The Power of the Pain
with Kelly Dean Billings, Guest Speaker

July 27, 2025 Our spiritual journeys often start with a crisis of faith, dark nights of the soul, or simply questioning what we've been taught, which can propel us into spiritual deconstruction, then reconstruction, if we are willing. Join me as I share mine.

Kelly Dean Billings has been a spiritual teacher for over 20 years. He's a spiritual counselor with hospice patients and sees clients in private practice. He worked nearly seven years w/ refugees in the Middle-East, mostly Palestine. He’s led various advocacy and justice initiatives for refugees, racial reconciliation, homelessness, and mental health. He completed an M.A. from Trinity College, UK; is a Certified Instructor of Mental Health First Aid; and holds a non-denominational ordination.

When the Word for Tree was Landholder
with Ellent Waterston, Guest Speaker

July 20, 2025 Ellen Waterston, author and Oregon Poet Laureate, contemplates and celebrates all things words -- their origins, power, color, meaning, and musicality, their evolution and life span; their exotic configuration into languages. What do the modifications, abuses, and losses signal about our capacity for relationship to place and one another?

Award-winning poet and author Ellen Waterston has dedicated herself to writing and advocating for the literary arts in the high desert region of Oregon, all the while continuing to write poetry and nonfiction works that have evolved into essential reading about Oregon and the West. She has published four poetry and five literary nonfiction titles and is the founder of the Writing Ranch and of the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize. 2024 was a banner year for Waterston who, that year, received Soapstone's Bread and Roses Award and Literary Arts Stewart H. Holbrook Award, and was named the eleventh Poet Laureate of Oregon. She is currently completing a fifth collection of poetry.