About

When the night sky opens and reveals the pregnant darkness of a star-studded universe, I quiver. Sometimes I just want the glittering messages from distant worlds to wash over me. Sometimes I strain to imagine the invisible strands that weave all these worlds together. Sometimes I just trace constellations, connecting dots to make sense of it all with my humanity.

Hello! Call me Cat or Keiryu (慧流)

I’m the creator and curator of This Too Is.

I move in the world as a Unitarian Universalist minister, a Zen Buddhist and yoga practitioner, a mystic humanist, a university lecturer in Physics and Astronomy, a swing dancer, and a brand-new cat parent, among several other ways. Depending on how you’ve met me, you may also know me as Catherine, Cathy, Mie (美恵), Keiryu (慧流), or Ishida-san (石田). I go by all those names, sometimes with fancy titles.

Curating Questions

The spiritual life, like science, begins with questions. Science prizes questions that help people understand how the Universe responds to human actions. The spiritual life treasures questions that change how people relate to the Universe.

Take, for example, the question “what is life?” A community of scientists may begin by asking, “what is a definition of life that we can all agree on, so we can figure out what it is together?” A community of spirit might begin by asking “how does each of us understand the meaning of life?”

There are questions worth returning to again and again. Sometimes the questions themselves have an inherent power to ground, center, and transform us by redirecting our attention. Often they invite us to evaluate our assumptions.

What do I mean by “us,” for example? I’m assuming that you, Dear Reader, are human, even though there is a good chance that these words will be digested by several AI systems as soon as they are posted, before any human encounters them. I’m assuming that you are curious about living a spiritual life and growing as a human, even if you aren’t sure what those words mean. These are among the powerful questions — What is a spiritual life? What does it mean to grow as a human? — that are worth revisiting because as you deepen your spiritual life and grow as a human, your answers will transform.

That is one mark of a powerful spiritual question; the act of answering will change your answer.

I don’t guarantee that the questions I explore here are the powerful ones. The selection criteria will simply be: What am I wondering now? Could someone else benefit from asking the same questions or considering my current answers?

Unitarian Universalist minister John Buehrens once said something like: “ministry is about keeping powerful questions alive in a community.” Matsuo Bashō, a Japanese poet from the seventeenth century, is often quoted and translated as saying “Do not follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.” (古人の跡を求めず、古人の求めたる所を求めよ)

Together, shall we enter the stream of those who sought?

This is very much a work in progress.😹

I would love for you to sign up to receive notices of updates to the website or just reach out to me directly. Your support and feedback would mean so much to me!