Seasons
of Meaning

How do people make meaning
through the Arctic year?

As I prepare to leave parish ministry after thirty-seven years, I look forward to a new chapter of reflection and writing. Both my twenty years as a queer Christian minister in Metropolitan Community Churches and the broader theological perspective developed through seventeen years of Unitarian Universalist ministry shape the questions I bring. Ministry during the U.S. AIDS epidemic taught me how grief accumulates and how people sustain one another through loss, stigma, and the love of chosen family. UU ministry has deepened my appreciation for the many ways people find meaning, within and beyond religious traditions.

For Seasons of Meaning, I propose to live in Tromsø from August 2027 through July 2028 and ask: How do people, drawing on different religious, secular, and cultural perspectives, make meaning, sustain relationships, and organize everyday life through the changing light of the Arctic year? Through selected encounters, community events, and everyday practices, I will first seek to understand seasonal life in its own setting, then consider what it might illuminate about grief and change.

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. After thirty-seven years accompanying people and communities through grief, uncertainty, identity, and change, I’m preparing for a new chapter centered on reflection and writing. My work asks 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 helped begin 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 from different religious, secular, and cultural perspectives experience 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.