Visible Contradictions
The Maps, Lenses, and Mirrors series is a collage of conversations, music, voice memos, visual art, and words exploring how to know.
Before you enter: take one breath and name one honest question you’re living. If you want, write it down. Let it sit beside you as you listen.
Start here (the short path)
This post holds notes and context for this unpolished, high‑presence fragment of a real conversation. After the video, I offer a little context, a pause in Beauty, and notes to help you stay close to what it stirs.
Watch the video (first)
Return for the notes (for clarity + a gentler landing)
If the player doesn’t load well here, YouTube will open it cleanly (captions + playback speed).
Video Artifact #1 (what this is)
Earlier this year, a friend asked if we could begin recording our conversations. Each time we talk, there’s a lingering wish for an artifact—something we can return to.
These dialogues make space for something new to emerge: in us, and between us. This video is a snippet pulled from my end of one conversation.
Below, you’ll find notes meant to contextualize, clarify, and ground what I was reaching for.
Seeing Ourselves Clearly
A granular reflection of our particular blind spots can be hard to find. And when we do find it, what is reflected can be hard to bear.
This conversation with Carin is a present-moment excavation of what their question stirred and the context guiding me as I meet the generative friction of my own contradictions.
Context doesn’t change the realities we find ourselves in. But it does change how we orient to those realities.
We do not develop into a full expression of our nature through ease and good fortune. The dynamic aspects of the birth chart—the part of our fate that can feel harrowing—often provide the agitation required to bring the soul into fuller flowering.
Relax Your Eyes
The Lyrical Nature of Our Own Belonging
Let’s ground this entire conversation in the context of Beauty, by contemplating the poetic wisdom of John O’Donohue…
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.
If we decide that contradiction is undesirable and has to be either hammered out or rooted out, or flattened, then it will do immense damage to the mystery of our own inner landscape.
Under the pressure of not contradicting oneself, and not being in contradiction with oneself, one runs the terrible risk of severing and dividing different sacred dimensions of your interiority from each other, and ends up creating a schizoid interiority. In other words, dualism is a consequence of our fear of contradiction. That also means that dualism is the force that most severely damages the seamlessness and lyrical nature of our own belonging.
People feel under pressure to choose one side or the other side of their own contradictory nature. And that choice always means loss, because you lose the side, you lose a part of yourself that is very necessary to your being and to your identity and to your future, indeed.
—John O’Donohue
So the question becomes: can I stay present to the tension long enough for a truer way of knowing to emerge?
The Horoscope: Latent Possibilities, Predilections, & Precarities
I have heard it said that the soul is a seed. For this seed to take root and flourish into full expression, it must be developed.
Astrology is a vital element in my soul-developing work. Most relevant to this dialogue, as a mirror for seeing and deepening interior fluency, bringing what is unconscious above ground, where new possibilities for conscious choice (sometimes) become perceptible.
A horoscope shows the precise location of planetary bodies at the moment of one’s first breath. This snapshot bears within it the qualities of time and space present as Spirit enters form, teeming with latent possibilities, predilections, and precarities.
This portrait of the sky represents twelve Zodiacal Signs and twelve slices of celestial pie, each corresponding to a domain of life experience.
In the video, I speak of the friction and flow between the planets. An “opposition” is when two planets are 180 degrees away from each other, on opposite sides of the circle; it is a polarity.
In my horoscope, the Sun is in Gemini in the 11th House, and Neptune is in Sagittarius in the 5th House…
You don’t need to understand astrology to follow the heart of this reflection. Tune in visually to the dark red lines, which illustrate the polarities I reference.
To Be Clear
When I speak about Neptune, I’m really excavating how the Sun–Neptune polarity operates within me. In the video, my language gets a little muddy—planets themselves don’t “like” anything.
I’m not offering this as astrological expertise, but as lived inquiry: learning to name what I’m experiencing from the inside.
Though I mistakenly reversed the order of this question, it remains potent. Here it is as written:
How do you tell the difference between “the invincible certainty of your heart” and neurotic self-delusion?
—Cynthia Bourgeault
Resources + Notes
This is the class I reference with Dr. Richard Tarnas (Cosmos & Psyche) and Dr. Becca Tarnas. I learned last January (in this video) that the elder Tarnas and Bruno Barnhart were friends, which is delightful to me. I will share Bruno with you in Part Two. (Also, I refer to him as Rick at one point, and I don’t think this is correct!)
Thomas Hübl’s words about relating are in the video below. If this short clip draws you, follow it back to its source. Another excellent starting place is his book Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World.
I have been contemplating this blog post. Cynthia refers to Gurdjieff’s teachings on developing a soul. Here is the first paragraph…
“According to Gurdjieff, the mysterious ‘X-factor’ that enters in the moment of conception is not yet soul but essence. Think of it as the hand of cards you’re dealt at the start of a card game. It comprises a set of unique characteristics including race, gender (and most likely gender orientation), basic body type and other genetic factors, influences emerging from more distant ancestry and bloodline—and yes, that unquantifiable legacy ‘from the stars’—all combined primarily according to what Teilhard would call “tatonnement” (“trial and error”): evolution’s predilection for trying out any and all possibilities. Cumulatively, all of the above will combine to confer on you what is commonly known as your ‘nature.’”
A Book List
A few texts that have shaped the questions underneath this reflection.
Thomas Hübl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World
Cynthia Bourgeault, Love is Stronger Than Death
John O’Donohue, The Inner Landscape
Here’s a link to my Bookshop storefront. Purchases support local bookstores and help sustain my work.
About Kirsten
My name is Kirsten. I write, collage, and practice spiritual direction in Vashon, WA. Describing what spiritual direction is feels like trying to “catch a cloud and pin it down.” Here's what's freshly alive in me: Spiritual direction is spacious accompaniment. Together we attune to the deep and the timeless. We hold questions no one else can answer for you and listen deeply to what arises. We open to what you sense and ground intuitions in rhythms and practices that anchor you as you live into what is emerging. We notice what is—obscurity, pain, fear, longing, wonder, delight, hope—and invite it into the home within you where true belonging and wisdom are always, already present.
Read More in the Maps, Lenses, & Mirrors Series
There Was No Contradiction in His Soul
What Strength It Takes To Bear A Slow Untangling
Can’t go under it. Can’t go over it. We’ve got to go through it.
