M. D. ✶ The Mystic
I did not arrive at this work through belief systems or inherited traditions. I arrived through lived psychological descent after prolonged disorientation, and the slow reconstruction of meaning from the inside out. What emerged was a way of perceiving existence that proved necessary for my own survival more than anything chosen.
My orientation was shaped in periods where identity dissolved, familiar narratives failed, and the body became the primary site of truth. In those phases, abstraction was useless. What mattered was what could be endured, what I could metabolize, and what could be lived with integrity when everything false fell away. As a lifelong painter and consumer of myth, symbolic language has ever been an integral mode of processing for my psyche. But depth psychology and somatic awareness appeared as tools rather than interests—they were the only forms of tracking inner reality that were accessible to me when ordinary frameworks could no longer hold.
Jungian psychology offered a map for experiences that could not be explained through surface language alone. Myth and alchemy provided symbolic coherence in the places where linear sense-making failed. Art and writing became the only containers capable of holding what was happening within me without reducing it. Over time, these elements converged into a practice rooted in contact—contact with the psyche, the body, with nature, and with the slow intelligence of transformation.
When I use the word mystic, I am not referring to spirituality as belief or performance. I mean direct engagement with inner reality as it is actually encountered: embodied, destabilizing, archetypal, and often inconvenient. Mysticism, as I understand it, is not about leaving the world behind, but about learning how to remain present when the familiar world dissolves and reforms.
My work—whether visual, written, or experiential—does not offer methods, diagnoses, or promises of transcendence. It is instead oriented toward accompaniment: a steady presence for those already moving through thresholds of unmaking and reorientation. I am interested in what happens after certainty collapses, and in how a life can be rebuilt without bypassing what has been lost.
This work is not for everyone. It is for those who find themselves navigating interior terrain without clear language or external validation—those who sense that something fundamental is reorganizing, and are seeking articulation rather than instruction. What I offer is not a path to follow, but a way of naming what may already be underway.
