Tau's purpose is to love the world, by guiding people on transformative journeys toward shalom.
I envision us doing this in at least three ways, three steps or paths toward shalom:
Wilderness, Wellness, and Way of Life.
Wilderness:
Guiding others on wilderness retreats and adventures that help you encounter the creation in such a way you are awed at how small you are in the grand scheme of the cosmos, but also at how significant you are.
Providing meaningful encounters with creation and local culture.
Eventuallly Tau hopes to own and steward properties: off-grid eco-retreat centers around the world for modern people to have deep experiences of shalom and grow their appetite for more harmony with nature, self, community, and God.
Wellness: or “wholeness,” if you prefer.
The understanding that we need to get well in our thinking, our being and our doing. That we won’t simply think our way into well-being when living in a post-industrial, modern, and technological culture.
We are overloaded with information but undernourished in transformation: and transformation happens more through powerful experience than by ideology.
Personal experiences of shalom, of true wellness, will include our body, mind, & spirit. It will also include the holistic wellness of whole communities, not just individuals.
So Tau will offer health-coaching, body-care, nutrition, and other integrative practices right along with meditation, prayer, Scripture, wisdom, and community.
Way-of-Life: Tau will promote living in the world with certain ways of being. Every deeply transformative journey is as much about an inner pilgrimage as it is about an outer one. So we will connect our retreat experiences to habits of “sustainable spirituality” that are contemplative and well-rounded back home. We realize that well-being is easier to experience on retreats in nature; it’s harder at home in the demands of a hectic life. But it is not impossible; what we need is to be guided, to find the connections and habits. Tau will deepen our desire in ordinary life for creation care, for play, for deep human connection across boundaries and cultures, for living simply with joy, for a rich life that is sustainable.
“Can Tau do all of this? Or any of it?” you might ask. The question is really “Do you believe real transformation can happen?” We all ask. We wonder. We hope. We doubt.
We struggle to live in shalom because there are structures and desires at work that habituate us to prefer noise over silence, distraction over presence, accomplishment over rest, cynicism over wonder, disappointment over delight, and consumption over creation.
Imagine you sign up for a Tau retreat. You are prepared with local history, optional health-coaching, and suggested spiritual reading and practices. You begin a preparatory inner journey. One day the trip comes and you travel to Panama or Moab, Alaska or a temperate forest in Japan, a jungle in Bali or a trawler prowling coastline. You spend significant time led by experienced guides into powerful and holistic encounters with people and place…with your deepest self. You come home and the journey continues: you are helped to connect your retreat experience with new habits and ways of being in your hectic, modern, and urban life. You begin to love the world and live well.
I believe we can take steps toward shalom. I believe retreat can renew us, make us new. I believe wilderness, wellness, and way-of-life can make a difference for the world. I ask you to believe with me in Tau.
