The Founder
One person, working it out in public.
Live Bodhi is not a brand pretending to have figured anything out. It’s a running log of one person’s attempt to actually live the philosophy he’s spent most of his adult life reading about.
My son was four years old the summer my parents invited him to Hilton Head without us.
He was their first grandchild. My mother took on daily adventures. She took him to the firehouse to meet the firemen, They watched alligators from the edge of the lagoon, She watched as the captain taught him to steer the ferry to Dafuskie Island. She was in her element. He was in his.
At some point during that week, he pressed his hand against the sliding glass door that looked out over the golf course and the golfers passing by. Just his hand, flat against the glass. Nobody noticed. The vacation ended, we came home, and life moved on.
A few weeks later, my mother called. She had picked up a bottle of window cleaner and was headed for that door when she saw it: a small handprint, perfectly formed, still there. She hesitated. She couldn’t wipe it away. That print was proof her grandson had been in that room, in that moment, in that life. As far as I know, she never cleaned that spot.
I didn’t fully understand what that story awoke in me when she told it. I’m not sure I fully understand it now. But something in it has stayed with me for thirty years and has only sharpened with time. I’ve come to call it a Bodhi Moment.
We are here briefly. Every person we meet, every place we pass through, leaves something behind — and takes something with them. Most of us move through that exchange without noticing it.
Live Bodhi is my attempt to notice. To stay awake to what’s actually happening in a life — mine specifically, and then maybe yours by extension. Not a framework for optimization, not a program. A practice of paying attention to what already matters and choosing toward it when the noise gets loud enough to make that feel impossible. A habit of fixing yourself in small incremental ways.
I spent over thirty years in the telecom industry and serving my country, lived on multiple continents, came to faith in my late twenties, and have been working on the gap between what I know matters and how I actually live ever since. Living Bodhi is what I have found to stay accountable to myself and to keep doing the work.
The short version.
I’m retired now, which means I have time and energy and no real plan for what to do with either. So I think. A lot. Probably too much.
I was born in Hilton Head and spent many memorable times there throughout my life. I spent the majority of my working years in the Washington Metropolitan Area and traveling around the world in service to my country. Recently my wife and I decided to drive south without a plan bigger than finding somewhere to land. We had been circling the DC metro for years after I left federal service, chasing contracting work I kept telling myself I wanted. One day I noticed I was longing to be somewhere else — near a beach or in Thailand, a country that has become my second home. We sold the house in Virginia and drove to Jacksonville, where my sister lives — that was the plan.
The federal service piece started in a place I didn’t expect. A fraternity brother of mine died in the World Trade Center on September 11th. He was someone I looked up to — great personality, positive about everything. After I lost him, I chose to change my trajectory. I left a comfortable private sector career and spent years traveling the world trying to honor that loss with something more than grief.
People who don’t know me might assume I’m withdrawn, serious, probably a little cold. What I actually am is a passionate idealist who holds himself and the world to standards that are probably unrealistic. It causes a lot of frustration. Living Bodhi is, in part, my attempt to loosen my grip and stop sweating the things that won’t matter after my journey is complete. This little kernel of a philosophy might have smoothed out some of my rough edges earlier if I’d landed on it sooner. I didn’t. So here we are.
Why "Live Bodhi"?
Honestly, it started as a t-shirt brand. I had this wisp of a philosophy rattling around in my head for years — something I got genuinely excited about whenever I talked to a like-minded person — and my original plan was to put clever things on t-shirts and sell them on a beach somewhere. Maybe that was the smarter call. Time will tell.
But the idea, frustratingly hard to nail down, grew bigger than just a shirt. What I kept coming back to turns out to be embarrassingly simple: life is short, most of us know it, and almost none of us act like it. Not in a morbid way — the opposite. Wringing every moment out of the time we have is the most freeing idea I know.
This site is for the person who looks at the world and can’t stop thinking: the king has no clothes. The person who sees the greed, the entitlement, the tribalism, the me-first posturing — people performing their values louder than they live them, the endless competition for who has it worst, who’s right, who wins. Who feels something between confusion and exhaustion, and would like, just once, to step off that particular treadmill. I’m not building a wellness brand. I’m not here to tell you to eat clean and meditate and join the right tribe. The thing most intentional living content gets wrong is the balance — work hard, sure, but don’t take yourself so seriously you forget why you started. Exercise and stay fit, but eat the cake too.
The danger isn’t in wanting things — it’s in the extremes. We spend our lives acquiring things that end up owning us: homes, cars, careers, reputations. Each one needs feeding. When something commands an undeserved percentage of your focus, you stop making choices — you’re just serving the tilt. Experiences are the one exception. The only things you can collect without fear of them collecting you back.
The message is simple: wake up, live fully, reset what you think actually matters.
I want Living Bodhi to resonate with people the way it has with me — not as a program to complete, but as permission to stop waiting for the right time to start actually living.
What this site is for.
Two things. First, it is the founder’s own practice — written down so the practice actually happens. Putting the work on the public record is the most reliable way he has found to stay accountable to himself and to keep doing the work. Second, it is for anyone who recognizes themselves in the writing. If a piece is useful, take it.
What this site is not.
It is not a coaching funnel. It is not a productivity system. It is not an invitation to a webinar. The site is not here to sell anything but the opportunity to understand what it is to Live Bodhi. There is no program to enroll in, no premium tier, no coach to hire. If that ever changes, you will see it coming from a long way off and it will make sense when it arrives. For now, this is a place to read, to think, and to take whatever is useful.
How to reach the founder.
The best way to reach me directly is [email protected]. If you found something here that landed, if you have a question, or if you just want to say something — that’s the address. I read everything.