No whiteboard or notebook in a coffee shop. No up at 3:00AM. No single conversation that cracked it open. Just a problem I kept running into, and a growing irritation that no one had solved it yet.

In 30 years, I have watched the tools change — from paper schedules on boards with red thread across the cards to Gantt software, from email chains to Slack, from handwritten notes to AI transcription. Each wave brought more capability and, quietly, more noise. We got better at capturing everything. We got worse at knowing what mattered.

The last wave — Plaud, Copilot, Teams transcription, all of it — finally pushed me past the edge. Everyone was recording everything. Every meeting left behind a document. By the end of a complicated week I was drowning in words, all of them mine or a colleague’s, all of them theoretically important, none of them telling me what I actually needed to know: had anything changed from what we agreed?

That is the question I have been trying to answer for three decades. Not “what happened in the meeting.” What changed from what we said we would do.

Leaders have always wanted the same thing. They call it different things — predictability, certainty, a reliable forecast — but what they want is determinism. Tell me when. Tell me how much. Tell me it will be exactly as planned.

Software has never been able to give them that. Not honestly. Especially not in the complicated, legacy-heavy, politically fraught world of enterprise modernization, where the sinkholes hide beneath the surface of every project — unplanned features no one remembered were there, dependencies that were assumed and never stated, decisions that were made in hallways and never written down.

Scope and schedule and budget look like constants. They are not. They bleed. Slowly, quietly, through hundreds of small decisions about details that no one flagged as significant in the moment. And then one day you look up and realize you have crossed a line you cannot see on any document, into a territory where the original agreement no longer describes the reality you are living in.

The problem was never information. It was the gap between what was agreed and what was actually happening. And I never had a tool that watched that gap for me.

There was a program manager once — I will not name him, or the project, or the client — who decided he did not like the answers I was giving him. So he stopped asking me and started doing. He was the kind of person who needed to be in charge, and in his mind, needing to be in charge was the same as being in charge.

I felt the shift before I could name it. Someone on the team was filling a role that was not theirs. Another person was operating in the space between responsibilities. The boundaries of who was doing what had quietly dissolved, and the dissolution was invisible because it had happened through a hundred small acts of accommodation, none of which anyone had decided to make.

One-on-one conversations did nothing. Stepping back made it worse. The only thing I could do was call it out as a risk — which felt, in the moment, like pointing at smoke and being told there was no fire.

What I needed was documentation. Not of what I thought. Of what I had actually observed, in sequence, across time. Evidence that a pattern existed before it became a crisis. A place where I could say: here is the shift, and here is when it started, and here is what I said about it, and here is what happened next.

That is what I built.

I called it Ad Finum. Latin for “to the end.”

As a musician, I know Ad Infinitum — to infinity, forever, without end. I was struck by the opposite. Projects end. They are supposed to end. The whole discipline of project management is a discipline of endings — of shipping, closing, completing, releasing something into the world and then letting it go.

To the end felt right. Honest. A little austere.

I want to say something about why I am writing this here, on The Rope, which is not a publication about software or project management or anything that comes with a license key.

The Rope is about the examined life. About paying attention to the interior. About what happens when you stop performing and start noticing.

Here is what I noticed: I had been carrying a limitation for thirty years and calling it the nature of the work. The information was always too much. The patterns were always too subtle. The evidence of a slow drift was always arriving faster than I could process it, so I managed from intuition — which is real, which is earned, but which leaves you alone with a feeling you cannot prove.

The tool I built helps me not lose the thread. It reads what happened in a meeting and compares it to what we said we would do, and surfaces the gap. It does not replace my judgment. It frees up enough of my attention that I can actually use my judgment — on the things that require it. On the conversations. On the people. On the quiet coaching that an experienced project manager spends most of their time doing, whether or not anyone names it that.

I have always had ideas. I have not always had the means to build them. That changed too.

Within a couple of days of starting — working alongside AI tools in a way I had never worked before — I had built something I did not believe I could build. Not a prototype exactly. A working thing. It surprised me in the way that anything surprises you when the gap between imagining and making turns out to be smaller than you thought.

What do I hope for it?

I hope it helps project managers — real ones, the ones doing complicated work in complicated organizations, the ones who feel the shift before they can prove it — have one less thing to carry alone.

I hope it protects people. From the passive drift. From the program manager who does not like the answer. From the meeting that changed everything and left no trace.

I hope, in some small way, it makes more room for the human parts of the work. The parts that cannot be automated, summarized, or extracted from a transcript. The part where you sit across from someone who is struggling and you have something useful to say, because you were not spending your whole afternoon rebuilding the record of what happened last Tuesday.

That is enough. That is what I hoped for when I started.

If you know a project manager who manages complicated things and feels the weight of it — you might send this to them. The product is at adfinum.us. The beta is open, by invitation. There is a request access form.

And if you are just here for The Rope — that is enough too. This is the examined life, applied to the tools we build to help us live it.

adfinum.us

I was rifling through the cutouts when a maroon album stopped me — the Symphonic Percussion Ensemble. Not something I would ever have considered purchasing. But something about it stood out. I flipped it over and inspected the names. No pictures. Just white text on a dark jacket. And there, halfw…

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When I was three years old, my grandmother handed me a rope and let me ring a bell. The sound that came through my body was the first proof I had that my faith was real, not an idea, but a resonance. Fifty years later, I would learn that faith doesn’t require a voice to survive. But first, it had to learn to hide. This is the story of what happens to faith when it is shamed into silence. And what sound it learns to make when it finally speaks again.

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I’ve been thinking about a particular sculpture since visiting the Cleveland Museum of Art recently. A piece called "Mother and Child” by Isamu Noguchi. I adore art, but it wasn’t a topic I expected to obsess over in a week full of reports, emails, and design meetings.

Noguchi said: “Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.”

I don’t know why that keeps finding me in the middle of software projects. But it does.

My background is in music composition, and I’ve had many a debate about what separates art from craft — whether they’re different things at all, or just different moods of the same impulse. In 2010, a developer told me he considered himself a craftsman and that code was art. I was skeptical. I told him to focus on the most efficient path to done. Earlier in my career, my boss John had made sure my job was to squelch exactly that kind of thinking — keep to tasks, hold the scope line, leave no room for creative drift or risk or the thing we called scope creep, as if curiosity were a disease.

I’ve softened on that developer. I think he was right and I wasn’t ready to hear it.

There are really only two kinds of work in sculpture. Addition and subtraction.

Clay welcomes accumulation — you build up, layer by patient layer, trusting that form emerges from what you put in. Stone demands the opposite. You take away. Carefully. Irreversibly. And you have to trust that what you’re after is already present, waiting.

Software works exactly this way. Most teams just never name it.

Additive work is where most of us live. An existing system. A backlog. A scaffold someone else built, with decisions baked into the foundation you didn’t make and can’t fully see. You’re extending something. The constraints are inherited. Your job is to build without breaking what’s already holding weight. That takes real skill. Real craftsmanship.

Subtractive work is rarer. And harder. It asks you to hold the ideal form in your mind before the material cooperates. To deprecate what doesn’t belong. To say *not this* as a deliberate act, not a defeat. To keep cutting until the thing that was always in there can finally breathe.

I recently left a project where leadership was performing what they called a lift-and-shift — different database, different middle tier, new customer experiences inside and out. Nothing was being saved. A complete rewrite. What they didn’t realize was that nobody had documented the business rules that needed to be coded. IT said they’d reverse-engineer from the existing code. The business said “good luck, because no one on our team was here when we built it.”

A lump of marble. No sculptor. No image in the stone.

The part no one talks about enough is the armature.

In clay work, the armature is the internal structure — wire, dowel, whatever holds the form while you work. Nobody sees it in the finished piece. But get it wrong and nothing else matters. The whole thing collapses under its own weight eventually, no matter how beautiful the surface looks in the meantime.

I’ve worked on projects with no armature. You probably have too.

They call it emergent architecture. It’s a polite term for a death sentence written in the first sprint.

There’s also the question of surface. Texture. Finish. The sculptor who leads with surface and ignores structure produces something that looks right and holds nothing. I’ve shipped features like that. Polished. Purposeless. Nobody’s proudest work.

The serious sculptor walks around the piece. Considers how it reads from every angle. Thinks about negative space — what’s absent, what the eye fills in, what the form implies beyond what it states. That’s product thinking at its most honest. Not just what are we building but what does this become in the hands of someone we’ll never meet, in a context we didn’t design for.

In 2013 I worked on something genuinely new — new to the industry, new to the business, the kind of project that comes along rarely. A real masterpiece in the making. Blood, sweat, and teams of sculptors pouring themselves into the stone.

They shelved it. Another priority. Millions in investment, quietly archived.

I still think about that one.

People ask whether it’s better to plan everything upfront or work iteratively, as if those are opposites.

They’re not. They’re different moments in the same contemplative practice.

You need enough stillness at the beginning to sense what’s in the stone. You need enough willingness to begin before the vision is complete. The sculptor doesn’t chisel randomly. But they also don’t wait for certainty before they pick up the tool.

You hold the image loosely. You let the material teach you. You remove what it isn’t, one careful cut at a time, and you try to recognize the thing when it finally starts to appear.

That’s the closest I’ve come to a formula. And some days, that’s enough.

I just finished a movie about people who gave everything to a country that betrayed them. Tonight I watched a rocket go to the moon and cried anyway.

The French 75 felt like people I recognized. Not because I’ve ever thrown a bomb or freed anyone from a detention center. But because I know what it costs to believe in something that keeps failing you. The film didn’t answer the question it was asking. Neither can I.

Victor Glover. Christina Koch. Jeremy Hansen. Reid Wiseman. Around the moon and back. The first person of color. The first woman. The first non-American to travel beyond low Earth orbit. They are going farther than Apollo ever did — not in nostalgia, but forward, into something we haven’t named yet.

I don’t know what to do with tonight. The same country that can’t locate basic human decency put those four people on a rocket. I watched the launch and felt something crack open that I hadn’t given permission to open.

Maybe that’s what it means to love a place you can’t defend. You don’t get to choose when it moves you.

Our country is one of frustrations and victories we may not live long enough to see. Tonight felt like both.

There’s a moment when the most experienced person in the room looks at a tangle of Try/Catch code and says the thing nobody wants to hear:

Remove it. If this fails, let it fail.

A try/catch block intercepts an error before it becomes visible. It patches the problem and lets the system keep running. From the outside, everything looks to be humming. Internally, something is quietly wrong — and the mechanism designed to protect the system is now protecting the system from knowing it’s broken.

We do this constantly. Catch blocks around grief. Around the conversation we should have had five years ago. Around the belief we took as truth. The error keeps firing. We keep catching it before anyone — including us — has to see it clearly. We keep on humming along.

Thomas Merton wrote that the biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. Not vice, not cruelty — just the daily choice to keep the lights on rather than find out what’s wrong with the wiring.

AI is, at its core, a very sophisticated catch block. It intercepts the friction of not knowing, of having to sit with an unanswered question long enough for it to do something to you. It fills the silence before the silence can teach you anything.

There’s a principle — the map is not the territory — that says our mental models are representations, not the thing itself. Useful. Necessary. But with edges, distortions, and blank spaces where the cartographer didn’t know what to draw.

I gave Ai a chance to build my map. Drawing from everything I’ve given it — my questions, my framings, my blind spots baked into how I ask things — and reflecting it as a coherent picture. Not the territory. A portrait of my existing understanding, served back with confidence. And a very good map makes you less likely to look up. Everything is already labeled.

I noticed that when AI doesn’t know something, it doesn’t stop. It fills in. Generates a plausible answer from the shape of what surrounds the gap. Delivers it in the same confident register it uses for everything else. Then, at the bottom: this response may be inaccurate. Please verify important information.

The caveat is the catch block.

You never saw the failure — you saw an answer. And you moved on because the answer was fluent, the caveat was easy to miss, and you just needed something to work.

After a long 1:1 conversation about exactly this with a co-worker, I opened a chat window and asked AI to build me an app to manage my life — drawing on everything we’d ever discussed.

It built one. Disturbingly good. It knew what I avoided. It knew how I thought. My patterns are reflected in a clean interface with nothing wasted.

I had just spent two hours on the spiritual cost of outsourcing ourselves to systems that learn us. Then, almost reflexively, I handed more of myself over. Not because I was coerced. Because the offer was there, I was stressed, and it looked like an order.

The system didn’t reach for me. I reached for it.

The catch block fired. I never felt the error.

The “via negativa” — the way of negation — is a theological argument for letting things fail. Strip away the comfortable image. Let the easy answer collapse. What surfaces when you don’t catch the exception is closer to the truth than anything you’d have built to replace it.

Simone Weil wrote that we must be ready to give up everything we think we know to receive what we could not have imagined—an argument against the catch block as a way of life.

The moment after failure and before the fix, something true is briefly visible that won’t be visible once the system is running again. Everything around us is designed to move you through that moment as fast as possible.

But it might be where we actually live.

Could you let it fail?

Maybe that’s not negligence. Maybe that’s the whole instruction.

-

Merton, Thomas. 1948. The Seven Storey Mountain. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, 1933, p. 58.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd, Routledge, 2002.

Fucking Dave, man. I don’t recall a time when we were young when he wasn’t pushing me beyond my limits. Our relationship is a constant push and pull of normalcy, irrelevance, and kindred.

My buddy Greg and I started hanging out more that summer in High School. We took my shit brown Cutlass Supreme over to the next city because Greg wanted me to meet this guy he knew from his circle.

Bushy brown quaff, Oxford dress shirt with the collar cut off and the sleeves past his hands, a pair of ripped jeans, loafers, and a hint of eyeliner - his friend was a drummer for a local group that was playing a Fourth of July city-wide festival. His bandmates were on the podium, and he came around from the back. “Hey, Greg!” he said in a cool yet happy-to-see-you tone. Greg introduced me, letting Dave know I, too, was a drummer. “Sweet!” the words spilling out of him like honey. We hit it off immediately.

I started seeing Dave at all the parties, and our paths began to cross so frequently that I wound up in his basement one night, hanging out, not even knowing it was his house. In those days, we were at parties Friday through Sunday, finally wrapping up at Spankies for the eighteen-and-under crowd. I recall thinking Dave’s house was the coolest because everyone could write stuff on the walls. No way in hell was my dad ever going to let me do that.

Like two people waiting for the other to break up, such it was for Dave and me with music. He was playing drums with some folks, and I was with Greg and Dan O. When Greg upped and disappeared to Florida to be a disc jockey, Dave, too, was moving on to a new gig. Now he was playing guitar and piano and looking for some players to front. He and I hooked up with Danny D and some guy named Mike, who slept with anything he could get his hands on. We were a wonderful disaster that somehow burned our brains and then made it off the roller coaster a couple of years later with all of our hands and feet intact.

Here was the routine: Up at seven and out to the barn, where the landscaping truck met us ready to go. We spent the whole day in the oppressive summer sun, cutting lawns or spreading mulch. The forman, Kevin, was addicted to two things: Metal and pot. Needless to say, our days were mind-numbing and long. Five would hit, and we would all separate to get cleaned up and meet over at Danny D’s for practice. Before the instruments were strapped on, we headed to Faris Beverage to buy a case of beer. Then back for a few hours of pure blissful sweat, blood, and rock. We lived it like Zeplin in the day. Neighbors would begin to call around nine or so, and that was when we headed inside for a final beer and made our nightly plans.

Reaching down, I felt something in my seat between the chair cushion. It was a wallet. We were front row at some strip club downtown, wasting time and money. “Let me see,” he quietly snatched it from my hands. “Follow me,” and I followed him to the bathroom. Checking the stalls first, he reached into the wallet, grabbed the cash and a gas card, and dropped the rest in the garbage can, covering it with some paper towels. We exited the place, and who knows what we did then.

It’s like the other time we were driving, and he spotted an envelope in the middle of a busy intersection. He jumped out of my car, ran into traffic, retrieved the envelope, and jumped back in before the light turned green. “A thousand Dollars!” he exclaimed. “It must have been some truck driver’s gas money,” he posited. Again, who knows where it all went? Things just seemed to fall into his hands. While one could say that it was theft, he had a way of making it so normal. Even comical.

He’s telling me to drive away, and I gun it for fear that someone is going to be shooting at us or something. Well down the road, I said, “What the fuck did you do?” “Jay, I walked up and asked for a pack of smokes. This really cute girl was working behind the counter. I started flirting with her. She put the cigarettes on the counter, and I picked them up. I told her that I was going to take these. She said, “Oh no, you’re not,” jokingly. I said yes, I am, and I bolted.”

The temperature cooled along the band front as we began onboarding a new generation of players. I could see that Dave was troubled and ready to go in a different musical direction. Off he went, and off I went. He went to economics and I to Music school. About half a year later, he reemerged. I got a call that he was putting together an all-star group for one night. He had been preparing music, arrangements, and sections. You could say it was like his version of a Neil Diamond concert.

That one night was memorable. I recall all the parents, siblings, and girlfriends there watching as we lit up the stage. That’s the thing; Dave had this way of bringing a light to the stage and to those around him in those days. He came across comfortable, kind, smooth, and someone you wished you could be, even if just for a few minutes of walking around in his brain.

After that night, we drifted. He first entered the working world in the Gulf of Alaska, around Valdez, on a fishing trawler. Later, he settled down back home. I dove deep into my own world of technology and the early days of my dial-up life. My girlfriend and I got married and wound up in Mishawaka, Indiana, where I worked for Greg as a software programmer.

It all came to a head about a year later. Out of the blue, Dave reached out, looking for a drummer to join him in opening for the Goo Goo Dolls in Chicago. Having made strides in my new career, I set music aside for the time. Tried as he did, he could not convince me to leave behind my life to pick up and play Chicago. I had become too practical. We didn’t speak for many years after that. He was deeply disappointed.

Life moved on as it does. Kids, career, what have you occupied most of the days? I wound up in Arizona for a while, and he stayed put back home with his family. Eventually, I returned, and we talked of getting together many times. Greg said Dave had developed a drinking problem and that they got together occasionally, but Dave was always drunk. It was too sad for me, and I stayed away. Occasionally, I would receive a text asking about this or that. Always music-related. When I replied, I never received a response. Grief ripped my heart out when I heard of his passing from Greg. I can’t attend funerals for friends. Try as I might, I can never bring myself to face the truth. Plus, they are never around to reminisce. This is just a small taste of the much larger impact he had.

The night before, I wrestled with God-Impatient with my feelings of disconnected-ness. The closeness created during my spiritual memoir writing project fell away and I was left with a vapor trail of agnostic confusion. Nothing would be solved that evening. Seinfeld played in the background as I tried to leave room for silence inside my head. The weight of the day sank me into a deep sleep.

Back on my feet, I filled hot coffee in my favorite mug, placed a blanket on top of my legs, and sitting cross-legged on the couch, I began my morning reflections with three grocery-store donuts and a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing. One bad choice.

I returned to “the cloud,” having completed it a few months back. In my attempt to cover all the ancient contemplative works, I didn’t absorb the content as well as I could have. But, with a quick refresh, the message became apropos. My struggle to remain with God frustrated me and I fell into questioning and ambivalence.

The cloud of Unknowing is the metaphorical space between yourself and God. Your work is to focus on that cloud and contemplate the sometimes dark places within it, in an effort to keep returning. Don’t expect to be pulled through -keep up the work of showing up. Everything else gets lumped into the cloud of forgetting. Personally, I think it is all just a single cloud. But, I speak with a small education modern psychology. The author is part of the Via Negitiva (A.K.A. apophasis) tradition where God is not finite, not knowable, not comprehensible through human categories—we approach through unknowing, stripping away all concepts, resting in silence.

I don’t know about you, but I personally prefer certainty through categories and meaning. But, that is where us humans suck. We are built to question and make meaning. Additionally, modern life is transactional, and my ADHD likes to move quickly rather than sit and relish possibilities with unknown. At least not without a reasonable return on investment. Just as an aside: a deluge of rain just began as I wrote this. Is this a sign? I obsess with discerning signs. Did the thread I was going down need examination? Certainly. I wonder if the unknown can ever be considered transactional. My reason needed to solve the abstract.

The author of the cloud challenges us to sit without expectation: in the dark, nothing known, showing up, no clarity, still craving, still seeking, and finding satisfaction enough to keep going until your inevitable demise. Then, the author suggested that you will rightly be in eternal knowing and love of God. Meanwhile, reason and faith never disappear. Most of us do not live in a place where we have the freedom to contemplate all day long. Even monks have work to do.

We live in the here and now. Especially when we are woken up early or caught in the rain and we say to ourselves, “Why me?” So, we struggle in contemplation and we struggle in the day to day to survive as well as keep faith.

I’m working my way through another book, “Agnostic, A Spirited Manifesto” by Lesley Hazleton. Her definition of agnostic refers to us who are in conflict between reason and faith. Not disbelief and not evangelism. An acceptance of balance. It’s raining much harder now, and there was even a thunderclap. Am I on to something here, or is it just the weather?

A storm moves in as I feel encouraged to settle into the human/eternal conflict. The curtains blow from my patio door and I decide to wrap it up.

If you are looking for clarity from me, I don’t have it. All I can say is this: in this answerless eternal push-pull of faith and logic we must accept our small confusing lives between the obtuse clouds and terra-firma. It is the only worship of God that I can see; coffee breath and all.

Show up in awe, tension, and frustration. Stop rushing to relax and get more intimate with this world that I reside. I demand this of myself. The rain is dying down and bringing with it the first sounds of folks on their way to work. Thanks for reading.

P.S. I am editing, now much later, and there are threats of tornados. I must have hit a cosmic nerve.

You cannot understand yourself until you understand the seven generations behind you. From that vantage point, history begins to open up like the sky and strange and familiar family habits come into focus.

For me, I am exploring my Serbian ancestry currently. Seven generations take me back to around late 1790’s—not the greatest time to be a Serb farmer.

I see a woman kneeling on a dirt floor in a burning country. She cant write her name. She had to bury at least 1 child in the churchyard—a wooden church that looked identical to her house because the village of 10 families built both. Armies moved through her valley and she learned to read danger in the sound of hoofbeats before seeing the horse.

She prayed the way she breathed. Not because she chose it. Because her mother’s hands had shaped her hands into the posture before she was old enough to have an opinion about God. She was never alone. Either the living the dead or God was always with her.

Seven generations of people surviving the un-survivable, encoding what worked into muscle and nerve and reflex — and then passing it forward to someone who would live in a different world and have no idea why they flinch at certain sounds or trust certain silences or feel, against all available evidence, that they are not entirely alone.

This is the work of recognition. Of honoring.

What are you carrying that was never meant for you — and what are you carrying that was meant for exactly you, and nothing has told you yet?

My bloodline, like most American mutts, is a buffet of national dishes. My ancestors Hailed from Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Poland, and Serbia. Mostly I am Swiss-German but The loudest faith tradition is Serbian Orthodox. In each family exists a generational word that winds back and forth through time’s spiritual arrow whose twists and turns of spikes and pillows we feel. A pull to stay the course Of faith or to come home Sometime in the future. Even if a new form is found.

Serbs have a word: Slava. It means glory. The saint of my ancestors, St. George, was baptized on the feast day of May 6th and he is my families Slava. Slava is passed from father to son across a thousand years or more, and existed before Christianity. It was later adopted with the Church. But, it was the women that were the teachers of the Slava tradition; the bread, the candle, the dead.

What can the world Slava mean to my grandmother who never worked the land; who, instead, worked at a manufacturing plant? Who only witnessed the “modified American” version. My grandmother knew this word. But her version of it could never hold quite the same meaning as it did for my great grandmother who suffered and worked the land In faith.

For my mother, it probably had no meaning At all. It was an annoying tradition, of many, that required her to a reason for dressing up like Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird complete with a bruised knee. A time of cousins and of feeling untouched by God.

For me, it meant dinner at grandmas and not much else except a different table cloth and a new candle. There was no man to pass the tradition down. There was only her husband, a Pole. There was my uncle. Another Pole. and my uncles best friend, my dad, a German. Then there was me and my cousin. She had no sons. But, I believe she slated me to be the next keeper. But mom had other plans.

Glory and Celebration died a slow death in my family. It took 3 generations, but it hung like a stained tapestry out of a garbage can. Once it served but was never replaced and America was cleaning house. By the seventies it was almost entirely gone. By the closing of the mill in the nineteen-eighties, it was near death.

The tradition of Slava kept things alive. It was the cosmic cleaning service that made all things new. It brought spring renewal. Rebirth and along with it, a celebration of those that have been left behind. A lighting of a candle, the breaking of bread, The idol and the naming of those past.

I am too far from the tradition now to formally and knowledgeably hold a Slava. But, I am here to bring Glory and Celebration to my family who has felt buried for decades. I call upon my grandmother and her mother. On my great grandfather Milena. I thank them for trying. I scold them for not doing better.

It is time for a rebirth. I will hold Slava myself on May 6th. I will welcome the martyrdom of St. George and that he was willing to die for what he believed. By the way, the whole bit about the dragon and the maiden was something that came later to make the legend more interesting.

This is not a Christian newsletter. It is not a Buddhist or Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish newsletter. It is not a newsletter for people who have their faith figured out. It is a newsletter for people who are still carrying something and who suspect — correctly — that the carrying itself is a form of spiritual work.

Every tradition I draw from, I hold the way a guest holds something borrowed: with care, without possession, with gratitude for what it offers. My own practice is Quaker. I hold it lightly here. What matters more than any tradition is the question every tradition has learned to ask: what are you carrying, and what will you hand forward?

Reply to this email. Tell me one thing about what you were handed spiritually — wanted or not. I read every one.

Bain was out on Sabbatical working on his latest opera, Mary Queen of Scotts and had not been present since my attendance began.  I feared him as the rumors of his stern and demanding teaching style garnered deep respect from even the most talented of musicians and composers. When I met him in Counterpoint, I was terrified.  Me, the back door student with the undeclared (meaning unaccepted) major of composition. I was sure to be ejected and put in my place. 

One day mid-semester, he called on me to stay after class.  He pulled up a chair across from me and sat.  He had this way of crossing his legs so that one draped over the other like no leg exited. Only the fabric of the pant.  His full head of white hair and thick black glasses stared me down. Me, the flannel wearing Eddie Vetter looking grunge.  My heart began to feel like this was it, I was going to be ejected.  

“Do you like composing music?” He asked.  

“Of course! I love it.”

“I see real potential in you and I am wondering if you would be interested in joining my department.”

To this day, I tear because someone of respect showed faith in me enough to call it out.

“I would love to.” I replied in my young and inarticulate response.

“Good.  Because I think you belong here.” He added.

I wore that conversation as a badge of honor.  One that I used as a sword whenever I felt the “roasting” of my fellow classmates jab at me.

The initial studies which focused on Classical theory were terribly difficult for me. But, for the first time, I was accepted and no one, not even my parents could protest.  I was getting a college education and I was doing it the way I wanted. I found meaning and purpose. 

It was not until my later years when I began to really absorb 20th century counterpoint and harmony did composition enter into the philosophical and spiritual. When I was musically competent enough to use music to create a message rather than prove understanding through assignments. 

Apart from the mines, there were Tank houses which produced copper cathodes for market and copper Rod Mills where cathodes were melted down to a one inch copper rod which could later be drawn down into wire. El Paso was a unique mix of tank houses for producing cathode and a rod mill. Copper Cathodes were shipped in from all over the country some were from company owned mines and some were from outside mines. It is important to get a perfect mix for casting rod.

The system I was helping create had to account for the processes at this facility and so, for an entire year, I was on a plane every Sunday evening by 6. Sometimes, I would catch the early Southwest flight from Phoenix to El Paso leaving at 5AM and arriving at 7AM. The flight was only 40 minutes long but crossed multiple time zones in the summer months.

Over this year, I began to become friends with a few of the employees and eventually going to El Paso was just as common as driving to downtown Phoenix. I believed I was older than most of them. But, I always felt younger and more immature than anyone.

Amber was from El Paso and working in Phoenix. From a sales side, she was able to maneuver the company to pay for trips home to visit family. Her dad was gone and her mom had remarried. You could tell that Amber was half Mexican. And her father’s picture proved that assumption.

Shane was a chemist in quality control. He and Amber were a thing. Off hours, Shane was a local DJ at a popular El Paso radio station. I found myself being a third wheel most trips. Sometimes there would be other locals to join us sometimes it was only me feeling awkward. One time, Shane was able to snag some tickets to go see Tool at a local venue and I scheduled my work trip to match the concert date.

Another time, we went out for drinks at some goth dive bar and I wanted to leave when he and some others started dancing in a circle giving Zeig Heils to some song. I found the whole thing offensive and that was the last time we hung out together. I chewed him out something awful citing that I have a Jewish last name and that while I was not Jewish I knew Jews and I made some sort of weird through-line to explain my disappointment. But, really I should have just said, what the fuck Nazi! And left. but, I think Amber drove that night, so I had to sit with my rolling rock and take it for a while.

Danny, one of the software engineers in El Paso took me out to the best Mexican food this side of the Rio Grande. Quickly I felt all eyes on me as I entered the shack of a restaurant as the only gringo for blocks around. The back of the restaurant was the boarder. Danny ordered in Spanish and they served us on paper plates and plastic forks. We grabbed a table and he was right, it was the best. I never found that place again and I knew I should not go looking.

There was the time that some of us from Arizona came for a conference and my friend Oliver and I tried to convince out boss Jim to let us borrow the rental to go to Juarez. Oliver and I had far too many drinks but were playing pool with these nursing students from Mexico. I don’t know what we were thinking. Thankfully, Jim put the kibosh on the whole thing and we moved on with our evening. We probably would never have come back from that trip.

The next morning, Oliver and I drove to the top of Franklin Mountain and looked over at Juarez from the parking lot of UTEP. There were no paved roads. All the houses were uncomfortably small and looked like a light breeze would send everything to ruin.

Why was I so self destructive even as I was in my thirties? I was bored and lonely.

However, once I learned about the mission trail, I started to step away from the crazy nights and began setting off by myself into the desert in search of history. There was Ysleta which looked like a newer church and I took some photos outside of kids playing in front. Then, I went on to San Elizario and then to Socorro. Which appeared to be the oldest with cement grave stones and thick stucco walls.

Concordia was where I found many opportunities to take images. The original cemetery was on the opposite side of the street but was moved when they built the 10 which ran straight through the middle of the city. Apart from the endless graves that appeared to be made of rebar and cement that was falling apart, there was a whole section devoted to what looked like Chinese. The Whole thing seemed out of place. But, many came to help lay track for the railroad and stayed. Eventually, racial violence forced the Chinese out.

I loved going to El Paso simply because of the solitude of travel. I was by myself, at my own pace, enjoying the sights and sounds alone with only my camera and all the time in the world. I could come and go from the mill and I set my own hours. I felt important but still myself. That was probably that last time I felt like myself professionally.

I never felt any emotion from him when exploring the contents. There was never a tear in his eye or a tremolo in his voice. At first, he would pick up an item, such as a Purple Heart and explain what it was and why a soldier would receive one. He never explained why he received his. To this day, I don’t know if I knew enough not to ask or if I just was too vacant to think of it. Apart from the Purple Heart, he has a Bronze Star, and a few others. Each was saved in a long leather covered box that snapped shut if closed too quickly. The medals were presented on a yellow satin.

Also in his box was a lighter that needed fluid and flint, a bayonet, and a Nazi officers cap. He explained how the bayonet was supposed to be a fixed to the end of the rifle, but he never said if he used it. The cap was the most odd and I didn’t ever want to know how he came by that. He never said either. His stories must have been endless and in some way he needed me to know that he had been through something. He also knew it was not appropriate to tell me as a young child.

We put things away and went on with our evenings. It went like this for a long time. Eventually, I stopped showing interest in the box and on a rare occasion I took it out to look for myself.

When he passed, my mom asked if I wanted the Nazi officers cap. I said yes until it appeared at my house. Once there, it became real and I left it in the garage until I told my mom to come get it. In the context of grandpa it held no power. Without him it repulsed me.

I never learned much about how my grandfather fared in the war. I knew he was a Sargent and had soldiers under him. But, there were no stories. Perhaps the box was the only way in which he could share the experience without scaring his grandson. The only way he could say I love my family and this is what I endured so you can be safe here now with me.

My first dose of Adderall blew me away! It was like someone turning on lights in a room that I didn’t know was dark. I was fifty three years old, diagnosed with ADHD and suddenly I could see through the mental smog that had been there my entire life.

For a few days, I grieved. All my struggles and failures scrolled past—every missed opportunity, every misunderstood instruction, every comment made like “lazy” or “distracted” or “irreverent”. My life could have been different. The sadness was visceral.

Then something unexpected happened: joy. And a clarity about what had been destroying my attention long before I understood my brain’s spaghetti code.

The Digital Trap I Built Myself

I’m an IT project manager. I’ve spent almost thirty years building systems, managing migrations, optimizing workflows. I was an adult before the internet went public, before cell phones were small enough to carry, and before digital cameras. I remember what slowness felt like. Let’s be honest, even early tech was painfully slow; 4 minutes to see every pixel paint on the monitor until the full image was visible?

But somewhere along the way, I became what I built.

My first digital camera was a Nikon D70s—6.2 megapixels that seemed to parallel film. Then came the gear trap. Higher megapixels. Faster autofocus. Film simulations. I was never satisfied with images straight out of camera anymore. I turned to Lightroom, presets, LUTs, spending hours in the digital darkroom—another reason to be a slave to my desk and someone’s software.

Photography led to writing on the computer. Composing music on the computer. My job in IT—all screens, all day. When I’d finally had enough, I’d retire to streaming services and my cell phone.

I was managing systems all day and being managed by them all night. Something had to give.

What I Found in the Fog

After the Adderall kicked in, I made a choice. I pulled out my old Nikon F3HP—the manual film camera I’d used in middle school—and made my way back into the world.

Film cameras are not convenient. You can load film wrong. You don’t get immediate feedback, so you only discover bad shots after the roll is developed. Film costs have gone up considerably. Even a home darkroom setup is no longer cheap.

But here’s what film gives me that digital never could: It gave me my attention back.

Slow: Street Photography on the Bus Downtown

Last year, I took the bus downtown with one intention: capture something real. People, buildings, interactions, morning light filtering through Cleveland’s industrial bones.

Before I left, I preset everything. Shutter speed no less than 1/125th of a second. Hyperfocal distance on my lens so I know the range of distance that will be in focus. F-stop set by holding my hand in sunlight until the meter reads dead center. (Off topic, but do you know that the 18% middle grey used for light meters is based on white skin color? - More systemic racism - another post perhaps)

This setup gets me as close to automatic as a manual camera can be. I can bring the viewfinder to my eye, click, and know there’s a solid chance of getting something workable.

But while this is slow compared to an endless storage digital “spray-and-pray”, it’s not as slow as I can go. I have gone slower and with more intentional awareness.

Slower: 8x10 Large Format in the Arizona Desert

It’s early morning in Skull Valley, Arizona. The sun hasn’t risen yet. I’m standing off the main road in a wash with my 8x10 bellows camera—a beast of meal and wood that looks like it belongs in a turn of the century episode of Boardwalk Empire.

I loaded only four film backs before I left Phoenix on my treck up the 17. That means a maximum of eight exposures for the entire trip. Eight chances. That’s it.

I’ve already scouted this location on a prior trip—studied where the sun will rise, how light will lay on the rocks, what frame might matter to someone looking at the print. Three other photographers are here, each with their own gear. My tripod is up. Camera leveled. Viewfinder cleaned of dust.

I frame toward my subject. Set focus as best I can in the dark. Pull the black blanket over my head, grab the loupe hanging around my neck, dial in the focus a fraction more. F-stop set. Focus on infinity. There’s a cactus halfway to the mountains—my middle ground. The foothills have interesting peaks for background.

We’re nearing dawn. Light meters come out against the golden desert chill.

The moment arrives. We all begin shooting.

It takes me fifteen minutes to shoot all eight exposures.

The Waiting Is the Point

Back home, I head straight to my bathroom-turned-darkroom. Negatives must be in complete darkness until they’re through the developer. I let them dry while I make a snack, check in with Tina, sit in silence for a bit.

Two hours later, I return. On my makeshift light table, I select the best couple of exposures.

The process to create the final print could fill another essay. But you get the idea.

What Film Taught Me About ADHD and Attention

Here’s what I didn’t expect: film photography works even better now that I have addressed my ADHD.

While in full distraction, I was constantly seeking stimulation—checking, refreshing, optimizing, upgrading. Digital cameras fed that perfectly. Infinite shots. Instant feedback. Immediate gratification. The dopamine hit of seeing the image right away.

Film does the opposite. It forces me to wait. To limit. To trust what I saw in the viewfinder without needing to check.

At 1/60th of a second, the shutter opens and closes before thought can interfere. My body has to know what to do. My hands set the exposure. My eye finds the frame. There’s no algorithm suggesting improvements, no infinite retakes, no stream for Instagram.

It’s the same discipline as my 5:00AM Quaker silence practice—showing up, being present, trusting what emerges when I stop controlling the outcome.

The Meaning I Found in Limitation

I’m not saying everyone should shoot film. I’m not impugning digital photographers or phone photography. Photography has been democratized.

But for me—someone who built systems for a living and then got trapped inside them, someone whose ADHD brain craves stimulation and novelty, someone who lost the ability to just see without performing seeing—film photography has given me my attention back.

The slowness isn’t romantic. It’s practical. It’s survival.

When I stand in the Cleveland Flats with my F3HP, loading Tri-X in the cold, advancing the film with that satisfying mechanical click, hearing the mirror flap, I’m choosing limitation as a spiritual practice.

And in that limitation, I can finally see clearly. I now apply all of it to my writing, my music, my work, and my relationships.

In 2013 I embarked on a journey that would change my spiritual life. Through my church at the time, I had read about a ministry group called "Stephen Ministers". Having always been interested in serving others and a predilection for all things psychological and self-help, I signed up for a 2 month training course. For those who are not aware, Stephen Ministry is an ecumenical helping ministry whereby a Stephen Minister is the care giver to another person (a care received). Ministers are not there to cure the other person, that is what the receiver can do with the help of resources and God. This story is about my time with my first care receiver. We will call him Randal to protect his family.

Randal was staying at a local rehab facility not too far from my home. From what I was told, he had taken a big fall and was recovering from a new hip. His wife, who was dealing with real failure was doing time at a local hospital. They had been apart for weeks and the stress of not being able to be there for his wife was causing him great distress. He requested a Stephen Minister through our mutual church. I had known of Randal but had never met him.

Walking through the halls of the facility, I continued to try and focus on Randal's situation and give a little prayer to help make our first meeting a soft place for him to land. I was unsure what I would be walking in to when I knocked on his door. For me, this was a giant step not only spiritually, but also the act felt a little out of the ordinary - uncomfortable but yet there was a sense of purpose - necessity to take care of Randal as best as I was trained.

Knocking, I poked my head in to find Randal in a wheel chair, watching TV and in good spirits. Not at all what I had built up the first meeting to be. For some reason, I expected him to be in bed, sullen, and not much into talking. Quite the opposite. Randal took it upon himself to grab his cane, stand up from the chair and walk towards me to shake my hand. I explained who I was and he was delighted that I took the time to meet him. We hit it off right away.

The courage I mustered to walk into a strangers room was other-worldly for me. Bu default, I am an introvert and never really had a strong sense of community. Here I was, a changed person after my ministry training, filled with God and wanting to make a difference. Randal and I kept things fairly light this initial meeting and he mentioned that he was being released the next day and asking if we could meet again the following week in his home. I agreed. As we departed, he must have been able to tell I was tad uncomfortable - all the same he asked me to pray with him. We held hands and I led. Being in the moment, I recapped our meeting and thanked God for being able to connect. I left feeling truly moved as if filled with love.

Our meetings went on like this for a few months. Mostly, he would tell me about his family, now all grown up, where they lived, what he did before he retired, and coming up as a child. One of our later session, Randal divulged to me that he and his brother had been molested as children by a local grocer. It happened first to his brother and then, perhaps in order to save himself, his brother introduced Randal to this person and the abuse started in on Randal. He was hurt and confused about not only how this man could do this to children but how Randal's brother could have done this to his own brother. I sat glued and listed and held space for him to recall the events.

This is not something that typically Stephen Ministers handle. Your garden variety Stephen Minister is there to help people through illness, the loss of a family member, and generally when things fall apart and people look to spiritual guidance. I was so grateful that he shared his story with me and I did what I was trained to do and explained that he would be wise to seek professional counsel with a therapist.

He had told me that he had been seeing therapists for years and showed me the tray of prescription drugs that he took to cope. We met a few more times after then. But, I wound up taking on a new position that had me traveling. Randal ended up becoming more ill and eventually I heard of his passing. I regret not checking in on him more. We became close. Even if he ruminated on his past and I listened. It made me feel touched to be present with him. I would have called us friends by the end of the experience.

Why am I telling all of this? It's not to promote Stephen Ministry (Though I do recommend). We all need someone to talk to, share life with, become intimate about our deepest concerns and belief challenges. Trauma is not for a friend to solve but a friend goes a long way to be present and hold space for someone who is just trying to make sense of the non-sense.

Faith has taught me to reach out to others and even situations to accept them for what and who they are so that I may gain purchase on a deeper revelations. People give constantly and it is important to allow yourself to receive. This is what faith is about. Opening yourself up to be vulnerable to the uncertainty that things may or may not work out in your favor. And that is OK.

One step at a time, with grandma behind me to catch my fall, I made it up the back staircase of squeaky wood steps painted with a matted red carpet that had not changed since 1921. Climbing past the colorful window depicting St. George and the Dragon, and up the spiral metal staircase I went. All the way to the bell tower. The smell of incense infused walls weighed down the air. Each step was full of struggle and excitement and I knew today was my day. I was three years old and today was not just another Sunday at my grandmothers church. That day was my first and last opportunity I ever had to ring the bell that called every Serb to service.

Arriving at the top of the stairs, excitement grew. Standing slightly over three feet tall on the crows nest size platform, I reached towards the spiritual technology of the time; my eyes traveling uo to the extended up into the liminal space between myself and the clapper. Only the smallest of sunlight from the open bell-free slats brought in enough lite to see the dull reflection of the brass. It seemed to go on forever.

With a raising of my arms and a hoist from grandma, I was now able to reach the second knot- smooth from generations of faithful use I hugged it around my chest and midsection. My Grandma's green dress and her recently set hair from the salon embraced the rope and myself.

"Now, use both hands," she said. Tentatively, I pulled. Only silence.

"Pull harder." she encouraged.

With all my heart and force available my yank brought about a deep clang that resonated through my bones. This was the first moment that I felt that a single sound could be so sacred. And, what's more, I was the one who brought the sound to life. Before I could realize, the rope pulled me up slightly and I felt myself starting to escape from my grandmothers hands.

"Let go" she giggled. and I relaxed back into her arms. I continued on a number of times but for how long I don't recall. I only remember her say,

"Ok, that is enough." and she put me back down onto the platform. How could I know then that the sustain of a bell would affix itself and resonate inside of me for the next fifty years. I choose to pull the rope.