Writings

 
Travel changes my world. It broadens my understanding of who and what I am on this planet, along with eight billion other souls who are fellow companions and teachers. I enter other cultures to understand how they’ve made sense of this great cosmic journey we’re on together. I want to hear about their mythology and spiritual lives; I want to visit, and when possible, sit in their sacred places, and take part in local rituals. Stories of violence, loss and triumph move me, not ...

            I’d been inside before, but stood outside now, waiting for my partner to emerge with a horde of photographers. I looked back into the narrow, red rock slot canyon. Stepping inside lead into a winding chamber of ever-changing sandstone colors. Water and time had carved it into a sensual, twisting world, steps away from an ordinary desert view. The slow movement of the sun above the sheer canyon walls lit up the narrow passageway in an ever-changing ...

 
Radiance
I wake up, for no clear reason. Then it hits me: that thermos of water I drank last night is back. Sleep retreats, and in its place is a recognition that I’m going to have to get up. I remember now where I am, and it makes this urgent need a complicated mission. I’m sleeping solo in a tent on remote Isla Espiritu Santo—Island of the Holy Spirit—camped on a narrow beach, in the Sea of Cortez, Mexico. I paddled a kayak here today with others, all women. Stretching ...