Seasons
of Meaning

How do people create light
for one another?

I’m a Unitarian Universalist Humanist minister and writer. For more than thirty years, I’ve accompanied people through grief, uncertainty, identity, and change. I’m interested in the practices that help us make a life when we cannot yet see what comes next.

For Seasons of Meaning, I propose to live in Tromsø through one complete Arctic year, learning how people make meaning, sustain community, and adapt to the changing light. I will first seek to understand those practical adaptations in their own setting, then explore what they might offer people navigating grief, uncertainty, and returning possibility.

What can we offer one another while living through a season we cannot hurry?

These are guiding questions for the proposed inquiry, not research findings.

Hello, I’m Nori.

I’m a Unitarian Universalist Humanist minister and writer based in Lawrence, Kansas. For more than thirty years, I’ve accompanied people and communities through grief, uncertainty, identity, and change. My work centers on how we make meaning, sustain belonging, and care for one another when we cannot yet see what comes next.

During a brief visit to Tromsø in 2023, I joined a whale-watching expedition. On the three-hour journey to the whale-feeding grounds, our guide described adaptations to Arctic darkness, including leaving lights glowing in homes so that people outside encounter warmth and human presence.

I carried that story home. It left me wondering: What can we offer one another while living through a season we cannot hurry?

That question is at the heart of Seasons of Meaning: Light, Darkness, and the Ways People Make a Life in Arctic Norway. I’m developing a proposal to spend August 2027 through July 2028 in Tromsø, learning how people adapt to diminishing light, polar night, returning sun, and midnight sun.

I hope to understand those practical adaptations in their own settings, then explore what they might illuminate about grief, change, and emerging possibility. I’m interested, too, in experiences that challenge familiar metaphors: darkness as rest or intimacy, light as demanding as well as joyful.

Norway is also my ancestral country. Meeting members of my Norwegian family during that visit opened further questions about language, inheritance, place, and belonging.

I hold a Doctor of Ministry from Episcopal Divinity School, a Master of Divinity from Iliff School of Theology, and a Bachelor of Social Work from California State University, Long Beach. My ministry has included congregational leadership, Humanist chaplaincy, interfaith dialogue, and public writing.

Through essays, conversation, and reflection, I hope to explore what sustains us through the seasons of our lives—and how we become companions to one another along the way.

I invite you to explore the project and selected writing here. If something sparks a question or a possibility for collaboration, I’d be glad to hear from you.

Ordained in Metropolitan Community Churches in 1989. Unitarian Universalist Association Affirmation of Call in 2010. A full CV is being updated.

Place, belonging,
and the lives we share.

My writing explores the ways experience becomes meaning: how we carry loss, how place changes us, and how we make room for one another. These two selections bring public life and personal pilgrimage into conversation.