SoulStream

In a recent episode of the SoulStream Living from the Heart podcast, we sit down with Doug Webber on Bowen Island for a deeply personal conversation about depression, community, nature, and faith. Doug shares how others helped carry him through a difficult season and how contemplative practices continue to shape his life today with grace. You can find the podcast on soulstream.org.

We recently sat down with Doug Webber at his cabin on Bowen Island for a conversation about inscape, depression, community, nature, and the presence of God. Doug shares honestly about a difficult season in his life, the people who helped carry him through it, and the practices that continue to shape him. You can listen here: https://soulstream926.substack.com/p/the-inscape-within-with-doug-webber

Attention, Communion, and Personhood: A Conversation with Felicia Wu Song

Sociologist Felicia Wu Song joins us to explore how digital culture shapes our spiritual lives and relationships. Learn how practicing presence and contemplation helps us recover personhood and live more fully with genuine connection. Discover “counter-liturgies” that can reshape our desires, restore attention, and transform how we show up for the people we love in a hyperconnected world. See link in the comments.

What if the land knows us?

This reflection invites us to step outside, listen with an open heart, and notice how the natural world may be companioning us in ways we have forgotten to receive.

What if the land knows us more deeply than we realize?

On the SoulStream Living from the Heart podcast, we talk with Deb Metzger—eco-spiritual companion, farmer, retired Lutheran minister, and wild guide—about birds, trees, grief, silence, and the sacred wisdom of the more-than-human world. We explore how to truly behold nature and let the wild become a companion in loss and healing.

Slow down, step outside, and listen. 🎧 soulstream.org/podcast

Maybe God is not waiting for us to become more spiritual, more disciplined, or more impressive in our prayer.

Maybe the invitation is more simple than that.

To pause.
To notice.
To receive.

Thomas Merton wrote that contemplation comes to us “as a gift.” That is such a freeing reminder. God is not something we force our way toward. God is already present, and simply inviting us to be open and receive.

What if nature is not just scenery, but sacred community?

In this SoulStream conversation, Victoria Loorz invites us to step outside, slow down, and listen for the sacred presence alive in trees, rivers, silence, and soil.

A beautiful conversation about belonging, spirituality, and re-membering our connection with the living world.

What if the earth is not just a backdrop for our spiritual lives but part of the sacred conversation?

In this episode of Living from the Heart, we're joined by Victoria Loorz, MDiv, a wild church pastor, eco-spiritual director, author of Church of the Wild, and cofounder of the Center for Wild Spirituality.

Victoria invites us to expand our understanding of spiritual direction, beloved community, and what it means to listen for God in relationship with the land, creatures, dreams, and the more-than-human world.

We talk about ecospiritual direction, the wisdom of paying attention, and how birds, fish, trees, and wild places can become part of the way we listen and discern.

At the heart of our conversation is a beautiful reminder that living from the heart includes our relationship with God, with ourselves, with one another, and with the living earth around us.

Listen to the full conversation on Living from the Heart.

In our podcast conversation with Paul Bergmayer, author of The Making of Modern Spiritual Direction, we explored what spiritual direction is and why it matters. Rather than reducing it to one simple definition, Paul invites us to consider what spiritual direction does. It creates space for deep listening, honest reflection, meaningful questions, and a greater awareness of God’s presence in ordinary life.

In a recent article, SoulStream Partner Doug Webber invites us into the poetry and thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially his word “inscape” which refers to the intrinsic nature or inner landscape of something, its unique identity, whether inanimate or animate.

Doug wonders how this word might help us consider Jesus’ inner experience during the week of his passion and how we might meet Christ in the face of others.

Hopkins writes:

“For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limb and lovely in eyes not his,
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

These lines invite us to notice Christ in another’s eyes, in the sacred act of seeing and being seen, and in Jesus’ own anguish, loneliness, and love.

May this reflection help us see Christ in all.

Read More on the SoulStream website at soulstream.org.