I cut words from magazines and fashioned them into a poem I have shared before in a visual post. Today, this calls to be spoken.

Love,

Kirsten

First, you will need to cross some dark threshold.

This deftness might 
be regarded as “its own breed of genius.”

Very slowly and then all at once,
You imagine what lies ahead or, perhaps,
behind. Your body feels the twilight, too.

Do not be afraid of fear.

A whole world exists on the underside
showing us something different,
hidden in the dark.

Looking for the color over there, and
here it is, unbound.

So deliciously unpredictable.

Unfathomed know-how, a shrewd intelligence needed to navigate the dark
kicks in at a level of intensity that far outweighs our
better idea for safety.

I can see the emanation of
what’s held here cosmically mirroring itself,
presence and wonder
breaking across your face.

You go from dark to light and back again

If any doubts remained after
cells wondrously bearing both,
they were dispelled forever.

And returning often to the same ground in new light reveals a different story.

More on the Soulspace Blog

A Letter to Christian Parents: The Only Thing That Matters Tonight is Presence

Can you still reach your stubborn hope?

Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way by Mary Oliver

Silence: Words + Portals

My name is Kirsten. I accompany folks as they attune to the inner experiences of life in spiritual direction, a place of presence and connection, a place to anchor briefly amid the chaos, a spacious place to be seen and known. To read more about this type of accompaniment, visit my offerings page.

“And every sign of love
Every seed that's growing
Every sweet surrender
To that silent knowing
Will bring you to your knees and
Closer to the reason”

—The Wailin’ Jennys, “You Are Here”

A cosmically ripe moment.

I wake before dawn with three words on my tongue.

Though I have barely dipped my toe into the celestial arts, I remember. Mercury and the Sun will kiss one another today, in a liminal veil-is-thin moment.

What if I take even the subtlest of synchronicities seriously?

I aim to write this trio of words down while they are still fresh, but time swings open. Three hours later, my pen comes to a rest.

A summons.

A voice from without calls to something within. Doubts and fears are stilled by a presence my heart recognizes—a presence that knows me intimately and is not at all troubled by my humanity. There is a summons.

It’s time. The way has already been made. You know what it feels like.

This is not yours. This is a love letter. A collective art project. A group mosaic that you cannot see the whole of. A kaleidoscope. You are the steward. The glue.

Along the way, there will be losses, and you will bear them. This will not be easy, but a felt sense of ease will be your guide.

Do not be afraid; I am. I am here. I have always been with you.

Now go. Breathe. Slow down. Have fun. Gather your supplies. Make lists. LOVE; it will not be lost.

A field guide.

On the heels of an experience I have no context for, at a moment I am unsure where guidance might be found, I open Audible.

Like Goldilocks, I try out two options. A classic by Father Richard Rohr? Something in me says no. Ooh, a book by Ken Wilber—it’s free on Audible Plus. Ten minutes in, I know this isn’t it. Both good options, but not for me, not now.

The author’s name rings a bell very quietly.

I am curious and hesitant. I press play on the free Audible sample and hear the first language of my heart for the first time in time.

This one is “just right.”

A sacrament.

This is no passing fancy.

I eat this book while I fold clothes, chop carrots, and simmer soup. I drink it on the treadmill and in the car, my arm out the window in cold salt air.

Though fluency is miles away, something in me already knows this by heart. I transcribe entire chapters by hand. Wisdom flows from ear to arm, from pen to page—at last visible to my eyes.

When thoughts run out ahead of feeling and sensing, the dog insists on going outside. Or my AirPods need charging. I behold the crescent moon in a midnight blue sky. Snow crunches under my feet.

For a moment, I can see.

We meet in Presence, unbound by maps and clocks. Here, on the underside of time, minutes melt into the precise depth needed for aliveness to rekindle.

I am always, already here. It is always, already NOW. And still, I forget. I forget.

In the presence of this honesty, good and bad meld together until I can no longer tell them apart. In the presence of this honesty, I remember that I am, and we are.

I open to the possibility of renewed attention. A warm wind stirs sensation awake in every cell. A feeling I recognize dawns freshly in my heart as I meet an old friend for the first time. A knowing gathers without strain.

Gratitude surges as I realize the only word my lips remember is the only key that unlocks this door. Silently, in a whisper, or in full voice, I say YES.

Here’s an audio reading of a poem about recognition…

More on the Soulspace Blog

• Sunrise/Sunset: A Practice for Awakening a Weary Soul

• What if losing one’s way from time to time is the way?

• What Are You Nourishing?

• We Are Here: Artifacts of Presence

My name is Kirsten. I accompany folks as they attune to the inner experiences of life in spiritual direction, a place of presence and connection, a place to anchor briefly amid the chaos, a spacious place to be seen and known. To read more about this type of accompaniment, visit my offerings page.

I came across Norman MacCaig’s poem in Anam Cara by John O’Donohue, and I will never look at my nightstand quite the same way again.

This poem suggests the dual rhythm of emptiness and plenitude at the heart of the life of the soul. Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected. When you feel nothingness and emptiness gnawing at your life, there is no need to despair. This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities.

—John O’Donohue

PRESENTS

I give you an emptiness,
I give you a plenitude.
Unwrap them carefully.
—one's as fragile as the other—
and when you thank me
I'll pretend not to notice the doubt in your voice
when you say they're just what you wanted.

Put them on the table by your bed.
When you wake in the morning
they'll have gone through the door of sleep
into your head. Wherever you go
they'll go with you and
wherever you are you'll wonder,
smiling about the fullness
you can't add to and the emptiness
that you can fill.

More Audio Reading on the Soulspace Blog

• The Maximum: An Audio Meditation

• Montana Sky Time, An Audio Reading

• What if losing one’s way from time to time is the way?

• Please Come Home, a poem by Jane Hooper

My name is Kirsten. I accompany folks as they attune to the inner experiences of life in spiritual direction, a place of presence and connection, a place to anchor briefly amid the chaos, a spacious place to be seen and known. If you would like to read more about this type of accompaniment, you can visit my offerings page here.

This voice memo read-aloud comes from Bruno Barnhart’s book, Second Simplicity. There are four numbered meditations; this week, “Two” is calling.

What catches your heart’s eye?

Notes

• The quote at the beginning of this reading is footnoted: Yang-shan Hui-chi, in Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, pg. 55.

• To receive Bruno more deeply, here’s a taste in the living memory of one of his students.

• I got a used copy from ThriftBooks. It looks like they have one more in stock at the moment of this writing.

More Bruno Barnhart on the Soulspace Blog

• The Maximum: An Audio Meditation

• In me, another world is born.

• Wisdom: A Knowing in Darkness

• What Strength It Takes To Bear A Slow Untangling

My name is Kirsten. I accompany folks as they attune to the inner experiences of life in spiritual direction, a place of presence and connection, a place to anchor briefly amid the chaos, a spacious place to be seen and known. If you would like to read more about this type of accompaniment, you can visit my offerings page here.

What stops me from being the way I want to be?

This post is part of the Maps, Lenses, and Mirrors Series, a collage of conversations, music, voice memos, visual art, and words exploring how to know. Here’s Part One.

Notes

The question above comes from Lillian Firestone’s book The Forgotten Language of Children.

More on the Soulspace Blog

• Being with others when they are in pain

• What Does It Mean to Go Slow?

• Core State Meditation: Holy/Hurt Podcast

• The Dynamism of Becoming: Notes from Real Life

This reading comes from Barnhart’s book, Second Simplicity.

You’ll want to listen when you have space. I recommend listening three times. First, let it wash over you with no expectations. Second, notice what the body responds to—and how it responds. On your third listen, is there a word or phrase your attention is drawn to? If so, consider carrying it with you consciously.

Where does recognition rise from?

Bruno Barnhart was a Camaldolese monk who has been described by someone who knew him well with these words from J.R.R. Tolkien:

“He was as noble and fair as an elf-lord, as strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer.”‍ ‍

More on the Soulspace Blog

• Sunrise/Sunset: A Practice for Awakening a Weary Soul

• Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way by Mary Oliver

• Teachers + Thresholds

• When In Doubt, A Lectio Divina Podcast

My name is Kirsten. I accompany folks as they attune to the inner experiences of life in spiritual direction, a place of presence and connection, a place to anchor briefly amid the chaos, a spacious place to be seen and known. If you would like to read more about this type of accompaniment, you can visit my offerings page here.

This post is part of the Maps, Lenses, and Mirrors Series, a collage of conversations, music, voice memos, visual art, and words exploring how to know. Here’s Part One.

Before we go any further, let us tuck this entire series into a vaster context—one concerned with the dynamic interplay between the inner dimensions of the human person and our collective outer unfolding. It is vital that we bookmark this and keep returning. Without this asterisk, we will miss the heart of the matter.

“A proper application of astrological symbolism would seem to lead not to selfishness and egotism, but toward self-knowledge and self-acceptance—not forcing the future or redefining the past but toward comprehending the moment.

To truly read the map of presence, with its peaks and valleys, its wide oceans and gentle streams, would rather imply an inner journey towards the beginning of real consciousness and conscience so that the whole vibrating cosmic web can be acknowledged and, for brief extraordinary instants, almost understood, related to, and maintained.”

—Rob Baker, Parabola, “Maps of Presence”

Video Artifact #2

I see the wheels of my heart turning in this low-quality, high-presence video from May 2025. In this relational space, as we articulate what we have each already recognized, seeds find fertile soil.

It is unity we have tasted, not uniformity. As we go our separate ways, what we take with us is distinct. It is the synthesis of essence and being in Teilhard that I cannot shake, nearly one year later.

Kirsten Harrison on living into who our soul was imprinted to be, drawing on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a teacher.

This artifact invites a willingness to bear another tension.

Although Teilhard’s ideas may ignite something in us, I am not asking us to swallow them whole. He was writing in a time both similar to and different from our own. His language may draw us, or leave us bristling.

Instead of looking directly at Teilhard, can we look through him? 

Perhaps a sojourn with Teilhard will enflesh something already felt, already known, but not yet refracted in just this light.

Invocation: A Song + A Short Meditation 

Prelude To A Soul, Sebastian Plano

An unknown heaven, Lee Van Laer

An unknown heaven by Lee van Laer

The search for a path though life

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Drop

From the vastness of the Ocean, an inherent wholeness unfurls particularly within a drop…

What might have been taken in my attitude during the last thirty years for obstinacy or disrespect is simply the result of my absolute inability to contain my own feeling of wonderment. Everything stems from that basic psychological condition, and I can no more change it than I can change my age or the colour of my eyes.

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in a letter to the church leadership after he was forbidden to circulate the ideas burning within him 

First, a little bit of context from his close colleague, Pierre Leroy, SJ, from the foreword to The Divine Milieu…

Père Pierre Teilhard de Chardin lived during a period of doubt and perplexity. He witnessed the modernist crisis, with the sacrifices it entailed; he was driven from his own country by the injustice of political strife and when he reached manhood he was caught up in the terrible war of 1914. A few years later he saw the collapse in the heat of the revolution of social structures to which centuries of history seemed to have given permanence. He was present when forces were let loose which were to lead to a second world war; he was in Pekin when the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was his own fate to be misunderstood and condemned to silence, and to suffer torments that at times came near to overwhelming him. Like many others, he might well have retreated into his own solitary existence and abandoned his chosen field of activity, but his reaction was the exact opposite.

Teilhard bore in his being what others might consider contradictions. Though it was not easy, he tuned the instrument of his life to the bass note sounding within him.

• Born May 1, 1881, in Sarcenat, France, Teilhard incarnated with a predominantly fixed Earth nature of a Taurus; the cosmos within him would express through Gemini-tinted glass.

• An EMT in World War I, where the seeds of his work came into form relationally, amid visceral precarities.

• A paleontologist with a wildly expansive intuition for latent futures nesting within the long arc of geological time. A practitioner of science, certain that Love is the organising principle of the Universe.

• In his element at a party, ideas came to life in conversation. A serious man who didn’t seem to take himself too seriously.

• A celibate Jesuit priest whose becoming was fanned into forest fire flames within the dynamic fecundity of a conscious and particular love, a mutual soul embrace.

• Died in New York City on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955, in an exile he painstakingly consented to, in fidelity to a deeper yes.

An Artifact of Conscience (An endangered species in 2026)

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

—Wallace Stevens

One might be tempted to lament the futility of a life broken open, poured out. 

In linear terms, one would have good reason to do so. Teilhard’s direct efforts did not change the immediate course of history. Teilhard “sang his heart to all dark matter,” and the tune did not resound far and wide in his lifetime. And this stings.

An Image

No consious work is ever wasted.

—Br. Raphael Robin

Teilhard’s Audacity at a Quantum Scale

• Was the friction Teilhard encountered sand in the oyster of being? 

  Was it his willingness to bear that friction?

• What is born in the dynamism between the sheer refusal to either let go of or cling to one pole of an irreconcilable tension?

An Impression

The events could have played out in myriad ways—any of which had the potential, given the requisite proportion of forces, to transmute Teilhard’s offering into a pearl.

Is this pearl still suspended in the cosmos—an inexhaustible sacrament for those with eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts to understand?

This dawns as feeling within me as Teilhard’s most widely circulated words, in context, take on vivid color and dimensionality…

Things were briefly quiet on the war front, so Teilhard had time to respond to his cousin Marguerite’s letters. I’ve recorded them in a voice memo, so you can behold with more than your physical eyes.

From The Making of a Mind: Letters From A Soldier-Priest...

Receiving the Sacrament

If something in you recognizes Truth… 
If a phrase shimmered, if a single word caught your heart’s eye…
Receive the impression consciously. 
No need to dissect the bird, simply take it in.

A Benediction

I give thanks for your presence. As you transition to whatever comes next, may the resistance you encounter, within and without, be food for your song. In us, another world is born. 

Love, Kirsten

There may be six billion of us, but somehow we are all One. 

—Bruno Barnhart

Notes + Resources

• There is no introduction to astrology I love more than this post by Frederick Woodruff.

You'll Love These Sun Sign Guides to Creativity by Frederick Woodruff

As a function, each sign of the Zodiac is a clue as to the notes we contribute to the symphony of life, to our unique expression as an Earthling.

Here’s how Woodruff describes the Taurus function…

Have you ever seen a human ovum under a microscope? Well, that tiny little egg has been carefully protected (and released on a schedule) since the woman who carried it was born. Consider the entire lineage of that egg. All that makes us Earthlings is in that egg. Through stillness and sustainment, the egg attracts what it needs to trigger a creative metamorphosis. And there you have the quintessential Tauri expression. It’s said that the Buddha was a Taurus. He sat still under a tree and became enlightened, but only because he persisted in pondering life’s big questions—in other words, the terms of his life were defined by constant inquiry: What is desire? What is life? What is death? What is beauty? Always, with Taurus, there are the enjoyments, the pleasures, of being embodied—our birthright as Earthlings—but also from the body comes the lineage of the egg: the questions and the concentrated power to endure and manifest via intention and persistence.

• Dr. Becca Tarnas with a look at Teilhard’s natal chart: An Archetypal Glimpse into Teilhard’s Evolutionary Vision

• My friend Carin shared this Alan Watts quote with me right after I read about the conditions Teilhard was writing in, vivifying my imagination and my appreciation.

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.” 

The Long Arc of Evolution Bends Toward Consciousness…. by Cynthia Bourgeault

A Teilhardian view of our present turmoil

• The Cost of True Love: A Conversation between Cynthia Bourgeault and Ilia Delio on YouTube

• “The Lost Words Blessing” by Spell Songs

  Look to the sky with care, my love
  And speak the things you see
  Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
  And even as you journey on past dying stars exploding
  Like the gilded one in flight, leave your little gifts of light
  And in the dead of night my darling,
  find the gleaming eye of starling
  Like the little aviator, sing your heart to all dark matter

• Pierre Leroy, SJ in the foreward to The Divine Milieu

In his own self the integration of life had been achieved; if he loved God, it was through the world, and if he loved the world it was as a function of God, the animator of all things. “The joy and strength of my life,” he wrote a month before his death, “will have lain in the realization that when the two ingredients—God and the world—were brought together they set up an endless mutual reaction, producing a sudden blaze of such instense brilliance that all the depths of the world were lit up for me.”

• Jesus’ reply to the disciples’ question, “Why do you tell stories?” in Matthew 13, The Message Bible

  Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward a welcome awakening. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it. 

My name is Kirsten. I write, collage, and practice spiritual direction online and in Vashon, WA. Describing what spiritual direction is feels like trying to “catch a cloud and pin it down.”

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.

I am so glad you’re here. These reflections and practices are written by a human artist and spiritual director. They are joyfully and freely given.

If you are nourished here and are presently able to, there is a way to offer appreciation by way of of virtual tip jar on the “Buy Me A Coffee” site. I am not buying coffee, though. Your generosity keeps my home fires burning and makes it possible for me to give my energies to this work.

Another way to support this work at no cost is to share it with a friend, post on social media, link it to your blog or website, or share it in your newsletter. Thank you!

Read More on the Soulspace Blog

• Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity

• Making Everything I’ve Received Flow Again

• Can’t go under it. Can’t go over it. We’ve got to go through it.

• We Are Here: Artifacts of Presence

Somewhere along the way, I started taking my small blunders too seriously.

Working in a large, open office space was taxing for me. There was a gift hidden in it, too. I was in proximity to other ways of doing and being—and to an unexpected teaching.

My co-worker’s way of responding to her mistakes took me aback. When the awkwardness of her humanity showed—when she made a mess or missed something obvious—she would exclaim, “Oopsie!” for all to hear.

I confess my initial response was a bit judgy, but it was short-lived. My micro-recoil quickly gave way to amusement. The novelty of her instinctual self-compassion transmitted wisdom.

Maybe it’s ADHD; maybe it’s the naivety/inexperience I’m beginning to understand can be par for the course when one enters the world with a preponderance of Gemini energy. Whatever the reason, “Oopsie!” was not on my menu of possibilities for an adult. Am I alone in this?

At some point over the last handful of years, “Oopsie!” has become a practice of sacred kindness. I say it so reflexively now, I’ve wondered if it’s mechanical—an impulse I should eliminate. Sometimes it comes out several times a day. It seemed worthy of self-observation. Here’s what I see…

Somewhere along the way, I started relating to myself compassionately. And it shows.

As I Relax

A Song by Ari Moshe Wolfe

As I relax and I allow, oh, the way, she opens up
As I relax and I allow, oh, the way, she opens up for me

Oh the seasons and the flow are inside me as I go
Oh the seasons and the flow are inside me as I go my way

Oh my breath, you are my guide as the river takes me home
Oh my breath, you are my guide as the river takes me home to now

As I relax and I allow, oh, the way, she opens up
As I relax and I allow, oh, the way, she opens up for me

Oh the seasons and the flow are inside me as I go
Oh the seasons and the flow are inside me, this I know
always

Oh my breath, you are my guide as the river takes me home
Oh my breath, you are my guide as the river takes me home to now
to here, always now

Notes

• According to researchers, amusement is connected to humor and includes elements of unexpectedness, incongruity, and playfulness. It’s typically seen as a brief spike in a person’s level of cheerfulness, lasting only a few seconds. The definition of amusement that aligns with our research is “pleasurable, relaxed excitation.”Amusement differs from happiness in that happiness is a general sense of pleasure, whereas amusement appeals specifically to one’s sense of humor.

There are two themes that clearly help distinguish amusement from other positive emotions, like containment, gratitude, interest, joy, love or pride:

1. An awareness of incongruity (there’s something unexpected about what causes us to be amused—we weren’t expecting that punch line or that behavior or that timing);

2. When we feel amusement, we feel playful with those around us.

—Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

• The ADHD world is curvilinear. Past, present, and future are never separate and distinct. Everything is now. People with ADHD live in a permanent present and have a hard time learning from the past or looking into the future to see the inescapable consequences of their actions. “Acting without thinking” is the definition of impulsivity, and one of the reasons that individuals with ADHD have trouble learning from experience.

  If a person cannot see what is going on in the moment, the feedback loop by which he learns is broken. If a person does not know what is wrong or in what particular way it is wrong, she doesn’t know how to fix it. If people with ADHD don’t know what they’re doing right, they don’t do more of it. They don’t learn from experience.

“How Adults with ADHD Think: Uncomfortable Truths About the ADHD Nervous System”

Read More on the Soulspace Blog

• Can’t go under it. Can’t go over it. We’ve got to go through it.

• Something Else: A Spiritual Director on Holding Obscurity & Disorientation

• Life is Hard: A Spiritual Director on Holding Complexities + Contradictions

• Dysregulation as Prophetic Voice

into this happy night in secret,
seen of none,
nor saw i aught,
without other light or guide,
save that which in my heart did burn

-st. john of the cross

don’t you write it down
remember this in your head
don’t take a picture
remember this in your heart

-amy ray

There’s a song that I’ve wanted 
To sing for so long 
But the tune is just out of my grasp 
I may see for a moment 
When the lights reflects gold 
But so delicate, slips from my hand 

Every word that I sing 
Is a cheap imitation 
Of things that I don’t understand 
Light reflecting on water 
The picture gets harder to see 
With the eyes of a man I hear 
“Come further up, Come further in 
The greatest story, none on earth have read”… 
(1)

A Koan:

A moth caught be the flame it cannot measure

(2)

In the depth of myself as a centre in the form of a point,
I am conscious of my own organisation.
Immense are the consequences of my transformation!
In me, another world is born. (3)

…So I’ll search for the melody
Offering everything
Till I am called out by name
Cause the chord that was struck
On the strings of my heart
Is still echoing throughout my frame
(1)

Beyond ideas,
Beyond the veil of time
Beyond all color
And bending of the light
Beyond all concepts
And movements of the mind
I will find you

-Audrey Assad
(4)

NOTES

This collage is an arrangement of other artists work to invite contemplation.

(1) One of the most enduring spiritual teachings I have received:

(2) Lyrics from This is Where, 40 Days Album, The Wailin Jennys.

I have been listening to this song for months and singing “by.” That’s what it sounds like, and that is what “makes sense.” But “be,” the correct lyric, disturbs and calls to something deeper.

(3) From the oratorio “The Embracing Universe” by Justin Grounds, from texts by Fred LaHaye, based on the life and work of Teilhard de Chardin. Recorded from isolation across the world in May 2020.

(4) Find You by Audrey Assad

A Voice Memo Poetry Reading

Listen from the inside, noticing what is stirred in sensation, feeling, and/or cognition.

This Rob Baker poem comes to us from the Spring 1990 issue of Parabola, “Time & Presence.”

Read More on the Soulspace Blog

• Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity

• We Are Here

• Making Everything I’ve Received Flow Again

• Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way by Mary Oliver

My name is Kirsten. I hold space in spiritual direction and accompany others through art. This post is a sample of the weekly audio read-alouds I share on Substack—bottling up presence you can enter anytime. Join me there for more!

What do these two words stir in you?

I’ve selected an image to offer as a Visio Divina, paired with one line from a Sara Groves song.

As my inner gaze meets the collage this morning, the words singing in my heart surprise me: “O Day of Resurrection.” I recognize them as words chanted in the Liturgy of the Hours.

The image sings to me of the felt sense of bearing whatever comes on the inside with the utmost tenderness—of encircling the whole.

A Visio Divina Practice

Come into rhythm with breath and the space around you.

What is it like to be with the image, as it is. Resistance is not a problem. As the mind wanders, return to the image.

What is it like to bear what comes?

Musical Accompaniment

If you would like a song to accompany you in the practice, I offer this one.

An Invitation to Notice

At the conclusion of bearing the image, here are some questions to guide you in deep listening:

Are there sensations?
Is there a feeling?
Are there words?
Are there inner contradictions calling to be encircled?

You may want to journal, leave yourself a voice memo, or talk with a loved one about what this was like for you. If you’d like to enter in together in spiritual direction, I would love to hold space for you.

The Liturgy of the Hours I sing with is by the monks at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, CA.

This post is a part of the Maps, Lenses, and Mirrors Series, a collage of conversations, music, voice memos, visual art, and words exploring how to know. Here’s Part One: Visible Contradictions + Knowing How To Know. And Part Two: What Strength It Takes to Bear A Slow Unfolding

A Voice Memo Read-Aloud

Today, we will continue exploring how to know with an audio read‑aloud.

In practice yesterday, I was drawn to a small section on wisdom and mystery from the work of Dr. Chris Morris and Bruno Barnhart, so I hit record on the voice memo app. 

Morris writes:

For Barnhart, wisdom is first and foremost a knowing in ‘faith,’ “a knowing in darkness, an affirmative cognition of mystery…and the knowing is consequently obscure as it is certain.

Listen from the inside, noticing what is stirred in sensation, feeling, and/or cognition.

Sources:

• Doctoral thesis—the source of the audio excerpt: Chris Morris, The Cross Now Rooted Breaks In Bloom: A study of Bruno Barnhart’s “Wisdom Knowing” and Wholeness in Christian Life.

• Blog post—a lovely (and brief) entry point: “A revolution in wisdom vital for our time” (Living Water; first published 2021, reposted as a tribute after Morris died unexpectedly in 2024)

• Podcast episode—to listen to Chris in his own voice: “Christ in the Torn Places.”

Related Blog Posts:

• The Maximum: An Audio Meditation

• We Are Here: Artifacts of Presence

• Visible Contradictions

• Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity

What a gift it is when another human describes inner experiences with granularity. In this collection, there are words about silence and portals to enter.

• A friend found words to describe the vibrancy of silence in this video podcast episode called Making Art From Your Heart Space. I’ve bookmarked the words so you can drop right in. If it stirs something, watch the whole episode. (I love the sign on the bookshelf behind him!)

• “Sweet Darkness,” a poem written and read by David Whyte

• A poetry film by Charlotte Ager & Katy Wang featuring Wendell Berry reading his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

• Henry Schoenfield offers a way into the grounding spiritual practice of sacred chant. The words of this particular chant are simply: “When silence turns to presence, in silence, there is presence.”

• Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness, Robert Sardello describes vivid worlds nesting within silence.

• Dr. Chris Morris’ crystalline presence is energetically preserved in this audio artifact, “Christ in the Torn Places,” recorded just three months before he died, unexpectedly, in 2024. Here, he speaks about the connection between silence and justice work, participatory wisdom, trauma, and a spacious way to see the work of transformation: the capacity to bear.

• Salt of the Earth, a short film by my friend Adam Thom, featuring Thomas Merton in his own voice. Watch for scenes from Adam’s visit to our little island with our beloved friend Ryan, whose earthly vibrancy came to an unexpected end in 2024.

A Quick Word From Kirsten…

If this article nourished you, here are two small ways to help keep the work going:

Share this post with a friend (or link to it in your newsletter/blog)

Leave a tip via Buy Me A Coffee

About the Author

This little collection is curated by Kirsten, a spiritual director and collage artist. If you want some company as you attune to what is stirring within you, Kirsten is available to meet for deep listening, online and in-person on Vashon Island.

Read More on the Soulspace Blog:

Tapestry of Wisdom: Grief

Tapestry of Wisdom: Prayer

Montana Sky Time, An Audio Reading

Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity

Help me be strong, help me be, help me

I wake up with lyrics on my lips from the distant past. Attention gathers at a cellular level, and there is an impulse to press play on a dusty mixtape.

I do not brace against outgrown words. Every cell in my body is grateful.

An image coalesces…

I am a delicate gold necklace, tangled and unintentionally tied into a knot. I keep trying to die to myself, but the context is all wrong. Something, someone, is untangling me with the fiercest tenderness, slowly loosening constriction. In this spaciousness, I am undefended.

What strength it takes to bear slow untangling.

I walk in the shoes of others’ wisdom—lyrics my heart recognizes, but cannot presently find words for. One song at a time, circulation is being restored.

I drink deeply when this tap is turned on. Attention is different here. Truth slips past defenses. I have a front row seat to inner contradictions and to something else. I sing myself home, over and over again—on walks, on short and long drives, in between Zoom calls, while I do the dishes.

Attention crescendos. Light shines on a few words from a new angle.

Words I have sung hundreds of times ripen and fall from the tree, a subtle synaptic restoration. According to the clock, these moments are inconsequential. In every other way, they are voluminous.

If we require a definition, let us call it knowing: a knowing that is personal, experiential, and tending toward union with that which is known.

-Father Bruno Barnhart on Wisdom

Questions to Ponder…

If time is not linear, is who we are presently singing to ourselves in another dimension?

Are we all perpetually singing in the round?

What songs called to you before you understood the resonance?

Are there brief clock moments that seem incredibly spacious? As you tune into your sense of time, is there a felt sense that wishes to come into expression? What do you know?

My name is Kirsten. I practice spiritual direction online and in person on Vashon Island.

I love the way Rob Bell describes the type of space I hold for others, “A spiritual director is trained to ask you the questions—to help you enter into whatever it is more fully, so that you can begin to discern what Spirit is up to in even this. This chaos, this turmoil, this joy. This challenge. This obstacle. This dark night of the soul.”

If you find resonance here, you can read more about my accompaniment offerings here.

Read More on the Soulspace Blog

• Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity

• We Are Here

• Recognition: An Invitation to Now

• Please Tell Me What To Do: The Gift of Not Receiving What I Thought I Wanted in Spiritual Direction

Holding the Tension of Opposites

Every single tender shoot of my soul’s emergence has been preceded by a merciful scambling. Tectonic rumbling magnetizes something irreconcilable, and neural circuits are not quite ready to bear it. The tension of opposites comes calling again.

Death is the only choice, but there is more than one way to die.¹

What does holding the tension of unreconcilable opposites generate in the heart?

The heart’s fear of being open is not fanciful: holding powerful tensions over time can be, and often is, a heartbreaking experience, but there are at least two ways to understand what it means to have our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken into shards and scattered about — a feeling most of us know, and a fate we would like to avoid. The other is to imagine the heart broken open into new capacity — a process that is not without pain — but one that many of us would welcome. As I stand in the tragic gap between reality and possibility, this small, tight fist of a thing called my heart can break open into greater capacity to hold more of my own and the world’s suffering and joy, despair and hope…(Keep reading in the footnotes!²)

Parker A Palmer in A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life

A Transmission, A Motion, A Practice

Dr. James Finley tells two poignant stories in this video that evoke the felt experience of the holding paradox—an extraordinarily familiar neural overload and the faint felt outline of something else.

The whole video is gold; I have bookmarked the stories. The teaching that follows gives words to inner experiences. See if you enter first through a felt sense rather than headfirst.

A Note About Content:

These are not easy stories. They touch primarily on two clinical settings, an impatient alcohol treatment facility and working with a client whose wounded spouse was dehumanizing her. Dr. Finley is exceedingly gentle. It is not easy to find places to where these things are talked about with such care and beauty.

My heart is magnetized to keep returning to the felt sense of these paradoxes, and so I do, over and over. In twenty-minute increments of silence, I climb into dissonance and breathe with it.

In this moment, she is completely vulnerable, and in this vulnerability, she is invincible in the world.
In this moment, she is childlike, and in being childlike, she’s manifesting the essence of maturity.
In this moment, she’s alone unto herself, and in this aloneness, she bears witness to the mystery that we’re all alone together.
In this moment, she knows nothing, and in knowing nothing, she manifests the essence of true wisdom in the world.
In this moment, she is dying, and in her death, someone is being born.

We’re Going On A Bear Hunt

In the heart of this season of paradoxical prayer, words from a children’s story come calling.

Questions for Opening

• Tune into the whole of you. Where is bracing’s ground zero?

• What is it like to spread bracing out, to let it be shared?
  As you breathe, see if something in you wishes to smile upon bracing.
  If there’s a loving wind at your back, perhaps a smile will form. If not, you are welcome to carry the wish.

• Tune in to the spaces between toes, to earlobes, and to your solar plexus…to the sound of rain, the memory of golden hour light on the trees, the spaces between thoughts.
  Is there a single square inch of softness? Where is its epicenter?

  What is it like when softening wraps its arms around bracing just to be with it?

• What is it like inside, in your real life, the instant gotta go through itdawns?

This version is too cute not to share…

Footnotes:

1 There is no wrong choice. The soul is patient. The Ocean, persistent. If I miss this wave, there will be another. And another. And another.

2 Name anyone who is famous for a personal devotion to truth and justice, love and forgiveness. I cannot think of a person fitting that description who has not spent a lifetime in the tragic gap, torn between the world’s reality and a vision of human possibility. That, in brief, is the story of the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Thich Nhat Hanh, to name a few. Hearts like theirs have been broken open to a largeness that holds the possibility of a better future for us all.

E.F. Schumacher painted the picture well: ‘Through all our lives we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled…Countless mothers and teachers, in fact, do it, but no one can write down a solution. They do it by bringing into the situation a force that belongs to a higher level where opposites are transcended—the power of love.

Parents often find themselves standing in the tragic gap between their hopes for a child and what is happening in that child’s life. If the parents fail to hold that tension, they will go one way or the other, clinging to an idealized fantasy of who “their baby” is or rejecting this “thorn in their side” with bitter cynicism. Both ways of responding are death-dealing for all concerned. But many parents will testify that by standing in the tragic gap and holding the tension, they not only serve their children well; they themselves become more open, more knowing, more compassionate.

-Parker A. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life

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 on the Soulspace Blog:

• Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity

• We Are Here

• Practicing Presence with Abstract Art

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.

1. Watch the video (first)

2. 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.

Wisdom: A Knowing in Darkness

Returning to Presence

We are here. Here we are.

Sometimes I forget to look up, to breathe consciously, to open to the life on the inside and the outside. I’ve been setting three alarms a day to pause and come back to my wish to act from what is most awake within me.

I look into the eyes of my son’s dog, gaze into my own eyes in the mirror, or imaginatively picture the eyes of a loved one looking at me — someone presently living on Earth or one still alive in my heart (like my friend Ryan, sitting on a log in the photo above).

There is a new poem below. Breathe with it, if you want to.

Listen for a word or phrase that draws your attention. Tuck it into your pocket or transcribe it in a journal. Let it unfold.

May you be warm and well,
Kirsten

Drench Yourself Anew

Anchoring Into Deep Knowing

In the thick of a relational conflict years ago, I could not understand what my body was bracing against. Though I had no experience with poetry, I found my way into a surprisingly nourishing practice. Guided by a simple template called a “French Pantoum,” I remembered myself.

Attuning to my inner experience of the conflict helped me access things I already knew but could not reach directly amid the stress and my nervous system’s survival strategies.

It was powerful to name what I knew deep inside. Writing this poem was grounding—a way back to the wisdom that is already, always within me.

I’ve adapted that template as a Scaffold for Obscurity.

Writing a Pantoum for Obscurity

Here’s a practice that may help you slip below rational thinking and pro-con lists into intuition and wisdom. I hope this practice is as grounding for you as it has been for me.

Step-By-Step Instructions:

STANZA 1

Line 1: What it’s like when I’m connected and feeling alive (Try and tune into the good here)

Line 2: The inner experience of the hard thing I’m holding

Line 3: A song lyric that resonates with me

Line 4: Words of wisdom I would say to my younger self, or words of wisdom from a loved one that stick with me

STANZA 2

Line 5: (repeat of line 2 in stanza 1) The inner experience of the hard thing I’m holding

Line 6: (new line): My felt sense of what is hard right now (can be an image or a somatic sensation)

Line 7: (repeat of line 4 in stanza 1) Words of wisdom I would say to my younger self, or words of wisdom from a loved one that stick with me

Line 8: (new line): What I wish to feel or experience

STANZA 3

Line 9: (repeat line 6 of stanza 2) My felt sense of what is hard right now (can be an image or a somatic sensation)

Line 10: (repeat line 3 of the first stanza) A song lyric that resonates with me

Line 11: (repeat line 8 of stanza 2) What I wish to feel or experience

Line 12: (repeat line 1 of the first stanza) What it’s like when I’m connected and feeling alive

Here’s an example:

I see the past, present, and future with a vast spaciousness.
I am so very tired of bracing.
Can I see I’m not my mistakes? Will I learn to let them go?
Life is hard; that doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong.

I am so very tired of bracing.
I can’t seem to get a deep breath.
Life is hard; that doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong.
I want to remember.

I can’t seem to get a deep breath.
Can I see I’m not my mistakes? Will I learn to let them go?
I want to remember.
I see the past, present, and future with a vast spaciousness.

An example of a different pantoum (not quite the same as the format above).

I release the breath I’ve been holding, and my body softens into the moment.
I’m terrified, and I’m not totally sure why.
I see you, and I’m not going anywhere.
There’s a calming and a quickening. I am reminded that the way is made by walking.

I’m terrified, and I’m not totally sure why.
You are safe. You are loved. You are wise.
There’s a calming and a quickening. I am reminded that the way is made by walking.
I start feeling like myself again.

You are safe. You are loved. You are wise.
I see you, and I’m not going anywhere.
I start feeling like myself again.
I release the breath I’ve been holding, and my body softens into the moment.

• If you want to share your poem with me, I’d love to read it!

• You can listen to this podcast episode to hear more about the French Pantoum as a Scaffold for Lament with Tara Owens (one of my spiritual direction teachers), recorded at the very beginning of the pandemic. Her template is available in the show notes.

I am so glad you’re here. These reflections and practices are written by a human artist and spiritual director. They are joyfully and freely given.

If you are nourished here and are presently able to, there is a way to offer appreciation by way of of virtual tip jar on the “Buy Me A Coffee” site. I am not buying coffee, though. Your generosity keeps my home fires burning and makes it possible for me to give my energies to this work. The support also makes it possible for me to offer soul care and witness to others at a reduced rate.

Another way to support this work at no cost is to share it with a friend, post on social media, link it to your blog or website, or share it in your email newsletter. Thank you!

PRESENCE + SPACE | WITNESS + WITH-NESS

My name is Kirsten. Come and journey with me in spacious accompaniment/spiritual direction. It is a place to attune to your inner experiences over time, a place to ask questions and excavate intuitions in the spacious presence of a fellow traveler. I meet clients online and in person on Vashon-Maury Island in WA.

Read More on the Soulspace Blog

• Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity

• The Places We’ve Loved

• Glimmering Landscape Time: Spacious Spiritual Practices to Hold Us in Spiritual Disorientation

• Somewhere Along the Way

Breadcrumbs Abound

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.

Precisely what?
Precisely how?

No one can say for sure, but breadcrumbs abound…

Resonance & Recognition

• Something else may beckon through a felt sense of recognition, a resonance that “makes no sense” or hasn’t before been consciously considered.
  💡 An idea
  🖼️ An image
  🎶 A song
  🎬 A movie
  📰 A blog post
  😴 A dream
  Anything, really!

• Something else may encircle what has been deemed unworthy, illuminating a possibility just now, just here…in the presence of something else.

• Something else may not conform to time as you have previously known it. One literal instant with something else may seem like hours or even days on the inside.

• Something else cannot be explained. If you try to pin its wings down, it will evaporate, but something else can be sensed in your presence. Knowing this may save you time and energy.

• Something else may be difficult to contain. This is normal. Nervous systems can be strengthened to bear what has not before been bearable…inner experiences that register as “so good” and the ones that seem “so hard.”

• Something else cannot be possessed. Savor every last drop. That feeling you are left with is GOLD. You can work with it consciously…
  ✨Write a poem, paint, or collage…whatever your current art form is, or try a brand-new-to-you medium.
  ✨Record a voice memo to remind yourself what you know in the presence of something else. Or send a voice memo to a friend.
  ✨Call to mind someone who is carrying a particularly fresh heartache or traversing a dense forest of uncertainty. Hold them and the feeling of something else together.
  ✨Take that GOLD with you on errands! How do others appear when you are fresh from something else? Your presence may transmit the glow of something else without saying a word…or maybe saying a word is exactly what you’ll intuit. There are no rules.
  ✨What else would you add to this list?
  

Staying Present in the Absence

If you tasted something else, and now there is only absence, I am sorry. Please, please, please do not doubt yourself OR something else. I will make this wager: your encounter with something else was not an illusion.

Part of something else’s elusive, allusive beauty is improvisational genius. A great shape-shifter, something else keeps things fresh. Absence may be as powerful as presence. Both may call forth great art.

With all of this context in mind, there are ways to open to a direct encounter with something else.

Orienting To A Way Of Being: Expectancy Without Expectations

🫧 Sink into a present moment experience with a memory of something else. What does it feel like/taste like/smell like/look like when it arrives? Get really granular!! How do you recognize something else?

🫧 Start the day with a WISH to remember. Spend one conscious moment asking. Open your Notes app/Notion/journal/etc. Tell something else you are opening, and you wish to see/hear/taste/smell/feel/sense/know, and then move on with your day.

🫧 Give yourself to rhythms and practices. There is no singular right way. You might start by giving your full attention to a song that moves you. Breathe with it. Feel it. Sense it. Let it surprise you.

Dear Something Else…

🫧 Honest words like these are beautiful, too…
Please, dear something else. I am lost. I am afraid. It feels like I am going under. Will you remind me of the things I know, but can’t remember?

The Inner Landscape: John O’Donohue on Suffering & Complexity

John O’Donohue is a soul friend over space and time. His words are portals to the immediacy of presence. John died unexpectedly in 2008, but the wisdom he transmitted is alive. I experience it most profoundly in his audiobooks and lectures.

The Inner Landscape is a two-chapter audio lecture John delivered on suffering, produced by Sounds True. I return to it again and again, especially when heartache and pain are most acute. Here is a description from the website:

Our bodies are mere outlines of a vast and complex interior world, a landscape of contradiction and immense mystery. This Celtic view of the human condition predates Christianity yet survives to this day as part of Ireland's unique spiritual tradition. In The Inner Landscape, poet and Catholic scholar John O'Donohue explores the themes of self-exile and hardship and the Celtic way of welcoming paradox and finding precious light in the darkest valleys of our inner terrain.

Instead of fearing the contradictions of the outer world, O'Donohue begins, the Celtic people welcomed them. They developed special blessings for times of suffering in the belief that hardship leads to a special insight or gift of the spirit. When you learn the Celtic "secret of equilibrium" - how to see every difficulty as a threshold of possibility - you renew your life with unending possibilities. Despite our vast technologies, O'Donohue says, our real knowledge is minimal. Only within "the inner landscape" with which we are each blessed can true knowing take place.

It is also available on Audible.

This blog post is drawn from the Soulspace Newsletter. If there’s resonance and you’d like to receive missives like this in your email inbox, please sign up at the bottom of this page.

Related Blog Posts:

• Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity

• Staying Present to the Absence

• What If Losing One’s Way From Time to Time Is The Way?

PRESENCE + SPACE | WITNESS + WITH-NESS

My name is Kirsten. Come and journey with me in spacious accompaniment/spiritual direction. It’s a place to attune to your inner experiences over time, a place to ask questions you don’t want to hold alone or intuitions you would like to excavate together. I meet clients online and in person on Vashon-Maury Island in WA.

I am so glad you’re here. These reflections and practices are written by a human artist and spiritual director. They are joyfully and freely given.

If you are nourished here and are presently able to, there is a way to offer appreciation by way of of virtual tip jar on the “Buy Me A Coffee” site. I am not buying coffee, though. Your generosity keeps my home fires burning and makes it possible for me to give my energies to this work. The support also makes it possible for me to offer soul care and witness to others at a reduced rate.

Another way to support this work at no cost is to share it with a friend, post on social media, link it to your blog or website, or share it in your email newsletter. Thank you!