“I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.” —Terrence (Publius Terentius Afer)

I am a dog dad, a Ducati enthusiast, a book collector, an outdoorsman, an entrepreneur, and an emerging scholar.

A sliver view of my near-thousand-volume map of the psyche—literature (Blake to Didion), cultural witness (Baldwin, to Sontag), philosophy (Nietzsche, Spinoza, Kant, Heidegger, the Greeks), myth/esoterica (Crowley, Levi, Watts, McKenna), and a deep spine of clinical, developmental, integral, transpersonal, and depth psychology.

I am a Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and am currently a student pursuing a Ph.D. in Depth Psychology with specialization in Jungian & Archetypal Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, aiming to complete my dissertation by 2029.

For me, all roads seemed to lead back to one central current. The enormous body of work C.G. Jung synthesized and later refined by scholars over the last century into a finely tuned language that captures the totality of the psyche, its movement, and meaning, distilled into universal empirical principles, narrow enough to be precise, but broad enough to be unique to every person.

Jae with his sister on her horse Dusty (1994).

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) —Walt Witman, Song of Myself, 51

Words both constrict and liberate. They condense the ephemeral realms of thought into active forms, while simultaneously expanding the mundane dimensions of time and space.

When distilled by the mind into utterance, they bridge the unseen and the seen, spirit and matter. They are neither fully concrete nor temporal abstractions yet, their potency may intone life or death.

Words traverse human landscapes as foolish emissaries, gods of men, unsavory house guests, tiresome dilettantes, transcendent angels, humble illuminations, and spellbound revelations.

They shape causality, bending reality as they are woven and spoken. In this way, words are inherently magical.

But for me, this magic has been a battle. I have suffered and caused suffering. Like many, existential curiosities, and emotional turmoils juxtaposed by small victories and fleeting joys light a checkerboard path through the labyrinth of my mortality.

Forever endeavoring to hold the tension between the opposites is a great work and an even greater mystery. This friction embodies the myriad paradoxes that define me: I am what I am not, and I am not what I am.

By refusing to identify with word-labels, I am free to shape myself on the human spectrum beyond the confines of duality—success or failure, good or bad, disordered or ordered, defective or effective, active or still, wrong or right.

I accept myself as I am now and as I am becoming. By reconciling the split duality within, I find myself arriving at a singular point: contentment.

A harmony between the finite dance of paradox. Thus transcending the tertium non datur, giving birth to a third option, the path less traveled, and my personal myth.

This is the inner alchemy of my life, and my living contemplation of these words: gnothi sauton