Ravenna, one of the doorways into
the mystical world of Dante
Journeys
These pilgrimages are contemplative in nature.
They are shaped around places where landscape, history, and myth still carry a living presence.
Walking through these environments, the journey opens a space for encounter:
with the mystique of the land, with the body in movement,
and with inner life as it unfolds in relation to place.
While each journey has its own rhythm,some take place in quieter seasons, inviting a more inward, meditative orientation.
Here, silence, slowness, and stillness become more pronounced companions.
The journeys are not tied to belief systems or backgrounds.
They are grounded in art, contemplation, shared presence, conversation, and wonder.
In-Person Retreats
Many people who feel drawn to a contemplative life have tried the practices available to them, and found that something fails to take root. Often not for lack of sincerity, but because the connection between spiritual practice and everyday life was severed. When that connection breaks, the spiritual life gravitates toward the pursuit of experience: the retreat, enlightenment, the altered state. And yet, experience, by its nature, passes, leaving life and the search for meaning largely unchanged.
What most people don't realize is that the tradition they are looking for may be hidden right before their eyes, deeply embedded in the culture that shaped them. The Western mystical inheritance — Christian, Islamic, and Judaic — was never about the pursuit of experience, but about an attunement to existence itself: to self, to others, to nature, to the world. These retreats are a serious immersion in that tradition.
Structured closer to a monastic rhythm than a typical spiritual retreat, each is built around a mystical school or tradition, approached through its primary texts, its contemplative practices, and the landscape in which it took root. That tradition is woven into the stones of its great sacred buildings, the artworks of its visionaries, the landscapes that gave those visionaries their language. Part of the work of the retreat is learning to see that inheritance again, from the inside, as those who created it intended it to be encountered.
In small groups, we explore not only what the tradition teaches, but what it asks of an ordinary life in the world today. The retreats are open to people of any religious background, or none. No prior knowledge or experience is assumed.
