Listening at Lookout Creek: Nature in Spiritual Practice

Gretel Van Wieren’s family cabin, the Cedar Shack, in northwest Michigan’s Manistee National Forest, is where she learned to fish and wade in rivers, build fires, send smoke signals, and distinguish false from true morels. It’s where she came to love the water and woods, and where she is now trying to teach her children to do the same. But decades of moving from place to place—from Eastern Africa to New England—have made trips back to the Cedar Shack scarce and short-lived. Even after movin...