Communion

com·mun·ion: /kə'myoonyən/ noun: the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level.

Communion

In mid-March, as the human ship anchored into Port Lockdown, my dearest friend and colleague, Jacob, urged me to begin writing a weekly essay for our burgeoning Commune community. Naively,I agreed. And these toiled-over Sunday screeds took on the playful, if slightly irritating, rubric Commusing.

The cocktail of pandemic, quarantine and social media induced a global drunkenness of anxiety and fear. By leveraging words as vessels for emotions, I hoped I could help people make a modicum of sober sense out of this confounding and uncertain time. Of course, when I penned the first missive in late March, I could not presage how tumultuous and indelible the year 2020 would be. Over time, these weekly exhortations dispatched to a million scattered souls across the globe became a sort of communion, a series of intimate spiritual conversations.

Through no premeditation, these articles took the form of biographical creative non-fiction, a genre of which I was completely unaware. Every week, I sharpened my pencil to lay my soul bare, swinging the door wide open into the madcap yarns of my family life with the hope that people might find their own stories within mine. Stories breed empathy, the donning of another’s emotional clothing, and forge connection in an increasingly atomized and lonely world.

This book is a compendium of these essays, a deep look into perennial spiritual riddles brought to the fore by an unforgettable year.

Purchase the book here.