Grounding + Becoming
A Spacious Wisdom Cross-Pollination
There is a current between knowing and unknowing. It will carry you.
Each one is troubled by the ultimate questions. And no one else’s answer can satisfy the hunger in your heart. The beauty of great questions is how they dwell differently in each mind, how they root deeper than all the surface chatter and image. How they continually disturb. Your deep questions grow quickly restless in the artificial clay of received opinion or stagnant thought, and if you avoid this disturbance and try to quell these questions, it will cost you all your peace of mind. Sooner or later, every one of us must come to our contemplative longing and gain either the courage, the recklessness to begin our own contemplative journey.
-John O’Donohue
Visible Contradictions + Knowing How To Know
It’s sometimes in the most unusual places that you actually discover the gift of the Beautiful. I always think that contradiction is what makes a person interesting. -John O’Donohue
Re-Member Yourself: A Note From Kirsten + A Poem About Holding Obscurity
When obscurity rises, and
you cannot see where to step next,
your gaze turns ever-so-slightly outward.
Oh, how humbling it is to be human!
What My Soul Already Knows: A Simple Poetry Practice for a Dark Night of the Soul
A simple practice for drawing on wisdom beyond rational thinking and pro-con lists — a steadying anchor for the disorientation of a dark night of the soul.
Something Else: A Spiritual Director on Holding Obscurity & Disorientation
If you are in the thick of obscurity, holding inner tensions that cannot be resolved, or feeling disconnected from your deepest knowing. If you are disoriented as the sands of time flow through the hourglass at a dizzying pace and there is no rest in sight, please open to this possibility with me: a taste of something else may also be very nearby.
What Are You Nourishing?
Water meant to flow into the hose is dripping from the spigot, seeping into the ground underneath it. This well-irrigated little patch of Earth is incredibly fertile, but has not been cultivated with intention.
My loves, drink these words.
Let us prepare for the unthinkable, speak of the unmentionable...
Strong Winds Pose No Threat, A Dimensionally-Layered Practice
Vibrant beauty that once took away breath is a backdrop now; you search for novel sacraments.
The Ocean is In Us, Too: A Spacious Dialogue About Living, Creating, and Becoming
There’s a certain kind of magic that happens when we drop into the flow of relating, present to the “unclear edge” of what is sensed, but needs space to find verbal expression. This conversation has been singing in me for weeks.
Panning for Gold: Wake Up, Remember
We feel the pain no words can touch, co-present with gold. Instead of writing it off as “all good,” we breathe with it.
Practicing Presence with Abstract Art
Contemplating abstract artwork is a way to wake up our hearts and find a doorway into the inner landscape. It offers us something quieter, deeper: a wordless language.
He Wished to See the Teacher: A Poem and Collage to Listen With
He is one of many who,
while walking the road of daily-ness,
catches a fragrance
so tantalizing, so familiar
like no other thing there are categories for,
and cannot not follow it.
The Dynamism of Becoming: Notes from Real Life
Snapshots of granular moments of becoming as I work toward an aim to develop finer discrimination and attention.
What if losing one’s way from time to time is the way?
Has anything ever been more clear? Anything more obscure?
Glimmering Landscape Time: Spacious Spiritual Practices to Hold Us in Spiritual Disorientation
How do I hold this _______________? (chaos, obscurity, grief, disorientation, restlessness, dark night of the soul…)
Lean Your Heart in Close, A Poem + Collage
Friends, I mustn’t tell you the way,
but lean your heart in close;
I'll cover my whisper.
Tuning in to the Beautiful, a Soulspace Newsletter
As we slow down to explore subtle inner experiences weaving through daily-ness, fleeting felt senses of a different quality shimmer.
Collaging Signals From a Creative Universe
When the gut-punch of anguish hit me hard, I collaged wisdom that called to me in songs and images.
Tending Our Souls Collection, Part One
As social media is changing, algorithms are making it difficult to get the word out about what we are creating. I want to spread the word about cool things that are available to support us in this vital work of tending our souls.