Dear friends, My name is Michael Berger and here I share a lot of the writing, teaching, and community-art projects I’m up to. Thanks for being a part of these experiments and ventures. Hope we can grab coffee one day and take a walk through a redwood grove.
After a long decade in the Bay Area, and some time teaching and writing in Las Vegas, I’m settling again into my hometown of San Diego, CA, teaching English in public schools, writing books, making art, and trying to build some spiritual-artistic spaces. Above all I’m interested in whatever can help us better honor the world’s complexities and beauties. Please share your wisdom.
I see myself as a writer and educator foremost - someone who believes that reading and writing and imaginative world making can help us become wiser, kinder, more reverent, and more expansive. Hopefully it can help communities reimagine themselves for the better, too. I love the many utopian tangents of the Imagination —whether mystical and anarchistic, artistic and ecological, science fictional and surreal. It would be lovely and maybe the most honest to call myself an artist, and maybe one day I will. For the artistic urge is primal. Art is the heart’s homeland on earth. It’s what we make with what we are, here, on this glorious mystery of a planet.
Teaching has been a big part of my life for a decade now. I’ve taught middle school, high school, university, and community college — mostly English and Humanities classes. Being an educator in America has opened my eyes to what diversity and difference mean and what they ask of us. In dialogue with students of every background, I’ve witnessed how our social structures and traditions can be contested, altered, reinvented, and repaired. The classroom is a quasi-utopian space, a model for what is possible in all areas of life, a laboratory of the visionary imagination. It’s also where we can laugh a lot, share food and resources, blow off steam, and feel safe and respected no matter what the outside world threatens us with.
Forever coloring my teaching and writing, my spiritual yearnings have led me on journeys through mystical Christianity, hermeticism, esoteric traditions, animistic and earth-centered practices, and, over the last few years, Islam and Sufism. My Sufi Muslim conversion journey is a big part of who I am and who I am always becoming. It is also a lens through which I learn from a diversity of traditions. And I’m always a beginner, always an explorer.
Spirituality and teaching aside, all that I am and all that I explore is rooted in queer, feminist, outsider, experimental, misfit communities of artists, writers, resistants, activists, and thinkers. My faith-worlds and my art-worlds love and accommodate each other. And disparity, opacity, paradox, contradiction, and mystery are friends on this journey. Guides, too. Sometimes troubling, always thoughtful, helping you to laugh, too. I hope to honor them here and, with you all, learn from them and become changed and inspired by them. Thanks for being here, for listening, and sharing your own joys and wonders.
Why subscribe?
I love the diverse community that has grown and keeps expanding through my substack page. Friends I haven’t talked to in years have reconnected because of reading an essay I’ve posted. Some of these friends have become collaborators. New friends have reached out to add some insights because of the disparate topics I try to bring together in dialogue. Strangers have found this space and shared their own explorations with me. My writing here also helps me design lessons and curricula for my high school students, many who are in deep need of mentorship, love, and support.
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