Accompanying Life’s Thresholds

 

Throughout this life, I have been drawn to thresholds.

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A threshold - the wind shifting, a place of crossing, a time when something is falling away and a new path is revealed.  Sometimes we chose the crossing, sometimes we are ripped from the comfort of before and life forces change. Those times when the fundamental elements of life are shifting and something new is struggling to emerge. Weddings and funerals. Illness and healing. Ceremony and transformation. Grief and becoming. Personal change and collective responsibility.

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As a board-certified chaplain, educator, ritual leader, organizer and clinical herbalist, I have spent more than two decades accompanying individuals and communities through these crossings. My work has taken place in hospitals, on mountain sides, in highly structured ceremonies, at retreat centers, in community organizing planning meetings, in the streets of a protest, and public health clinics. Along the way, I have explored questions of how people navigate life’s significant passages in connection with meaning, integrity, and wonder. And when we lose our way, how do we return?

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As a nonbinary person, I have come to know thresholds not only as places and moments we encounter, but as a way of being. Living within a body and being that is of a threshold has shaped how I understand transformation, belonging, and the sacred. It has taught me that some of life’s most important questions cannot be answered. Some questions can only be lived.

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Over the years, I have become increasingly interested in the ways that people and communities make meaning in the face of suffering and during periods of great change. Through chaplaincy, ritual, justice work, teaching, research, pilgrimage, and spiritual care, I continue to explore a simple question:

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How do we move into, through and beyond life’s thresholds with compassion, integrity and in good relationship we each other and with the earth?

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The Herbal Chaplain is a home for that exploration.

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It is a place where chaplaincy, ritual, nature, spirituality, justice, and what I have come to call Threshold Work meet. A place to reflect on sacred journeys, personal transformation, community resilience, and the many ways the holy reveals itself during times of change.