My Vision

Hello!  As a devout sensuist (someone who takes delight in experiencing the world through the senses), I want to be here to offer you a space and experience to be open to that part of you that is intensely alive, powerful and tender, courageous and forgiving, full of wonder and awe, open and present.  It is my hope that you are or will soon be a sensuist, too!

Academic and Professional Background

In conjunction with my work as your guide, I am a Landscape Architect and I have been designing gardens and public spaces for over 10 years. I also have a degree in Psychology and Philosophy from Santa Clara University. At one time in the past, I worked as a private investigator, and as such, I interacted with a wide variety of people.  For the past 15 years I have studied and performed Middle Eastern dance.  Curently, I study hoop dance, a dance form which utilizes a hoop or multiple hoops as the dancer's  partner.

My Journey

About five years ago, I embarked upon what I like to refer to as my “Hero’s Journey,” the term coined, of course, by the influential mythologist, Joseph Campbell. On this journey I have learned much. I’ve read extensively on mythology and cultural studies, psychology and philosophy, neuroscience, sensory studies and erotica, among others. My guides have been Joseph Campbell, many great writers and thinkers from American Indian cultures, Deepak Chopra, Diane Ackerman, Ivan Illich, Anais Nin, Julie McIntyre and so many others. 

I have come to feel a deep connection with the Dionysian Maenads:

They went to the wilderness to worship, to the wildest mountains, the deepest forests, as if they kept to the customs of an ancient time berfore men had thought of building houses for their gods.  They went out of the dusty, crowded city, back to the clean purity of the untrodden hills and woodlands.  There Dionysus gave them food and drink: herbs and berries and the milk of the wild goat.  Their beds were on the soft meadow grass; under the thick-leaved trees; where the pine needles fall year after year.  They woke to a sense of peace and heavenly freshness; they bathed in a clear brook.  There was much that was lovely, good, and freeing in this worship under the open sky and the ecstacy of joy it brought in the wild beauty of the world.

-Edith Hamilton Mythology:Timeless

I have also come to experience and yearn for the numinous.  The Gale Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines the term numinous as based on the Latin numen ("will, the active power of the divine") and this term was coined by Rudolf Otto (1917/1926) to define a "category for the interpretation and evaluation" of nonrational manifestations of the sacred. According to Otto, the numinous is characterized by a "sense of one's creature state," mystical awe (tremendum), a presentiment of divine power (majestas), amazement in the face of the "completely other" (mysterium), demoniacal energy, and paradox.

Our Journey

Gallery of the Senses is founded on the belief that the deep engagement of the senses, coupled with an open and trusting heart and a present mind lead us to a sense of deep intimacy with others, oneself, and indeed everything.  This state of intimacy is so blissful that we each yearn for it; it is that yearning for reconnection with our initial whole.  It, in fact, brings us to exist in the numinous in our daily lives.  I believe it is possible to exist in this state of intimacy, and I wish to reach out to you to partner with me on this sensual journey.

As a Landscape Architect, sensuist, searcher and creative soul, I’ve striven for a very particular effect in my work. It won’t be found in the reality home and garden programs. It is something that was intangible for me for quite some time, and I eventually came to understand that I demand authenticity and connection in both my work and my personal life. My work is never guided by trend or fashion, nor my personal life. I became aware that it is all connected for me, and that is precisely why I am offering this journey.

I hope that as we progress, these connections will become increasingly evident for you. I ask for your trust in me because the exploration of intimacy demands a certain kind of openness. I will reciprocate, with my own trust and vulnerability. I believe that you will all find it worth the risk. I suggest to you that you will benefit from this journey in direct proportional amount to your openness and level of presence. And, as such, I sincerely hope for your open nonjudgmental hearts.

The universe is dead for us, and how is it to come alive again?  "Knowledge" has killed the sun, making it a ball of gas, with spots; "knowledge" has killed the moon, it is a dead little earth fretted with extinct craters as with smallpox; the machine has killed the earth for us, making it a surface, more or less bumpy, that you travel over.  How, out of all this, are we to get back to the grand orbs of the soul's heavens that fill us with unspeakable joy?  How are we to get back to Apollo, and Attis, Demeter, Persephone, and the halls of Dis?  How even see the star Hesperus, or Betelgeus?  We've got to get them back, for they are the world our soul, our greater consciousness lives in.  The world of reason and science, the moon, a dead lump of earth, the sun, so much gas with spots; this is the dry and sterile little world the abstracted mind inhabits.  The world of our little consciousness, which we know in our pettifoggin apartness.  This is how we know the world when we know it apart from ourselves, in the mean separateness from everything.

-D H Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover

All serious daring starts from within.

-Eudora Welty

We live on the leash of our senses.  Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restain us, but how beautifully.  Love is a beautiful bondage, too.

-Diane Ackerman

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox!  This is what is the matter with us, we are bleedng at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep looming in our civilized vase on the table.

-DH Lawrence

Lady Chatterly's Lover

Intimacy is the food that feeds the soul of love.

-Julie McIntyre

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

-Diane Ackerman

The Self is not a known territory, but a wilderness.  Too often we forget that.  Too often we reach the boundaries of what we know about ourselves and turn back.

-Paul Ferrini

The Wisdom of the Self