Gary Hahn — A Life in Six Dimensions
This website is a doorway. Step through it and you will find the story of a life — layered, unfinished, and moving forward — that eventually led to the creation of Kent "Swampy" Glade and the world he inhabits.
A person cannot be understood through a résumé alone. Family, faith, health, work, creativity, personal growth, and financial realities do not exist in separate compartments. They interact, collide, and shape one another across a lifetime. This site is organized around that truth.
Welcome to the Life Cube — six dimensions, six colors, one life.
BUS
Business & Financial Life
CR8
Creativity & Imagination
FAM
Family & Relationships
LOA
Love One Another / Faith
PER
Personal Growth & Resilience
QST
Quest / Career & Vocation
Explore the full story at KentGlade.com | Connect on LinkedIn | Discover more at Linktree
BUS — Business & Financial Life
The business dimension of a life is rarely glamorous. It is built from early mornings, difficult decisions, and the slow accumulation of hard-won understanding about how money, people, and responsibility actually work.
Credit Management
Gary's experience as a credit manager for a paper company introduced him to the intersection of trust, risk, and financial accountability — lessons that no classroom fully teaches.
Lumber & Building Materials
Serving as co-manager in the lumber and building-materials business brought direct responsibility for operations, customers, inventory, and the daily realities of commerce.
Lessons in Responsibility
Managing money, managing people, and managing expectations are three different skills — and learning all three simultaneously is one of life's most demanding classrooms.
Strategic Leadership & Market Adaptation
The early operational roles — credit management, co-managing a lumber and building-materials business — didn't feel like rungs on a ladder at the time. They felt like obligations. You showed up, you made calls, and you lived with the results. Broader responsibility didn't arrive through promotion so much as through the slow accumulation of decisions that had real consequences attached to them.
Strategic thinking wasn't something Gary learned from a course or a framework. It was learned by watching what happened when a decision was right — and paying even closer attention when it was wrong. That kind of education tends to stick.
Decision-Making & The Bigger Picture
Decision-Making Under Pressure
The practical side of business life — customer relationships, financial margins, and operational decisions — shaped a pragmatic, grounded approach to problem-solving that carried forward into every other dimension of life. Pressure is not an obstacle to good judgment; it is the condition in which good judgment is forged.
Managing money, managing people, and managing expectations are three different skills — and learning all three simultaneously is one of life's most demanding classrooms.
The Bigger Picture
Financial experience is not separate from personal growth. Understanding how money flows, where it stops, and why it matters is part of understanding how the world works. The BUS dimension of the Life Cube is not about wealth — it is about the discipline, accountability, and real-world wisdom that come from taking financial responsibility seriously over a lifetime.
Stories, reflections, and lessons from the business dimension will be added here as the Life Cube develops.
CR8 — Creativity & Imagination
Creativity is not a talent reserved for artists. It is the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist — and then begin building it. That definition has guided Gary's creative life across decades and disciplines.
WHAT'S YOUR PASSION?
A lifelong commitment to storytelling — from early writing to books, articles, and environmental narratives that connect science, nature, and human experience.
HOW DO YOU GET THERE?
Years of imaginative work building a world, a voice, and a mission rooted in environmental education and storytelling.
WRITING & SPEAKING
Translating complex ecological ideas into accessible, engaging content for audiences of all ages — itself a profound creative act.
SOCIAL AND NETWORKING
Designing websites and building digital platforms — shaping how ideas reach people across screens and distances.
Media, Concepts & The Creative Principle
Gary's creative work has never stayed in one lane — writing, design, film, education, digital media. That movement isn't scattered; it's been a long, deliberate search. The question underneath all of it has always been the same: how do you get an idea from inside your head into someone else's? That's the thread. Everything else is just figuring out which medium gets you there.
The media concepts, the platforms, the projects — none of that is separate from the storytelling work. It's all the same work. Every format is another attempt to answer that question, another tool for closing the gap between what you understand and what someone else can feel. The container changes. The intention doesn't.
Concept Development
Transforming nascent ideas into fully fleshed-out concepts, defining purpose, audience, and core message.
Visual & Media Design
Crafting compelling visual narratives and selecting appropriate media to convey complex information with clarity and impact.
Strategic Communication
Ensuring messages are not only creative but also strategically aligned to achieve specific goals, fostering engagement and action.
FAM — Family & Relationships
Family is not a single chapter. It is the entire book — the context in which everything else happens. Gary's family story is warm, complex, and honest about the full range of what family can mean across a lifetime.
Childhood & Vib Drive
The earliest memories — the foundation beneath everything that followed.
Six Years in an Orphanage
A defining chapter that shaped resilience, perspective, and a deep understanding of belonging.
Twenty-Eight Years of Marriage
Patience, sacrifice, partnership, and the slow work of building a shared life.
Becoming a Father
Fatherhood changed the way Gary understood time, responsibility, and love.
Loss, Resilience & The Meaning of Family
Loss & Resilience
Family stories include loss. Acknowledging that honestly is part of what makes this section real rather than sentimental. The FAM dimension of the Life Cube does not pretend that family is always easy — it insists that it is always worth understanding.
The Meaning of Family
Family is not only the people we are born to. It is also the people we choose, the communities we build, and the relationships that hold us together when everything else shifts. Six years in an orphanage — a chapter that would mark any life permanently — taught lessons about belonging that cannot be learned any other way.
A marriage of twenty-eight years, fatherhood, loss, and the communities of faith and work that surrounded them all: these are the building blocks of the FAM dimension.
Personal stories from the family dimension will be added here as the Life Cube grows.
LOA — Love One Another
LOA stands for Love One Another — the principle at the center of Gary's faith and the lens through which he has come to understand spirituality, meaning, and the human search for something larger than ourselves.
Accepting Christ at Twelve
Gary's faith journey began with a decision made at age twelve — a foundation that has been tested, deepened, and transformed by everything that followed.
The 1997 Accident
Struck by a forty-one-ton rock truck — a moment that became a dividing line. Before and after. A profound contribution to his evolving understanding of life, faith, and purpose.
The Shadow Lands
Travelling through the "Shadow Lands between light and darkness" — a space of honest questioning, spiritual searching, and the slow movement toward deeper understanding.
From Religion to Spirituality — The Central Principle
From Religion to Spirituality
The accident and other experiences contributed to an evolution from a primarily religious framework toward a broader spiritual exploration — one that retains Christian faith and the principle of Love One Another at its core. This is not abandonment; it is deepening.
Science, History & Faith
Gary's thinking draws upon a lifetime of interest in science, history, archaeology, and the human search for meaning — understanding these not as opposites of faith but as companions in the search for truth.
The Central Principle
Love One Another is not a slogan. It is a practice — one that Gary has returned to again and again as the most durable guide through the Shadow Lands and beyond. Whether the context is faith, family, career, or the natural world, the LOA principle points in the same direction: toward the other person, toward service, toward connection.
Reflections, stories, and spiritual explorations will be added here as the Life Cube develops.
PER — Personal Growth & Resilience
The personal dimension is the interior life — the health, habits, curiosities, challenges, and quiet transformations that happen beneath the surface of the visible story. It is where character is actually formed.
Health & Physical Resilience
A life that includes a collision with a forty-one-ton rock truck is a life that has been tested physically. Health — its loss, recovery, and maintenance — is a recurring theme in the personal dimension.
Intellectual Curiosity
Gary's interests span science, history, archaeology, environmental systems, storytelling, faith, and the nature of human experience. Curiosity has been one of the most consistent forces in his life.
Self-Development & Reflection
Personal growth is rarely dramatic. It happens in the accumulation of small decisions, honest self-examination, and the willingness to keep learning long after formal education ends.
Challenges, Resilience & the Interior Life
Challenges & Resilience
The personal dimension includes the hard chapters — the ones that do not resolve neatly but that shape a person more deeply than the easy ones. A forty-one-ton rock truck. Six years in an orphanage. Loss. These are not footnotes; they are the load-bearing walls of the structure.
Personal Interests & the Whole Person
This section will eventually contain short personal stories — moments, observations, and reflections that do not fit neatly into any other dimension but that are essential to understanding the whole person. The PER dimension is the connective tissue that holds BUS, CR8, FAM, LOA, and QST together.
Character is not formed in the comfortable chapters. It is formed in the ones we would rather not have lived through — and chose to keep going anyway.
Short personal stories and reflections will be added here as the Life Cube expands.
QST — Quest: Career & Vocation
QST means Quest. A career is not a list of job titles — it is a journey with direction, detours, discoveries, and purpose. Gary's professional life has moved across environmental regulation, public service, education, and creative enterprise.
AUTHOR
Writing, Books & Storytelling
DESIGNER
Websites, Concepts & Environmental Projects
DIRECTOR
Film, Video & Media
ORATOR
Public Speaking & Storytelling
The Environmental Career
Gary's professional life has moved across environmental regulation, public service, education, and creative enterprise. Selected career stories — rather than a conventional résumé — will be developed here as the Life Cube grows.
Environmental Regulation
Work in the regulation of surface coal mining brought Gary into direct contact with the intersection of law, land, and environmental responsibility — where policy meets the ground.
Wetlands & Clean Water
Wetlands work and clean-water initiatives represent a sustained commitment to protecting the natural systems that sustain all life — work that is both technical and deeply purposeful.
Reclamation
Restoring land after industrial use is both a professional discipline and a metaphor for the broader work of healing and renewal that runs through every dimension of Gary's life.
FEMA Disaster Assistance
Service in disaster assistance brought Gary into communities at their most vulnerable — deepening his understanding of resilience, service, and the human capacity to rebuild.
GIS & Environmental Education
Geographic information systems and environmental education represent the technical and communicative dimensions of a career devoted to understanding and protecting the natural world.
QST / AUTHOR — Writing, Books & Storytelling
The AUTHOR dimension of Gary's Quest is where the written word becomes a vehicle for ideas, stories, and the kind of environmental education that reaches people where they live.
Books & Long-Form Writing
Gary's authorship includes work connected to the Life Cube, the world of Kent "Swampy" Glade, and environmental storytelling that bridges science and human experience in ways that academic writing rarely achieves.
Articles & Short-Form Work
Articles, essays, and shorter pieces have allowed Gary to explore ideas quickly and share them with a wider audience — testing concepts before they become books.
Environmental Narratives
Writing about wetlands, reclamation, clean water, and the living systems that sustain us has been a consistent thread throughout Gary's authorship — where science meets story.
Storytelling as Education
The most effective environmental education does not lecture. It tells a story that makes the reader care before they realize they are learning.
QST / DESIGNER — Websites, Concepts & Environmental Projects
Design is the discipline of making ideas visible, navigable, and useful. Gary's design work spans digital platforms, environmental projects, educational programs, and conceptual frameworks.
Website Design
Building websites — including this one — is an act of design thinking: deciding what matters, how it should be organized, and how a visitor should move through it. Every navigational choice is a statement about what deserves attention.
Environmental Project Design
Designing environmental education programs, reclamation plans, and public-facing initiatives requires the same clarity of purpose as any other design discipline — the stakes are simply higher.
Educational Concepts
Developing frameworks like the Life Cube — a structured way of understanding a human life across six dimensions — is itself a form of design: conceptual architecture built to be both intellectually rigorous and emotionally accessible.
The Life Cube as Design
The six-color, six-dimension structure of the Life Cube is a designed system. It is not decoration. It is organization — a way of making a complex, multidimensional life navigable for any reader.
Design projects, concepts, and portfolio links will be added here as the Life Cube develops.
QST / DIRECTOR — Film, Video & Media
Direction is the art of guiding a story from concept to completion — deciding what the audience sees, when they see it, and what it means. Gary's work in film, video, and media direction extends the same storytelling instincts that run through every dimension of his life.
Film & Video Concepts
Developing film and video projects — particularly those connected to environmental education and the SWAMPY universe — is a natural extension of Gary's creative and communicative work.
Media Direction
Directing media projects requires the ability to hold a vision clearly while managing the practical realities of production — drawing on both creative and organizational experience.
Project Direction
Beyond film and video, Gary's directorial experience includes guiding complex projects from initial concept through completion — environmental initiatives, educational programs, and creative enterprises.
Storytelling in Motion
Moving images carry emotional weight that the written word alone cannot always achieve — tools for reaching audiences who might not otherwise engage with environmental or educational content.
Film, video, and media projects will be featured here as the Life Cube expands. Links to related work will be added.
QST / ORATOR — Public Speaking & Storytelling
The spoken word has a power that the written word cannot fully replicate. Gary's work as an orator — in public speaking, environmental education, storytelling, and presentations — reflects a lifelong commitment to communicating ideas in ways that move people.
Public Speaking
Presenting to audiences — whether in community settings, professional conferences, or educational environments — requires the ability to read a room, hold attention, and leave people with something they did not have before.
Environmental Education
Teaching people to care about the natural world is one of the most important forms of public communication. Gary's environmental education work has reached audiences across multiple settings and formats.
Storytelling as Oratory
The most effective presentations are not lectures — they are stories. Gary's approach to public speaking draws on the same narrative instincts that run through his writing and creative work.
Communicating Ideas
Whether the subject is wetlands, the Life Cube, faith, or the story of Kent "Swampy" Glade, the goal is always the same: to make an idea land in a way that the audience carries with them.
Speaking topics, presentation materials, and booking information will be added here as the Life Cube develops.
The Life Cube & the Companion Book
This website is designed to grow — and to eventually connect directly to a companion book built on the same six-dimension framework. The book is not yet finished. Neither is the life. That is the point.
Six Colors, Six Dimensions
The book will use the same structure as this website — BUS, CR8, FAM, LOA, PER, and QST — with each section containing selected stories from Gary's life, organized by dimension and color.
Stories + Reflection
Each story will be followed by reflections, lessons, questions, exercises, or small tasks designed to encourage readers to examine that same dimension in their own lives — turning memoir into invitation.
A Mirror, Not Just a Memoir
The Life Cube is not only Gary's story. It is a framework for understanding any life — including the reader's own. The book is designed to be both memoir and mirror, both personal and universal.
The Website as Living Companion
As the book develops, this website will serve as its living companion — a place where stories can be expanded, updated, and connected to the broader world of Gary's work at KentGlade.com.
Connect & Follow the Journey
The Life Cube is a work in progress — as all lives are. Gary's story continues to develop across platforms, projects, and dimensions. Follow the journey wherever it leads next.
The full SWAMPY universe — Kent "Swampy" Glade, environmental storytelling, and the world Gary has been building for years. Visit for the complete picture.
Connect for professional updates, career reflections, and the continuing development of the QST dimension — career, vocation, and the quest that keeps moving forward.
Linktree
Explore all projects, platforms, and pathways in one place. Linktree is the hub that connects every dimension of the Life Cube to the wider world.
The Life Cube is a work in progress — as all lives are. Thank you for being part of the journey.
About This Website
This site was designed to be sophisticated, uncluttered, and highly readable — a reflection of the Life Cube's commitment to clarity and depth over noise and decoration.
Design Philosophy
White backgrounds throughout. Six Life Cube colors used as accents, banners, and motion-line signatures — never as competing backgrounds that fight for attention. The design earns its energy through restraint, not volume.
Speed Lines & Motion Stripes
Aerodynamic, tapered speed-line graphics appear along page edges, beneath major headings, and between sections — inspired by streamlined design and the sense of a life moving forward. They are accents, not wallpaper.
Color as Navigation
Each Life Cube section carries its own color signature. When you enter BUS, black accents lead the way. In CR8, green. In FAM, red. In LOA, yellow. In PER, purple. In QST, blue. Color is not decoration here — it is wayfinding.
Readability First
Body text remains black or dark charcoal on white throughout. The design is energetic without being busy — forward-moving without becoming a sports website. Every choice serves the reader.
Built to Grow
A Beginning, Not a Finished Product
Every section of this site is designed to receive new stories, links, and content as the Life Cube develops. The architecture is intentional — it was built to expand without losing its shape. Placeholder sections are not gaps; they are invitations.
The Life Cube Framework
The six-dimension structure — BUS, CR8, FAM, LOA, PER, QST — was chosen because it maps the full terrain of a human life without pretending any one dimension is more important than the others. Business without family is incomplete. Creativity without faith is rootless. The dimensions interact, and the website reflects that.
As Gary's story continues to develop, so will this site. New content, new connections, new chapters. The Life Cube is designed to hold them all.
Explore the Six Dimensions
Navigate BUS, CR8, FAM, LOA, PER, and QST to find the dimension that resonates with where you are right now.
Follow the Companion Book
Watch this site and KentGlade.com for updates on the Life Cube book — memoir, framework, and invitation in one volume.
Connect Across Platforms
KentGlade.com for SWAMPY. LinkedIn for professional updates. Linktree for everything else.
The Life Cube — Six Dimensions at a Glance
A quick-reference guide to the six dimensions and their core questions — the framework that organizes this site, the companion book, and the ongoing work of understanding a life fully.
Gary Hahn — A Life Moving Forward
Every dimension of the Life Cube is a doorway. Every story is an invitation. The Life Cube is not a finished document — it is a living record of a life that is still being written, still moving forward, still asking the questions that matter most.
BUS
Hard-won financial wisdom and business accountability
CR8
Decades of imagination turned into worlds, words, and platforms
FAM
A family story honest about belonging, loss, and love
LOA
Faith tested, deepened, and practiced as Love One Another
PER
Interior growth forged through curiosity, resilience, and the hard chapters
QST
A career of environmental purpose across Author, Designer, Director, and Orator
Six dimensions. One life. Always moving forward.
Gary Hahn | KentGlade.com | LinkedIn | Linktree