Starting the Journey After a short presentation on the history of the 12 th century chapel, and a few samples of their home-made liqueurs, I wandered away from the cloister and into a grove of trees. Founded in 11th century France, the Carthusian Order is perhaps the most austere of the Roman Catholic monastic orders. The monks live more like solitary hermits than the community-oriented Benedictine and Trappist Orders of classical medieval Europe. The year was 2011, and I was in the last few months of joint master''s degrees in forestry and theology at Yale University. Our European forestry field trip had stopped at a medieval Carthusian monastery nestled in the rolling hills of rural Slovenia, mostly for the liqueurs, but there was also a small medieval village life museum and several state foresters there to answer questions about the surrounding forestland. After the fieldtrip I would return to Connecticut to join the school''s Forest Crew in the northeast corner of Connecticut for a summer as an intern forester. I was feeling tired from the pace of our travel, and the gnawing anxiety of looming student loan debt and uncertain job prospects. I was also nursing the dull throb of a drawn out crisis of faith that left my relationship with the Mormon (LDS) faith anything but clear.

I continued my solitary walk along a stucco''d wall clothed in red roses, wandered into the forest and stood in silence. The forest held the cloister in a soft, vegetative embrace. I craned my neck to gaze up into the leafy branches of a cruciform ash tree with veins of lianas slithering up a slender bole. As the sun-dappled leaves flitted and started, my body began to relax for the first time in a long time, and a sense of calm came over me like a cool breeze. Something about the balance of land, work, and prayer was undeniably appealing to me and my mind began to turn with questions. With beginnings in the desert wilderness, monasticism grew from seeds planted by the so-called desert fathers and mothers, a loosely organized group of Christians that 20 th century monk and writer Thomas Merton called "spiritual anarchists." Whereas Catholic friars and priests take the familiar religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to a superior, monks make a vow of stability. From the Latin stabilitas, this means that they vow to live a life committed to the community and to the place.

The cell (a monk''s room), the monastery''s chapel and refectory; the paths, fields and forests, become the desert wherein monks set out on a journey toward union with God. Their rootedness to place and the rich historical and theological symbolism of wilderness are pathways on this journey. European monastic communities, which institutionalized this desert solitude, have been managing land both as a material and spiritual resource for centuries, and in the present case, the land supported the monks'' life of prayer with its agricultural produce and liqueurs. The forests surrounding the monastery served not only as a physical buffer zone against the noise and concerns of the outside world, but as a spiritual refuge from the heady contemplative prayer that punctuated the monks'' daily rhythm. Standing in that grove of trees set me on an amazing journey, one that would lead me to discover the riches of contemplative Christianity and teach me valuable lessons about the power of place in our troubled and troubling times. But first, a bit about me. I was raised in Yorba Linda, a wealthy equestrian suburb that abuts the scrubby Chino Hill State Park in Orange County, California. The Tongva, Chumash, Acjachemen and Payómkawichum peoples have lived on the idyllic shores of Southern California from time immemorial.

Spanish ranchos and later Anglo-Americans farmers who marginalized these Indigenous peoples lavished in the Mediterranean climate. After World War II, houses and strip malls burst from the soil like so many pastel toadstools. Today Orange County is something of a poster child for the conspicuous consumption that many Americans aspire to. My parents become active in the Mormon Church, or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was about seven, and these were the religious waters I swam in until a mild rebellious phase during my teenaged years, when Kurt Cobain and grunge became by pseudo-religion. Eventually, I settled down and decided with some trepidation to participate in the central rite of passage of Mormonism by going on a mission trip. Unlike my Evangelical friends who went out with large groups for a week or so at a time, Mormons send their young people on missions for one and half to two years. I was sent to the Santiago Mission which comprises the northern third of the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti. After my two years, I enrolled in the LDS church-owned Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

The campus is nestled between the Wasatch Mountains and the vast Utah Lake. As a student, my faith in Mormonism stagnated. The political climate of Utah, and a deep longing for a richer spiritual life left me feeling isolated from my chipper peers. I carried this weight into my master''s work in forestry and theology at Yale. Busy as I was, I still felt the nagging of existential loneliness and a deep sense of uncertainty about my place in the world. After I graduated from Yale, I landed a teaching position back in Salt Lake City and summer work with the US Forest Service--putting both my masters of theology and masters of forestry to work! I stepped away from my Mormon practice and began to meditate, to eagerly visit temples, cathedrals, synagogues and mosques. Teaching courses in religious studies and ethics at the local community college, I too became a student of the world''s beautiful faiths. It was during this time that I discovered the writings of Thomas Merton, who had almost single handedly revitalized Catholic contemplative spirituality in the 1950s and 60s, and was enjoying a surge in popularity among spiritual types from a variety of backgrounds.

I learned that there was a monastery of Merton''s order in Huntsville, Utah, so I decided to go on my first ever retreat. Perched in a mountain valley of neatly quilted hay and pasture, overlooking impossibly beautiful mountains, the monastery radiated the kind of peace that I was craving in my search for spiritual sustenance. There was a deep power to the place that I could not name, but reminded me of the peace I felt in that grove of ash trees in the monastery in Slovenia. On the day I arrived in Vancouver at the end of July 2013, the air was humid and thick with the smell of decaying mushrooms. It was my first semester of doctoral work, and I had decided to live on campus in a small communal dormitory for graduate students called Green College. I pulled into a small parking lot at the University of British Columbia, perched on the edge of the continental mainland, and checked in at the residence office. I was told that my dorm was not quite ready, so I decided to explore. I descended a steep staircase, and step by step the heat and humidity eased and the sparkle of the Salish Sea began to glimmer through the emerald green canopy of Douglas fir and big leaf maple trees that clung to sandy cliffs.

My legs, stiff from the long drive, began to tremble slightly from the repetitive movement. When my feet finally hit sand, I looked up and the shady green of the forest had transformed into a bifocal view of tan beach and calmly lapping blue sea. Wild rocky shores, distant mountainsides of verdant Douglas fir forests. I felt like I had found the long lost Garden of Eden in the wilds of the Pacific West. I felt at home in Vancouver''s lush coastal rainforest, and soon, I found my next spiritual home as well. I was baptized into Saint Augustine of Canterbury''s Roman Catholic Church on Easter of 2014. Contemplative Christianity became a much yearned for well of spiritual sustenance for me, and as I searched for a dissertation topic that would allow me to explore the emerging alliance between religion, spirituality and ecology, the relationship between monks and their places presented themselves as the perfect project. The power of monastic places which had led me to Catholicism, was also leading me to investigate questions about the power of place in a world of ecological distress.

Over the next seve.