The Weekend Seeker

Dear Seeker,

I’m sitting at my kitchen island right now. The sun isn’t up yet, and Tommy is snoozing in his bed still. My laptop lies betweeen a hot mug of coffee and a messy little stack of books—Karen Armstrong, M. Scott Peck, William Zinsser. An old Neal Casal song plays over a speaker.

On paper, these things don’t seem to have much to do with each other. But this messy countertop embodies exactly the question I like to ponder each week in this newlsetter: How can we more deeply connect with our souls and the sacred in this jittery digital age?

Frankly, I used to worry my own spiritual life was a total mess. And to some spiritual purists out there it probably looks like that. Over the years, I’ve bounced from Christianity to Buddhism and Hinduism. At various times, I’ve devoted myself to psychology then poetry then yoga then deep nature walks and then whatever random paperback had recently caught my eye.

For a long time, I felt like there was something wrong with this approach. Did it show a lack of commitment on my part? Was I flaky?

Friends would say things like, Why don’t you stop seeking and find something, for God’s sake? Others would say,, “I took the precepts, and now I’ve arrived. Maybe you should look into this too. Don’t spend your life seeking. Find! I did.”

These days, I just smile and say, “Good for you!”

But I also find myself wondering if, in their certainty, they’re trying not to feel something. It seems obvious to me that none of us have this life thing figured out. We’re all just blindfolded and our hands are touching different parts of the same elephant. I’m holding a tusk, you are holding the tail.

For me—and maybe for you—seeking is the path. And, hey, I do find. I experience plenty of finding.

At the end of the day, I just want to continue become kinder, more awake, and less guarded. Oh, and more open to the wildness of wonder.

Here are five things that connected me with my soul this week. Maybe one of them will do the same for you.

If you ever feel spiritually homeless, Karen Armstrong offers sweet relief. She advocates that we stop stressing so much about what we believe and pay attention to what we do.

I’ve been reading her memoir, The Spiral Staircase. Toward the end, she mentions a conversation she had with scholar Hyam Maccoby at a cafe in London. He told her that, in most ancient traditions, faith was never about agreeing to twenty impossible propositions before breakfast. It was about doing practices. It was about praying, meditating, serving others, showing up for your life and for life itself. Practicing—including living with deep intention—slowly changes you from the inside out. And none of this is about becoming more godly.

As Armstrong puts it, real faith should make you more human.

I really want you to feel like you have full permission to try on different practices! Nevermind which faith they come from. Sure, some people dig one well a hundred feet deep. I respect them. Good for them.

But maybe some of us are meant to dig ten holes twenty feet deep instead. Consider this your permission slip. Besides, if you have ADHD like me, we experience depth across a wide landscape, not just straight down. It’s a gift.

Besides, who’s counting how many wells you’re digging?

What matters to me is this: Is the practice actually changing us? Are we becoming kinder, more courageous, and more present?

This feels like a much better measure of spiritual progress.

One of the trickiest parts of trying to live a soulful life is figuring out navigate faith and reason. We want to stay open to mystery without becoming ungrounded.

I picked up M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled again last week. (I read it once a year.) Most of it is about the hard, unglamorous work of growing up. He covers discipline, responsibility, and love, among other timeless topics.

But near the end, Peck takes on transcendence and spirituality.

I’ve always appreciated that he sees having a deep spiritual life as a crucial part of becoming a mature adult. Spiritualty isn’t just a phase you outgrow once you get educated. No, the reverse. Having a spiritual life is a sign of a mature mind. It’s the path to becoming fully human.

One line grabbed me this time.

“The path to holiness lies in questioning everything.”

What a motto.

He’s not saying we should doubt everything to no end. He’s asking us to stay curious and open. This universe is wilder and stranger than we can imagine.

This conversation reminds me of Nick Cave describing his own internal tug-of-war:

“The Hitchens part of me is bad for the business of songwriting.”

In one interview, Cave was talking about the tension between his strong inner pull toward God and mystery, and his “Hitchens” side. He named this part of him after the famous journalist and atheist Christopher Hitchens.

Most seekers are familiar with both of those voices.

Sometimes our work as seekers is simply to refuse to shrink the universe down into a logical soundbyte

Instead, step outside under the dark sky. Let the cold night air hit your face. Turn up the music. Let yourself be moved by unnameable things.

Question everything, sure. But stay wide open to wonder.

You don’t need to fly to India, sit a ten-day silent retreat, or have a dramatic mystical experience to encounter your soul. Sometimes you just need to sit down at a desk with a notebook and pen and write about the life you’re living.

My writing craft book recommendation this week was William Zinsser’s Writing About Your Life. I find his main point deeply reassuring: you don’t need a wild, headline-grabbing life to write something meaningful. Just be honest with your particular life: your family, your work, your old apartment with the drafty windows, and the various bad mistakes you’ve made.

Over time I’ve come to view writing as a spiritual practice. Writing about your life pushes you to slow the hell down. My shoulders actually drop when I write honestly.

Every day, I re-discover that stories I’ve told myself for decades mean something totally different now than I thought ten or twenty years ago.

You don’t have to be writing a book to do this work. Journaling works the same way. Write about the house you grew up in or the smell of your mother’s hands. Noodle around about an old friend who’s gone now or that day you said, fuck it, and walked away from your job. Don’t worry about making it pretty; just write and notice what happens in your body.

Telling the truth about your life. Grappling wiht what you don’t understand… Now that’s seeking.

It’s easy to feel enlightened when you’re sitting alone on a cushion in a quiet room. Relationships are where the real work happens. They show us right where we hide and where we might hold on for dear life. They can cause a sudden tightness in your chest and send you into a panic. They can also reveal how fast our so-called “evolved” self completely vanishes when we don’t get what we want.

I’ve been spending time with Heidi Priebe’s work lately. She’s an attachment specialist with a fantastic YouTube channel where she breaks down relationships, emotional maturity, and human behavior. She brings to this work a beautiful mix of rigor and empathy.

Learning about your attachment system might sound more like psychology than spiritual work. But in the case of learning about how you move in relationships, I don’t think there’s much of a line between the two.

We can meditate and read sacred texts all day, but our relationships will tend to show us how un-enlightened we really are.

Maybe learning how to notice our patterns and hold more loosely to things we can’t control is a form of deep devotion to life.

Music is still the fastest way I know to feel the edges of my soul. Chanting does it, but so does cranking up a great popular song in the car on the highway at sunset or picking up my guitar. Good songs are like telescopes into the heart.

I only recently stumbled onto Neal Casal, a singer-songwriter who died by suicide in 2019. I’ve had his track “All the Luck in the World” on repeat all week. Knowing how his life ended adds a layer of sadness to this tune. But it’s still gorgeous. And that voice!

I don’t know what he intended, but this particular song captures the painful moment when you realize you’ve outgrown a chunk of your life. Maybe it’s time to leave a relationship, a circle of friends, or just an old version of yourself. You know, deep down in your bones, that, if you want to become who you’re meant to become that you must burn off the dead wood.

There’s a pair of lines in the song that gets me every time: And maybe leave some people behind.

“You tried to do the best you could, but it wasn’t quite enough.

To find a way to make this real, a way to stand true.”

That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? We’re all just trying to find a way to make this real.

Listening to Casal made me realize something about my own coming month. My main spiritual goal these next weeks is simple: Play more guitar. Playing the guitar brought me so much oy when I was younger. Of course, life got busy. I want that blissful feeling of music running through my fingers again.

Maybe that’s sacred, too.

What’s been opening you up to your soul lately?

Maybe it’s a book, a song, or a new old practice? Maybe it’s going to therapy, grieving a hard loss, breathing the cold air on a quiet trail, or pondering a question you have absolutely no answer for.

Pay attention to it. Take a breath and feel it. You don’t need to analyze it or know where it’s taking you. Sometimes the whole spiritual life starts by just noticing what makes you come alive.

I’d love to hear what’s on your mind. Just hit reply and let me know—I read every note.

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Until next weekend,

Brad