I pray and meditate fairly often, using a variety of methods, including: slow deep breathing, energy sweeping, simply standing still, word prayer (with feeling), receptive meditation (waiting for “gifts of awareness”), feeling the energy of trees (tree hugging), seeing colors in my mind (and “tuning”/clarifying the colors), processing spiritual dreams, various “mind experiments”, epiphanies, and occasionally reflecting on approximately 10 -20 mystical experiences which came to me throughout my life's course, and which suggested an “intelligent designing” process which is more real than the physical reality we generally perceive. 

    Although I am open to a wide range of spiritual experiences and concepts, my wife and I are fairly traditional worshippers, in that we are regular church-goers and have maintained a membership at a Methodist church for a long time (lifetime for my wife, over 34 years for me). 

   I was raised in northern Kentucky and attended rural churches as a boy. The enthusiastic revivalist, hellfire, style of preaching and the sin theology (and rigid role expectations of the larger rural culture which seemed woven into the church's beliefs at the time) left me with emotional issues concerning religion, but never totally soured me to the idea of using conventional forms of religion as spiritual growth and maintenance” “vehicles”.

    I do believe, however, that all religions have a calling (whether they hear it yet or not) to discern core spiritual principles which they may share with one another - in order to find “common ground”.  I believe the spiritual communities should aspire to form a larger “transfaith” community, and should consider forming actual model communities (of the type I am writing about in the above-mentioned book) which assist folks in living according to those consented-upon spiritual principles. I discerned 5 spiritual principles that the fictional characters in my book's community endorse and promote. “Allsberg” is the name of that fictional transfaith town. 

  My hobbies include: writing poetry and prose, philosophizing (especially about things spiritual), distance running (ran 10 marathons, slowly!), songwriting, trying to play golf!