Spiritual Journaling: Christina Baldwin on Bridging Our Inner and Outer World Through Writing

“We call spirituality a journey and speak in metaphors of travel, yet many of us never leave the neighborhood. The journal becomes the metaphor made real, a travelogue of the mind,” writes Christina Baldwin in the opening chapter of her book Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice. “On days when I’m not sure what the … Read more

Excuse Me, I Have Work to Do: Mary Oliver’s Uplifting Calibration of Perspective in Her Poem ‘I Go Down to the Shore’

Excuse Me, I’ve Got Work to Do: Mary Oliver Reads Her Poem I Go Down to the Shore

“I love the stillness of early summer evenings downtown … the entire stretch along the quiet docks all of this comforts me with sadness when on these evenings I enter the solitude of their ensemble,” Fernando Pessoa wrote while finding calm amid uncertainty and disquiet. “In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, … Read more

The Sixth Stage of Grief: Finding Meaning

In 1969, Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified the five stages of dying in her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. Three decades later, in her final book On Grief and Grieving, co-authored with her friend David Kessler and published posthumously, Kubler-Ross adapted the stages she had observed in the dying to account for the similar … Read more