Blog
“Mom, now is not the time for meaning-making!” my teenager said to me.
Instantly, I knew what she meant—and I apologized.
I have a habit of looking for deeper meaning, of going beneath the surface of things. That impulse is not inherently bad. But when it happens too soon, it bypasses what needs t...
“I feel crunched and crushed,” she said.
It was an online spiritual direction session, and this was how my directee—a college professor—began the call.
She went on to describe the anger and angst she felt living within society’s grind culture and the relentless pressure it places on people. This p...
Wild Geese
 You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile...
Wisdom Tree Collective is a formation that takes spiritual direction seriously.
This is not a program that skims the surface or rushes formation. It is a space of depth, rigor, and reverence, shaped by prayer, discernment, and long fidelity to the vocation of spiritual accompaniment.
From the ou...
Up at 3:00am. On the road by 3:30am.
Dark - cold - country roads - black ice - no specific directions. U-turns and navigating with wrong info. But at 5:35am we see the vehicles and arrive safely.
Why are we doing this? What is the reason?
We stand in the dark waiting. Not sure what to do. The sh...
I’ve been reviewing a series of conversations from my time as a student in Wisdom Tree Collective’s School of Spiritual Direction. The beauty of our program is that you still have access to all the dialogues and papers you had during the training. Something I wished I had when I attended school at T...
How do we meet events we cannot fix?
A massive winter storm swept across the continental United States this weekend. I read that nearly 40 states were under winter weather alerts. Here in Nashville, TN, we have snow and ice.
So far, news reports indicate that tens of thousands of customers across ...
For the first 18 years of my life, I felt as if I was inhibited from seeing the breadth and
depth of Holy Mystery. It’s not because God was small, but my understanding of my
image of God was.
Everything was so black and white. I was so trapped in dualistic thinking. Right and
wrong. Saved or lost. I n...
During my early years as a dean of students, many of the students I talked with were burdened with issues similar to what I had experienced. The main difference between us was that I had had time to reflect and learn from them. It was an unsolicited invitation to listen to students with fresh ears, ...
" At its foundation, it is a journey of opening our hearts to the love of all those sacred beings who dwell in spiritual form across the veil. Our Western minds may tell us that what we see is all there is, but the religious and mystical imagination knows a deeper truth."
~Christine Valters Pai...
“Ring around the rosie. Pocket full of posey. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.”
For reasons I can’t quite explain, this curious rhyme recently intruded upon my thoughts. It carried me back to childhood, to evenings when my mother would recite it at bedtime. I had no idea what the words meant then, and ...
