On a classically gorgeous Autumn afternoon last October, I tapped on the roof of my car and released my guardian angel while passing through the gates of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. I was on my way to spend a few days of silence and solitude tucked away in the Woodland Hermitage at St. Mary’s Retreat Center—exactly twelve years from the first of many visits that would change the trajectory of my life in ways I could not have imagined at the time.

Lifting my eyes from the laptop screen as I try to conjure the opening lines of this story, I fix my gaze on the familiar white cross nestled among the evergreens on the far side of Kanuga Lake. The view from the porch of the conference center has not changed much since my first visit in 2014 as a first-time attendee at the Haden Summer Dream & Spirituality Conference. However, the world and my perspective certainly has.

“When your ship, long moored in harbour, gives you the illusion of being a house; when your ship begins to put down roots in the stagnant water by the quay: put out to sea! Save your boat’s journeying soul, and your own pilgrim soul, cost what it may. “Archbishop Hélder Câmara