My first serious encounter with runes was in a graduate seminar on symbolic systems in pre-literate cultures, somewhere in the mid-nineties, in a classroom that smelled of old carpet and someone's lunch.

After twenty years sitting with people in my counselling practice, couples who can't stop fighting, individuals who can't stop choosing the wrong partners, people who love each other deeply and have somehow still managed to make a complete mess of things etc., I have become quietly convinced that the most useful relationship advice is very old.

I've been sitting with this topic for a while, the way I sit with most things that feel important, a little cross-legged on my back porch with tea going cold beside me and the the morning fog still sitting over the bay. Gender and sexuality.

There is a long tradition, considerably longer than the sceptical tradition I was trained in, that holds the opposite view with remarkable consistency across cultures and centuries. The Pythagoreans, and yes, we mean Pythagoras himself, the same man whose theorem you learned at school, working in southern Italy in the sixth century BCE, believed that numbers were not merely useful abstractions but the actual substance of reality.

I should say upfront that I came to this subject sideways, the way academics usually come to anything that matters. My formal training is in cognitive psychology and continental philosophy, and for the first fifteen years of my career I would have been politely dismissive of anything involving the phrase "third eye."

When I was in my twenties, long before I settled on the West Coast, I spent several years travelling through North Africa, Turkey, and parts of the Middle East. During that time, I had the privilege of sitting with Islamic scholars, teachers, and students who generously shared not only their knowledge but also their hospitality.

Over the years, my travels have taken me through Eastern Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, the Middle East, and across much of Western Europe. Along the way I became fascinated not simply by different religions, but by the symbolic languages people use to understand themselves.

When students ask me why tarot has endured for centuries despite enormous cultural and technological change, I often suggest that they begin by setting aside the idea that tarot exists primarily to predict the future.

Living in a small town on the coast of Maine has taught me that the changing seasons are more than entries on a calendar. Here, winter announces itself with quiet determination, spring arrives almost shyly, summer fills the forests with birdsong, and autumn transforms the landscape into brilliant shades of crimson and gold.

If there's one thing living in New York has taught me, it's that fear wears many different faces. Sometimes it's loud and obvious, the anxiety of losing a job, worrying about someone you love, or facing an unexpected diagnosis. Other times it's much quieter.

Living on the West Coast, I've had the opportunity to meet people from an extraordinary variety of spiritual backgrounds. Some attend churches, others meditate in Zen centres, some practice yoga, and others identify as Pagan or Wiccan.

When students first encounter Zoroastrianism, they are often surprised to learn that it is one of the world's oldest continuously practised religions. Founded in ancient Persia, probably sometime between 1500 BCE and 1000 BCE—although scholars continue to debate the precise dates—it has profoundly influenced the development of later religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.