’m drawn to opening language up — seeing what a word can hold when we loosen it a bit. Luxury is one of those words.

So let’s break it open gently.

Intimate Other is a reflection on intimacy as presence rather than possession — on relating without scripts, outcomes, or predefined roles, and allowing connection to remain open, responsive, and alive.

The modern shed isn’t about trend—it’s about fit. Born from sloped terrain, compact lots, and practical budgets, it favors a simple roofline, efficient form, and a contemporary way of living lightly on the land.

This essay reflects on quiet as a listening space—one that allows meaning to surface without force. In the absence of urgency, truth steadies, the body settles, and decisions arise from readiness rather than pressure.

Buying or selling a home isn’t just logistical.
It’s a transition—often an identity shift.

This piece explores what it means to step back, widen the frame, and make space for both intuition and reality before choosing what’s next.

In the language of the zodiac, the Snake is the year of shedding—quiet, internal, instinctual. It asks us to loosen skins we’ve outgrown, to release patterns, roles, and relationships that no longer fit, often without applause or certainty. The Horse arrives differently: outward, embodied, alive with motion. Where the Snake teaches us how to let go, the Horse invites us to move forward as ourselves—not cautiously, but honestly—trusting our seat, our rhythm, and the ground rising to meet us.

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.

A Personal Manifesto

I believe imagination isn’t wrong — it’s early.

It sparks the direction before the steps are known.
Action builds the steps.
Being carries them forward.

I trust listening over proving.
I value structure that serves spirit.
I believe magic becomes real when it’s practiced, embodied, and shared outward.

I aim to live aligned —
building what I can carry,
witnessing what asks to be seen,
offering what I’ve learned in service to others.

Not because magic guarantees arrival,
but because it invites becoming.

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.

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.