Holding Pattern

I made Holding Pattern without a clear image in mind. What I had was pressure. The sense that something was circling without resolution, asking to be held rather than explained. The painting emerged through accumulation and restraint. Layers were added, scraped back, and redirected. Each decision responded less to intention than to the condition the surface was already carrying. I wasn’t trying to resolve the image. I was trying to stay with it.

Materially, the surface itself is ruptured; cracked, weathered, and refusing integrity. The paint records its own breakdown. This isn't a representation of rupture; it's rupture as material fact. The painting embodies what it's examining by subjecting itself to the same forces of deterioration it's addressing conceptually. The medium becomes inseparable from the inquiry.

As arts-based research methodology, this is knowledge production through making rather than through language. I’m not illustrating a thesis about reproduction-as-death-denial that you arrived at discursively. I’m using paint, surface, gesture, and material breakdown to think through something that can't be fully accessed through writing alone.

The painting knows things my writing can't get to. It enacts the gravitational pull of the drive, the suffocation of the holding pattern, the way ideology fragments bodies even as it organizes them. The counterclockwise inward spiral isn't a metaphor I chose to represent an idea, it's a formal discovery that emerged through material engagement, and it carries meaning that exceeds paraphrase.

Arts-based research treats the artwork as primary data and the making process as an investigative method. The decisions I made; impasto that builds up and cracks, a spiral that compresses rather than expands, colors that register as bodily rather than symbolic, these aren't aesthetic choices decorating research findings. They are the research. The painting generates understanding about death anxiety, compulsion, and cultural reproduction (egg) that exists in formal and material relationships rather than in arguments.

The rupture also functions methodologically as refusal of traditional research's demand for coherence and resolution. Academic writing wants to arrive somewhere, to synthesize, to offer frameworks. The painting refuses. It stays with fragmentation, with irresolution, with the holding pattern itself. That refusal is epistemological; it insists that some truths about mortality and compulsion can only be approached through sustained engagement with what won't cohere.

What I’m doing is using the body's engagement with materials, the physical acts of mixing, applying, scraping, building, and watching paint crack, as a way to metabolize cultural and psychological forces that are otherwise difficult to grasp. The painting becomes a site where those forces can be witnessed and worked through without being explained away.

Working With Academia Without Being Rewritten

Yes, I’m working on a PhD. But that fact is routinely mistaken for the point.

The degree is not the axis around which my thinking turns. It’s a container. A temporary structure. Useful, sometimes generative, occasionally constraining. What it is not is an origin story, nor a corrective arc meant to sand down who I already am.

One of the tensions I keep encountering in academic spaces is the tendency to read clarity as rigidity. When a student speaks with confidence about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and where they are not willing to go, that clarity is often interpreted as resistance. As if seriousness of intent must signal a closed mind. As if conviction is incompatible with learning.

I don’t experience it that way.

I’m in my sixties. I’ve lived abroad for years at a time. I’ve made art for over three decades, long enough to watch entire theoretical fashions rise, harden, and quietly disappear. I’ve failed publicly. I’ve revised privately. I’ve changed in ways that mattered and refused change when it felt performative or hollow. That history doesn’t make me inflexible; it makes me selective.

There’s a recurring assumption in academia that improvement requires visible transformation. That a “good” student emerges looking markedly different than when they arrived. New language. New posture. New allegiances. Sometimes even a kind of aesthetic conversion. Growth becomes legible only when it announces itself as rupture.

But not all development works that way.

Some learning deepens rather than redirects. Some refinement sharpens what is already there instead of replacing it. For practitioners who come in with a long arc behind them, progress often looks less like reinvention and more like compression. Fewer detours. Cleaner lines. A stronger refusal of what doesn’t belong.

That kind of maturation can read as stubbornness if one expects the student to be plastic.

I actually like my program. I respect the faculty. I value the conversations. I’m not at war with academia. But I am uninterested in being improved in ways that dilute the very work I came to do. I’m here to articulate, not to audition. To clarify, not to contort myself into novelty for novelty’s sake.

If there is change happening, and there is, it’s happening subterraneously. It’s happening in how precisely I can name what matters, how quickly I can discard what doesn’t, and how calmly I can hold my ground when someone suggests that seriousness requires surrender.

I’m pursuing this path in my way. Not despite academia, but not because of its appetite for visible transformation either. I’m not here to become someone else. I’m here to say, with more precision than before, who I already am and why that stance matters.

That distinction feels worth defending.

The Red Hand Problem

How artists metabolize existential anxiety, and why the work still matters.

I keep returning to the same question, no matter how many theories I read or objects I make: What exactly happens to existential anxiety when it moves through the hands of an artist?

Not rhetorically. Mechanically. Psychologically.

The image above is one attempt to make that process visible. Three pale figures stand upright, stripped of detail, reduced almost to afterimages. They are not portraits so much as placeholders. Awareness has rendered their bodies thin. Over them reaches a red hand, oversized and intrusive, neither comforting nor gentle. It interrupts and intrudes. It stains. It marks.

That hand is not expression. It is intervention.

Most people manage death anxiety by keeping it diffuse, by never letting it fully localize. The artist does the opposite. The anxiety is brought forward, concentrated, and given a task. Creation becomes a site of containment. The fear does not disappear, but it changes state. It becomes workable.

This is what I mean by metabolizing existential anxiety. Not purging it. Not transcending it. Converting it into form.

Psychologically, this matters more than we often admit. The act of making gives the anxious mind boundaries. Time slows. Attention narrows. The self becomes less abstract and more procedural. The question shifts from What does it all mean? to What happens if I put this here? That shift is not trivial. It is regulatory. It allows consciousness to stay in contact with mortality without flooding.

The white figures in the image are not victims. They are witnesses. They stand because the hand is doing something on their behalf.

This is where arts-based research comes into focus for me. ABR is often framed as alternative knowledge production, which is true but incomplete. Its deeper value lies in its psychological function. Making becomes a way of thinking that does not rely exclusively on symbolic abstraction. Image, material, gesture, and repetition—these are not illustrations of insight; they are the insight.

When anxiety stays purely cognitive, it spirals. When it enters the body through making, it circulates. It acquires rhythm. It becomes legible.

This brings me to the harder question: is there any value in writing books like Glass Bones and Rupture?

If the goal were resolution, probably not. No book resolves the fact of death. No theory seals the crack. But that has never been the real task. The value lies in creating sustained containers where anxiety can be held long enough to be examined without collapsing into distraction or denial.

These books are not answers. They are pressure vessels.

Writing them will force me to stay with the material—psychologically and ethically—longer than images alone sometimes allow. It slows the metabolism. It traces the process. It makes visible what is usually hidden: how fear becomes form, how rupture becomes method, and how meaning is provisional but still worth making.

The red hand, then, is also authorship. It is the decision to intervene rather than look away. To touch the thing that makes us uncomfortable and accept the consequences of contact.

Artists do not escape existential anxiety (not at all). They work it. They give it edges. They give it weight. They give it somewhere to go.

That’s not a cure.
But it is a practice.
And in a culture built on denial, practice may be the most honest form of value we have left.

Living With The Dimmer Switch

One of the biggest challenges I face when I talk about Becker, Rank, Zapffe, or Terror Management Theory isn’t that the ideas are too complex. It’s that they’re describing the very psychological machinery that makes them difficult to understand in the first place. (Becker, 1973; Greenberg et al., 1986; Rank, 1932; Zapffe, 1933/2010).

That’s the paradox.

From an evolutionary perspective, human consciousness didn’t just give us language, imagination, and culture. It gave us a problem no other animal has to solve: we know we’re going to die, and we know it with enough clarity to make life unbearable if that awareness stayed fully online all the time (Becker, 1973; Solomon et al., 2015). So evolution didn’t eliminate the problem. It built a workaround.

These thinkers essentially suggest that the human mind evolved a dimmer switch mechanism. This is not an on-off switch, but rather a regulator (Jacobson, 2025). With too much awareness of death, the organism freezes, panics, or collapses. Too little, and life loses urgency, meaning, and care (Becker, 1973; Yalom, 2008).

So the psyche learned to keep mortality awareness just low enough to function and just high enough to motivate (Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 2015).

That’s why so many people genuinely believe they don’t think about death or aren’t afraid of dying. They’re not lying. The system is working exactly as it’s supposed to (Greenberg et al., 1986; Pyszczynski et al., 2015). These defenses operate beneath conscious awareness, the same way breathing or balance does. You don’t feel yourself regulating your blood pressure either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

In fact, one of the clearest signs that death anxiety is present is the firm belief that it isn’t (Solomon et al., 2015).

Becker’s insight was never that people walk around consciously terrified. It was that culture exists to make sure they don’t have to (Becker, 1973). Worldviews, identities, careers, religions, politics, moral certainty, and even the idea of being a “good person” quietly serve the same psychological function: they tell us we matter in a universe that otherwise wouldn’t notice our disappearance (Becker, 1973; Greenberg et al., 1986). Once those structures are in place, the fear drops out of awareness. The dimmer switch does its job (Jacobson, 2025).

This is also why these ideas often provoke irritation or dismissal instead of curiosity. When someone encounters them for the first time, they aren’t just learning new information. They’re brushing up against the scaffolding that holds their sense of reality together. The mind doesn’t experience that as insight. It experiences it as a threat (Greenberg et al., 1986; Pyszczynski et al., 2015). The response isn’t “Is this true?” so much as “Why does this feel wrong?”

Zapffe pushed this even further and suggested that consciousness itself may be over-equipped for the world it inhabits. We see too much, anticipate too far ahead, and know too well how the story ends (Zapffe, 1933/2010). The defenses he described—isolation, distraction, anchoring, and sublimation—aren’t moral failures. They’re survival strategies (Zapffe, 1933/2010). Without them, the weight of existence would be crushing. So when people recoil from these ideas, they’re doing exactly what the human animal evolved to do.

This is where my work sits.

Artists tend to live closer to that fault line. It's not because we're braver or more enlightened, but rather because creative practice weakens the dimmer switch (Jacobson, 2025; Rank, 1932). Making art requires attention, dwelling, repetition, and exposure. Over time, some of the automatic defenses erode. You keep looking where others glance away. That doesn’t make life easier. It makes it more honest.

This is why arts-based research matters so much to me (Barone & Eisner, 2012). I’m not trying to convince anyone with arguments alone. I’m showing what happens when someone lives with the dimmer turned slightly higher than average and then tries to metabolize what comes into view. The artifacts aren’t illustrations of theory. They are the evidence of a nervous system and a psyche working under different conditions.

So when someone says, “I don’t have death anxiety,” I hear, “My defenses are intact.” And when they say, “This feels abstract,” I hear, “This is getting too close to something I’ve spent my life not naming.”

That isn’t a failure of communication. It’s the terrain.

My work isn’t about forcing understanding. It’s about creating conditions where understanding can happen without overwhelming the person encountering it (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Jacobson, 2025). That’s why I move through story, image, material, land, and memory. I’m not avoiding theory. I’m respecting the psychology that makes theory hard to hear in the first place (Becker, 1973; Solomon et al., 2015).

And in that sense, the difficulty isn’t a flaw in these ideas.

It’s the sound the dimmer switch makes when you try to turn it up.

The resistance.
The discomfort.
The urge to look away.

Those aren’t misunderstandings.

They’re the evidence.

References

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts-based research. SAGE.

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189–212). Springer.

Jacobson, Q. (2025). Living with the dimmer switch [Blog post manuscript]. Unpublished.

Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2015). Thirty years of terror management theory: From genesis to revelation. In J. M. Olson & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 52, pp. 1–70). Academic Press.

Rank, O. (1932). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development. W. W. Norton.

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. Random House.

Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death. Jossey-Bass.

Zapffe, P. W. (2010). The last messiah. (Original work published 1933)

A Reading: Introduction In the Shadow of Sun Mountain

Introduction

In the Shadow of Sun Mountain (2020–2024)

I lived for years on twelve acres in the mountains of central Colorado, on land where the (Tabeguache) Ute had lived, traveled, gathered medicine, and buried their dead for thousands of years. That fact was not abstract to me. It was present every day. In the plants that grew around the house. In the way the light moved across the ground. In the silence that settled at dusk. The land didn’t feel empty. It felt inhabited by memory.

Sun Mountain rose nearby, not dramatically, not as a monument, but as a constant presence. Its shadow crossed the land in long, slow arcs. I began to understand that shadow less as an absence than as a reminder. Something persisted there, something unresolved. The land wasn’t haunted in the theatrical sense. It was honest. It held the residue of belief, fear, violence, endurance, and the stories that try to make those things bearable.

The plants themselves became teachers. This work is grounded in ethnobotany and spiritual ecology, not as metaphor, but as epistemology. The (Tabeguache) Ute understood land through use, relationship, and attention: which plants heal, which harm, which alter perception, which open ritual space, which return the body to the ground. Medicine was not separate from cosmology. Knowledge was embedded in practice, repetition, and care. Working among these plants, photographing them, painting them, and incorporating them into mixed media was a way of entering that lineage of attention, however imperfectly. The work does not claim that knowledge as mine, but it does acknowledge that plants carry memory and instruction, and that ways of knowing grounded in land and body predate and quietly challenge the abstractions that made conquest and erasure possible.

This work began with a question I couldn’t shake: why do human beings need an enemy to feel secure?

The Great Mullein Plant—Palladiotype from a wet collodion negative. 2022

I’d spent years photographing sites where violence had taken place, standing in spaces where something irreparable had occurred and sensing that the story told about those events was never the whole story. Living on that land intensified the question. The history of the (Tabeguache) Ute was not distant. It was botanical. Ecological. Embedded in place. Their knowledge of medicinal plants, spiritual botany, seasonal movement, and relationship to land was not a footnote to history. It was a worldview that had been violently interrupted.

The longer I lived there, the clearer it became that the question wasn’t only historical. It was psychological. What allows people to draw a line between “us” and “them” with such confidence? Why does that line harden so quickly? And what does our buried awareness of being temporary have to do with it?

My studio practice kept circling the same terrain. I worked with wet-collodion photography, color reversal prints, painting, and mixed media not out of nostalgia, but because these materials resist control. Collodion is unstable. A glass plate can appear solid and fail without warning. Silver remembers everything. Chemistry responds to temperature, breath, humidity, and time. You don’t dominate the process; you negotiate with it.

That instability mattered. It mirrored something I recognized in the human mind when it tries to manage fear, especially fear it refuses to name. What began as an old photographic process became a form of inquiry. The fractures in the plates, the fogging, the lifting emulsion, the breakage, they echoed the fractures I was seeing in our collective imagination.

Ernest Becker helped sharpen that connection. He argued that culture itself is a defense system built around the fact that we will die (Becker, 1973). We build worldviews to seem steady. We cling to identity because it promises continuity. And when those stories feel threatened, we look outward for someone to blame.

Othering is not an accident. It’s a psychological survival strategy. A way to redirect fear so we don’t have to feel it directly.

In the Shadow of Sun Mountain grew from that realization. What began as an artistic investigation rooted in land, plants, and material practice expanded into a broader inquiry into how death anxiety shapes behavior, morality, and the human capacity for cruelty. Starting a PhD in my sixties didn’t create this path. It helped me name it. Becker, Rank, and the existentialists gave language to what I had been sensing intuitively for decades: that creativity is not separate from mortality, and that artists often work at the fault line where denial begins to crack.

The chapters that follow trace how fear becomes ideology. How ideology becomes violence. How violence becomes history. And how history becomes a story we repeat so we don’t have to confront what made the violence possible in the first place.

This isn’t a moral lesson. It isn’t a condemnation delivered from a safe distance. It’s an examination of the ordinary human mind and what it does with the knowledge that life is short, unpredictable, and finite. It’s about the psychological architecture we inherit, the beliefs we defend, and the places where those beliefs fail.

Sun Mountain is both literal ground and conceptual ground. The plants, the landscapes, the objects, the materials, and the photographic processes are not illustrations of theory. They are part of the thinking itself. The shadow it casts represents what we push away: the parts of ourselves we disown, project, or punish in others.

If there is any hope here, it’s a quiet one. That facing impermanence might soften the need to harden ourselves against difference. Artists understand that tension intimately. We work every day between creation and loss. We accept what breaks. We learn from what cannot be repaired.

This book is an invitation into that space. It begins with a question and refuses to resolve it too quickly. It follows it through land, material, history, psychology, and lived experience, toward a clearer understanding of what we do in the presence of death, and what might change if we learned to see ourselves more honestly.

References
Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

A Salt Print From Another Life

I printed this 4x5 salt print today from a negative I made back in 2009, when I was living in Germany. Pulling an old plate like this into the present is always a strange experience. It’s like opening a time capsule you didn’t realize you buried. The negative was unvarnished—intentionally, because I wanted to see how far the elements had carried it over sixteen years. The result is this distressed, fractured surface that feels less like damage and more like memory asserting itself.

The subject is a simple setup: a cigar-box guitar propped on an old chair, a yarmulke (I got in Budapest) hanging beside it. At the time, I was thinking about the way ordinary objects can hold the weight of identity and belonging. Today, the print reads differently. The salt process softened everything, pulled it into an older register. The marks, flaws, and chemical bruises add a gravity the original plate didn’t have. It’s as if the print has aged along with me, and it’s finally showing its own scars.

Salt prints have a way of whispering rather than shouting. They blur the line (no pun) between what’s depicted and what’s remembered. This one carries the ghosts of two moments: who I was in 2009, exploring Europe with a camera and too many questions, and who I am now, printing in the desert, working at the intersection of creativity and mortality. These processes keep teaching me that nothing stays untouched—not glass plates, not bodies, not beliefs. Everything changes.

What I love most about this print is that it feels like a conversation between past and present versions of myself. A reminder that every piece of work we make continues living long after we think we’ve finished with it.

Impermanence and Insignificance: A Brief Note from the Void

I’ve been sitting with Escape from Evil again, and every time I revisit Becker’s later work, I feel the same jolt. He names the thing we spend our lives circling. Not death, exactly, but the quieter dread underneath it, the fear of slipping through this world without leaving so much as a fingerprint. Impermanence on one side. Insignificance on the other. It’s a tight little vise. And it’s psychologically terrifying.

Becker saw our terror clearly: we are symbolic creatures who can imagine infinity, yet we’re trapped in these fragile, temporary bodies that can vanish in a moment. The universe isn’t just big. It’s indifferent. And in that indifference, we feel an echo of our own smallness.

“The real fear isn’t the moment of dying. It’s the reckoning that follows: what does our ending reveal about how we lived?”

— Quinn Jacobson

Most of us respond by building what Becker called “immortality projects”—the long list of things we hope will grant us some kind of permanence (like what I’m doing right now). Careers. Families. Beliefs. A reputation. A legacy. Art. Even the small rituals of daily life can start to feel like talismans against oblivion. Becker never mocked these efforts. He understood their necessity. Without them, we’d drown in the sheer scale of our vulnerability.

For me, that tension shows up every time I work. Photography, especially the old processes I use, makes this dance impossible to ignore. A wet collodion plate holds everything and nothing at once. Light settles on silver and forms an image that can last centuries, yet the plate itself is so delicate you can wipe it clean with a rag or crack it between two fingers. It’s the same paradox Becker lived in: durability wrapped in impermanence.

And honestly, that’s why I keep returning to these ancient materials. They tell the truth gently. They remind me that nothing I make will rescue me from the limits of being human. But the making still matters. Maybe that’s the part Becker understood so well: our projects don’t need to defeat insignificance; they only need to give us a way to live with it.

Impermanence isn’t the enemy. Insignificance isn’t a verdict. They’re conditions. The water we swim in, if you will.

What we create—our art, our relationships, our gestures of care—won’t make us immortal. But they mark our brief time here with intention rather than avoidance. They let us stand, for a moment, in the truth of our smallness and still say: I was here. I noticed. I tried.

That might be enough.

Living Truthfully Inside Impermanence

Rupture is not simply a wound; it’s the generative moment when denial collapses and creation begins. It’s the place where death anxiety, cultural myth, and personal memory are transmuted into presence. Within rupture, the artist becomes a witness rather than a defender, turning from the fantasy of permanence toward the truth of impermanence. In that shift, art no longer seeks to outlive death; it becomes a form of living with it.

Otto Rank’s distinction between the artist and the neurotic illuminates this process. Both encounter rupture, the psychic shattering that comes when one’s symbolic world no longer holds, but only the artist metabolizes it. Where the neurotic internalizes and chokes on anxiety, the artist transforms it into form. The creative act becomes a means of surviving truth, of remaking coherence in the face of its undoing. Ernest Becker described culture as a shield against mortality; I see art as the moment that shield cracks. The fracture is not failure but revelation, an aperture where something honest can enter.

My work with wet collodion lives inside that aperture. The process itself enacts rupture: collodion, glass, silver, and time. Each plate holds the risk of loss. The collodion might peel, the image might fog, and the light might fail. Yet those failures become evidence of life. The surface bears the marks of both fragility and endurance, transparency and strength. Each plate is a negotiation between control and surrender, between the impulse to preserve and the inevitability of decay. To work in this way is to accept that every act of making is also an act of unmaking. I’m connecting deeply to these ideas and am excited to see where it takes me.

Update from PhD Land

Clarity on Direction for Doctoral Studies

As I move through this program, I’ll be posting here as part diary/journal and part research/reminders. I’m going to start at the beginning (first things first, in that order).

Despite existing research on death anxiety and Terror Management Theory, there remains a lack of understanding about how artists uniquely engage with mortality through their creative practice. Here lies my sweet spot: artists metabolize absurdity into elegiac beauty, creating work that doesn’t deny death but dwells in its presence.

While previous studies have examined the psychological strategies humans use to manage death anxiety, few have focused on the role of art-making as a direct and conscious confrontation with death (the main driver for me). The literature has largely prioritized quantitative measures of death anxiety and its behavioral outcomes, but less attention has been paid to qualitative, practice-based explorations of how mortality awareness shapes the creative process.

“I use mortality as a creative source, creating art that turns fear into connection and purpose.”

— Quinn Jacobson

I want my work to address this gap by investigating how artists’ engagement with death anxiety can lead to existentially authentic art. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines autoethnography, interviews with artists, and analysis of creative works, this study will explore how artistic practice functions as a site for mortality confrontation and how such engagement reorients artistic purpose and output. It sounds daunting, I know, but it’s really just asking questions about how mortality affects creative people versus those who don’t identify as creative.

The research will contribute to existential psychology, art theory, and creative practice by offering an integrated theoretical and practice-based model for understanding how artists process death anxiety. The findings are expected to inform theories of death anxiety, models of creative practice, and arts-based approaches to existential therapy, ultimately supporting artists, educators, and mental health practitioners in fostering deeper, more meaningful engagement with the realities of death.

“The life-giving question guiding me now is: How might confronting mortality through creativity lead us into deeper, more authentic ways of being human?”

— Quinn Jacobson

Vision Seed (short form)

Helping people directly confront mortality—not as a means to an end, but as a source of ingenuity, fortitude, and a closer bond—is my vision seed. I use historical wounds, grief, and death anxiety in my writing and art to demonstrate how facing our greatest fears can lead to purpose and service. My mission is to advance these discussions so that we can live more compassionately, reciprocally, and with greater presence.

Update on My Book and Preparing for My Doctoral Studies (PhD Program)

Greetings,

I hope this post finds you in good health and good spirits. I know that’s a lot to ask in the world today, but remember gratitude, humility, and awe go a long way to lift your spirits. I try to employ them every day. Happy Spring Equinox, too! It’s warm here. We’re hitting 82F (28C) most days and sunny.

“In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil.” 8” x 10”, 381 pages, seven chapters, and it weighs 3 pounds.

What About My Book?
My book is being printed as I type—the final draft copy anyway. I’ve gone through so many iterations it’s hard to keep track. I can tell you that I’m very happy with the work. In fact, I’m over the moon about it—excited. I hope to include a lot of it in my doctoral studies. I’ll keep you posted when I have copies ready to ship.

Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership PhD
I’m preparing to start my PhD work (Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership) at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is the ONLY school I would attend to do something like this. Period. It’s a great fit for me. It’s a lot like Goddard College, where I earned my M.F.A. These schools are rare and special.

What is the program, and why am I pursuing a PhD? This is how the school describes it:
This unique transdisciplinary doctoral program is designed to prepare you as a regenerative leader to navigate the complexities of changing the old story of separation, domination, competition, and control into the emerging story of cooperation, compassion, connection, and capacity to regenerate broken social systems and struggling ecosystems. Relationships based on authentic partnership are key to our future. This program responds to the question of ‘how shall we shape these relationships of mutuality in order for individuals, families, and communities to live in good relationship with each other and with the plants, animals, soils, waterways, weather systems, oceans, and atmosphere upon which we depend for our lives?’ Responding to these challenges requires “change agents” capable of honoring wisdom traditions and creating new knowledge to envision and enact a new paradigm.

It begins with these questions: “Do you have a vision?” and “Can your vision make a difference for the world?”

I can see my pursuit clearly in those goals.

I’ve given a lot of thought to this. A couple of months ago, I wasn’t going to do it. And I still have days where I wonder if I should or not. My reasons for doubting have nothing to do with the importance of the work. I feel strongly about that. I feel like I would be contributing something unique and valuable to the world. My concerns have been around funding and what the current government is doing to the DOE and other institutions that I would rely on. However, right now, I’m enrolled and ready to attend my first residency at the end of August. I understand part of it is on a ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Does that sound familiar to you? I’ll write more about it later.

I’m going to use my blog as a journal as I go through the program. I think it will help me sort things out and use it as a reference as I go through the program. I have a lot of ideas and am well on my way to making this happen. What I’m hoping to find in the program is a community that I can interact with and expand my ideas. Give me new thoughts, approaches, and information that I don’t currently possess. I have a lot to learn. I know that’s what happened in graduate school (M.F.A.). It was wonderful and very enlightening. I hope for the same here, maybe even more.

What do I hope to accomplish? After reading Ernest Becker’s book in 2018, I discovered why I was making art and why I had the questions I did about human behavior. I've since married the two ideas and feel I have a decent grasp on the intersection of creativity and mortality. In other words, why artists create and how existential art is a powerful buffer against death anxiety. My goal is to show how creative types process and deal with finitude (their impending death) differently than non-creatives. Or at least that’s the question I’m going to address. Keep in mind, this can (and should) radically change over time, but that’s the gist of it.

I think I've found a powerful combination to work with. The interplay between visual art and writing creates a unique space to explore mortality and Becker's theories. Photographs and paintings can capture what words sometimes can't—those abstract, ineffable aspects of confronting mortality. The visual work becomes a direct embodiment of death anxiety and its transformation, while my writing provides the conceptual framework and personal narrative that grounds the experience.

This dual approach seems especially fitting for exploring Becker's ideas. His concepts often deal with the tension between concrete physical reality (our mortal bodies) and symbolic systems of meaning (our immortality projects). My combination of visual art and writing mirrors this tension perfectly—tangible images paired with explanatory text.

The autobiographical element adds another crucial dimension. By documenting my own journey through these philosophical territories, I’m not just theorizing about art as a mortality buffer but demonstrating it in practice. My creative process becomes both the subject and method of the book and my doctoral studies.

By capturing these ceremonial and medicinal (Ute) plants, both alive and after death/going to seed, I’m creating a visual meditation on transformation rather than simple cessation. This connects beautifully to Becker's ideas about death as both an ending and a transition that humans seek to understand through cultural and symbolic frameworks.

The cultural significance of these specific plants adds another layer—these are plants that have been used in healing practices and ceremonies, often related to life transitions. By documenting their living and dead states, I’m tapping into indigenous wisdom about mortality that offers a counterpoint to contemporary death denial.

Meanwhile, my abstract paintings exploring my personal concepts of death—the abyss, chaos, the unknown—provide the subjective, emotional dimension of confronting mortality. The contrast between these approaches is particularly effective, to my mind: the photographs document an observable process in the natural world, while the paintings express the internal, psychological experience of contemplating one's own mortality.

This combination seems especially relevant to Becker's work and Terror Management Theory (TMT). The photographs acknowledge death's reality and place in natural cycles, while the abstract paintings might represent the symbolic systems we create to manage our awareness of that reality.

I begin this August with a six-day residency. This is what the first year looks like (2025-2026):

FALL
VPRL 600 Residency I: Seeking
VPRL 610 Embodied Cosmology
VPRL 620 The Phenomenology of Visionary Practice and the Call to Serve

WINTER
VPRL 630 Traditions of Native American Thought: New Minds and New Worlds
VPRL 640 Regenerative Leadership

SPRING
VPRL 670 Roots & Streams: Finding Your Voice, Clarifying Your Vision, Mapping Your Influences
VPRL 651 Self-Directed Study I

SUMMER
VPRL 660 Introduction to Research Methods: Pathways of Insight
VPRL 681 Self-Directed Study II

My (current) thesis idea: "Transcending Through Creation: The Artist's Existential Advantage in Confronting Mortality."

 Thesis implications: The title suggests a powerful hypothesis: that artists possess unique psychological tools for confronting death anxiety through their creative practice. It indicates my dissertation will explore whether creative individuals have a distinct existential advantage when facing mortality awareness.

I’ve been thinking about the first course, “Embodied Cosmology.” No, it’s not about Tarot cards (LOL!) or astrology. Although it might sound a bit strange if you’re not familiar with the verbiage. Let me explain how I feel about it.

I think about Peter Zapffe’s ideas about “cosmic panic.” Some people stare at the night sky and are exhilarated and engaged—buffering death anxiety with illusions. Some stare at the night sky and see the reality of the indifference and terror of it all.

Artists don't escape the fundamental human condition of mortality—they just develop different mechanisms for confronting it directly.

What distinguishes the artist in this framework isn't an immunity to death anxiety but a willingness to stare longer at the unbearable truth before turning away. Where others might immediately retreat into cultural or religious buffers that deny death's finality, the artist might instead develop practices that allow them to hold mortality awareness in consciousness just long enough to transform it through their work.

This transformation isn't about finding false beauty in terror but about developing the capacity to metabolize terror itself as a raw material for creation. The resulting work doesn't need to be beautiful or comforting—it might be disturbing, challenging, or bleak. What matters is that through the embodied act of creation, the artist has found a way to process mortality awareness without completely surrendering to either denial or paralysis.

In this sense, cosmological embodiment for artists might function not as an escape from Zapffe's cosmic panic but as a unique pathway through it—a method for physically engaging with the knowledge of cosmic indifference and personal extinction that doesn't rely on conventional meaning systems.

The artist's advantage, then, isn't transcending death anxiety but developing more sophisticated and conscious techniques for managing it—techniques that acknowledge the terror rather than disguising it as something else. This allows for moments of clarity about our true position that might be unbearable without the transformative vessel of artistic practice.

This approach offers rich territory for my studies, particularly in examining how my own artistic practice has functioned as a way to metabolize cosmic panic and mortality awareness through physical creative engagement rather than through denial or distraction. This is, in essence, embodied cosmology.

These are the kinds of ideas I’ll be tackling throughout the program.