The Ocean is In Us, Too: A Spacious Dialogue About Living, Creating, and Becoming

Spacious Conversations
Written By Kirsten Harrison

Unscripted, intuitive, and soul-deep.

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 with Carin Huebner has been singing in me for weeks.

Though we draw water from different streams and use different words to speak of our experiences, what flows between us springs from a common Source. The flow between is what sings most vividly.

We are becoming together.

Our dialogue recalls to memory John O’Donohue’s words. He says good conversations are like “food and drink for the soul,” and asks…

When was the last time you had a great conversation?

…A conversation in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew.
…A conversation in which you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you’d thought you’d lost.
…A conversation that brought the two of you onto a different plane.
…A conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterward.”


In this conversation, we explore...

Practice, Presence & How Showing Up Matters

What if showing up—especially when nothing feels profound—is the work? We talk about how moments of synchronicity redirect us toward trust, even when clarity is missing, and how spiritual practice plugs us into more than we understand.

The Greenhouse & The Art of Letting Go

Carin walks us through a tangled morning in the greenhouse, where romaine grew wildly and needed to be pulled to save the peppers. What do we do when abundance threatens what is essential? Tender noticings related to sacrifice, grief, and being reminded of what we already know logically, but cannot access.

Chaos, Quantum Connection & Finding a Still Center

Thomas Keating once wrote, “Chaos is our home.” What if silence and stillness aren’t the absence of chaos, but ways to move through it? Carin recalls a children’s book that continually guides her — stillness, like the surface of a pond, makes it possible to see and to sense our connection with the wider field of consciousness.

Leaving Home, Remembering Self, and Quietly Returning

A tender excavation of what it’s like when our nervous systems protect us from doing what we wish to do. Inhabiting our “us-ness” and the possibility of self-witnessing in real time. Can we bless ourselves as we leave and welcome ourselves home when it’s time?

Artifacts of Presence & Creativity as Collective Flow

If we are each a drop of the ocean, the ocean is in us, too. We talk about artmaking, bottling up aliveness, and constellations of creation: you never know who your light will beckon. Maybe even you.


A Note of Clarification from Kirsten:

Early in the video, I use the word obedience, and some of you may be understandably disturbed by this choice. Once a word with negative connotations for me, Cynthia Bourgeault reversed the direction of energy in it with this clarification in her book Eye of the Heart…

We now turn to the question of obedience. To our modern ears, the term seems to suggest knuckling under to an external authority, but the Latin word - ob audire - actually means “to listen deeply’” or ‘”to listen from the depths,” “with the ear of the heart” as St. Benedict puts it. And yes, that listening is, in itself, also a doing, a submission to what the heart has heard.

Who or what are we “obeying”? That which is lower in us bows to that which is higher. Maurice Nicoll deepened my appreciation for the virtue with a new twist in his book The New Man…

The power that man may gain over himself, in the sense of making all that is in him, all his different desires, different momentary wills, different thoughts, moods, etc., obey “something” in him, owing to the fact that this “something” in him is of such a nature that it deprives all these different things of any power to affect him. The Greek words for faith, pistis, is from the verb “patho,” which means to persuade or make, to obey.

What in a man will make all sides of himself obey him? What persuasion in his mind will bring him into a position where everything in him will yield its power to him?

So, if you can bear the dissonance, please hold space for the reclamation of the word “obedience” as a movement toward sovereignty and wisdom that arises from what is deepest and truest within you.

About Creative Sessions

Creative Sessions is an ongoing conversation between two artists and seekers—Carin Huebner and Kirsten Harrison—exploring the sacred, strange, and often contradictory terrain of being human and making art in this moment.

Maybe you’ll find resonance with these words and images; perhaps you are holding similar questions. Maybe the words, images, and questions you carry are different. It is our wish to offer spacious openings for deep listening.

Kirsten Harrison holds deep space for the sacred within daily life as a spiritual director, collage artist, and writer. Her offerings of spacious accompaniment and generous soul hospitality have a unique flavor that is shaped, in part, by neurodivergence, dancing with uncertainty, and a wish to continually soften into healing and becoming in service to the whole.

Carin Huebner lives at the intersection of existential curiosity and practical creativity as an artist, creative coach, and founder of SPACEBUG—a creative wisdom studio that supports artists and weirdos in rewilding their practice.

Show Notes

“Starting from the premise that everything is alive—a feeling that is deep and immediate for many children—Be Still, Life draws the reader into a still place where everything is moving. Thought-provoking in its depiction of the relationship between stillness and motion, this is certain to engage children, slowing them down through sheer fascination and delight.”

  • “The Beauty of Chaos”

“We try so hard to put order into our lives and into the cosmos. There is none. Instead, there are lots of comings and goings, ups and downs. In fact, everything at the subatomic level is chaos. Moments of perfect order coalesce, only to dissolve again into the thrilling immensity of infinite possibilities. Love is all because it is nowhere, not in one place, but every place. Every form is teeming with life and with various forms of consciousness or no consciousness, like bees swarming or in a hive or ants on an ant hill.

Life on every level is busy, yet it's doing nothing, remaining for a moment, and then quickly passing away, only to be back in another form and another kind of community, and another chaos. Chaos is our home. It is always becoming, ending, and starting anew.”

— Thomas Keating in Reflections on the Unknowable

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Kirsten Harrison https://www.mysoul.space
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