I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to our Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Jaqui Eicher’s reflection and poem. After reading Christine Valters Paintner’s poem, “St. Gall and the Bear,” I responded in writing to the prompt: “Write about a time you extended kindness to someone or an animal being and they reciprocated in ways you did not expect.” My writing took me back twenty years to a moment that still sparkles in my heart; electric with love. What emerged brought tears to my eyes because I now recognize this animal encounter

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Callie J. Smith’s reflection Inner Hospitality On Those Different Days. My friend stopped his bike on the trail in front of me, sniffed the air, and asked, “Do you smell it?”  “What?”  “The animal smell.” I breathed in. Nothing.  “It’s that gamey scent,” he tried again. “You don’t smell it?”  Was it a bad smell? An unwashed body smell? I had no idea. “What’s ‘gamey’ mean?” “It smells … different.”  I shook my head, not smelling anything

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Alexia Jons’ reflection Living the Sacred in Ordinary Time: How Creativity Becomes a Form of Contemplative Prayer. For a long time, I assumed spiritual depth would arrive through dramatic moments—clarity during prayer, profound insight, or some unmistakable experience of transformation. Instead, I kept encountering God in quieter places: while journaling in the early morning, sitting with unfinished thoughts, or writing words I didn’t fully understand until they appeared on the page. What surprised me most was how

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Christine Davis’s reflection and poem Life to Life. In recent years, after deaths and losses, changes and griefs, I’ve moved farther and farther away from the traditional dogma I was raised under, and have grown increasingly impatient with what seems to me to be the empty use of religious jargon; the way words like ‘God’ are thrown around void of any true meaning, as if the terms themselves are idolized instead of being understood as signposts to