Note: This post is the third in a series. To read it in context, start here.

Inscendence—as over against the otherworldliness of transcendence—is ‘sinking back into the source of everything,’ during which we no longer belong to the world in our old ways.

—Bill Plotkin

I sit in the small chapel adjacent to the main church, settling into the welcoming quiet punctuated by soft candlelight. So many thoughts swirl through my mind. So much has happened in such a short time. It’s a relief to take a moment to simply be, in this intimate nook set aside for prayer.

As I sink deeper into the silence, I become aware of something stirring in me, a tender yearning, drawn forth by the warming touch of I-know-not-what. I feel compelled to give voice to this yearning. I feel vulnerable, exposed, even though I am alone with my own thoughts. I am like a child whose wanting feels transgressive somehow, but the words come out anyway:

“God, if you love me, can I have some feeling of your love?”

Then, as my respectable adult persona comes online again, mildly embarrassed and a little surprised at the words I just uttered, I shuffle out of the chapel and into the night.

MONASTERY JOURNAL EXCERPTS, November 2001-January 2002

“Strange. I don’t know what to make of it. This morning, as I walked along the entry road…how to describe it? Things just seemed brighter somehow, more vital and alive. Everything looked the same, but there was a hint that colors were more colorful, if that makes sense. Plants seemed to sing. Well, not literally, just that they exuded a quality of each plant having its own tone or note that harmonized with all the others. Everything was a part of it. The rabbits that scurried away from me as I approached, the clouds drifting across the living sky. Maybe even me. All of this was obscure, not clear, more like a hint of a hidden, flowing unity to things, but it definitely left an impression on me. I’m left wondering what, if anything, that was all about.“

“I felt that peculiar aliveness again this morning, as I have to varying degrees on and off all week. But its quality shifted significantly today, altered into something not altogether different than before, but definitely a radically new flavor or manifestation of…whatever this is.

When I got to the bench at the first switchback, looking down at the ocean with the sun shining down on me, it was as if that aliveness and vitality concentrated and personalized itself and directed itself like a ray of sunlight toward me. The closest analogy I can think of to how it felt is—like being enfolded in the arms a grandmother who utterly adores you. She hasn’t seen you in years and just can’t get enough of you. She pulls you into herself and can hardly let you out of her embrace because she is so excited and filled with joy. Still obscure, like an impression of something happening tangential to or below the threshold of the world I perceive with my physical senses, but also distinctly real.”

“The sensation of being held in a loving embrace continues. It’s not something I am always conscious of, it’s rather subtle most of the time, but whenever I stop and get quiet I notice it again, like a familiar friend: “Ah, there you are.” I talked to Father Michael about it and he was affirming but otherwise didn’t have a whole lot to say, other than encouraging me to receive it, let it happen, don’t overthink it. Also, I don’t know why it’s taken this long, but today I finally remembered my prayer, spoken so childlike in the chapel a few weeks ago, like something that caught me unawares, escaped my lips and then I soon forgot about it: “God, can I have a feeling of your love?” Is that what’s happening? At the least, so many curious synchronicities—my life seems bathed in them these days.”

“Wow. Last night.

The charismatic folk singer, John Michael Talbot, is staying at the monastery on retreat. He offered a free concert in the church. His music is not my cup of tea but I attended anyway. Why not? At one point, as he introduced the next song, he spoke of how the Holy Spirit can reach us through music and invited us to open ourselves to that possibility. Again, why not? No expectations but in my mind I held the intention to be open.

I didn’t notice anything at the time, and the concert ended. But when I returned to my room and got quiet… All I can say, it was like my heart was on fire. It was that same sense of loving embrace but now much more internal and amplified, literally in my chest. I felt irresistibly drawn into it, as if I could fall into my own heart and into this burning, alluring love.

But I couldn’t.

As strong as the attraction was, I couldn’t let go. Of what? I don’t know. It felt like I was being invited to let go of my very “self,” like my “me” couldn’t fit through the aperture that led to this inner flame of love. And I didn’t know how to or was too afraid to let go of “me.” It was excruciating! The parable of the camel that cannot fit through the eye of a needle came poignantly to mind. The rich man cannot enter the kingdom any more than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. So what “riches” am I hoarding that bar my entrance?”

“Had a helpful talk with Michael today. It’s like there is a single thread running through all of this—from the intuition that brought me here, to the joy I felt in saying ‘yes’ to that intuition, to reframing my identity as an adopted person (naming identities that don’t fit, are too constraining), to the impulse to ask for love, to faint glimpses of a hidden unity, harmony, and vitality in the natural world, to experiencing a loving embrace that has grown more and more internal… There’s a pattern to it, a dynamism at work, as if it’s all wisely choreographed. Again, don’t overthink it but remain open, trusting.

I’m grateful, also, to be here of all places, at the monastery, in the stream of a spiritual tradition that can validate and offer guidance to what’s unfolding. I can’t imagine being able to validate or navigate this otherwise.

One thing I want to add: lately on occasion I’ve noticed a sense of spaciousness, not so much heart-centered as before but like an abyss or an ocean that I can fall into. Like a feeling of immeasurable space superimposed upon the world I know, or an elusive depth-dimension to the world. Like I could drop my limitations as a separate self and spread to fill that endless expanse somehow. But again, I can’t. Again, it feels like my sense of self, my “me,” is the obstacle—the knot that can’t untie itself but keeps me bound to the known, the limited, the too-small. God help me.”

“Another intuition keeps drawing my attention now: Give my childhood to God. That’s it. No further instructions. Of course, after all that’s happened over the past couple months, I trust this nudge. I haven’t talked to Michael about it but I plan to do something with him the next time we meet. So far, I wrote a prayer and am writing fragments of my childhood, stream of consciousness snapshots, especially of events, feelings, relationships that feel particularly painful or burdensome. Will keep working on it.

The next step…

Where will it lead?”

Note: This post is the second in a series. To read it in context, start here.

I return for the second time to the monastery in the wilderness perched over the Pacific Ocean, peddling through sheets of rain. Utterly saturated even through my raingear, I push my loaded touring bicycle up the steep entry road. An old blue pickup truck filled with large plastic garbage bags approaches from the other direction. It slows down when it reaches me but does not stop. I briefly make eye contact with two men through the water-streaked window, their faces inscrutable. And then they drive on. Not the warmest welcome, but then again, I do not know what to expect. And, it must be admitted, neither did they, in this place that likely sees many eccentric wanderers wash up from the road below.

When I reach the monastery, I am shown to a room in a rustic single-story building for workers behind the monks’ residences. I hang up as much of my wet gear as I can and try to settle in. But after weeks of travel, mostly alone and almost always outdoors, I’ve grown partly feral. I cannot bring myself to sleep indoors just yet. So, after the rain passes and I’ve had some time to explore, I set up my tent another mile up a fire road near a small lake.

I quickly develop a routine: Each morning, I hike down the hill to the monastery, attend to my work responsibilities, participate in liturgical prayer and eat lunch with the monks, and peruse the extraordinary monastic library like a kid in a candy store. Each evening, I walk back up to my tent to sleep.

By day, I wander awestruck through the redwood canyon below, and along the forbidding rocky shoreline that abruptly plunges into some of the deepest coastal waters in the world. By night, I savor the stark silence beneath a stunning canopy of stars undimmed by light pollution.

I absorb the works of contemporary spiritual writers like Thomas Keating and Laurence Freeman, surprised by the parallels they draw between Christian contemplative prayer and Buddhist meditation, with which I am more familiar. The homilies I hear at Mass imbue scripture stories I remember from childhood with new meaning. This is not the moralistic Catholicism I was taught growing up. Even less so the repressive faith that compelled my mother’s family to send her away to a maternity home when she was pregnant with me. Still, the symbols, stories, and rituals that permeate life here shimmer with a familiarity that echoes down through my Italian ancestral roots.

Why am I here?

Because I followed a mysterious signal, a tug of joy that pulled against the grain of my own ideas and superficial desires. Now I am in a place where such seemingly anomalous events are welcomed—not as aberrations in an otherwise predictable fabric of linear cause-and-effect, but as disclosures of a deeper reality. Something addressed me through the medium of my own intuition. What had been a monologue of desolation has become a conversation that I did not initiate. The question of why I am here is not mine alone to answer.

I ask to speak to a monk and am introduced to Father Michael, a tall, dark, energetic South African man with a deep resonant voice and penetrating gaze. He asks me when I had last been to confession. “Not since I was a child.” “Okay, then let’s start there,” he replies, and we set a time to meet.

Thinking about seeing Michael again, I feel a mixture of nervousness, excitement, curiosity, and confusion. I want to come prepared. Confession implies having something to confess, after all. But when I reflect on my life, the focus of my mind’s eye seems to fragment. The pieces of my life don’t fit together. I feel untethered, floating in an ocean of incoherence. I fear that I could fall into nonexistence at any moment, with nothing or no one to catch me—a kind of existential vertigo that I’ve lived with for as long as I can remember. Surely this is a burden that weighs more heavily on me than any harm I may have done to others?

When the day comes, I still feel woefully unprepared. I meet Michael in a simple room with two comfortable chairs facing one another in front of a large window. A candle flickers before an icon on a low table. The atmosphere feels warm and welcoming. I take a seat and am immediately put at ease. After a brief introduction and prayer, Michael invites me to speak.

At first I am at a loss for words, so Michael asks me to tell him more about myself. When the words do come, they seem to tumble out of me before I have time to think, as if pressed out of my mouth by the sheer need to be heard. I don’t know if I am making sense. I hardly know what I am saying. Is this even confession?

When the words finally stop, I feel drained and dispersed. I wait for Michael to pick up the pieces.

“Can I make a suggestion?” he asks. I nod for him to continue. “In listening to you, I wonder if we can say that your core sin, before anything else, what keeps you bound up in pain, what causes you to act harmfully toward yourself and others, is this: that you believe that you are the person you see in the mirror of your adoptions.” He pauses, giving me space to take this in.

Slowly, something gathers in me, like the vibrations of a tuning fork harmonizing the cells of my body. Michael’s words reflect a truth so simple that it cuts through my confusion, yet at the same time so deep and wide that I can barely comprehend it. A gentle warmth rises in my heart. I lift my eyes to meet his. “Does that sound right?” he asks. “Yes.”

When I was a baby, adoption demanded the impossible of me—that I cease to be who I am and become something else. Before I had words, I learned that survival meant adaptation to people who couldn’t know me in my depths, who didn’t share my history or lineage. I learned to mirror my adopters who could not adequately mirror me back. I learned to become a fiction unto myself and leave the rest of me behind.

All of this was compounded exponentially when I was relinquished and adopted again at age nine, only now the ruse was obvious: How could I possibly forget who I was and to whom I belonged for the first nine years of my life? But I wasn’t given a choice. I had to become something else entirely all over again, at yet another unbridgeable distance from myself.

Do I have a choice now? And who am I without these familiar mirrors? Even if they only reflect distorted, fragmented images of myself, they are all that I know.

As Michael closes our time together with prayer, I am filled with wonder.

“May God give you pardon and peace in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

I am not sure what forgiveness means, but I do know that it restores freedom and agency and invites me to leave the past in the past.

So much remains a mystery. Surely this is only a beginning. But let my ‘yes’ be enough for now. Let my ‘yes’ be enough.

Amen.

If a person wishes to be sure of the road they tread on, they must close their eyes and walk in the dark.

—John of the Cross

Let me begin by telling you what this is not: This is not the story of how I terminated the contract that identifies me as the child of genetic strangers. My official birth certificate still lists my adopters as if they gave me birth. In the eyes of the state, I remain bound to a legal fiction to which I never gave consent, born not of a woman but by judicial decree.

Rather, this is the story of a series of events that flipped the script of my adoptive identity and oriented me toward greater wholeness, truth, and agency. This is the well to which I return whenever I need to recalibrate my inner compass. Therefore, I approach this retelling prayerfully, open to new insights and perspectives.

I reach the sign I passed the evening before, “New Camaldoli Hermitage,” south of Big Sur, California, on the Pacific Coast Highway. From around the corner where the driveway disappears into the surrounding foliage, a woman jogs toward me. She takes one look at my bike, heavily laden with panniers and camping gear, and exclaims, “You’re not going to ride that up to the monastery, are you!?” “Why not?” I ask. “Because it’s another two miles of steep switchbacks!” Flustered but undeterred, I reply, “Well, then I guess I’ll walk.” I lock my bicycle to a signpost hidden from view of the road and set out on foot.

Seven days earlier, I left behind my last point of orientation on either a map or a calendar.

When I planned for this bicycle tour, I had no set route, destination, or timeline. But I did sign up to volunteer to help with a public event at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco—the date, October 19, 2001. I packed my bike in a box and flew from LaGuardia Airport in New York City to Ontario in Southern California, where I reassembled my bike on the sidewalk and rode into the desert. I met up with a friend in Palm Springs and we bounced from Joshua Tree National Monument to Tucson to Sedona, Arizona, where we parted ways. And still, I was so intent upon fulfilling my modest responsibility at Spirit Rock that, through a whirlwind combination of hitchhiking, a Greyhound bus, and bicycling, I managed to cover over 800 miles from Sedona in just a few days.

In contrast to my dogged determination, when I arrived at Spirit Rock, no one seemed to have expected me. Even so, someone handed me a broom and I got to work. I stayed on for several periods of meditation, dinner, and a Dharma talk before disappearing into the night and setting up camp off a nearby trailhead.

After a fitful sleep through a torrential downpour, I awoke to a pristinely quiet, glistening green world. In fact, I was so enthralled by the redwood forest—my first taste of these magnificent trees—that I was eager to keep travelling north to see the real giants. But the previous night’s deluge gave me pause. This was just the beginning of the rainy season, and the rains would only get worse the further north I went. On the spot, as I sipped my morning Earl Grey tea, I decided to bike south instead.

As I absorbed the familiar vibrations of tires rolling on asphalt over the next few days, I began to feel the weight of having nowhere to go and no home to return to. This utter lack of reference points struck me as simultaneously liberating and oppressive. I went from exploring the geographical deserts of the Southwest into an interior desert of untethered aimlessness. And yet, it was into this very aimlessness of spirit that something mysterious emerged, an intuitive nudge that was all the more conspicuous for its specificity: go to a Catholic monastery. What? Why? Never mind, the intuition persisted, just go. I didn’t hear words, mind you, I just knew, even if this knowledge seemed to contradict my reasoning and desires.

I didn’t actively look for a monastery. If anything, I tried to hold this intuition at bay, to not think about it while I just keep biking. Nevertheless, as I snaked along the coastal highway one evening looking for a place to camp, to my surprise, there it was—New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Catholic monastery. I pitched my tent by the ocean a short distance away. The next morning, despite a strong urge to keep moving, I turned around and headed back to the monastery. At the least, I needed to see what, if anything, this intuition was prodding me toward.

I arrive on foot at last to the monastery bookstore, a glorious 1300 feet above the Pacific Ocean. I greet the monk at the desk and peruse the books on display. Not knowing what else to do, I leave. “I showed up and nothing happened. Now I can get back on the road,” I think to myself. I stop abruptly in the parking lot, however. I want to buy a book by Thomas Merton that I had thumbed through. When I enter the bookstore the second time, I meet a maintenance worker, who introduces me to his supervisor, who offers me a job.

Even though I have less than 300 dollars in my bank account at this point, with no other prospects on the horizon to earn more, I am unsure about taking a position on the monastery maintenance crew. “If you decide you want the job, just meet me here at three,” the supervisor tells me.

In the meantime, I attend Mass with the monks. The routine is still familiar from my nominal Catholic upbringing, but I am unmoved. More than unmoved, really, I feel mildly repulsed. I am accustomed to monasteries—I lived in a Buddhist monastery only a few years prior. But the Catholic faith of my childhood still strikes me as an impenetrable labyrinth of ritual, belief, and symbol, grounded in an archaic worldview, whatever wisdom might lie at its heart.

I decide to bolt. I run back down the hill to my bicycle, ride sixty miles to the town of San Simeon, and sleep on the beach.

The next morning, I wake up in my tent utterly depressed. All I can think of is to keep moving, moving, moving, but I don’t know why. What felt liberating about having no points of orientation on a map or a calendar has now curdled and revealed itself as something approaching despair. Apathetically, I pick up the book by Thomas Merton that I purchased at the monastery and begin to read. Again, unmistakably, the intuition returns, stronger than before: go to the monastery! I ride to the nearby town of Cambria, call the maintenance supervisor on a pay phone, and ask if I can still have the job. “Sure, see you on Monday.”

That night, camping in the same place where earlier I awoke in a bitter depression, a profound shift has taken place within me. I feel elated, pervaded by a joy and lightness of heart seemingly without cause. I dance amidst moonlight and shadows beneath the cypress trees.

The next morning, I begin the ride back to the monastery. No longer merely an obscure intuition from an inscrutable source now, but joy leads the way. I said ‘yes’ to something alluring me from depths I cannot fathom, to an invitation that feels intimate while respecting my freedom to choose. And from a desert of aimless wandering, without roots, orientation, or a sense of home, joy itself has become my true north.