Inward Light
Articles
Story of a Book of Spiritual Healing
Snap, Crackle, Pop!
The Flint and Light of Respect
Othering Among Friends
Radical Welcome
The Wisdom of Ordered Council
Loss in Two Voices
Bittersweet Wisdom
The “Why” of What We Do
A Red Sky
Two and a half years later, her voice still haunts me. From the other side of the fence, I hear her yell at her children as they play in the backyard. It’s a sunny day, and my wife and I are riding our bikes on a path that runs right beside this family’s home. We are enjoying a weekend vacation in Ashland, four hours south of our own home in Salem, Oregon. A blissful afternoon, we are all unaware that, just two days later, a fire will race up the path we’re riding on. It will level this entire neighborhood to the ground, including the mobile home we just passed, with the door that just clacked shut. Whole communities in several towns will be completely wiped out by just one fire – one of the many fires about to explode across our state. This particular fire, the Almeda fire, will consume 2,600 homes and three lives. Throughout the 2020 wildfire season in Oregon, at least twenty-one fires will each burn more than a thousand acres or cause significant structural damage or death. Over a million acres will burn, 40,000 people will be evacuated, and at least eleven people will be killed.
What I’ve Been Trying to Say
Life Cycle of a Quaker Meeting
The lessons we learn from accompanying people as they die can help inform our understanding of the care that Quaker meetings need as they change and age. While closure is an expected and important part of any life, including the life of a meeting, in our youth-focused culture, it can be hard to tend this part of our life cycle. We believe that Quakers are missing some important opportunities for deep spiritual experiences and growth when we don’t address these challenges. Here, we will consider what it might mean to tend the Spirit and the spiritual life of a meeting that is in the later stages of its life.
Pieces and Patterns
The Perception of the Heart
Close-up on The Lord’s Prayer
“Bulletin” and “Lincoln”
Esther
Steel to Flint
God (or Not) among Quakers
Elizabeth Gurney Fry: A Quaker Mess
Friends are doing a lot of reevaluation these days, reexamining our past and our venerable Quaker ancestors. In some cases, when moral inconsistencies emerge into the open, reexamination means that some iconic Friends are losing their luster. In other cases, stories of early Friends’ messy lives help us to see their humanity, which can lend greater depth and nuance to their spiritual writings. This happened for me when I read Chad Thralls’ May 2011 article in Friends Journal on the “embodied” life of Thomas Kelly. Learning how Kelly confronted his inner demons through surrender to Spirit increased my appreciation of his lyrical testimony.
Dielectric
Listening During Meeting: An Apologia
A Living Universe (excerpt)
Mountain Time
To Form a Faithful Community
On February 24 this year, Russia invaded Ukraine. For now, I ask you to set aside all history and politics. I ask you to step back with me to that moment when I realized in terror that terror had just filled a country I had visited many times, where I had friends, where there was a Quaker meeting and facilitators for the Alternatives to Violence Project. The invasion couldn’t be happening . . . but it was.
God’s Loving Eyes
Two Crows
That Spark of Connection
Soul-Work in Community
Normal Feelings
Gandhi’s Smile
Growing into the Light
Presence and Place
Magnolia Grove Monastery
Forging a Relationship with Self
Finding Life with the Dead
Place of Privilege (abridged)
A Spiritual Home
Let Our Lives Speak
Creating out of Silence and Light
Evangelism
Alternative Realities
Individual Decision or Mutual Discernment
Membership is Important
On Membership and Being in the Light
The Ground from which Miracles Spring
Words: The Saving Grace
Speaking of Animacy
Embodying the Words of Thomas Kelly
Listening for the Yearly Epistle
Serve The Land
Friends for Racial Equity
News as Spiritual Exercise
Privilege and The Other (unabridged)
Sabbath Economics
Our Debt to America’s Indigenous
Final Accounting: Carpe Mortem
Fake News for Real Peace
A Longing for Beauty
Thoughts from a Loving Gadfly
The Show Goes Wrong
Illusions and Miracles
Listening to the Silence
Wild Diversity
Native Connections
The Gathered Meeting
Soul Force
The Dreamer
Cassandra 2020
Next Year in Bunnytown
Prophesy
A Drawer Full of Oranges
Win-Win-Win-Wins
Confidence
Stuck in Punxsutawney, Again
Quaker Worship and Intentional Design
The Parable of the Bowls
The Miracle Teacher
A Psalm
Twenty Nickels Make a Dollar
Staying Connected with Our Children
Radical Vulnerability Revisited
Worship by Approximation
Secret Sauce
Disclosures and Wonder
“That of God” Within
Meditation, Worship, Science
Alchemy
A Vision from 2050
In the Living of These Days
John Woolman’s Remedies for a Disease
On the Side of the Rebel Jesus
Peace through Pieces
The Fancy Sunday Hat
Singing in Quaker Worship
Olive Rush and Her Legacy
Visual Ministry
Quakers and Conflict
Appreciative Eldering
More Powerful than the Grave
The Light, Then v. Now
Listening Beyond Words
Martha and Mary
We Are All One
Our Neighborhood
Seek to Truly See
From "Spacious"
Open the Channel
Prayer
That of God in Research
In the September/October 2018 issue of Western Friend, “On Children,” I wrote about my experiences as a Child Protective Services (CPS) social worker. Much of what I described about investigating child abuse concerned “control.” For example, my Quaker practices of listening in silence and discernment helped me “learn the rules so you can break them properly,“ as the Dalai Lama recommends. “The rules” in this case were Washington State’s Child Protection Laws and the policies of CPS, which attempt to control the behavior of parents by enforcing norms to restrict physical discipline of children and to achieve minimum levels of care. Those enforcement structures are the stick. The carrots used to control families are the programs that CPS offers to help them, as well as the refuge in foster homes that CPS offers to children when parents fail. Unfortunately, social workers can cause harm when they fail to use judgment and discernment in applying the laws appropriately in each unique situation. As Parker Palmer so beautifully describes, one of the paradoxes of life is that both control and spontaneous creativity are necessary for human flourishing.
A Personal History with Korea
Service – A Gateway to Fulfillment
A Quakerly Dance Form
Quaker Time – A Friendly Logic Puzzle
River Magic
Desert Church
Poems from Before the Monsoon
Ten Days
Peace with Frisbees
Amor Fati
A Thousand Times, Come
Self-Compassion and Quakers
In Memory of Mary Dyer
Soledad Worship Group
The Strengthening Power of Discomfort
What is Tribe?
Faith in Our Youngest Friends
God, The Father
The Inner Boss
I have had the privilege to spend my life attending to leadings of Spirit. My young adult years were largely spent living very simply, moving from an internship to an activist position to part-time jobs in the non-profit and education sectors, which allowed me to follow my own artistic leadings while paying attention to what might be next. I had the benefit of spiritual mentors who sometimes also happened to be my bosses and jobs in which I had little supervision and much freedom to live into my leadings. My spiritual life as a Quaker and my work life were closely intertwined, and were often also intertwined with my personal life as well. I co-founded an activist and ecumenical intentional community during this period.
A Scientist’s View on Space and Spirituality
Race and Quakerism
Somewhere in My Youth
Journey to the Heart of Worship
Essential Listening
Into Beauty
Quaker Composer
Celebration of Garbage (corrected)
God Came to Visit
Unbalanced
Sanctuary in Mancos
Two Borders, Two Border Walls
Activists, Advocates, Human Beings
What’s Not to Like about Quakers?
Rumpelstiltskin
Who Left their Dishes in the Sink?
Raising Children in a Quaker Home
Return to the Farm
Minute on Fear and Healing
Pro-Woman Practice and Policy
The Landscape of Sanctuary
Finding Balance with MS
Embedded in Two Cultures with AFSC
Here Sleep Dragons
Time Crystals
Quaker Water
The Practice of the Presence
Prophets on the Field of Play
Competing to Find Out
A Deeper Understanding of Racism
The Confluence of Body, Mind, and Soul
Mindfulness and Quaker Worship
Workout, the Counterpoise to Worship
A Science of Quaker Practice
Body-Mind-Spirit Preparation
The Message is the Message
The Media of Ministry
Quaker Radio
The Joyful Quaker
What is the Light?
Axis Becalmed
Shining Light on Anti-Semitism
Some Notes on Quaker Speech
Who We Are
Knowing Oneself as Spirit
The Illusion of a Split
Surmounting Limits in Quakerism
A Courageous Step
Endless Beginning
Passage Out of Chaos
A New Intimacy
Before “Things”
The Original Quaker Peace Testimony
Irish Hospitality
Vietnam: A Study in Contrasts
Seventieth in Nagasaki
Money, that Tainted Thing
Building a Moral Economy from the Ground Up
The Economy of Unknowing
An Invitation to Play with God
Play + Work = Plork
Quakers in the Arts
The Abundant Benefits of Play
Focus and Immersion in Present Experience
Those Other Quakers
Bicycle Story
Being the Change at Friends House
237 Acres of God
Overcoming Need
Words from a Guardian Angel
Leaving the Ground
Gifts Known and Unknown
A Journey from Chaos to Friendship
Ministry
Truth and Truth and Truth
Radical Vulnerability
Taking Stock
Never Too Early
Just Talking in Prison
From Problems to Perfection
What’s Hell Got to Do with It?
Resisting the Temptation to Polarize
Driving as a Spiritual Discipline
A Field Guide to Evil
Slow, Simple, Not Easy
Taming Uncle Johnny
Quakers, Sport, and Being in the Zone
Ego, Imagination, Condition, and Light
Do Quakers Mean Business?
Simplicity and Our Complex Economy
Time, History and the Eternal Now
the tree thing, experiencing connectedness
Time in the Real World
Patriotic Principles and Quaker Testimonies
A Quaker Patriotism
Vicious Games
White America’s Myth of the Black Male
I received more reaction to my posting, The Iconification of Nelson Mandela and American Racism, than for any other of the 257 postings that I had done in almost seven years. Some of the responses were supportive, some critical, and some “yes, but.” Below is my original newsletter article, followed by a sampling of the responses.
I Am A Patriot!
Of Quakers and Cowboys
Mysticism and Magic
Irony’s a Bitch
The Meaning of Life in Twenty Words
A Paradox of Belief
The Bonds of Animal Affection
Manifest Destiny Revisited
Privelege, Interrupting
The Bonds of Animal Agriculture
Leap into Wings
The Spiritual Power of Art
The Lure of Mount Madonna
The Revolution According to Mark
Rage Transmuted
The Balm of The Other
Dangerously Comfortable
Friends, Veterans, and the Military
Seeds That Became a Yearly Meeting
The approach of Intermountain Yearly Meeting’s 50th anniversary in 2024 has me thinking back to the years before IMYM existed.
A Quaker Rosary
My father describes himself as “ethnically Catholic” and on every official document lists his religion as “COSMIC.”
A Pocketful of Seeds
I was born,
in Winter,
with a pocketful of seeds,
beans and basil,
onions and peas.
Awaken
Be still – free of time and space.
Be free – in the eternal and the infinite.
Calculating steps
The once-great forests of our land,
trees that blanketed the continent
with quilts of seasons, are gone –
Forgiveness in a World Aflame
For those of us watching the bloody conflicts in Israel-Palestine and Ukraine, I’m wondering what forgiveness means.
Transcendence and Community
At the close of our business meeting last August, I felt a lack of Light in the room.
Good Samaritan Mindset
Sierra Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends (SCYMF) has just given $75,000 to the Kake Regional Cultural Healing Center in southeast Alaska.
Poems
I made the choice / to move forward / but I break my / own word
Stretching Prayer
Body prayers are common spiritual practices throughout the world.
Continuous Gratitude
Over the years, my prayer journey has slowly grown to include prayers of gratitude.
Faith Like a River
Prayer is conversation, not a monologue.
The Power of Prayer
When I joined Amigas del Señor Methodist-Quaker Monastery in 2006, I enjoyed the simple lifestyle.
The Perplexity of Prayer
A dove-white drapery is placed over a casket which cost several thousand dollars.
Quaker With-Oneness
The Quaker community where I was raised spent a lot of time thinking about words. I remember sitting through business meetings as a child when the language of a single-sentence minute could be deliberated, revised, read back, and deliberated again more than a half dozen times before unity was reached.
Quaker Discernment about Technology
My life is shaped by computer science and my Quaker faith. Virtually no evolutionary process, including the evolution of faith, evolves in a straightforward line.
Zoom Fog
Friends who had yearned for the quiet, human-centered, mystical experience from before the pandemic had to tolerate audiovisual equipment.
Somehow More Intimate
Reading and listening differ from spoken feelings.
Better Shape than When He Came
I first met Red Stephenson in 1947 when I was five, shortly after our family moved from Eugene to Berkeley.
At a Safe Distance
Even before we moved into this house, we heard the neighbors talking about the animals. Deer, of course, but also coyotes, owls, seasonal javelina, and an occasional sighting of a bobcat or mountain lion.
On the Christian Calendar and Epiphany
We can learn from and happily follow Jesus’s teaching. We experience a Light or a Word from beyond ourselves that is a guide to our lives. The lesson of Epiphany is that those two are identical; Jesus is Light.
Conversational Arts: The Foundation of All Relationships
When people feel valued, when they know that you have listened, they are much more receptive to therapy and interventions.
Vocation – Life Experience, Research, and Opportunities
I almost missed the call. If I had, I would not have been the first. If I had, I cannot conceive that my life would be better – but more likely, neither as nourished nor as fulfilling.
How Stillness Helped Me Find New Paths
When life again decides to challenge my equanimity, I will be in a better place to navigate change.
Row, row, row
Here now on this boat, both mother and father are attentive to their little boy and whatever his floating reveries may be.
Time and the River
The river moves continuously; it has its ebbs and flows, just as in my life there are periods of night and day, but those no longer seem to cut up time into segments any more than the ebbs and flows disturb the unbroken movement of the water.
Life on Wyoming’s Snake River
The Snake River ceased being our private playground. We started to see for the first time people floating down the river in rubber rafts and many more people fishing in our private fishing holes.
Living Waters
Help me to dip deep
Into the Well of Your Divinity