In the second century A.D. the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius may have best defined pantheism when he wrote, "Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy." My account uses many more words and covers a year in my life, roughly November, 2005 to November, 2006. It barrels through the history of pantheistic thought in the West, from the Greek philosopher of the sixth century B.C.E. to the internet sites 2500 years later. This overview is personal, not definitive. I am in love with Marcus Aurelius. I ignore Plotinus. I admire Virginia Woolf, whom many would not consider a pantheist at all. As for Eastern philosophies, they come late in my story, in the 1960s and 70s after their texts had entered American mainstream and my local bookstore. In this account, science is a good friend--although not perfect; friends are not perfect. Quakerism is central to my experience, and I am grateful to belong to a Quaker Meeting which allows for pantheism as one of its beliefs. My title Standing in the Light comes from the Quaker phrase "to stand in the Light," a concept with many meanings, encompassing political beliefs as well as spiritual. In my case, it is very much related to the bright New Mexican sky. In my case, pantheism is a word whose back I ride like a man on a horse trying to get somewhere. Or maybe a word more like a house, a place of shelter when it is cold and rainy, a house with big windows and a gorgeous view.

In the summer of 1996, I sat on my porch steps in the small town of Silver City, New Mexico, trying to decide if I should become a Quaker. I had attended my local Meeting off and on for twelve years but had not yet written my official letter asking for membership. Should I write that letter now? I was forty-two years old, a wife and mother. I felt anchored in my life. I felt the sun on my face. I felt the rough concrete against my legs. I watched an ant move across the sidewalk. Was I ready, for the first time, to join an organized religion? Did I have in fact any religious belief, or was I mainly attracted to Quaker culture and history?

The Quakers in my Meeting are also known as unprogrammed Quakers and Universalists. Following the earliest tradition of Friends, we have no scripture, no preacher, no creed. Instead, we practice silence, the act of sitting in a circle, saying nothing, and waiting--waiting for the Light. The Light is a deliberately broad concept. Among Universalist Friends, the Light can take the shape of Christ, the son of a heavenly Father, or the shape of Buddha, a human prince who enlightened himself and preached the Middle Way. Or the Light can take no shape at all and serve only as metaphor, a substitute for the ineffable. In my Meeting, how each Friend defines the Light is a personal choice. We conform to Quakerly ways of opening and closing silence. We share similar ideas about social justice and nonviolence. And we wait for the Light. We do not ask much of our members. We do ask this.

In front of me, on my porch step, was a sidewalk, a patch of grass, a broad strip of asphalt, more sidewalk, a stone wall, a pine tree and, higher above, electrical wires. Cars drove by. A raven gurgled, liquid and insistent. In the blue sky, white clouds floated above brown hills. "Well," I said to myself, "the Light is all this, I suppose, these steps, this concrete, this ant, that raven. The weft and warp. It is," I gestured, "the street."

I did not have the perspicuity to shout, "Pantheism." I would do that a few hours later, looking at a dictionary. Pantheism is the belief that the universe, with all its existing laws and properties, is an interconnected whole which we can rightly consider sacred. At that moment, I had decided to call the wholeness of the universe the Light. I had decided to believe in a holiness that was not confined to any one thing but immanent in everything. God was in the raven and concrete not as a supernatural being but as the miracle of raven-ness and hydrogen molecules and light waves bouncing off a hard surface to enter my soft receptive eye--an image reflected upside down which my brain instantly turned right, my brain humming with insight, adrenaline in the blood, water vapor in the sky, all of it an amazement, all of it numinous. Suddenly, on those porch steps, I was so pleased, so grateful to be part of this existence.

Soon after, I joined my Quaker Meeting, or the Religious Society of Friends, or more simply the Gila Friends since our membership extends across the watershed of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico, surrounded by the Gila National Forest and Gila Wilderness in a specific landscape of ponderosa pine, juniper, oak, prickly pear, grama grass, and yucca. It is a landscape of transition, between conifer forest, grassland, and high desert, a southern range for elk, a northern for coatimundi. It is a place where not enough rain falls and then too much, flooding the arroyos. Very few people in our Meeting are originally from this area. Most of us have come here just to be here, our home of choice.

Pantheism is a word easily confused with other words. Pantheon, for example, refers to a collection of many gods. Polytheism is the belief in many gods. When I tell an acquaintance that I am a pantheist, she looks at me scant-eyed. Do I believe in tree spirits? No, that is animism, I explain-the belief that individual souls inhabit natural objects and phenomena. Am I a pagan? she wonders. Yes, I say. Paganism is the religion of anyone not specifically a Christian, Muslim, or Jew. But, I add, she is probably thinking of Neo-pagans, people from a technological society who are trying to revive the ancient worship of nature. My pantheism does revere nature. But I don't practice any ancient rituals.

Importantly, what pantheism is not is theism--the acceptance of a single, personal god. Pantheism is not atheism, either, a disbelief in a sacred or numinous universe. There is some argument here. The well-known atheist and scientist Richard Dawkins calls pantheism "sexed-up atheism." Well, nothing wrong with being sexy. But the pantheist acknowledges a strong religious impulse. The pantheist walks literally, every day, in the mind and body of God. Panentheism sounds the most like pantheism but also is not, being the doctrine that God is both immanent in the world and transcendent or outside it, too.

I was born in 1954. Growing up in America in the last half of the twentieth century meant being exposed to almost every belief system listed above. My mother was an agnostic, a widow who raised her two girls in apartment buildings in Phoenix, Arizona. Mostly she played bridge. We didn't go to church. In the summers, I was sent to Kansas to live with my father's parents where being a Methodist was like eating breakfast or buying sneakers, part of the rhythm of life. I recited the Nicene creed and ate potato salad at the church picnic. Back in Phoenix, I went to temple with Jewish friends and Mass with Catholic friends, fancying myself an anthropologist--but also hungry for something. These were secret worlds. I listened by the door. In college, one of my roommates had an alter to the Hindu god Ganesh. The Hare Krishnas filled the airports then. My older sister practiced Transcendental Meditation. Meanwhile, some Westerners were looking to their druidic past. They wanted to believe in magic, and New Age mythology was a wide net.

Today I have to wonder why pantheism-a word I only learned in 1996, at the age of forty-two-was the one belief not to winnow out, the wheat separated from the chaff, the gold panned.

There is a time in a reader's life when books are inhaled and absorbed into the body. They become the body of who you are. Between the ages of 17-22, I gulped down writers. I read them fast and whole, something like a snake swallowing its prey, and I read everything they wrote, one book after another, trying to steal their souls or, more nicely, become who they were. Starting with nineteenth-century literature, I read Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Particularly, I read Whitman, in love with the physical world and finding divinity everywhere, for whom "a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillion infidels" and a gnat sufficient explanation. I could as easily have read Johann Goethe or William Wordsworth or Alfred Tennyson.

I read avowed pantheists like D.H Lawrence and the poet Robinson Jeffers, who wrote, "I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy... The whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine." I could just as easily have read Frank Lloyd Wright, "I believe in God, only I spell it Nature" or Albert Einstein, "I am a deeply religious unbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion."

After college, I traveled through India and Southeast Asia, the de rigueur copies of the Bhagavad-Gita and Upanishads in my backpack. I was still the anthropologist, still listening by the door. It never occurred to me to become a Hindu or Buddhist. But the ideas echoed nicely. All the world is Brahmin. Buddha has Reality for his body. The Buddha's body is the world.

Eventually, I went to a graduate writing program in Missoula, Montana. Everything, always, had been about writing. I composed my first story in the fourth grade and never looked back. In my understanding of how I was to live, in my nascent and fumbling sense of how I could live, everything had to be transformed into language. Everything had to be transformed. It hardly seems now I had a choice. It seems now that writing was something that happened to me--which is what, I have learned since, many writers think. Of course, it is not true. Of course, we chose.

As it turned out, graduate school was less about writing and more about mountains and cold weather and falling in love. Peter was also in the writing program, a young intellectual from a military family who had spent most of his childhood in Europe and the East Coast. We were different enough to attract each other but alike enough to stay together. We had mutual dreams. It was in the air. Earth Day. Ecology. Back to the land. We talked about our desire for roots and community. We wanted to connect more directly to life. We were hungry for something.

In the 1980s, Peter and I married, moved to southwestern New Mexico, bought twelve acres in a small valley near the Gila National Forest, and built an adobe house-a house made of mud. Born in city and suburb, we were reading eagerly now about composting toilets and catching gophers and pruning fruit trees. We had a wonderful view of a distant mountain. We had an oppressively-large garden which we irrigated from a nearby acequia, and a herd of goats. We had two homebirths-a girl and a boy--and too much home-made goat cheese in the refrigerator. Our naivety that we could live simply and sustain ourselves on this land lasted about two weeks, or perhaps a little longer. Peter took on a succession of jobs: high school teacher, Nature Conservancy field director, and town planner for Silver City, thirty miles away. I became a teacher of writing skills at the small university in Silver City, a job I still have twenty-five years later.

Living in the country, our social life revolved around potlucks, and these gatherings were often Quakerly since a number of "weighty" Quakers happened to live in our valley, too. Some were involved in the Sanctuary Movement, a network of churches committed to helping refugees flee the political violence in Guatemala and El Salvador. Almost all the Quakers I know are deeply political, believing that the Peaceable Kingdom or Kingdom of God exists here and now and not anywhere else. They want to "stand in the Light" when that kingdom is threatened. Between raising my children, commuting into town, teaching, and writing, I was learning about Quaker ideals from people who were trying to live out those ideals. I was learning about silence and the small inner voice that can be heard in silence.

Then we moved to town. Our children were growing up. Peter and I had not quite foreseen that this would happen-that our children would grow up and want to play Little League, join band, or be in a drama club. The local middle and high school required an hour and half bus ride there and back, and now the days were never long enough. In 1996, the same year I finally joined my Quaker Meeting, my husband and I left our small rural valley for Silver City, population 10,000 with a trade area of 30,000. We did this so our daughter Maria and son David could have a better education and more conventional social life. So we wouldn't cross a river to drive thirty miles to work. So I could walk to the university. So Peter could walk to his office. In town, we would be closer to shops and the library. We could go to cultural events, the occasional concert or play. We could have central heating instead of a wood stove. Life would be easier.

My experience on a porch step in a small American town is a version of pantheism first expressed in the seventeenth century. In 1656, the Jewish community of Amsterdam excommunicated the twenty-three-year old Baruch de Spinoza for his "evil opinions" and "abominable heresies." The cherem or banishment of the young man was unusually harsh:
Although the Jewish elders did not record the nature of these heresies, they likely referred to the pantheism that Spinoza would develop more fully in his mature work, including the infamous Ethics which on publication in 1670 was immediately banned and suppressed throughout Europe. Spinoza's ideas were not new. Greek philosophers in the sixth century B.C.E. had also rejected the idea of supernatural gods in favor of a universe made up of a single divine substance. The Greek and Roman Stoics were pantheistic and believed in a divine Unity which they called God or Fate or Providence or the logos. As recently as 1600, the scholar Bruno Giordano had been burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition for his pantheistic notion of an immanent God which could assume many forms. But Spinoza was the first to describe pantheism in a way that appealed to a modern and scientific sensibility, offering what he saw as a logical "geometric proof" that God was and could only be an infinite substance identical with Nature. The Ethics remain Western philosophy's most coherent and complete defense of this idea.

Spinoza concluded that nothing can exist outside God. There could be no Creation outside the Creator. At one point in Ethics, he lightly scolded, "There are those who imagine God to be like a man, composed of body and soul and subject to passions; but it is clear enough from what has already been demonstrated how far off men who believe this are from the true knowledge of God." He later conceded that if a triangle could think, it would also imagine God to be like a triangle. But both triangle and man were wrong.

Spinoza's logic led him to deny personal or individual immortality. Something immortal lived on when a human died but it was not that human's personality or "soul." There was no after-life in the sense of a heaven or hell. There was no relationship with a loving, engaged, personal Father. The Bible said these things because the Bible was written by human beings who wanted to believe them. God did not write the Bible. God didn't really care about human beings. God was existence itself.

Spinoza's pantheism harshly rejected both Jewish and Christian tradition. For that time and place, this was very dangerous. People were being imprisoned, tortured, and executed for less. Spinoza knew this and wrote discreetly, sometimes just to friends, sometimes anonymously. His major work Ethics was kept in a desk drawer and only published after his death by lung disease at the age of forty-four.

The philosopher himself never used the word pantheism. That would be left to one of his disciples, an Irish writer named John Toland who first coined the term in the early 1700s. Toland also called pantheists "Spinozists" in honor of his mentor. Toland had his own problems with Church authorities and lived in fear of religious persecution for most of his life. He waited until he had nothing left to lose-until he was sick, dying, alcoholic, and penniless--to write and send out his personal manifesto, which he called Pantheisticon.

Toland's description of pantheism relied more on poetry than logic. Grandly, he proclaimed, "The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country, and all men are my family." He described a pantheist as someone who believed that the only eternal and divine being was the material universe, which was infinite with an infinite number of stars and earths circling around their suns. Thought was a property of the brain. Soul was another. Thought and soul were forms of matter and death the endless transformation of matter. Virtue was its own reward. In Pantheisticon, the writer indulged himself and imagined a secret society in which these ideas were celebrated and applauded--a network of underground private clubs with pantheistic creeds and rituals. He hoped for a future of religious tolerance.

Toland would be pleased today with the World Pantheist Movement, a lively Internet-based organization founded in 1998 with over a thousand members in fifty countries. The WPM's earnest goal is to promote pantheism and support the values of environmental activism and human rights. Their advisors include scientists like James Lovelock, author of the Gaia theory, and cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, a prominent figure in another organization called the Institute of Religion in an Age of Science. Secrecy in such clubs is no longer necessary, and the small membership of these groups may be misleading. Paul Harrison, founder of the World Pantheist Movement, believes that up to 10% of people in the religions of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as many others outside organized religion, have quietly abandoned their belief in a personal god or after-life even as they retain a strong sense of religiosity. These 200-350 million have shifted their focus of reverence from the supernatural to the natural. After parsing out the history and meaning of pantheism, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy agrees, "There are probably more grass-root pantheists than Protestants or theists in general."

Like any religion, pantheism disagrees with itself. There is confusion and contradiction. We can define pantheism as the belief that the universe is an inter-related whole which deserves human reverence. Everything is God. But the definition of everything varies.

What Paul Harrison calls scientific pantheism imagines the universe to be made of one substance--matter/energy. The dance of matter/energy is beautiful and holy but also impersonal and non-sentient. As Spinoza first outlined, human consciousness is a product of matter and dies when the body dies.

For a few pantheists, including some Hindus and Buddhists, the reverse is true. The universe is also made of one substance, but that substance is mind, not matter. Matter is an illusion, a product of mind. Everything is God, and God is consciousness.

Other pantheists (also known as dualists) separate the universe into two substances-matter and spirit. Since spirit can exist without matter, the human soul can exist outside the human body, beyond death. There may be a collective World-Soul which manifests in different forms, such as gods. A form of soul or spirit may be present in plants, animals, and rocks. This kind of pantheist might also be a polytheist or an animist. He or she might have a magical worldview-supposing, for example, that simply thinking about an object can affect that object and that nothing is bound by merely physical laws. Non-flying things can sometimes fly. Non-thinking things can sometimes think.

I don't believe that. I am a scientific pantheist, credulous in my own way. The culture of science is a distinct one and certainly mine. I believe that the latest discoveries in biology, chemistry, and physics are true, or at least true for the moment, for science is a method, not a destination. I believe we live in the body of the world and that we are compelled to know the world. We are compelled to witness. Thoreau set the bar, "The woman who sits in the house and sees is a match for a stirring captain. Those still, piercing eyes, as faithfully exercised on their talent, will keep her even with Alexander or Shakespeare." I believe in that woman. I believe that what we see is real and important and we have a natural urge to see ever more clearly.

I believe that I live inside larger laws. In the culture of science, the fact that the religious impulse is ubiquitous among humans can be explained by evolutionary biology. In our evolution from living as a social ape to living as Homo sapiens, religion either had some genetically inheritable advantage or was a byproduct of something that did. That's fine with me. The fact that a sense of the numinous may be hardwired does not make the numinous less of a true feeling. Similarly, if I know anything as a parent, I know I would give my life for my child. The fact that maternal love is hardwired does not change that love. Moreover, I would not want to feel differently. I would not want not to love.

I believe that science is about connection, complexity, harmony, and surprise. Science is about beauty. The more I see--the more I know--the more beautiful the world seems. Importantly, the way I experience beauty has always been physical. The yellow sunflower hits me with a friendly punch. A mountain view causes a flutter in my chest, a subtle movement, something like an ache. We say that the heart soars, a common description for what we feel before a beautiful natural scene (or a painting or a piece of music). There is a sense of hollowness, a hormonal cascade. There are sensations.

Neurologically, however, I am not built for mysticism. My heart soars at the sight of beauty. Something in my chest flutters. But I never faint or have aural hallucinations. My spiritual responses are not dramatic. Because of this, I have to work hard for my religious view. I have to have faith.

My sense of beauty is also limited, almost always evoked by the natural world. Once I did feel an enormous connection, the heightened pleasure of existence, standing in line at a pharmacy in WalMart. (All that color! All those things! And the smiling, complicated faces of people.) I recognize that humans are not outside nature and that many people consider our accomplishments to be extraordinary. But for the most part, I am moved to an understanding of the divine by the non-human, the Beloved-that-is-not-me. In this, I am fairly conventional. A lot of my friends feel the same way.

For a long time after we moved into town, I felt content, even smug. It seemed to me that I could be content almost anywhere, with my family and my writing. I was adaptable! I was self-sufficient. I didn't know myself very well. I didn't know that in moving to the country and choosing to stay there for fifteen years, I had followed an instinct. I had heard a voice. Someone had been yelling in my ear: this is who you are. This is what you need. Pay attention.

After we lived in Silver City for about five years, I stopped attending Quaker Meeting. I didn't discuss this with any of my Quaker friends. I kept paying my yearly dues and receiving my monthly newsletter. I just slowly drifted away. I missed one Meeting and then another and then another. I stopped waiting for the Light. Of course, I was very busy, a working mother of two teenagers. That seemed a good enough excuse.

Today, I am crazy with desire-anxious, grouchy, determined--to move back to the country and reclaim myself. By now, we have sold our first homestead and bought new property in another rural area also thirty miles from town. These six acres in the Gila Valley adjoin eighty acres of a Nature Conservancy wildlife refuge on the Gila River. Our land, once again, is near the Gila National Forest which extends for another three million acres and includes the Gila Wilderness and Aldo Leopold Wilderness. The scattered communities of Cliff and Gila number about 500 human beings, a settlement dominated by Mormons and the descendents of ranchers, supplemented by retirees and hippies. The Nature Conservancy sponsors the scientific study of the Gila River, and visiting biologists and hydrologists are part of the mix. Our view includes irrigated farmland, the rugged folds of Bear Mountain, and a more distant view of the Black Hills. We have paid more than we can afford for this and understand better now that every country house is a satellite to the city. This time we won't pretend to grow our own food or sustain ourselves on the land. We go to the country for reflection and redemption. We go despite the fact that living in town is more ecological. We go with a new set of illusions. We will live here until we die or die trying.

This past summer, my father-in-law gave us money to build on our new property a large single room with a bathroom and kitchen, a place where we can live part-time until we manage the move from our jobs in town. The little house was finished in October. An extended porch wraps around walls filled with windows and French doors, as many as I could get for a 360 degree view. We visit the house every weekend and sometimes stay longer, commuting again to work. Every time I look out a window, I hope for the lift of a sandhill crane, a quail or fox, a herd of javelina. Every time, every single time, I am hungry for something.

I can not say now that I am content. Both my children are in college this fall, and I suffer, I grieve, the loss of my life as a mother. You do something for twenty years, and it feels good, it feels important, and then you are out of the game-fast, like a football player with bad knees. The glory years are over. Goodbye to baby smells, doctor appointments, homework assignments, PTA, deep concerns, daily concerns. Every morning you had a reason to get up. You were always needed. You were never lonely. Goodbye to all that. As parents, we are not supposed to admit this selfish sorrow. Certainly, we are not supposed to wallow in it.

I am 51 years old, sliding toward death, and I don't much like myself. I have failed at so many things-not the very best writer, not the very best wife or friend, not even the very best parent. I don't much like the world either, which is too full of suffering and disease and war, as the world has always been. I am acutely aware of how my country has betrayed itself, refusing once again to fulfill its potential, to be wise and strong. I am acutely aware of how humanity has betrayed itself, poisoning the earth, heedless of the future we create for our children. As a Quaker, I have lost my sense of the Light. I dislike town. I don't feel special. I am surrounded by miracles-the porch step, cars, black ravens gurgling and croaking-only I don't see the connection. What do they have to do with me?

Still, I feel hopeful. My husband and I have a house in the Gila Valley and a new view of mountains. Living in nature will restore me. This time, I will pay more attention. This time I will take along some friends, some books I haven't read for many years, some things I have forgotten. I will take along my science, my neglected pantheism, my neglected Quakerism. If I know anything, I know that I do not want to live in a universe devoid of community, mystery, and awe. I do not want to be alone in my brain, my timid and lazy personality, unconnected to the rest of the world. I cast my lot with Spinoza, Thoreau, and Einstein. I want to live every minute in a holy universe, so pleased and grateful to be part of this existence.

Of pantheism, I will ask the questions we must ask any religion. How can I lead a better and more joyful life? How can I come to terms with my death and suffering? How can I come to terms with all death and suffering? How should we live as humans on the earth? How can we be at home here?

This time, during my days and nights in the Gila Valley, digging down into the earth, rooting my life back into the natural world, this time I will go deeper.