Like many who go on a Goddess reclamation journey, I lost access to both relationships and communities that once anchored my life.

It was a disorienting few years.

Hard as it was, I accepted these losses as the price I had to pay for finding and exercising my feminine power.

But though I left the religion of my ancestors, deeply wounded by it, I also never stopped loving that world.

Ancient scripture, sacred language, prayer, ritual, mysticism, or the strange old worlds from which those traditions came still called to me. Increasingly, I found myself drawn toward the Middle East, and eventually toward the desert itself.

So I went:

with two small suitcases, an envelope of cash, and no Plan B.

Over the years, that journey has taken me through Egypt, Arabia, Anatolia, the Syrian borderlands, and Sinai. I began traveling through, and eventually living within, landscapes that had formed many of the traditions I thought I had left behind.

And the closer I came to the land, the stranger the old division became.

I encountered the Goddess not by moving farther away from my inheritance, but by moving more deeply into its world.

Through ancient texts and sacred languages. Through temples, churches, monasteries, shrines, ruins, and pilgrimage roads. Through icons and hymns, lamentation and prayer. Through the oud, ney, and frame drum. Through Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and ancient Near Eastern traditions that had developed in conversation with these landscapes over thousands of years.

I began studying the languages themselves, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic, because translation alone increasingly felt insufficient. I wanted to hear something of these traditions in their own voices.

I also began to understand that the different territories of my work had never been as disconnected as they appeared.

Goddess spirituality. Embodied gnōsis. Sacred sound. Jewish and early Christian mysticism. Ancient Near Eastern religion. Pilgrimage. Feminine traditions hidden within the margins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I wasn’t changing subjects. I was traveling ever deeper into the desert.

And the desert changed the questions I was asking.

What happens when we stop encountering ancient goddesses as figures extracted from their landscapes and begin exploring the worlds that knew them?

What forms of relationship with the feminine sacred survived inside traditions that officially became patriarchal and monotheistic?

What might we discover if we approached the Divine Mother not only through ideas about Her, but through the languages, songs, prayers, images, gestures, landscapes, and devotional practices through which human beings have approached Her for millennia?

And what happens when women who left their inherited religions to find the Goddess discover that returning does not necessarily mean going backward?

These questions became the ground beneath Return to the Desert.

Today, my work brings scholarship and lived practice into conversation. I write, teach, make art and music, research ancient traditions, and create devotional experiences that invite women into direct encounter with the sacred worlds of the desert.

I am particularly interested in the Divine Mother as She appears across the religious landscapes of the Middle East: in goddesses and saints, Wisdom traditions and sacred texts, icons and hymns, pilgrimage and prayer, stars and stones.

I don’t believe information alone is enough.

We live in an age when more knowledge about religion, history, scripture, and spirituality is available to us than at any previous moment. But knowing about something is not the same as encountering it.

Sometimes you have to learn the prayer.

Sometimes you have to sing the words.

Sometimes you have to walk the road.

Sometimes you have to touch the stone.

Return to the Desert is an invitation to do exactly that.

I now live in Cairo, Egypt, where I continue to study, write, make art and music, and follow the old roads wherever they lead.

The desert is never very far away.