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
What is the opposite of a great poem?
I’ve been carrying an evocative question as I continue this work of “becoming.”
We Are Here: Knowing + Creating as the Integral Springs Forth
We have talked at length about what’s been shifting in our sense of the world and our inklings about why we are here. In this offering, there’s a deepening.
Faint Outlines of a New Possibility
We are alive, friends. It’s painful and exquisite. There is so much darkness. It’s real. Death is all around us. Unaddressed pain has mixed with power and fragmented us, but we are encircled by a Love that is permeating the darkness in the most creative ways.
Good Conversations as Food + Drink for the Soul
John O’Donohue said good conversations are like “food and drink for the soul.” What does this stir in you?
Teachers + Thresholds
The teachers who have shaped me invited me — whether explicitly or in the way they uniquely inhabited their life and calling — to engage with my soul.
A night of complete undoing
John O’Donohue give us words for the obscurity we encounter in our dark nights of the soul. I take comfort in knowing I’m not the only one to encounter this location in my spiritual geography.
And Still, I Burn, A Poem About Longing
Every so often, I’m visited by a traveling itch.
I push up my sleeve and scratch deeply,
but this itch is a deft matador.
End of the…
This practice invites you to engage with evocative images to listen with curiosity for inner resonance and resistance.
Contemplative Curiosity: Dr. Gerald May on Making Friends with Mystery
When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists only to be solved.
Everything is Going to Be Alright
What words shimmer for you in this poem by Derek Mahon? What arises in you as you hold those words?
The Dark Night, Songs for Our Seasons of Obscurity
This playlist is not designed to tell you that your dark night of the soul is not so bad, nor is it an attempt to coax you out of your dark night.
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.
Note to Self
Waiting for medical test results on this particular day, I found it difficult to get a deep breath. I also found thinking complicated, as worst-case scenarios danced in my head. I took a walk, capturing images along the way. As I contemplated this image, my soul gifted me a blessing.
Aundi Kolber on Trauma and "Trying Softer"
If you’re weary of trying harder, Aundi Kolber suggests an alternative - ”trying softer” - with our attention, our bodies, our emotions, and more.