My journey of writing poetry began in my teenage years, where, like many young poets, I wrote from the depths of heightened emotion and romantic idealism. The early stage lover archetype dominated my writing – passionate verses about unrequited love, cosmic connection, and the yearning for a perfect union. I poured my heart onto pages, believing that true poetry meant transcending the ordinary world for something more sublime. I spent years chasing the mystical and studying maps of consciousness and psychology.

As I matured, I began to recognize the beauty in embracing not just the light but also the shadow aspects of myself. Rather than trying to heal, spiritualize or transform my wounded parts, I learned to sit with them, to love even the unhealed portions of my being. This shift marked my first steps toward something new in my awareness, which I now call Post-Integral Realism – understanding that wholeness doesn't always mean transcendence or healing but can simply mean being present with what is, including our darkness.

When I engage with Post-Integral Realism, I find myself returning to the ordinary moments of life with renewed attention and affection. While I understand the transcend-and-include pattern of integral metatheory and the oscillations of metamodernism, I choose to suspend these frameworks methodologically – not to reject their validity, but to more fully inhabit the present moment.

In my poetry, this philosophical stance manifests as an intimate engagement with the concrete and mundane. You will see an evolution of my writing from seeking transcendence to resting in this realism. I don't seek to transcend everyday experience through verse; instead, I let my words sink deeper into life's ordinary textures. Each poem becomes a way of dwelling in reality rather than attempting to rise above it.

What draws me to Post-Integral Realism is its radical intimacy with what is. While I carry awareness of more complex theoretical frameworks and heuristics, I find that temporarily bracketing them allows for a more direct relationship with experience. My poems emerge from this space – where sophisticated maps of meaning meet simple presence, where the mundane reveals its inherent depth without needing to be transformed into something else.

This approach represents an evolution in my philosophical and artistic journey. Rather than always seeking to transcend or oscillate between different modes of being, I've learned to find profound meaning in staying with what is. My poetry is an exploration of this – finding extraordinary depth in ordinary moments, not by rising above them, but by sinking more fully into their reality.