ONE INQUIRY/ MANY FORMS

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People sometimes ask how writing, psychology, organizational consulting, painting, music, scientific research, SoulArts private retreats, photography, and interactive multimedia works could possibly belong together.

 

The question always makes me smile because, from the inside, they never felt separate.

 

I’ve never experienced life in compartments: Art over here. Science over there. Spirituality somewhere else. Business in another room.  

 

Life has never belonged that way in my viewing of it.

 

From the time I was very young, drawing and painting were going on before I ever learned the alphabet. My mom would not allow me to use a coloring book as she wanted me to have my own lines not draw inside someone else’s. (That early permission to resist predetermined boundaries became both a strength and, at times, an impatience with systems that leave too little room for independent inquiry. Music, too, became an early language through a family of musicians and sining in choirs, playing in band, and early life poetry put to song.

 

Alongside those creative expressions grew an equally persistent fascination with the larger questions of human life:

 

• Why do people become who they become?

• What gives rise to direction, to ideas, to courage?

• Why do some experiences enlarge us while others leave us repeating the same patterns for decades?

 

Those questions carried me into the study of comparative religion, opening into both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Psychology and sociology followed naturally as I tried to understand the individual, the social world, and the places where each fails the other; graduate school later added the discipline of applied social research.

 

Founding my own organizational consulting practice widened the field yet again, allowing me to observe not only individuals but entire systems—the cultures, assumptions, loyalties, fears, and possibilities that form the basis for how groups of people live and work together, what allows them to function well, and what prevents them from doing so.

 

Looking back, I can see that I was never collecting disciplines. I was learning different languages for observing and investigating the same mystery: Life/Meaning/Living it well.

 

Some questions are explored best through research. Others through conversation. Some reveal themselves while standing in front of a blank canvas. Others emerge in music, in dreams, in a large scale installation art work, in organizational conflict, in grief, or in the unexpected symbolism hidden inside an ordinary afternoon. Each language reveals something essential which the other cannot so naturally call into view.

 

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Then life interrupted my current flow of observation...

 

An unexpected awakening during my forties offered its own unique layer of seeing. It did not hand me a new philosophy. It stripped away the illusion that life could ever be understood from a prepackaged awareness or from a theoretical distance. The inquiry became personal. Knowledge gradually gave way to participation. I stopped asking only, “What is true?” and found myself asking, “How do we actually live what we discover to be true?”

 

Without planning it, people began asking to work with me privately.

 

Over the years those conversations expanded into mentoring, retreat intensives, advisory work with organizations, books, paintings, songs, community gatherings, and more recently the SoulArts Diary Series and Living Legacy projects.

 

To someone looking from the outside, those may appear to be very different endeavors. But to me, they are instructively different conversations within the same life.

 

• A painting can express something that cannot be contained nor understood in words.

• A piece of music can carry a feeling long before understanding arrives. •Research invites a disciplined level of discernment.

• Research invites disciplined observation and discernment.

• Psychology offers a multi-faceted lens into the human condition.

• Social systems thinking reminds us that individuals never exist apart from the larger fields in which they live.

• Contemplative inquiry continually asks us to become more honest than comfortable.

 

None of these stand above the others. Each has become a voice in a much larger conversation.

 

Perhaps that is why I have never been especially interested in choosing between art and science, contemplation and action, intellect and intuition, personal growth and organizational change. Human life has never forced me to choose. It has continued inviting me to see more completely.

 

Today, when I look across the many expressions of my work, I no longer think of them as separate accomplishments.

 

I see one lifelong inquiry finding the form it needed at each and any particular moment.