A Year of Spiritual Thinking

Shifting my perspective to embrace what I do not yet know

The blue tree that surprised me, all by itself in the prairie, on my walk.

I am embarking on an experiment that both terrifies me and exhilarates me: a Year of Spiritual Thinking. For the next year, I am going to give myself permission to radically shift my perspective and experience everything—my writing, my re-storying work, my daily routine and relationships, my routines and rituals and habits; my house and my plant-relatives, all of my experiences, and the world around me—through a primarily spiritual lens.

Note that I am making a distinction here between spiritual and religious.

The word spiritual, says my dictionary, means “relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.” Thus, it is deeply rooted in that connection to the ephemeral and essential, arising from the Latin spiritus, which means both “breath” and “spirit,” and itself comes from the verb spirare, “to breathe.” To consider the spiritual is to consider the mystery of our essential selves, including our inspiration of the formless, colorless, odorless gas—oxygen—necessary to our aliveness.

In this year of spiritual thinking, I hope to explore the essence of breath and spirit, both of which are basically inexpressible in words, and the wisdom gained from that essence. To gain a new perspective on my life, life in general, and living in this world.

That same blue tree looks different when I change my angle.

Shifting the balance from striving to loving

My main intent of this year is to shift the balance of my life away from striving and toward a deeper level of being in love with this world and we who share the planet.

By “striving,” I mean attempting to achieve something, whether that is some kind of goal in my writing or an award for one of my books, or a review in a particular place, a certain level of income, writing an article for a particularly prestigious journal—that kind of outward focused striving for power, recognition, money, or material things.

My aim in taking this year of spiritual retreat at home within ordinary life is to simply shift my focus from striving, as I have done all of my adult life, to reflecting, to considering what this life means, and sharing that wisdom, whatever it may be.

My goal is simply to change the tenor of my life from always working toward something material or career-focused—something tangible—more toward simply being. To taking part of this life in a deeper and richer way, to being engaged in this existence in a deeper and richer way, to practicing my terraphilia not for something, to belong.

To be in relationship, to deepen my relationship with this living world and we who share the planet in a way that I am most concerned with the richness of relationship, not richness in the material or social or cultural sense.

I have no program or framework for the year ahead. I am not going to study with a particular teacher. I have no goals or expectations in mind. I am not going to go anywhere or attempt to “escape” my ordinary life in order to find enlightenment. I want to learn what I can learn through the minutia and wonder of everyday life. And by reading and listening to words and music that enlarge my mind, heart and spirit.

While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes.
—the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh

Learning from everyday life

I want to open myself to the idea of life itself as a spiritual practice. We are most alive when we are completely in the present moment, no matter how mundane, not anticipating what is to come or reviewing what is past.

There is a Buddhist saying that the fastest way to enlightenment is not through retreating to some sacred community, but by living our everyday lives. Nor does reaching enlightenment change our lives, only how we live them.

After the ecstasy, the laundry. —Buddhist saying

I want to shift the moments that make up my life toward the spiritual. To, for instance, make my morning breakfast cereal in a more mindful way, taking time to thank the oats, the blue corn ground into meal, and the flax. The grapevines that grew the fruits dried into raisins, the blueberry bushes that flowered and were pollinated to swell into blueberries. The fresh and clean water, the cinnamon trees whose bark produced the cinnamon, the ginger root dried and ground.

I want to remember to be part of this life in its most quotidian moments. I want to I see and value the richness and the spiritual depth and the connection to all others with whom we share this planet. That’s what this year of spiritual thinking is all about.

I looked up from my writing to see this sage thrasher bathing in a rock basin carved by my late husband, a sculptor. One of those sacred-in-the-everyday moments I want to not be too “busy” to notice.

I have no expectation of how it will go or what I will learn. To have expectations—a premade box to fit into—is to doom any possibility of change and transformation. Expectations imply some kind of control, which would impede the idea of reaching within and without, and learning more deeply how I belong in this world and how I can love this world.

And that combination of terror and exhilaration I mentioned at the beginning? It comes from, as the philosopher L.A. Paul writes in her book Transformative Experience, “[Knowing] that undergoing the experience will change what it is like for [me] to live [my] life, and perhaps even change what it is like to be [me], deeply and fundamentally.”

In any kind of process involving a transformation, whether internal or external, there is no controlling the metamorphosis that happens when we open ourselves to new experiences and understandings.

Will I find a different “me” over the course of this year? I don’t know. We never know how life will transform us. But we can learn from the process.

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May you experience the unfamiliar as an unfolding and not as an undoing. And may you not take any of it, or yourself, even a tiny bit more seriously than absolutely necessary.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

from her “Not Feeling “C’ristmas-y’?” newsletter

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How can you help in my year of spiritual thinking?

Suggest resources

What spiritual resources—books, podcasts, Substack or other newsletters—inspire you? Hit the comment button below and share one or two, with a few words on why. I’ll add them to my list for this year of spiritual thinking.

Join a challenge

Starting next Sunday, I’ll offer monthly or twice monthly challenges to allow you to join my year of spiritual thinking at whatever level fits you. Watch for them and come along!

Note: The “year of spiritual thinking” is a deliberate reference to the title of Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicles her year of grappling with the unthinkable, the sudden, shocking death of her husband and daughter’s critical illness. A year of transformation that came to Didion unbidden and unwanted, shaking her to the core.

In her case, the “magical thinking” was an allusion to the idea that somehow catastrophic events can be averted by thinking outside time and space. In my case, my year of spiritual thinking is an effort open up the parts of myself that I unconsciously closed off to prevent further pain from catastrophic events in my life.