Held by Dust and Signal

I’m drawn to thinkers like David Bohm, whose reflections on wholeness and meaning as movement, and Jung, who understood synchronicity as a correspondence between inner and outer worlds, shape how I approach both thought and practice. Artists such as Nancy Holt and Ryoji Ikeda influence my sensibility—inviting perception to slow, to attune, to listen differently. Yet just as formative are the people closest to me: my family.

I come from a line of tinkerers and artists—my father and grandfather, problem-solvers and inventors; my mother and grandmother, collectors and menders of what others discarded. My grandfather once tied magnets into tennis balls for my mother to swing through the yard, gathering metal parts he’d later use to fix clocks and build toys. His garage was a living archive of curiosity and care. My father sees solutions where others see chaos; my mother finds beauty in what’s overlooked.

Their influence lives in my work—in the way I explore environments, investigate materials, and search for the potential in what’s broken or forgotten. My creative practice, shaped by both theoretical inquiry and inherited ingenuity, is an ongoing attempt to weave meaning from the seen and the unseen.

When I was a child, my grandfather passed away. It took me time to realize that the man I loved now existed only through his belongings—his blue velour recliner where we once played guitar, the scattered remnants of his inventions, the quiet echo of his stories. His presence lingered, not as a person, but as a constellation of memories embedded in objects.

A few years later, during my adolescence, I lost my grandmother. Her passing struck differently. I had come to believe she was invincible—a permanent figure in my life. Her death introduced a rupture in the order of things, one that unsettled not just my emotions but my understanding of reality. These early encounters with death stirred in me a kind of existential inquiry: Why do things end? Where do they go? And what is this strange continuity that seems to persist through time and memory? It was in this space of loss and searching that the idea of reincarnation, and the question of what death feels like, first came into view—not as doctrine, but as a mystery.

That mystery still lingers in my work. It informs how I sense time, how I relate to material, how I consider the invisible structures that shape our experience. What began as grief has become a practice of attunement—a reaching toward meaning through what’s gone, what remains, and what might yet be returned.

At that age, I didn’t have a framework for death, but I sensed something enduring. Concepts like spirit or afterlife weren’t taught to me in ways I accepted, but I still found myself insisting—instinctively—that something of us moves beyond time. I didn’t claim to know what happens, but I believed, even then, that some part of thought—perhaps attention, awareness—was indestructible. I was fascinated by the hidden architectures of the world. I played video games not to win but to fall through the map—to see the gridlines, the geometry beneath the illusion. This curiosity stayed with me, and for a time, it hardened.

That impulse—to observe what underlies experience—has never really left me. In my youth, I began questioning the very nature of thought. What is it made of? Where does it come from? Could it have dimensions? I remember being eight years old, lying in bed, trying to use recursive thoughts about infinity to shape the dream I would enter. I tried to influence the unseen mechanisms of my own consciousness, not out of control, but out of wonder.

That wonder continues in my creative practice at the intersection of inherited memory, philosophical inquiry, and the slow unfolding of meaning over time. What began in loss became an attunement—an awareness that meaning often emerges not through certainty, but through sustained attention to what lingers, what loops, and what quietly insists on being noticed.

Part II: The Shape of Memory

When I was six, my brother and I were playing in our grandmother’s yard when we noticed the garage door slightly ajar—a rare sight. That space, always sealed off, had taken on an almost mythic quality for us. I froze at the threshold, sensing that what lay beyond wasn’t just a garage, but an entrance to something mysterious. The air felt charged.

Inside, the dim light caught on layers of dust, and my eyes landed on a board game tucked high on a shelf. I didn’t know what it was yet—only that I needed to see it. With the help of my brother, who encouraged from below, I climbed a stack of boxes and bags of laundry to reach the shelf. Just as I grasped the object, a small heart-shaped piece fell to the ground, scattering dust into a shaft of sunlight. I paused, glanced at my brother, and we shared a quiet recognition: this wasn’t just a toy.

What I had found was a Ouija board. There were no bright colors, no cartoon figures—only letters, numbers, a “Yes,” a “No,” and a solemn “Goodbye.” The board seemed to explain itself without words. We didn’t play with it, not really—we listened. Even then, we knew it was a doorway, not a game.

My brother still recalls that moment as a reflection of who I was as a child—drawn to the unseen, unafraid of the unknown. I had dreams where I spoke to people who had died. I shared these with my mother, not as stories, but as messages passed on through me. I didn’t have language for it, but I was already forming questions about time, memory, and what consciousness does when it’s not tethered to the body. Even at eight years old, I would lie in bed thinking about infinity—looping thoughts until I drifted into dreams, trying to influence the mechanisms behind my own imagination. I wanted to understand how time folded into memory, how the future might send whispers to the present, and whether our thoughts could outlast us. Not as fantasy, but as inquiry. I wasn’t looking for answers. I was looking for the feeling of asking something no one could yet explain.

Before college, I immersed myself in philosophy and psychology, reading thinkers like Shelly Kagan and Christoph Hoerl. I searched for frameworks that could hold the weight of my questions, hoping they’d bridge the invisible gap between experience and explanation.

But I came from a lineage far from academia—laborers, menders, storytellers. My family never needed theories to validate their knowledge. Their lives were embodied wisdom, passed through their hands, their repairs, their quiet resilience. I carry them with me in every question I ask.

At eighteen, I enlisted in the U.S. Army to pay for school. I scored high in spatial reasoning and object recognition, which led me to work as a radio signal specialist in an airborne infantry unit. I deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, helping design communication systems for multinational operations. I was immersed in signal, time, pattern—without knowing it, I was already building a language between the visible and the invisible. But war leaves its trace.

After my service, I began experiencing vivid flashbacks, prophetic-feeling dreams, and long stretches of déjà vu. I struggled to feel present, to connect with others, to speak my mind without fear. I was eventually diagnosed with PTSD and Schizoid Personality Disorder. I told almost no one. I withdrew, afraid of how the world would receive this version of me.

The pain fractured my relationships. Some were repaired in time. Some weren’t. But in the wake of that silence, something else began to grow—an acute awareness of how perception, emotion, and time can fracture and re-form the self. I began to see synchronicities not just as coincidence, but as patterns with rhythm, messages half-remembered.

What I experienced—what I still experience—doesn’t fit neatly within diagnostic boxes or philosophical categories. My sense of time became layered. My thoughts sometimes felt like echoes returning from futures not yet lived. These aren’t beliefs. They’re lived experiences that ask to be held, not solved.

One of my clearest memories is of standing with my grandfather beneath the stars. His skin, illuminated by the moonlight, glowed like something cosmic. He pointed to constellations, tracing invisible lines across the sky. Each gesture was a story, a code, a quiet confidence in something larger. His voice didn’t explain the universe—it invited me into it.

That night shaped me. It wasn’t just awe. It was transmission. A way of knowing passed not through fact, but through feeling. I saw, in that moment, the beauty of unknowing—how mystery itself could be a kind of truth.

This is where my practice lives now: between signal and silence, between inherited memory and unfolding time. Between the pain that shaped me and the questions that continue to move me. I don’t know where I’ll end up. But I trust the asking. I trust the not-knowing. And that, in its own way, feels like the beginning of something whole.