I was raised by agnostic parents who fostered a love of exploration. By the time I went to college, I’d lived in five countries: Nigeria, Kenya, England, Israel and the United States. As an adult I continued to travel to places as far flung as Buryatia (a Siberian province by the Mongolian border) and the Gambia (a tiny slice of a country on the West African coast).
Now I realize that the greatest adventure is the inward journey of spiritual development.
Along the way to that realization, I trained as a sculptor and completed a Ph.D. in evolutionary theory. I’ve had many jobs from museum exhibit developer to college professor to statistician. Yet, I always taught - just about every age group from preschool to retired folks, and many subjects including spirituality, writing, art, and evolution.
I began to take creative writing seriously at about the time of my first (and last, it turned out) major, scientific publications. Since then, I have had fiction and creative non-fiction published in literary magazines. After writing a memoir of my monastic experience, Rough Grace: Inside the Invisible Cloister of Benedictine Community (that still needs a publisher), I began writing plays.
Despite its twists and curves, I am grateful for my entire life journey. Even the most painful passages - such as being raped as a child, or spending a decade lost in the ashen land of suicidal depression - have born invaluable fruit. Every past experience challenged me to grow in important ways - nurturing compassion, humility, sensory presence, and self-knowledge. Luckily, every experience is useful to a writer. Delightful, painful, extraordinary, ordinary: all are sources of creative insight and energy.
From childhood, I have perceived the Universal Presence that flows through and around all that exists, and is the stuff of which we are made. Never having found an institutional worship home that matched my native perception, I created a private, eccentric practice. Then, in the mid-1990s, while I was on the faculty of DePaul University in Chicago, I began to study energy healing. A couple of years later, I had a vision. A brilliant light rose through my body with the words “Let go.” So I abandoned the security of tenure-track professorial life for a journey to who-knew-where. An interfaith Unitarian Universalist, and emphatically not a Christian, I was shocked when this led to a Benedictine monastery. In 2001, I become an oblate (a lay associate of the monastery). It was not enough. I felt so strongly called that I joined the monastery community for fourteen months. There I studied monastic history and theology while engaged in daily monastic practices. Now I call myself a Christian, albeit an interfaith, Universalist one (if you wonder what that means, check out my blog).
Throughout my peripatetic life, I have tried to live from my creative center, expressing myself with writing, sculpture and live performance. After leaving the monastery, I trained as a spiritual intuitive guide. Now I also help other people connect to their inner, creative source, and live from their spiritual creative center.
Our lives are part of a larger, coherent picture. I don’t understand how this can be, but I know - absolutely KNOW, from direct, personal experience - that viewed from this larger, divine perspective, our suffering dissolves leaving only goodness and love.
I have been given amazing help in reaching this place of acceptance - from therapists, teachers, friends, family, my inner guide, and from Jesus, himself. I continue to get support, as I sink down and resurface in the ongoing dance of spiritual and creative development. So I am immensely grateful if I can pass on some of that help to my companions in earthly struggle - though personal contact or the written page.
Namaste.
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