About

I’m Julie, a nurse, infection preventionist , science/medical writer, former lab scientist, mom of three boys, and passionate searcher for meaning in all things spiritual. (And as Rob Bell so famously says, “everything is spiritual.”) I call my blog Scientuality as a play off of Science and Spirituality, and also because when spoken out loud, the combination sounds a lot like Sensuality – a point that I feel is crucial. Science and spirituality are pointless if they don’t foster in us a deep sense of what it means to be human, and if they don’t instill in us a passion for living out that humanity as a part of an enchanted universe.

I believe that all things are interconnected, that we are all sustained by a ground of being, and that science is revealing so many things that the great wisdom traditions and faith mystics have been saying all along.  In my posts I attempt to write about the connections and intersections I see between these two fields, often processing my thoughts and coming to new conclusions while typing away.

While I love hardcore science with lovely data sets and statistical correlations, I’m very willing to explore alternative ideas that may not adhere so well to rigorous experimentation and validation.  I’ve experienced enough ambiguity and “oddness” in various life circumstances to recognize that not all reality is definitively “test-able”, and in many cases, it takes science a while to catch up.

In other cases, many questions I ask just seem to be without answers, and no matter how hard I search for explanations, there are none to be had.  In all my ruminations, I attempt to heed the great advice of Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I don’t see myself as a great innovator of novel ideas, but rather, a curator.  My mind loves to categorize, label, and make connections.  This often gets me into trouble as it means I’m very good at dualistic thinking and I have to work harder to approach life in a non-judgmental fashion. However, it occasionally enables me to bring together ideas that are sometimes seen as completely separate and unrelated. This is what I attempt to do in this blog: to curate what I experience in life and find new, meaningful connections between all these experiences and ideas, and perhaps establish to a greater degree the interconnectedness of all things.