Welcome to Home for the Wayward

Your story and your path are sacred and full of meaning if you have eyes to see it. Unfortunately, so much of the way we were taught to connect to our higher purposes--religion, politics--gets in the way of finding that vision for ourselves. The Home for the Wayward is a non-religious community for people finding their own way to meaning.

The Home for the Wayward isn't a place to learn a prescribed path to find meaning in your life. It's a place to unpack old lies and baggage. It's a place where we learn to tell our own stories about ourselves and our unique purposes using intuition and creativity. It's a place to find friends in the discovery.

The Home is for anyone and everyone looking to evolve the way they see the world through community and creativity. 

The Home for the Wayward is no therapy, it’s a place to learn from one another and encourage each other on our journeys.

What to expect at the home:

1. The Ponder as We Wander book club: We read a book together at a reasonable pace (2-3 months per book). There’s a monthly Zoom discussion on the fourth Saturday and there are weekly posts for asynchronous discussion. Sometimes we bring in an author for our discussion! Past reads include: Comfortable with Uncertainty by Pema Chödrön, Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith from Politics by Alisa Harris. We enjoyed discussing Ms. Harris’s book with her!
2. A weekly Zoom coffee hour for a chance to talk about deconstruction joys and challenges, creative endeavors, and life in general with people who are also on journeys to spiritual self-leadership.
3. A safe and confidential community that respects YOUR path. One of the reasons I charge for access is to help ensure people joining are serious about and invested in their self-leadership journeys. People who join agree to commit to confidentiality and empowering and supporting one another. We are not here to preach to each other or target each other for sales pitches.
4. A place to share your creative work. Deconstructing folks often find deep meaning in creativity, so we encourage one another in our creative endeavors. We encourage members to share songs, poems, artwork, and events or shows that showcase their creative work. To share your work, it should be unique to you (no multi-level marketing, no spam.) We have a weekly show and tell post that’s a great opportunity to share what you’ve been up to!
5. Coming soon: a course on spiritual self-leadership

In the last 10 years, I’ve gone from pious and lonely in my own skin to being in love with myself and spiritually free. My beliefs about spirituality and how the world works have evolved substantially—I embrace that. I expect they’ll continue to evolve for the rest of my life.  Some people call it deconstruction. I think of it as expansion! The things that have become solid ground to me are my faith in the power of love and the resilience of life and my confidence in my own intuition.

I started writing my own story in the aftermath of my divorce, when the major upheaval of my life shifted my vision and I started to see little miracles of meaning in the circumstances all around me. Writing helps me uncover that meaning, that sense of connectedness to myself, to others, and to the world around me. That connectedness is what I consider spirituality. I don’t really know where it comes from. Maybe God, maybe the breath of life that shares our molecules with one another. I’m not sure it matters much—I don’t need to understand the source to be the master of my own meaning.

I’m not a spiritual guru. I’m not a therapist. I do have a masters in literature, which I believe helped me develop my eyes to read meaning in life the way I learned to read meaning in poetry and prose. I consider myself to be more of a facilitator than a teacher or coach—I believe you have everything you need in you already. I believe your meaning is unique to you. I’m just here to help you find it. I'm here to learn from you as much as you learn from me. Welcome.

"I appreciate the opportunity for discourse at a high level about what really matters." -J.W.

"So glad to have a space to talk about things like this." -A.S.