Subterranean

For decades, I have been guided by a conversation with voices from across the centuries. These honest writers have been my companions, saving me from loneliness by opening worlds of meaning like unexpected doors.

My thirty-three years in higher education revealed an institution increasingly focused on profession and utility. But my own path was drawn by a quieter, more subterranean current. While the institution spoke of outcomes and applications, I found myself listening for a different frequency—the resonant hum of fundamental questions. My work became not the complexification of ideas, but the patient inquiry into how a simple truth, held to the light, could refract into infinite significance. It was a search less for an explanation than for what the poet Robert Lax called “a vision.”

And the astonishing revelation, the vision itself, is this: the deepest reward for such a search is not knowledge or justice, but joy. Likewise, the fruit of kindness and compassion is not recognition or reciprocity, but joy.

After sixty-seven years, the goal is clear. When I fall asleep with the words of the long-gone resting on my chest, I know it was never about expertise. It was always about that elusive, ever-present joy—my most faithful teacher. I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s insistence: “Joy is not made to be a crumb. It is made to be a feast.” And indeed, it has been.