Walk with Me
Recently, I had the privilege of recording my first audio book, Walk with Me, Transformation through the Path of Spiritual Direction, which was published as a text in 2020. Writing was a surprise to me. Finding words and presenting ideas seemed something for academics and thinkers – not for someone like myself who was an artist and heart-centered. However, my heart led me to a path of writing that has been incredibly fulfilling and it is out of my heart that I am finding the words to share. In 2020 Walk with Me, part memoir and part guidance for people entering spiritual work, was published with Friesen Press. This past month, I read it out loud in Philip Janz’s recording studio, recording it so I can share it as an audio book. It was powerful to read the whole book out loud in a few days. It was a gift to be with Philip – honouring 20 years of working together! And it was a gift to read this text and remember how much it means to me. I wanted to share a few quotes with you:
“Transformation through darkness often leads to expansion. Our culture sees expansion as something to attain or possess; however, inner expansion comes from an opposite energy – losing form, allowing, surrendering, and yielding to a process. Expansion that emerges from this process carries a vitality, beauty, truth, and a reality that can only be known as … resurrection. One may understand the phrase “I was dead, but now I live” in an inner way, a way of the soul.”
“I believe that a life of contemplation is like the life of a tree. It’s the journey in and down … first. Contemplation is deepening of one’s root system into the soil and further yet into the inner wellsprings before the fruit emerges on a branch. This journey in and down is a hidden and silent journey, often with a great deal of solitude of the heart. It can be confusing like a labyrinth and disorienting at times. The places of our formation may be dark and obscure to our sight. However, the darkness of our inner soil is not dark to Love; it shines as the daylight. In this place, as we are held and nurtured in Love, we are meant, like a seed in the ground, to let go of the form we’ve known. We are invited to surrender into the process of yielding our shell to the earth, opening and expanding into the darkness. A seed needs to be in the darkness before it can spring into the light. A seed needs to go down before it goes up. And so, must we.”
May we have courage to do the inner tending of our souls so that we may be trees of rooted strength and vitality.
