Being of good Midwestern stock, I was baptized a Presbyterian. When I was in the first grade, my grandfather died very suddenly. Around the same time my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I started asking a lot of questions about religion. I never really did like Sunday school, but a neighbor in the area of rural Michigan where we lived was a Christian Scientist, and I began to go to church with him and his family. It was the first time that I experienced the power of spirit. I have no idea why Christian Science spoke to me, but I suspect it helped me make sense of my grandfather's death and my mother's illness. I began to understand that if God gave Jesus the power to heal others then maybe we all have the divine power to heal. I felt some power over my mother's illness through that. When I was sixteen, my good friend died what I thought was a senseless death. I lost faith in the church and left it. When I was a senior in high school, I shot a sick rabbit and got tularemia, which is rabbit fever. At the time there was no treatment for the disease and ninety percent of the people who got it died. I went into a coma and experienced a near-death experience. When I came out of it, I was paralyzed and blind. Slowly my sight and mobility came back, but viewing the passage to death changed my life.

I had no particular interest in Native American spirituality, but where I grew up there were a lot of Native Americans in the area. I have always felt that the land holds spiritual energy. When I was in my early twenties I was deer hunting and I was confronted by an albino white buck. After I saw it, I reached down and found a tomahawk head. I later learned from Native American friends that the buck was a sacred sign and the tomahawk was thousands of years old. It became an anchor to me.

Six to ten years later I met and started working with a Native American shaman, and that was a real turning point for me. It answered a lot of the questions that I hadn't found answers to through my parents or Christianity.

Today my daily practice consists of sitting at a circle that I have made in the woods below our home (though I can do the ritual in my mind no matter where I am). I address the four directions north, south, east and west, then the sky above and the earth under my feet. At each of these positions there are spirit teachers; some are animals, some are in human form. They are not deities but specific teachers. Their lessons touch virtually every area of life the life force itself, the rhythms of the Earth, family dynamics, self-knowledge and introspection, universal wisdom, the alchemy of Nature, and the relationships between spirit and our physical existence. Some of these helpers have been in my life for as long as I can remember. Others came to me in my adult years. I consult with them about specific problems I may be facing. Sometimes I address one or two, sometimes several. These consultations are always helpful to guide me in my relationships to myself, family members, the environment, business associates, and a higher power.

I don't remember ever anthropomorphizing a higher power. I cannot even imagine having the confidence to claim that I might be capable of defining it or even holding it in my mind long enough to understand it. Nevertheless I feel its presence and find comfort in this. While I have no doubt of its presence, I am not even tempted to name it and I accept that while we draw power and comfort from it, words themselves cannot lead us to it. We are already there. My prayers are prayers of sitting with the wisdom that I believe is accessible to us through spirit. Emptying our minds, we can sort out the personal from the universal and touch that which is timeless. Out of this can come compassion, forgiveness, and love. Books have not been as valuable to me in my spiritual practice as have been the lessons of life itself. How better to connect with our spiritual essence than through observing and listening to nature, our own behavior, the behavior of others, and the ebb and flow of life itself? However, I love reading books about the great religions and other people's spiritual experiences. I think Aldous Huxley's discussions of the "perennial philosophy," which are the beliefs that are common to all religions and spiritual disciplines, convinces me that truth has infinite paths but is constant.

I think we all are spiritual whether we consider ourselves so or not. I receive comfort and guidance from my spiritual practice, and I look to it whenever I think about improving the quality of my life and the lives of those who have to put up with me.