I don’t think much about pack weight, other than how heavy mine is next to Ben’s. We’re more or less the same size, same fitness, same grit, so he takes the tent and I take the stove, rope, first aid. Not much first aid. I leave the splint and tourniquet and stock up on ibuprofen and caffeine instead. Seventeen miles in, seventeen miles out, with an alpine start somewhere along the way. Quick trip. Light packs. We take the window covers down around 8 a.m. and let the sunlight get us moving. Full parking lot. One car rolling in, like we would have done if we had left Seattle before dawn instead of driving through the night. I don’t mind an early morning, but I wanted to start this one fresh.

Ben takes a caffeine pill, I hang our permit from the rearview mirror, and we grab a few leftover cookies from the driver’s seat. We wake up five miles later when the trail turns uphill.

Holy mystery abounds in the Pacific Northwest’s mountains, forests, and coastlines. In a 2007 UC, Berkeley study entitled The Nature of Awe, nature, music, and art—in that order—ranked as primary elicitors of this profound experience. For most people in this region, church doesn’t spark that connection to the divine. Those who have experienced an evening seasonal liturgy at St. Luke Church in Renton, WA, however, tell a different story. St. Luke’s offers liturgies on every solstice and equinox to honor the changing seasons—not only the budding branches and dropping leaves of the natural world, but also the shifting seasons of the Spirit in our own internal lives.

The liturgies began as a collaboration between The Rev. Kevin Pearson and musician Charles Rus, as a way to speak to this particular Pacific Northwest context. Over the last two years these liturgies have grown a following, attracting participants of all ages who find special sustenance in these liturgies, including many who wouldn’t be caught dead in a church, except this church. Whatever their religious background, their arrival is met by a carefully choreographed adventure into the sacred. Through poetry, the beauty of art, meditations, movement, ritual, and silence, the divine life is evoked. You won’t hear a sermon or celebrate Eucharist (at least in their normative forms); still, St. Luke’s seasonal liturgies carefully provide structure for formlessness and time for eternity.

Everything that happened in those two weeks happened in the public bath. The furtive glances, the failed attempts to blend in, the unfamiliarity and the discovery and the bafflement and even the necessity of it all. I was in Japan for Calvin’s wedding, and I was in the Kyoto bathhouse because after three days of sweating in ninety percent humidity, lugging a thirty-five pound backpack through streets and temples and shrines, and sleeping in parks and train stations, I smelled worse than nattō.

One year ago, I lived in Washington, D.C. I walked amid suits and skyscrapers, museums and monuments. Every building declared that this was a Very Important City, and every politician and think tank and NGO affirmed it. Congress wrestled with the budget, the bureaucracy implemented infrastructure projects, the Pentagon directed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lobbyists pressured the government to fund X and support Y and oppose Z. Everyone pushed their pet cause.

Sometimes I feel like him.

Not because I cast spells or lead an army of Death Eaters or kill people, but because I’ve made my own sort of horcruxes, and I’ve split my soul into more pieces than Voldemort’s seven.

In case my brother dies before me, he and I have already planned his funeral. It will go, more or less, something like this:

Friends and family will file into the church. A few whispers, a few sad smiles and nods. I will sit in the front pew with the rest of our family, and our friends will sit behind us. Black suits and black dresses; tears and tissues. Sisters will hold hands, and husbands will hug their wives. Everyone will look to the front of the church, waiting for the last stragglers to find seats in the back so the service can begin.

When I stumble upon words like “sex” or “seduction” or “flirtation,” I tend to keep reading.

I don’t think I am alone in this. Sexuality is as basic to humanity as hunger or thirst, but—at least in our society—sex is far more influential. From Burger King to Old Spice, advertisements are rife with innuendo. Almost all comedy movies include sexual humor, and I cannot remember the last time I bought groceries without seeing magazines about sex and dating at the checkout lane.