Reflections from the ongoing work of practice, leadership, and attention.
These essays reflect an ongoing practice of attention—exploring grief, leadership, belonging, and what it means to live into a new story, personally and collectively.
Stewarding the New Story: A Grand Synthesis of the New Story Stewards Program
How do we meet a world in upheaval? Through grounding, witnessing, shared grief, and connection to the divine, we begin to give the New Story form. A reflection on the New Story Stewards Program and how Spirit finds expression through our stewardship.
Embracing Mystical Life: Part Two
In this second reflection on Embracing Mystical Life, I explore the tension between surrender and responsibility, vocation and spiritual practice. Through contemplation of the Way of Community, questions about public service, leadership, writing, and spiritual formation emerge alongside a deeper inquiry into nature, presence, and the soul’s ongoing return to Spirit. This report on practice reflects on holding uncertainty, trusting the journey, and recognizing the threads of grace that have appeared throughout a lifetime.
Embracing Mystical Life: Part One
This reflection explores what it means to remember ourselves as souls in a culture that often pulls us toward distraction, productivity, and disconnection from deeper presence. Through stories, contemplative practice, personal reflection, and metaphor - from the Rainmaker and the Grail to mindfulness, social media, and the natural movement away from our source - it considers what it means to stay rooted in Spirit while living fully in modern life. Ultimately, this piece is about remembering connection, cultivating presence, and learning how to return to balance even as life continues to pull us outward.
Something Rather Than Nothing
Every so often, my son and I fall into long conversations that stretch across everything—physics, philosophy, God, and what it means to live a good life. In one of those conversations, he asked a simple question: what does it mean to follow God? I didn’t have a definitive answer, but I found myself returning to something more basic—the fact that there is something rather than nothing, and what that might ask of us.
Praying and Acting in Liminal Space
This period has been hard. I found myself reaching toward something that felt like it might change everything—only to watch it pass by. In reflecting on prayer, I began to see that it is not separate from action. To pray is to witness, to grieve, and to open ourselves to something beyond us. And from that place, we act. This piece explores what it means to stay open, to keep moving, and to find some grounding in a world that does not always offer any.
My Heart Doesn’t Fit in a Box
There is a growing amount of attention, energy, and legislation directed at a very small group of people. This piece steps back to ask why, and to explore the human, biological, and societal complexity we often ignore. A reflection on gender, grief, and the consequences of mistaking our categories for reality.
Learning to Live in Liminal Space
This synthesis reflects on the first five sessions of the New Story Stewards program, exploring how we learn to live in liminal space — the threshold between the Old Story that is unraveling and the New Story still emerging. Facing the reality of the polycrisis, it considers the practices of witnessing, grieving, prayer, and action as ways of grounding ourselves in humility, presence, and love while helping steward what comes next.
Grieving in Liminal Space
A reflection on grief in liminal times—moving from witnessing to grieving to action. Through ritual, community, Frederick Buechner’s writing, and testimony before the Washington State legislature, this report explores the movement of Witness → Grieve → Pray → Act and what it means to let grief move outward into the world.
Witnessing in Liminal Space
This session invited us to see ourselves in liminal space—to notice its textures, its discomforts, and how we might dwell there more honestly. Witnessing, I am learning, is more than seeing something happen; it is allowing ourselves to be shaped by what we encounter.
Listening to Survivors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation
I attended the Summit on Crime Survivors because I knew commercial sexual exploitation was an area I did not understand well enough. What stayed with me most deeply were the voices of survivors, and the question of what responsibility listening creates when listening alone is not enough.
A Veil to Protect Community
Not every act of transparency strengthens trust. At a recent council meeting, I found myself wrestling with whether a small, intentional veil—keeping outcomes public while resisting personalization—might actually help preserve community connection in a time when division comes easily.
Imagining and Welcoming a New Story
In this session, I found myself reflecting on how deeply misaligned our ways of organizing life have become—from the values we elevate, to the hierarchies we accept, to the pace at which we expect life to unfold. This synthesis statement and report on practice explore where my own assumptions were challenged, where resistance surfaced, and where I began to glimpse a different way of seeing and living into a New Story.
Grief as Learning: A reflection on The Grieving Brain
A reflection on grief as a learning process—how the brain struggles to update after loss, and how attention, time, and care can slowly reshape our relationship to what has changed.
Longing for a New Story
In this first Report on Practice, I explore what it means to live in the “space between stories,” how meditation shaped a difficult month, and where small openings toward the New Story are beginning to appear.
Reports on Practice: An Introduction
I came to this work for reasons that have been building for years. My life exists at several intersections: public service and inner work, organizational consulting and spiritual practice, the demands of showing up for my community and the quiet necessary to stay grounded in myself. For a long time, I've been looking for a structure that could help me integrate these dimensions rather than toggle between them.