In Conversation with Julie Gabrielli
7 Questions on Writing About the Divine Feminine and Spirituality
Hello beloved reader,
It gives me great pleasure to bring to you this interview with
whose Substack I have long enjoyed:
Homecoming invites readers into a space of deep reflection, wonder, and gratitude for our place on this planet. Through essays, stories, and insights drawn from nature, architecture, and community, Julie explores how we can find resilience and belonging in a world facing climate crisis. Weaving together creative inspiration, environmental consciousness, and personal reflection, her work reminds us that despite the challenges, we are still part of a miraculous, interconnected world—one that calls us to pay attention, be astonished, and share our awe.
Subscribers receive a rich blend of thought-provoking content, including NatureStack, a bi-monthly collection of standout nature writing from Substack; Reciprocity: the Interview, a series of in-depth interviews with some of the best nature writers on Substack (this was actually the inspiration for this series of 7 Questions interviews); Building Hope, a collection of essays exploring resilience, architecture, and our deep connection with the living earth; reflections on architecture’s role in environmental reconciliation; and literary explorations of Thoreau’s Walden. Additionally, Homecoming is where Julie is serializing her climate fiction novel, Flux—a gripping eco-thriller that navigates the high-stakes intersections of environmental science, corporate power, and personal integrity.
At its heart, Homecoming is about bearing witness to the miracle of creation, cultivating a deep love for the world, and listening to the voices of past and future generations urging us to keep dreaming.
The 7 Questions:
1) Why are you drawn to writing about spirituality and/or the Divine Feminine?
With a few exceptions like the St. Francis Prayer series last fall, I don’t write overtly about spirituality or the Divine Feminine. Unless you count that the earth is the very embodiment of the Divine Feminine. The human-made world we call “civilization” sits on a foundation of stories about who we are and why we’re here. Unfortunately, many of those stories are misguided. Some are downright damaging, like the story that we are separate from and superior to the natural world, as the pinnacle of creation. Or the story of scarcity, that there’s not enough to go around. Or that control is the best way to get what you want. Or that the only worthy destiny is the endless progress of technological advancement.
Writing helps me to listen for and recognize stories of belonging, abundance, mystery, and the sacredness of the world. I write to express my love for the world, my wonder and awe, and to conjure tender moments laced with joy and grief, delight and despair, celebration and loss. Recently I was reminded that being awake hurts. There is no antidote for pain, no way to avoid suffering. It’s the price of being human. More attention and more noticing are the only way through.
2) How does writing about spirituality affect you, in your work and/or personal life?
Writing puts me in a reverie. It’s a balm that soothes my innate anxiety and softens the rough edges of impotent rage about politics or the latest violation against a wild place. At its best, writing connects me with beings and messages that too often go unnoticed in my busy daily life of responsibilities, lists, and distractions. It’s a way to pay closer attention. Close attention is always rewarded. Quiet insights are possible, and even on rare occasions, revelation.
3) What is an experience you have had that is perhaps the most mystical and unexplainable in the rational/material realm?
It happened on a thirty-foot sailboat in a gale on the Chesapeake Bay—not an experience anyone would choose. The experience both shredded and reassembled me. I’ve attempted to write about it many times. This comes the closest (the third section, called “Love”).
“Events like this defy attempts to name or describe. This is not a topic that can be known, analyzed, picked apart, turned into a neat story. Believe me, I have tried. How does one net a liquid living light, or contain the energy that drives the universe? It doesn’t want me to tell stories. It wants me to let go and be ravished.”
Marie Howe’s poem, “Annunciation,” paints such a perfect image of the experience that I wept when I first heard it.
4) What is the first memory you have that there was something else besides the material realm?
This is a tough one. For years and years, decades, really, I had a very tenuous relationship with being here, in a body, in this physical realm. I didn’t feel at home in my body until my mid-thirties and forties. I can’t pinpoint a first memory, maybe because somehow, I’ve always known there’s something besides the material world.
There were smaller moments, like the time in Tai Chi class when we were all going through the movements and suddenly, I felt completely interconnected with everyone else. We were no longer sixteen bodies, but one organism, all moving together. My separate sense of self went on a brief blissful hiatus. I wasn’t moving; I was being moved. Of course, as soon as my busy rational mind weighed in with its commentary, Hey, isn’t this cool?—the feeling vanished. Such is the contract we made, apparently, with the material realm.
5) What do you hope for, for your writing?
I hope my writing draws people in to experience their own belonging, to know that we are all most welcome. All needed. We are not bystanders. “Nature” and “the environment” are not places separate from us or inconveniences that we can overcome with technology. The very fact that we need words for them speaks to our self-exile.
Writing is a form of connection in at least three ways. Firstly, to myself. In the pages of a journals, I’ve found the love and acceptance I’ve craved my whole life. Secondly, when I’m writing in flow, I feel connected to something deeper, an energy sourced within or even beyond me. Words emerge to surprise me with their novelty, their wisdom, their otherness. I feel less an author, more a scribe. Thirdly, and most precious, I long to connect with others, to enact interdependence via the written word, the image on the page, the reading voice. It’s this connection that I most value about writing and interacting on Substack. Connection is all the more valuable during times of collapse, such as the one we’re all living through now.
One example of the sort of serendipitous connections possible on Substack is
’s intelligently kind and comprehensive series, the Collapse Book. She wraps with a two-part chapter called, much to my delight, Homecoming. This spoke to me:“A natural consequence of this truth is the (crashing) realisation that we have been fighting for something that needed to die. This one hit me hard. Oh boy, we had it wrong! But, then, did we really? Didn’t we always know? A sadness imbues…
“Another is that we can’t fix this, even if we wanted to. Bless us; we felt we were meant to."
As an architect, my work was closely tied with problem-solving, which suited me fine. Once I learned about the climate and environmental crisis, I was all-in for fixing. Fixing and evangelizing. I was meant to, you might say. It was a hard landing. Fortunately, writing thrives best in environments of uncertainty, nuance, and paradox. Good thing, because that’s the reality of the real world around me (us).
6) Who is a writer or other creative artist who makes you feel inspired, helps you to remember we’re spiritual beings having a human experience, and perhaps makes you cherish Mother Earth just a little bit more?
There are so many! I admire women who have the courage to share their vision. Women like Mary Oliver, Hildegard of Bingen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wangari Maathai. But the inspiration I often return to is a man whose life illustrates what’s possible when both masculine and feminine energies are trusted and thrive in balance. R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller was a visionary architect in the mid-20th century. As a young man, he suffered depression from devastating losses: the death of his beloved daughter and the loss of his job and livelihood. He contemplated throwing himself into Lake Michigan, but was persuaded otherwise by a full-on epiphanic experience with this message:
“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”
One of my touchstones is his utterance: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new reality that makes the existing reality obsolete." Building is a thrill. Nothing is built in isolation by one person working alone, so no matter what we build, we’re also building community. The material and the spiritual are indivisible.
7) What are the words of wisdom and/or spiritual principle(s) that you come back to time and time again that give you solace and uplift your heart?
Don’t believe everything you think is a favorite slogan I learned in meditation training.
I’ve collected quotes and slogans and poems for as long as I can remember. Once I realized that not everyone does this, I became self-conscious and a touch critical for a while. What’s wrong with me that I need to find resonance with others’ words? Why can’t I trust what I think? Do I even know what I think? Now, I’ve let all that judgment go and just enjoy it and feel thankful when I read or hear something that strikes a chord. Here’s one from Einstein:
Intuition is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
This wisdom from the Dalai Lama hangs above my desk on a lovely saffron banner:
A Precious Human Life
Every day,
think as you wake up,
today I am fortunate
to have woken up,
I am alive,
I have a precious human life,
I am not going to waste it.
I am going to use
all my energies to develop myself,
to expand my heart out to others,
to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings,
I am going to have
kind thoughts towards others,
I am not going to get angry,
or think badly about others,
I am going to benefit others
as much as I can.
BIO:
Julie Gabrielli’s work as a writer, architect, and professor navigates our time of climate collapse and environmental reconciliation. She is a Clinical Associate Professor in the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation. She was a founding principal of TerraLogos eco architecture and in 2013, her firm, Gabrielli Design Studio, was named Baltimore Magazine's Best Remodeling Architect.
She earned a Fiction MFA from Southern New Hampshire University in 2022. She writes the Homecoming newsletter on Substack, and her work has been published in the magazines Orion, Ecological Home Ideas, and Urbanite; and in literary journals: Dark Mountain Journal#6, #8 and #10; Dark Matter #3 and Immanence. Her essay, "Song of the Chesapeake," is included in the 2025 anthology, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing: Dreams Before Extinction.
Please also note: this series of interviews will live under the tab labeled “Alchemical Conversations” on this Substack, with the intention that the space will become a kind of resource of writers collaborating in reclaiming the Divine Feminine. Perhaps each string of words each of us writes is a thread in a vast, intricate, and beautiful tapestry we are collectively weaving—each row of this evolving fabric moving us toward an evolution of consciousness, a deeper awareness of the spiritual dimensions of our ecological crisis, and the healing needed to restore a harmonic balance with Mother Earth.