Meaning
How I Approach This Work
Meaning is not something human beings simply possess. It is something we continually create, inherit, negotiate, embody, and revise through relationship.
A Statement
What the Physics of Meaning Is
The Physics of Meaning does not attempt to prove God, nor does it ask science to validate spiritual experience by borrowing the language of physics.
It begins somewhere more grounded: with the recognition that human beings do not encounter reality from nowhere.
We develop inside bodies, relationships, families, cultures, institutions, histories, technologies, ecologies, and systems of power. We adapt to those conditions. Those adaptations shape perception. Perception gathers into meaning. Meaning organizes identity, relationship, and action. And through our participation, we help create the conditions in which other lives will develop.
The Physics of Meaning studies that continuous movement between world and person, body and meaning, adaptation and participation.
Science offers indispensable ways of investigating how these processes occur. Spiritual traditions ask different but equally human questions:
What is worthy of devotion? What does belonging mean? What kind of life should we create together? What does love require of us?
This work does not collapse those questions into one another. It creates a place where they can remain in conversation.
My own orientation within that conversation is love. I do not offer love as a scientific conclusion or a universal truth others must accept. I offer it as the direction from which I choose to participate: a commitment to remain responsive to reality, to preserve the possibility of revision, and to build conditions in which life can become more fully itself.
The framework therefore does not ask whether science can finally prove the sacred.
It asks whether we can investigate meaning, embodiment, ecology, development, and human participation seriously enough that the sacred does not have to disappear when scrutiny enters the room.
Not proof, but relationship.
Not certainty, but participation.
Not above or below, but with and through.
The Inquiry
Begin with a pattern, not a conclusion
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
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
Myth as method, not belief
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.
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
Four kinds of claim, never substituted
Empirical Claim
Something testable, grounded in research, accountable to evidence and revision.
Philosophical Argument
A reasoned position that invites examination, disagreement, and dialogue.
Symbolic Lens
A myth, story, or image used to illuminate — not to prove. Its value is in what it helps us see, not in whether it is literally true.
Phenomenological Observation
First-person account of lived experience — honest about its vantage, not claiming universality.
Modern academia is highly specialized. What I am trying to do is older — what used to be called natural philosophy: 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 Inquiry Examining Itself
A method that promises revision has to show its revisions
Two essays — how the knowing was actually acquired, and what the framework turned out to be for.
Soma & Sky · The Origin
I Learned Physics Backwards
How the body knows before language. Gravity as first teacher, thirty years of wordless correction — and the discovery that physics didn't replace what the body knew. It recognized it.
Read on Substack ↗The Record · The Revision
The Center I Was Trying to Prove
What the physics was for, where it broke, and what remains: orbit versus capture, participation over mass, the framework demoted to notes — and held more truly for it.
Read the Essay →Where the Approach Lives
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
The Literacies
Perceptive, symbolic, relational, participatory — the capacities of conscious participation, mapped as a spiral that keeps its open space.
Explore the Literacies →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.
Enter the Framework →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 ↗