I was born and raised in the Netherlands, and spent most of my early adult life moving between things that interested me deeply but didn't quite add up: mathematics, endurance running, accountancy briefly and unhappily, and eventually art history and philosophy, which felt from the beginning like the closest I had come to a natural home.​

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The route was not straight. There were periods of real difficulty — a depression that ended a career I should never have started, the accumulated weight of years spent in places and fields that were not quite right. I mention this not for its drama but because it is part of what made the eventual direction feel necessary rather than chosen. At a certain point the question of how to live stops being theoretical.

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The academic formation came later than it does for most people, and was more hard-won for that. I completed a BA in art history at Utrecht University, where I graduated at the top of my cohort, and went on to a doctorate in the philosophy of art at Cornell University — a place I had once driven past convinced it was beyond reach, and which turned out to be the most intellectually formative years of my life. My dissertation concerned the rediscovery of the icon in German Romanticism: the question of how a tradition that had all but lost its sacred art began, slowly and with considerable difficulty, to find its way back to it. I did not fully understand at the time how close that question was to my own.

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For most of my adult life I had been meditating and reading widely across spiritual traditions, drawn toward depth but unable to find a framework that held. The Eastern traditions offered genuine things. So did the encounter with Jung and Steiner, which opened doors I am still grateful for. What shifted, gradually and without any single catalyzing moment, was the recognition that the tradition closest to my own formation — the Christian mystical tradition of the West — contained depths I had never looked at seriously. That recognition came not through institutional religion, which never quite worked for me, but through the writers and practitioners of the tradition itself: Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton, John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich. What I found there was not consolation but something more demanding — a form of practice and attention that asked for the reorientation of the whole life, not the optimization of the self.

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I have lived in Turkey for several years now, and spend much of my time on an island off the coast of Istanbul — one of a small chain that sits within sight of the city but belongs to a different world. The island is an old place, with an old character: more churches than mosques, rooted in Armenian and Orthodox forms of Christianity that predate the Ottoman city by centuries. Most of the churches are no longer in use. But the island retains something of that history in its stones and in the quality of its silence. I know the forest well — the paths that the tourists don't take, the places where you can sit for an hour without seeing anyone. It is a good place to write and to think, and its particular history — Christian, Greek, Armenian, now mostly secular and Turkish — speaks quietly to everything I believe about the relationship between tradition, place, and the interior life.

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Istanbul itself is not incidental to the work. It is a city where the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish mystical traditions have coexisted for centuries, and living inside that reality — as a Westerner committed to the contemplative tradition in Christianity and with genuine respect for what the other traditions have found — has shaped how I understand the possibility of serious interfaith encounter. Without smoothing over their differences, but convinced that these traditions speak to each other in their contemplative depths.​

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The work I am building has two dimensions that I see as inseparable. The first is the series of contemplative journeys I lead across Europe — small, intensive encounters with the sacred art, poetry, and places of the Western mystical tradition, structured as genuine introductions to the contemplative life rather than cultural tourism. The second is the longer work of establishing a research and retreat center in Turkey dedicated to the serious study and practice of mysticism across traditions — a place for scholars and practitioners, for interfaith dialogue that takes each tradition on its own terms, and for the kind of research into depth psychology and consciousness that the field both needs and rarely receives.

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Both projects grow from the same root: the conviction that the contemplative traditions of the world have something to offer that the contemporary world has largely stopped knowing how to ask for.