Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics

Modern Western culture conditions us to step away from that precipice as quickly as possible. We are conditioned to see death and painful longing as problems to be solved rather than as sacred landscapes to be revered.

Grief is an individual journey, and there are no rules to follow nor laws you can break. It takes as long as it takes (forever, in my case, and maybe in yours, too), so there’s no point in judging yourself or others for not “getting over it” swiftly enough.

All desire is holy desire.

Whenever my jeans become a little tight, my self-worth begins to deflate.

More and more children in Western society seem to be entering adulthood with an expansive sense of their own gender identity. I see this expressed in the classrooms where I teach and filling the horizons of every social media platform. These youth approach sexuality with an open heart and a curious mind, ready to love whom they love, without the bu

I do not perceive this love dance as a malady to be cured but rather as an opportunity to celebrate the terrible beauty of the human condition.

Instead of engaging spiritual practice as a contraption to catapult us up and out of this relative world, the feminine mystic shows up right here, in the center of the incarnational experience. We bless the messy wonder of it all, the experience of being human.

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

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 behav