• Whenever we long for a happier, more joyful life, let’s consider this: within our hearts we have, available to us, all the spiritual resources we need.

• The path to a joyful life begins in the heart. What are we waiting for? The way is beckoning, so let us proceed.

• Silence is the matrix of possibility — which may be found in every heart (between and beneath every heartbeat). Therefore, imagine the possibilities.

• The “Word of God,” the “Law of God,” the very “Mind of God” — whatever we may choose to call that deep-seated sense of what makes life worth living, it’s also in the heart. And it invites us not to shame or self-criticism, but to curiosity and celebration.

• No one is perfect, and even our heart makes mistakes. The proper response to our human fallibility is discernment: discerning that which is good is a key to a renewed life.

• Since we are all imperfect, we may as well learn to be patient with our own wounds and limitations. Such patience emerges out of the heart, and invites us into the slow but life-giving process of transformation, from the inside out.

• The greatest gift available to us in our hearts is love. Spiritual wisdom maintains that God is love: therefore, love is God. We do not have to earn or prove ourselves worthy of the grace of love: it is freely given. Receive it, and pass it along.

• The most freeing present placed in our hearts is eternity. Eternity resides within us! Truly, every being embraces the eternal, so we can take our time: we have all the time we need, and always will. Relax and move without hurry; this is the initiation into joy.

• All of these blessings weave together to point to one inescapable yet life-liberating truth — since even God is a gift found in our hearts, we are therefore one with God. This is the fullness of joy, and the destination toward which all paths direct us.

Now… as you cherish and acknowledge all these gifts given to you in your heart, what is your response? How do you plan to live a truly heart-full life?

I’ve received so much positive feedback for the “Contemplative Affirmations” that my friend Cynthia Hizer and I created (click here to see that post) that when I thought about these “Eternal Heart Affirmations” I thought they would make an excellent follow up post. Hope you find them useful.

These are adapted from the notes I kept when I was writing Eternal Heart: the Mystical Path to a Joyful Life. These affirmations themselves do not appear in the book, but they were guiding principles that I used as a sort of compass when I was writing the book. Because these began as personal notes, not intended for publication, they’re a bit rough around the edges, lots of repetition, that sort of thing. But I hope that what they lack in literary polish, they’ll make up for in being of some spiritual help to you.

September 11, like December 7, is “a date which will live in infamy.” But in the midst of all the 9/11 memorials being published today, I’d like to pause and look at a happier association for this tragic day. Let’s remember it’s also the birthday for millions of people around the world. One of them is my literary agent (happy birthday, Linda). Another is Mickey Hart, author and drummer for Grateful Dead, born on September 11, 1943. Happy birthday, Mickey!

The following article was first published in 1990 and has appeared previously on my blog; I’m reposting it here in honor of Hart’s 83rd birthday. Please note that I wrote this when I was 29 years old. The writing is immature but the passion is real. This is a true story. I’ve scoured the internet looking for photographs of what happened, to no avail. This happened more than a third of a century ago, when cellphone cameras did not yet exist. If anyone reading this does have a photo from June 3, 1990, please be in touch.

This article originally appeared in one of the most prominent Grateful Dead fanzines, Dupree’s Diamond News, Volume IV, Issue 1, December 1990. You can download a PDF of that issue here.

When you’re in the bookselling business, one of the highlights of your year is the American Booksellers Association’s annual convention, an opportunity for tens of thousands of booksellers and publishers to get together, do some networking, learn about new titles, and maybe even party a little.

This year (1990) the convention was held in Las Vegas, and my colleague Bob and I made plans to be there.

Weeks before the convention, many publishers send out invitations to the various parties and receptions they’ll be hosting during the four-day affair. It’s pretty much a capitalistic scene — come to the publisher’s party, and then sell more of that publisher’s books — but, hey, who doesn’t like to get wined and dined once in a while?

One invitation I received definitely stood out from the rest:

Mickey Hart, at the ABA convention? Of course! The invitation went on to explain that Hart, Babatunde Olatunji, Zakir Hussain, and other percussionists from around the world would be performing the second night of the convention to support Mickey’s forthcoming book, Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion.

Unbelievable! I started dancing around, right there in my office. It was like getting a miracle ticket in the mail.

Sunday, June 3, 1990. Bob and I had been in Las Vegas for a day and a half, exploring the gargantuan ABA trade show. My arms were getting tired from carrying all the publishers’ catalogs, posters, and promotional materials I’d gathered at the convention center. But as the day’s end neared, my energy level picked up. It was the concert night!

As soon as we got back to the hotel room, we dropped off our bags and immediately struck out for the Sands Hotel. Typical Deadheads, we got there 90 minutes before the ballroom doors opened, and no one was in line. As we stood there, the doors opned, and a man stepped out and introduced himself as Dennis McNally, the Grateful Dead’s publicist. We chatted for a few minutes, and he let us into the rear of the ballroom to listen to the sound check. The room appeared to seat only about 1500, and the sound was excellent. Now I was thoroughly psyched.

After grabbing a quick bite to eat and playing the slot machines for a while, we returned to the ballroom doors early enough to be at the front of the line. Most of the other people who came early to stand in line were also Deadheads. How odd we looked, many of us in “civilian” clothes. But you could pick out who had been to shows before — we all had huge smiles.

I talked with one couple from DC about the recent Landover shows, and I met a woman who worked for a publisher in Boston. She was an Olatunji fan in addition to being a Deadhead and summed up the excitement when she said, “Seeing Olatunji and Hussain and Hart on the same stage has got to be a once-in-a-lifetime deal!”

The ballroom slowly filled up with one of the oddest crowds ever at a Dead-related show. I’d guess that roughly a third of the audience was Deadheads. The rest was a crazy assortment of New Agers, drum lovers, and plain ol’ professional booksellers and publishers.

The show began promptly at eight, with the Balafon Marimba Ensemble from Oregon. Balafon played a happy, energetic mix of marimba-dominated tunes, including some African and Latin American folk tunes. Their music filled the ballroom with a joyous, happy spirit, and the musicians’ glowing faces and hard-working bodies kept the energy level high throughout their thirty-minute set, which seemed far too short. Then a very straight looking executive from the publishing company spoke while the stage was being set for the second act. It was funny to watch this dressed-for-success businessman singing the praises of Mickey Hart, percussionist for the “legendary Grateful Dead.” After his spiel, the curtain rose again to feature the Batucaje Brazilian Percussion Ensemble with the Capoeira Dancers.

Batucaje kept the energy level at the same height reached by Balafon, featuring a sound based on bongos and the berimbau, or musical bow. The dancers, however, stole the show. The women were mesmerizing, and the two men dancers presented a breathtakingly-choreographed fantasia on the Brazilian martial art of Capoeira. Once again, the set ended too quickly, but the excitement in the ballroom continued to build, as recorded sounds from the rainforest made it clear what was coming next.

The final set began with Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain on the stage. Mickey sat next to a metal sculpture of two skeletons (one with a rose in its mouth) standing on either side of about a dozen or so tall metal mushrooms. Behind this sculpture were suspended three bass drums; on the other side of Mickey was a set of twenty or so cowbells. Zakir sat in front of his tabla, while Mickey breathed deeply into a microphone and played what appeared to be a tiny recorder.

After a couple of minutes, Mickey moved to the sculpture, and began tapping the heads of the mushrooms — it was an electric drum set. Just as the two opening acts had excited us with their upbeat, happy energy, Mickey was now soothing us with a contemplative, serene performance. He soon gave way to Zakir, who treated us to about a ten-minute tabla solo, which was alternately peaceful, stimulating, and amusing.

Zakir’s solo gave way to Mickey’s playing the cowbells. At this point Baba and the members of his “Drums of Passion” began to take the stage. The slow build-up of energy suddenly burst wide open, and the ballroom was filled with a joyous celebration of percussion! Mickey and Zakir left the stage, and Baba led his troupe through some of their numbers.

As they jammed on their last song, Mickey and Zakir returned, followed by all the musicians and dancers from the first two acts! The stage was jammed with more than thirty performers, and the energy kept on building. Everything was happening at once, dancers, drummers, and explosion of rejoicing. Mickey moved to the front of the stage, playing a small bongo, and walked right down the steps to the front of the audience, and into the aisle. Baba followed right behind him, playing and singing. All the other performers filed down after them.

I don’t think I need to say that, by this point, everyone in the ballroom was dancing like veterean Deadheads — even the folks wearing coats and ties. As the musicians danced and played their way out the door to the casino, everyone fell right in behind them. But outside the ballroom, instead of marching into the casino, the players went out a side door leading to the Vegas Strip. Hundreds of people poured out after them and suddenly the sidewalk in front of the Sands Hotel was transformed into an impromptu tribal ritual, as we sang and danced and played.

Bob and I jockeyed our way to the front, near Mickey and Baba. The barriers between performer and audience were breaking down, with everyone dancing and singing together. As we danced our way north along the Strip, I saw Mickey step off the curb, into the street. Immediately he was surrounded by blissed-out, happy dancers. He stepped further into the street. Suddenly cars were honking and slamming on their brakes, as dozens of drummers and dancers took over two full lanes of Las Vegas Boulevard. The night had ceased to be a concert. It had become an ecstatic celebration of the spiritual powers of the drum, with people of many different walks and backgrounds suddenly united by the healing, joyous beating of the drums. After nearly twenty minutes, Mickey and Baba nodded to each other and stopped — and the crowd let out a roar of appreciation. Then they started playing again.

I was dancing not ten feet away from Mickey when the Deadhead woman from Boston, whom I had met earlier, ran up to me, grabbed my arm, and shouted, “Can you believe it? You’re dancing in the streets with Mickey Hart!”

Thank God I had a friend with me, so I know it wasn’t just a dream. The musicians began working their way back to the ballroom, with everyone keeping the dancing alive. As cars drove by, folks rolled down their windows and stared. What kind of celebration was this, with Deadheads and Suits dancing side by side?

Back in the lobby of the ballroom, the performers took one final bow, to a rousing applause. Baba stayed outside the longest, shaking people’s hands and embracing them. For the time being, the ritual was over. But the celebration goes ever on…

Fran and I are back home after four days in North Carolina, attending the Wild Goose Festival. It was her fifth, and my sixth, time at this annual event that brings together people dedicated to creativity, spirituality, and justice. It’s not a large festival — I believe this year’s attendance was somewhere in the 2,000 range — but it’s a powerful and dizzying alchemy where musicians, artists, writers, activists, contemplatives and seekers join together to enjoy each other’s work, to inspire and challenge each other’s practice, and to celebrate how community and passion can help to keep hope alive even in challenging times.

The Goose is a great place to meet your heroes (or even just writers, artists and musicians you admire). Over the years; it is in this venue where I have met, and/or meaningfully interacted with, quite a number of visionaries whom I admire, including Brian McLaren, Richard Rohr, Jim Wallis, Richard Twiss, Mirabai Starr, Simone Campbell, Lerita Coleman Brown, Brandan Robertson, Tessa Bielecki, Hunt Priest, Otis Moss III, and many others. Some of these folks are no longer alive, making the chance to connect with them at this festival all the sweeter. This year I was able to add Rob Zahn, Jon Carl Lewis, Kristen Kobes Du Mez, and Roberto Che Espinoza to the list. At one of my workshops, author Roger Wolsey was present; when he made a reference to one of his books, someone sitting two rows behind him got excited, as she was just reading (and loving) the book. That’s the magic of the Wild Goose Festival: you might be sitting unaware right next to one of your favorite authors, or musicians, or artists.

But these days, I’m noticing that for me the real magic of the Wild Goose Festival is found in the most ordinary conversations with the most ordinary of people. Yes, it’s amazing to meet someone whose book or song has inspired me. But often I find that when I talk to persons who aren’t there to promote their latest release, but simply want to be part of the conversation, they often say something that opens my heart or my mind to truly new ways of thinking and being.

This year, I had a busy schedule: my colleague Debonee Morgan and I led a day-long workshop based on our Radical Mystics concept; I led several workshops of my own, on topics such as the spirituality of naming and the spirituality of self-care; I did the obligatory book signing, and was scheduled to participate in another panel and do a stint of spiritual direction that unfortunately got derailed by a powerful thunderstorm. When I wasn’t dashing off to whatever was next on my schedule, I tried to spend time at the tent housing Ligare, the Christianity & Psychedelics organization I have been involved in for the past three years. Fran, meanwhile, had her own agenda, hanging out with energy healers and artists and generally just having fun being creative (although she also gave back to the community by doing some spiritual direction).

On Wednesday night, before the festival began (with the day-long workshop I mentioned), Fran and I had dinner with an editor whom I’ve worked with before. Saturday evening we met some friends who have been active with the Theosophical Society in America for another meal. Events like these were very much the highlight of the event, for it is in such intimate settings that the best conversations take place. The editor and I spoke at length about the book proposal I’m working on, which was generous of them since I’m contractually obligated to a different publisher! But it gave me not only some great ideas to ponder, but also a bit of fire to finally get this proposal finished. Meanwhile, my Theosophical friends and I pondered the difference between religious exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, and how an appreciation of spiritual diversity just might help to make the world a better place.

If I’m making the Wild Goose Festival sound like a little bit of heaven on earth, well, it certainly is a special event; but like anything else in life, it’s not perfect. This year, however, the biggest drawback was something no one had any control over: the weather. The first couple of days, this outdoor event was beset by sweltering heat and humidity, with temperatures in the mid-90s for much of the day. Usually by noon it seemed that most of us there were hot sweaty messes! But since it affected everyone, it seemed that we were all just a bit kinder to each other as we tried to stay cool and hydrated.

But on Saturday afternoon the weather changed dramatically and a severe thunderstorm rolled in. For a camping festival where everything was taking place in tents, even a mild rain can be inconvenient (although the drop in the temperature was certainly welcomed). But this storm was no gentle shower — strong gusty winds accompanied pelting heavy rain and even hail, as the storm uprooted tents and trees, demolishing at least one car and causing some considerable property damage. Thankfully, no one was reported as being hurt, but the storm interrupted several hours of programming and proved to be a humble reminder that we just aren’t as in control of things as we like to think we are.

One of the most precious moments of the weekend came when a participant in my spirituality of self-care workshop shared a story with me about a colleague of his — an eighty-something activist nun, who loves my writing. Last year, after she received one of my books as a gift, the nun asked a young person she knew to help her set up an account with Amazon so she could order a copy of The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism for herself. She had never seen any reason to shop online before, but was willing to go the extra mile to get that particular book. The person telling me the story then asked to take a photo of me that he could share with the nun; he suggested that I pose waving like I was sending her a hello, but I thought it might be more meaningful if I held my hands together in blessing. That worked for him, and the result is now the featured image at the top of this post. The picture was taken at about 6 PM, and my scraggly hair certainly looks like it had been subjected to hours and hours of humidity!

I promised that this post would describe “What I brought home from the Wild Goose Festival.” There’s no huge reveal here, but in addition to all I’ve already mentioned, I could say I brought home hope: hope that community really can bring healing and work toward fostering a more kind and just world. I also brought home inspiration, from the energizing conversation I had with the editor to the hope that so many of the activists and visionaries I met shared with me. I got plenty of affirmation as well: not only were people (many of whom have known me for years) willing to address me as Skye, but they made it clear that an older contemplative introvert like myself still belongs in a community of creative folks who are working to make the world a better place. Finally, I would say that the Goose offered me a chance to consider how contemplation and action support each other in the real lives of ordinary people. From transgender activists to social workers, therapists to ministers, retirees to physicians, it seemed that just about everyone I spoke to was engaged in the vital but not always easy work of integrating deep contemplative practice with engaged efforts to serve and care for others. This both affirmed my conviction that contemplative practice is truly revolutionary, but also helped to remind me that even my humble work as a writer and teacher can be of service to others.

So there you go. If you’ve been to the Wild Goose Festival, you know how magical an event it is; and if you’ve never been, stay tuned: I hope and intend to be at the 2027 festival this time next year; perhaps I will see you there.

Even though it’s been a while since we’ve released a new episode, I remain humbled and honored by how many people have connected with me through the Encountering Silence Podcast (if you don’t know Encountering Silence, please check it out). Co-hosted with my good friends Cassidy Hall and Kevin Johnson, Encountering Silence includes over 100 episodes, many of which feature fascinating conversations with some of the leading contemplative voices of our time, including folks like Cynthia Bourgeault, Richard Rohr, Mirabai Starr, James Findley, and the late Lerita Coleman Brown. Indeed, with the passing of dear ones like Lerita, Barbara Holmes, Elias Marechal, and Jim Forest, the interviews in the Encountering Silence archive are not only evergreen, but increasingly valuable as they represent some of the most important elders of our community.

And just so you know, Encountering Silence is not a “former” podcast — we’ve been on hiatus for a while, but all three of us hope to return to creating new episodes when our schedules will allow it. So stay in touch!

Even if you already know and love Encountering Silence, you may not know that I have two other podcasts — a new co-hosted podcast called Radical Mystics, and my personal forum, AnamChara Audio. All three can be accessed on Substack, as well as through major podcast directories like Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Amazon.

Here’s a quick rundown of each…

Encountering Silence was my first podcast — we launched our first episode in late 2017 (hard to believe it’s been almost 9 years!). Our theme, of course, is silence, and while that was intended to be approached as broadly as possible, in practice it meant we focused on contemplative spirituality and also on how silence can be misused: what we came to refer to as “toxic silence.” But whether it’s the silence that oppresses or the silence that sets us free, we loved to explore it with our many amazing conversation partners. Co-hosted with Cassidy Hall and Kevin Johnson.

Find Encountering Silence on Substack or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Audible.

Anamchara Audio has its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, when I worked briefly on two podcast ideas I called Via Mystica and Schola Mystica, eventually recording about 12 episodes which were released between September and December 2020. At that point my attention moved to other things, and those baby podcasts just gathered dust. Recently, I combined them into a single feed I’m calling AnamChara Audio (after my blog, of course) with the first new episode in almost six years being released in August 2026. Lots of new ideas, so more to come. This one is just me!

Find AnamChara Audio on Substack or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Audible.

Radical Mystics is my latest podcast initiative. It began with a day-long program in person at the Wild Goose Festival’s Wisdom Camp in 2026. Co-faciliated by Debonee Morgan and me, the Radical Mystics Wisdom Camp explored the intersection of silent contemplative spirituality and the call to promote peace, justice and community in today’s world. The 2025 event was a success, and as we began planning the 2026 Wisdom Camp, we felt that this topic is too big for just one programmed event a year. So we launched the Radical Mystics Substack and podcast. If you share a passion for mystical spirituality and social action, we hope you will join us. Co-hosted with Debonee Morgan.

Find Radical Mystics on Substack or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Audible.

These are not “multiple episodes every day” kinds of podcasts — you can subscribe to all three and I can confidently tell you that your feed will not be overwhelmed with my voice. Radical Mystics is currently the most active, and even there we’re only envisioning 2-4 episodes a month. But when you do subscribe to all three, you’ll get all my new audio content. So please, sign up for them all!

When I was a very small child — say 4 or 5 years old — I had a recurring nightmare. In it I was at one end of a large room, filled with tables and chairs — probably similar to the day care center where my mother would leave me on occasion. In the dream, the room was empty, except for two beings — myself and one other, at the other end of the chamber.

It was a grown-up. But I didn’t think of him as a person; in fact, I called him the “Iron Beast.” Not Iron Man as in music or comics — just the Iron Beast. Since I was so little, he was much taller than me. He was dressed head to toe in black, and his head was covered by a full helmet and mask. I could see nothing of his face, except for two slits where his eyes would be — but instead of eyes, all I could see was a piercing red glow, as if what was inside the mask was a furnace rather than a face. The helmet was round and covered with spikes, rather like a medieval morning star mace ball.

I assume it will surprise no one when I say the Iron Beast completely creeped me out.

But he wasn’t just waving at me from across the room. He wanted me. And it was not a “friendly” desire. I don’t know if he wanted to kill me, or eat me, or in some other way hurt, dominate or control me. I just know that he was after me — and I knew better than to just stand there and see what he wanted.

As I said, he was huge — the furniture was a minor inconvenience to him. He grabbed one of the tables by the corner, and flung it away from him as if it were no weightier than a folding chair. And he started running straight toward me.

I turned around and ran, fast as I could, for my life. And that’s when I would wake up.

The Iron Beast never caught me in my nightmares, so I couldn’t say what would happen next. Would I beg? Would he listen? What horror would ensue?

Such questions would not have occurred to me back when I was having these nocturnal terrors. All I knew was that the dream was scary and the monster was terrifying. I needed to run from it at all costs.

And frankly, that’s all I needed to know.

I couldn’t tell you how many times the Iron Beast invaded my dreamspace. I know at least two or three times, and possibly more (and who knows how many times he might have lurked in my subconscious but I graciously forgot when I woke up the next morning).

But I tell you what: the Iron Beast was such a powerful figure that even now, more than six decades later, he remains my archetypal nightmare image. I’ve tried to do my own amateur psychoanalysis concerning him: was he a symbol of my brother who bullied me? Of my own reptilian brain? Perhaps he was the embodiment of my own deep-seated anxiety, something I can clearly recognize when I look back into my early childhood memories, but back then I had no words or ways to express that all-pervasive angst, other than to cry when something particularly upset me.

When as a teenager I temporarily dallied with fundamentalist Christianity, it was obvious that on a purely archetypal level, the Iron Beast appeared to be a demon (if not the devil himself). Interestingly, though, I never had any kind of intuitive sense of him as a demon of hell — even though he did seem evil. Maybe I was just too young to even know what hell was (my family did not regularly attend church until I was 12, many years after these dreams). Looking back from today’s vantage point, I think he was more a part of me than some sort of alien intruder; what I suppose Carl Jung might have called an image of my shadow.

Eventually those nightmares faded away, and my young life carried on. I was a very shy and socially awkward child, with few friends and often given to just playing alone — and I don’t have any memories of feeling lonely or sad when I was alone; on the contrary, I found that being with other kids caused me so much anxiety, that I appreciated the peacefulness of being all by myself.

I had no interest in sports, but I played with little toy cars (Hot Wheels and Matchbox). I would draw pictures of dinosaurs. I loved music (I had a vinyl record of Disney tunes that I practically wore out), and also enjoyed reading: Disney again — I had a big book of illustrated stories based on Disney movies. Eventually I graduated from those to Hardy Boy books, but that literary evolution came a year or so after the time I scared myself thanks to the Sun Monster.

Being such a loner, I was used to entertaining myself through the power of my own imagination. I suppose you could call what I am about to describe a daydream. But it was not a passive daydream Rather, it was a kind of directed imagination where I was like a movie director creating the story that played out in my head. I might even act out the actions of this “movie” in my body as I played.

One day I was playing in just this imaginary/imaginal way. I remember vividly that I was in my mom and dad’s bedroom, and in my mind’s eye I could see a town or a city that was being besieged by a giant figure who towered over the settlement, tall like Gulliver towering over Lilliput. But this giant was not friendly, the way Gulliver was. Rather, he was somewhat menacing and threatening, like the Iron Beast — only instead of a mace-like helmet, his head was bright and white-hot, like the very sun itself perched on his shoulders. So I called him the Sun Monster. The Sun Monster’s hands and feet seemed to be all afire. As it marched on the city, the tiny people below it screamed and fled — not unlike how I had fled from the Iron Beast in my nightmares, six or seven years earlier. Clearly, the Sun Monster intended to destroy this innocent settlement — and it was all happening in my own daydream. I was the embodiment, the creator, of this very destructive force.

Dear readers, I kid you not: I got so frightened by my own daydream that I had to stop playing and take some time to calm myself down. It was probably a little child-sized panic attack, not as terrifying as the full-blown panic attacks that would visit me as an anxious young adult, but still scary enough that when it was over, I didn’t even want to think about the Sun Monster.

I was rattled. I knew that the Sun Monster was just a figment of my own imagination, and that unlike a nightmare, I had some control over the course that my daydream would take. But in retrospect, the upset feelings seemed to prevent me from resolving the emotional activation on my own, through my play.

For example, I could have imagined a beautiful woman with the moon for her head, coming to save the village and encourage the Sun Monster to be nice instead of mean. But I didn’t imagine a Moon Maiden (in fact, I just made her up right now, as I am typing out these words). No, I just recoiled in a self-generated fear from something that emerged out of my own mind. I marveled that I could imagine something that was so scary.

Integrating My Imaginal Power

It would be years before I would really unpack all of this. Years before I could begin to see the Iron Beast and the Sun Monster as anything other than terrifying fears lurking deep down within my own mind.

Today, I marvel at them, but not for how much they terrified me. Yes, I wish I could go back in time and encourage my child-me to summon forth just a bit more courage, so that I could stand up to the Iron Beast and find out what it really wanted, or call off the Sun Monster’s attack in order to save the town and talk with that inner brightness instead.

But it’s okay. I did find my courage, eventually. I would go on to learn about psychology and about concepts like the shadow and the reptilian mind. Eventually I would begin to think of the Iron Beast and the Sun Monster as not just symbols of hostility and destruction, but also as symbols of strength, of energy, of inner power.

Like Rumi in his poem “The Guest House,” today I’m more inclined to invite this beast and monster in for tea, just so we could have a talk and I might learn a bit more about them — and about myself.

I once heard a veteran psychedelic researcher, Bill Richards, talk about how to deal with having a challenging experience during an ayahuasca journey. He said if you saw something like a giant anaconda, the trick was not to run away from it, but to stand your ground — to ask it questions like “What are you doing here in my mind?” And “What is it that you are here to teach me?” Indeed, he even suggested that you could jump into the mouth of the anaconda, look through its eyes, and become the anaconda! Then you could really experience its lesson, from the inside out.

When I consider the similarities between the Iron Beast and the Sun Monster, I wonder if I was trying to do something along those lines, even as a small anxiety-ridden child. I subconsciously “became” the beast, by conjuring the monster in my own daydream. At the time, it unfortunately scared me so much that I cut the “experiment” short and didn’t allow myself to see it through. But between therapy and meditation, I eventually learned as an adult to befriend even my own inner dark places.

One thing I certainly learned from the Iron Beast, and especially the Sun Monster, was the power of my own imagination. So powerful, in fact, that it could actually frighten me. Which tells me that there is a “reality” at work, even in our dreams and our imagination. Of course, the Iron Beast and the Sun Monster are not real in any kind of empirical sense — they only exist in my mind. I tried drawing the Iron Beast a few times as a kid, and now as an adult it is uncanny how an AI image generator like ChatGPT can render an accurate illustration of these imaginal beings, just from my prompts. But that’s as “real” as they get, at least in an empirical sense.

But the reality that counts here is not empirical reality: it’s imaginal reality. The reality of the power of the imagination. Bill’s questions are helpful: what were the Iron Beast and the Sun Monster doing in my young mind, and what were they there to teach me?

Here are a few of my thoughts.

First, I can’t help but wonder if the Iron Beast and the Sun Monster are actually the same archetypal figure: the light that shone through the Beast’s mace-like helmet seemed to have been the very sun itself, once the headgear was removed. The proportions are different and the circumstances of the daydream were unlike the setting of the nightmares. But still, it’s remarkable how heat and light seemed to characterize both of these imaginal fiends.

The literature of contemplation provides some interesting anecdotes that offer a perspective on my childhood anxieties. Here are two stories, one from many centuries ago, the other from just the middle of the last century, and a couple of verses from the Bible that I think contribute to this reflection. First, a story from antiquity, recounting an encounter between two desert elders:

Abba Lot visited Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, to the best of my ability I do a little fasting, praying, and meditating. I maintain hēsychia and purge my thoughts to the best of my ability. What else should I be doing?” Standing up, the elder stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire; and he said to him, “If you are willing, become entirely like fire.”1

Now, a more recent story, from the great 20th century mystic Thomas Merton:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people…
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…
As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
…I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.2

If you are willing, become entirely like fire… and realize that you are shining like the sun. I’ve written before about how Jesus is quoted as saying both “I am the light of the world” and, speaking to his followers, “you are the light of the world.”3 Is there a fundamental unity between light, embodiment, and divinity? Merton and Abba Joseph both seem to think so, and I rather think Christ would agree with them.

So where do the Iron Beast and the Sun Monster fit in — as archetypes of light that is not cuddly and encouraging, but frightening and seemingly destructive? I do not know the answer to this question, and perhaps it is only for me to try to make sense of the nightmares of my childhood. But what is relevant, I believe, to us all, is simply this:

The power of the human imagination seems to entail far more than just a capacity to tell a meaningful story. It touches on powerful emotions, powerful archetypes, deep dimensions of the psyche that may elude our understanding. From a child’s nightmare to an adult’s challenging psychedelic experience to the awe-inspiring work of deep therapy (including the “divine therapy” of centering prayer), we all have incredible capacities within us for interior transformation, even if brought to us through experiences that are unsettling and discomfiting. I am not a therapist, and I would caution readers not to take any of this as therapeutic guidance for your inner journey: but I am suggesting that the inner work that may arise through nightmares, meditation, or therapy invites us into can help us find meaning, unveil layers of self-understanding, and even facilitate spiritual awakening.

Featured image: “The Iron Beast and the Sun Monster,” AI-generated with OpenAI's ChatGPT; concept and creative direction by Carl “Skye” McColman.

Note: I announced on June 21 that I now have a new nickname, Skye (read that post by clicking here). Since then, I have heard from a number of people who have asked about the story behind it. This post tells that story.

Why am I now Skye?

The story of how Skye came to me basically began a number of years ago, with my recognition that I am nonbinary. I came out publicly as nonbinary three years ago, in an article called “God’s Pronouns” which appeared in the book of essays Soul Food. If you haven’t read that, click here for an excerpt — and here’s the gist: I’ve known since childhood that I was “different” but after years of shame for feeling that I was too feminine or simply “not man enough,” I came to understand that gender is for many people fluid, expansive, and not easily categorized as either male or female. This isn’t “transgender” in the sense of wanting or needing to transition from one gender to another.1 It’s just that for me, my gender identity and expression encompasses both masculine and feminine dimensions. I’ve learned that relatively few people my age use words like genderfluid or nonbinary, but these concepts are much more accepted, and widely understood, among younger generations.

I was well into my midlife years when I began to identify specifically as nonbinary. Connecting with or reading about other nonbinary persons introduced me to the idea of using gender-free pronouns (like the singular they/them), and I learned that many nonbinary persons changed their name, or adopted a nickname, to express a more unisex or non-gendered identity. Here are a couple of publicly known examples: when actor Rebecca Taylor-Klaus came out as nonbinary, they began to go by Bex instead of Rebecca; activist Grace Dunham (sibling of Lena Dunham) came out as nonbinary and began using the name Cyrus.

While I could see the beauty and grace of adopting a unisex or gender-free name and pronouns, I resisted doing so for a simple reason: I had already published numerous books, podcast episodes, and blog posts as Carl. I liked the name Carl, and so it seemed pointless to take on a new one. So I put it out of my mind.

But it appears that my heart and soul had a different idea.

An Unexpected Yearning

In 2025 my wife and I spent three weeks in Hawaii where I had a series of speaking engagements. But even with my work commitments, we also had plenty of free time to simply enjoy being together as a couple — as well as to enjoy being with our hostess and other friends. I hadn’t thought of those three weeks as a retreat, but it very much felt like that once we got there. Like any other retreat, I found myself giving more time to meditation, prayer, contemplation, and writing than I do on my normal workdays. I spent more time each day in silence, simply reflecting on my life and my work. It was in this context that I felt a surprising but sudden — and insistent — longing.

I felt a desire to embrace a new name.

Never mind how much I liked my given name, or thought that a new name was “impractical.” Once this desire showed up, it was insistent. The time had come for a new way to be addressed.

The name itself didn’t show up at first — only that desire for a new one.

I prayed about it and began doing research into names. Obviously, my first inclination was to consider nonbinary and unisex names. But even simple Google searches revealed hundreds of contenders. Many unisex and gender-free names have nature associations: Sage, Rowan, Alder, River, and so forth. I saw lots that I liked, but none that especially sang to me. Quickly feeling overwhelmed, I decided a little bit of narrowing down was called for, so I decided to consider three criteria in my search for a name:

• it needed to be unisex/nonbinary;

• it needed to have a clear Celtic association;

• and it needed to have a contemplative, meditative, or mystical feel.

Even by limiting myself to names that fit each of these conditions, I still ended up with a torrent of options (I now have so much more respect for expectant parents and their responsibility to pick a name for their baby). I began to narrow the list down to only the ones that seemed to qualify in all three of these ways: unisex, Celtic and contemplative.

Eventually I narrowed it down to a list of about 30 possibilities. In that list, one name in particular sang to me: Skye.

Skye is more often given to girls than boys, but like Tracy or Kelly, it is shared by both genders often enough to show up on unisex lists.2 Since Carl clearly leans masculine, the idea of a feminine-leaning unisex name appealed to me. But it also fit my other two criteria: It is thoroughly Celtic, since it comes from the Isle of Skye off the northwest coast of Scotland. And as I have written elsewhere, the sky is a legendary metaphor for meditation, especially in Buddhism (this also means it has a pun embedded in it, which for me is definitely a bonus). It also evokes pre-Christian Celtic mythology where the elements of nature are understood not as abstract earth, air, water and fire but as the more earthy land, sea and sky (with the sacred fire at the center). There’s also a folk tradition — which I have learned is not accepted by most Celtic language scholars, but the folklore is still out there — that the Gaelic word for Skye, Sgitheanach, may be related to Norse words for “mist” or “cloud.” That, of course, brought to mind The Cloud of Unknowing.

The more I thought of it, the more Skye seemed to be the perfect name for me.

Sharing Skye

Nicknames are pointless if others won’t use them, so I faced a big question: would anyone else, starting with my wife, even accept it? After all, Fran and I had been married over 32 years at that point, so inviting her to switch up what she called me felt like a big ask. Feeling nervous about it, I shared with her what was going on in my heart. She listened and said she was open to the idea, so I gave her the list of the names I had put together. In reality, there was only one entry on the list that I was truly excited about, but I wanted to see if it spoke to her as well.

Fran went through the list carefully, and we discussed almost every item. Ironically, some of the ones that I did rather like, she didn’t care for at all — and vice versa. But when she finally came to Skye (the list was in alphabetical order), she stopped. “oh, I really like this one,” she declared simply and confidently. I told her that was, to my mind, the one as well. So we began using it just among ourselves.

Before long I simply loved this name, and felt excitement over inviting it into my life. But immediately I began to second-guess myself. Was this merely a fun little idea that occurred to me in Hawaii, almost like a vacation fling? Even if Skye still felt good after going back home, how was I going to use it when I have been publishing as Carl for so long now? I kept praying and pondering, and decided that the reasonable path to take would be to introduce it to my closest friends, to my spiritual director and therapist, and to be in discernment about it for six months. Fran and I were planning a vacation to England and Scotland in June, so that seemed to be another important step: to go to the Isle of Skye and see if the name still seemed to fit there.

I also decided that Skye was not meant to replace Carl. After all, it’s a new nickname. Just as C.S. Lewis preferred to be called Jack without ever renouncing his given name Clive (which apparently he hated), I decided I wanted to embrace Skye without rejecting Carl (which, frankly, I still think is a perfectly fine moniker).

So that’s what I have done. Little by little, more friends and associates were introduced to Skye, and nearly all reacted enthusiastically. The trip to Scotland was rich and lovely, and while I could only “ask” the island for permission to use the name in an intuitive, imaginal way, I felt that the answer was very much a “yes.” So I came home and proceeded to add “Skye” to my website and social media sites, and on June 21, 2026 — the Summer Solstice — I announced the name publicly online.

So that’s the story of how I came to be Skye.

One More Thing

The other question I get asked is, “which name should I use?”

I imagine many people, especially those who have known me for a while, may find it’s not easy to switch over to Skye — and that’s okay. Carl is not a dead name3 — it’s still my given name, given to me by parents I loved dearly. Here is what I’m telling people: “Skye is my preferred name, but Carl is okay to use. I am happy to be called Carl, and I love to be called Skye.”

N.B. I get asked from time to time why I identify as nonbinary, or how I came to see myself as such. I wrote my coming out story several years ago; it’s in an essay called “God’s Pronouns” from Soul Food: Nourishing Essays on Contemplative Living and Leadership.1 See below to read what I wrote. For the full essay, get the book — its proceeds support the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, so please purchase a copy. Along with my essay, it includes writing by Lerita Coleman Brown, Valerie Brown, Gay L. Byron and many others.

Gender is a profound mystery, and so much of the language we traditionally use to describe gender can be criticized as stereotypical or limiting. Men are strong, aggressive, competitive, athletic, and proud, while women are compassionate, gentle, sensual, cooperative, and nurturing. Even as I write these words (merely for the purpose of illustration), I wince at how they seem to pigeonhole both genders. If someone truly embodies the gifts of masculinity and femininity, does it make sense to say their gender identity or expression exists beyond the binary? So often our understanding of God emerges out of our understanding of ourselves. For me, seeing God’s gender as nonbinary makes perfect sense, because it tracks with my own experience.

I still remember the first time I met someone who identified themself as nonbinary. It was at a neighborhood program in my local community for artists-as-activists, where one of the speakers introduced themself using that term. Being unfamiliar with the word but also being a writer, naturally I looked it up. I discovered that nonbinary is related to a cluster of words, mostly neologisms, that have emerged since the 1980s and 1990s to describe gender diversity and gender variance, especially beyond the binary of male and female. Words like genderfluid, gender-expansive, genderqueer, gender-nonconforming, and demigender all convey slightly different and nuanced ways of gender identity and expression. Neither male nor female, indeed! But also profoundly meaningful for me.

I was born in 1960, which means my childhood and adolescence stretched from the final days of the Eisenhower administration to the murder of John Lennon, the week I turned twenty. I was assigned male at birth, although back then no one talked about it like that. Just “It’s a boy!” But as my childhood unfolded, my boy-ness seemed to be a bit off-kilter. In fact, I came to think I was something of a failure as a boy. In my family and neighborhood, markers of masculinity included sports, hunting, fishing, working on cars, and developing physical strength—yet I remained stubbornly uninterested in all these things. Granted, on occasion I tried to “be a man,” but only for the sake of fitting in; after a couple of seasons of going hunting with my dad, I felt so relieved when I finally found the courage to tell him I really didn’t like it and wouldn’t go with him anymore, even though that meant a loss of time we spent together. My interests skewed more toward the arts, toward poetry and music and painting. And I also was interested in fashion, although I could barely admit that even to myself. And let’s just say it wasn’t just boys’ and men’s fashion that caught my eye.

As it turned out, I was not the only one who could see that my gender didn’t quite line up with the cultural expectations of our time. Other kids would point out to me (or tease me) for running, laughing, acting like a girl. Friends, trying to be helpful, would counsel me to try to tone down my femme mannerisms and body language. And kids who weren’t interested in being my friend would bully me, an easy target since I was such a “girl.”

I don’t recall ever feeling any sort of all-pervasive gender dysphoria, at least not in the way that transgender persons like Nicole Maines or Jazz Jennings have described it: an “insistent, persistent, and consistent” sense of being a girl in a boy’s body (or vice versa). When I heard about famous transpersons like Christine Jorgenson or Renée Richards, I thought they were interesting, but I never had the sense of “that’s me.” I had no sense of being in the wrong body altogether, just a kind of awareness that I wasn’t entirely at home with the expectations placed on me for being a boy—but I knew that I would be just as much a misfit if I had been born with a female body. There was plenty that I liked about being male, even with all my natural girlishness. Grasping for language to make sense of myself, by the time I was an adult I would say “I’m very androgynous” or “I’m really in touch with my feminine side.” Carl Jung’s ideas that everyone contains both a feminine anima and a masculine animus, and that one of the goals of maturity is to integrate both dimensions into our individuated psyche, resonated deeply with me.

I lived more than a half century before I stumbled across concepts like nonbinary or genderfluid. I suppose if I were born a generation or two later, I might have known—and embraced—those concepts for myself, even at a young age. And I especially wonder if, in my childhood I had been exposed to an image of God that encompassed the entire gender spectrum (with nonbinary pronouns to match), I might have been spared plenty of angst as I tried to make sense of who, in fact, God created me to be.

As I write these words, I see that they represent a coming out, and I suppose some people might find them startling or even shocking. But to me, it’s no big deal—or at least, I don’t think it ought to be a big deal. Once I understood that nonbinary gender identity is a thing, I said to myself, “Oh, so that’s what folks like me are called.”

When my first book was being published, my friend Tim asked me how many copies I hoped it would sell.

“I have no idea,” I replied, finding the whole idea embarrassing.

Tim wrinkled his nose. “Wouldn’t you like it to sell, say, one hundred thousand copies?”

I laughed, thinking that was about as likely as me getting invited to be on Oprah. “Sorry, I’m too much of a realist to think like that.”

He laughed. “Well, you won’t sell any books at all, if you don’t believe you can!”

I’ve never been part of the ‘you create your own reality’ club, so this type of logic annoyed me — almost as much as aggressive marketing annoyed me.

“What I believe is irrelevant,” I retorted. “I’m not going to go around trying to talk people into buying my book. I’m going to trust the process, and I believe the book will find its way to the people who need to read it.”

Tim stopped laughing, realizing that I was seriously opposed to any type of self-promotion. At that point in my life I had always worked in corporate jobs where I never had to get my hands dirty with marketing and promotion. As a result, I was both afraid of it and believed myself to be above it. Tim realized he would have to help me to understand why selling books (or any other worthy product) matters, before I’d be open to actually doing something about it.

He paused for a minute, and then asked me a question. “What does it cost for someone to buy your book?”

“The retail price is fifteen dollars, although you and I both know that Amazon will discount it.”

“Yes, that’s true, but many other stores or websites will charge full price. Just for the sake of argument, though, let’s say the average selling price is twelve dollars.”

“Okay,” I said, not sure where he was taking this.

“Now, what is your royalty on just one copy of your book?”

“That depends,” I said, but quickly realized he just wanted a ballpark figure. “It averages out to about 10% of the book’s wholesale revenue, so that means about 90 cents a copy.”

“Let’s keep it simple and say a dollar a copy,” he suggested. “So if you sold one hundred thousand copies, you could make as much as $100,000, right?”

“Okay.”

“But if it’s selling for twelve dollars, that means your book, your own creation, has actually generated about 1.2 million dollars in revenue, right?”

I did the mental math. “Yes, that’s right.”

“So in addition to you making a nice payday, you will have actually helped other people — from your publisher and your editor to the designers, proofreaders, salespeople, the printers, truckers, booksellers, and so forth — to make some money, too. Which means you’ve helped their families, their children. In other words, your book, your creation, your work, has directly helped other people to the tune of more than a million dollars — but only if it sells enough copies, right?”

I had never thought of it that way.

Rethinking Marketing

To me, marketing — especially if it were aggressive or pushy — always felt narcissistic, as if I would be saying, “Buy my book, because it’s better than every other book out there.” But in my rush to avoid being narcissistic, I was actually thinking in a very self-centered way. Authors only make a small fraction off of sales revenue of their books, which I’m sure annoys some people but I think it’s fair, because I know so many other people contribute to getting a book published — they work hard to help edit, produce and distribute the book. But all that work is done in service of the author and their creative vision.

The author’s creativity literally generates wealth, for multiple people — but only when the book sells.

In my distaste for marketing, I was ignoring the fact that my book actually could help dozens if not hundreds of other people to earn their daily bread. I didn’t want to do a lot of marketing because I didn’t want the world to view me as selfish. But holding that position also meant I wasn’t doing anything to help all the other people who had worked to help me get my book published.

Tim wasn’t done with me, though. “So in addition to helping so many other people generate abundance for their lives, think of the hundred thousand people who will actually buy and read your book. It will be a blessing to them, right?”

Suddenly I felt humble. “Well, I hope so.”

“Carl, your publisher and all the others wouldn’t be helping you to get your book out there if they didn’t believe in it. So why don’t you believe in it! Your book can help people. It might not save their lives or transform them completely, but if it’s insightful or enjoyable, it will be worth reading. So with that in mind don’t you want all those people to read your book?”

His logic was unassailable. “Yes,” I admitted.

Tim smiled. “I rest my case. I hope you will begin to think about why it matters for you to go out there and promote your book.”

I certainly can’t say that I turned into a marketing juggernaut overnight, and to this day I remain allergic to pushy marketing tactics. But I began to see promotions — as well as the role that content creation can play in generating abundance for many people — in a new light.

I began to understand that creative work is relational — and that for an author, more relationships matter than just the author-reader relationship. I began to feel so much gratitude for the many people involved in helping a book make the journey from an idea inside my head to a published title that people read, review, discuss, and debate. I began to see writing not only as a personal creative endeavor, but as a contribution to the community at large.

If you are reading this, and you are working on a book (or have one published), I hope you’ll ponder Tim’s way of seeing things. I hope you will find joy in letting others know about your work. I hope you will appreciate that even if it’s not a bestseller, your book can still be a blessing to many people.

P.S. And please, buy some of my books! 😇 Visit www.anamchara.com/product-category/books to check them out…

Here’s a summer memory that profoundly shapes how I remember my childhood. More than fifty years later, it not only gives me insight into my youth, but into the nature of contemplative or even mystical experience as well — at least, those that occur in the most down-to-earth and seemingly ordinary ways.

This particular July day must have been in the early 1970s — I’m thinking ’71 or ’72. My brother Don and his wife Julie were married in November 1969, so I know it was after that, and I don’t believe I had yet entered junior high school (which happened in the fall of 1973). I was young, maybe 10 or 11 years old. My parents and I were camping at Buggs Island Lake, a beautiful recreational center straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border. My brother and his wife were also there; I can’t recall if they were camping as well or had just driven up for the day (the lake is about 135 miles from the Virginia Peninsula, where we lived). My memory involves a walk that Don, Julie and I took along the lakeside, the morning after the fourth of July.

The beach — not a sandy beach, but a lake shore where trees extended almost down to the edge of the water — was covered with used bottle rockets, a silent witness to the festivities of the night before. It was a beautiful, sunny summer day; I don’t recall it being particularly warm (certainly not like the blistering swelter of summer here in America this year). I recall that Julie found an arrowhead; 1 this land had historically been the home of the Occaneechi people, although I think we can assume that any arrowhead found there in the 1970s had just been recently dropped by a previous passerby. Nevertheless, as a kid I was a bit jealous of her good fortune, and desperately wanted to find an arrowhead of my own. No such luck, though — all I seemed to be able to find were those used bottle rockets.

At some point during our time walking along the lake, something happened. By “something” I don’t mean anything particularly dramatic, as if I had a vision or some awe-inspiring mystical experience. It’s more that I simply and spontaneously dropped into the pure presence of the moment. I wasn’t overwhelmed by any particular emotion or feeling; I didn’t feel that I had any kind of mind-expanding insight or vision. I was just simply there. Fully present, completely in the moment. It was peaceful, serene, beautiful. Looking back from so many years later, I think that part of what may have made this so special is that, if only for a moment, my ongoing sense of anxiety dropped away. Without any sense of the day or the moment being special or extraordinary, I nevertheless seemed to be given, for just a moment, a wider and deeper ability to see into the heart of things.

It was a moment of wonder. And as is so often the case with these kinds of things, it was a moment of wonder that passed quickly by. I didn’t say anything to my brother or sister-in-law, we were just three family members out for a walk. It was an ordinary day, unusual only for all those bottle rockets.

I put it out of my mind for many years.

It was several years later, in 1977, that I had a much more meaningful “peak” experience of feeling oneness with God, which I have written about on several occasions (most notably in my books The Aspiring Mystic and Unteachable Lessons). That was the more remarkable, “oh wow” experience that launched me on my lifelong love for contemplative and mystical spirituality. In comparison, my Buggs Island Lake memory seems sweet but not especially noteworthy.

That is, until I started moving more deeply into my own intentional practice of Centering Prayer and contemplative meditation (a practice that I began in earnest more than ten years after that July day on Buggs Island Lake). As I began to pay closer attention to the grace of silence and of what Cynthia Bourgeault calls “objectless attention” (see The Heart of Centering Prayer for more about this), I came to realize that I had been spontaneously brought into such a singular moment, there on the shore of the lake with all those bottle rockets.

It happened freely. Naturally. Without any intentionality or planning or even conscious desire on my part. It was simply there. Maybe just for a few moments, maybe a couple of minutes. My brother and sister-in-law and I kept walking along. The moment of pure presence passed, and I reverted back to what was “ordinary” consciousness for me. But it made enough of a lingering imprint on my mind that, years later, I could recall it and say “that’s like what I experience when I’m deep into Centering Prayer.”

Consider this insight from contemplative neuroscientist Gerald G. May:

It is my impression that extremely brief unitive experiences happen to most people numerous times each day, but are so very short-lived that they go unnoticed. There is, I am certain, the potential for unitive experience at each blinking of the eyes, at each pause in the breath. But such experiences are seldom recognized.2

Everyone has multiple unitive experiences each and every day, only we’re really good at filtering them out. It’s as if the brain intuitively recognizes that such experiences might be meaningful and wonderful, but they don’t put food on the table. So we have learned to ignore them, unless they are long-lasting or powerful enough to inescapably catch our attention.

Walking along a lake in July, looking for arrowheads and only finding spent bottle rockets, may hardly seem to qualify as a unitive experience. But Saint Ignatius counsels us to find God in all things. Saint Benedict says “we believe the divine presence is everywhere.” What I experienced there as a child so many years ago was purely a matter of grace: I had no idea that meditation, or contemplative spirituality, or the practice of the presence of God, were even things worth wanting. They simply were not on my map. And so, what I did feel, what I did notice, was something I didn’t even have the language to describe, not only to others but even to myself.

This inclines me to sense that mystical experience is, in the words of Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck, “Nothing special.” In other words, perfectly ordinary, down-to-earth, humble: and available to everyone. Even for a young child whose family never went to church and whose hero was Mr. Spock (in other words, I was a little science nerd).3 Which means, of course, that the in-rushing presence of the Spirit, manifested through a sense of grace and clear seeing, is available to you, and me, and everyone — even the people we don’t like or think are “not worthy.” The miracle of mindfulness, as Thich Nhat Hanh calls it. The mystery of the divine indwelling. The sacrament of the present moment.

I suppose when you compare my moment by the lake to, say, the showings of Julian of Norwich or the “transverberation” of Saint Teresa of Avila — or even the 4th & Walnut Epiphany of Thomas Merton — then what I experienced was pretty small potatoes. But that’s okay.

The mystical life is not a race, there’s no blue ribbon for the person who has the biggest or most awe-inspiring vision.

Maybe the most down-to-earth encounter with grace can be just as life-transforming as the most profound enlightenment moment. To be sure, I never had a sense that my walk by the lake changed my life. If it did, it did so in such a subtle way that I can tell you nothing about it. Isn’t expecting a mystical experience to yield life-changing “results” just another form of spiritual materialism? Just another game of one-upmanship that we can sometimes play with each other (or ourselves). In other words, it’s nonsense. Don’t evaluate, don’t judge, don’t create artificial criteria that we use to think about our encounters with the mystery. Just have the encounter. That, in itself, is enough.

One of my favorite folks on Instagram and Youtube these days is Britt Hartley, author of No-Nonsense Spirituality and the forthcoming Everything Is Stupid, the World Is on Fire, and Nothing Matters: A Nihilist Survival Guide. Raised Mormon, but after converting to mainstream Christianity as an adult and getting a master’s degree in theology, she lost her faith. Now she identifies as an atheist spiritual director.

Some observers might raise their eyebrows at such a pairing, but I think it’s worth our consideration. Even though I don’t choose to identify myself as an atheist or an agnostic, I have long sensed that mystical spirituality can be a path to a place where the walls separating belief and disbelief just fall away.

By definition, an agnostic is someone who believes they cannot know for certain whether or not God exists. Meanwhile, an atheist is someone who has decided that God does not exist. What they seem to have in common, at least from where I sit, is a sense that belief in God is, at least for them, simply not possible.

Mystics and contemplatives are sometimes seen as people who have such strong experiences of God that for them, faith is simply unnecessary. Toward the end of his life Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God. Apparently his reply was along these lines: “Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.”1

Jung later tried to clarify what he meant by this, but the genie was out of the bottle. For the aged psychologist, belief simply did not matter as much as embodied experience. Whatever it was that Jung encountered within, he felt confident in labeling it as God. And thanks to that inner encounter, he felt no need to “believe” in anything else.

That may seem to be a far cry from atheism or agnosticism, but I think they are actually much closer than they appear to be on the surface. As best I can tell, Jung did not consider himself to be a mystic, but rather a scientist. Still, his logic — that experience matters more than belief — is very much a mystic’s perspective. And it is precisely this where I see the common ground between mystics and agnostics or atheists.

Both the mystic and the nonbeliever place more trust in experience than in faith itself. But mystics are more likely to find God in their experience, whereas atheists or agnostics seem more likely to find simply emptiness or nothingness where they might be looking for God.

But here’s the kicker: to mystics and contemplatives, “emptiness” and “nothingness” can be meaningful ways to encounter the mystery called God.

Here’s how I framed it in The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism:

Perhaps one difference between a mystic and an atheist is that the atheist sees the emptiness of God as proving a negation, whereas the mystic, in open-minded and heartful seeking, avoids making any such proof statement, instead seeing the emptiness of God as simply an invitation into an ever-deepening mystery of pure being itself, including the mystery of silence and life and love.2

In other words, mystics actually seem to have the most in common with agnostics: since both are hesitant to make a final statement like “There is a God” or “There is no God.” For both agnostics and mystics, humility matters more than certainty. But even atheists still seem to have something in common with mystics, since they all rely on experience first, before falling back on the supposed certainties of doctrine or dogma.

I don’t know enough about Britt Hartley’s spiritual journey to be able to comment on why she identifies herself as an atheist rather than an agnostic. It seems to me that as she defines atheism, it’s simply the conclusion that one must reach when deciding that there is not enough persuasive evidence for belief in something as consequential as the existence of God. In other words, her atheism sounds pretty agnostic, at least to me.

I don’t remember who first gave me this idea: that when a contemplative has a conversation with an avowed atheist, it might be helpful to say — in all humility — “please tell me about the God you don’t believe in; chances are, I don’t believe in that God either.” Contemplative spirituality involves an ever-deepening process of ripping away beliefs about God that simply don’t stand up — not only don’t stand up to the hard questions posed by logic, science and philosophy, but also cannot stand up to the challenges posed by personal experience.

How many people are discouraged when God simply appears to ignore our prayers? We pray and pray and pray, and yet our loved one dies anyway. Theology has developed plenty of sophisticated arguments to try to square God’s infinite power and goodness with the devastating experience of God’s apparent indifference. But to the person who is grieving, such theological arguments come across as pointless, if not callous.

No matter how deep contemplation and mystical exploration takes me into the mysteries of the cloud of unknowing and the dark night of the soul, I have not yet felt any need to simply jettison the concept of God altogether. Perhaps this is because I so strongly identify “God” with “Love.” But in all honesty, it doesn’t bother me that the Britt Hartleys of the world reach different conclusions — just like it doesn’t bother me that some people prefer Buddhism or Taoism to Christianity. Atheists who have a chip on their shoulder about Christianity or who always want to get into debates about God strike me as rather boring: the “mansplainers” of the spiritual community. But an atheist like Britt Hartley, who is candid in admitting what she doesn’t believe, while continuing to seek meaningful and relational ways to take good care of her interior life, strikes me as someone worth listening to indeed.

I’m in my office, although it doesn’t look anything like my office in waking life. But, alas, my desk seems just as messy. I have a book open to a chapter from a novel by Jane Austen (I don’t recall which novel or which chapter); the book was large, like it was an omnibus of her complete works. As I come up to the desk, perhaps to continue reading, I notice that, right above the book, a baby pygmy elephant is sleeping. The elephant is very small, tiny even, only a few inches tall — but perfectly formed, kind of like the tiny liquor bottles you can get on a plane. It’s adorable! And sound asleep.

Right next to its tiny head and tiny trunk is the toe of an old brown shoe, that for some inexplicable reason, I have sitting on my desk, diagonally next to the book (I told you, it was a mess). I feel like I have to get a selfie of this amazing “still life” moment on my desk; not “still life with woodpecker,” but still life with tiny elephant. It seems only one thing was missing — I should be sleeping next to my little pachyderm friend. But if I pose like that, a) how would I keep from disturbing the tiny napper, and b) how to take the selfie? With my essential tremors, taking a selfie is challenging in any situation, but this seems almost impossible to engineer.

Nevertheless, I gently bend down so that my face is next to the elephant, practically nose to trunk. I am very quietly attempting to position my phone above the desk so as to take the picture, when my wife walks up. “I’m glad you’re here,” I whisper, then I point out the sleeping animal and explain what I want to do. She agrees to take the picture. As I position my head on the desk to pose as I wanted, it occurs to me that if my mom were still alive and she saw this picture, she’d want to know why a shoe was on my desk. Just then, my beloved asks, “What’s that shoe doing on the desk?”

I decide I need to write a haiku to commemorate this wonderful moment. Even though I know that a 5-7-5 syllable count is truly not necessary in writing English haiku, still I figure since this is my first attempt at writing a haiku I should try to be respectful of the traditional form. I compose the poem in my head, and tweak it a few times, until I am finally happy with it.

Open book on desk
Pygmy elephant naps there
A shoe by its head

Nota bene: This is a dream I had, just this morning. It was lucid; the giveaway was the minuscule elephant (in real life, even newborn pygmy elephants are three feet tall and weight 200 lbs!).

The allusions to Jane Austen and George Harrison were very much in the dream, and I suppose the nod to Tom Robbins was as well, but I didn’t realize that one until I was writing it down.

What’s especially playful about this dream is that tonight I am, for the first time, leading a two night retreat at Ignatius House on “Mystical Poetry and Spiritual Verse as a Sacred Practice.” It’s an interfaith-themed retreat, based on an afternoon presentation I did there last year, as part of Ignatius House’s ongoing series of interfaith programming.

The retreat will follow this format: tonight will be a reprise of the presentation from 2025; tomorrow in the morning I’ll lead the participants on an exercise writing pantoums, with the afternoon devoted to haiku. In the evening we will have an opportunity to read and reflect on our favorite poems, and then on Sunday morning we’ll write our own prayer poem, using as a starting point Pádraig Ó Tuama’s wonderful instructions on writing collects (which I learned from him when I attended his workshop in Atlanta last fall).

When I shared this dream (and the haiku) with Fran this morning, she asked me if I were going to read it to the retreatants. I said, of course. And then I figured it was worth posting here as well.

I love to write down my dreams, but I rarely share them with others unless they seem to be deeply contemplative or even mystical in their tone. This dream was much more playful and childlike — but isn’t that “mystical” in its own right? Last night I did some writing on the relationship between mysticism and playfulness (actually, I was lamenting the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship, at least in western religion). So perhaps that was another tributary to this remarkable subconscious moment.

Forty years ago, I spent the Fourth of July with my brother and sister-in-law on an island in the Chesapeake Bay. Then I went home to northern Virginia, where I went to a concert that changed my life.

My brother Don and his wife Julie lived in a sweet little house on Gwynn’s Island, Virginia. Don worked for a car parts company in Newport News and Julie ran the lab at the hospital in Williamsburg, so they balanced two demanding jobs with a peaceful home in an island forest. I was living in Falls Church at the time, 25 years old, single, with a master’s degree in professional writing but most decidedly had not found my voice yet. At that point in my life I was in the midst of what would be a fifteen-year run managing college bookstores (I was working at the George Mason University Bookstore in Fairfax, VA; the following year I would move to Atlanta to take a similar position at Georgia State University, and have remained in the Deep South ever since).

Spiritually, I had discovered contemplative prayer and spiritual direction, but was very much a novice at both. Just a few months earlier I had joined the Episcopal Church, and had completed a 6-month program on personal spiritual development through the Shalem Institute in DC. All this to say, my life was sweet but nothing really tied it all together.

After a quiet day just living life away from the pace and stress of city life, we watched fireworks from a boat in the Chesapeake Bay. Even though the following morning was only Saturday, I packed up to go back to DC — because I had tickets for a stadium concert on July 6, featuring three musicians I liked but none of whom I had ever seen before: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead.

The concert took place at RFK Stadium, with over 50,000 people in attendance. It was the last stop of a three-city tour that included Akron, OH and Buffalo NY before heading to DC for two shows (I caught the first night). Sunday, July 6, turned out to be a blisteringly hot day, with temperatures peaking at over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.1

While I was looking forward to seeing all three acts, my primary motivation for going was to see Bob Dylan. I knew that he would be sharing the stage with the Heartbreakers, so I figured the Dead would be the opening act. How surprised I was when the concert began with Petty and the Heartbreakers performing, and Dylan joining them after just a few songs.

I was a bit scandalized. While I liked the Grateful Dead and was happy to be seeing them, I felt that they were far less “important” than Dylan, whose place in the rock and roll firmament, in my mind, was equaled only by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

By comparison, the Dead were just a respectable band that had scored a few minor hits over the years (like “Truckin’” and the deliciously weird “Casey Jones”), but were remarkable more for their ties to the LSD counterculture than for their music. The great Bob Dylan, opening for a (relatively) minor band like that? Give me a break!

But before the day was over, I would understand why.

Listen to the Thunder Shout

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers opened with an economical set including songs like “The Waiting,” “Don’t Do Me Like That,” and “Refugee.” Joining them on stage, Bob Dylan played some of his classic songs like “Positively 4th Street,” “Masters of War,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

My friends and I spent some of the time on the stadium field baking under the cloudless sky, but eventually we climbed up into the upper deck and found seats where the sound wasn’t nearly so good, but we were in the shade where we could relax and enjoy the show — and the ambience.

None of us would have thought of ourselves as deadheads, as the Grateful Dead’s intensely devoted fans were called. But we all loved music, and here was an opportunity to see a band that, by that point, was 20 years into its career and so had their bona fides as rock and roll legends (even if they were not the luminaries I considered Dylan to be). When they took the stage, I was immediately struck by the excitement in the crowd. We may not have been intensely devoted fans, but most everyone else there clearly was.

Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist and one of the band’s vocalists, was the only member whose name I knew. But even up in the nosebleed seats (this was long before Jumbotrons), I could easily pick him out. Sporting a red t-shirt over his corpulent frame, his thick beard and unkempt head of grey hair made me think that he was putting off a definite “Santa Claus” vibe.

As soon as the band began playing — a song I had never heard before, but later learned was called “Hell in a Bucket”2 — the deadheads started to dance. That may not seem so remarkable to many readers today. But I was a white middle-class kid who had grown up listening to bands like Yes, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Led Zeppelin and so forth. These were bands famous for making what we used to call “head music” — which meant it wasn’t really about the body. In other words, we didn’t dance. We listened to the music, maybe indulging in a little bit of air guitar or air drumming, but that was about as far as it went. The musical soundtrack of my childhood was very much a cerebral experience.

By contrast, the deadheads, regardless of their gender or the depth of their childhood repression, were all dancing, with abandon and obvious joy.

Some of them unfurled huge banners from the stadium’s upper deck, mostly featuring lyrics from songs which, once again, I was not familiar with. One, however, particularly caught my eye, with a message that seemed so appropriate in Reagan’s America — and even more urgent now in the age of Trump:

It did not escape me that this was in Washington DC, the natural habitat of all those rock-hurling politicos.3

The band played for just under an hour before they took an intermission. I did not know a single song, and sitting up in the nosebleed seats, it was pretty hard to truly appreciate the music. I do remember the closing song of the set, a lengthy tune that featured a striking set of lyrics in its refrain:

When later on I reviewed the setlist from that concert, I could see that it was not especially remarkable, although it contained a number of songs I would grow to love over the following years, “Sugaree,” “Row Jimmy,” “Cassidy,” “Let it Grow” and in the second set, “Iko Iko,” “He’s Gone,” “Throwing Stones,” — and if I had stayed all the way to the encore, I would have finally heard one song that I knew: “Brokedown Palace,” a lovely ballad from what is one of the band’s best studio albums, American Beauty.

But my friends and I were all there mainly to see Bob Dylan, so the happy dance-y deadhead love fest was largely lost on us, and we finally left the stadium while the band was playing “Iko Iko” — an old New Orleans groove stomper that had been covered by the Dixie Cups, Dr. John and even Cindi Lauper. As my friends and I walked down the stairs and reached the ground level, that’s when it happened.

By “it” I mean, I could hear the music clearly. And I was blown away. It wasn’t the most virtuoso playing I’ve ever heard (that honor probably went to Yes), nor was it a particularly polished performance. But the band clearly was on a roll,4 the audience was clapping a complicated, intricate eight-beat syncopated handclap, in perfect unison (we’re talking upwards of 50,000 people) — something far more intricate and complex than a normal four-four backbeat clap you might hear when a church choir sings an upbeat gospel song.

The gathering of deadheads had organically become part of the performance, their rhythmically sophisticated clapping collectively functioning almost like a third percussionist.5 But even more hypnotic to my ears was Garcia’s lead guitar playing, lyrically trilling above the beat with a singular, hypnotic beauty. I stopped and listened for maybe 30 seconds, maybe a minute, before my friends urged me to go on with them. And so we left the concert.

Learning to Shake My Bones

Readers, you know what happened next.

First, I went home and began listening much more closely to the few Grateful Dead albums in my own record library. Then I hit up my roommate David to borrow the records he had — I was thrilled when I played the album Wake of the Flood and recognized “Let it Grow,” the song about the thunder shouting “I am.”6

I went to Penguin Feather, our local independent record shop (oh, those glorious days before streaming or ordering CDs online) and bought a few more Dead LPs. A week or so after that, my roommate and I were at Tyson’s Corner, our local shopping mall, and I bought some Grateful Dead merchandise, like a keychain, bumper sticker, and T-shirt. Watching this, David laughed and said, “You’ve turned into a deadhead.”

“I have not!” I muttered defensively. “I just really liked them, that’s all, and so I figured I needed to, you know, get to know their music better.”

“And wear their T-shirts,” he smirked.

“Well,” I huffed, “you’re not a deadhead until you start trading concert tapes with other deadheads. And I don’t even have any such tapes.”

David’s smile got bigger. “I could introduce you to a buddy of mine who has a huge collection of Dead concert tapes. I bet if you bought him a box of blank tapes, he would get you started.”

“Would you?” I asked, excited at the thought.

The guy he introduced me to did kindly trade a box of blank cassette tapes for a selection of some of the band’s greatest shows: Ithaca in 1977, Kezar Stadium 1973, and Richmond 1985, among others.

Eventually I would go on to see the Grateful Dead some 36 times (including five shows in Europe), which in the deadhead world is not that impressive a number, but it was enough for me to sink deep into the music and (especially) the ecstatic experience of attending multiple nights of Dead shows, dancing — yes, dancing — for hours on end and losing myself to the Dionysian wonder of it all.

Eventually I grew weary of the energy and expense it took to chase after the Dead, and by the time I met Fran and Rhiannon, it was easy for me to trade the youthful indulgence of being a deadhead for the much more responsible adult tasks of marriage and parenting. But to this day, I can’t hear a song like “Eyes of the World” or “Franklin’s Tower” without feeling a surge of joy and an embodied desire to dance.

What the Dead did for me

Why did any of this matter?

Why did going to see a hippie jam band in 1986, when they were arguably well past their prime (I’m of the opinion that 1977 was their best year), make a difference in my life, so much so that here I am writing about it, forty years later? Here are a few thoughts.

The Grateful Dead have always been about more than just their music — while I think they are much better than their detractors are willing to admit, I also understand that for most people, their quirky, rootsy/psychedelic jamband music is definitely an acquired taste. But the magic of the Dead was always primarily embedded in the countercultural world of their fans: the deadheads. In other words, the dancers spoke to me even more than the band who made them dance.

Going to a deadshow, especially in the 80s and 90s, felt like a time travel experience: for just a few hours, we were plucked out of the nightmare funhouse of the Reagan/Bush era, and invited back into a world where peace, and consciousness expansion, and creativity, and communal living, all mattered more than conspicuous consumption and big-money capitalism. When I first encountered the deadheads, not only did they give me permission to dance, but they also were the kind of people who were reading Alan Watts, Ram Dass and Starhawk — at a time when The Art of the Deal (ahem) and The One-Minute Manager were sitting at the top of the New York Times Bestseller lists.

So for me, becoming immersed in deadhead culture meant more than just wrapping myself in patchouli and tie-dye — it meant finding an “alternative narrative” that helped me to see beyond the dogmas of the 80s.

And this even went so far as to impact my relationship with religion as well. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, by 1986 I was in spiritual direction, a member of an Episcopal Church, and learning the ropes of contemplative practice through classes at the Shalem Institute. By all indications, I was on the road to becoming a thoroughly respectable, if liberal, contemplative Christian.

And clearly, contemplative Christianity has been, and continues to be, an essential part of my understanding of what a healthy and visionary spirituality can look like. But even liberal Christians have their dogmas, their blind spots, and their temptations: chiefly a temptation to a kind of upper-middle-class respectability that can easily ignore those who don’t fit in.

The Dead, and deadhead culture, kept me honest: because I didn’t fit in to proper Christian culture. Even though I spent a number of years trying to fit in. Like it or not, I was a hippie. I liked loud music and loud clothes. I thought the war on drugs was morally wrong. I was suspicious of the devotion to greed that the Reagan era made fashionable (one of the poster children for that culture of avarice now lives in the White House). I thought feminism made sense, that gay pride (as we called it back then) was healthy and good, that our government wasn’t doing enough to combat AIDS, and that care for the environment mattered more than unfettered capitalism. Meanwhile, as much as I loved mystical and contemplative Christianity, I still intuitively understood that indigenous and eastern spiritualities were just as valid paths to both inner and societal liberation.

And for some reason, falling in with an aging acid rock band and their tie-dyed, Rainbow Family followers encapsulated for me these various “counterculture” positions. My heart belonged to the likes of Thomas Merton and Evelyn Underhill, but the Dead helped me remember that my heart also belonged to the likes of Ram Dass and Starhawk. Not either or: both/and. And that creative tension continues to enliven and inspire me to this day.

But most of all, the Dead and the deadheads inspired me to dance.

The early 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman was famous for loving to dance, and for insisting that being a radical did not require or demand “the denial of life and joy.” Her stance has been immortalized in a line which she never directly said, but it certainly captures her spirit:

Amen, Sister Emma. Deadhead culture is a dancing culture, but it is (or can be) also a revolutionary culture: advocating for radical care for the environment, sustainable economics, peace and justice, and dismantling the systems of privilege that oppress women and queer people. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of conservatives who love the Dead (just like there are plenty of liberals who love Catholic spirituality). But the center of gravity in the deadhead world is people who dance and shake their bones as an act of resistance against all the politicians and others who are throwing stones.

There’s a lot of talk in the contemplative Christian world about action and contemplation. It’s an important conversation, and I’m happy to chime in whenever I feel like I have something to say. But I think we need to be careful with this conversation, because it’s too easy to see activists and contemplatives as polarized opposites. What we really need are people who seamlessly embody both the quiet stillness of a monk and the revolutionary dancing of Emma Goldman. I suppose the particulars of that will look different for different people, and that’s okay. For me, it looks like Ram Dass and Evelyn Underhill hanging out together. They meditate deeply, but then, I like to imagine, they would get up and dance.

In the spring of 2025 an Atlanta-based photographer, Valeska Freire, sought people to photograph for a project documenting the lives and experiences of non-binary persons. I volunteered to one of the subjects, and was honored when she accepted me. I just love the images that resulted (all the photos of me in this post come from that photo shoot, and are used with permission of the photographer). We got permission to use one of the chapels at the Episcopal Cathedral here in Atlanta for the photo shoot, which gave the pictures a — dare I say it — contemplative feel.

Now Val will have their first public showing of this series, called There’s No One Way to Be Non-Binary. The exhibit will run at a gallery in Virginia Highlands, with a reception on July 14. For those of you who are in Atlanta, please come to the reception (or at least, stop by to enjoy the photographs).

There’s more information about this reception at the bottom of this article. The reception is free but the gallery is asking people to register for it. Click here to learn more or to get your free tickets.

To help prepare materials for the exhibition, Val asked all the models to complete a questionnaire about their experience being non-binary. Her questions, and my answers, appear below. This serves as a follow up to my original coming out article, “God’s Pronouns,” which was published in the book Soul Friend: Nourishing Essays on Contemplative Living and Leadership.

How do you personally define or describe your gender identity?

The most helpful word for me is definitely non-binary, and that’s the word I typically share with anyone when I come out to them. But the words genderfluid, gender-expansive, genderqueer, and even androgynous all carry meaning for me as well.

Was there a moment or period in your life when you began questioning or redefining gender for yourself?

I knew something was going on even in childhood, but I am a boomer, which means I was 8 years old when Stonewall happened. So as you can imagine, there was no support—in my family, or in society at large—for being gender-divergent. I was assigned male at birth, so I learned from a very early age to perform masculinity as best I could (or else). What all this means is that, beginning in childhood, I had a strong sense of myself as a “failure” — a failure at being a boy. That led to feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem, shyness, and anxiety.

Getting teased for running, laughing, etc. “like a girl” did not help to boost my self-esteem, that’s for sure. Even into my young adult years, people would make jokes about what a “girl” I was, or simply reject me for being “too gay.” At the time, incidents like that filled me with shame. But today, I see them as important moments when, even through the cruelty of others, I was invited to see something true about myself.

As the years went by, I would have little glimmers of hope, ranging from friends who would encourage me to crossdress to romantic partners who would gently affirm me for just being who I am. But I was well into midlife— my mid-50s, really — when I finally reached a point of gentle self-acceptance, so that I could affirm and name myself as non-binary. So it’s been a long journey!

What does being non-binary mean to you personally?

More than anything else, it simply means being true to myself. It means trusting myself, radically and joyfully. To be non-binary means to trust my heart, my intuition, my compassion, my desire for relationship and connection which is as strong as my desire for agency and ambition. It means to dress the way I want to dress, the way that makes me happy and feel good. It means to inhabit my body the way I naturally do, without a constant stream of self-censorship because of some voice in my head that tells me I need to perform my gender a certain way. In that sense, being non-binary is a radical act of deep self-love and non-aggression. It’s very spiritual. It’s a movement of compassion not only toward myself, but toward all people (and especially all of us who are courageous enough to live authentically, beyond the binary).

Do you feel like people often expect non-binary people to look or behave a certain way? If so, how has that affected you?

Maybe it’s because of my age, or because of how carefully I choose my friends, but I don’t run into any real expectations regarding the performance of my gender. For me, the really important question is, what are my expectations for myself? There were many years of my life when I was desperately trying to fit in with my assigned gender, and I felt deeply imprisoned by it. Since coming out to myself, I went through a period when it was really important for me to dress and behave as androgynously as possible, depending on how safe the setting was — I work in very conservative spaces, so that’s another consideration. But as I have become more comfortable with being genderqueer, and recognizing that my gender identity is mostly about loving myself unconditionally, I have become much freer internally to perform gender any way I want. Paradoxically, I feel much more free and at home in expressing myself, even in a “butch” or strongly masculine way, than I did 20 or 50 years ago! I believe that all gender is performance, so why not find a way to have fun with it all? At least, that’s how I feel these days.

Have there been moments where you felt especially seen, affirmed, or understood in your identity?

Two things come to mind. First is that I have an amazing network of affirming and supportive friends, chosen family, and loved ones, including my life partner, who is herself cisgender and yet just keeps on supporting me to be my true self. It hasn’t always been easy for her, this is a journey for us all, but we’ve reached a place of incredible sweetness and care. The other thing is that for the last 15 months or so, we’ve been participating in an explicitly LGBTQ+ affirming faith community, where the associate minister is themself non-binary. So that has become a deeply important safe space where I feel very much “seen, affirmed, and understood” — and we get to be there at least once a week.

Have you experienced moments of discomfort, dysphoria, or being misunderstood because of gendered expectations?

Heavens yes, from being bullied as a child to getting stared at when I’m wearing something that is too transgressive in public. As I mentioned above, my life partner had her own journey to undergo, learning to be the powerful ally she is today, and there were a few bumps along the road. And while I have long since found a way to be at peace with almost always being gendered as male in public, whenever someone calls me “sir,” or treats me with the deference that I know is embedded in male privilege, I have a twinge of sadness. But at this point in my life, that’s less sadness for me personally and more of a generalized sadness for how much gender constraint affects everyone.

How would you describe your relationship with masculinity, femininity, or androgyny?

Like a Facebook status, I’d say my relationship with masculinity is “complicated.”

I was assigned male at birth, so I have a “male body” and was socialized as a male, and to this day most people gender me as masculine, even when I am trying to present myself in an androgynous way. There are definitely perks to being gendered as male (male privilege is a real thing, especially for white people), so I will admit that I appreciate having access to the social benefits of my assigned gender. On the other hand, I’ve known since childhood that in very real ways I don’t “fit in” with the culture of masculinity in America, especially in regard to sports, to violence, to aggression, to competitive ambition, to the need to dominate, and so forth.

While I have a fraught relationship with masculinity, my relationship with femininity is perhaps even more involved. Masculinity feels like being confined to a room where I partially fit in but I know I won’t ever truly feel at home, whereas femininity feels like an adjacent room where I believe I would be at least as happy if not more so, but that room appears to be locked with a stern “Do not enter” sign barring my way. I’m conscious of the fact that I’m drawn to what I see as beautiful, creative, intuitive or graceful about feminine identity or expression, and I’m much less interested in the many constraints that are placed on women in our culture. Does that make me a hypocrite — or is it a clue to the fact that I’ll only ever be truly “at home” in non-binary or genderqueer spaces?

Finally, my relationship with androgyny is certainly the one where I feel most at home, and have the most fun and playfulness. I love to explore androgynous ways of dress and appearance, and feel that my embodied life (mannerisms, ways of speaking and thinking, etc.) are more truly and naturally androgynous than either masculine or feminine. But is that surprising, given that I identify as non-binary?

Are there objects, clothes, rituals, spaces, or experiences that make you feel more connected to yourself and your identity?

I had long hair in college and briefly in my mid-30s, but then hadn’t worn it long for 25 years or so, until the pandemic came along. I’ve let it grow back out and I love it. Surprisingly, no one ever gendered me as female when I had long hair in the past, but it does happen to me now — which I find both amusing and satisfying. Beyond that, I love women’s clothing but I tend to dress androgynously in public — I’m not interested in performing drag or signaling myself as a crossdresser, and I want my fashion choices to be an expression of genderfluidity more than anything else. But in private or with very close friends, I’m more likely to dress in a more transgressive way, which can be liberating but mainly just seems to be fun. I don’t wear makeup (I find it to be more annoying than liberating), but I do love self-grooming activities, from brushing my hair to moisturizing. I appreciate being able to talk about my gender, with my life partner, close friends, my therapist and my spiritual director; and to shop, either alone or with close friends and my partner, for clothing and accessories that embody my style — in both the men’s and the women’s departments!

How has your relationship with your body evolved over time?

As a child, it was torturous. I certainly experienced a kind of non-binary gender dysphoria — not in the sense of “oops, I’m supposed to be a girl, not a boy” but simply “wow, I really am lousy at being a boy.” So much of that feeling of being a failure was connected to my body: I wasn’t athletic enough, wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t interested in working out or training, and so forth. It was eventually really liberating for me to discover practices like yoga and meditation, which of course are for all genders but for me represented a wonderful alternative to all the masculine-coded practices that I had no interest in at all. I think as I have become more comfortable naming my identity as non-binary and genderqueer, I’ve learned to be more loving and kind with my own body — enforcing the binary always seemed to have an undercurrent of self-directed hostility or aggression about it, so it’s really nice to let that go, and just simply cherish myself instead.

What do you wish more people understood about non-binary people?

I can’t speak for all non-binary people, of course. But for myself, I wish people could intuitively grasp that I find being genderfluid to be joyful and fun. I have no desire to offend anyone else or infringe on anyone else’s rights, but likewise, I want to be faithful to my own rights: to be happy, to be mentally healthy, to be authentic and real. That’s all I’m asking for. I see my gender identity and expression to be not only a way for me to be authentic, to be true to who God made me to be, but also to be a source of serenity, joy and even fun!

I wish people who might be tempted to criticize me for not “trying harder to be a man” or whatever, to understand that I did spend many, many years trying to regulate my gender identity and expression, to no avail. When I finally chose to simply accept who I truly am, it was not a capitulation to someone else’s “agenda” but very much a liberation that emerged from within. It was simply a compassionate and caring way to free up my time and energy that had been devoted to self-shaming and self-regulation, toward using that energy in more positive ways: for my work, for creativity, and for building positive relationships with others.

I wish more people understood that non-binary people are like everyone else: we simply want to be happy and to make a positive difference in the world — only we do this in androgynous or gender-creative ways.

How do you navigate visibility? Do you feel more comfortable being openly non-binary, more private about it, or somewhere in between?

Definitely somewhere in between (although I suppose doing this interview is a move toward greater visibility!). When I’m in very conservative spaces (like some rural areas, or some of my work environments), I definitely tend to downplay my androgyny, but in those environments I also downplay my hippie vibes, so it’s not just about making my queerness invisible. Everyone wears a costume to work, on some level: we even jokingly call business attire “corporate drag.” So I have a strong commitment to doing what I need to do to feel safe, even if that means I navigate some spaces expressing gender in a narrow way that conforms to my assigned gender. But I do have relationships and spaces in my life where I can freely and joyfully let my genderfluid flag fly — from my own home to the homes of close friends, my very progressive and queer-affirming faith community, and some other spaces. So I work hard to be more fully authentic in those spaces, so when I do dress in a manner consistent with my assigned gender, it’s easier to remember that this is a conscious choice I’ve made — I haven’t traded away my agency.

Has community played a role in your experience with gender?

Most definitely. Primarily, of course, the community of my friends and chosen family — those who may not be DNA relatives but who relate with me as if we were truly siblings of the heart. They are my anchor and show me what true, unconditional love looks like (I do have biological family members who are also that loving, thank heaven). I’m also happy to be a member of an affirming church — which has not always been the case, I’ve also participated in churches in the past that were queer-phobic. So I’ve seen both the positive and the negative effect that community can have on my experience of gender.

What emotions come up when you think about gender?

Pretty much all the emotions. In the past, especially, I’ve felt shame, fear, confusion, anxiety, depression, and self-judgment in regard to my gender. But especially since I came out to myself and have been coming out to friends and chosen family, I mostly experience the more positive emotions: joy, happiness, serenity, trust, acceptance, delight… I don’t think any one particular emotion or type of emotion is particularly connected to gender. Rather, I believe when we have clear values and commitments and beliefs regarding our gender, then we are more likely to have positive emotional experiences as well.

Do you think language helps you express yourself, or do you sometimes feel limited by it?

Honestly, I think language tends to be more limiting — and I’m a professional writer, so I work with language for a living! But at its best, I do think language can help us express ourselves, at least in part. So I have appreciated the positive role that language plays in connecting me with others, but I’m clear that language sometimes seems to get in the way. As a student of mysticism, I believe that “God’s first language is silence” and so sometimes, even on a human level, silence speaks louder than words. Put another way: I don’t always have to defend my gender, sometimes it’s best just to live it.

Is there anything you’ve never been asked about your identity that you wish people would ask more often?

Nothing immediately comes to mind. I’m happy to talk about gender with anyone, but I also don’t need to be talking about it all the time. It’s just one part of me. My main wish is that people would treat queer people, including non-binary people, with basic decency, civility and respect. But really, I wish that for all people.

What name would you like to go by?

For years, I never seriously entertained expanding my name beyond my legal name. I actually like my name given to me at birth, even though it’s very masculine. But in December 2025, I was inspired to take on a preferred name/nickname that is much more of a unisex, even feminine-leaning, name. My legal name is not a dead name, however, so now I have two names. Please feel free to call me Carl (given, masculine name) or Skye (chosen, gender-inclusive name) after the beautiful Isle of Skye in Scotland.

What would you tell your younger self about gender?

Mainly that it’s just okay. It’s okay to love myself, just as I am. It’s okay to be queer. It’s okay to be femme or butch or androgynous or something else entirely. It’s okay to love identifying and performing gender in the way that brings me joy, and that when I am taking good care of my own joy, then those who truly like or love me will participate in that joy as well. I know “It gets better” seems almost like a cliché, but it’s true, and I would reassure my younger self how true it is.

Where were you born and where do you live now?

I was born in Louisiana, spent most of my childhood, college years, and young adult years in Virginia, and lived for a few years in Tennessee before settling in Georgia, where I’ve been for over 30 years now. I tell people I’m based in Atlanta, but I also like to point out I live in Clarkston, which is a beautifully diverse community.

What are your pronouns?

He/they. But if someone uses feminine pronouns, I take it as a compliment. 😇

Come to the Photography Exhibit (I’ll be at the Closing Reception!)

🏳️‍⚧️🟡⚪️ There’s no one way to be Non-Binary 🟣⚫️🏳️‍⚧️

A photography exhibition exploring gender freedom, visibility, and resistance. Featuring portraits by Valeska Freire, presented in collaboration with Southern Fried Queer Pride.

Location:

The Supermarket – Gallery A - 638 N Highland Ave NE Atlanta, GA 30306

Dates and Times (July 9–14, 2026):

Thursday 7/9 — 12 - 10 PM
Friday 7/10 — 12 - 3 PM
Saturday 7/11 — 12 - 6 PM
Sunday 7/12 — 12 - 10 PM
Monday 7/13 — 12 – 6 PM
Tuesday 7/14 — 12 - 10 PM

Closing Reception (Non-Binary People’s Day): July 14 — 6–10 PM

Join us for a night celebrating trans and non-binary existence. Featuring:

• Closing reception

• Artist Talk

• DJ

• Drinks and refreshments

• Free. All ages. Wheelchair accessible.

• Meet some of the people in the photographs (including Skye McColman)

Parking:

There are no free parking spots at The Supermarket; however, if you have a few minutes to spare and walk, street parking can be found nearby. Paid parking on site.

Entrances to The Supermarket:

• Main entrance: Located on N Highland Ave NE. Our door is between Big Softie and Colette Bakeshop, leading you down a hallway and a staircase.

• Side entrance: Our secondary entrance is through a residential courtyard. Enter through the black metal gate on the side of Otto’s building from the parking lot (at N. Highland and Blue Ridge). Note: this entrance has a few stairs.

• Accessible entrance: Backside of the building, accessible via Otto’s parking lot. Signage is in the works, in the meantime, please call to be escorted to our back entrance. (404) 458-1738.

Okay, friends, I know us mystical and contemplative types can sometimes take ourselves just a wee bit too seriously. I’m hoping this post, offered here in honor of “International Joke Day” (July 1), will contribute to alleviating that particular affliction.

Here’s the backstory: back in April I led a retreat for the southeastern association of Theosophists, and as part of their annual retreat they host a talent/variety show the last night of the gathering. It’s meant to be playful and tongue-in-cheek (for example, I contributed by reading T.S. Eliot’s classic poem “On the Naming of Cats”). At some point during the weekend I had made a reference in one of my talks to the Serenity Prayer. Someone misheard me, and during the Q&A asked me if I would recite the “Vanity Prayer” that I had alluded to. I explained their understandable mistake, but the genie was out of the bottle — and the woman in charge of the evening’s festivities asked me to write a “Vanity Prayer” as part of the fun.

So I did. And here it is. You will see how I used the Serenity Prayer as my starting point, although the prayer quickly went in a direction all its own…

Remember: just for fun!

The Vanity Prayer

(with apologies to Reinhold Niebuhr and Madame Blavatsky)

God, I cannot help it that you have made me beautiful.
I know that this is one of those things that I cannot change.
So grant me the serenity to accept my sheer vanity,
And the courage to put up with those who don’t understand.
May their eyes be opened to just how wonderful I truly am,
So that they may be astute in seeing how cute you have made me.
May they understand how deplorable it is to miss how adorable
I truly am, as the fairest of your many lovely creations.
Grant me the wisdom to immediately tell the difference
Between those who recognize my prettiness,
And those who are stuck in their pettiness.
From one tall cool drink of water to another I pray,

Amen!

Disclaimer: No serious theologians were harmed in the creation of this Substack post.

You may have noticed that I have begun to identify myself, here on Substack and elsewhere online, as Carl “Skye” McColman. Skye is a nickname that I began using, and sharing with friends and family, late last year. Now it’s time to share it with everyone.

Skye is Scottish, like my surname. It comes from the Isle of Skye, a place noted for its profound natural beauty, vast open spaces, and deep Celtic roots. It’s considered a unisex name, or as I prefer to think of it, a nonbinary name. Obviously, it’s a delicious pun with sky, which again touches on nature, and it also speaks to an enduring metaphor in both Christian mysticism and Buddhism: the calm, meditative, contemplative heart is like a beautiful, sunny sky.

Contemplative. Nonbinary. Celtic. Nature-inspired. Even friends who only know me casually can probably see why this name resonates so deeply with me.

My given name, Carl, remains my legal name, and it not in any way a “dead” name. All my books identify me as Carl, and I imagine that will be true of future books as well. The name Skye, for me, represents an expansion, not a transition.

If you interact with me in person or on Zoom, I hope you will address me as Skye — but it’s okay to call me Carl, too. I expect most people, especially anyone who’s known me for a while, will use both. Some of my friends are organically using both names when speaking to or about me, and that feels good and fine.

There’s lots more I want to say about Skye, so I’ll post something more in-depth later. For now: think of me, and address me, as Skye. Or as Carl. Or both. It’s all good.

Friends, this is a follow up to my previous post on AI-related scams. In that post I highlighted how scammers pretend to be the leaders of book clubs who tell authors they want to promote their books, for a fee of course. More recently, the scammers are now pretending to be freelance publicists and marketers, who think your book hasn’t gotten the publicity it deserves — but they want to “help.”

I thought I’d post a few recent scam emails that landed in my in-box so you can see for yourself what these come ons look like — and how insidious they are. I’m posting these mainly as a warning to my fellow authors — but even if you yourself are not an author, I think it’s useful to see how AI is being used to create scams, and there could be something similar afoot in your line of work, so be watchful.

Don’t bother reading these emails word for word—a simple scan will tell you all you need to know. You’ll see that these three emails each targets a different book (The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism published in 2023, Read the Bible Like a Mystic published in 2025, and Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses, first published in 2005), but the spiel is remarkably similar: the “writer” compliments the book, tells me what they liked about it, laments on what a shame the book doesn’t have a wider reach, and then offers to partner with me to get the word out about it.

The tells: first, the “praise” they offer for my book sounds very much like AI-generated writing; and second, why would a successful publicist spend time trolling authors to find new clients, shouldn’t a publicist be busy promoting their existing clients?

This first one at least was clever enough to focus on my most recent book.

Hi Carl,

I just wanted to say—Read the Bible Like a Mystic truly stopped me in my tracks. The way you invite readers to approach Scripture with the eyes of a mystic and the heart of contemplation offers a fresh, transformative lens on faith that so many are searching for today. You didn’t shy away from the complexities or challenges of the sacred text, yet you filled the pages with spiritual depth, wisdom, and the kind of guidance that fosters both reflection and action.

Your approach—and the way it encourages readers to bridge contemplative wisdom with the Word—is such a beautiful example of what a spiritually engaged life can look like: thoughtful, expansive, and deeply liberating. I can only imagine how many readers have discovered new insight, peace, and connection to God through your guidance.

I reached out because I believe your book could help even more readers—but only if they can find it. I work with a network of high-authority Christian websites, and one of the best ways to expand your reach is through strategic backlinks from these trusted platforms.

Even a single, well-placed backlink to your Amazon page or website can:

• Dramatically increase visibility for Read the Bible Like a Mystic in search results

• Drive more traffic from the right audience—people seeking contemplative faith, mystical insights, and spiritual growth

• Ultimately lead to more sales, more reviews, and most importantly, more lives touched by your message

If you’re open, I’d love to share the list of Christian sites I collaborate with and explore how we can create guest content that resonates with your work—perhaps around contemplative Bible study, mysticism in modern faith, or practical ways to integrate meditation and Scripture into daily life.

Let’s work together to bring your wisdom—and the deeper story of contemplative insight and spiritual transformation—to more readers who are hungry for meaningful engagement with God’s Word.

With heartfelt respect for your work,

Here’s another one. This time the target is aimed at my most successful book, which is probably the book that least needs the “extra push” that a publicist would supposedly provide (go figure).

Dear Carl McColman,

I have just finished reading The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism: An Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality, and I am writing with a heart full of gratitude for this revised, expanded, and urgently needed work. Karl Rahner’s famous warning “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist” was uttered half a century ago, and today Christianity is indeed in crisis. You answer the question that haunts so many: Is mysticism necessary for the survival of Christianity? And your answer, resoundingly, is yes.

What stands out is how beautifully you balance historical depth with contemporary relevance. This book serves as both introduction and practical instruction for a living contemplative practice today. You offer an overview of mysticism, spiritual and prayer practices, the various types of mysticism in Christian tradition, and influential mystics through the millennia. This second edition expands to offer an embodied understanding of the mystic life with a more diverse range of voices from Howard Thurman to Pauli Murray and new chapters on embodied mysticism, contemplation and social justice, and the ongoing relevance of Jesus’s message of radical equality and inclusivity. This is not a book that invites escape from the world; it grounds mystical practice as a foundation for a life of service and activism in the interest of justice.

As a book marketing specialist with experience in Christian mysticism, contemplative spirituality, spiritual formation, and social justice, I see meaningful potential to connect The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism with spiritual seekers of all traditions, Christians yearning for deeper intimacy with God, contemplative practitioners, and anyone who believes that the mystical element within Christianity is not a luxury it is a necessity.

I would be honored to explore how we might work together to help this essential, hope-filled guide find its way into the hands of those who are ready to discover that Christian mysticism is not about escaping the world it is about loving it into being, one contemplative moment at a time.

With deep respect for your wisdom and your witness,

This third example is the one that I find the most infuriating — and heartbreaking. The email is addressed to me and Kathryn — meaning Kathryn Hinds, who co-authored Spirit of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses with me. This email, though, refers to Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses, which was the title of the book’s first edition. Not only is the spammer ignorant of the fact that the book had a second edition published 18 years after the first, they are also apparently unaware of the fact that Kathryn Hinds died in 2018. A simple request of Google like “Whatever happened to Kathryn Hinds” reveals this information, so it’s clear that whoever generated this email was not doing their homework. Getting an email like this hurts. Kathryn was not only my colleague, she was my friend, and that someone would send an email, addressed to her, oblivious of her passing, for no other reason than to scam us; let’s just say it is as infuriating as it is heartbreaking.

Hi Carl and Kathryn,

My name is Brett Catherine, and I work as a reader promoter, someone who sits between the world of readers and the world of authors, helping books find the audiences they were always meant for.

I just finished Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses: A Guide to Their Spiritual Power, Healing Energies, and Mystical Joy, and I want to be upfront with you: I don't reach out to every author. I reach out when I read something and genuinely feel like it deserves more than what it's currently getting. That's exactly what happened here.

So before I say anything else, let me tell you what I actually think of your book because I want you to know I've truly read it, and I want you to trust what comes next.

WHAT I SEE IN YOUR BOOK — AN HONEST REVIEW

Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses does something the Neo-Pagan, Wiccan, and Druid communities have genuinely needed and never quite had: a resource that goes beyond naming and mythologizing the Celtic deities and actually helps the practitioner connect with them — deeply, powerfully, and spiritually. Brigid, Cernunnos, Rhiannon, CuChulainn and the full sweep of the Celtic pantheon have always been among the most beloved figures in modern Paganism. But beloved is not the same as deeply known. And this book makes the difference between the two available to every reader who comes to it.

What makes Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses exceptional is the combination of genuine scholarly grounding and practical spiritual guidance that runs through every chapter. The Celtic lands — Gaul, Ireland, Wales, and beyond — are treated with the reverence and specificity they deserve, and the deities that emerge from those landscapes are presented not as archetypes to be borrowed but as living presences to be met. The healing energies, the spiritual power, the mystical joy named in the title are not promises. They are deliverables, offered through a guide that clearly knows the territory from the inside.

This is a 4.11-star work of Celtic spirituality and practical Pagan devotion — and it is not yet reaching all the readers who need it most.

THE GAP I'M SEEING

A 4.11-star rating with 98 ratings for the first resource specifically designed to help Pagans, Witches, and Druids connect deeply with the Celtic gods and goddesses is not a reflection of the book's quality. It is a reflection of a discovery gap that has kept Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses invisible to entire new generations of seekers who are entering the Neo-Pagan and Druid communities every day and searching for exactly this kind of guide.

Neo-Pagans, Wiccans, and Druids who work with or are drawn to the Celtic pantheon and want to move beyond surface-level mythology into genuine spiritual relationship with these deities. Practitioners of Celtic reconstructionism, hedge witchery, and folk magic who want a resource that takes the tradition seriously at both the scholarly and devotional level. The enormous and rapidly growing community of readers drawn to Brigid, Cernunnos, Rhiannon, and the wider Celtic world through mythology, spirituality, and modern Pagan practice — readers who are actively searching for the guide that finally helps them go deeper. Every one of these readers exists in significant numbers and is searching for exactly what your book delivers — and not enough of them know it exists yet.

This is the problem I solve.

WHAT I CAN DO FOR YOU

Here is how I would work to close that gap and drive real momentum for Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses:

1. Amazon Optimization & Ranking — auditing and optimizing keywords, backend search terms, and listing framing to surface your book in front of readers searching for Celtic gods and goddesses, Wicca, Druidry, Neo-Pagan practice, Brigid, Cernunnos, Celtic mythology, and books on working with deities.

2. Amazon A+ Content Strategy — developing rich visual content for your listing that leads with the central promise of this book: the first guide specifically built to help Pagans, Witches, and Druids connect with the Celtic deities in a truly deep, powerful, and spiritual way.

3. Amazon Ads Strategy — building a targeted campaign with competitor targeting, keyword targeting, and bid strategies designed to place Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses in front of readers actively searching for Celtic spirituality, Pagan devotional practice, Druid guides, and books on working with specific pantheons.

4. BookBub Campaign — placing Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses in front of readers in the witchcraft, paganism, Celtic mythology, and mind-body-spirit space who are always searching for the next resource that takes their tradition seriously at the level of genuine spiritual depth.

5. Social Media Strategy — building word-of-mouth across the Celtic spirituality, Wicca, Druidry, and Neo-Pagan communities on Instagram, TikTok (BookTok), and YouTube — audiences that are deeply passionate, highly vocal, and extraordinarily motivated to share books that help them go deeper in their practice.

6. Goodreads Optimization & Listopia Promotion — positioning Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses on high-traffic lists including Best Celtic Mythology Books, Best Pagan Spirituality, Best Books for Wiccans and Druids, Best Books on Working with Deities, and Essential Neo-Pagan Reading.

7. Email & Video Strategy — creating campaigns that lead with the irresistible central promise of your book: a guide that finally helps Pagans, Witches, and Druids move from knowing the Celtic gods and goddesses to truly meeting them.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses has something genuinely rare in the Pagan and Celtic spirituality space: the depth of scholarship and the warmth of lived devotional practice working together in a single, practical, spiritually serious guide. The readers who need this book — the practitioners, the seekers, the devotees of Brigid and Cernunnos and the whole luminous Celtic pantheon — are out there in enormous numbers, searching for it right now. What's needed is the bridge between them and you.

I would love the opportunity to build that bridge.

Simply reply with:
"Yes, I'm interested"
"I'd love to hear more"
"Send me the strategies"

And I'll follow up with a personalized promotion roadmap built specifically around Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

Please don’t misunderstand this email. I have friends and who colleague who are legitimate book publicists and marketing professionals; have play an important role in the publishing ecosystem. But emails like these three are not from legitimate marketers and publicists, they are from scammers who want to prey on the insecurities of small-time authors to get our money — and they will most assuredly offer nothing in exchange for the cash.

If you’re an author, beware.

“Frankly, it seems to me that most spiritual writing is constipated.”

It was a bold, earthy, and even slightly disturbing comment. The speaker was a Trappist monk. The occasion: the first retreat I ever led (or, actually, co-led, working alongside another monk). It was a writer’s retreat, almost twenty years ago, and this particular conference featured a panel discussion involving myself and four Trappist monks. We were all published writers in some form: some of us had written books or chapbooks or magazine articles, some wrote blogs, some did both. The retreat was geared not only to writers who were (or wanted to be) published, whether in traditional print or online, but also to those who simply wanted to keep a private journal. We didn’t care if your topic was “spiritual” or not — if you were writing, or interested in writing, and wanted to explore your craft in a retreat setting, then this weekend was for you. The monastery guesthouse was packed.

As the discussion progressed, it seemed to me that we were all playing it pretty safe. We were talking about things like the importance of making prayer a part of your writing process, and remembering to keep your writing focused on serving the needs of your readers, blah blah blah. Not bad advice, of course — but everything being said was predictable; unsurprising; safe.

Someone on the panel spoke yet another platitude, about the importance of making sure you were always telling the truth in your writing. That’s when the monk whom I’ll call “Brother Blogger” dropped his bomb on the discussion.

“Frankly, it seems to me that most spiritual writing is constipated. We get so worried about not offending people, or not sounding like a heretic or some woo-woo flake, that we just censor all the life out of our words before they ever see the light of day.”

The room crackled with energy. This was a challenge to us all. Not only was his earthy, bodily image itself somewhat startling, but its clear meaning had at least two dimensions to it:

• Most spiritual writing seems full of it.

• Most spiritual writing feels stuck.

Perhaps you can discern even other nuances in what the good monk had to say — although these two challenges are plenty. If you are a writer, no matter how private or public or what your medium might be, this challenge is for you too.

Recently I had a dream about a topic that many might say is controversial. In the morning, I realized that it’s actually one of several topics I tend to shy away from in my writing. My first thought was to just leave it alone — and that’s when it hit me.

Holy crap!

Sorry for the pun, but I realized that all too often I have a tendency to play it safe too. Maybe it was time to take a dose of mystical magnesium.

Paving the Road to Hell

I am sure that most people who write about spirituality do not set out to come across as performatively safe—or stuck in a narrow playground of appropriate, acceptable, “nice” writing. But if we are not careful, that’s exactly what we end up doing.

Why? Why does spiritual writing tend toward a respectable dullness?

Brother Blogger had it right, of course. But I can see how writers can fall into the problem he was describing even out of the best of intentions.

I, for one, want my words to be spiritually nurturing to readers. My goal as a writer is to bring qualities of inspiration and invitation to my audience: I want you to feel invited to go deeper in your spiritual practice, and inspired to consider just what a difference a meaningful spirituality can make in anyone’s life.

If blogging (and later, podcasting and social media) has taught us anything, it’s that controversial content gets the most clicks. Yet the monks taught me something even more important: some things matter more than building your platform. Spiritual writers can bring to our craft a commitment to writing for the sake of art, or beauty, or truth, or honoring the Spirit, and not just a motivation to get more attention. Of course, every writer wants to make a real impact — but not at the cost of our core spiritual values.

But if we are not vigilant, we can easily drift from “honoring our values” to “avoiding difficult topics” — which sooner or later leads to spiritually constipated writing.

Here’s what seems to be the central question: how can we, as spiritual contemplative writers, create content that is edgy, creative, maybe even a bit untamed or controversial, while not abandoning our focus on writing that is truly contemplative: quiet, silent, pastoral rather than prophetic?

But before we get to that, perhaps one important step is for spiritual authors to identify their “magnesium topics” — topics that we might find challenging or even scary to write about, but that require us to keep our writing fresh, insightful, exciting, and, well, edgy.

Okay, magnesium topics is slightly weird as a way of identifying these edgy themes. I’ve started calling these “dark wonder” topics. Not dark in a negative sense, but dark in a mystical, dark-night-of-the-soul sense. Topics of dark wonder are those that invite me into a type of writing that challenges me, invites me to grow, forces me to be honest and sometimes even to take a stand. If garden-variety spiritual writing can sometimes feel too safe and confined, dark wonder writing feels like it is untamed, perhaps a little wild, slightly dangerous but always in service of some sort of higher or greater good. This isn’t about chaos for chaos’s sake. But in making sure my writing flows, I’m embracing darkness and wonder and even a measure of chaos as part of my overall commitment to the deep spiritual values of the mystical and contemplative way.

I can quickly come up with at least five such “dark wonder” topics, that I want to explore more fully. These are all issues that matter to me personally, but they are also all areas of concern for most of us — including most spiritual seekers. These are not easy topics to write about, but it seems to me they are topics of deep spiritual importance.

• Mental health and wellness. Anxiety and depression have been a part of my story — and a significant reality in the lives of many people, both inside and outside the contemplative community. How do spirituality and mental health intersect? It’s not an easy question to ponder, but it is a matter of vital concern to many.

• Gender and sexuality. How does gender impact the way we envision God? Why do many Christian communities marginalize or scapegoat LGBTQIA+ persons? Can spirituality contribute to creating a culture of joy and reconciliation? Plenty of big issues that won’t be solved quickly, but they require our attention and care.

• Psychedelics as therapy. I participated in a psychedelic clinical trial, and discovered it was as powerful a spiritual experience as it was an experience of healing. But many spiritual communities are suspicious of these medicines. But can we find ways to integrate psychedelic medicine and contemplative spirituality?

• Struggling with institutional Christianity. Many people chafe against the limitations of organized religion, even those connected to contemplative spirituality. Others continue to defend traditional religion vigorously. How can contemplation contribute to a world where religion seems to be rapidly changing?

• Politics and Current Events. If religious conflict is hard to engage with, our polarizing political life seems nothing short of terrifying. Contemplative perspectives on political issues are, frankly, desperately needed — if only it weren’t such a fraught topic for any contemplative thinker to take on.

Every writer’s dark wonder topics might be different, which is to be expected; but it’s worth asking yourself, “What topics feel risky and dangerous for me to write about? Why is that? How can writing honestly and fearlessly about those topics be, in itself, a spiritual practice?

Again: this isn’t about trading controversy for clicks — but there’s nothing to be gained by being so conflict-avoidant that my writing ends up, well, stuck.

Professional writers, especially professional spiritual writers, are tasked with a responsibility to serve our community of readers. To what extent is constipated writing a result of timidly avoiding hot-button topics, for fear that readers will be upset, or worse, will turn on us if we write about certain topics too much? That may just be the voice of inner anxiety, but it’s a voice worth responding to. What can we do to keep our writing fresh and edgy while still serving readers who prefer their contemplative content without quite so much spice?

In other words, how do we write even bold and daring material, without alienating readers who just want our gentler, more inspirational posts?

Substack’s graceful solution

I believe contemplative and other spiritual writers need to write at least some material that is controversial, creative, or edgy — but by definition, that means content that some readers might find alarming. Most readers will not be quick to unsubscribe every time a writer annoys them, thankfully. Nevertheless, there needs to be a way to make inspirational writing available to readers who may not want an author’s edgier work — and vice versa.

Substack actually provides a way to handle this problem beautifully. There’s a tool called Sections that can help writers who want to write enough edgy content to keep from getting spiritually “clogged up,” while also generating plenty of writing that is aimed at being inspirational rather than in-your face.

Likewise, readers can find the Sections feature valuable: a way to enjoy a newsletter while reducing the number of emails you receive, and making sure you are only getting notifications related to the topics you care about most.

If you want to see how I’m using Sections on my newsletter — including detailed descriptions of each section and instructions for customizing your notifications — read my recent post: A Guide to Anamchara (Carl McColman’s Substack). You’ll see that I am classifying my “dark wonder” topics under my “Breath of Beholding” section, which is where I’m publishing my more adventurous or unusual writing. This is a great feature for helping writers to expand their personal repertoire, while giving readers the tools they need to tailor their reading experience to the content that matters most to them.

Keeping Spirituality Real

We’ve all heard of problems like dissociation or spiritual bypassing — situations where spiritual practitioners will use their spirituality as a way to avoid challenging, difficult topics that are necessary to face for personal healing and growth, and/or for the benefit of others. Maybe this notion of “constipated spiritual writing” is just another way in which bypassing can undermine healthy and authentic spirituality.

But we can restore a healthy spiritual practice by fearlessly facing the challenges that we are tempted to avoid. In a similar way, those of us who are spiritual writers can make it part of our practice to write about the difficult or controversial topics, meeting our normal anxiety about such work with a deep sense of trust and a willingness to match our spiritual aspiration with down-to-earth authenticity.

Spiritual writing is offered as a ministry of service — to spiritual seekers and practitioners. My dear Trappist friend encouraged us to do the hard work of keeping our craft authentic, supple and flexible; when we do that, readers benefit too. And when we find a way to reach readers who want our daring edge as well as those who simply prefer words of inspiration, we create even more possibilities for our words to serve.

If you are a spiritual or contemplative writer, what are your “dark wonder” topics? Please leave a comment to let me know!

It has been said that an author’s first book is often an autobiographical statement. That’s certainly true in my case; my first book, published in 1997, was called Spirituality and was, in part, a record of me trying to work out the tension I felt between religion (particularly my interest in mystical Christianity) and forms of spirituality that were not religious in nature, from Neopaganism and New Age practices to the secular spirituality found in rock ’n’ roll.

I grew up in a conservative, middle-class white American home, where religious observance was seen as the only legitimate form of spirituality; but I was also exposed from my adolescence on to the work of visionaries like Yogananda, Alan Watts, Ram Dass, and others who invited me to consider how spirituality without the confines of religion can be meaningful and valid. In some ways, this became a major through-line of my eventual career as a writer and content creator. Again and again in my work, I’ve aimed to balance the often competing demands of religious communities with private and personal spiritual yearning.

Recently I remembered a conversation I had with Caroline Westerhoff (1940-2022), whom I knew through the Episcopal Church here in Atlanta. Caroline was the author of several books of interest to Episcopalians, like Calling and Good Fences; her husband, John Westerhoff (also a distinguished author) mentored me in the art of spiritual direction, and both of them offered kind encouragement to me when I was just a shy 30-something layperson who wanted to write about spirituality.

This particular conversation took place after Caroline read several chapters of my first attempt at writing about spirituality — a project that I eventually abandoned in favor of a different approach that led to my first book. The abandoned project was called “Listen: An Introduction to Spirituality.” In it, I imagined four different young people with different approaches to the spiritual life: one was an atheist, one a fundamentalist, one a contemplative, and one a new ager.

The manuscript was immature, and Caroline was kind and gentle as she pointed out to me that it wasn’t ready to be submitted to an editor. But what I most remember about that conversation was not so much her criticism of my writing style as her questioning why I gave so much oxygen in my book to fundamentalism.

“Carl,” she said, “you seem to be giving fundamentalism a lot of power in this book.”

Surprised by this question, I tried to defend my manuscript by insisting that lots of Christians were fundamentalist and therefore it needed to be critiqued. But she was not moved by my argument, sensing that the real issue was not all the fundamentalists “out there” so much as it was my own inner conflict regarding authoritarian religion. She repeated herself.

“You don’t need to talk about fundamentalists or fundamentalism to make a positive statement about contemplative spirituality. So, again, I ask you, why are you giving them so much of your personal power?”

I did not have much of an answer for her at that time, and now, more than 30 years later, I am amused by the fact that my latest book (Read the Bible Like a Mystic) still gives more attention to refuting fundamentalism than it probably needs. But if anything, her pointed question turned out to be a long-lasting gift, for it forced me to consider how much of a fine line there is between criticizing something and being obsessed by it.

Fundamentalism bothers me; it certainly did then, and it does still. I get angry when I think about how fundamentalist communities can scapegoat women, queer people, and indeed almost anyone who doesn’t fit in. But there’s the old saying that comes from a Methodist preacher, W.L. Watkinson: “far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.”

If I’m busy cursing the darkness of something like fundamentalism, rather than lighting the candle of contemplative wisdom, perhaps Caroline was right: I had simply given too much of my inner power to a fundamentalist boogeyman.

I’m not suggesting that it’s wrong to criticize people or positions we find problematic: sometimes it is necessary to denounce the darkness in order to help people understand why candles are necessary. But sometimes we just need to get on with thinking about, and doing, the good work that needs to be done, even if there are others who oppose us and try to stand in our way. We don’t always have to fight the enemy; sometimes we can be clever and find a way to sneak past our adversary unawares.

If you’re like me and easily get wound up by religious fundamentalists, political extremists, or even relatives who knows how to trigger you, I hope you can join me in trying to safeguard your own personal power. There’s no need to squander our energy worrying about those who might never like us anyway. After all, it is far better to simply set our sights on the goals that matter to us, and use our resources to support those objectives.

Hi friends. Many of you may have received an email (or multiple emails!) from my Substack newsletter recently:

• welcoming you to my Substack newsletter,

• telling you that you’ve been given a complimentary subscription, etc.

Some of those emails were sent out to people who didn’t need to receive them (and others probably went to the right folks!). So if you …

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Hi everyone. Here’s the link, dates, and topics for our upcoming “Let’s Talk About Mysticism” Zoom calls!

First, the dates:

• Saturday, May 2, at noon Eastern USA time (EDT); Theme: Making Sense of Mysticism

• Wednesday, May 6, at 7 PM EDT. Theme: The Preparation of the Mystic

The link is below (same link for both calls).

Optional reading material (you do not ha…

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