1st, John, what wonderful and emotive art work you do! In your essay you’ve used the word “heart”. Especially in writings with themes such as yours a word such as heart, soul, unconscious, common unconsciousness, psyche or (more rarely) the terms synchronicity or morphic resonance jump out to me. My fiction, for me, is that meaning and purpose resides in the arena these type words and phrases vaguely allude to.

It seems to me our culture has currently significantly reduced our exploration of interior energies and complexes — substituting instead materialism, rote religion, statistical symptom treating psychology, external recognition and cynical disaffection. My conviction is that the actions you describe are, in fact, the testimonial pattern behaviors toward meaning. Each of us helping others to discover their own unique inner nature and become authentically aligned with their own life is perhaps a high calling. Maybe by writing this response I can help remind myself to remember that calling more clearly.