How the Work Came to Be

This work did not arrive all at once, nor did it begin as a project.

I did not arrive at this work through a program, a credential, or an institution.
I arrived through noticing.

Long before I had language for philosophy or contemplative practice, I was writing poetry. Some of my earliest memories of expression are poems written in childhood — including one simply titled A Poem, from my early elementary years. In it, I described a poem as “a kind of little story that sometimes tickles your heart,” something that could be read, sung, or laughed at — a person’s best friend, and a heartening little story.

From the beginning, I’ve been drawn to small forms that can hold a great deal — little stories that say so much with so little.

Language could never hold all of what I was noticing. That was often the most frustrating part. Experience arrived faster, fuller, and more layered than words could carry. Poetry became a way to stay honest without trying to say everything — a form that allowed meaning to remain intact without being exhausted by explanation.

That early relationship with poetry eventually became public. My childhood through young adult poems were later collected and published as Poems from a Lost Soul. The book was not an arrival point, but a record — a way of letting language carry what it could, while acknowledging what would always remain felt rather than explained.

Growing up, I often experienced myself as a lost soul — not because something was missing, but because what I noticed didn’t yet have a place to land. Sensitivity, attention, and feeling arrived without a shared context to make sense of them. Poetry became a way to survive that gap — a place where the unsayable could exist without needing to be explained.

What began as personal survival gradually revealed itself as a shared inquiry.

Poetry never stopped being part of my life — it changed form. As experience deepened, language increasingly needed breath and body. Songs emerged as another way of staying close to what was being lived, allowing feeling, rhythm, and voice to carry meaning that prose could not always hold.

This work was not developed at a distance from life. It was shaped through living — through relationship, loss, devotion, conflict, repair, and return. Experience was not something to be analyzed later; it was the ground from which noticing arose.

Alongside this, I carried a long-standing fascination with how things connect — from the smallest physical phenomena to psychological experience, from natural systems to the wider cosmos. I did not experience these as separate domains, but as different expressions of the same underlying patterns. This orientation toward connectedness shaped how I noticed the world long before I had language for it.

Over time, I also noticed that experience does not arrive neatly labeled as good or bad. Meaning depends on context, story, and stance. Even qualities we tend to idealize — like love, care, or devotion — can become constraining or distorting when they turn into measures, tests, or demands. This recognition shaped my resistance to prescriptive frameworks and my emphasis on ethical attention rather than moral certainty.

This way of working was not smooth or linear. It was often hard, messy, and deeply confusing. Noticing did not resolve uncertainty; it intensified it. There were long periods without clarity, reassurance, or external validation — stretches where staying with experience required endurance rather than insight. The work continued not because it was elegant, but because it felt necessary.

Noticing, at first, was not a method. It was something that happened when I slowed down enough to feel experience before interpreting it. Language became a place to hold what I sensed — not to resolve it, but to keep it intact. Small shifts in attention began to matter: the way words tightened or softened the body, the way meaning arrived differently when it wasn’t rushed, the way presence could change the ethical quality of an interaction without anyone saying a word.

When language fell short, I trusted the felt sense of coherence — the way something rang true before I could explain why.

Over time, noticing became a sustained practice — not something I did, but something that shaped how I listened, wrote, and related. I began to see that attention itself was not neutral. The way we notice organizes the conditions for what becomes possible — internally, relationally, and systemically.

This inquiry gradually moved into writing. First as fragments and reflections, then as longer field notes and essays. Writing became a way to stay close to lived experience without collapsing it into explanation. I was less interested in conclusions than in fidelity — in staying true to what was actually happening, even when it was unclear or unresolved.

As the work continued, patterns began to reveal themselves. Experiences that initially felt personal showed coherence across contexts. The language of resonance, fields, and emergence arose not as metaphor, but as lived description. This became the foundation for what would later be articulated as the Resonant Spectrum Principle — a philosophical framework exploring how awareness, coherence, and resonance operate across scales, without reducing experience to mechanism or belief.

Alongside this theoretical articulation, practical forms emerged. The Noticing Life™ developed as a contemplative writing and practice ecosystem — essays, journals, pauses, and live experiences designed to support reflection without prescription. These were not tools meant to produce outcomes, but spaces designed to allow meaning to arise in its own time.

Teaching, when it occurred, did not take the form of instruction. Instead, it involved designing conditions in which others could encounter their own noticing. This included educator-facing materials, small-group contemplative spaces, and live experiences that emphasized presence over performance and inquiry over intervention.

Throughout this work, cross-disciplinary practice remained essential. Writing, voice, embodiment, and systems thinking informed one another. Noticing was not confined to cognition; it lived in the body, in sound, in relationship, and in silence. This non-linear integration was not a departure from rigor, but its source.

The work remains ongoing. The Resonant Spectrum Principle continues to be developed in long-form writing. New journal editions and essays are in progress. The inquiry itself is understood as living — responsive to context, shaped by relationship, and grounded in ethical attention.

I do not offer this work as a solution or a system to be adopted. I offer it as a practice of staying with experience long enough for something honest to emerge.

Noticing, in this sense, is not passive.
It is an ethical act.