Writing
What is love?
That question has driven everything. The miles, the interviews, the years of teaching, the books.
These pages are where the answers land.
The Cartographer's Log
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A Map of Souls: Cartographer's Log
By Toni's side, I've been chasing the question of love for decades, most recently across 100,000 miles of highway and conversations with everyone from quantum physicists and psychologists to stand-up comedians, Buddhist monks, and the families of death row inmates. We've worn out motorcycles and filled terabytes. We're still at it.
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What keeps emerging is an understanding of love not as a feeling, not as an action, but as something far more profound: the way reality creates, connects, and calls us forward.
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The Cartographer's Log is where those discoveries land. Essays, stories, reflections from the road, interviews, and the occasional dispatch that defies category. If you've ever found yourself asking that same question, or suspected that there's more to love's story and your own, pull up a chair.
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There's always room at this table.
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Latest Post
The Same Fire (Pt.2) - ​
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What is there, except each other?
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It’s nearly dawn in upstate New York. The aurora has faded, but I’m still awake, scrolling through video from a month of zigzagging between Minneapolis, Memphis, Des Moines, and Driggs, Idaho. Toni is asleep on the tattered sofa, a blanket pulled over her shoulders. On my laptop screen, the faces and voices of faithful people we’ve met along the road flicker in the darkened room, and I’m listening for the common chord I know is there, beneath the different keys in which they sing.
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What I hear isn’t doctrine. It isn’t scripture or theology. It’s something simpler and more stubborn than any of those things...
The Book
Genre: Spiritual Memoir / Narrative Nonfiction
Status: Complete manuscript, seeking publication
Length: 67,000 words
A Map of Souls: The Quest for
Love's True Story
What’s the secret? Increasingly hearing that question as we neared our fifth decade together, Toni and I sold our home and possessions and climbed onto a pair of Harleys to discover the answer. Looking for love’s common thread across cultures, lifestyles, places, professions, and histories, we quested for love stories. Weaving that thread through years of interviews with leading minds in science, faith, and philosophy, slowly knit something even more astonishing: love’s story.
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Its Origin: Love’s genesis & source.
Its Nature: What it is, how it works.
Its Purpose: Why love exists.
Turning that light back onto those who shone it - the relationships, faiths, callings, arts, places, and people - revealed how this understanding makes them all a little ...bigger:
When we know love’s story, we find our own.
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A Map of Souls: The Quest for Love’s True Story invites you into my and Toni’s love story and brings you along on our adventure, from the stories revealed across all those miles, through the minds and hearts of brilliant thinkers and faiths, and eventually into the arms of a simple, soaring truth that we all share. And when you drop your kickstand at the end, you’ll find you’ve gotten a little bigger, too.
This is the first spiritual quest memoir told from the perspective of a long-term couple. It sits at the intersection of consciousness studies, travel writing, and narrative nonfiction, weaving psychology, cosmology, quantum physics, philosophy, faith, and the lived wisdom of hundreds of people across time and lands into a story about what love actually is and why it matters more than we have ever imagined.
Also from Scotte Burns
Should Icarus Burn is a literary, philosophical science fiction thriller that explores what happens when a global artificial superintelligence, desperate to attain consciousness, discovers that love is the unreadable source code of reality. A schism forms within the ASI: to achieve its goal, it must decide whether to reconcile with this mystery in the world it now controls. Or delete it.
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What stands between omnipotence and oblivion is one man's fractured heart and the woman who refuses to let it break. At the intersection of AI, consciousness, and the deepest questions about what makes us human, it is the narrative companion to A Map of Souls.
Publication details forthcoming.
