This is the simplest explanation of my purpose and approach. When I was just a baby, and my dad’s career was staring him down, he would hike with me on his back across San Francisco Bay. On his walks he’d talk out loud to me for advice, and I would babble at passing gulls. When I was grade school, walking was a way of getting to school, a bonding activity with my peers, and an epic quest to explore the world around me. After homework I’d run outside with a “Be back soon, Mom!” and I would come back in when the sun was low enough in the sky to mean ‘dinnertime’. I joined marching band in middle school; made it into a manner of life in high school. During the lockdown, I would walk for hours in the mountains of Southern California, often heading out well before sunrise and coming home well after sunset, looking for sense and structure in a world I no longer recognized. When I graduated college as a young man with a philosophy degree I went to the Rocky Mountains for two weeks. A few months into my first “big boy” job I took up trail work as a way to soothe my nervous system, plan my next big moves, and process the often self-abasing aspects of customer-service focused work.

Walking turned to feeling, thinking, and as I thought I began to catalogue, categorize. This led to exploration, naturally: are the ways in which I understand and think mutable? How does the language of my thought impact the character of it? And so I’d change, watch, postulate. Poetry and philosophy were very natural mediums for this kind of expansion: both have to do with the language of being. This is what I am, and how I exist.