Writing by Scotte Burns
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
The 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.
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.
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.
There's always room at this table.
Latest Post
I Bet You Weren't Expecting That
Marmots, flying grandmothers, and the unexpected gifts of the road
Riding out under the pale, spreading dawn of Green River, Wyoming, headed back toward Colorado, I prepared for the day’s ride in a way I seldom do: downloading an audiobook to my music player. As much as I enjoy a great story and recall many of them while my thoughts wander the highway, I treasure the marriage of music, rolling scenery, sensual immersion, and freed imagination that the open road offers. Focusing instead on a narrator’s voice during a ride would normally just be a distraction.
I anticipated this day’s ride with the same dulled senses as if I were simply driving a car, though, thinking it would just be getting from one place to another. After all, the road ahead was a stretch of hot, barren interstate, our least favorite kind of road, and it was one that I’d ridden before so I knew it promised little once past the stark, rugged beauty of Flaming Gorge.
Once rumbling down I-80, rather than the dusty, asphalt monotony I’d expected to encounter, the Cowboy State gave a peace offering in the form of a brisk morning, a clear, open sky, and a nearly-deserted, newly-topped interstate allowing buttery flight at eighty-five. With the horizon spotless for a hundred miles in every direction and the only wind the cool buffeting of the bike flying over the freeway, my player joined in the conspiracy to make me experience this ride a little differently than I’d imagined. Punctuating the rush of laser-white lines and smooth asphalt blazing by under my floorboards was a perfect, serendipitous road medley: Highway Star, We Are the Road Crew, Race with the Devil on a Spanish Highway. The hits just kept coming.
I couldn’t have asked for a better reminder that expectations can be limiting things, and that roads, like people, nearly always deserve a second chance...
The Book
Genre: 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?
People asked Toni and me that constantly as we passed our fourth decade together, and we never had an answer. It took some time to understand why. They were asking about a marriage, and the thing we could not explain was far more than that. So we sold our home and most of what was in it, climbed onto a pair of Harleys, and went looking for the question underneath the question: What is love?"
Over the better part of a decade we rode 100,000 miles across 48 states, carrying that question to hundreds of people from every background, belief, and walk of life. Neuroscientists and Lakota elders. Gang leaders and Tibetan monks. Street people, soldiers, and psychiatrists. Every one of them could tell us what love feels like, who they love, and why. Almost none could say what it is. The single point of agreement: well, you know it when you see it.
My own first map of love had been drawn in violence, addiction, and chaos. Knowing it when I saw it would never be enough.
So we kept riding, and along the miles the stories stopped behaving like a collection and started behaving like evidence. Science, cultures, philosophy, and the contemplative traditions each hold a piece of this. None of them holds it alone. Laid against the testimony of people who actually live and express it, the pieces began to fit into something I had not expected to find: love's origin, its nature, its purpose, and beneath all three, love as the creative aspect of consciousness itself.
Not love stories - Love's story.
Then we reflected that light back onto the people who had shone it, onto their relationships, callings, arts, and places, and found the understanding made every one of them a little bigger. It turns out that when we know love's story, we find our own.
A Map of Souls: The Quest for Love's True Story is 70,000 words of narrative nonfiction with a Foreword by Dr. Eben Alexander, author of Proof of Heaven. So far as we've seen, no one has run this experiment before: two people forty-plus years married, riding together into a decade of field research on the nature of love. Toni writes in these pages in her own voice, chasing the question with open joy and wonder while I pursue it as a quest. Where I worry it like a scholar, she treats love as somebody worth meeting.
You will ride all of it with us.
And when you drop your kickstand at the end, you'll find you've gotten a little bigger, too.
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.
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.
