Tessa Bielecki was born in Norwich, Connecticut on September 16, 1944. From early childhood she loved the diverse peoples and cultures around our planet and studied Russian and French at Trinity College in Washington D.C., preparing for a career in international relations. Her dream took a more spiritual turn when she met Fr. William McNamara in 1965 and with him co-founded the Spiritual Life Institute.

With a brave band of fellow-monks, she helped create a monastic community and four retreat centers over four decades: Nada Hermitage in Sedona, Arizona in the 1960s (lost to land developers in 1981), Nova Nada Hermitage in Kemptville, Nova Scotia, Canada in the 1970s (lost to logging development in 1998), Nada Carmelite Hermitage in Crestone, Colorado in the 1980s (sold in 2020), and Holy Hill Hermitage in Skreen, County Sligo, Ireland in the 1990s.

After serving as Mother Abbess and traveling between these centers for almost forty years, Tessa left monastic life in 2003. In 2005, with friend and colleague, Fr. David Denny, she created The Desert Foundation, a small informal Circle of Friends exploring the wisdom of the desert and the inner desert of loss, grief, and injustice, offering stories of hope in a welcoming Tent of Meeting.

Tessa is a seasoned retreat facilitator and the author of numerous articles and several major works: Teresa of Avila: Mystical Writings, Holy Daring, Ecstasy and Common Sense, Season of Glad Songs: A Christmas Anthology, Desert Voices: The Edge Effect, and the Sounds True audio learning course, Wild at Heart: Radical Teachings of the Christian Mystics.

You will find recent podcasts at Messy Jesus Business, Contemplify, Spiritual Wanderlust, and The New Monastics. Her e-course on the Christian mystics is here, a webinar on interspirituality here, and her masterclass on St. Teresa for the Women Mystics School here.

Tessa has decades of experience with inter-religious dialogue, most notably with Buddhists throughout the 1980s at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She has led pilgrimages to Spain, Italy, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, and visited Russia, Mexico, Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands, where she participated in symposiums called Women for Peace and Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy.

She had the privilege of speaking three times at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and was part of the Lindisfarne Fellowship during its early years in Crestone, Colorado. She was also a member of the first group who met in Rio de Janeiro to draft the Earth Charter. Under the auspices of the Embrace Foundation, she represented Christianity in a gathering of major world religions at the United Nations Chapel.

She was an adjunct professor at Colorado College for almost fifteen years, teaching courses with Dave on Fire and Light: A History of Christian Mysticism and Sand and Sky: Desert Spirituality from the Middle East to the American Southwest.

After leaving monastic life, Tessa spent fifteen years as a hermit in the wilderness of Crestone, Colorado, where she loved to “chop wood and carry water.” In 2017 she felt called to return to her beloved Arizona where she now lives in Tucson and explores the Sonoran Desert and what it means to be an “urban hermit.” She is currently writing a memoir and creating a podcast called Fire and Light.

She loves not only her silence and solitude, but colors and flowers, hiking and swimming, movies and books, big earrings, farmers’ markets, cooking and celebrating with friends, and anything orange. Above all, she loves living the full four seasons of the year: summer, fall, winter, and spring, as you see on tessabielecki.com.