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
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.
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.
Kirsten’s Reading List
I’m reading (and already recommending!) The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors by Lama Rod Owens.
Honest Offering: A Prayer and Guided Reflection
Prayer is fundamentally an offering of ourselves to God. It is not a matter of offering the pious thoughts of theologians or spiritual writers. Nor is it a matter of offering God only what we believe to be worthy.
Trauma-Supporting Spiritual Care
Have you noticed the concept of trauma coming up more frequently in the past few years? You are not alone; it is confusing. What do people mean when they use the word trauma in this rapidly-changing landscape?
Being Human: Beautiful and Ominous
Coming home to our bodies is about recognizing we are complex beings whose present-tense needs are worthy of time and care. These needs are not distractions, but rather, a portal to our deepest wisdom.
Tapestry of Wisdom: Prayer, a curated collection
As you follow the threads of wisdom in this post, and listen for resonance in your own soul, may you find comfort in this quote from George Bernanos, “The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.”
Tapestry of Wisdom: Enneagram, a curated collection
The enneagram came to me in a season when I was ready to take a look at the parts of me that I’d been afraid to look at. It was a tool that pointed to some tender spots within me that I didn’t have language for in a compassionate way.
Sorrow & Joy
A playlist for days we are holding the paradox of Sorrow & Joy. Naming and feeling our own pain reminds of our connectedness to others, in sorrow and love.
Tapestry of Wisdom: Grief, a curated collection
Whether we are grieving the loss of a loved one, a faith community, a dream, or a self-image, in attuning to our felt sense granularly, we bear witness to our experience.
On Poetry and Brain Rest
I was in a minor car accident a couple of weeks ago. Though not badly hurt, I received a prescription for brain rest. My doctor also suggested bundling up and going outside to be among the trees and birds. Nature as medicine.
Please Tell Me What To Do: The Gift of *Not* Receiving What I Thought I Wanted in Spiritual Direction
My spiritual director wouldn’t give in to my pleas for a narrow way.