THE INQUIRY

I left the East End of Long Island when I was 21 and have now spent half my life there and half on the West Coast in Southern California.

My family roots on the East End extend back generations, many closely connected to the water—whaling captains, fishermen and baymen. Water was simply part of the landscape of growing up there.

I went into the field of applied behavior analysis, spending fifteen years in study and applied practice, primarily in the field of autism. Much of that work centered on observing behavior, learning, environments and change, with later work extending into service-dog and restorative justice programs within California correctional facilities.

Parenthood brought a significant paradigm shift. Lived experience came into direct conflict with much of what I had learned professionally. Questions about behavior, compliance and change widened into questions about conditioning itself—how we learn to see another person, what we believe should change, and what happens when observation comes before interpretation.

What shapes the way we see another person?
What draws our attention?
What disappears into the background?
How much of what feels like perception has already been conditioned?

The work of J. Krishnamurti entered an inquiry already underway. His observations on conditioning, attention, and seeing without immediately naming, judging, or trying to change what is there gave language to questions that had become increasingly difficult to ignore.

At the same time, another kind of observation was taking place.

Watching my son—whose mind and body feel safest near the water—surf, fish, play, and simply be in many of the same places where I grew up began to bring different parts of the inquiry together.

Returning after spending half a life somewhere else created another perspective on a place that had once simply been home: water and land, work and leisure, people serving and being served, belonging and access, and many different lives unfolding alongside one another in the same place.

Returning to the East End through these overlapping experiences helped reveal the lens that had always been there.

The Unfixed Lens grew somewhere within that recognition: that what we see, what captures our attention, and what quietly fades cannot be entirely separated from the conditions, experiences, histories, and relationships through which we have learned to look.

The inquiry is not about arriving at a different or more correct way of seeing.

It is about noticing that there is a lens at all.

Exploring Re:Vision grew from that inquiry.