What are you afraid of?  What keeps you up at night?  Is it something immediate?  At work or school?  With your family?  Is it money or health?  What about the global fears?  The international rise of fascism and the future of democracy?  The pressure cooker of our culture and the hazards of our new technologies? …

I don’t know about you but I remember as a kid longing for summer to start.  We would joyfully hurl ourselves into freedom on the last day of school.  By upper elementary/middle school that would include the defiant singing, chanting really, of Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education…”  It was true liberation.  One of…

I had the pleasure and the privilege of sitting down with Lisa Moriah to talk about my roles and the meaning behind them, my own journey as a Jewish convert, and the intimate journey of transitioning from one spiritual foundation to another. We also explored the concept of reclaiming aspects of previous traditions and the…

Such Silence – a poem by Mary Oliver As deep as I ever went into the forest I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old, and around it a clearing, and beyond that trees taller and older than I had ever seen. Such silence! It really wasn’t so far from a town, but…

We used to live in a too-small, too-crowded house with too many children.  Our small deck was my sanctuary where I created a container garden.  One season I decided to plant strawberries.  When I went looking for starts at my favorite nursery, I couldn’t find “regular” strawberries, just some little alpine varietal.  Being the lazy…

When I was a teen, I tried to find space for myself in the tradition of my childhood.  My mother encouraged me to talk with her spiritual director, a sister of St. Joseph.  I told the sister about my sense of myself as an outsider in our patriarchal tradition, including my alienation from masculine God…

Years ago someone posted a photo of herself sitting in her new inflatable kayak in her living room.  She was so excited to have finally taken the plunge.  “I want one,” I said. “Do it,” she replied.  And so for years I imagined the day I would have my own kayak, or stand-up paddle board,…

I have been trying to find my way into a regular morning spiritual practice for a long time.  Over the years it has proven to be anything but regular, taking on many different shapes.  I have sneaked out from my overfull house to settle myself on an old towel among the plants on our back…

I went on my first solo camping trip this summer. Just a few days, to a favorite camping spot in the little visited wilderness of the Trinity Alps. In spite of decades of experience and a car loaded down with luxury gear for the middle-aged camper, I was unaccountably nervous. Until I hit the road…