The Ache That Pulls Both Ways On Wanting to Be Alone and Wanting to Be Known There is a kind of loneliness that does not come from the absence of people, but from the presence of an unhealed structure. It is not episodic. It does not announce itself as despair. It is simply there—a baseline condition, like gravity. This essay is an attempt to explain why a person can simultaneously crave solitude and ache for companionship, and why this tension is not a contradiction, pathology, or moral failure, but a predictable consequence of early relational trauma. ...
Writings
The Way of the Barista The barista makes coffee. Steam hisses. Espresso pours. A customer says thank you. No gap between doing and being. The hand moves; the spirit follows. The world answers back. Here, the body believes before the mind begins to speak. There is no philosophy of warmth...only warmth itself. The cup trembles, and all creation hums, it is good. The philosopher watches, writes, and in writing loses what he sought. He abstracts the scent into syntax, the taste into theory. He trades the warmth for a word. He calls this progress. Wittgenstein saw it: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." So he built a ladder to climb beyond words — and the scholars built temples around the ladder. They forgot the climb, forgot the silence at the top. The semioticians arrived later, counting symbols in the ashes of meaning. The word once lived in breath and body; now it flickers on screens. A civilization speaking endlessly of embodiment, and yet terrified to touch. The trap is knowing. The mind turns inward, studying its own shadow. A hall of mirrors, a recursive hum — each reflection more sterile than the last. Wittgenstein fled to the mountains, tried to live without words. He taught children, chopped wood, sought absolution in simplicity. But even his silence became grammar. He had seen the fall and could not unsee it: to name is to separate, to analyze is to kill. The Desert Fathers warned us: Beware the man who speaks of God as if he knows. Speech, unbaptized by silence, becomes blasphemy. It is not wickedness that damns us now, but the endless commentary on our own estrangement. And then— the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Not symbol. Not metaphor. Flesh. Breath. Pulse. The Logos Himself crossing the chasm between sign and thing, between knowing and being. The grammar of heaven spoken in dust and blood. Here lies the Cross — the hinge of all opposites. Heaven bends down; earth opens upward. The abstract meets the actual. The Word bleeds. Lao Tzu said: "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." But the Logos was spoken, and in that speaking, the silence of eternity became sound. The infinite named Himself and did not shatter. This is not philosophy. It is invasion. It is meaning made matter. The metaphysical wound, healed by a scar. And so the sickness begins to mend. Language is no longer weapon but wound made whole. We remember how to speak with our hands, how to pray with our breath. To say without dissecting. Wittgenstein dug in the soil and called it peace. The monks of the desert called it hesychia — stillness. The place where words bow to Being, where the intellect kneels to listen. There, thought becomes quiet enough to hear what is not thought. The barista's hiss and the monk's silence rhyme. Both serve in the same temple. The Word does not destroy language. He transfigures it. What was once a system of signs becomes a symphony of meaning. Words become icons again — not idols that trap the eye, but windows that open into glory. Every syllable trembles with the breath that made it. Every name becomes invocation. To speak rightly is to bless. To bless is to participate. To participate is to love. The barista makes coffee. Steam hisses. The machine hums. Light pools in the cup. He does not think of ontology. He simply pours. And the Logos dwells again among us, not in scrolls or screens, but in the trembling hand that serves. The philosopher, if he is lucky, sits still long enough to taste it. For the world is charged again — not with theory, but with presence. Not with meaning as argument, but meaning as aroma. The Word became flesh, and still does.
Brother, Still I write because the silence will not break. The phone is mute; the years drift out to sea. What word remains? A shadow in its wake— A brother lost, though bound in blood to me. We shared a house of storm and brittle glass, No father’s hand to hold, no quiet guide. You bore the weight of years I could not pass, And I, the younger, watched you from the side. ...
New Wineskins There is a kind of despair that flatters itself. It dresses in cynicism. It names itself insight. It sings of hate and ruin as though this were strength. It repeats, again and again: I see through everything. And so it refuses to be touched by anything. But hate is not strength. Despair is not wisdom. They are closures of the soul. They seal us off from the living stream. Meister Eckhart wrote: If your soul is full of anything, no new thing can enter there, not even God Himself. ...
Smoke in the Cold I watched a man smoke outside on the sidewalk this morning. He had a wool coat and a face like a riverbed—lined, quiet, used to waiting. The smoke curled up and disappeared, the way stories do when no one writes them down. We live in a time that hates smoke. We hate the smell, the stain, the suggestion of death. We speak in warnings: Dangerous. Addictive. A sign of poor choices. But there was a time when to smoke was not to sin. It was to mark the end of a meal, or a long silence. It was something to do with your hands while thinking. It was a fire you held close. ...
Nebraska, the Last Time We drove three hours ahead of the storm, racing toward birds that might save us. At their sanctuary we rested, you on an old bench beneath weathered boards, fighting for air through plastic tubing. I watched dark clouds gather. No cranes in sight. No birds for you. A woman approached, phone in hand, radar glowing with green and red warnings. "The storm," she said. Nothing more needed. We left what we came for, abandoned the hope of some grand reunion, some field of dancing we'd imagined. Windows down, first raindrops striking skin, we drove in silence through gray fields. Then they appeared— streams of them crossing the sky, thousands breaking the horizon, their ancient calls carrying over wet earth. A river of birds flowing opposite our direction, their red crowns like small flames against the darkening world. You gripped my hand. Two pilgrims watching travelers more weary than ourselves, all of us being washed clean.
The Comfortable Critics: Adorno, Chomsky, and the Illusion of Intellectual Rebellion There are men who shape history, and there are men who comment on it from a safe distance. The former take risks. They build, lead, and sacrifice. The latter, the intellectual critics, stay in their studies and write about the evils of power while enjoying its protection. Theodor Adorno and Noam Chomsky belong to this second class. Their names carry weight in the world of critique. Adorno, the dour philosopher of the Frankfurt School, saw modern culture as a machine that pacifies the masses. He despised jazz, Hollywood, and anything that gave common people pleasure. Chomsky, the sharp-tongued linguist turned political critic, built a career deconstructing the illusions of corporate media. He sees power structures as a grand manipulation, keeping the public docile. ...
A Garden Within I toil in Adams’s legion day by day, As sweat to dust now feeds the barren clay. Have I lost sight of what once burned so bright? Yet deep within, where shadows fear to stray, A patch remains, untended, raw and plain, Ten thousand days beneath life’s driving rain. It waits there still through layers dark with time, Not Eden’s glory, but its own domain. No haven lush with dreams of sweet repose, But stubborn earth where silent strength still grows. It thirsts in patience for its hidden spring, As sun beats down and bitter north wind blows. ...