On Creating

On Creating is a lyric-philosophical essay on the act of making and on what survives it. It opens by refusing the idea that becoming "aligned in time" makes a person perfect or separate: the author remains, at forty-two, the same human shaped by his environment, seated between his mistakes and his successes. From there it turns to vocation — a late-life return to study at Maharishi International University, the timing accepted as līlā and synchronicity rather than something to be controlled — and then to craft, arguing through Heidegger's techne and Zhuangzi's Cook Ding that a new tool becomes art only when it amplifies the hand rather than replacing the voice. At its center the essay sets philosophy aside to show the human behind the work: a husband and father who has spent much of his life unheard, kin to the unrecognized poet (Dickinson) and to Plato's account of poetic "madness" as a gift of the Muses rather than an affliction. Beneath the doubt it finds the deeper ache — that words are a lossy medium for a resonance that came before them — gesturing through Babel and the Vedic Nāda Brahma toward the single language humanity once shared. It then ascends to its central claim — that creativity has always carried one timeless resonance regardless of medium, that we make because we were made (Tolkien's sub-creation) — and resolves on Love as the force that joins all making and outlasts the body, braiding Dante, Paul's 1 Corinthians 13, and Plato's Diotima. It belongs to the author's "On —ing" series and his "jays" framework of alignment, intent, and the timeless trace a life leaves.