Most mornings, I read before the day gets noisy and then go walking. I carry a question with me, though I rarely expect to return with an answer. The point is to loosen the question from the language in which it first arrived and let the road, the weather, the body and whatever I encounter have their say.

I am a writer, blogger and barefoot philosopher. I use that last word in its oldest sense: a lover of wisdom, someone trying to learn how to live. Philosophy, for me, belongs in the street, the kitchen, the garden and the difficult conversation. It begins wherever our ideas about life collide with the life we are actually living.

Soulcruzer is where I conduct that inquiry in public. I have been writing here since 2004, following my curiosity through story, myth, psychology, technology, music, walking and the unfinished business of becoming human. The subjects change, but the deeper questions keep returning. What shapes a life? Which stories have we inherited? How much of what we call reality is interpretation hardened into habit? What might become possible if we learned to see our stories as constructions rather than commandments?

I call this work **Narrative Alchemy**. The name points towards a practice of examining the stories through which we make meaning and testing whether they still deserve their authority. Some stories shelter us. Some help us cross difficult ground. Others become rooms we have forgotten how to leave. I am interested in the moment when a person recognises the walls and begins to imagine a door.

My approach is deliberately plural. I draw from existential philosophy, Daoism, depth and archetypal psychology, NLP, myth, metaphor, chaos magick and the strange intelligence of the imagination. I treat these as lenses rather than creeds. Each reveals something and conceals something. The task is to keep looking, to change lenses when the view becomes too certain, and to remember that no model gets the final word on a human life.

That includes the stories I tell about myself.

I graduated from West Point and served for ten years as an officer in the United States Army. Since leaving military life, I have spent more than two decades working in learning and development, coaching and facilitating conversations with leaders, teams and organisations.

Those experiences shaped me, but they do not contain me. I have spent much of my life moving between identities: soldier, trainer, coach, consultant, poet, blogger, husband, father, wanderer, beginner. I no longer feel compelled to make them resolve into a single polished character. A self may be less like a monument and more like a gathering place, full of competing voices, old loyalties, unfinished arguments and unexpected guests.

Writing helps me hear what is happening in that gathering place. Walking changes the rhythm of the conversation. Reading brings other minds into it. Dialogue tests what survives contact. More recently, working with AI has opened another chamber of the practice: language responding to language, thought meeting its reflection in a machine, the prompt becoming a new instrument for philosophical and creative inquiry.

I sometimes call myself a **text-based ontologist** because I am fascinated by the way words participate in making worlds. Names alter what we notice. Metaphors organise perception. Stories tell us who we are permitted to become. Now that text can generate images, music, code and interactive environments, this old human power has acquired a new technical form. I want to understand what that does to imagination, authorship and the stories by which we live.

Soulcruzer is my record of that investigation. You will find finished essays here, but also field notes, fragments, experiments and reports from the path. I am less interested in presenting a coherent system than in leaving honest evidence of a mind in motion.

The question beneath it all remains simple enough to ask and difficult enough to occupy a lifetime:

How shall I live?

This blog is where I keep returning to the question.

How I Think Things Work

Here is my rough cartography.

The Basic Model

We are meaning-making animals. Constitutively. Sartre’s formulation is the cleanest: existence precedes essence. We arrive without instructions. The meaning is waiting to be made. That is the most extraordinary freedom available to a conscious creature.

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is where I send people first. It was arrived at in the most uncompromising laboratory imaginable. That authority is different from rigour, and more useful.

Stories are the operating system. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what is possible, what we deserve — these are programs running on the hardware of consciousness. They shape perception so thoroughly that they become invisible, mistaken for the territory rather than the map. The NLP tradition established this clearly. The narrative therapy tradition extended it. Chaos magick made it radically practical: beliefs are tools, to be picked up and put down deliberately. The skilled practitioner holds and releases them as needed, using each for what it can do.

Free will is a useful fiction. Useful fictions do real work. Hans Vaihinger spent his career on this. His “as if” philosophy is the most honest position available: the most generative stance is to behave as if your choices matter, because the alternative produces paralysis and bad stories. The skilled navigator behaves as if the stars are fixed, knowing they are not. The fiction earns its keep by being useful.

The chaos magick formulation is sharper: adopt the belief that serves the working, then release it when the working is done. The belief is the instrument.

Reality is layered, and the higher layers are real. Reduce a love affair to atoms and molecules and you lose it. The reduction is accurate and entirely beside the point. Friendship, meaning, archetype, narrative structure: these are genuine features of the reality human beings actually inhabit, the actual furniture of the world. James Hillman: the gods have become symptoms. The depression, the inflation, the rage. The psyche speaking in its native language.

Re-Visioning Psychology is the entry point. Give it time.

Framing is therefore one of the most powerful tools available. If reality presents itself in layers, and the layers we inhabit are shaped by the stories we hold, then the ability to reframe is a fundamental human capacity. To shift the lens. To step between interpretive frames deliberately. A survival skill. The difference between a person who is trapped and a person who is not is often nothing more than the frame they are standing in.

The examined life is a practice. Pierre Hadot spent his career recovering the fact that ancient philosophy was a set of exercises, not propositions. Ways of transforming the self. Ways of practising death so that life became visible. Socrates did not run seminars. He stopped people in the street. Philosophy, understood this way, is what you do with what you know.

Philosophy as a Way of Life by Hadot is the book that changed how I understood what I was doing.

What I Think Is Happening

We are living through the collapse of two of humanity’s primary meaning-delivery systems, without a replacement ready. This is the context for almost everything that is going wrong.

The religious frameworks are depleted. Better explanations replaced their literal claims. When we ejected the faulty claims, we accidentally ejected the meaning they carried. The crisis this has produced is real and largely unnamed. People are struggling because they lack a story big enough to live inside.

Harari maps this transition clearly in Sapiens, though he is more interested in the mechanism than the wound.

Work is next. The first wave of industrialisation replaced physical labour. AI is replacing cognitive labour. Not all of it, not immediately, but enough and fast enough to strip work of its role as identity anchor for millions of people. We are not ready for this. The economic and political institutions we have built assume that most people will define themselves by what they do for eight hours a day. That assumption is already cracking.

Language is becoming the universal substrate. This is the development I find most extraordinary and least fully reckoned with. In late 2022, something tipped. The prompt became the brushstroke. Text typed into a box becomes image, sound, code, story, interaction, argument, program. The word was always generative cosmologically. Every mystical tradition understood this, from the Logos of John’s gospel to the abracadabra of the chaos magician. Now it is generative technically as well. The two registers have converged. This changes what it means to be a writer, a thinker, a maker, a philosopher.

Religion and work are depleting as sources of meaning, and arriving into that vacuum is a technology that most people have no framework for. The timing matters. Into that vacuum flows anxiety, tribalism, conspiracy, and despair. All symptoms of the same underlying condition: people living without a story they can stand inside.

The only question that matters right now is whether we can build new meaning-making frameworks before the old ones fully collapse. This is primarily a philosophical problem. A story problem. It will manifest as political and economic, but that is where it surfaces. The roots are elsewhere.

The work of helping people recognise and rewrite the stories that limit them sits at the centre of this.

It is a response to the actual emergency.

My Values

Life, as I am living it, is one long inquiry. Part field note, part pilgrimage, part conversation with something I cannot quite name.

At the centre of it is a simple but stubborn desire: to live freely and artfully. Freedom, for me, is the freedom to follow the rhizome. To let the mind move laterally, intuitively, associatively, without having to justify its path to some external authority. My thinking does not move in straight lines. It branches, loops, doubles back, disappears underground, and surfaces somewhere strange and alive. That is not a bug. It is the feature.

Curiosity is a way of being, not a method. A posture toward existence. To ask better questions. To stay open. To resist the dulling effect of certainty. I am suspicious of the person who has finished being surprised.

I trust lived experience. The wisdom that comes from walking, paying attention, getting things wrong, sitting with discomfort, allowing ordinary life to become a teacher. I am drawn to ideas, but I have no interest in living only in abstraction. Philosophy matters to me most when it touches the ground. When it changes how I take a walk, how I speak to another person, how I meet the morning.

Walking has become one of my primary ways of thinking. The path, the trees, the weather, the rhythm of the body: these are part of the work. Nature, solitude, and slowness are not luxuries I occasionally permit myself. They are conditions of the thinking. I need time away from the noise to hear what is actually moving beneath the surface.

Language is a living medium. Writing is how I discover what I think, what I feel, and what I am becoming. Words are thresholds. Through them I make contact with meaning, memory, myth, and possibility. The blank page is a place I enter.

Beneath the surface of ordinary life there are archetypes, symbols, patterns, ghosts, gods, monsters, and guides. To live well is partly to see through the literal world into its deeper dimensions, to recognise that every life is also a myth in motion. The stories we inhabit are structural. Change the story and you change the life. I take the imaginal seriously.

I want a simpler life. Room for what matters: reading, walking, writing, conversation, contemplation, friendship, beauty, and useful work. My ambition is to build a life-first practice, one that supports freedom, creativity, and depth rather than consuming them. The question I apply to any new commitment is whether it moves me toward that life or away from it.

The work I want to do is soulfully useful. To open doors, offer language, invite people back into conversation with their own lives. To help them remember themselves. The essay, the coaching session, the conversation in the street: if any of these help someone hear something they already knew but had stopped listening for, that is enough.

I am drawn to the solitary path. I am also drawn to the tribe, the campfire, the old human need to sit together and make meaning. The digital griot: gathering fragments, carrying stories, keeping the signal alive for those who are also trying to live more consciously. Both pulls are real. I do not have to choose.

Nature, mystery, language, meaning. The ongoing practice of turning lived experience into something useful to another person.

That is the life I am already living. Imperfectly, with great intention.

Some of My Most Important Books

A partial list. The books that rewired something.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

Two poems in this collection have followed me for decades. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a portrait of the examined life not examined: a man so paralysed by self-consciousness that he cannot act, cannot risk, cannot eat the peach. I read it as a warning. “The Hollow Men” goes further. These are the people who did not choose, who arrived at the end having been “shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.” The fear I wrote about in the About page comes partly from here. Eliot named it before I knew I was carrying it.

Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

The film is something else entirely. The book is a philosophical novel wearing the clothes of military science fiction, and it shaped how I thought about duty, citizenship, and the relationship between rights and responsibility long before I understood that was what I was reading. I first read it as a West Point cadet and again after leaving the Army. It reads differently each time.

Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life

The book that changed how I understood what I was doing. Hadot spent his career recovering the fact that ancient philosophy was a set of spiritual exercises, a practice of transforming the self. Socrates did not run seminars. This is the tradition I am working in, and Hadot named it for me.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Arrived at in the most uncompromising laboratory imaginable. Frankl’s account of finding meaning in Auschwitz is clarifying rather than uplifting. The argument underneath the memoir: we cannot always choose our circumstances, but we can choose our orientation toward them. That authority is different from rigour, and more useful.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling

The acorn theory: each of us carries a daimon, a guiding intelligence that knows what we are here to become. Hillman’s argument is that the psyche is teleological, always pressing toward the shape it was given at the start. This reframed the coaching work entirely. The question is not who am I becoming but who have I always been trying to become.

Stephen Larsen, The Mythic Imagination

Larsen was a student of Campbell’s and carried the work deeper into psychological territory. The mythic imagination is the native mode of the psyche. We think in stories, symbols, archetypes. This book helped me understand why the coaching work and the philosophical work keep converging on the same territory: the story beneath the story.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Overused, often misapplied, still indispensable. Campbell demonstrated that the monomyth is a story about how the psyche moves through transformation. Every person who walks through a threshold they cannot un-cross is living this pattern. Knowing the map does not make the journey easier. It makes it legible.

Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

The most practically useful book I have read on belief and the structure of reality tunnels. Wilson’s argument: your nervous system filters reality through circuits programmed by your earliest experiences, your culture, your random encounters. You are seeing your model of reality. And the model can be updated. This is the philosophical underpinning of everything I call narrative alchemy, even if Wilson would have put it very differently.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Difficult, deliberately anti-linear, rewarding in ways I am still discovering. The rhizome: a model of thinking that grows in all directions at once, without a fixed root or a hierarchy of branches. It gave me language for something I had always done but never had a framework for. I have not finished this book and I never will. That is the point.

Michel de Montaigne, The Essays

The first blogger. A man writing in public about what it is like to be inside his own mind, across a lifetime, without arriving at conclusions. The Essays are digressive, alive with genuine inquiry, unafraid of contradiction. Every time I feel the pressure to be more systematic, I re-read Montaigne. He is the tuning fork.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche at his most exhilarating. The challenge to examine the foundations of your values rather than inheriting them by default, the insistence that the philosopher’s work is partly the work of creating a framework worth living inside. Beyond Good and Evil gave me permission to take seriously the idea that values are made, not found. Nietzsche rewards the careful reader and punishes the lazy one.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Eighty-one short chapters that have been generating commentary for two and a half thousand years without being exhausted. The Tao Te Ching resists being a system. Wu wei: doing by not doing, acting in accord with the nature of things rather than against it. The water metaphor: water yields to everything and eventually cuts through stone. I return to this book when I notice I am trying too hard.

Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

Written by a man who had killed sixty people in single combat before retiring to a cave to write philosophy. The Book of Five Rings wears the clothes of sword strategy. Underneath: the relationship between mastery and simplicity, seeing clearly without attachment to outcome, the way a practice becomes a way of being. My military background brought me to it. My philosophical practice is why I stayed.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Japhy Ryder’s rucksack revolution: thousands of young Americans walking into the mountains with packs on their backs, refusing the dream of the box, the car, the TV flickering in every window at the same time on every street. There is a passage where Kerouac stands in a suburban neighbourhood looking at the sameness of it all, everyone watching the same programmes, living out identical lives in identical rooms, and feels the quiet despair of it. I read it first at twenty and it landed like a diagnosis. I have been running from that vision of life ever since. The rucksack revolution never entirely happened. The aspiration was correct.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Walking

Two texts in one entry because they belong together. Walden is the record of an experiment: what if you went to the woods and refused to live a life you had not examined? “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” Walking is the companion piece, Thoreau’s philosophical case for sauntering, for the walk with no destination except contact with the actual. He traces “saunter” to the medieval pilgrims walking to the Holy Land, à la Sainte Terre. Every walk is a pilgrimage if you take it seriously enough.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Walking as a philosophical act. Solnit traces the history of walking as a way of thinking, a form of political engagement, a practice of attention. This book gave me permission to take walking as seriously as I always had, and the language to explain why it belongs at the centre of the practice.