Welcome to the website of Doug and Norvene Vest...

Taking a cue from the title of one of Doug’s books, we hope you’ll enjoy “sauntering” with us through our various involvements.  You may wonder what a “composury” is: it’s a word we created to describe the little out-building where Norvene had her office in our southern California home. Presumably not only did she compose books there, but she also experienced composure in its secluded setting!  So, with our move to southern Arizona, we've adopted the name as appropriate for our home, the Desert Composury. And we have taken the word as a key part of our collaborative name: Composury Colleagues.  

Our site combines several aspects of what Doug’s recent book calls “Homes for the Heart.” On our pilgrimages and retreats, we endeavor to combine active and rest periods to enable reflective experience by establishing “home away from home,” a sacred container, for those periods. In our home setting in the Sonoran Desert, we find the pace of life and the understated beauty of nature a great asset to our daily contemplative schedule. Finally, the heart is the deepest home, expressed both in Doug's poetry which graces these pages, and in the spiritual direction we share with those who come to be with us.

We hope these views and notes will bring you some of the wonderful gift of shalom, the fullness of peace. 

-Norvene and Doug Vest.

The "Original Composury". (Click for larger view)   Years later, we marveled side by side that we were given life together because, like a busy spider spinning sunlit outside our kitchen window, we’d released those early, breeze-cast filaments from our deepest inner selves.

Day-lighted desert: largely landscape, if scoped by eyes alone; a work of rustic art stretching farther than a thousand galleries imagined end to end.  At night, stars uncloak a ceiling stippled by its countless lights, their whisperings unheard by ears a billion miles away on tiny earth. But silence, if maintained – meditation on the wonder – reveals the biggest universe of all: internal – an inside greater than what’s out.

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