Mary’s way was the way of the heart. She exemplified devotion.

on climate change each week and use social media to educate the people to whom you are connected.

For Teresa, union was a matter of embracing every particle of inescapable reality as imbued with, dripping with, overflowing with divinity.

When someone close to us dies, we get to be creative about how we honor them. We don’t have to follow the funerary practices of mainstream society. We can mourn our loved ones according to our inner directives.

The pain of missing loved ones who have died, or a way of life that has ended, occupies a similar region of the heart where spiritual longing resides.

We are conditioned to see death and painful longing as problems to be solved rather than as sacred landscapes to be revered. We are encouraged to medicate our grief, to treat loss as a malfunction that needs troubleshooting, to satisfy our longing as swiftly as possible. We may feel obliged to employ any of dozens of spiritual methods, from

Cynthia emphasizes that one of the most important elements in this process is dropping our preconceived notions of what healing is supposed to look like. “The conceptual mind can’t figure it out,” she says. “The need is too great. It’s overwhelming.”

Gaia, the mythic goddess, spontaneously came into being, without being created by some external force or driven by some utilitarian agenda. This is the feminine principle. She is being for the sake of being, beauty for the sake of beauty. We are entwined with the Earth. We belong to her, and we are her. If the Earth is sacred, then so are we. The

The part of our brains with which we navigate the challenges of the everyday world is uneasy in the unpredictable sphere of art making. We cannot squeeze ourselves through the eye of the needle to reach the land of wild creativity whilst saddled to the frontal cortex, whose job it is to evaluate external circumstances and regulate appropriate