Being obsessed narrows the mind
to a single path, thinned to bone by repetition.
Many obsessions are not an obsession;
they tug the mind in different directions, refusing to settle.
What looks like restlessness is wider attention,
a refusal to mistake narrowing for depth. 🐝
It must be hard to trace the logic around my projects and interests: my day job in information technology — operational resilience, digital currency, artificial intelligence; my background in information architecture, library science, and open source; and my ongoing artistic work in meditation, philosophy, literature, and publishing.
I pivot often. At heart I am an artist, using an arts-based business model and repackaging what I do in different surface forms for better traction. I also learned a great deal from IBM sales. In my last years with IBM Watson I worked as a Technical Presales Architect, travelling worldwide with a sales team. That experience taught me to focus on the positive message, signal not noise.
It may look a little wild from the outside, but I stopped explaining myself long ago.
What I never compromise is the anchor, the path: to create a worthy work of art.
I was inspired early on by John Coutanche, my high school English literature teacher at Parkside Collegiate Institute in St. Thomas, Ontario. I looked him up today and learned that he passed away on April 12, 2017.
Our English literature class was a small circle of Grade 13 students. On the last day he handed each of us prints of a few verses. One of them set my path:
I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
~ William Blake
Thank you, Mr. Coutanche.
Good morning, readers,
I discovered the word umwelt in the book Animals Are People by Peter Morville. Umwelt is a rich and evocative word — borrowed from the German for “environment,” but in its deeper sense, it means the subjective world each creature inhabits. Coined by biologist Jakob von Uexküll, it describes how every organism lives in its own bubble of perception: a tick senses heat and butyric acid, a bat hears with sonar, a human reads meaning in words. Each lives in its own reality — overlapping, yet distinct.
Peter Morville uses umwelt beautifully in Animals Are People to explore how empathy, design, and ecology are all about understanding other worlds of experience — animal, human, and machine. It’s one of those words that quietly changes how you see everything.
Umwelt is the key to my projects in 2026. Later in the year, I will be launching a major writing project in stages. Already, I have reorganized my web presence around it.
Please note the following important updates:
Subscribe to my new Meditation Community
My first project in 2026 is to launch a free, weekly, online Meditation Community. I have been facilitating a similar group at work for the past seven years, and as I approach retirement, I want to create a public space for this. It deserves a dedicated newsletter. Learn more and subscribe here.
My all-Canadian bookstore, Snail Books, is open for business
Snail Books celebrates the conclusion of its launch. You can preview and buy your copy of The Divine Mind for $4.99 on our website. In January 2026, I will begin selling e-books of my earlier title, Slow Reading. Purchasing a book from Snail Books is a great way to support my art.
This newsletter will bundle news and be less frequent
Thank you for the amazing success of this newsletter — it launched my essay career and Snail Books. Going forward, this newsletter will bundle updates and appear less often. My writing will shift to dedicated newsletters, such as the Meditation Community newsletter mentioned above, and later this year, an Umwelt newsletter.
Thank you,
John