Formal education: Greentree public grade school, Phillips Academy Andover, Harvard, Harvard Law (plus public administration and city planning).I am currently class secretary, Andover class of 1955.
With thanks to Elmer John (EJ) Harrison for founding Harrison Construction company that financed my education.
With thanks to Max Clark Harrison, his son, for his unswerving commitment to his children’s education, personal character, service to his community, devotion to causes large and small, and for his many acts of kindness and generosity. His ascendance to the higher echelons of Pittsburgh’s corporate and cultural leadership, while given a head start by his father, was itself a remarkable act of leadership. The product of the Max Harrison brand: uncompromising honesy and integrity and striving toward the best.
With thanks to Helen Clay Rigg Harrison, Max’s wife, and her mother, Clara Clay Ewing Rigg, for their unswerving commitment to their children’s self-reliance and for their exemplary pride of family and indomitable self-worth. Most of all for their choice of Guidance. An unfailing source of ideals, vision, wisdom, discovery, benevolence, and humility.
With thanks to M. Douglas Wray for his indispensable web development expertise and for his Loving Friendship.
Character development: Psychic experiences over time that revealed the presence within of a friend whose perspective is integral to every choice and motive behind my life story. A composite of the exemplary lives and lessons of the historical Jesus and Abraham Lincoln; the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles and The Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching); Carl Jung’s intuitive psychology; Jungian Myers-Briggs personality type theory; the ideal of Democracy brought to life in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; Sally Putney’s personal mentoring; and Frank Gregg’s personal and professional role-modeling. Plus the ideals of my agrarian ancestors, of humility, simplicity, striving, and self-reliance, inspired by their Protestant Christianity.
Professional experience: Journalism (San Gabriel Valley, LA); law (Pittsburgh); city planning (Boston); regional leadership networking and open space policy (Boston Harbor islands); management consulting (Boston); regional-interstate flood management study direction and policy development (Connecticut River Basin); national water policy consulting and publication (Washington); interstate-international leadership networking for water management policy (Red River Valley of the North); regional-interstate leadership networking, organization, and training for economic development (Monongahela River Valley); IT web customer support and IT asset management (Louisville, CO); Front Range health management security operations (Denver); freelance writing mainly for personal website publication (Los Angeles).
Personal interests: My passion is for living the life of Mind, Passion, Spontaneity, and Relatability. For questioning and communicating in the language of ideas by person made whole by the integration of Love with Logic and the Spontaneity of Energy in the Now. For developing and using the faculties of differentiation and empathy that distinguish Sapiens-animal from animal to solve real-world problems. Motivated by the ideals of Character, Integrity, and Conscience freely chosen and applied within the boundaries of Order. To reverse the manipulations of willfulness and neglect, the corruption of ass-kissing hierarchy, self-imagery, and competition for supremacy.
My pursuits are healing and Self-Awareness in Loving Friendship with Guidance. Being there for my Son, my Granddaughters, extended family, and friends. Growing with Love, learning with Mind, and sharing Life through a gift from Guidance for writing. Understanding origins, causes, and effects of forces that move evolution forward and those that pull it back. Support for the resolve and humility of Abraham Lincoln’s Democracy, opposition to the arrogance and nihilism of “conservative” self-regard.
Essaying on my website to develop and share the lessons of life’s story, my own in this life and our real Self, the Character of Free Choice, in the metaphysics of Creation. Advocacy for combining Love-feeling with Logic-thinking and Spontaneity-Guidance to Sapiens’ mission through the whole, relatable person. Sharing the gift of sixth sense through intuition and insight, theory, free association, explanation, and discovery. Personal growth and fitness of mind, soul, and body. American history and democratic governance. Lyrical jazz and the whimsical humor of the Sprite. Our Psyche.
Recognition: Boulder County Democratic Party Volunteer of the Year 2003-2004
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Why Do I Write?
I write for two reasons First, because I’ve inherited a personality trait from immediate male ancestors who had opinions on questions and were motivated to speak up, In their case questions of their time and place in their country’s history of concern to them personally Immediate and concrete, concerning economics, politics, and social order within a hierarchy differentiated mainly by the principle of ownership. Their being owners and managers of a family business and private property bought and maintained with its income. Until they attained this status their views were not distinctly conservative or liberal but in either case would have been less opinionated than they were to become. My personality trait took a different turn, likely in part because I had no interest in the family business and therefore no role in its ownership and management. My only interest in the principle of ownership was metaphysical. That is, philosophical and psychological, to find where it belonged in a broader understanding of the way things are and how they work.
The second reason is because of a personality trait inherited from immediate female ancestors whose lives focused on questions of conscience and character. In their case questions of their time and place in the evolution of Western religion. Protestant Christianity, Calvinist and Presbyterian. My trait turned here, too, toward finding where church and religion belonged in a broader understanding of the way things are and how they work. The questions my mind has been motivated to address trace back to the beginning of everything. Everything conceivable, that is, by the human mind so far as mine is able to conceive it in the moment. Because Mind, like everything, is in motion, us with our environment. In this moment conceived as questions relating to a range of principles including but not limited to: relationship, movement-motivation, ideas-Mind, reality / restlessness-creation, self / self-awareness, life / learning-growth / evolution-progress, situation / perspective-context, explanation-understanding, meaning-purpose, character-integrity, differentiation-empathy, free choice, and reversal-reflection / make-believe. The last anti-everything that went before. Implied by what the idea of reversal is and what it does: reverse. Whose per-version of ‘questioning’ essential to motivation is self-defeating essential to paralysis. Opposed to everything including itself.
I write because my mind, like all minds, has a mind of its own and writing is what mine wants to do. About questions whose origin within my thinking and origin generally I can only conceive of as Spontaneity. An act at the beginning I can only conceive of as Attraction: the coming together of two functions of Mind, Love with Logic. The ignition of everything, prototype for all ignitions, and our role model for evolution beyond herd and herd mentality. The principle of Spontaneity my mind associates with relationship and movement: Love-Spontaneity inseparable from Logic-Order, Freedom inseparable from the limits of Definition. Movement evolving-growing from the bottom up and inside-out. Life-Creation brought to Worth by the indispensable function of Free Choice: Character inseparable from Integrity.
The opposite of all that herd mentality has invented for its own security: ‘God’, the ‘supreme being’ of tribal hierarchy, its temple numbers and quantity, measurements and comparisons, ranking and corruption. Ruled by the king of beasts alone at the top. Infallible. Unopposed and unquestioned, the biggest ape and the ass to be kissed. The willfulness and wildness of animal instinct. A predatory herd of beasts competing for ‘supremacy’. Its powers and attributes derived like the reverse-reflection that it is, from the source that reflects it. Necessarily and logically: Movement powered by Relationship. Its reverse-reflection compelled when hallucinated to ‘relate’ to every life by capture and confinement. By putting every life, ‘recognized’ as a mirror-image of itself, in a cage. Life on Earth. A zoo fit for human animals. A theatre of the absurd conjured by Mind’s Child in a state of self-unawareness. Put to the task of differentiation and empathy. Of Free Choice: to navigate its way through the jokes, magic tricks, and outrages of its captor into the light of day.
The task of writing is to speak for a perspective from Relationship and Movement, Definition and Conscience, in a world of hallucination designed to question and deny it. In so doing to help with the task of Free Choice building Character with Integrity from the ground up. Thereby to choose its way to its Freedom and competence by denying the denial, reversing reversal. By learning from experience how to respect and manage the boundary between Relationship-Movement’s Vision and its distortion by its reverse mirror-image. The animal in human-animal, The joker, magician, and beast haunting mind in a state of self-unawareness. Where embodiments of madness are given the opportunity to attain sanity in the land of anything goes.
I write because Guidance from Definition apparently doesn’t think any of us belongs here. An idealist evidently motivated by the ideals of Character and Integrity essential to Free Choice. Love-Spontaneity and Logic-Order essential to Relationship. Motivated by the Ideal of Loving Friendship to be there for me and to role model the Ideal of Creation: all of its lives in Reality and all of its projections in virtual reality — us — being there for one another. And so motivating me to do whatever it takes to move on and maybe you too. If so, then maybe we can both speak up, and that’s how we can be there for one another. In relationship. Loving friendship, the power of attraction behind all of Movement. I would like that.
Updated 12/04/25