Crann Bethadh and the Corr

I saw the blue heron at the reservoir last week—so still I almost missed it. Only when it lifted its long body into the air, wings slow and certain, did something in me go quiet. I had just finished chanting Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō on the same rock I’ve mentioned before, and for a rare moment my mind was clear enough to notice what had been there all along.

In many Native American traditions, the heron is a guide of self-reflection, self-reliance, discernment, and timing. Herons wait. They trust stillness. They know when to move, and when not to. Standing there watching it rise over the reservoir, I recognized immediately what it was mirroring back to me: Some crossings cannot be forced. Some healing unfolds on its own tide. Trust the timing. In Celtic mythology, the heron is also a guide of thresholds — a creature of transition and transcendence — embodying the spirit of transformation and adaptability.



Trusting the process is a challenge— something I am still learning to accept. The heron reminded me that the urgency I carry, the instinct to fix or force resolution, is not the same as healing. It showed me—right after chanting for reconciliation and recalibration—that wounds mend in their own time, not according to my timeline. It reminds me to let things be. To let things go. This is my test.

The heron stood there, patient and unhurried. It knows a fish will come. It offered a kind of wisdom I am only beginning to trust. It opened a doorway. And it opened that doorway in the very week we began studying Going Forth—Macy and Brown’s reminder that new paths often emerge when we become still enough to notice them. 

There is a word for reverence for trees: dendrolatry. It feels like a cornerstone of this entire eco-chaplaincy course. So much of our work has been learning to see the more-than-human world not as backdrop but as teacher—an invitation to listen to the wisdom embedded in land, water, wind, fungi, roots. The coursework has been less a departure from my life than a filter that underscores the relationship I’ve had with these teachings all along, only without knowing their names.




Every time I try to understand this calling, I circle back to the trees that raised me—the ones that witnessed me grow-especially the maple in our backyard. It’s the one my father planted in 1964 when that house became our home. The one my brother wrote a poem about at age twelve. My proud father kept a  typed copy of that poem folded in his wallet until the day he died in 1991. I didn’t know it then, but that tree was teaching us something about grief, about resilience, about the rings we grow around our ruptures to stay standing.

Joanna Macy writes that “Going Forth means acting even while still in pain” (Macy and Brown 2014, 197), and that has been the quiet instruction of my life long before I had chaplaincy words for it.  The maple modeled that truth: scarred, ringed, imperfect, still standing until the day my mother finally had to have it cut down. Only the stump remained—and even then, a small green sprout pushed up through its center. In a tree, the rings are not the strongest part—they are the record of survival. They are the story of the tree. Strength comes not from any single ring, but from the tree’s willingness to keep growing around what tried to break it. 

In Irish tradition, the Tree of Life is Crann Bethadh—the sacred tree connecting the underworld through its roots, the mortal world through its trunk, and the heavens through its branches. Each village was said to need such a tree for protection and balance. Only now do I see that our maple served that function in the Keating clan—a quiet axis holding the stories none of us yet had language for. That maple was bearing witness to them all.



My brother wrote his maple poem long before any of us could name the ruptures to come. My father quietly carried it everywhere. They were each reaching toward something steady—a trunk to lean against when the rest of life felt like bad weather. Their gestures were small, but now I see them as acts of survival, the way roots quietly seek water underground.

Trees survive lightning by grounding the charge through their roots and growing new rings around the wound. Humans do the same—though our wounds are far less tidy. And if I’m honest, lightning has never been just a metaphor in my life. People have said I am a lightning rod for as long as I can remember: the one who attracts the strike, absorbs the shock, holds the charge others cannot or will not carry. I never understood why. But lightning is not personal. It hits where the field is charged. Trauma works the same way. It doesn’t choose us. 

In the mountains, I learned to respect lightning with my whole body—crouched on a 12,000 foot pass in the Snowmass Wilderness while a storm cracked overhead and ninth-graders sobbed into their rain shells, or turning a jeep full of Texan tourists around at 11,000 feet at Breckenridge  the instant the lightening detector chirped, even with blue sky above us. Lightning teaches humility, timing, discernment. Skills I had in the wilderness but not always in my personal life. There, I walked straight into storms—relationships, jobs, places— mistaking volatility for aliveness—that charged air for connectivity.

Here is what it took me decades to understand: A lightning rod is not a moral failure. It is a structural role. It reveals where the charge is in a system. I’m learning it’s not my only role. It seems I have always been something else too : a mirror.

In outdoor education, mirrors save lives. A flash of reflected sunlight can guide someone home. A small square of aluminum can become a lifeline. The mirror shows what is already there but hard to see. Over the years, students, colleagues, and even strangers have told me that being around me illuminated something in them—sometimes something they were ready to see, sometimes something they weren’t. A mirror doesn’t create truth; it reveals it. If we are honest-the first thing we often notice when we look at our reflections are the flaws we perceive. So then, we must choose to fix or to accept the flaws we see or to avoid the mirror altogether. 

Maybe that’s why the ecological metaphors land so deeply now. Maybe that’s why the heron appeared when it did. The land has been placing guideposts along my path long before I recognized them as such:

The porcupine that reminded me of boundaries—the quiet, necessary kind. Even gentle beings carry armor. It is ok to use it. It’s ok to protect your heart.

The snake that reminded me of shedding—of crossing a threshold I could not yet name. It moved like a sentence underlined by the land itself: let go of what is heavy- shed what no longer serves you.

And then there’s the heron—the one who started this whole reflection. It reminded me about timing. Of patience. Of the sacredness of not forcing what is not ready. The heron’s lesson is the one I am still learning: that waiting is not weakness, and that honoring another’s rhythm is its own form of devotion.

None of these animals predicted anything. They simply reflected truths I wasn’t ready to say aloud. Nature doesn’t give answers; it offers mirrors.

Rebecca Wildbear writes that aligning with our true voice can feel “raw and even sickening,” because truth strips away our camouflage. Her reminder that the world doesn’t need us perfect—only honest—braids itself through each of these encounters. Honesty can be terrifying, but it is how the work begins. Mirrors are honest.

It’s not lost on me that many of these guideposts revealed themselves during or just after chanting at the reservoir. Eco-chaplaincy has taught me that when the mind settles, the world speaks—not in instruction, but in reflection. Once I allowed myself to be still enough to see these guideposts, I could finally begin the work of listening and healing.

 I have thought my calling is to support Third Culture Kids—helping young people–whose lives have been like my own daughters– to name the invisible griefs of global mobility and to navigate the ambiguous losses that accumulate like unmarked rings in a tree. That is still part of it. But now I see that my calling widens:

To help people tell the story beneath the grief.
To help them name the rings they grew to survive.
To help them recognize the guideposts already waiting for them.

Macy and Brown write that “Going Forth asks us to discover what we can offer to the world in transition” (2014, 195). This might be my offering: creating spaces where people can finally speak what has been living inside them—tenderly, honestly, without shame. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson reminds us that everyone’s voice matters in shaping a livable future— that the mosaic of change needs every piece, every color, every courage. My piece may be small, but it is mine to carry. And this brings me back to the heron.



Mary Oliver writes:

“See how the sudden gray-blue sheets of her wings strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing takes her in.”

What she names is exactly what I felt at the reservoir; the improbable possibility of ascent, of transformation, of rising into a new life- even when everything feels “inert, so nailed back into itself.”

The heron lifts anyway.

That, to me, is the essence of Going Forth. Not certainty. Not perfection. Not resolution. Just the willingness to rise — slowly, deliberately — into whatever comes next.

To look in the mirror.
To write what I see there.
To say the quiet parts aloud.
To grow new rings around old wounds.
To respect the reflections of the truth.
To be grounded.
To notice. To Listen.
To let time do its work.

I am still seeking my place in the Great Turning toward life.


 Bibliography
Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth. What If We Get It Right? New York: Riverhead Books, 2023.

Macy, Joanna, and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2014.

Oliver, Mary. “Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond.” In Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays, 29–30. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

Wildbear, Rebecca. Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth. Boulder: New World Library, 2022.

From Tea to Protest: Ritual and the Sacred Pause

From Tea to Protest: Ritual and the Sacred Pause

By Kerry Marie Keating

Introductory Statement

Across the many countries I’ve called home, ritual has been my quiet teacher. Whether kneeling on tatami mats in Japan, joining monks in Thailand, or pouring tea after an Irish funeral, I have come to see how ritual carries us—through joy and grief, belonging and exile, belief and doubt. It is the thread that ties the sacred to the ordinary. What began as a reflection for my chaplaincy course has become something larger: a meditation on how ritual holds the human story together—from tea bowls to protests, from solitude to solidarity.

I. Rituals of Discipline: The Way of Tea and the Way of the Sword

When I was teaching middle school history in Sapporo, Japan, we were in the midst of a unit on Buddhism, Shinto, and the Samurai. My students were fascinated by how the samurai code, or bushidō, emphasized discipline, mindfulness, and ritual practice. To bring those ideas to life, we accepted an invitation to the home of one student’s grandmother to participate in a traditional tea ceremony—chadō, the Way of Tea. She dressed me in a kimono and guided us, step by step, through the precise choreography of bowing, pouring, and serving. Every movement was deliberate, every gesture full of intention. My small class translated her words while we all tried—unsuccessfully—to ignore the ache in our legs, giggling through the kneeling. The tea itself tasted like grass to me, but the grace of the ritual was unforgettable.

As Aaron Rosen suggests in “Curating an Interfaith Pilgrimage,” interreligious understanding often arises through shared movement and aesthetic encounter—what he calls a kind of “curated pilgrimage.” Participating in the tea ceremony felt much like that: a walk through beauty and discipline that revealed connection across difference. Though I was an outsider to the tradition, I was invited to move, kneel, and breathe within its rhythm, discovering common ground through the act itself rather than through words or doctrine.

The samurai used ritual to prepare mind and body for combat. In that sense, chadō was as essential as sword training—a spiritual discipline that balanced mastery with humility. Years later, as I watched my daughter commit to her own path of disciplined service at West Point, I recognized a similar rhythm. Like the samurai, the cadets’ rituals—salutes, parades, and pledges—shape the moral muscle memory of duty, restraint, and honor. Both traditions sanctify discipline as a sacred act, revealing how ritual lends dignity even to the art of war.

II. Rituals of Renewal: Mochi, Monks, and Mutuality

That winter, I joined another Japanese New Year’s ritual—the pounding of mochi, or sweet rice cakes. This ceremony contrasted the meditative tea ritual. It was loud, messy, rhythmic, communal—and yes, there was plenty of sake, itself a sacred distillation of rice. On the island of Iriomote Jima, villagers and I took turns hammering sticky rice in heavy wooden mortars while others turned it between strikes, a dance of coordination and trust—especially considering the sake involved.

I learned later that mochitsuki is far more than a festive custom. It is a ritual of renewal and gratitude performed at the New Year, when the boundary between the human and divine is thought to be thin. The pounding transforms separate grains of rice into a single, unified mass, symbolizing communal strength and harmony. The cooperation between the pounder and the turner becomes a physical expression of interdependence, while the finished mochi is offered to the kami in thanks for the harvest and as a prayer for health and prosperity. Even the laughter and noise carried a sacred undercurrent—transformation through effort, joy, and togetherness.

While teaching in Thailand, I encountered another kind of ritual renewal. My four-year-old daughter and I had just moved into a new moo ban (neighborhood) in Bangkok. One Saturday morning, we joined our neighbors for a house-blessing ceremony. A truckload of monks in saffron robes arrived to chant and receive offerings of rice and fruit. The air was fragrant with incense and sunlight. The monks’ procession wound past each home, blessing us as they passed. Though I didn’t understand the words, I understood the rhythm—the giving, the receiving, the quiet joy.

During Songkran, the Thai New Year, and Loy Krathong, the festival of lights, I learned that ritual could be both solemn and playful. Songkran’s exuberant water fights and Loy Krathong’s candle-lit boats symbolized cleansing, renewal, and remembrance. In Thailand, anyone could participate; belonging was porous, joy the common language. There is a reason Thailand is called the Land of Smiles.

III. Rituals of Reflection: Faith and the Feminine Journey

In the final month of my pregnancy, I stayed at the Snowmass Monastery near Aspen, Colorado. I wanted a retreat—a time to rest and reflect before my daughter was born. There, guests could stay in simple stone huts overlooking the Rockies and pay what they could. Elk herds grazed in the fields. Each evening I waddled down to the chapel to hear the monks chant their vespers. Their ritual. Their declaration of faith. I felt enveloped in peace. The music was low and steady, like breath itself. My daughter was born a week later.

Years afterward, when we were living in Rome, she made her First Communion with her classmates at Marymount International School. For me, this was less an act of religious obligation and more an act of cultural integration. We were guests in a Catholic country, and I wanted her to experience the beauty of that tradition with her Italian classmates. The ceremony, with its white dresses, lilies, and ancient hymns, offered a kind of belonging that transcended belief—it was community made visible.

Later, in Morocco, we lived beneath the pink walls of Marrakech. Some mornings, my daughter and I would do yoga on our rooftop as the call to prayer echoed across the city toward the Atlas Mountains. That daily soundscape—sunlight, breath, and the mingled voices of devotion—became its own form of prayer. It reminded me that ritual, wherever it is practiced, opens a window between body and spirit, culture and faith.

My daughter and I traveled from Marrakech into the High Atlas Mountains to climb Mount Toubkal—the highest peak in North Africa. The ascent began in the village of Imlil and carried us past rocky fields and herds of goats until we reached the stone refuge at the mountain’s base. We rose before dawn to reach the summit by sunrise, overlooking the Sahara, where fine red dust mingled with snow.

After our descent, our hosts prepared a feast and served glass after glass of steaming mint tea poured from high above into colorful jeweled cups.

That sweet, fragrant tea—shared in exhaustion and gratitude—was a ritual of welcome and renewal. The next day, in a carpet shop back in Imlil, we were plied again with mint tea until I found myself buying a rug I hadn’t known I needed. In Morocco, as in Ireland and Japan, tea is never just a drink; it is an offering, a conversation, a way of saying you belong here.

IV. Rituals of Remembrance: Death, Tea, and the Rosary

In April 2022, my daughter’s father, Colin, was struck by a car near his home in Ireland. He died after three weeks in a coma. My daughter turned fifteen during those suspended days. Colin was 51.

The Irish are particularly adept at mourning the loss of a loved one and saying goodbye. They have a saying—An rud a ghoilleas ar an gcroí caithfidh an t-súil é a shileas—which means “What pains the heart must be washed away in tears.” I keep the Irish here deliberately: for centuries the language itself was forbidden under British rule. To speak it, like to grieve aloud, was once an act of resistance.

Colin lay in his coffin in his family’s sitting room, his body surrounded by photographs, flowers, and the people who loved him. Neighbors streamed in to pay their respects and stay while sandwiches were passed. They stayed when the room grew still as the family encircled the open casket and began to pray the rosary—An Choróin Naofa. The words flowed like a tide down tear-streaked faces—recited not for performance but for endurance. We clung to the rhythm to steady our grief. In that ritual one witnesses the truth that grief is love with no place to go. The community surrounded us with their care. I do not remember all their faces, but I will never forget their presence.

The next morning, his coffin was lifted into a glass-sided hearse. We walked slowly and silently behind it through the narrow roads of Kilcurry as the neighbors stood along the road and made the sign of the cross as we passed. The farmers stopped their tractors and tipped their caps. His rugby teammates carried his coffin into the church. The incense mingled with the scent of rain. It was ritual as revelation—a choreography of profound loss, love, and dignity.

Afterward, more tea was poured. The work of mourning paused as people gathered around kitchen tables, telling stories and passing endless plates of sandwiches and biscuits. Tea, in Ireland, is how people hold the unholdable. It steadies trembling hands, gives the bereaved something to do, and turns private grief into shared humanity. This ritual became one I built for my daughter—a nod to her Irishness and our own small act of continuity. Every morning I would make her a cup of Irish tea as she was waking up and preparing to face the day. Over the years, that ritual began to reverse—sometimes she would make the tea for me. In those quiet exchanges, love took its simplest and most enduring form.

V. Rituals of Duty: West Point and the Moral Imagination

My daughter is now in her first year at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Her education there will span five years, followed by a minimum of six years of service. She has entered a world defined by ritual—from the Reveille that wakes cadets at dawn to the silent handshake in which a medallion passes palm to palm, symbolizing honor and belonging.

Last month, she sent me two cards. One contained a “Proud West Point Mom” sticker; the other, two of the academy’s moral-compass cards—one on Love, another on Patience. These cards, drawn from a larger deck, are virtues cadets are asked to memorize and embody. When she returned from Summer Leadership Experience at West Point after her junior year –she hung those virtue cards on her bulletin board to become her daily mantras.

My daughter will play rugby for West Point—a sport steeped in its own codes and rituals of courage, teamwork, and respect. Watching her step into that world, I see the same sacred choreography I once studied in samurai culture: repetition as transformation, form as formation. Ritual can elevate service into vocation—but it can also conceal the cost of violence beneath its pageantry. I once told her that the pomp and circumstance of war can draw a veil across its brutality. Ritual gives shape and dignity to what might otherwise be unbearable.

VI. Rituals of Resistance: Bread, Protest, and the Anointing of Kings

Since returning to my hometown in Connecticut, I’ve been volunteering two mornings a week at the House of Bread in Hartford. Two weeks ago, while serving breakfast, a fellow volunteer asked why I had attended the “No Kings” protest at the State Capitol.

“What protest?” he asked.

 “No Kings.” I said. Surprised he wasn’t aware of it.

“What are you protesting?” he asked.

“Where should I start? Abuse of Power?”

He looked at me with genuine conviction. “You know, our president is anointed by God.”

His sincerity caught me off guard. We were standing in a soup kitchen founded by Catholic nuns, serving the city’s most impoverished residents—people whose very need was born from systemic inequity. A few minutes later, another volunteer, an older man, pulled me aside and said gently, “You know, he’s a good man.”

And I thought: Is goodness measured by the banana bread he bakes for those he believes God has not anointed?

That morning stayed with me. It was a portrait of America’s cognitive dissonance—the quiet collisions of faith and politics, charity and blindness. These are the same contradictions that keep our nation divided. They are also the rituals of belief that sustain power.

The “No Kings” protest took place a mile away, beneath the gold dome of the Capitol overlooking Bushnell Park. The crowd was mostly educated, middle-aged, middle-class citizens—people like me. The protest echoed the Boston Tea Party, resurrecting the symbolism of tea and rebellion. But this was no isolated event: it was part of a coordinated movement across the United States and even around the world—a shared choreography of conscience.

Protest, too, is a ritual and a right of democracy—a recurring act of collective remembrance that insists power must answer to the people. Like any ritual, it is rooted in repetition and symbol: the tea invoked rebellion, the chants called for renewal, and the crowd enacted a collective moral pause before power.

As the call-and-response rose and fell—

 “Show me what democracy looks like!”

 “This is what democracy looks like!”—

 I found myself remembering Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again.”

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

 And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

 I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

 I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars…

 O, let America be America again—

 The land that never has been yet—

 And yet must be—the land where every man is free…

 Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme.

It is significant that these lines were written by Langston Hughes, a Black poet speaking during the Great Depression—a time of economic despair and racial oppression. His audience was America itself. His protest was both lament and hope: a demand that this country live up to its own creed. Standing there in Hartford, I heard his voice still calling across the decades.

VII. Rituals of Return: The Sacred Pause

In Ireland, the kettle is its own kind of bell. The work of the day stops; people gather, pour, and talk. Tea becomes communion—an everyday liturgy of pause and presence. I think of it often now, how across continents and centuries, ritual keeps offering that same invitation: to stop, to see, to listen, and to connect.

From tea bowls to battlefields, from temples to protests, ritual endures as humanity’s most faithful way of remembering itself—and each other.

Bibliography

Harmakaputra, Hans A. “(Inter)Religious Ritual Participation in a Classroom Setting.” In The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies, edited by Lucinda Mosher and Chad Pecknold. New York: Georgetown University Press, 2022.

Hedges, Paul Michael. Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods for Studying Religiously Diverse Societies. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.

Hughes, Langston. “Let America Be America Again.” 1935. In The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad. New York: Vintage Classics, 1994.

Rosen, Aaron. “Curating an Interfaith Pilgrimage.” In The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies, edited by Lucinda Mosher and Chad Pecknold. New York: Georgetown University Press, 2022.

The Torii and the Turtle: Ritual, Resonance, and Recalibration

The Torii and the Turtle: Ritual, Resonance, and Recalibration.

Cherokee Morning Song— “We n’ de ya ho” (Robbie Robertson version)

 A we n’ de Yauh ho — I am of the Great Spirit, Ho.

The Cherokee Morning Song opens many of my dawn walks. Robbie Robertson’s version carries a haunting reverence that reminds me I am entering sacred space. Its refrain—“I am of the Great Spirit, Ho”—feels like both declaration and surrender, a call to remember our shared belonging within creation. Beginning my practice with this song has become a kind of land acknowledgment and invocation, situating me in relationship with the first peoples of this place. It prepares me to meet the land—and myself—with humility, grace, and gratitude.

Janisse Ray writes:

“What thrills me most about longleaf forests is how the pine trees sing. The horizontal limbs of flattened crowns hold the wind as if they are vessels, singing bowls and air stirs in them like a whistling kettle. I lie in the thick grasses covered with sun and listen to the music made there. This music cannot be heard by anyone else on the earth. Rustle, whisper, shiver, whinny. Aria, chorus, ballad, chant, lullaby.”¹

Those words have been an anchor for me as I return to Reservoir #6 daily, a place I knew as a child and have come back to after a lifetime spent exploring the world’s sacred and beautiful places. I returned to my hometown in June to be closer to my daughter at West Point and to face inner work I could no longer defer. I promised myself that, no matter how heavy the day felt, I would begin there. Sometimes that meant the long four-mile loop around the water; sometimes the steep four-mile climb to the high cliffs above King Philip’s Cave along the Metacomet Trail; sometimes only the half-mile walk to the old jumping rock where I sit with my feet dangling over the water. I meet myself where I am at. It is both my discipline and my devotional, full of lifelines and lessons.

The place—and the time I gift myself there—steadies my soul. Last spring, after my daughter and I became estranged, a friend reminded me of the daimoku I had once practiced and said, “You will turn poison into medicine with each breath.” I answered without hesitation: “I’ll do anything to heal.” That vow—fragile and fierce—became the hinge of my mornings. I chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. I am determined to show up for myself. Sometimes, as I sit at the rock and begin to chant, I find myself watching the water’s shifting layers—the wisps of morning mist that drift across its surface, the quick skitter of water striders that dart like my racing thoughts, the ripples that widen and dissolve, the mirrored clouds and the bright red and yellow leaves floating peacefully by. On certain mornings, when the light is right, I can see past the reflections to the silty bottom below. The stillness of that moment feels like seeing into the depths of my own mind. The bugs and ripples are the surface noise; the reflections are what I imagine to be most important; the clear glimpses below are the truth that chanting helps me uncover. Meditation, like this reservoir, reveals what lies beneath the moving surface.

The purpose of chanting daimoku is not worship but remembrance—awakening what is already within. To chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is to align breath, body, and awareness with this universal rhythm — to polish the mirror of the mind, transforming heaviness into clarity. Over time, the rhythm of the chant has become a bridge to the rhythm of the natural world: wind over water, the heartbeat of the land, the slow turn of the seasons. In Nichiren Buddhism, to “awaken one’s Buddha nature” means to uncover our innate capacity for wisdom, courage, and compassion—what Western chaplaincy might call the wholeness of being present for holy listening. Chanting aligns the chanter with the Mystic Law of cause and effect that binds all life, a practice of breath and presence that mirrors the rhythms of the natural world. Over months of returning to Reservoir #6, I have watched the sun shift south, the greens fade into reds and golds. The rhythm of the chant has become a bridge to the rhythm of the earth—the pulse of wind across water, the slow turning of the seasons, the quiet exhale of dawn.

As part of our eco-chaplaincy course practice, I added the Four Directions prayer, orienting each chant to East, South, West, and North—and to the Buddhas of the Ten Directions in Nichiren teaching, who embody wisdom and presence through all space. Facing each direction became a dialogue: a torii—a gateway between the ordinary and the sacred. In many Indigenous and earth-based traditions, the Four Directions orient body and spirit to the living world: East as the place of beginnings and illumination, South as vitality and growth, West as release and transformation, and North as wisdom and rest. Turning toward each as I chant deepens my awareness that I am part of these cycles—breathing with the same wind, turning with the same earth.

In both Japan and Thailand, where I have taught, temple gates or toriis as they are called in Japan, serve a similar function, marking the transition between the mundane and the divine—a reminder that sacred thresholds are universal. My experience living within those cultures taught me reverence for ritual as a lived dialogue between the human and more-than-human worlds. In bowing to the land here, I acknowledge its first peoples—the Wampanoag and Metacomet—whose understanding of spirit and creaturely kinship still saturates this ground and deepens my understanding of and connection to nature and to myself.

Because I have been showing up and keeping my breath, this place began to answer in ways it had not before. Turtles rose first—slow, ancient messengers breaking the surface for breath before disappearing again. In many Northeastern Native traditions, the turtle is Grandmother Earth—the patient bearer of life, the land itself. The Wampanoag call this continent Turtle Island.

Then, one morning, a beaver surfaced and played in the shallows where I chanted, offering the lesson of patient repair. Another day, a fishing spider—the size of my palm—hovered just below my toes, devouring flies that had distracted me: a teacher of focus and stillness. A porcupine crossed my path and let me walk behind him without raising a quill, his quiet trust a lesson in boundaries.

The bear came once, huge and silently camouflaged in the brush, and for a moment we stood in mutual regard before she snorted and ambled off. Later, a hawk swept past me on the cliffs above King Philip’s Cave along the Metacomet Trail’s ridgeline, its wings stirring the air beside my cheek as I looked out toward West Point—an invitation to see beyond immediate suffering.

Janisse Ray’s habit of listening for the music of the pines, reminds me to listen for that music in these trees—and to look for the guideposts the natural world offers through the creatures that grace me with their presence. I look to Native traditions to understand their significance: Bear as healer, beaver as builder, porcupine as gentle keeper of boundaries, spider as weaver and order-bringer, hawk as messenger of vision, turtle as earth’s slow heart. These encounters are not accidents but conversations—an interspecies verbatim that teaches me how to listen. Gifts of awareness.

Late one afternoon in early September, after a yoga class focused on releasing the psoas—the muscle said to hold grief and regret—I was compelled to return to the reservoir. I sat at the water’s edge and set a new intention: not only to process my own pain as a mother but to honor the heartache of all mothers, everywhere, across time and place. As I began to chant, the emotion rose like a tide. My tears mingled with those of all those mothers and came not as a gentle stream but as a waterfall—a tsunami moving through me. I felt it in every cell of my body, a deep trembling release that reminded me that grief, at its essence, is love unexpressed. In that moment, I sensed my mother’s presence—steady, luminous and compassionate—near me in a way I had not since childhood. When the chant finally fell silent, I was emptied and filled at once. I was forgiven and renewed by the collective sorrow. My Buddhist mentor later told me this was a glimpse of Buddhahood—the peace that can arise when pain is fully met with compassion, when the personal becomes universal and the universal becomes personal again. It was a gift of hope for my shattered heart.

Calder and Morgan write that “pastoral care acknowledges the environment and our human presence within it as of religious and spiritual concern.”² This ecological CPE approach feels like what I am practicing at Reservoir #6 each morning: an eco-verbatim between my breath and the living world. As Dahill reminds us in This Creek Is the Baptismal River, “baptism into living water means baptism into the community of creaturely life.”³ Her call to rewild ritual and to “think like a tree”⁴ has expanded my sense of chaplaincy from human care to earth care. The reservoir is both font and teacher, a sacrament of attention. A gift to my soul.

Through the readings this term, I’ve come to see that what I am practicing at Reservoir #6 is not separate from the theoretical frameworks of eco-chaplaincy but a living expression of them. Calder and Morgan’s vision of a CPE that listens beyond the human, Dahill’s call to return ritual to the elements, and Macy and Brown’s “Work That Reconnects” have shifted my understanding of pastoral presence from the interpersonal to the inter-being. These scholars have given language to what my body already knew: that healing happens through relationship—with water, wind, creatures, and the turning earth itself.

I look to Afoot and Lighthearted, a Journal for Mindful Walking for words to inspire and guide this work. Mary Oliver’s words, “Attention is the beginning of devotion,”⁵ underscore those of Thich Nhat Hanh who adds, “Walk as if your feet are kissing the earth.”⁶ These lines shape my practice. When I walk with that tenderness, the creatures do not flee: the deer simply watch; even the porcupine remains unbothered. This devotion to noticing has become a way of seeing with new eyes—the very movement Joanna Macy describes in her spiral of the Work That Reconnects, a shift from despair to participation.⁷ As a person who lives with neurodivergence, this practice has also become a way of reclaiming my own mind. My attention doesn’t always move in straight lines—it flares, leaps, fixates. For much of my life, I’ve seen that as something to manage or mask. But out here, it feels like a kind of grace, a superpower. My sensitivity to sound, texture, and rhythm makes me attuned to the subtleties of wind and water, the glint of wings, the smallest motion at the periphery. What once felt like distraction now feels like devotion. Neurodivergence, in this light, is not an obstacle to meditation but another form of noticing—a way of listening deeply to the world’s complexity and beauty.

The chaplaincy skills I am cultivating—deep listening, humility, ritual leadership—are being trained here in the field. To be a chaplain in nature is to accompany a wider community of beings, to hear the world’s grief and praise together. The reservoir teaches me to sit with pain without rushing to fix, to see beneath the surface to the silt where lotus roots grow. Chanting does not erase hurt but lets light reach it. That light—reflected, rippling, refracted—guides me toward wholeness and ultimately toward restoration, recalibration, and reconciliation. 

The work of writing this reflection has become a crucial component and a necessary extension of the same practice it describes. The rhythm of revision, the patience to listen for what wants to be said, and the courage to name it truthfully are their own form of chanting. The act of shaping words mirrors the discipline of showing up each morning: both demand attention, humility, and a willingness to see beneath the surface. This writing, too, is a torii—a passageway between experience and meaning, between the visible and the unseen. Each sentence is another breath toward wholeness. Another gift.

As I leave the reservoir, the pines still murmur in the breeze. Janisse Ray’s words return to me—the “aria, chorus, ballad, chant, lullaby” of the living world. I realize I have been learning to listen for that music all along: in water and wind, in hawk wings and beaver wakes, in the quiet beat of my own heart. The practice that began as survival has become devotion, a dialogue with everything that breathes. This noticing—rooted in stillness, carried in sound—feels like the beginning of a new kind of listening, the kind a chaplain must bring to both forest and human sorrow alike.

Bibliography

Calder, Andy S., and Jan E. Morgan. “Out of the Whirlwind: Clinical Pastoral Education and Climate Change.” Journal of Pastoral Care & Counseling 76, no. 1 (2022): 31–42.

 Dahill, Lisa. “This Creek Is the Baptismal River.” Call to Worship 56, no. 2 (2022).

“Holy Shit: Lutheran Carnality and Thinking like a Tree.” Anglican Theological Review 105, no. 2 (2023).

 Macy, Joanna, and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects. Gabriola Island, BC: New World Publishers, 2014.

 Robertson, Robbie, performer. “Cherokee Morning Song.” Music for The Native Americans. Capitol Records, 1994.

 Smith Whitehouse, Bonnie, ed. Afoot and Lighthearted: A Journal for Mindful Walking. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2019.

Religion, Violence, and the Work of Peacemaking

Religion, Violence, and the Work of Peacemaking:

For more than three decades, I have lived and taught at the intersection of religion, conflict, and education. My work as an international educator has taken me from El Salvador to Libya, Thailand to Indonesia, Ireland to Japan, Italy, and finally to the United Nations International School in New York City. Across these contexts, I have encountered the deep entanglement between faith, identity, and power—themes that run through this module’s readings and lectures. Long before I enrolled at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, my professional and personal life had already been a study in interreligious encounter, violence, and reconciliation.

My understanding of religion and violence began not in a university but in a Catholic elementary school in West Hartford, Connecticut-not too far from HIU. At St. Timothy’s, we prayed for the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands and for the American nuns murdered in El Salvador. These distant conflicts became, for me, moral puzzles: why was faith so often linked to suffering? That question would guide the next thirty years of my life.

Years later, I found myself teaching history and literature at Escuela Americana in El Salvador (1997–1999), a school affiliated with the conservative ARENA Party. Outside the walls of that institution, I came to know a group of Irish NGO workers who were serving rural campesino communities aligned with the FMLN. Among them was Dr. Mo Hume, now Professor of Latin American Politics at the University of Glasgow and daughter of the Nobel Peace Laureate John Hume. Through Mo, I began to see the parallels between postwar El Salvador and Northern Ireland: both societies scarred by histories of colonization, both wrestling with violence carried out in God’s name.

Irish Peace Bell at Trinity College in Dublin placed in Memory of the Jesuits murdered in El Salvador.

Through Mo Hume and our friends I learned of her father's edict that “we should spill our sweat, not our blood,” and about his vision of the European Union as proof that former enemies could build peace through cooperation rather than conquest. She also told me about the Irish School of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin, where scholars and activists were working at the intersection of theology and peacebuilding. Years later, I would attend that program myself, earning my M.Phil. in International Peace Studies (2004–2006). When I arrived, I noticed a large Peace Bell in front of the school, dedicated to the Jesuits murdered at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in El Salvador—a physical reminder that the moral struggles of Latin America and Ireland were intertwined.

Inside the UCA chapel, the traditional twelve Stations of the Cross are replaced with images of contemporary suffering: the crucified Christ mirrored in peasants, laborers, and martyrs of El Salvador’s civil war. The art reimagines the Passion as a story of political and social violence, insisting that salvation cannot be separated from justice. That choice—the replacement of the ancient narrative with a modern one—embodies the idea that violence and faith are not historical opposites but coexistent realities, forever wrestling for meaning.

During my studies at Trinity, I wrote an essay on Just War Theory, exploring how President George W. Bush invoked St. Augustine to rationalize preemptive war in Iraq (Moseley 2020). At the time, Colin Powell was calling the U.S. strategy “Salvadorization,” echoing the counterinsurgency tactics the United States had supported in El Salvador decades earlier. My research into that period revealed that many Salvadorans recognized the methods used at Abu Ghraib—they had endured similar torture, taught by U.S.-trained officers at the School of the Americas. The moral irony was unbearable: the same theology once used to restrain violence was now being used to sanctify it.

Religion, as the lecture Blaming Religion (Vimeo 2021) and Hedges’s Understanding Religion (2021) both underscore, is too often scapegoated for violence whose real roots lie in power, inequality, and identity. My own experience confirmed this. In El Salvador, faith was used both to bless the oppressor and to inspire the oppressed. The question was never whether religion caused violence, but which interpretation of faith people used to justify or resist it.

The postcolonial lens offered in Postcolonialism and Decolonial Theory (Vimeo 2021) helped me understand how global education—my own field—has also been shaped by missionary and imperial legacies. Teaching in Christian-founded international schools in Japan, Thailand, and Rome revealed how education often carries the imprint of colonial hierarchy, even when cloaked in benevolence. At Ruamrudee International School in Bangkok, founded by Redemptorist priests, I watched Thailand’s “Red Shirt” and “Yellow Shirt” movements invoke moral and spiritual language to justify political violence. Later, in Indonesia, I taught at a school attached to Freeport-McMoRan’s Grasberg Mine in West Papua—a stark example of how corporate and colonial interests perpetuate economic violence long after the missionaries have left.

These experiences have taught me that violence and religion cannot be disentangled from power. To teach history or ethics in such contexts is to confront how narratives are used to sanctify domination or inspire liberation. In Politics, Peacemaking, and Power (Vimeo 2022) and Sometimes It’s Ugly (Vimeo 2022), this paradox is laid bare: the same scriptures that fuel exclusion can also ignite the moral imagination necessary for peace.

When I later taught at the United Nations International School in New York City (2017–2019), I found myself in a community that lived the practice of interreligious understanding. Every classroom conversation about justice or belonging became an act of peacebuilding. My students—children of diplomats, aid workers, and teachers, all third culture kids like my own daughter, helped me see that moral education is itself a form of nonviolent resistance. It cultivates empathy across belief systems and prepares the next generation to engage difference without fear.

Yet even as I taught about reconciliation, I carried a more intimate understanding of conflict. My daughter’s father grew up in Dundalk, a border town in Northern Ireland where British Army helicopters once landed in his family’s fields in pursuit of paramilitaries. While I was a girl in Connecticut praying for Bobby Sands, he was living in the shadow of the Troubles. These parallel lives—his surrounded by violence, mine shaped by the moral distance of prayer—eventually converged in our shared commitment to understanding the human cost of division.

Religion, violence, and peace have thus never been abstractions for me. They are the throughline of my life’s work and experience. What this module has offered is not revelation but resonance—confirmation that the frameworks of postcolonial critique, moral theology, and interreligious ethics I first encountered in my M.Phil. remain essential today.

Today, the question of whether war can ever be just has become deeply personal. My daughter is now a cadet at West Point, preparing to serve in a world still marked by moral ambiguity and global conflict. Watching her train in ethics and leadership reminds me that Just War theory is not an abstract exercise—it is a living moral framework that shapes decisions with life-and-death consequences. My hope is that I have provided her with a life experience that will inform her and guide her to lead with compassion and humanity. I find myself returning to Augustine and Aquinas, to the belief that war may be justified only to protect the innocent, and yet also to the haunting awareness that violence always exacts a spiritual cost. History has taught us that there are innocents on all sides of a conflict. Perhaps the real challenge is not determining why or how or when war is just, but ensuring that those who fight—and those who send them—never lose sight of its human toll.

Now, as I study Chaplaincy at Hartford International University, I recognize how this journey has come full circle. The classrooms where I once taught about the world’s brokenness have become the foundation for a ministry of accompaniment and healing. Every school, every student, every conflict has prepared me to serve as a bridge between worlds of faith and suffering. Religion is neither inherently violent nor inherently peaceful—it is the vessel through which humanity seeks meaning in the face of pain. My vocation now is to help transform that search into compassion, justice, and peace.

References (Chicago Author-Date)

Hedges, Chris. 2021. Understanding Religion. Hartford International University. Moseley, Andrew. 2020. “Just War Theory.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/justwar/Links to an external site.

“Blaming Religion.” 2021. Vimeo, FALL 2021, 6. https://vimeo.com/592342147Links to an external site.

“Postcolonialism & Decolonial Theory.” 2021. Vimeo, FALL 2021. https://vimeo.com/634702664Links to an external site.

“Politics, Peacemaking, and Power.” 2022. Vimeo, HIU 2022, 6. https://vimeo.com/778924615Links to an external site.

“Sometimes It’s Ugly.” 2022. Vimeo, HIU 2022, 6. https://vimeo.com/778919589Links to an external site.

“Waging the Beautiful Struggle.” 2022. Vimeo, HIU 2022, 6. https://vimeo.com/768092631Links to an external site.

Mining the Sacred: Eco-Grief, Colonialism, and the Kamoro’s Resistance

Photo by Niamh Keating

Reflecting on my time in West Papua and the readings for this week, I find that my experiences living and working with Freeport McMoran — teaching at the company’s expat school in Kuala Kencana from 2015-2016 — offer a lens through which to understand the ecological grief and displacement discussed by Aph Ko and Joanna Macy. These readings resonated deeply with my lived experience outside of Timika and the nearby villages of the Kamoro people.

At the time, I lived in a guarded compound, where the daily realities of safety protocols — armored buses and armed guards — underscored the conflict in the region. Behind this security, the extraction of gold and copper from the Grasberg Mine was not just economically important but also deeply disruptive to the Kamoro people's way of life. As a teacher in this remote region, I often saw the disconnect between the high salary I earned and the systemic struggles of the Kamoro, whose land and culture were being torn apart by the mining operation. The company’s operations are a modern example of the colonial processes Aph Ko critiques in her work. The racial and cultural exploitation, where Indigenous people’s land and personhood are sacrificed for profit, is a central theme of Ko’s argument — one that was all too evident in my experiences and highlighted by the work of Kal Müller.

As Aph Ko discusses in Racism as Zoological Witchcraft, colonialism is deeply tied to the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples, and this is a pattern that still plays out in resource extraction industries like the one operated by Freeport McMoran. The Kamoro’s grief, however, is not just environmental; it is deeply tied to historical displacement and economic oppression. In visiting the Kamoro community, I saw firsthand how Freeport’s mining activities had displaced people from their ancestral lands and poisoned their sacred river. Despite the company’s reassurances, I could see the toxic damage firsthand, and the rivers’ ecological health was visibly deteriorating.

As a teacher, I was in a unique position to understand both the privileged perspective of being a foreign worker for a corporation that profits from this destruction, and the marginalized perspective of the Kamoro. These roles allowed me to reflect deeply on the concept of eco-grief, which Joanna Macy discusses in The Work That Reconnects. I began to understand that the grief the Kamoro were feeling — and that I began to share in — was not just an emotional response to environmental devastation, but also a deeper, cultural loss. This grief, shaped by centuries of colonialism, was tied to the very foundations of their identity — their relationship to land, river, and culture, all of which were being threatened by Freeport's extraction.

One of the highlights of my time in West Papua was the opportunity to spend a day with the Kamoro, learning their cultural traditions, including their drumming. My daughter, who was 8 at the time, captured a powerful photograph that she recreated for her AP art project last year: Kamoro men drumming, an image that became emblematic of the resilience and cultural survival of the Kamoro people. (See photo above)This moment connected deeply with Joanna Macy’s reflections on cultural healing and resistance. In Macy’s work, she encourages us to recognize grief as an expression of resilience, and I saw this in the Kamoro’s survival through their art, music, and language, despite the challenges they faced.

Through Kal Müller’s anthropological work with the Kamoro, which helped us navigate our visit, I was able to understand that Jared Diamond's ideas in Guns, Germs, and Steel — how resource extraction reshapes the course of Indigenous peoples’ lives — were not just theoretical. Müller’s research and Diamond's historical framework revealed the ongoing consequences of resource extraction, showing how the Kamoro's culture was not just being displaced physically but erased in the global economy. Müller’s efforts to help foreigners understand the Kamoro were crucial in preserving the people’s voice and sovereignty, much like Diamond's global perspective on colonization and resource extraction.

Müller’s ethnographic work provides a powerful lens through which to view the eco-grief discussed in the readings. He documents how the Kamoro’s cultural identity is deeply tied to their land and how the destruction of their ancestral environment by the Grasberg Mine has displaced them, both physically and psychologically. As Joanna Macy describes, grief is not just an emotional response to loss, but a recognition of deep connections to the land, people, and culture. The Kamoro's grief is therefore both environmental and cultural, reflecting eco-grief as described by Macy, and a clear manifestation of the colonial relationship between resource extraction and Indigenous displacement.

When I consider Aph Ko’s discussion of grief as a racialized and colonial experience, I see how the Kamoro’s sorrow goes beyond environmental loss. Their grief is tied to a historical pattern of exploitation — where colonialism and resource extraction have historically denied their humanity. The Kamoro people's grief, as well as their resilience, are part of the legacy of colonial systems that continue to affect Indigenous communities across the globe.

The devastation caused by the mine is well-documented, such as in The Guardian’s photographs of West Papua, showing the toxic waste and ecological destruction that continues to damage the land.

This destruction, combined with the historical trauma experienced by the Kamoro, creates a vicious cycle of grief and loss that is rooted in colonial violence. This collective eco-grief, as described by Joanna Macy, can only be fully understood when seen through the lens of colonialism and racial oppression, which is still ongoing in places like West Papua.

As I reflect on the eco-grief described in the readings and my experiences in West Papua, it is undeniable that the very copper and gold extracted from the Grasberg Mine are essential components of the technology that powers our daily lives. Copper, for example, is a core element of the smartphones, computers, electric cars, and renewable energy technologies we use every day. Gold, too, is integral in the electronics we rely on, including the devices in our pockets. These minerals, extracted at great human and ecological cost, fill a global demand that is essential to modern life — but this comes at the expense of communities like the Kamoro, who suffer displacement and loss of their ancestral lands.

This stark reality forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that our everyday lives are sustained by the extraction of these resources, often from lands that belong to marginalized peoples. By recognizing this, we must ask ourselves: How do we change our behaviors, our consumption habits, and our global economic systems to reduce the harm caused by these resource extraction practices? The environmental and cultural damage inflicted on the Kamoro people can only begin to be addressed when we confront the systemic inequalities that perpetuate this cycle of extraction and exploitation. If we want to change the impact on the environment and on Indigenous communities, we must also change the way we live and the resources we consume.

Related Blog Posts:

Kamoro Tribe: Mware

Papuan Perspective

References:

Ko, Aph. Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out. North Atlantic Books, 2020.

Macy, Joanna. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy. New World Library, 2012.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Müller, Kal. The Kamoro. 2022.

The Guardian. "West Papua: Verdant Heartlands Devastated by Mine Waste," November 2, 2016. [https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2016/nov/02/west-papua-indonesia-verdant-heartlands-devastated-by-mine-waste-in-pictures](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2016/nov/02/west-papua-indonesia-verdant-heartlands-devastated-by-mine-waste-in-pictures

Song of the Sea by Kerry Marie Keating

In these nascent stages of my eco-chaplaincy study, I’ve come to understand that sacredness isn’t confined to temples or texts—it pulses through tide and time, in rituals passed down through generations, and in soul work of reconciliation. Watch Hill Beach is my sacred site. The sand is laced with my mother’s ashes. The wind carries our memories. In returning here, I am not just walking the shore—I am walking a spiritual path carved by waves, books, brokenness, and love. This is where I bring my sorrow. This is where I ask the sea—and the sacred within it—to help me find my way back.

The very name Watch Hill holds layers of meaning. Historically, it was a lookout point — first for the Narragansett and Niantic peoples, then for colonial settlers. Later, a lighthouse was built to help sailors navigate the waters safely. It has withstood hurricanes, erosion, and centuries of change. Its resilient beauty is breathtaking to me. Watch Hill is a place of vigilance, protection, and guidance. Similar to where my daughter is now- West Point-it is place created to keep people safe from harm. I never took Niamh's dad here, but I feel his presence in the wind. I see his shape in the clouds. I talk to him when I am here. I ask him to help me see a way back to Niamh. I ask him to help me keep her safe from harm- both foreign and domestic.

I came back to Watch Hill to find my way. Not to a place—but to a person. To my daughter. To myself. It’s where my daughter and I scattered my mother’s ashes. My daughter honored the grandmother she never knew. It’s where I have my happiest memories of love and peace throughout my life. Something about it brings out the best in us. Although she and I lived all over the world as I taught and traveled, I always brought her back here.

This beach was our return ritual. We have our traditions: a coffee and pastry from Sift, a long walk down the beach to watch the egrets and sandpipers by the bird sanctuary, a midday milkshake at St. Clair Annex, riding the waves all afternoon followed by a cheeseburger with bacon at the Olympia Tea House while we watch the sunset. These are simple, grounding rituals I shared with my own mother and passed down to my daughter. In our life marked by transience, those small repeated acts gave us a sense of place and continuity. My daughter and I were mostly on our own, and ritual was how we made ourselves feel like we belonged somewhere. Although I have endeavored to make our journey itself our home—this stretch of sand and sea has become a place for us to return and remember who we are.

Now my daughter and I are estranged. And my heart is lost. She is my compass point but I am struggling to find my route back to her. For many months now, my sole purpose each day is to find my way back to her heart. She is chuisle mo chroí—the pulse of my heart. My magnum opus. She is at West Point now in her first year, becoming someone braver and bolder. She carries both her trauma and her ambition as she learns how she can utilize the strength she has gained from both to one day lead with courage and candor. I come back to this beach—to ask for guidance and for glimmers of hope. To chant daimoku. To walk. To pray. To grieve. To breathe. To heal my heart. To return myself to the person she needed me to be.

When I walk the shoreline now, I feel like I am many women at once: I am my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother. I am 8. I run down the sand, chasing my mother’s petite form—so full of lightness, like a sandpiper scampers along the tide. I am 32. I hold my mother’s arm as she braves the waves she fears. I am 38. I imprint my daughter’s tiny foot in the sand. I am 47. I witness my daughter’s delight as she dives into the waves, playing like a seal in the seafoam—an Aries water baby in her element, no matter how cold the sea might be that day. I am 55. I walk alone. I am collecting seashells and sea glass with them both in my heart, placing them in jars—just like my mother did. Just like my daughter loves to do. I have those jars now. They sit on my porch. When I chant near them, I feel close to both of them at once—Anne-Marie and Niamh-Marie.

When my mother died ten years ago-she left behind a small trust that changed my daughter’s life — providing enrichment opportunities I could never have afforded as a single mom and a teacher: violin lessons, backcountry ski club, rugby camps and tours, a NOLS expedition in the Alaskan Talkeetnas, a cultural immersion trip to Peru’s Andes. These experiences helped my daughter imagine possibility. Something my mother–an Emily Dickenson fan–liked to dwell in. My mother — always the teacher — knew that experience and education opened doors and shaped lives. She did that for my daughter. The granddaughter she never knew. Today I sat by the sea and thanked her. She parented through literature. She gave me Gift from the Sea when I turned 21. Story was her compass. Books were her guideposts. And now I see some of the most important lessons were learned over time and through experience. The sea helps me see them as I walk by her side and listen to its song.

In April 2022, my daughter’s father—Colin—was struck by a car in Ireland, not far from his home. He lay in a coma for weeks before he died. My daughter turned fifteen during those suspended days. Before we could fly to Ireland to sit vigil, we came here—to Watch Hill. We sought solace by the ocean, where my mother’s soul is now part of the sand and sea. In the blustery New England spring, we sat together on the stones, stunned and silent. The cacophony of waves crashing on the rocks spoke for us while the ocean held what we could not carry. The sea eased the weight of our sadness. We sent our love and hope to Colin across the Atlantic—no hospitals, no borders, no time zones, no dysfunctional family histories—just open water between us and him. The sea became our conduit, our only act of faith in a moment of unbearable not-knowing. The sea bore witness to our sorrow.

Though Colin hadn’t been part of our daily lives, I nurtured their relationship for fifteen years. They were truly two peas in a pod. They found their connection in rugby. She will now honor him on the rugby pitch at West Point—playing the game he shared with her, carrying his spirit in every tackle, every pass, every try. His death shattered something fragile we had just begun to build. And in the aftermath, I turned all my focus toward what I imagined was my daughter’s grief as well as the practical work of our survival. I didn’t tend to my own pain as I should have, and that neglect became a wound between us. I know now I carried the weight of a lifetime of unresolved grief and abandonment—pain that seeped into everything and that my daughter absorbed. For this I am deeply sorry.

She was entering puberty. I was entering perimenopause. We were both raw, both unmoored, both aching and unsure of how to hold ourselves—let alone each other. Grief isolates and distorts. Ours festered until our relationship fractured under the weight of what we could not say. I was terrified she would endure the same turmoil I did after losing my father, yet I didn’t know how to help her because I had never learned to help myself. Instead, I succumbed to fear and control.

I come to the beach now—to heal, to ask for forgiveness, to hear myself think, and then -- to stop thinking. To find my way back to myself.

I am seeking what I call the sextant of sacred grief—a way to find true north when the heart has lost its bearings. A sextant is a maritime instrument used by sailors to locate their position by measuring the angle between celestial bodies and the horizon. But it is also a symbol: of orientation, of seeking, of connecting heaven and earth in the pursuit of direction. I seek connection to the heavens when I talk to my mother about the heartache unique to every mother. I seek Colin’s counsel, asking him to help me heal our daughter’s pain—hoping he can see what I cannot yet face. The sextant reminds me that healing and reconciliation are not maps; they are acts of navigation. It cannot promise a clear or easy route, but it can offer orientation. It says: Here is where you are. Now, where will you go?

I sit by the sea and send these words out into the world:

To my daughter, mo chroi: I know I failed you in ways I am only now beginning to understand. If I could go back, I would hold you tighter. Listen to hear and to understand. I would let you be angry. I would trust you more to learn from your mistakes. I would let you be–you. Princess Niamh of Tir Na Nog. Nuckachakanikachakanu with her Magic Freckle. I would let you learn in your own time and in your own way. If there’s ever a way forward, I will walk it with open hands and heart. I’ll wait at the shoreline. The kitten of the Mist waits with me. The sea sings our song.



My brother got a tattoo of a sextant on his back. It was his symbol of survival—of finding direction and navigating back from the brink of alcoholism. He too loves the sea and has found the sacred in it as a surfer and sailor. From what I hear now, his soul sextant has guided him to the happiest, healthiest time in his life. In my family, love and loss have always been tightly braided. The sextant on his back—the very symbol I now carry in my heart—feels like a message: that we’re all trying to find our way. Sometimes we help each other navigate the storm, only to drift apart again. I go to the sea now to ask the sacred to help me break this cycle. To help me find my way back—this time, to my daughter.

For me, the sextant is sacred. It is the symbol of the spiritual work I’m doing now—charting my way through grief, guilt, shame, regret, and longing. It is how I remember that though I feel lost—untethered and unmoored—I am not directionless.

My father gave me Jane Eyre on my sixteenth birthday. Decades later, after his death and my own estrangement from my daughter, I see it for what it was—a lesson in how love--to survive--must learn to forgive. My father loved more than literary maps. He loved route finding too. He planned road trips in his white VW Beetle, finding hikes and hidden beauty, sharing with us his reverence for nature. He taught me to plan a route that would become an adventure—full of possibility and wonder. He didn’t always ask, “What’s the fastest way?” but, “What’s the most beautiful one?” He taught me to think for myself, to make informed choices, and to always have an alternate route in mind. I hear both my parents’ voices now as I walk this beach, trying to find my way back to my daughter. Trying to stop the cycle of silence, shame, and separation. I feel the pain I caused both of them and I ask for their forgiveness.

Marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols coined the term Blue Mind to describe the calm, meditative state we enter when we are near water. The ocean slows the brain. Softens the ego. Invites awe. Opens the heart to truths we need to see. It helps us remember we are small—but not alone. It has saved me many times—and especially now. This is why I feel peace here—even as the tears that stream down my face blend with the salty sea air. It allows me sanctuary so that I am able to finally release generational sorrow. The power of the sea is not only to erode and wash away. Science tells us that sea air is full of negative ions, which elevate serotonin and lighten mood. But long before science confirmed it, we knew: the sea heals. It cleanses. It connects. The ocean is where I go to feel something larger than myself. It’s where I go to listen—to the waves, to my mother, to the ache in my heart, to the love that still lives beneath all the hurt. It’s where I go to remember that time is a tide, and love is never fully lost.

The rituals of this beach—the milkshakes, the dinners, the walks, the waves—were the last things I did with my mother before we became estranged over my pregnancy. They are also what I passed on to my daughter. I return to them now as prayer. When I walk this beach, I chant. I remember. I ask. I grieve. I breathe. I work to accept what has happened and my role in it, as well as to align with the future I still hope for with and for my daughter.

I gather pieces of sea glass and place them in jars like my mother and daughter did. I sit with those jars on my porch, surrounded by all three of us—past, present, and hoped-for future. The shells are like chapters in the story Gift from the Sea that my mother gave to me when I turned 21. In that book, each shell symbolizes a distinct stage of life, reflecting Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s journey and relationships, with the shells themselves serving as metaphors for the impermanence and cyclical nature of existence. My mother gave me a theology of salt and silence, of tide and time. She showed me that healing is not linear, and that the sea—with its turning shells and vanishing footprints—teaches us how to love, how to let go, and how to return.

I know I cannot undo the harm. But I can hold it. I can heal. I can try to transform it into something that might one day lead back to the places we hold in our hearts for one another. I am my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother. I walk the beach with both of them beside me. I carry their hearts in my heart as I walk. Through it all the sea sings its song. I walk to find the way back. The journey is my map. The sea watches and listens. The waves bear witness. They hear the song of hope in my soul and sing with me.

May the sea keep whispering to you, even when I can’t.

May you always know that you are my heart.

Mo chroí.