Welcome to the online home of
Carolyn Metzler!
Welcome to the online home of Carolyn Metzler! Let this be a place of connection and exploration for you. Here you can find a source for writing to touch your heart and feed your mind. Here you can find stories in which you might recognize your own. Here you can find images to enlarge your spirit. Here find a welcome in which you are safe, engaging in online conversation over a cup of tea. Find reason to laugh, or to weep, or to puzzle, and all will be an invitation into deeper intimacy with yourself, maybe with me, and the certainly with the Holy One. This is more than a website. It is a kitchen table.
This site will give you information about existing books and my forthcoming book, Finding the North Star in a Mapless World: Wilderness Spirituality in Uncertain Times. I am the author of two books of poetry, a children’s book, and many essays and articles
on a host of subjects.
I am so glad you are here. Pull up a comfy chair, take a deep breath, and
let’s begin together.
Carolyn
Silence is nakedness. Utter and complete nakedness. In Silence there is no defendedness, no argument, no alternative proposal, no Plan B. There is only the here and now as it is. As I am. Not as I hope to be, want to be, aim to be. (Carolyn Metzler, Canyon Journal 2019)
Coming
Soon!
Finding the North Star in a Mapless World:
Wilderness Spirituality in Uncertain Times
A bit about the book:
Through poetry, music, embodied practices, stories, and silence we explore these times together and discern how to find our way through wilderness into transformation. What are the ways in which we discern what is most true for us in our times of un-doing? What is trustable when the rest of is is coming apart?
Find some tools for survival and well-springs of hope. Give yourself to this process. However it is for you now, there is a place on the landscape here for you.
Wilderness.
It is a place where we all have to go from time to time. It is not a safe place. It is not a tame place. It is the place which laughs at our pretensions, snickers at our defenses; the place which sighs wearily at all our certainties and definitions.
Wilderness is of the Earth, and also of human life. We call it shock, grief, illness. It arrives with a phone call, a diagnoses, or a pink slip. It happens slowly, after a time of spiritual discontent and boredom. It happens gradually, the unfolding of a creeping awareness that what used to be wonderful no longer fits for our awakening self. It is relationships that slice away at our inner goodness, the faith that chokes us. It is a job that deadens our soul.
The most important work of wilderness is transformation. It is deeply trustable.
In this book I name and explore the wildernesses of our lives. There I have found companions there who love me when I could not love myself; who believed in me when I could not see my way forward.