My unfolding story…
Here are a few defining moments from the story of my life that is still being written. I offer them in the hopes that they may provide some connection points with readers. The list is incomplete, and I fear it doesn’t do justice to the dark nights of the soul and the beauty and struggle of transformation along the way. My journey is characterised by creativity, faith, spirituality, searching for love and wholeness, and an ever evolving path of psycho-spiritual healing and growth.
12 : I wrote my first song. Throughout my teen years, songs became prayers and journal entries set to melody. Songwriting was a joyful creative discovery and a life-line to the Divine that nourished me in dark times.
When I was young
I found myself in song
A lonely melody wound it’s way to you from me.
And I found You were there.
And I knew You were there.~ River Tides, unrecorded, 2017
17: I participated in a personal growth course for teenagers called ‘Safe Places’, facilitated by Lucelle Cook. In that semi-circle of soft, pink chairs I learned what it felt like to be in a group where my soul was safe to show up. Tears were considered holy, feelings were explored on paper with crayons, wisdom was shared. That group “heard me into speech” and I began to connect with the true pulse of myself, the sensitive soul hiding under layers of coping mechanisms. This early experience formed my fundamental belief in the transformative power of safe soul space, both in groups and one-on-one. This theme recapitulated in 2020 when I attended a series of Circle of Trust retreats, facilitated by Mennie Scapens and based on the inspiring work of Parker Palmer.
19: I moved to Sydney to study songwriting at the School of Creative Arts, at C3 Oxford Falls, a vibrant mega-church on the Northern Beaches. After graduating, I became part of the staff at C3. I was involved with the music label and eventually looked after the music publishing arm. I spent eight golden years in that community, individuating, learning and growing. It was a time of brightness and formation, though not without its shadows and things to sift through later. My final year was a time of disruption and dis-integration, personally and professionally. A rupture that opened me up.
27: I moved home to New Zealand, burnt out and beginning again - a story I have shared elsewhere. I returned to my parent’s farm, returned to my core, played with melodies, fell in love with trees, found solace in quietness and books. I continued a journey of inner healing, looking like an adult, feeling like a child as I worked through layers of trauma. I discovered the contemplative path, part of my own Christian faith tradition previously unknown to me. I discovered the Silence beneath all language, a deeper current of faith. I dared to re-examine some of the evangelical Christian theology and culture I had inherited and to explore the expanding edges of the Mystery I sometimes call God. I began to search for a new and purposeful path for myself amidst the ongoing healing journey I was on. Transformation rarely occurs in a straight line of predictable progression. Re-forming takes time. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a palaeontologist and Jesuit priest offers the best words of wisdom I have found on this reality in a short excerpt called ‘Patient Trust’. I return to it again and again, and offer it often to those I companion.
30: With a desire to create something of my own, I left a marketing job and secure pay-check to start my own marketing and brand storytelling business, Engage Communications. The growth curve was steep but engaging. I discovered I had a flair for breathing new life into tired communications and for helping business owners to tell their story with strategy and soul. In the early days, I said yes to everything. This helped me to learn and grow, but it also meant I created a business that wasn't a natural fit for who I was. I hustled, but I lost connection with my heart. I was succeeding but, it felt off. Several years in, I signed up for an online business course and never made it past the first module, which focused on self-reflection. My heart was crying out for something ‘slow, deep and true’. I allowed those core values to come face to face with the fast-paced, disconnected, treadmill I was on. I began to change my business from the inside out. I let go of short-term projects, stopped public speaking on social marketing and entered into long-term partnerships with client’s whose values and purpose better aligned with my own. Most importantly, I returned to music and the heartbeat of creativity within me that I had lost touch with.
34: I released my debut album, ‘Not All the Leaves are Falling’. This contemplative, folk-pop album explores my journey from loss to hope and the liminal spaces in between. A lifetime dream, this project was a long time coming. I am grateful for the way it has found a little life of it’s own and has resonated with people near and far. My songs are much better travelled than I am!
36: I began my two-year formation as a Spiritual Director with Spiritual Growth Ministries. I felt a deep call to this work in my homecoming years when I attended my first silent retreat and met the woman who would become my spiritual director. This call first showed up as a strong and strange sense of my future self working in this way with people. It continued to show up as pictures of two chairs facing one another in collages I would make from magazine cut-outs. Five years later, the journey began in it’s fullness. The practice of sitting with others and exploring the currents, calls and invitation of the Divine in their lives is sacred work that I treasure deeply. Out of the various roles I have, I consider myself a Spiritual Director/Companion first and foremost. It is the central tree in my garden and influences who I am in all of my other roles.
37: I walked the Camino di Santiago Compostela, an 800 km ancient pilgrimage, beginning in the south of France, heading over the Pyrenees and following the Milky Way along Northern Spain to the Cathedral at Santiago di Compostela. When I had first read about the Camino two years earlier it felt as if a live, green seed had been planted in my heart. As part of my preparation I wrote a research paper for my spiritual director formation programme called ‘Camino Conversations | Exploring Pilgrimage as a Spiritual Practice’. The six weeks I spent walking the Way of St James was one of the most significant experiences of my life. I travelled alone, but met many companions along the way. It was in one sense a contemplative retreat from the roles and responsibilities of my life, but it was also a deep engagement with life - with my self - my strengths and my shadow, nature, God, fellow pilgrims. It felt like a mid-life review and marked the beginning of a second spring in my life. I am still harvesting the many lessons and graces that grew in me along the way and working with the tidal wave of change energy I came home with. I suspect my personal Camino reflections will grow into a book I can share: a kind of contemplative travelogue or spiritual memoir with poems, prayers and personal essays.
38: I became a certified Transformative Coach with Coach Masters Academy. I began this training on Zoom during the first New Zealand Lockdown, while sharing an office with my brother-in-law. Panic-buying noise-cancelling headphones proved to have been an inspired idea! COVID-19 brought an abrupt end to some long-term communications contracts, but it also brought a lovely man into my life, so I think we’re even. Coaching rose to the forefront as a way for me to develop my ‘two-chair’ one-on-one work with people. I recommend it for people who are seeking safe soul space for growth and transformation, but who wouldn’t usually seek out a spiritual director. I have found my coaching conversations to be deeply rewarding and enlivening. It has opened up new vistas in me in the way I view people and approach life.
39: I am beginning 2021 by becoming visible again, by re-engaging with the world outside of my little rural office after a year of quietly re-landscaping the garden of my life. I have a sense that these paths I am treading will grow into fullness in the coming decades. I am ready to meet life with all the graceful intention I can summon and the surrender of open hands, loose expectations. I’m letting go of ‘Engage Communications’. As I approach 40, it’s time to simply be ‘Kathryn’ in the world and to work with those whose paths intersect with mine.
