We're Here to Renew the Sacred

I’ve written a lot over the past few years. Tweets, essays, threads, letters, rants. I’ve loved sharing the inside of my head, and especially loved finding out that it looked familiar to a lot of other people. I’d never really found that before, a sense that what was inside me was inside a lot of others too.

I’ve been through a lot this year, and it’s come with a sense that some era has passed. I won’t know for a long time what exactly that era was, but it does feel like something is changing in the way I express myself, the way I write (or don’t write) and speak (or don’t speak). So while it still feels alive, I wanted to collect some of my writing that I enjoy from this part of my life, and package it up for others who might enjoy finding it in one place.

Almost everything in here has been published elsewhere in some form; the only new pieces are “A Prayer” and “So Badly.” Everything else has been re-edited and polished up to some degree. In some cases that involved rearranging paragraphs, in others I just added or subtracted a comma.

It feels worth saying that most of what I’ve chosen to include here is work that I can still pretty much stand by and endorse — but I don’t think that accounts for all of it, and judging by the stuff from a couple years ago that stayed on the cutting room floor, I have no idea how long I’ll continue to stand by any of this. That point should hopefully be made clear by my choice of a final essay in the collection, but I want to state it clearly up front too. All of this is in process. All of this will remain in process. Life is always on the move.

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I write a fair bit about my spiritual practice throughout this book. It’s an unusual set of practices, or so I’ve been told. If you have any curiosities about it, you can always find me at RiverKenna.com.