I grew up on the farmlands outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where October light falling across harvested fields taught me to notice the sacred in ordinary things. That landscape still lives in my poems—in weather, birds, fields, family tables, old songs, grief, faith, and the quiet moments most people pass by.
At the center of my life is Jesus Christ. My faith is not simply a subject I write about; it is the lens through which I understand suffering, healing, beauty, love, death, forgiveness, and hope. I write because I am continually searching for the places where truth and grace meet the ordinary human experience.
My life has taken a few unexpected turns: three years in the Army and six in the reserves; three master’s degrees in Music, Counseling Psychology, and Business; twenty-five years in the high-tech world; and two decades as a trauma-certified counselor working with addiction, grief, relationships, and the difficult work of healing.
Music has always walked beside me. During my military years, I taught myself guitar, later adding piano, ukulele, harmonica, and mandolin. Music and rhythm, phrasing, silence, and melody inevitably find their way into my poetry.
I love haiku, lyric, narrative, dramatic, philosophical, confessional, and psychological poetry. Many include faith, Christ, mental health, marriage, family, philosophy, trauma, memory, and the beauty hidden inside the mundane. Some of my favorite subjects are close to home: my wife of forty-four years, our three daughters, their husbands (Mijos), and our six grandchildren—the voices around a dinner table, the laughter over dishwater, the small moments that become the stories we keep.
Alongside poetry, I write music and Christian theological reflections, exploring the intersection of beauty, truth, suffering, faith, and grace.
Favorite Poets: Milton, Blake, Poe, Dickinson, Browning, Whitman, Keats, Plath, Eliot, Frost, Oliver, Rumi, Yeats, Thomas, Bishop.
Favorite Philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Kant, Nietzsche, Locke, Descartes, Lao-tzu, Augustine, Aquinas.
I think of my life as an asymmetrical symphony—words, music, faith, family, memory, and the unfinished work of becoming, with Christ at its center.
Haiku
October fields breathe—
voices rise over water,
God in the laughter.