Start Here: Why I Write and Who I Write For

For the Soul-Weary, the Searchers, and Those Unwilling to be Numbed to Sleep

So, I’ve lived a lot of lives.

When people ask where I’m from, I still pause.
Because the answer isn’t on a map.
It’s in the motion between places, in the memory of arrivals and departures, in the quiet art of becoming.

I was born in San Francisco in the 1960s, when incense and unrest floated in the same air. The Human Be-In. The Summer of Love. These weren’t history-book headlines. They were the wallpaper of my childhood. The city was a sermon in contradiction: compassion and chaos, dreamers and drifters, saints and swindlers all claiming to know the truth. I didn’t know it then, but that tension would become my life’s theme, the search for meaning amid the noise.

And then I moved, a lot. San Juan. London. Phoenix. Each place carved something into me.
Each goodbye stretched the thread of home until it became an inner compass instead of a street address.

That compass guided me into service.
Decades of military life.
Decades of federal work.
Years where purpose came wrapped in uniform and order, while meaning hid in the margins.

I’ve stood in the wreckage of Beirut after the Marine Barracks bombing, among the broken and the brave. I’ve walked through rooms where evil was cataloged in files and faces, where the human spirit was tested against the machinery of cruelty. I’ve seen what people do when the world collapses, and what they do to rebuild it.

I’ve investigated crimes and taught cadets, broken bread with strangers and buried friends, listened to stories that never reached the news but revealed the soul of this country in fragments, grief, humor, decency, and hope tangled together.

And somewhere in all that noise, I found philosophy.
Not as escape, but as anchor.

Marcus Aurelius. Kierkegaard. Epictetus. Nietzsche. Arendt. Baldwin.
They didn’t give me answers. They gave me better questions, and the courage to live inside them.

Over time, my compass shifted again, from service to reflection, from action to articulation.
Now I write.

Not as an academic or pundit, but as a man who’s seen the long arc of both decency and delusion. A secular humanist. A faith-friend. A lifelong public servant who still believes the soul is a public trust.

My work lives where the spiritual meets the civic, where reason meets reverence, where philosophy meets poetry, where grief meets grace. Light Against Empire is the home for that work, an umbrella for writing that refuses to separate inner life from public responsibility.

Through Light Against Empire, I write about democracy, courage, and the moral weather of our time.
Through Chronicles of Collapse, I write as witness and satirist, philosopher and citizen, tracing how empires fall and how souls endure.
Through The Compass of Faith & Reason, I write essays and reflections exploring meaning, morality, and wholeness, written for those navigating faith and doubt, spirituality and reason, reverence and inquiry.
Through The Daily Light, I offer brief, immediate reflections for those immersed in the news and the noise. Not more information, but orientation. A steady flame to help you stay awake, grounded, and human without burning out.

I follow in the spirit of voices like John O’Donohue, Rainn Wilson, adrienne maree brown, and Diego Perez. Not because we share doctrine, but because we share devotion, to meaning, to mercy, and to the discipline of staying awake in a world that keeps trying to sedate us.

I write for those who are tired of the performance of wisdom and hungry for the practice of it.
For those who want to stay tender without becoming naïve.
For those who are trying to keep their souls intact while everything around them monetizes the hollow.

I don’t offer perfection. I offer presence.
I don’t offer salvation. I offer solidarity.

If you’re wandering, come walk with me.
If you’re questioning, come ask with me.
If you’re weary from the noise of certainty, come sit in the quiet with me awhile.

This space, this work, this life, it’s for you.
For anyone who’s ever been cracked by life and chose to grow anyway.
For anyone still foolish enough to believe tenderness is strength, and attention is love made visible.

This is the work now:
to live with attention,
to resist cynicism,
to defend wonder,
to keep the soul intact,
and to carry each other home.