You Care About the Earth. So Why Do You Still Feel Disconnected From Her?
Start Here: this is what Where Insight Meets Earth is, and whether it is for you.
You feel the losses of the natural world in ways you cannot always explain to other people.
Still, something feels missing. Not a gap in knowledge, but rather a gap in contact. The Earth still feels like somewhere you live rather than something you belong to.
We live in a culture that treats the natural world as a resource and backdrop. Something to visit, consume, or grieve from a distance. That orientation runs deeper than we realize; it shapes how we walk, what we notice, and what we feel entitled to belong to. It spills over into how land is treated, how other species are regarded, and how the slow erosion of the living world becomes something we watch rather than something we are part of.
The disconnection you feel is not a personal failing. It is what happens when a culture teaches you to use the Earth rather than live in relationship with it.
You have tried the available approaches. Some helped. None quite reached the thing underneath. At some point, you started wondering whether the problem is you, or the approaches, or whether this kind of belonging is even possible anymore.
Where Insight Meets Earth is for nature-minded spiritual seekers ready to stop inhabiting the Earth and start belonging to it, through contemplative walking, ecospirituality, and practice rooted in kinship with the living Earth.
On my second walk along the Camino de Santiago, I came down with full-blown bronchitis. Coughing, wheezing, struggling to breathe through villages and across plateaus I had been anticipating for months. When your body is occupied with the basic work of breathing, you cannot walk for performance. My attention stopped turning inward and went outward instead.
It went outward.
I noticed the quality of light on the path. The sound my walking poles made against stone. The way the fields held the morning. I was not monitoring my experience. I was in relationship with where I was.
Hundreds of healthy miles had not taught me that. Five days of walking sick did.
Everything I write here lives inside that difference.
What Brought Me Here
My academic formation, my tree named Hermann, my bronchitis on a French plateau, and the two ravens who stood in my path on a January morning in Paris all belong to the same person. I am still trying to hold them together as I continue to deepen into what they teach.
That person is Jeffrey Keefer, a Chaplain at New York University, a Professor of Research Methodology with a PhD in Educational Research, and an Ordained Wild Guide. I have walked the Camino de Santiago five times, four of them along France's ancient Le Puy route, covering over 500 miles of pilgrimage paths.
This combination, the academic and the contemplative, the research and the ravens, is precisely what this publication is built from. I developed and teach the Rewilding the Soul Ecospirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, which began in March 2026. I also guide small contemplative walking retreats for 4 participants, with private rooms, directly on the Le Puy Camino de Santiago route, where the Camino itself does most of the teaching.
What Actually Shifts
Readers who stay long enough report specific shifts. Walks change. Ecological grief becomes something they can carry rather than something that flattens them. Specific places and beings become real relationships rather than scenery.
Over time, this publication builds:
A contemplative walking practice that works on a city sidewalk or an ancient pilgrimage route, turning ordinary movement into genuine presence.
An ecospirituality rooted in kinship rather than guilt, so your relationship with the Earth nourishes rather than exhausts you.
The ability to hold ecological grief without being consumed by it, because you have a practice underneath you.
The lived experience of belonging to the Earth rather than merely inhabiting it.
You will not find productivity hacks dressed as spirituality here, or climate doom without practice, or someone performing certainty they do not have.
I generally post three posts per week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) with daily Notes to fill in the gaps and engage in conversation. No ads. No algorithms deciding what you see.
What You Receive
Free subscribers receive every post, full archive access, and the ability to comment and connect with others asking the same questions.
Some of my favorite posts for people interested in my writing include:
Paid annual subscribers receive all of the above plus Pack Light, Walk Present: The Contemplative Camino Packing Guide with a Camino Packing and Planning Audit conversation with me directly. They also have my genuine gratitude for keeping this writing open and accessible to everyone.
If you recognized yourself anywhere in what you just read, this is where you subscribe.
We are fellow seekers on this path.
~ Jeffrey
Thank you, Jeffrey!