WHEN YOU PAY ATTENTION, YOU PAY ALOT

David’s work explores our personal and collective relationships with the created world and with others, and how both deepen as we risk opening at once to our own vulnerability, our immeasurable potential and the possibilities that await us. His work proceeds from his own search to find and make a home in the world.

Deserts, both literal and figurative, have played an important role in his personal and professional formation. Born in Arizona, his many visits to the Grand Canyon and Coconino Forests near Sedona exposed him to the allure of the ethereal beauty of the desert southwest. While in college in Southern California he studied theology and at once was inspired by a second read of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and following graduation promptly departed to Africa to live and work in the Democratic Republic Of Congo. This proved to be the transformative experience of his life. Through immersion in a culture rich in primordial spiritual and theological traditions, and a grand diversity of art, music, dance and literature, his view of the world expanded, becoming more inclusive, and his relation to the natural world less intellectual and more grounded in the body. Africa was a revelation.

When he returned to California to begin theological studies, he began visiting a Benedictine monastery in the high desert of Southern California. After ten years of pilgrimages to St. Andrew’s Abbey, he became an oblate of that order and maintains his love of that contemplative tradition to this day.

David comes from a long line of rebels and bootleggers on his father’s side, and a clan of contemplatives and the profoundly religious on his mother’s. He counts himself fortunate that both parents were gifted with eyes to see the wonder and complexity of the extraordinary in the ordinary — from his father’s furniture making, landscape design, bartending artistry, and artisanal marijuana cultivation, to his mother’s deeply contemplative engagement with the natural world of plants, and the soul of a writer, David developed his love of jazz and afro-Latin percussion, having played professionally from the age of 15.

David’s work reflects these eclectic and diverse threads, evident in his speaking, teaching and writing.