While researching The Quest, I stumbled across Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols— and then Gina bought me The Red Book, Jung’s own illustrated record of his inner journey. Something in those pages opened a door I hadn’t known was there.

Jung drew a small mandala every morning. A circle divided into four. A map of his inner situation, updated daily. He believed the drawings tracked something the rational mind couldn’t — the slow movement toward wholeness.

I set down his book and picked up a pencil.

My first mandala was simple: a circle, two crossing axes, four quadrants, and a smaller circle at the center. Body. Mind. Soul. Spirit. The center labeled Self. The inscription at the top: Wholeness.

That single drawing inspired the shape and symbolism of everything that followed.

The body-mind-soul-spirit framework led directly to the next question: how do these four aspects of being move through time? That question produced the life stages mandala — Development (ages 0-25), Establishment (25-50), Enjoyment (50-75), Enlightenment (75-?) — with each stage having its own quadrant, each requiring something different from the person living in it.

And with those, a new awareness.

I had learned a new word — quaternity — and once I knew it, I saw it everywhere. Four seasons. Four directions. Four humors. Four Noble Truths. Four forces of psychology. Four archetypes of male functioning. Four kinds of crisis. Wherever I read, wherever I wrote, I started finding sets of four hiding inside the material. Each one became a mandala. Each mandala became a page in what eventually grew into a hand-drawn journal of seventy-four circles as of this writing.

The evolution took years. It was never planned as a collection. Each drawing addressed a question, and the questions kept multiplying.

When I finally laid all seventy-four out for review, what emerged was unexpected.

They were never separate drawings. Every mandala turned out to be a facet of the same sustained question: what is a human life made of, and how does it become whole? The unity wasn’t designed. It surfaced on its own, the way a theme surfaces in music you thought you were improvising.

A hidden autobiography was running underneath the whole thing. The Neurosis mandala with three of its four quadrants hatched over — drawn during the years when most of the self was unavailable. The Directions mandala sat half-empty until last month, as I read Lily King’s Euphoria and discovered her cultural grid, and holy fuck! a Eureka moment of epic proportions. Let’s just say I am wholly an EAST person. The Four Kinds of Crisis mandala carrying a handwritten inscription: I experienced all four at the same time, 2006–2011. The mandalas were field notes from a life in progress. They just didn’t announce themselves as such.

And then the synchronicities arrived — the kind Jung named and spent a career trying to explain.

The sidewalks of Barcelona, where Gina and I now live, are paved with tiles that bear an uncanny resemblance to my mandala concept. I walk on my life symbol every day. It was designed by a young Antoni Gaudí, years before I drew the first circle, decades before I knew this city would become home.

Before we left for Europe, Gina created a large mosaic of broken glass — my life mandala rendered in full color, with its symbols, its quadrants, its center. A stunning, fragile, irreplaceable object. It was too large, too heavy, too delicate to bring across the ocean. We left it behind. 

Gaudí built a city’s worth of mosaic in Barcelona, from the playful serenity of Park Güell, to the naughty elegance of Casa Batlló, to the indescribable symbolism and beauty of La Sagrada Familia, and so much more. 

The first mandala asked for wholeness and had no idea what it was asking.

Seventy-four drawings later, the answers are still arriving — one tile, one circle, one synchronicity at a time.

Here are a few of the 74 total…