It seems like every day a new guru, spiritual teacher, or self-help sovereign gets outed for sexual misconduct and harmful behavior. The followers of these people float off, betrayed and ungrounded, tugged between a desire for instruction and an increasing suspicion...
I bought my first tackle box at Paul’s Tackle Shop on Talbot Street in Ocean City, Maryland, in 1972. It’s blue and made by a company called Old Pal. Some internet research suggests that Old Pal went out of business in the 1980s, but Paul’s Tackle Shop is still going...
I recently came upon an essay of Mary Oliver’s written near the end of her life. In it, she writes of her longing in the Spring to discover what she describes as “the desire to be lost again, as long ago” in childhood. “Now in the spring I kneel,” she writes, “I put...
Two days after I was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, I had an abortion. I went looking for one spiritual initiation and got another. I was crossing campus on a spring morning, headed to my class on Dante’s Divine Comedy, when the smell of wet dirt...
I’ve always considered myself to be both a very independent person and a very introverted one.I’ve always considered myself to be both a very independent person and a very introverted one. When I was in my early-mid 20s, I was especially entrenched in this view of...
This summer I’m celebrating the 22nd anniversary of my first year as a camper at Rowe Camp. That kind of anniversary is often accompanied by nostalgia and “best of” memories, so I thank you in advance for indulging me. There is of course no shortage of stories to...
The first time I put up a one person show, I didn’t know what I was doing. The first time I taught a workshop, I didn’t know what I was doing. The first time I gave a sermon at the Church of the Pacific, I didn’t know what I was doing. I learn by doing and...
If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found. ––Terry Tempest Williams Emerging from...
Seeking the most powerful healing practices to address the invisible wounds of war, Dr. Ed Tick has led journeys to Viet Nam for veterans, survivors, activists and pilgrims for the past twenty years. He writes: “During one of my annual reconciliation journeys to Viet...
Andy Bichlbaum is a guy from Tucson, Arizona who has held a bunch of jobs and was fired from pretty much all of them. He has a ‘terminal’ degree in experimental fiction writing, which enabled him to publish a couple of books that made him so rich and lazy that he took...
