Hands Like Roots: Notes on an Entangled, Contemplative Life draws its subject matter from roots deep in science, spirituality, and a love of life. This liminal work integrates seemingly disparate knowledge-hydrology, cognitive linguistics, climate instability, embodiment-with the inner experience of prayer and meditation, creating an accessible, poetic, heart-opening whole. Authentic, impassioned, intelligent and vulnerable, Hands Like Roots is a real love story about a human heart and the Heart of the Ineffable.

Therese DesCamp has written essays, articles, columns, reflections and reviews for Willamette Week, The Holy Ghostwriter, the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Religious Studies News, the Journal of Pastoral Psychology, the Monterey Herald, the United Church Observer, Broadview Magazine, and the Valley Voice newspaper.Therese is a graduate of Portland State University (B.Sc.), Pacific School of Religion (M.Div.), and the Graduate Theological Union (Ph.D.). Her essay "Singing the Red Dress Song" was long-listed for the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize; she has received awards for her scholarship, research, and teaching from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA and United Theological College, Montreal, QC. Therese has taught at Pacific School of Religion; University of California, Berkeley; Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley; Vancouver School of Theology, Vancouver, BC; and in the Grade 4-5-6 classroom at Lucerne Elementary School in New Denver, BC. She has been leading retreats for 35 years up and down the west coast of North America, and is a member of the 2020 cohort of the Living School, a program of the Center for Action and Contemplation. She has spent over three and a half decades in twelve-step recovery. Therese currently works as a writer, an ordained minister and spiritual director. She and her husband George Meier live in New Denver, B.C., where they built and managed a retreat centre for a decade, co-sponsoring the Convergence Writers' Weekends from 2012 through 2020. Therese served ten years on the Slocan Lake Stewardship Society and currently serves on the board of The Contemplative Society.