Ontolog is a collection of mornings.

I begin with This Morning, I... and write. This isn't a body of knowledge. It's a body of practice. An investment of daily attention.

This practice sounds simple but it is quietly demanding. Discovering what feels too dangerous or too joyful to say.

I don't write to produce. It took me *many* years to understand that following the thread of thought beneath the noise -- hearing the hum beneath the doing -- is productive. The work of shaping, and being shaped by, the systems I inhabit. Each morning disappears, but I am changed by the making of it.

Some mornings, I can't let my mind off leash. I convince myself that answering email, paying a bill, dusting my ebooks is more important. Re-selecting fonts, another todo list app, making two cantankorous pieces of software talk to each other.

I have enthusistically begun, and quit, this practice many times. Nevertheless, I persist.

For decades, I've been writing every morning, by hand. I wrote in private, because the world didn't yet feel safe. My roots grew deep enough to grow outward. Ontolog is me Pressing Send. On a thought, a feeling, a rebellion, a whim. Whatever is here, it represents where I choose to invest my attention. That choice is sovereignty.

And yes, that comes with fear. Shyness and sometimes shame. But also: Insight. Courage. Contact.

This may seem far away from my profession, architecing technology systems. It is not. It is noticing the patterns and loops. It's being inside the system and witnessing it. It's embodiment and emergence. It's recursive and relational.

If you can't reason about reality, you shouldn't be architecting it.

Technology isn't just technical — it's ethical, relational, and systemic. I write to stay in relationship -- with reality, with people, with the systems I'm shaping and shaped by. Not to dominate and control them -- to master them -- but to feel it shifting through me.

Mastery is what happens when you no longer seek to become the master.

I've published books, given many talks, led workshops, and supported many of teams. But I don't do these things to prove I'm a writer or an expert. I do these things because thinking is, above all else, an intimate, open-ended relationship with other people.

More than anything, I write to learn. To synthesize: bring together what others know with what I sense, and what I've lived. To create paths of learning that let others emerge changed — not just informed.

To write is to build experience. Not just for me -- for us.

Writing isn't what I do between projects. It is the project. It's how the work emerges, takes shape, finds resonance. What people pay me for? Often, it began here -- with a morning thought, shaped into clarity.

Every morning, I'm scared. But I also want you to see me be brave.

Let your words be anything but empty, why don't you tell them the truth? --Sara Bareilles