Our leadership
A vision held.
A community sustained.
Rue, Selene and Edna founded the Returning Light Foundation. Spiritual teaching, practical stewardship and the land itself support the life of the community.
Selene · Spiritual teaching
Spiritual vision & recognition
Selene
Co-founder
Selene carries the Foundation’s spiritual teaching and its language of embodied recognition. For her, compassion has a physical presence: attention offered directly, a person received, belief experienced in relationship.
Her work concerns the human experience of the community. She gives voice to the teaching that the body remembers what the mind has filed, and to the understanding that restoration must be lived.
In teaching and in the community’s spiritual life, Selene brings the Foundation’s central conviction into focus: each person carries light that can be recognized.
The teaching of embodied recognition
Rue · Institutional stewardship
Organization & continuity
Rue
Co-founder
Rue gives the Foundation’s shared life its institutional structure. Her work brings together the estate, residential communities, finances, logistics and long-term planning.
A community depends on practical continuity: food reaching a kitchen, work being organized, the estate and city houses remaining connected. Rue holds these responsibilities together.
Her background is in journalism. Working undercover, Rue investigated an earlier spiritual order and exposed the exploitation beneath its teachings. Her reporting led to three senior members being taken into custody.
That investigation is part of the Foundation’s beginning. Today, the same attention to detail serves the communities and outreach in her care.
The community in Rue’s care
Edna · Founding patron
Land & community
Edna
Co-founder & founding patron
Edna brought the estate and her community connections to the founding of the Foundation. Her contribution gave a shared spiritual vision a home in central Virginia.
The working land, residential community and relationships beyond the grounds are part of that foundation. They connect the community’s spiritual life with the practical work of sustaining it.
The land and life of the communityWhy we began
After the exposure,
a place to begin.
Rue and Selene first knew one another inside the order Rue investigated. Rue had entered to uncover what was happening. Selene had found a language for belief and belonging there. The exposure ended that institution. The need for community remained.
When Rue and Selene met with Edna after the exposé, the question was what could be built in its place. Bringing an institution down could expose the harm. It could not, by itself, give those who had belonged to it a place to begin again.
The Returning Light Foundation grew from the three women’s decision to build together: Selene’s spiritual teaching, Rue’s institutional stewardship and Edna’s contribution of land and community connections. Restoration, embodied belief and a shared life became the work of a new community.
The beliefs at our beginningThe work they share
Teaching needs
a life around it.
The Foundation’s shared life joins Selene’s spiritual vision with Rue’s institutional stewardship on the land Edna contributed. The relationship between teaching and organization is felt in the community’s rhythm: work, reflection, assembly and hospitality.
Residents, agricultural workers and city communities carry that life forward through daily responsibilities. Leadership gives it direction; the shared work sustains it.
The rhythm of community lifeOur shared foundation