About

Always ask: who is carrying who? Who is being lifted?

Briefly then.

About three five years ago, while driving North on Interstate 91, just shy of the first exit for Greenfield, I heard a voice. Clear and fluid, unmistakably feminine, it said, “What if everything you think you know is wrong?”

I was a month shy of forty then, a spiritual dilettante. Sincere but prone to drifting, earnest but naive. I was a lector at a Catholic church, counted my breaths on a buckwheat hull-stuffed zafu. In a vague, never fully-articulated way, I was devoted to God. But despite periods of intense and dedicated prayer through the years, I had never had such a direct and profound experience of the Divine as I did on the highway that day.

The voice didn’t name itself. It didn’t return – or hasn’t yet anyway. It was a time of intense dreams while sleeping and, while waking, a sense that some deep interior shifting was underway, as if some ancient foundation was being rapidly dismantled. In favor of what, I couldn’t say. A number of doors opened; some closed. My writing, always the better part of me, grew simpler, clearer. I discovered that I loved teaching and was good at it. Some healers showed up in my life, and I invited some others. I had no idea where any of this would lead. Grandiosity remained – remains – a risk. I knew I was called, but to what and by whom?

Three Five (or so) years later, I still can’t say. No – that’s not true. I can say a little. I know that I am called to write, as plainly and directly as possible, about how my life is changing. I must stand witness to a process I barely understand! And – in the broadest sense of the word – I must teach. It’s not clear where and how to do this, though students of different stripes and needs do appear. I recognize them by the need they awaken in me: for ever more guidance, ever more learning.

In all of this has come peace and – in a natural, serious way – joy. There is no mystery, no secret. So long as I have been a guest in this body, I have been writing – often about the terms and conditions of being a guest. And once I understood teaching to be a process of mutual sharing and exploration wherein the traditional hierarchy of student/teacher grows dim or becomes obsolete altogether, I saw that I have always been a teacher, because I have always been learning.

What is this blog then, this website? What is the point of a virtual way station, even one that longs to be helpful to a spiritual degree? Confusion always attends! Thank you for visiting, for sharing the way. Say hello as you pass if you’d like, take whatever blessing you might find, and fear no umbrage if you need to shake the dust off your shoes and move on. We’re in this together. We’ll figure it out.