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.

Talkeetna Story-Where the Rivers Meet

 

Talkeetna Story—Where the Rivers Meet

As a child of the ’70s, I spent my days outdoors—unsupervised in suburban Connecticut. The local reservoir was my forest sanctuary. Even then, I was shaping my identity, sensing the spiritual powers embedded in the living landscape. It is there that I began the process of becoming what Mourning Dove calls a “persistent seeker,” one who recognizes the spiritual energies in the natural world.^1 At home I’d sit on my dad’s lap, flipping through National Geographic, imagining what those distant worlds might feel like.

My real nature-immersion story begins later—at twenty-five, when I left my happy home to see what I could find out. I went seeking the moments that Thomas Berry describes: moments when we are truly ourselves.^2

During college, two friends went on outdoor courses with NOLS—the National Outdoor Leadership School. One climbed Mount Aconcagua; the other spent a semester in Patagonia’s wilds. Their stories of survival with only what they carried inspired me. I wanted that too, but the program seemed expensive, impossible even, and I filed it away as a daydream.

After college, living in Seattle, I immersed myself in outdoor culture. I worked at REI, joined The Mountaineers, and even heard Reinhold Messner speak about his Everest expeditions. One night, before a Rolling Stones concert, my roommate and I were in a pub. Nearby stood two men—one large and striking. His friend nudged me, saying, “My friend here just climbed Everest.” I joked, “Reinhold Messner?” He laughed. Not Messner, but similar feats.

He spoke of his recent Everest expedition, where, for the first time, they brought down garbage—used oxygen canisters—a huge environmental effort long before anyone worried about Everest’s trash. I had never considered the human footprint on even the most remote, sacred places.

At the concert, we snuck to their floor seats and danced to “Jumping Jack Flash.” Later, over a beer, I asked Scott how he found his way into the mountaineering life. He shared that in his youth he climbed in the Shawangunks nestled between Lake Minnewaska and Mohonk—not far from my ancestral hometown in Kingston, New York—and later he'd worked for NOLS as an instructor. When he mentioned NOLS, I confessed I had always wanted to take a course but couldn’t afford it. He looked me in the eye: “That’s b.s.—if you really want to do something—if you take the time to look deeply, you find a way forward.” His solution-oriented vision made an impact.

Route-finding in the Talkeetnas—where there are no national park trail maps and no established trails—even staring at a topo map, the best path is never obvious. A friend recently cautioned me, “Don’t mistake the map for the territory.” Instantly, I was transported back to navigating Alaska. It takes real effort to step back, look closely, and see clearly what must be done and where you must go.  I learned there to pause before I act--something I continue to work on today. Barbara Kingsolver wrote that our greatest and smallest explanations of ourselves grow from place; though she referred to one’s place of origin, my experience in the Alaskan backcountry shows that each place we enter in nature reveals more truths about who we are and who we are capable of becoming.^3

The day after I met Scott, I told my cousin—an avid climber—that I had met a mountaineer at the concert. “Scott something,” I said. Then I remembered the business card he had handed me: Mountain Madness—Scott Fischer. My cousin’s reaction: “Do you have any idea who he is?!” Inspired, I took a teaching job, lived simply, saved money, and applied to NOLS. I was accepted for the Alaska Outdoor Educator course in the summer of 1996. Scott had recommended Alaska because he had instructed there and said it was the best place to truly test yourself in nature. In the end, I sold my car to pay tuition and travel to Alaska. I had found my way.

The trip meant more than I realized. I had lost my dad to leukemia a few years before, and I sensed he would have loved this journey for me. Alaska was not just about testing my mettle and learning Leave No Trace practices—it was about mourning and honoring my father.

I walked through icy streams and glacial plains, singing to keep grizzlies away, sharing stories about my father. Those thirty days transformed me. The Talkeetnas’ vastness and beauty revealed a new power: the ability of nature to hold grief, witness pain, and offer space for healing—and to help me find the courage to live fully and bravely.

In Alaska, the land taught me who we are in relation to place. In grizzly country, teamwork isn’t optional—it’s survival. Facades drop. The masks we wear in daily life have no place. You must connect, meet each other as you truly are, see the unique value in every person—and trust your own worth. As Jay Griffiths observes in Kith, land can shape someone’s psyche, giving fragments of themselves that they might not otherwise discover.^4 The people I had just met listened quietly as I spoke of my dad, saying what I could not at his hospital bedside or funeral. The mountains seemed to listen with reverence, and the icy glacial pools washed away the residue of grief. For the first time in years, I felt free. I felt my father’s love.

Myself and my instructor Eleanor Huffines

Two months before my trip—in May 1996—tragedy struck: Scott Fischer died on Everest in a disaster that shook the climbing world. He was very much on my mind throughout my expedition. When asked to share what brought us to the Talkeetna Outdoor Educator course, I told my story about Scott. My instructor, Eleanor Huffines, said, “I knew him well. I am so glad to hear this story. It sounds so very like him.” The media often portrayed him poorly; the man I met at the concert was nothing like Krakauer’s account in Into Thin Air. The man I met had given his life trying to save the group he led up Everest.

I carried his inspiration forward. I loved NOLS so much I returned the following season to work at their Pacific Northwest Branch, in between the Cascades and Olympic Mountains. That job opened doors of opportunity—like teaching in El Salvador, which I would not have done without NOLS’ support. That community never shies from adventure that fosters growth. El Salvador was fresh out of civil war in 1997. My mom worried: “It’s so dangerous! That’s the place where they murdered the nuns!” Yet that experience shaped my life profoundly. Years later, when I completed my  Peace Studies M.Phil. at Trinity College Dublin, I wrote my thesis about El Salvador because in its story I saw patterns of colonialism, oppression, and greed repeated by globalized systems around the world.

Looking back, meeting Scott Fischer was a turning point. His words pushed me from fear and doubt to adventure, growth, and connection with the natural world. Two summers ago, I helped my own daughter Niamh—then sixteen and grieving the loss of her father the year before— to attend the same Talkeetna NOLS course. I guided her through the application process, secured a scholarship, and organized a GoFundMe to supplement the rest. She's called it the best month of her life--and she's had a life full of adventure. Though our experiences were thirty years apart, I love that we shared that experience. In that moment, I understood viscerally what Barbara Kingsolver wrote: “People will need wild places. Whether or not they think they do, they do. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. Wilderness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd, and that our choices matter a great deal.”^3

My daughter Niamh in the Talkeetnas in 2023 age 17

Alaska was that place for me. It seems to be for my daughter too. The wild, like the rivers converging in Talkeetna, continues to meet us where we are—and shows us who we can become.

Me in the Talkeetnas in 1996

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1. Mourning Dove, “Recognition of Spiritual Energies in Nature,” in Coyote Stories, ed. Jay Miller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), ___.

2. Thomas Berry, “Loneliness and Presence,” in The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), ___.

3. Barbara Kingsolver, “Knowing Our Place,” in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, ed. Bill McKibben (New York: Library of America, 2008), 946–947.

4. Jay Griffiths, Kith, in A Country Called Childhood (London: [publisher], [year]), 4.

The Rock That Remains

The Rock That Remains ( written for my Eco Chaplaincy class at HIU)

Being asked to choose just one encounter in nature where I felt the divine is nearly impossible. Even when I’ve lived in the most chaotic and densely populated cities in the world, I have always sought and found natural beauty. You could say it is my life’s quest.

There is a rock—a cliff, really—at the edge of Reservoir #6 in the town where I spent my childhood, and the town I have now returned to decades later. This cliff, buried in lichen and memories, doesn’t call attention to itself. No one jumps from it anymore. But I return to it again and again, drawn not only by its physical form but by the grounding presence it offers. The water below shifts and shimmers, reflecting the changing seasons, but the rock remains unmoved. Somehow it has become my chapel, my altar—and it seems, my mirror.

As a preteen, I followed my older brother up to this place with his friends. They always seemed to be having more fun than me, and mostly, they were kind enough to let me tag along. I watched them all leap with youthful ease from this ledge. Not one to admit my fear—especially of heights—I summoned my courage and made the run and leap of faith into the cold blue water, cheered on by the voices of my brother and his best friends. Back then, that cliff was a thrill—a dare—something to conquer. A place of adrenaline and the power of naive youth. A place where we broke the rules and loved every second of it.

Now, it has become a sanctuary—a still point in a world that is anything but still.

I’ve lived all over the world as an international teacher. I’ve sat in silent awe at some of the most spectacular and spiritual vistas this world has to offer. But this is the place that comes to mind when someone asks me about my home. Over the years, I’ve made a point of returning anytime I am in the region. I introduced my daughter to the trails my father once walked me on as a girl—the same trails I brought her Irish father to when he first came to meet my mother.

The reservoir itself has become more than a body of water. It is a receptacle of life—of memory, of tears, of healing. It holds the seasons, like it holds rain and snowmelt, and somehow, it holds me too. I have cried there for each of those I have lost—my dad, my mom, my daughter's father. And I feel their presence there still, as if the water remembers, as if the rock listens.

I go there now to chant, to breathe, to pause. To sit in the stillness. To watch and to wonder. I’m learning to quiet my mind and let my thoughts drift past like the ripples on the reservoir’s surface.

This place teaches me about time—how healing rarely comes all at once, how grief returns in waves, and how nature makes no demands for closure. When I’m there, I am every age I ever was and every age I will be. It is a portal of sorts. I mentioned all the places of beauty I’ve sought around the world. I’ve found a few portals of peace. But this rock—this quiet edge of water—was my first one. It is where I learned to find myself. Where I learned to sit in the stillness.

I would come here as a teen to escape the strife in my home. I’d run miles around its trails-training to achieve my dreams. I’d sit and watch the sunset and imagine what my life might become. And now I return. The rock listens when I chant, when I cry. Stalwart and steady. It reminds me who I am and what I am capable of. It gives without demanding. Like the reservoir, it holds what I bring to it.

As I read Brown this week, I’m struck by the way he intertwines personal story with ecological insight. My own story, too, is not separate from this place. This reservoir and this cliff are more than memory—they are collaborators in my formation, my point of origin story.

I am so grateful for this sacred space—for this rock that remains, and for the waters that continue to receive, reflect, and renew.