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The Guest House: "Gem Tactics": Daily Summaries Delivered
by Shawn Parell and David Keplinger
Welcome to The Guest House, a commonweal meditation on the complexities and creative potential of being human in an era of radical change. In Season Two, cohosts Shawn Parell and David Keplinger are exploring what Emily Dickinson called "Gem Tactics," the practices by which we polish our creative engagement with life.
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- Oct 1, 20269 min
Narrated Essay: What the Circle Asks
In Bailick Park in Midleton, County Cork, nine immense stainless-steel feathers rise from the earth and curve toward the sky, forming an empty bowl. From a distance, they look almost weightless, like the remains of an immense bird. Up close, they are ribbed steel with riveted joints, casting a dark industrial sheen against their soft green surroundings. Their shape carries the invisible weight of famine, but also something more receptive and circular, like palms in open prayer.The sculpture is called Kindred Spirits. It honors the Choctaw Nation’s gift to Ireland during the Great Famine of 1847. Only fifteen years after the Trail of Tears—when starvation, disease, and death plagued the Choctaw as they marched from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States—the tribal nation learned of the treatment of the Irish people under British colonial rule. They were themselves still impoverished, still living in the aftermath of trauma and devastation. Yet they gathered $170, roughly $5,000 today, and sent it across the Atlantic to feed families they would never meet.Kindred carries the old root of kin and kind. I’m reminded of the distinction between being kind, which is an expression of our feeling of belonging, and being nice—which derives from the root word nescius, meaning “ignorant” or “not knowing.” To be nice is to be polite no matter how we feel. But to be kind is to extend our relational and ethical imagination beyond those familiar to us: to recognize ourselves in lives we cannot see, in people whose language, history, and stories are not our own, yet whose tender aliveness is no less real than our own.In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig coined the word sonder: “the profound realization that every random stranger you pass is living a life as vivid, complex, and real as your own.” I think of sonder as I move through airports and hotel lobbies, glimpsing faces illuminated by phones, people pulling suitcases through corridors. Everyone is carrying a world unseen: a diagnosis, a divorce, a child asleep at home, a hope they have yet to speak.I arrived in Ireland a few days before I was set to teach at Ballymaloe House. It was late September, and I had given myself the unusual permission of having nowhere I needed to be. I stayed in small inns and drove along stone-walled lanes, past fields bright with rain, lakes shagged with green moss, farmhouses with whitewashed walls. I sat in framed windows, holding porcelain cups of tea, and watched clouds and sunlight move gradually across the morning. With no schedule pressing against presence, I spent long stretches in strange conversation with myself about my desires and regrets, and my ancestry, and the land, and how I want to embody this life.One afternoon I drove to Lough Gur, where the Grange Stone Circle—the largest of its kind in Ireland—stands. The stones are enormous, weathered, low to the earth, arranged in a ring that has lasted for thousands of years. Archaeologists have surmised some things about the people who gathered here from remnants of beaker pots and animal bones, but they cannot say exactly how they prayed, what they feared, what they remembered, or how they ritualized the cross-quarter days, when sunlight angled through the dark. The stones don’t explain themselves. But the circle's near-perfect shape and the discovery of a posthole in its center suggest it was measured from a central stake with a rope, the entranceway aligned with the sunset on the festival of Samhain in early November.I sat down in the grass and leaned my back against one of the circle’s largest stones. The afternoon was calm, with no other visitors nearby. The lake rippled beyond the field. A bird called once. And I had the rare perception that whatever needed to happen could happen, that nothing in me had to be managed or made useful.To my surprise, I began to weep.Long ago, I learned how not to cry, and why. I am more inclined to be the person listening, comforting, finding the next practical step. But this grief—this ancient tenderness—asked nothing of me but to reverberate. It did not arrive with a question, a name, or even a reason. It was elemental, like weather; a movement whose only condition was presence and whose only message belonged to the humble ground on which I sat.Grief is one of devotion’s most honest forms. It breaks the hardened surface, asking us to place ourselves on the soft earth, where we cannot manage its outcome or coax its meaning. I cried beside that stone for a time, my heart held by its weight. And when I finally stood, my body felt emptied and rearranged.After my previous visit to Ireland, I dreamed of spirals for weeks—of the spirals I had seen in the Neolithic carvings at Newgrange and in the springtime fiddle ferns, but also of a colossal, sweeping spiral of time
- Sep 3, 20265 min
Narrated Essay: When to Plant Clover
In summer, each day invited us to expand. We followed the impulse to flower and yield; to stretch out, romp, and move; to say yes to every invitation.But in September, the imagination begins to shift. Mornings and evenings are laden with the scent of change. And as our fidelities grow more modest—sharpening our pencils, organizing our closets and calendars—our attention gathers in the nearer world.As a student of the migration of light for many years, I’ve come to trust the seasonality of practice. In the garden, not every task belongs to every season. There is a time to plant, a time to tend, and a time to harvest. There are pruning seasons and fallow seasons, too—intervals in which we make room for the conditions from which new life can grow.These inward times may not look like much from the outside, but they are essential, making release and regeneration possible. Our nervous systems and psyches are made for this: breath, reflection, reciprocity, return, creative discipline. The metabolic gestures of a real life.For his recent birthday, my son received a tiny terracotta pot with a few clover seeds in a paper package. He planted them in soil and sprinkled a few drops of water each day—and within a week, small, green, faithful sprouts appeared.Sometimes, we must sprinkle water over soil and wait. Sometimes, we must watch and learn to pray. Sometimes, we must cover the field with clover and let it rest. We must rest. This, too, is a practice.~“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.” - Wendell Berry, “The Long-Legged House”~This season, I find myself turning toward what most anchors my attention: my children, and the privilege of accompanying them in their little worlds; my work as a psychotherapist, teacher, and fellow human; and the teachings that sustain and quietly elucidate my days. The work I care most about depends on these forms of nearness.At a moment when the internet is increasingly organized to reproduce itself—when generated material arrives in ever-greater volume, and we find ourselves questioning the authenticity of a written voice, and wondering what will become of us in an endless loop of data—I am listening to the wisdom of fatigue and giving myself permission to step out of an accelerating current.Like you, I want to keep faith with a more human scale. Rather than sliding into the logic of perpetual production, I am committing to a more respectful relationship with time. This means making room for the actual dynamics of the psyche, being more intentional about how I inhabit the guiding principles of my life, and allowing this work to emerge with genuine energy and form.To that end, as a simple step, I have decided to close the paid membership option here. This publication will continue, freely offered. The archive of meditations and classes that was previously behind a paywall is now available to everyone. I’m sure that here and there The Guest House will open into a longer essay, a practice, or a conversation that arrives through inspiration—but not because an editorial calendar requires feeding.Friends: I want to express my gratitude for the generosity with which you’ve supported this body of work over the past two years. I hope it has served your path in some small way, and that you will continue to cultivate the permissions and rituals your spirit needs now, however this practice of unburdening makes sense in your life.Let’s keep finding ways to gather, share our stories, serve one another, and develop our respect for this living world. Now is the time to shore up for the duration. I’ll be right here, and perhaps more so, leaning into the tender and irreductible nature of being human.With a bow from my desk on a fresh September morning.ShawnUpcoming Gatherings+ September 20-26, 2026: Yoga, meditation, and culinary arts in the key of autumn harvest at Ballymaloe House, County Cork, Ireland.+ November 20-22, 2026: A Doorway Into Thanks: A Mary Oliver Retreat co-taught with biographer Lindsay Whalen at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, MA. Registration now open.A Practical Note for Paid SubscribersAs of September 1, your payments have been paused.You will retain access to the full arc
- Jul 19, 20268 min
Narrated Essay: Pictures For The Future
Registration will close this month for The Tender Harvest, a harvest yoga, meditation, and culinary retreat at world-class Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland. Join this Sept 20-26, 2026, for a time of deep nourishment, learning, and inspiration. Just 2 rooms still available!A dog’s retching yanks me from sleep. I’ve been floating between worlds all night, and suddenly I’m across the room before a thought can take shape. The dense atmosphere of a dream lingers as I kneel to wipe the floor, then thins as my mind reaches for it. I was in a foreign place, though the landscape felt familiar. I was with friends, though they were not themselves. There was a house. The house was a river. Its rooms were water.With a sigh, the dog returns to bed. The house settles back into stillness. I move mutely to my meditation cushion. Incense lit, tea steeping, for a time, I watch tendrils of smoke and steam mingle in the dawning air.Practice teaches us to notice what’s here. Gradually, our attention steadies and we begin to perceive what is real—the interplay of spirit and matter, psyche and body—through the tuning fork of our awareness. We grow quieter, more supple, more receptive—less beholden to neurosis and fixed assumptions. What we lose in certainty, we gain in texture and attunement.As humans, especially now, our well-being depends on how honestly we inhabit the faculties of our aliveness. What do we know to be true, and by what inner or outer measure? How much doubt do we allow in the margins of confirmation? What may appear real, yet on closer examination, carries the subtle signature of an illusion? And, inversely: where have we developed trust in modes of knowing that defy rational explanation?In classical yoga philosophy, pramana offers a basic epistemic map. It names three valid sources of knowledge: direct perception (pratyaksha), inference (anumana), and trusted testimony (sabda). I know the river is cold because I have placed my hand in it. I know the river is cold because it flows from glacial melt. I know the river is cold because someone I trust has told me so.Of these, direct perception carries the weight of fact. Yet fact alone does not confer context. The elephant’s tail may still seem a pestle to a blind man, as the Buddhist parable goes. Here, the animal’s trumpet or a friend’s account can augment our own perception. Thus, these three sources of knowledge uphold one another.But in Paris last month, standing beneath Hilma af Klint’s paintings at the Grand Palais, I sensed how this era of dissolving certainties is inviting us to loosen and refine our frameworks for human intelligence. Knowing is not the intellect’s final stamp of approval. It is a function of our embodied, psychic, and spiritual capacities—and it keeps calling us to widen what we recognize as real.Born in 1862, af Klint painted vast, abstract diagrams of a reality folded within this one: swirls of color, spirals, botanical forms, and galaxies. Her pioneering abstract works, begun as early as 1906, were long kept hidden and revealed only, at her direction, decades after her death. Working with a circle of women known as The Five, she participated in séances where language and image moved through them. One presence, whom she called Ananda, instructed her to create a series of paintings “for the temple.” These “pictures for the future” were meant for the future, for an audience who could see beyond the pastoral and parlor depictions of her time.Standing before af Klint’s paintings a century later, I considered what it takes to be faithful to what arrives through intuition—to stake our knowing on image, or symbol, or an inner insistence just beyond explanation.Carl Jung described intuition as that which “mediates perceptions in an unconscious way… and has the character of being given.” Distinguishing it from the more rational functions of thinking, sensing, and feeling, Jung characterized intuition as irrational, bypassing conscious logic to immediately grasp hidden patterns, meanings, and future possibilities.In the years surrounding the First World War, Jung recorded dreams, visions, and dialogues with figures arising from his psyche. He came to understand that aspects of the psyche “produce themselves and have their own life.” The Red Book was later compiled as a document of these encounters and his willingness to be reshaped by
- May 12, 20267 min
Narrated Essay: Entering the Estuary
I’ll be teaching yoga & meditation this September 20-26 at Ballymaloe House in Ireland with Erin Doerwald. It’s a profoundly beautiful, nurturing setting for retreat. Join us for rhythms of daily practice, exquisite farm-to-table meals, and cultural exploration. Plus cedar saunas and a cold sea plunge! We welcome you to join us for this extraordinary retreat—more info at shawnparell.com/irelandI was puttering around on my desktop last week—doing anything to avoid beginning this draft—when an email arrived from Satya Doyle Byock, Director of the Salomé Institute of Jungian Studies, psychotherapist, and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. I’m connected to Satya’s work through a yearlong course in Jungian psychology, so it felt synchronous that her voice should reach me in the midst of a procrastination I had entered but not yet named.In her newsletter, Satya reflected on how AI-generated content has begun to drain her motivation to write, or at least to write in the digital landscape:“The existential (or is it creative?) concern is not only that I don’t know that I can keep up; it’s that I’m not sure I want to.I don’t want to feel frenzied for any reason, let alone in order to keep pace with robots.”I felt an immediate resonance. A similar resistance has been gathering at the edges of my awareness in recent months. As ever, I am drawn to the practice of writing; I feel reluctant, though, to keep step with machines, and wary of the subtle infiltration of AI’s manufactured voice into the written word. Its outputs are refining by the day, but its velocity, seamlessness, and casual superiority register as categorically inhuman. Even the term content betrays the shift: it names a product, not a process. Writing still implies the grist of a mind at work.Momentarily, I consider abandoning the whole imperfect enterprise of these essays. Why compete with the speed of light? Human attention—my attention—has already been profoundly shaped, even warped, by life in the digital age. Like Satya, I am unwilling to have my nervous system further conscripted into that race.But then I pause. Because keeping pace is not, and never was, the aim of this work.In 1884, William James insisted, in his early challenge to Cartesian dualism, that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.” Emotion, for James, arises from embodied sensation—from the interplay of pulse and breath, fascia and nerve synapse. What, then, are we encountering in AI’s frictionless outputs, if not language severed from the very conditions that allow for feeling?Beyond its basic communicative function, writing is one of the ways humanity has revealed itself to itself across generations. Its deeper value—like all art—is metabolic. The artist’s task is to sustain attention—to lower a bucket into the shadowed recesses of the psyche and draw up something true. Something we can hold up to the light and marvel: this has been here all along.Silene stenophylla—the narrow-leafed campion—offers a botanical echo of this process through millennia. Revived from 32,000-year-old tissue preserved in the frozen burrows of Arctic ground squirrels, its cells were coaxed back into bloom. Its resurrection gestures toward the truth that creation unfolds according to its own tempos, on timescales that exceed human urgencies. No algorithm can hasten such an emergence. It belongs to the potential of living systems. Silene stenophylla stands for all that has yet to be brought to light.My family is moving through a health circumstance that has re-angled the light on everything. I find myself asking, with unusual clarity, what it means to be human. What is this brief and improbable flare of existence, this particular arrangement of spirit and days—and what, in fact, matters within it? I am learning that no intelligence outside nature’s intelligence—the one that moves through this body, shaped by my relationships, my encounters, my losses and blessings—can do this work for me. Integration is not transferable. It is slow chemistry, the metabolism of meaning, made possible by contact and time.In this unprecedented modern experiment—this “rough initiation,” to borrow Francis Weller’s phrase from In the Absence of the Ordinary—we are tasked not only with preserving our shared existence, but with tending the intricate ecology by which we make sense of being human at all.To that end, I was struck by <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/pr
- Mar 23, 20264 min
Narrated Essay: The Finch's Song
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.” —D. H. LawrenceThe sky is a flawless blue above the high mountain desert of Northern New Mexico. Though the air is thick with dust and pollen, transitional winds sharpen the senses and sweep away winter’s accumulations. White blossoms rise from the upturned branches of the apricot tree while the ground beneath them cracks with thirst.Strange, precarious, hopeful, persistent—spring is arriving like this.The footnote beneath every casual conversation about the weather is the acknowledgment that winter never truly came. There was no white hush of falling snow, no soft crunch of boots on morning trails. Instead, we drifted mildly between seasons. And now, as one season seems to step over the stalled breath of another, some disturbed, animal part of us still seems to be waiting for what should have been.Meanwhile, my son runs into the kitchen sobbing. He has found his black betta fish floating belly-up among artificial sea grass and smooth glass pebbles. He holds our hands and dares to look again at the body of the fish that drifts motionless with its long, obsidian streamers. He asks us unanswerable questions. Inside this clear bowl with its fabricated landscape is a miniature initiation with a force more surprising and less negotiable than anything he has known.So, we speak softly about the kingdom of the living, and how every living thing will one day cease to be as it was, about energy, and spirit, and how time moves all things.The earth tilts, and so must we. Even in grief, the world continues making its arrangements, asking us to gather ourselves and show up for its manifold losses and resurrections.For one example, house finches are nesting in the transoms above my downtown office, their tangled warbling made of brief, insistent notes, repeated and rearranged over and over again. Their lives are delicate, I know, but their song carries no hint of brevity or mourning.Equinox offers a momentary balance in the forward thrust of light. It reminds us how we, too, can find our way to equilibrium, and thereby resource the heart as it learns to bear its own weather. Framed by all manner of human suffering, current and perennial, simple acts of care can become green shoots rising up through hardened soil. A hand held, a stranger respected, a woman rested—these are all defenses against despair.“Care”—from the Old English caru, cearu—once referred to the burdens that bend the heart: “sorrow,” “anxiety,” “concern,” “grief.” In this sense, the impulse to nurture began as a name for the wound itself. Before it meant to tend or guard, to care meant to ache, to remain near the pain.True care does not hover above suffering, nor does it rescue; it simply shows up with a willing heart and persists. What appears small is not, therefore, insignificant. The heart hears the finch’s song and remains willing to listen, not because it is promised anything, not because the world is kind or comforting, but because it still knows how, and that counts for something. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shawnparell.substack.com/subscribe
- Feb 22, 20266 min
Narrated Essay: Deconstructing the Caterpillar
Just as there are darkened seasons in human history—times when the structures sustaining civilization collapse in on themselves and humanity finds itself stiff-fisted, grasping at brittle branches, slipping between worlds—so too is every individual subject to phases of undoing in the metamorphosis of a lifetime.Entering the chrysalis is rarely a matter of choice. We would resist if we could. One morning, we awaken with a pit in the stomach, a visceral unease that signals change even before we can name its source. Quite all of a sudden, we find we have entered a dream with no solid ground and no turning back. Loss feels imminent, along with the uncertainty of what comes next or how we will get there. We try to keep moving, mistaking busyness for control of circumstance. We hoist the blueprints of our former lives above our heads to keep them dry, trying to shore up what is already dissolving.We try very hard, as all creatures do, not to die. Yet for the caterpillar, entering the chrysalis is a form of programmed death—a gruesome act of self-digestion. What can the larva comprehend of its own metamorphosis as it surrenders to darkness and enzymatic dissolution? Before it can be reconstituted, the caterpillar’s whole body must pupate—which is to say liquify. Epithelial cells breaking down, muscles and mandibles lysed by their own enzymes, the entire body reduced to a nutrient slurry.Every winter, nature takes this serious turn. Fallen leaves coil in on themselves, roots retreat, seeds release, and stillness wraps the living world. Here’s orientation from a recent column in our cherished local magazine, the Santa Fe New Mexican —“In winter, our arid steppe climate shows us the value of leaving things alone. Grasses left standing become shelter. Seed heads become sustenance. Evergreen shrubs offer cover from wind and predators when the world feels most exposed. What looks untidy to us is, in fact, a carefully balanced system of protection and patience. The garden does not ask us to fix it in January—only to witness it.”The winter gardener knows not to try to fix such depression, but instead to witness and accompany the world beyond control. For the winter gardener recognizes the fallows as sanctuary, the outer casings of seed heads and pale grasses as fortresses of transformation, and death as a passage between birthing seasons. This is the winter gardener’s regenerative faith.Similarly, with respect to human development, Jungian analyst and author Marion Woodman called the chrysalis “a twilight between past, present, and future,” a place where the psyche must “tolerate annihilation—just long enough for the new form to begin assembling itself.” She described the sojourn of life as a series of “border crossings between what we were and what we cannot yet imagine.”For the caterpillar, the dream of the butterfly is carried by imaginal cells—tiny, sac-like clusters that, through the primordial twilight of metamorphosis, give rise at last to compound eyes, scaled wings—a new and elegant anatomy. This is how a creature built for crawling holds within its body the imagination of flight.In his 1910 Oxford lecture, The Birth of Humility, anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett described metamorphic thresholds as “psycho-physical,” when body and mind falter so that “latent energies [may] gather strength for activity on a fresh plane.”The most courageous way we can enter the chrysalis is with attunement. “Pause,” Marett wrote, “is the necessary condition of the development of all those higher purposes which make up the rational being.” James Baldwin attested that the darkest hour can “force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error.” We cannot will ourselves to grow, for transformation is an act of presence, not power. But within the privacy of our consciousness, with patience and attention, we can rediscover the forces shaping our evolution and develop faith in what is becoming.In Jungian terms, the collective mirrors the individual psyche: what deconstructs in the outer world—painfully, though necessarily—reflects what must be reimagined from within. Today, democratic principles and ecological balance are slipping from their axes. But, as Marett observed, “Not until the days of this period of chrysalis life have been painfully accomplished can [a person] emerge a new and glorified creature.”Some silent, imaginal knowledge within us already knows the way. Here in the high desert, the earliest bloomers will soon appear: proof that the intelligence of life has been preparing the ground, all along, for the resurrection of some new and common beauty.Together, we’re making sense of what it means to be human in an
- Jan 25, 20265 min
Narrated Essay: The Baring Season
Nearing the end of January, I’m only beginning to feel the sinew of this new year. Here in the United States, we’re reckoning with what seems like a sudden surge of authoritarianism—though, as Hemingway reminds us in The Sun Also Rises, collapse happens “two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” The hubris we’ve unleashed from within now sends shockwaves through the world, unmooring the institutions we’ve depended on and unsettling the nervous system of our species.Staying human amidst the swirl has become a practice unto itself. We must maintain the pleasantries of our daily lives, yoke ourselves to the people and practices that organize and buoy the mind, and make actionable the indignance of our deeper values—all while sifting through the muck and shimmer of the collective unconscious.Of those in privileged circumstances, many are divesting themselves of accountability or arming up for an uncertain future. Even a question like “How’s it going?” can land strangely if it feels insulated from the existential tremors of the moment.Winter, of course, is the barest season. It’s a time when thin, long-shadowed light clarifies sight and stillness disciplines attention, when branches shiver as the wind exposes the decorative notions of warmer seasons.A few weeks ago, I sat down with two friends, David Keplinger and Lindsay Whalen, whose companionship is like wool wrapped around the cold turnings of life. Our purpose was to interview Lindsay about the poet Mary Oliver—the subject of her forthcoming biography from Penguin Press—and to trace the threads of synchronicity and coherence among us.I imagine that rendering anyone’s soul requires discipline and sustained concentration. But Mary’s life, as her poetry reflects, was singular, cloistered, and prolific, demanding of her biographer an uncommon devotion. In our conversation, Lindsay explained that she misses Mary less than she might another deceased friend, given that she remains in constant contact with her. Yet there’s one quality of Mary’s presence she said she misses: “When she looked at you, she really looked at you. It was a sustained gaze.” David, whose friendship with Mary spanned decades, smiled in agreement: “In her life, as in her work, she looked longer instead of looking away.”The word concentration derives from the Latin concentrātiō, meaning “the action or act of coming together at a single place.” It breaks down to con- (“together, with”) + centrum (“center”)—literally “bringing to a common center.” Originally, it described physical gathering, such as converging on a single point, and later evolved to refer to mental focus.In the prose collection Winter Hours, Mary distinguishes faith—“tensile, and cool, and [having] no need of words”—from hope, which she portrays more vigorously as “a fighter and a screamer.” And in her poem “The Clam,” we see how even a lowly, languageless creature is granted “a muscle that loves being alive.”Winter, too, does this work, sucking vital force inward to the quick. Every living thing must concentrate to survive. Trees shunt sap to heartwood and root; slow-breathing bears dream of thaw; squirrels make their caloric calculations. Even seeds, dark-bound beneath frozen ground, aspire toward germination.Hope, in this sense, is muscular. It is the fight to make the world a place we can live in. Not mere optimism, but the tender refusal to shut down in the face of suffering. It is the muscle that strengthens our will, linking imagination to endurance and promise to conviction.I have attempted several commentaries on this deranged geopolitical moment, wishing to say to friends around the world that we have a long history of abusive power dynamics to reckon with in the U.S.—which is no excuse. But we also have citizens like Renée Good, whose last words were “I’m not mad at you.”So, don’t give up on us.Even winter seems uncertain now, bringing tepid temperatures and pallid light where once it cut clean. So we train our gaze on what’s alive and here. We look closer, we grope for strength, for the sinews of our common sense—those cords that connect fibrous muscle to bare bone. A blackbird’s caw splits a sodden field. Hope does not flinch; it fastens.Together, we are making sense of being human in an era of radical change. Your presence here matters. Thank you for reading, sharing, ‘heart’ing, commenting, and subscribing to The Guest House. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shawnparell.substack.com/subscribe
- Jan 18, 20261h 0m
The Poet of Dawn is the Poet of Darkness: A Talk with Mary Oliver Biographer Lindsay Whalen
Seven years after Mary Oliver’s death, her work feels even more vital, showing us how to love the world with its myriad faces.In this episode, we have the sincere honor of speaking with biographer Lindsay Whalen, whose forthcoming book from Penguin Press explores the life behind the beloved poet. Our conversation ranges from the poet’s focus on real life and her famous anonymity to David’s and Lindsay’s shared experiences with Mary in the years they knew her.Gathering these voices who represent the small group of surviving friends of the poet, the conversation goes deep into the links between Mary’s influence on Shawn’s practice as a yogi and therapist, David’s poetry, and Lindsay’s much-anticipated account of this singular human life.Lindsay Whalen is writing the first biography of the poet Mary Oliver, forthcoming from The Penguin Press. She is the recipient of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship and is a graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA in Fiction. She began her career in publishing, and continues to work with authors as an independent editor.Resource Links:Learn more about Lindsay and her work:Upcoming Seminar: Lindsay Whalen on Mary Oliver and “The Human Seasons” *Begins Jan 20, 2026. Scholarship applications due by Friday, Jan 16, 2026.Instagram: @lwhalen13NYMag Article: How Mary Oliver’s Biographer Finally Met the Legendary PoetMore from David - book releases, workshops, mindfulness talks, upcoming events, and more:Website: Davidkeplingerpoetry.comInstagram: @DavidKeplingerPoetrySubstack: Another Shore with David KeplingerSubstack Author Page: https://substack.com/@davidkeplingerMore from Shawn - free audio meditations, upcoming events, retreats, monthly essays, yoga classes, and music alchemy:Website: Shawnparell.comInstagram: @ShawnParellSubstack: The Guest HouseSubstack Author Page: https://substack.com/@shawnparellTogether, we’re being human in an era of radical change. Your presence here matters. Bless our work algorithmically with your This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shawnparell.substack.com/subscribe
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About The Guest House: "Gem Tactics"
Welcome to The Guest House, a commonweal meditation on the complexities and creative potential of being human in an era of radical change. In Season Two, cohosts Shawn Parell and David Keplinger are exploring what Emily Dickinson called "Gem Tactics," the practices by which we polish our creative engagement with life.
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The Guest House: "Gem Tactics" publishes monthly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does The Guest House: "Gem Tactics" cover?
The Guest House: "Gem Tactics" covers topics including Fitness, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality, Health & Fitness, Mental Health. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
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