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The Mystic Cave Blog

Thanks for visiting my Blog page. It began back in 2019, offering reflections on life that bubbled up from the various creative projects I was working on.

Then, it became something else. Having spent my entire life in the church, and the last forty years as an ordained minister, I found myself processing that experience through the musings in my blogs.

Now, it's moved beyond that to become an exploration of the new terrain "on the other side of church land." Death and dying, spiritual resilience, guides and mentors--how do we find our way along the Unknown Path?

I've now linked the blog to my bi-weekly podcast. The two will reflect the same theme, the blog providing a link so you can listen to the episode.

Each blog invites you to respond with a comment or a question. I hope you'll do that, turning a monologue into a conversation. It's richer that way, and less lonely.

If you'd like to receive new blogs directly to your email inbox, including the link to the podcast, please fill out the subscription form on my Home page. A new blog is posted every other Sunday.

Worship in the Woods

"Soulcraft Intensive," a program of the Animas Valley Institute, October, 2022, outside Louisville, Kentucky It didn't feel like worship, exactly. But I wouldn't know what else to call it. We sat in a circle under a clear fall sky, a distant hawk circling high overhead. The morning sun burned hot for mid-October and those among us not soaking it up were trying instead to shelter ourselves from it, pulling hoodies up over our heads and blankets over our knees. The night befo

Brian E Pearson

3 days ago3 min read

Getting Edgy

[Photo Credit: Norway's Pulpit Rock by Dylan Shaw on Unsplash] There's a scenic drive in the mountains of Montana that tempts you to survey the scenic vista while, at the same time, forbidding you to do so. The Going-to-the-Sun Highway is a narrow two-lane road that flanks the Continental Divide at Logan's Pass, just south of the Canadian border. The alpine meadows, glaciers, and mountain waterfalls are stunning. In all likelihood you will see mountain sheep, elk, and other

Brian E Pearson

Apr 124 min read

What's in a Name?

[Photo Credit: Matt Gross for Unsplash] It was the final day of my Vision Quest. I was camped out alone at the edge of a mountain meadow. I had been fasting for three days. I felt weak and nauseous. Still, I was eager to complete my Quest by asking the Universe for a soul name, something that would help me live into whatever new identity was emerging for me from my time on the mountain. I had turned seventy a few days earlier. Entering my eighth decade felt momentous to m

Brian E Pearson

Mar 293 min read

Home ... by Another Way

[Photo Credit: Danny Howe on Unsplash] Was there only one course my life could have taken? Looking back, all the branching points do seem to have a certain symmetry to them, as if all those painful departures from the straight and narrow were somehow necessary, corrective even, as if both the path and its destination were predetermined. But might there have been another path, another way? Mythologist Joseph Campbell, before he began characterizing the world's myths by the a

Brian E Pearson

Mar 153 min read

The Liberating Law of Love

The Coulees around Lethbridge, Alberta [Photo Credit: Helen Schuler Nature Centre] Dave Ward, an influential youth pastor in my teens, left the church to start his own cult-like Christian congregation. Someone once described him, derisively, as having found the light, but not the love. That description has stayed with me as a useful reminder, in matters of faith, that we need both. The freedom in Christ that Dave preached was tempered by the "spiritual laws" he taught, laws

Brian E Pearson

Mar 13 min read

(And I say to myself ...) "What A Wonderful World!"

[Photo Credit: Vitaly Gariev] Is it just me, or are people becoming more beautiful? I know, that's a terrible thing to say, even to think. Beauty is subjective, in the eye of the beholder, and all that. Comparisons can be degrading. And it's entirely superficial, anyway, as if you can judge a book by its cover! But this is why I put it to you as a question. Because there just may be some thing worth considering here. As populations formerly separated by geography now begin

Brian E Pearson

Feb 153 min read

From Purgation to Illumination

[Photo Credit: Marek Studziński] On the last evening of my second marriage, my wife stood in the doorway of the study. I turned in my chair to face her. "If you're going," she said, "then you need to go now. I mean, right now." In that instant, the world dropped away beneath me and I fell into a dark, dizzying, disorienting void. I felt like I was dying. Convulsive sobs overtook me as I drove away, forcing me to pull over and yield to them. I had no idea how all this was go

Brian E Pearson

Feb 13 min read

Why the Dead Watch Over Us

[Photo Credit: Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash] When I began attending a spiritualist church here in town, there was a lot to take in, as the supernatural slowly became natural, the extraordinary ordinary. For instance, I was learning that those who have passed on remain, in their essence, the people they were when we knew them in the flesh. If there are angels' wings to be handed out, or further development and personal growth in store for them, it doesn't happen on the fir

Brian E Pearson

Jan 182 min read

The End Before Each Beginning

Photographic Evidence of "The Lions" in North Vancouver [Photo Credit: Luc Tribolet for Unsplash] I returned to North Vancouver in search of the homeland I'd left behind, years before. It was raining as the taxi drove me into town from the airport, so I couldn't make out the low mountains of the North Shore, or the higher, majestic "Lions" who stood guard over the city of my childhood. When I asked the driver about them, he informed me, in a thick foreign accent, that there

Brian E Pearson

Jan 43 min read

A Soulful Christmas

Photo Credit: Addy Mae on Unsplash "It's the most wonderful time of the year." Yes, but it's also the most sad, which may not be a bad thing. Every year, at some point during the Christmas season, I give in to a brooding melancholy that seems to have become part of my annual observance. Sometimes, it will materialize as we decorate the tree, each sparkling ball or dangling bauble a telling relic of Christmases past. Sometimes, it will haunt me as I light the candelabra for

Brian E Pearson

Dec 21, 20252 min read

A Fallow Field in Winter

Photo Credit: Krista Bennett on Unsplash I feel I owe it to you who have been receiving these blog posts and, even more, to you who have been reading them, to give an account for my silence these past few months. Entering the fall, I thought it was simply a matter of losing my focus for the podcast I produce, The Mystic Cave , new episodes of which I've been attaching to these bi-weekly musings. I shared with you in an earlier post (September 21) my abortive attempts to jum

Brian E Pearson

Dec 7, 20253 min read