In our latest Fire and Light podcast, “My Story, Your Story,” you’ll find out what the Irish mean by this popular old saying. In our conversation, Dave Denny and I explore how the concrete details, the joys, and sorrows in everyone’s unique life story have an uncanny power to communicate universally across time and cultures. We ponder the meaning of “destiny” and the way our lives unfold along enduring themes that weave in and out over the years. We conclude with a meditation to help you discover and celebrate your own destiny and the legacy you hope to leave for the next generations.

At the beginning of this year, we celebrated  the first of several landmarks we’ll celebrate in 2023:  the 50th anniversary of my meeting Dave Denny when he was a young Prescott College student and came on retreat to our first contemplative center in Sedona, Arizona. Now we celebrate Dave’s 70th birthday on May 2. In April we commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Spiritual Life Institute losing Sedona to unrestrained development and moving to Colorado in 1983 and the 30th anniversary of my writing the first of three books on St. Teresa in 1993. (Next year is the 30th anniversary of the first publication.)

And we just marked the 20th anniversary of leaving monastic life in the SLI and beginning our life as hermits in the wilderness on San Isabel Creek outside of Crestone, Colorado. (We didn’t create the Desert Foundation until 2005.) In each of these transitions, we crossed a threshold into a new and exciting adventure, each one a story in itself. We talk more about these landmarks in “My Story, Your Story” to help illustrate the way your own personal story unfolds.

When I first began my contemplative life in Sedona in 1967, I read Demian by Herman Hesse, which had a big impact on me. “You must find your dream,” Hesse said. I had found mine. “But there is no dream that lasts forever,” he cautioned. “Each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one.” True. But maybe it’s truer to say that our lives are really a single dream with multiple chapters in different colors, with different music and nuanced grace notes in each one.