Rewiring My Brain

“So, what are you doing now?” my well-meaning friends would ask after I had quit my job with no apparent employment or other occupation in sight. The only honest answer I could give was to say, “I’m rewiring my brain.”

Perhaps a few understood, but to most it must have sounded like Steve was going off the deep end. Which, I guess, I was. I was 52 years old and had just resigned from running the nonprofit I had founded a decade -earlier. Our son was in college, our daughter a senior in high school, applying to college. My wife was working for the same little organization I had just left. We lived simply, but still. . . . It was not, to say the least, a sensible time to quit working. …

Stephen Blackmer is a conservationist and forest ecologist who took time out for “Rewiring My Brain” (40) and became an Episcopal priest. He is the founder of Church of the Woods, a church rooted in the faith and practices of Jesus and Francis of Assisi that meets in the woods year-round. He is also director of Kairos Earth, which seeks to renew an understanding of the natural world as a bearer of the sacred, and to restore this awareness as a foundation of both religious practice and practical action to conserve the earth.