Meaning
How I approach symbolic inquiry, development, and the study of human experience.
Meaning is not something human beings simply possess. It is something we continually create, inherit, negotiate, embody, and revise through relationship.
The Inquiry
My work sits at the intersection of developmental psychology, embodied practice, education, symbolic thought, and cultural observation. I study how meaning develops within individuals, relationships, communities, and cultures.
I do not begin with conclusions. I begin with a recurring pattern — then ask where else it appears.
Children. Dance. Films. Grammar. Climate. Economics. Religion. Development. The discipline comes afterward: comparing the pattern across domains without assuming they are identical. That is the method.
The Traditions I Draw From
I draw from many traditions. They are not interchangeable. They answer different kinds of questions.
Developmental Psychology
Helps us understand how minds, relationships, and capacities grow across a life. Empirical, testable, accountable to evidence.
Phenomenology
Explores lived experience from the inside — what it is like to be a body in the world, perceiving, relating, and making meaning.
Ecology
Reveals how living systems organize themselves — through relationship, reciprocity, and the patterns that sustain or exhaust them.
Myth & Narrative
Offers symbolic perspectives that illuminate recurring patterns of human life. Stories, films, and religious narratives become ways of asking questions — not final answers.
Following the Thread
I use myth as a method of inquiry rather than a system of belief. It is one of the ways I learn to see. The same is true of film, literature, movement, and symbol — each is a different angle on the same underlying question.
The method looks like this:
- Notice a recurring pattern
- Ask where else it appears
- Compare across domains without assuming they are identical
- Hold the comparison open — resist premature resolution
- Return to the body, the evidence, and the relationship
Keeping the Distinctions Visible
Modern academia is highly specialized. What I am trying to do is older — what used to be called natural philosophy or public intellectual work: thinking across disciplines while remaining accountable to each one.
That comes with a responsibility: to be explicit about which kind of claim I am making, so readers can enter from many backgrounds without feeling that one kind of evidence is being substituted for another.
That is the commitment this work tries to honor.
The Philosophy
After the Death of God
The essay collection that started everything — on what happens to human development when the structures that once organized meaning no longer hold the same authority.
Read the Essays →The Language
Symbolic Literacy
Four ways of reading meaning before it becomes language — through the body, attention, pattern, and time. The practice of noticing what is shaping you.
Explore Symbolic Literacy →The Inquiry
The Physics of Meaning
A phenomenological record — thirty years of watching how meaning actually behaves. How it gathers weight, bends attention, and organizes a life before anyone has named it.
Explore the Inquiry →The Portfolio
Embodied Threads
Original ballets, children's books, and creative productions — the twenty-year body of work through which the theory was being tested before it had a name.
View the Portfolio →