Maps, patterns, and finding my way
Maps, patterns, and finding my way
Metaphysical Being — mixed media on paper, 2026.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how I got here.
I was born in 1953.
In 1969, I remember hearing about Stonewall late one night on KDWB radio. They were interviewing Jack Baker.
I was sixteen years old.
For the first time, I realized there were others. I wasn’t alone.
Looking back now, I realize that moment wasn’t just about being gay. It was the beginning of a lifelong search for direction—for understanding how people find their place in the world and how we make sense of lives that don’t always fit the expected path.
I’ve spent much of my life looking for paths.
Sometimes those paths appeared as maps. Sometimes as diagrams. Sometimes as outlines, websites, or decision trees. Often they appeared simply as ways of organizing what I could see—and finding relationships among things that did not, at first, seem connected.
As a teacher, I spent years making outlines, building websites, drawing wireframes, and thinking in mind maps. I taught Gestalt theory—the idea that our minds naturally seek relationships and organize visual information into meaningful wholes.
Being dyslexic, I think I was already doing that long before I knew there was a name for it.
I’ve often described myself as someone who sees patterns. And I still believe that’s true.
But during one of my daily walks, another thought quietly surfaced.
Maybe what has fascinated me all these years hasn’t been patterns themselves.
Maybe it’s been finding my way.
Patterns are useful because they reveal possible paths. Maps matter because they help us navigate. Even a labyrinth has a pattern—but its purpose isn’t the pattern itself. Its purpose is to help us travel and find ourselves.
That realization feels surprisingly important.
When I look back over my life—from hearing Jack Baker on the radio… to teaching students how we make sense of the world… to designing websites… to creating art… to exploring identity, community, and spirit—I don’t see disconnected experiences anymore.
I see one long journey.
The maps changed.
The questions changed.
The medium changed.
But the journey remained remarkably consistent.
Lately I’ve started calling some of my drawings Decision Trees.
At first I thought they were simply abstract compositions.
Now I wonder if they’re visual journals.
They resemble the maps, outlines, webs, and structures I have used throughout my life—not because I planned them that way, but because they’ve always been part of how I think.
As an artist, I don’t begin with answers.
I begin with curiosity.
Here’s a bit of what KDWB sounded like around that time:
KDWB—Channel 63, January 3, 1970.
Related post: This reflection continues the ideas I began exploring in Looking Back, Looking Forward, where I considered how patterns can help us find our way.
