I am program curriculum developer at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, where I’ve worked for more than 20 years in both the programming and marketing departments. I have had the pleasure bringing to Omega and hosting dozens of renowned teachers, writers, artists, and performers, including Pema Chödrön, Thomas Moore, Sylvia Boorstein, Nick Flynn, Robert Thurman, Natalie Goldberg, and Meredith Monk.

In addition, I have initiated, developed, and produced a number of multi-faculty events, including programs cosponsored with Shambhala Sun magazine and the New York Center for Jungian Studies, and on subjects ranging from social media, drama, writing, and radio documentary production.

While my major programming interests are contemplative studies, writing, and psychological and spiritual inquiry and development, my other programming interests include cooking, yoga, relationships, and personal growth. And the more fickle area of “whatever tickles my fancy.” I also teach my own workshop, Memoir as Buddhist Practice: A Writing & Meditation Retreat. It’s really good.

As a writer, I have appeared in a variety of print and online publications. Recent publications include a personal essay, “Love’s Legacy Lost,” in the September 2009 issue of the Shambhala Sun and another personal essay, “My Marital Status,” published in The Sun magazine in December 2007. That essay is anthologized in The Best Buddhist Writing 2008 and in and The Mysterious Life of the Heart: Writing from The Sun about Passion, Longing, and Love.

For more than a year I wrote a popular monthly column, Here & There, for the eOmega News, and for more than 30 years I have published in other print and online venues that offer and interesting but confusing map of my development as a writer, including the New York Times, Beliefnet.com, the Christian Science Monitor, and House Beautiful.

My interviews with Pema Chödrön, Marion Woodman, and Sister Joan Chittister–all published in The Sun–are part of an ongoing series of talks with prominent women who have most influenced me. I am thinking I might interview my mother, but I’ve a feeling I already know what she’ll say.

I hold a master of divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City where, as part of my studies, I was a student chaplain in the psychiatric unit at Lenox Hill Hospital and witnessed the sometimes very, very fine line between sanity and insanity.

Speaking of which, I am also working on a novel, God help me.

I live in New York’s Hudson Valley and make frequent trips Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. I took the photo above during a walk a few miles from Gampo Abbey, a Buddhist monastic community on the northern tip of Cape Breton (next stop, Newfoundland), where I seek refuge from e-mail, texts, Facebook, and Twitter during silent, solitary retreats in a small cabin on the grounds there overlooking the vast, changeable and beautiful St. Lawrence Bay.