I was pretty settled into my little spiritual routine. I wasn’t searching anymore—I was orbiting. Little rituals kept me alive. Sunsets, mostly. That was my thing. I’d throw a bottle of wine in my backpack and hike out somewhere high, usually near Cathedral Rock. Now, don’t get me wrong—Sedona’s not Hawaii. There’s no golden orb dipping into the Pacific. No grand finale. Just a slow death of sunlight across the canyon, shadows stretching out like old regrets. But that was the beauty of it. The quiet of it. The desert doesn’t give you spectacle. It gives you silence. It gives you smallness. It tells you, flat out, that your problems don’t mean shit in the grand scheme of things.
That’s why I loved it.
I’d get there just before sundown. Most of the tourists would be heading back—God forbid they get caught in the dark without their bug spray and Wi-Fi. Past the parking lot, you walk through Dry Creek, up the trail. It’s nothing special, not at first. But once you clear the trees, the world opens up. There’s a plateau up there—a flat, red rock stage where people sometimes gather for full moon drum circles. It feels charged, like the earth’s got something alive under its skin. The twisted juniper trees all lean like they’re listening to some secret. I’d crack open the bottle of wine, lay flat on my back, and let the stars take over.
At first, just a few. Then more. Satellites zip by. Then comes the full show—the Milky Way bleeding across the sky, reminding you how fucking small you are. And it’s beautiful. It’s humbling. You lay there in your dirt-covered clothes, your head spinning just enough from cheap red wine, and suddenly nothing matters. Your ex-wife doesn’t matter. Your mortgage doesn’t matter. Your email inbox? Burn it. You’re just dust, watching light from a billion years ago blink back at you.
That was my ritual.
Then one night, this older Asian woman wandered over as I was reaching for my wine and asked, “Would you like to join our drum circle?” I was in a rare mood—open, quiet, cracked—and said, “Yeah… I would.” So I joined them. A handful of women and one man who looked at me like I was a threat to every woman he ever wanted but couldn’t have.
There was a woman from Denmark, an energy healer from Phoenix, the Asian woman from New York, and one other I barely remember. The guy, though—he hated me. I could tell. He was one of those resentful spiritual types. The kind that doesn’t actually want peace, just wants power in a room full of women who clap when he says “vibration.”
They led me into this semi-meditative, semi-awkward circle where they played pre-recorded music off some speaker and shared stories. One lady talked about falling in love with her Reiki teacher—destroyed her marriage, now she was here to “learn the art.” The Asian woman was running from some traditional family nightmare. The Danish woman? She was the strangest. Believed heaven was inside Mount Shasta, underground, and that lava tubes were the spiritual portals. Left her family and kids to chase it. I didn’t judge. Hell, I was drinking wine with strangers on a rock—I wasn’t exactly preaching stability.
At the end of the session, they had us lay down in a circle, heads touching, feet pointed out like some cosmic flower. We stared up at the stars, the Milky Way bleeding through us like a wound we didn’t know we had. One of them asked, “Why are you here?” One by one they answered—some generic, some broken, all searching.
Then it was my turn.
I said, “I’m here to soften. To become more feminine. So I can learn how to accept and receive love.”
The women melted.
The guy? He stared at me like I’d pissed on his dreamcatcher.
But I didn’t care. I wasn’t there to impress anyone. I wasn’t trying to get laid. I had already cut myself off from the digital poison—no cell phone, no low-hanging fruit, no more Tinder-flavored connection. I was detoxing from people, from patterns, from my own bullshit.
Sedona felt like wandering through episodes of your own mind. You don’t plan much. You just drift until you cross paths with something—or someone—that holds a mirror up to you. Looking back, every person I met had something to teach me. Some tiny truth. Even if it came wrapped in delusion. Even if it stung.
That’s what church is supposed to be. Not the building, not the dogma—but the people. The gathering. The tribe. Sedona was my church for a while. The canyon was my pulpit. The stars were my choir. And these wandering souls—these broken, buzzing humans—were my congregation. I liked them. I liked their stories. I liked feeling something again.
I’d done it in churches.
I’d done it in boardrooms.
I’d done it in marriages and at dinner tables and in hospital waiting rooms.
Created circles. Shared space.
But the lesson—one I learned the hard way—was this:
Be careful who you let into your circle.
The right people will lift you.
The wrong ones will kill you slow while pretending to clap.
And whatever you do—
don’t try to fix the broken ones if they’re happy being broken.
That’s not love. That’s martyrdom.
