“Do your own work,” “Look to your own culture, not to ours,” “Stop taking other people’s spiritual pathways and cultures! Especially after you have taken our land!” This is part of what I (and many others) have been hearing from BIPOC folks for decades. Growing up Quaker, when first encountering…

Be it a retreat, conference, vacation, or another adventure: spend time focusing on the art of returning, rather than only ongoing/leaving. “Well it sounds like you had a great trip. Are you depressed now?” our neighbor asked us. We were sitting in his backyard, sipping cappucinos in the Hudson Valley…

Thanksgiving: a feast, a celebration, a prayer, a fantasy, a reality, an origin story. Increasingly, people are asking, “what really happened?” The very question unsettles the holiday’s already shaky foundation. It evokes the question: “why are we celebrating Thanksgiving?” Thanksgiving is a quintessential American holiday. It reflects and forms American…

Sometimes when I work on people as a bodyworker, when I'm physically touching their bodies, I feel within them the histories of colonization. I feel the traumas of their ancestors. I feel the trauma of being forcibly separated from land and rivers, and waters. It sits uneasily in the body. …

Between Summer Solstice and Autumnal Equinox lies Lughnasa, one of the four cross-holidays of the Celtic Wheel of the Year. The other holidays are Beltane, Samhain, and Imbolc. All are connected to fire and the cycles of the harvest. At this point, I am still finding other cultures’ references to…

Can we create new ways of approaching a new year? Right on schedule, I’ve been seeing a lot of correspondence and advertisements for services that will, apparently, help me ‘have the best year ever in 2022’ from a variety of coaching, business, and related services. Given how many people had…

Origin Stories shaping our National Consciousness Columbus Day. Thanksgiving. Fourth of July. These three holidays publicly commemorate the origins of our nation: linked together they form a collective origin story for the United States of America. Together, the holidays, the rituals around them, and the stories we tell ourselves about…

A continuation of an exploration of Thanksgiving and possibilities of reconciliation. Please read Part I first! What do we long for? Humans long for harmony. To the extent that ‘reconciliation’ also entails justice, we long for reconciliation. The desire for the Beloved Community dwells in our hearts. …

Beneath a false historical narrative, a harmful pageant, and a beguiling dinner tradition resides a real longing — for both giving thanks and for reconciliation. Might this longing guide us towards a more authentic story to live by than the Pilgrims and Indians myth? “There is a longing at the…