The Birthday Pilgrim

Observations from Sixteen Weeks in the Spiritual Wilderness

Admittedly, this space slowed way down over the last sixteen weeks, but not for the usual “life got busy” reasons. What happened was stranger and better: I went on an academic pilgrimage so absorbing that I surrendered to it. The course, offered through Harvard Extension School, was called The Spiritual Lives of the Nonreligious, and its capstone assignment was to write my spiritual autobiography in four thousand words.

Yikes!

Or so I thought.

What I didn’t expect was that writing the spiritual autobiography would feel less like completing an assignment and more like finding a trail through the wilderness I had already been walking.

And because this is birthday season for me (It’s today, actually.), I’m calling this journey my birthday pilgrimage—the course changed me.

For sixteen weeks, I read, listened, took notes, wrote papers, revised arguments, wrestled with definitions of spiritual and nonspiritual, and remembered. I learned to think with scholarly frameworks that I did not have before. I learned the difference between a feeling and an argument, between an insight and a thesis, between a life story and a spiritual autobiography.

That last distinction matters.

A life story can say, “Here’s what happened.”

A spiritual autobiography asks, “What did these events teach me about meaning, belonging, belief, unbelief, practice, rupture, and repair?”

It asks where the sacred entered, where it vanished, where it disguised itself, and where it returned in another form.

Tracing my journey, I discovered the sacred usually comes with a playful touch, a dash of irony, and a touch of European seasoning.

My First Theology Was a Kitchen

My first spiritual teachers were not theologians. They were immigrant grandmothers and great-grandmothers in kitchens.

One kitchen smelled of tomatoes, fried meatballs, cedar, and pasta dough. On Saturdays, when I was a small child, my Italian grandmother took me to the fresh market where we shopped for all the ingredients so that we could make dinner for my father’s return at 5 p.m. She made pappardelle by hand and hung the noodles to dry on a wooden laundry rack. My father would return in the evening, and the meal would gather the day into meaning. Only now do I understand those Saturdays at Grandma’s as ritual: fixed order, repeated gestures, sacred objects, food preparation, waiting, and a culminating meal.

Another kitchen belonged to my maternal great-grandmother, who had become deaf after childhood measles. She made Austrian and Hungarian pastries while I sat at the table, learning by watching. She gave me scraps of dough to roll out by hand. I sprinkled powdered sugar over her cakes and croissants. Later, her friends arrived and spoke German around the table while my great-grandmother, though silent, remained fully included as she was excellent at lip-reading.

Food connected people. It’s its own language in every culture.

Before I had belonging in a church, I had belonging at a table.

This is one of the gifts the course gave me: a way to recognize that spiritual formation does not always arrive with an official seal of approval. Sometimes it arrives as the sauce is simmering on the stove. Sometimes as powdered sugar falls like snow. Sometimes as the cedar scent is released when Grandma’s Bible is opened in the living room, while meatballs are frying in the kitchen.

The Dream, the Buddha, and the Cookie Festival

The course also helped me see that my spiritual life did not unfold as a straight road. It moved in spirals.

A dream in my twenties called me toward Catholicism after the sudden death of a friend. In the dream, I entered a church, knelt before a fountain and a statue of the Holy Mother, and heard a soft voice ask, “Are you ready to find faith?”

For a time, Catholicism gave me a language for grace, grief, Mary, sacrament, structure, and belonging. It held what my family could not hold. It gave the dream somewhere to live.

Then came rupture. Institutional trust broke. The world grew larger. I moved to London. I traveled through Europe. I stood in cathedrals and ruins and began to see religion not only as faith, but also as history, power, beauty, conquest, architecture, music, and longing.

In South Korea, on Mt. Namsan in Gyeongju, amid Buddhist temples, magnificent stone Buddhas that appear to almost touch the vivid blue sky, and pagodas, all from the Silla Kingdom, my guide, Mr. Park, told me, “Do not come before Buddha with small questions on your mind.”

I have never forgotten that.

As we had walked the last mile up the mountain slope, I was thirsty enough that my first question was more likely to be for a glass of water. But a larger lesson stayed with me: my chosen religion was one sacred language among many, not the entire grammar of the unseen.

Curiously enough, on the way down the mountain, Mr. Park turned to me and asked: “Are you a career woman because you don’t have a husband?” I wondered if that was the question he brought before Buddha that afternoon.

Years later, after I married into my husband’s large Italian family with its own documented history, I created what I called the Cookie Festival: part brunch, part tree-trimming, part cookie-making, part family history game, part pilgrimage to St. John the Divine to hear Christmas carols rehearsed in that vast sacred space.

At the time, I thought we were hosting a festive family gathering.

Now, I understand I was making a ritual.

Not inherited whole.

Assembled from inheritances. That sentence feels important. So much of my life has been assembled from inheritances. The broken ones. The beautiful ones. The ones I had to research. The ones I had to forgive. The ones I had to stop carrying. The ones I had to bless before setting down.

What I Learned About Myself

So, what did I learn about myself from sixteen weeks in the spiritual wilderness?

First, I learned that I am not as scattered as I sometimes think.

I am a pattern-seeker.

Food, dreams, pilgrimage, ancestry, technology, ritual, language, Mary, astrology, earth-based spirituality, writing, family stories, sacred sites—these are not random interests. These are different doors in the same house.

I keep asking: How do human beings make meaning when inherited systems no longer hold? How do we translate what was interrupted? How do we stay spiritually alive without surrendering our authority to institutions, ideologies, algorithms, or fear?

Second, I learned that I am a translator.

I translate between old and new, sacred and secular, ancestral and digital, scholarly and personal, symbolic and practical. This has always been my work, though I did not always have a language for it or a framework to explore it in depth.

Why This Matters Here

When I began The Signal & The Spiral, I knew I wanted to write about myth, AI, creative intelligence, and future forging. I knew I wanted to explore how ancient symbolic patterns meet emerging technologies. I knew I wanted to resist the flattening of human imagination into productivity metrics and machine logic.

But studying The Spiritual Lives of the Nonreligious gave me a deeper foundation for why this work matters.

It reminded me that the future is not predestined by technology. The future is spiritual. It is ancestral. It is embodied. It is cultural. It is ritual. It is deeply human.

The question goes beyond, “What can AI do?”

The better question may be, “What kind of human beings are we becoming as we use these tools?”

And underneath that: “What must we remember so we do not become exiles from our own souls?”

That is where I find myself on this birthday threshold.

Not with a manifesto.

Not with a five-point plan.

Not even with certainty.

Instead, I return as a birthday pilgrim, carrying field notes from sixteen weeks in the wilderness. And the spiral, true to form, has brought me back here—to the pattern—to the signal beneath the noise.

Thank you for being here when I returned.

There is more to come.