I’ve loved seeing Bob’s evolution in the MEA community over the past few years and this lovely guest post gives you a flavor of the soul of this special man. And, here’s a YouTube audio of this poem put to music. 

The Journey of a Lifetime

From Mind to Heart, inspired by Carl Jung

Written by Bob Craig

There comes a silence deeper than sleep—
not the quiet of peace,
but the hush before the soul begins its long descent.
You think you are breaking,
but you are only being broken open.

The mind, that proud architect of certainty,
keeps building its towers of thought,
until lightning finds it.
In the flash, the scaffolds burn away—
and what remains is open sky.

Through the doorway of suffering,
the self walks barefoot.
Every idea of who you were
crumbles into dust that feeds the roots
of something wordless, waiting.

Aloneness becomes a garden.
No longer punishment,
but a field where presence grows untended.
You learn to breathe without witness,
to listen to the pulse beneath all things.

Your shadow, once chained deep below,
emerges and sits beside you.
You share bread of awareness.
You learn that the monster was never hunger,
but the fear of your own fire.

Old storms still circle—
the winds of projection, of drama, of need—
but they no longer affect your weather.
You stand in their center,
watching without judgment,
the way mountains watch the clouds pass.

Intuition opens like a second sight,
a knowing that tingles beneath logic’s skin.
You stop asking “why”
and start asking “what now?”
Synchronicities become your secret language,
the alphabet of the unseen.

You learn to die in small ways—
in endings, in letting go,
in the quiet surrender of control.
And each death makes room
for a truer birth.

At last, praise and blame lose their sting.
You measure your worth
by the stillness of your own breath.
What you guard now is not reputation
but radiance—
the sacred economy of your energy.

Suffering becomes your tutor,
pain your patient companion.
You drink from their cup and find
the taste is strangely sweet.
For it is not perfection that emerges,
but wholeness—
a strength that bends,
a heart that listens,
a soul that no longer seeks to be understood,
but to understand.

And so the journey completes its circle:
The busy mind, having searched the stars for answers,
bows to the open heart
and whispers,
“I am home.”

-Bob

Bob Craig spent 40 years working at the intersection of people and technology, 25 of those years as a CIO.  He now helps others flourish on the AI frontier by exploring the intersection of Artificial and Human Intelligence, seeking a deeper sense of what it is to be uniquely human; to honor the complexity of AI without fear but with clarity.