When Crazy Wisdom closed in early 2022 after forty years, owners Bill Zirinsky and Ruth Schekter weren’t sure whether or how the store might ever reemerge.

After decades cultivating what Zirinsky calls “an oasis for people searching in their lives in the spiritual and psychological realms, and in the areas of integrative medicine and sustainable/conscious living,” he just knew it was time for a sabbatical at least.

Operations partner Rachel Pastiva, general manager Chandra Mitchel, and co-owner Bill Zirinsky are reopening Crazy Wisdom on Dec. 1. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie

“I get tired even thinking about all we were doing,” he recalls in an email in advance of the store’s December 1 reincarnation. Along with the books and eclectic selection of New Age merchandise, Crazy Wisdom had an upstairs tea room and hosted hundreds of meetings and events each year, including live music, fairy teas for kids, poetry and storytelling nights, author visits, drum circles, Death Café, and Witches’ Night Out.

The tea room never reopened after the pandemic. The food and drink service had been “an ongoing drag on the store’s finances,” Zirinsky writes, and once relieved of it, 2021 was their most profitable year. Yet the couple was also focused on raising their family and publishing the long-standing Crazy Wisdom Community Journal magazine and the digital Crazy Wisdom Biweekly ezine they’d launched in 2020.

The store was established in 1982 by Aura Glaser, who later cofounded the Tibetan Buddhist learning center Jewel Heart.​​ Crazy Wisdom’s oxymoron of a name hearkens to a lineage of Buddhist masters manifesting wild and unfettered insights. Originally on E. Ann, it had moved to N. Fourth Ave. when Zirinsky took ownership in 1989 through “the good auspices” of mutual friend Jon Ellis. With a background in Buddhist meditation, Gestalt therapy, and writing and editing, Zirinsky expanded the store’s scope to include body/mind studies, archetypal psychology, integrative and holistic medicine and healing, and worldwide spiritual and wisdom traditions.

Schekter, Zirinsky’s then-girlfriend, soon moved from Manhattan to join him and help run the store, particularly overseeing its lines of jewelry, crafts, statuary, and instruments, alongside longtime managers Carol Karr and Sarah Newland. In the late 1990s the couple bought 114 S. Main from the Mayer-Schairer Company, undertook extensive renovations, and now own the building outright.

The fond appreciations that followed news of Crazy Wisdom’s recent closure were “like receiving a gold watch from the community at large,” Zirinsky writes. With the help of another longtime manager, Rachel Pastiva, they spoke with no fewer than twenty-one parties interested in buying the business and renting its building.

“The whole period was, for me, akin to walking through a beautiful morning fog, not sure of where it was leading, not sure of when and where the fog would lift,” he reflects. One couple came especially close to taking over but eventually backed out, leaving Zirinsky and Schekter with the choice of seeking different business as a tenant or reopening Crazy Wisdom in some simpler form.

Once they decided to reopen, they hired Chandra Mitchel to manage a four-day-a-week operation on the first floor while they refurbish the upstairs to resume its myriad of programming next year. “I’m excited about that, but also want to temper people’s expectations,” Zirinsky writes. “This store will be smaller, with no food and beverage service, and we won’t be trying to do as much as we used to do.”

The local holistic community remains vibrant, so “it will be fun and interesting to turn on the Crazy Wisdom motor again,” he writes. “And when we’re ready, we know now that it’s quite easy to turn the motor off, too. You just close the doors and say goodbye.”

Crazy Wisdom Bookstore, 114 S. Main. (734) 665–2757. Wed.–Sat. 11 a.m.–7 p.m. Closed Sun.–Tues. crazywisdom.net