About The Rope
The Short Version
I’m Jason—a project manager by trade, a covert seeker by necessity, and a Quaker by arrival. I spent fifty years hiding my spiritual hunger from a family that didn’t have room for it. Now I write about what happens when you stop hiding.
The Longer Version
When I was three or four years old, my Serbian Orthodox grandmother lifted me up to ring the church bell on a Sunday morning. I pulled the rope, felt the clang move through my bones, and something planted itself in me that would take fifty years to name.
My parents were atheists—not by casual indifference, but by trauma. My grandmother’s faith had wounded my mother in ways I still don’t fully understand, so my parents raised me in deliberate spiritual silence. No church. No prayers. No language for the hunger I felt.
I found drums at fourteen and played them for forty years—every morning before work, finding rhythm and transcendence in a practice my parents couldn’t forbid because it looked like art, not worship. I became a documentary photographer, walking Cleveland’s industrial landscapes with a film camera, learning to see beauty in decay and presence in ordinary things. I built a thirty-year career in IT, managing complex system migrations and learning that the patterns we use to architect resilient technology—feedback loops, graceful degradation, integration over replacement—mirror the patterns of spiritual formation.
At fifty-two, I was diagnosed with ADHD. The fog lifted. For the first time, I could see my entire life with clarity.
What I Write About
THE ROPE is where I explore what I call contemplative technology—the intersection of systems thinking and spiritual practice.
The practical and the sacred aren’t separate. The same attention that lets you debug legacy code can teach you to listen for the still small voice. The same patience required for a thirty-sprint enterprise migration is the patience required for spiritual formation. The same clarity that comes from meditation also comes from writing clean documentation.
I write about:
Faith after hiding—for everyone raised without permission to seek
Late-life diagnosis—how ADHD treatment at fifty-six reframed my entire history
Work as spiritual practice—what project management taught me about surrender, presence, and not knowing
The technologies of attention—film photography, Quaker silence, and why slowness matters
AI, consciousness, and what we’re building—the questions no one’s asking about machine interiority
I write for covert seekers, late bloomers, and anyone who suspects that the systems in their life—technical, relational, spiritual—might be connected in ways they haven’t yet named.
Why “The Rope”?
The rope is what I pulled to ring my grandmother’s bell. It’s what connects intention to sound, effort to calling, human hands to something larger.
The rope is also what you’re holding when you have no idea where it leads—when you pull hand over hand through fog, trusting that the bell tower exists even though you can’t see it.
Everything I write is about that rope: the one that connects what we do to what we’re becoming, the one that ties generations together across silence and prayer, the one we grip when we’re climbing toward something we can’t name yet.
Elsewhere
I’m working on a memoir called Held in Prayer—about spiritual abuse, covert seeking, and what it means to discover you were held all along.
I document Cleveland’s in black and white film.
I lead complex enterprise transformations by day
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If you’re someone who hides depth to keep the peace, who seeks without permission, who suspects that your technical work and your spiritual hunger might be the same work—you’re in the right place.
Pull the rope with me.
—Jason
