The Light of Lucia
As our waking days get increasingly shorter and darker, our longing for transcendent light increases in tandem. Solstice times hold needs in tension: requisite turn of the wheel of the year towards elements of the next season with what our body's inherently need for wholeness. We are nourished by the dark like the seed who knows to bed down in the dark earth to grow. And yet, even in our knowing of this need, there is always longing for the next season, for the next turn. As we wander into the last week of the darkest time of the year, our desire for light and the nourishment it provides expands with the shadows.
The Return: How Returning Home Requires An Open Door
Our personal pilgrimage journey is global in both scope and impact, and we are invited to transformative micro-practices that overhaul how we view our homescapes. Our return requires us to leave the door open to the world just beyond its threshold, maintaining a posture of looking out for opportunities to give of our gained wisdom and our boon of blessings.
Arrival: What is Your Gift?
The required posture on the Pilgrim’s Path has prepared you for your arrival; you have practiced the necessary way of seeing and listening to the surrounding greater community of things. So it is that when you arrive to your sacred destination, you are equipped to receive that which is for you. Equally, if not more, important is how are are you prepared to give? How does pilgrimage posture the spirit of reciprocity in you?
The Silence Breakers: Mother Earth Says #METOO
Time Magazine rightly recognized the countless women behind breaking the silence of patterned sexual assault as the 2018 Person of the Year. It is not a surprise that our cultural consciousness is cracking as it experiences a reckoning in response to the #metoo movement during this season of stretched out night. Advent comes during utter darkness, and yet there is yet hope in the coming light. There is another female whose voice we must elevate alongside all the other voices who have spoken: Mother Earth otherwise known as Gaia.
Pilgrimage: It Grounds You
Through the archetypal movements of pilgrimage, one finds deep meaning and spiritual connection through both the exilic wandering and the renunciations associated with the journey; moreover, as a result, one finds themselves deeply connected within the community of creation, and profoundly rooted and at home in their pilgrimage place.
Pilgrimage: A Profound Act of Listening
I absolutely believe that one might need to journey to a holy place on the other side of the planet to recover this renewal. And, sacred sites are also all around us, quietly remaining in the more wild edges of our frenetic lives, awaiting being noticed, remembered, attended. The pilgrimage process is one that can be engaged just as much at home as abroad and with just as much potential for transformation. It is the profound act of listening, which transforms the average elements of a place or even just your normal mid-week day, into a pilgrim's portal: a way of sensing and seeing that transmits the sacred to and through the greater community of things that surround us!
Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.
In sacred travel when the pilgrim mood is awakened and engaged, every experience is potent and portends a deeper meaning; every contact attests to some greater plan. No encounter is without sacred significance.
Pilgrimage Demands Your Presence
Iona is sacred land and people make pilgrimage here to soak of these stories, hoping that something of this sacred soil will stick and have a profound impact on their personal lives. And my hunch is that there are many more sacred sites all around us, even in our own urban neighborhoods, if only we would pay attention.
Go. Deliberately.
What might have started as a soft whispered call has now become a heart-throbbing desire to go and find the animus mundi--the Soul of the world! Pursue the wild place that makes your heart skip both with doubt and desire for here is where you will find your Answer covered in salty barnacles and cracked-leathered edges and God within the windswept moors and tangled trees.
Pilgrimage Awakens the Soul
There is an urgent restlessness and a deep seeded remembrance to come home to our true selves, a deep longing for an integration that braids the soul, the soil, and the sacred. This longing, this soul-solicitation-asking initiates the seeking process, as it is inherently true that you cannot cultivate an integrated home-space for your soul unless you first have intentionally gone out and away from all that you know and are comfortable within. Will you go?
Homescape Seek & Find: Discovering JOY in Our Wild Edges
I have started doing monthly nature mandalas as a spiritual practice, as a way of developing a framework for exercising my senses to awaken to the Sacred wisdom that resides within nature. Theophanies, or God-showings-are synchronistic signs that reveal significance and meaning, as well as reveal something of the character of God. By going outside to co-create a nature mandala, I have sought to develop the capacity to receive Divine symbols and experience the mysterious presence of God within the natural world.
Grateful for GodSpace's blog for sharing this practice as well!
Rewilding & Journeying with Nature: A Conversation with Pilgrim Podcast
Are you curious about how I understand rewilding as a spiritual practice and nature as a sacred guide? Are you wondering if a Rewilding Retreat is right for you? Listen in to this illuminating conversation I had with Lacy Clark Ellman, host of the Pilgrim Podcast and pilgrimage guide with A Sacred Journey. I think you will come away with a desire to be rewilded!
A HOLY HIGH: How Hildegard Found Her Inspiration Grounded in the Garden
This essay was forged and formed in the garden. As I have read Hildegard of Bingen's writings over the last couple years, her wisdom has transformed how I understand the plant-life that surrounds me. There is an invitation to deep interrelationship through the soil that ultimately draws us closer to the Sacred Source. Thank you to the editors at The Other Journal who have worked so kindly and diligently with me to give this essay its powerful prose!
The Treasure: How Pilgrimage Cultivates a Connection to Place through Permanence
I am thrilled to be preparing to deliver a paper at William & Mary College next week at their annual symposia on Pilgrimage Studies. In many aspects, this opportunity feels very much like a pilgrimage journey in and of itself. A couple years ago I received an invitation to submit a proposal for this particular academic gathering, which very much felt like the call, the requisite summons of any meaningful pilgrimage. However, life circumstances prevented the manifestation of that opportunity until now. And so I have the opportunity to seek the wisdom gained these past couple years as I have journeyed through the descent, the time of darkness and disintegration that occurs when a journey is truly leaving its indelible mark on you, and prepare for my arrival.
Rewilding Prayer: How Caim Invites Protection for All of Creation
This week my youngest son started pre-school. And while his mornings will be spent within woodland walls and upon forest floors at a nature preschool, both he and and I were experiencing a deep anxiety around this fundamental shift in our daily rhythm together. I awoke early on his first day of school for a time of meditation and prayer practice on our behalf and for personal preparation.
I began with an embodied, ritualized form of prayer, the Celtic circling prayer.
Trials and Trails that Wound: How We Learn from the Dragon
We are coming into the season of Michaelmas, the ancient festival time of St. Michael who is connected to myths and lore around harvest abundance and more prominently, dragons. St. Michael is an archetypal representation of our inner light and courage that is called forth when scarcity is nigh. This scarcity and its corresponding fear is our dragon, one that we all must meet.
Yes, dragons and the dark woods within which they live, can scar us. But instead of killing the beast in return, can we learn to ride the dragon, and see our scars as sacred?
Guidance & Wisdom from the Sacred Wild
I feel like I've been walking towards today for years. It was four years ago that my work with Waymarkers was put in the vault as I left to pursue my Masters in Theology & Culture with a focus in eco-theology from The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
This journey took me through some of the most wildest of woods where I was taught again and again of the revelatory quality of the natural world, and that the woods are indeed the wisest of teachers. I reflect on themes experienced in these last years during the commencement speech I was asked to give during my graduation ceremony. You can listen to that here.
Iona: Getting There Well
The journey itself to Iona makes this place unique; it is long, quite complicated and even relatively uncomfortable for the urbanite who is accustomed to quick and easy travel. This distance provides the perfect pilgrimage process, for it truly requires a removal of oneself from all that is familiar and supplies a lengthy trek-full of obstacles, no doubt! Once there, one finds a sparsely populated island, with almost no cars and a large abbey, whose structure appears to have dropped from the heavens onto this topographically small and relatively insignificant place. Sheep outnumber the residents and the sunlight plays on the hillsides in the most magical ways. One senses almost immediately Iona is indeed a "thin space" – that brushing up against the Divine is inevitable.
Emergence
This is merely a note to awaken you to what is emerging here at Waymarkers. I graduated with my Masters in Theology & Culture from The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology and a specialization in Thomas Berry's Universe Story from Yale University this past June. Waymarkers is soaking this up and becoming a sacred guide, a presence that will take us deeper into the wilds where Creator can be heard speaking through all created things.
Seminary Musings: Connected to the Other through the Stars and Soil
Friends,
On this Day of Epiphany, and before my next term at school holds my time hostage once again, I wanted to take a moment to share some of the emerging thoughts that have been personally prominent these past few months. As we take time today to reflect on the legendary Three Wise Men, kingly magis who had deep knowledge of the links between the Divine and the cosmos, may we too ponder how we invite our celestial neighbors to inform our sense of awe of the Grand Story in which we continue to participate.