LEWISTON – Stephen Hyde has been on a life-long journey. He told several dozen people at Bates College about it Tuesday afternoon. There were no tales of adventure or descriptions of exotic lands, but his experiences in personal discovery offered direction for attaining contentment in one’s life

“Coming Home: Learning the Sacred and Practical Art of Return” was Hyde’s topic.

Hyde, who lives on a farm in Pownal, is a Zen priest, a wilderness guide and an associate in the Two Roads Maine program. He spoke about his life-long quest for a spiritual center, and he emphasized the importance of nature and deep ecology – individual connectivity to the natural world – in his search.

His quiet voice and a deliberate pattern of speech captivated the audience for well over an hour. Hyde spoke of life experiences that face nearly everyone, such as raising a mentally challenged daughter and learning how to lend support to a brother diagnosed with prostate cancer. He told how he arrived at an understanding that “the only opportunity we have to be alive is in this moment.”

For him, the key to “coming home” has been learning to avoid paying too much attention to the past or the future. You can’t allow yourself to get caught up in “the stories” of your life, he said.

Hyde told how the Connecticut farm of his grandparents, where he first lived, was sold off while he was still young. He told about “normally adolescent” years in high school and, later, college years and the student strikes of the late 1960s.

“Something in me said you have got to get out,” Hyde said. He told the group he was beginning to feel that doors would close and they would never open again, so he set off with a 7-week-old puppy for Alaska – “basically, to the ends of the earth” – but he never actually reached Alaska.

“I did find my wife, though; what a find,” he said.

Hyde’s life journey of self-discovery went from his early Episcopalian roots to an earnest study of Buddhism. He returned recently from study in New Mexico with his Zen master, a woman.

Hyde said much of his early spiritual awakening came as he spent time “traveling out in the woods and just wandering around.”

He emphasized the importance of meditation in his life, including the lessons of accepting life’s challenges he received from his daughter, Anna, now a young lady, who sat attentively beside him throughout the presentation.

“Anna brought some very interesting elements into the mix for me,” he said. “She helped me know what makes life worthwhile. She touched the core of me.”

For Hyde, his work as a naturalist and environmental educator, coupled with a passion for writing, offered the path to his understanding of “why nature mattered as a place of spirit.”

Hyde told the group that “something is always coming up” in every person’s life, and he called them the barriers that challenge us to examine our lives.

“These are the places where we return to this point of being alive,” he said.

Brothers Stephen and David Hyde, and David’s wife, Sarah, founded Two Roads Maine following David’s bout with cancer a few years ago, and David’s realization of the importance of nature in healing. The organization offers retreats in natural settings for people at emotional or physical crossroads. They include snowshoeing trips, kayaking and canoeing in Maine, trips to islands off the coast of Georgia, and wilderness trips in Canada. The intent of these programs is to re-establish through direct experience one’s personal relationship with the natural world as a way of investigating both illness and healing.

Hyde’s talk at Bates was the first in the 2003-04 series on Spiritual Journeys: Stories of the Soul, presented by the Office of the College Chaplain at Bates College.