Lots of Playing and Exploring
A year into my forties, it seemed a good time to get serious and find my purpose beyond pharmacy and fatherhood, however good to me the former and dear to me the latter. 
Over the next few years, with camera in tow, I let my artist-photographer-nature-explorer roam wild.

In 2006 I combined my photography and poetic-philosophic musings into a 45-minute video presentation set to music. Twenty years after leaving Wright State, I saw this project as a dissertation of sorts, a response to why I left the Ph.D. program and a summary of my journey since then.

Shortly thereafter I started playing around with web-design, mostly as a means to share my writings and photography. 

Around 2010 I started building a website to explore my various ideas and findings regarding cannabis. Immediately after this I decided to leave conventional pharmacy. 

Nine months later I was back in school working on my Master's degree at Regis University.
What landed me at Regis stemmed from a discovery a few years previously that proved a key turning point in my life. It came in the form of another man's vision, one which not only allowed me to keep my own path, a path which I had worked so hard to both forge and find, but helped me to see the greater common path which we all share. Like a suddenly risen sun, the vision illuminated a very great swath of time and space, and most importantly, spirit.

The vision came from a Jesuit Priest-Paleontologist by the name of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and was found in his seminal work The Phenomenon of Man, originally published in his native French in 1955 under the title Le Phenomene Humain. As I say in the preface of my thesis, "His thinking...lifted me out of an intellectual dead-end and helped me build a bridge between hard physical science and personal transcendent experience. His inspiration is ultimately what landed me at Regis." So too, Teilhard's vision provides the initial impetus for this school.

Finally, in accord with the work of Teilhard, the spirit of Manitou Movie School and the framework of thought on which it is built is best expressed in Marilyn Ferguson's 1980 book, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time. Within its pages we can see how conventional thought is at best only half correct, just one side of the story--that in fuller reality life is as much a process as a thing, a becoming as being. Thus the learning continues as our eyes are still opening.

So, if we must stay in school, if our learning still has a long way to go, we should make it as fun as possible, taking full advantage of the adventure of exploration, the thrill of wonder and discovery, and the joy of creativity and community. Of course, how exactly we do this is the work in progress.
So I got a bunch of friends together, plus recruited my son, and we put on a play. Thus was activated the latent actor and improvisational artist in us all. It was hardly professional but infinitely fun. And I was the jester, or the clown as it were.

And then there was another part of me that demanded expression.

Ever since graduating from college in 1986 I have found great solace and satisfaction in exploring and spending time in Nature. Here again I feel at home, perhaps more so than anywhere else. And since moving to Manitou, time on the trail, at least an hour or two a day, has become as much a part of my daily routine as brushing my teeth. It is the greatest medicine.
Given my passion for the outdoors, once I discovered digital photography, its ease and capability, I was certain my niche was at hand and started shooting away. Big and small, colorful and dull, everything was fair game, and I couldn't get enough.
A Vision Beyond Mine