Mary Allen has won several spiritual writing awards, and all of her writing can be considered ‘spiritual’ in that it ‘deals with the bedrock of human existence—why we’re here, where we’re going, and how we can comport ourselves with dignity along the way,’ as the writer Philip Zaleski defined spiritual writing in an interview published in the New York Times.

I like Zaleski’s definition, Mary Allen writes, because it acknowledges what I’ve always believed—that spiritual writing is simply writing that looks at whatever comes into the writer’s scope of awareness, closely and deeply, from all angles, bringing to bear every gift the writer has at her disposal to find the truth, beauty, and meaning in it. It’s writing that exposes the essential mystery that lies at the heart of everything—whether it’s a ladybug or the cancer diagnosis of a friend—through faithful attention to specific, humble, concrete details. It’s writing that makes the unbearable bearable and the mundane luminous. Life itself is a spiritual endeavor whether we know it or not, and to me any writing that honestly grapples with life is ipso facto spiritual writing.

In The Rooms of Heaven, Mary Allen writes about love, death, grief, and the afterlife. The spiritual writing in her collection of personal essays, The Deep Limitless Air, has been described “so light-handed and matter-of-fact as to be barely distinguishable from the apprehension and appreciation of ordinary life,” according to the memoir writer Peter Trachtenberg.  Mary Allen has also written about the innate spirituality of children, about exploring and healing the “house of the mind” through the vehicles of hypnosis and EMDR, and about the meaning and symbols found in the tarot cards. She and her friend Tania Pryputniewicz have co-hosted a website called Tarot for Two.

I’ve been playing with the tarot cards with my friend Tania Pryputniewicz for more than twenty years, Mary writes. Sometimes we write about what the cards have to do with what’s been happening in our lives. Doing that writing forces me to think about the cards and what they have to say about everyday life, to try to bridge the gap between the symbolic and the concrete—which in turn has deepened my understanding of the cards and increased their usefulness to me as guides.  Symbolism talks to us in an intimate language as complex, concrete, and multi-faceted as the tapestry of life itself, which also talks to us through metaphors and symbols if we can only figure out how to listen. When I play with the cards I try to listen to them and to life and to hear what they have to say about each other.

Click here for Tarot for Two.

Click here to listen to a podcast by Mary Allen about how writing itself is a path to mindfulness and other spiritual practices.

Click here to read an award-winning essay, At the Monastery, by Mary Allen.  The essay won first prize in Tiferet Magazine’s spiritual writing contest in 2013.