SCL Announces New Director
- dcprichard
- Apr 27
- 4 min read
Dear SCL community,
It is with a much awaited joy that we get to share our new Executive Director, David Prichard, with you. Though our Board chair, Ani Vidrine, knows and values him through their work together at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, for the past three months we, the SCL Board, have been in a deep process of getting to know him too. We have all come to find his contemplative and leadership style a delight and a great match for SCL.
Below we offer a bio for David, beneath which is a letter of introduction from him to you.
With blessings, gratitude and hope for this new beginning,
The SCL Board of Directors
Introducing David Prichard:
For 15 years David has practiced deeply in the secular mediation linage of Shambhala, which was founded by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and in its Tibetan Buddhist counterpart lead by his son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, for whom David worked closely as a personal aide. He was trained and certified as a Mediation Instructor in those lineages in 2017.
After the birth of their first child in 2019, his family resettled in Mississippi, David’s home state, where they began a homestead, now budding into a retreat center called Marpa Farms. David has started and operated several enterprises during these years on the land, including market gardening, lump hardwood charcoal production, a specialized hand pruning service, and permaculture landscape design (with clients including the historic Welty House and Gardens, and Jackson’s Medgar Evers Library).
David’s spiritual practices deepened with the return home, as the clear waters he’d known in Buddhism mixed with the baptismal fount of his birthplace. He is a Contemplative Spiritual Director, and is an associate in the Spiritual Guidance Program, class of 2026, at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation. He has begun to lead small prayer groups, and offers retreats that join the insights of eastern and western religious traditions.
Currently, his practice is nourished by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgault and Kabir Helminski, Christian/Fourthway and Sufi mystics respectively. He believes that the spiritual path begins as it ends, with primordial goodness and worthiness of experience. He is interested in what he calls the “day-long living prayer” using “applied spirituality” towards that end. He is curious about the circumstances in which the world’s religious and wisdom traditions may open to one another without the depth of their singularities being lost in the process.
He is available as a mediation instructor, spiritual director, retreat leader, writer, and speaker.
A letter from David to you:
Dear SCL Community,
It is with a great sense of joy, creativity, and awe that I join you at the School for Contemplative Living. Your deep and committed presence here transmits at a frequency soothing to the soul—even to one as myself, who has until now been listening in, so to speak, largely through the channel of your Board of Directors.
It is not hard for me to image the wandering and hungry contemplative—as that is the role I’ve known best in my life—and what a sense of home and welcome they must feel when stumbling into one of your meetings. I look forward to stepping into each of them myself soon, as a new stranger, and to soon be as among friends, I hope.
I would also like to find other possibilities for us to gather and get to know one another. Soon I’ll send times for in person and Zoom options. I look forward to hearing, and coming to share your values around SCL as I take up its leadership.
In the meantime, if there are thoughts or questions for me, or prompts or themes that you think would be helpful to pose to the community during such gatherings, please feel welcome to make use of this survey:
I wonder how I might further introduce myself here. And wondering, I turn to the present moment: I am seated in an old deck chair down hill from the retreat cabin on our homestead, which I’ll now be using as an office. Before me is a thousand feet of new hedgerow plantings, and beyond that four strands of electric wire to keep the sheep off the young saplings. I can hear the shouts (joyful at present, praise God) of my three young children coming from the barn-house a quarter mile on up the drive, and I hope my wife there is also enjoying a moment of Spring’s free abundance and festive joy.
This land-based life is one of those commitments contemplation has lead us to: contemplative living being for me much about the bindings one consents to, those that would increase the sense for, and devotion to Reality.
For some years now, my professional labors have been based on a relationship to the land and all that lives upon it. I have joked that, like Amos, I have been a pruner of sycamores, as detailed hand pruning of trees has been the lion’s share of my off farm work (though, alas, I have pruned very few sycamores! And none of the fruiting type … Mostly crepe myrtle’s, live oaks, and old camellias...). To that end I’ll share a contemplative poem, recently written, called “I Am a Pruner of Sycamores.” It takes Pessoa’s “I am a keeper of sheep” as inspiration. Both poems can be read here on Substack:
Until we meet each other, be accompanied by my wish that you be sustained this Spring in that peace that knows all weather and all seasons, inner and outer—that which is with us always when we find ourselves just as we are.
Henceforth Yours,
David Prichard
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