Dave Denny and I camp with John Glinsman, Amelia Ray Weesies, and Mike Petrow; Fires under the stars; at the CAC conference with Carmen Acevedo Butcher, Kelly Deutsch, and Adam Bucko
We camped in the high desert of New Mexico and hiked the Valley of Dreams, a magical place in the Navajo Nation’s Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness. (Watch this video of the mysterious rock formations and hoo-doos, but stop when the photographer begins to talk!)
We built fires in the morning for warmth before breakfast and fires at night under the vast canopy of stars for story-telling and soul-sharing: Dave Denny and I, Mike Petrow, Amelia Ray Weesies, and Mike’s good friend, John Glinsman, who turned out to be a student in our 2003 class called “Fire and Light: A History of Christian Mysticism” at Colorado College. This later inspired our Fire and Light podcast.
The Desert and Resistance
Camping in the wilds was perfect preparation for the workshop the “Rev. Dr.” Petrow and I did a week later at the autumn conference sponsored by Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque. We asked the question, “What does the desert teach us about resistance in our culture of status, speed, and selfishness?” I answered with four “Cs” and five “Ss”. Mike added the desert virtue of apatheia: letting go of non-essentials to focus on what really matters.
Healer with a Thousand Faces
We’ll tell you more about all of this in future web posts on tessabielecki.com and sandandsky.org and in our winter Caravans newsletter. My podcast interview for Mike’s powerful series, “Healer with a Thousand Faces,” will appear in January 2026. Watch for these, and please subscribe if you don’t already.
Cosmic Consciousness
This season Dave and I were both interviewed for another smaller podcast called “Cosmic Consciousness” with Dr. Daniel Sage, therapist and educator. Dan describes my interview as a “fascinating conversation” in which I recount my “journey into monastic life, living contemplatively, founding monastic communities, writing books about St. Teresa of Avila, working through trying times, exploring desert wisdom, and living a fulfilling and rich spiritual life.”
Dave discusses his calling as a Carmelite monk and priest, his experience with inter-spiritual communities, and the importance of taking time to be silent and solitary, especially in nature, as a way to stay sane and serve in a world of chaos and “soul-dulling digital inundation.” As a bonus, he shares one of his poems, “Weird Stuff I Love.”
Revisioning Contemplation in Action
The over-all theme of the CAC conference was “What do we do with Christianity?” For me the answer is simple: make it more contemplative, the first “C” I described in our workshop. (I smiled when Diana Butler Bass used a series of “Cs” two days later on the main stage!) As I learned from William McNamara decades ago, “The contemplative is not a special kind of person, but everyone is – or can become – a special kind of contemplative.”
When I first moved to the Arizona desert in 1967 to join the Spiritual Life Institute, I read this from French philosopher Jacques Maritain: “We need to take contemplation out of the monasteries and put it on the roads of the world.”
That has been my life’s work my entire adult life. And that’s why I left my “urban hermitage” in Tucson and made the journey to Albuquerque with 1800 other folks.
Strange shapes dominate the Valley of Dreams; the scale of the valley makes me feel small; Dave wanders the red-pebbled dreamscape.
it sounds as though you have been doing some wonderful things and we look forward to hearing more about them. it is cold and rainy in our iowa ‘desert’ so perfect for contemplation. even in the midst of difficult times, there are so many blessing and much to be grateful for.