June 2024     It's been a few years since I felt the nudge from the Holy Spirit and the encouragement of some loved ones to post again on this site. During the pandemic, I retired from hospice spiritual care but have remained active and busy with spiritual direction clients and leading retreats. I thought the formation and direction work would cease but God had other thoughts. I continue to have active direction clients and about once a year I am asked to lead a retreat.

I have been a spiritual director since 2003, and I serve both ordained and lay directees. I also meet with laity who are feeling a call to ordained ministry. I sit on the Western MI Commission on Ministry and am a spiritual director for both Episcopal aspirants and postulants. 

Retreats, especially multi-day retreats, take a large amount of time for discernment and writing, and once per year is just about right for me!  My most recent retreat was leading the women of Holy Comforter Parish in Charlotte, NC, through a three-day formation retreat centered on holy self-care, in all its forms, and hearing the call of the Holy Spirit within all of one's life. 

As is for all spiritual directors the time spent with directees (remember the Holy Spirit is the true director) feeds my own formation along the way.. a good and holy result. 

If you are led to explore your faith journey, and your relationship with God, or want to find the movements of God's spirit within you and within your life experiences and relationships I would be honored to hear from you.  We will first see if meeting with me is a good fit for both of us. 

Whether we meet or you find another path, may God bless your journey. 

Peace, 

Rosemary 

the land that holds us : or Behind The Barn

 I remember back of the barn in the sunlight,
feel the breath beaten back by the heat,
and spaces within open,
hollow to its own sacred sound.

Even at six it can happen.
gift given, no practice
simple grace,
Knowing you are not alone
and enough right now
along with the grass and the corn
and the sky that pulls the top of your
head about off.

shine like the sun

Working with people who are facing death, moving through their death and standing witness to this next to the people who loved them, or struggled with them, and who are left without them in their lives reminds me each time of this certain question. "If I knew I was dying today, how would I love differently?" Not  a looking back kind of "how would I have loved differently".. but a present form of "How would  I love differently right now and moving ahead?" On the day of death all else fades but love..  and why not now? 
  IT is an asking kind of  prayer of immediacy.  Yearning prayer.. to be transformed deeper. .. to the point that nothing stands in the way.  Deepest compassion enter in.  Welcome to your new home. Help me out with the "house" cleaning. It must shine like the sun.

One word of salt...

If I had one word to speak
alone, it would be a cry
not a word,
a shriek of joy
and a hoot of owl

that speaks
to you and all
that I love,
with thanks.
----------------

How do you stick with my
impatient heart?
like glue made from
flour, and water, and
salt of the earth?
or of  mud
or tentworms on a burning bush,
hidden, waiting, indestructible?
---------------
Theosis:
Prayer stretched worship
pulled our hearts
tight to its hoop,
and stitched us
back again
into ourselves in You.