A quiet morning revealed the difference between doing and simply being In the wee small hours of the morning, while the whole wide world is fast asleep… The rain has stopped. The streets are fresh and warm. The sky is clear. The day begins to form… The opening lyric to these favorite songs conveys the sensibility […]
What the Butterfly Reveals About Humanity’s Painful Transformation My contemplations tend to focus on the present. They’re usually prompted by one of my photographs, the social climate, or patterns in current events—what people are talking about online or in person. For these I generally write with a “closeup” or “normal” lens. This topic requires something […]
How Love is Learned, Modeled and Shared From Early Childhood on Kinds Of Love Love is a family of capacities. Some forms occur through biology, others through relationship and still others through deliberate moral and spiritual cultivation. As a felt experience, many types have been identified. Eros is romantic or erotic; Philia is friendship and […]
Qualities of Love and Consciousness Are Shaping Our Evolutionary Future My common practice for this blog is to select a photograph that will prompt a contemplation. In this instance, due to a period of focused readings in theology and philosophy relative to the future of humanity, there came a moment when I had the distinct […]
Seeing the Divine as Relationship While researching for my post “What Makes a True Leader” (October 19, 2025), it became apparent that “dominators” historically created and thrived due to a hierarchical social structure. Thinking about it, I began to realize that hierarchies are pervasive; we take them for granted. In Western religious traditions, the spiritual […]
Why the “Domination” Paradigm Fails and the “Communion” Paradigm Endures Through decades of studying the rise and fall of the ancient Maya civilization of Central America, one of my areas of interest has been the formation and decline of “kingship,” how power was gained and wielded and how it failed. Universally, and from a whole-systems […]
Are They “Individuals” or “Persons?” In the early 1960s I was photographing quite a lot in Cincinnati’s Findley Market downtown. This woman turned and saw that was pointing my camera at her, so she turned and posed. I took the shot, thanked her and we moved on. After writing my post, “The Typewriter and Authenticity,” […]
Evidence of cosmic order All evolution is a dance of wholes that separate themselves into parts and parts that join into mutually consistent new wholes. We can see it as a repeating, sequentially spiraling pattern: unity to individuation to competition to conflict to negotiation to resolution to cooperation to new levels of unity and so […]
What can we do in the face of unsettling change, eroding confidence and civility? The world has tilted in the direction of uncertainty. Social, economic and cultural norms are shifting and many are being dismantled.[1] Droughts, tornados, fires and flooding are becoming more frequent and severe. Technologies are evolving faster than the wisdom to manage […]
Chapter 14: Pattern (The final in this series) Through repetition, patterns create visual harmony, rhythm and order, all of which can contribute to meaning and create a sense of stability and symmetry which is pleasing to the eye. Patterns are apparent in the energy fields within atoms, the immensity of the cosmos and the way […]
Contemplative Photography 