About seven years ago, contemplative practice had deepened my capacities for and commitment to love and presence to such a degree that I found I could no longer teach and ask students to learn in the same ways I had been. My personal life felt fine but at my small, rural, New Hampshire state university I felt enveloped by students’ distress, colleagues’ stress, and a sense of general dispiritedness and joylessness. Students who, as children, had loved reading, claimed that now, as English majors, they despised it. And so, that August, I knew I had to make a change.