Richard Kretz

In the fall of 1974, a wide-eyed freshman sat in an expository writing class at Elizabethtown College and scratched out his first poem after initiation into Transcendental Meditation. That moment, though I could not have known it then, marked the beginning of a fifty-year odyssey through mountains of knowledge, valleys of suffering, and the relentless refinement of the soul. Today, grizzled by time, tempered by a heart attack where I shook hands with Death and lived to walk away, I stand at...

“What if the world's oldest symbols were never intended to be solved? What if they were designed not merely to satisfy the intellect, but to transform the observer?” Modern minds often approach ancient symbols as puzzles awaiting solution. We ask who composed them, what hidden message they conceal, or what historical event they commemorate. Those are worthwhile questions, yet they assume the primary purpose of a symbol is to communicate information. Perhaps another possibility exists. What if...

The dragon is older than history and more persistent than empires. It coils through the dreams of every culture that has ever stared into the abyss of nature or the night sky and felt something immense staring back. From the fire-breathing wyrms of the frozen North to the feathered serpents of Mesoamerica, from the chaos-dragon Tiamat of Mesopotamia to the benevolent rain-bringers of China, the oracular Python at Delphi, the coiled kundalini at the base of the spine, and the dragon slain by...