Art, wild rivers, making mistakes, living on some edge or other — certainly on the edges of our culture — and writing about that, are what my life is about. 

Out of those mistakes, rivers, experiments, people I've met has evolved Zen Mountain Journal, at first a newsletter and then an art journal, then a publisher of an annual collection of my art and poetry. And now a Substack and publisher of my journals.

As a boy I roamed the woods imagining myself an Indian, paddled remote lakes in northern Quebec, and once briefly encountered, glimpsed really, a sense of profound harmony while paddling slowly along a wilderness shore. That moment — fleeting, wordless, unforgettable — became the compass point of my life. The Tao helps me get my bearings as I stray off course in the stormy billows of life.

My path wandered far from it at times: firefighting with Indigenous crews, living alone atop a lookout tower, then years in real estate and on Wall Street. But in my early thirties I returned to the woods, to art, to writing, and eventually to the ancient poems of Taoist mountain hermits and Zen monks — men who sought the same quiet I once felt, and expressed it in simple but mysterious language.

Their poems are vague, luminous, ambiguous by design. They gesture toward truths that can’t be spoken. I meditate on these poems, paint from their spirit, and offer modern interpretations — not as scholarship, but as a companion for those who seek a life of inner peace, simplicity, and meaning.

For thirty years, through Heron Dance and now Zen Mountain Journal, I’ve explored what it means to nurture the song within — the “soundless music” the hermits described. My work is for searchers and seekers, for those who feel called toward quiet, toward nature, toward the Great Mystery.

The Tao, and the ancient Zen poems it inspired, are a refuge, a reminder, and a beacon leading toward the inner quiet of interior worlds.