The Spiral Path Blog

When I wander through the forest, the trees demand my attention. Especially here on the west coast, where trees can stretch more than 90 metres into the sky and be as wide as 20 metres in circumference, I am dwarfed by their massive expanse. I often stop to stand in awe of them, gazing up to their dizzying heights. Read the rest on our Substack!

After performing Chopin for a business conference crowd,  Michael Jones  sat down at the piano in the hotel lobby and started playing his own music. A man who’d been in the audience earlier stopped to ask what music he was playing now. When Michael said that it was just a piece he’d written himself, the man, whose voice was slurred with alcohol, asked “Who will play your music if you don’t?” Those...

I was reading something this weekend about pain and how it’s the body’s way of telling us there’s something we need to pay attention to. And then I thought… it works for the heart and the mind too. Read more

“So… what made you move to Shawnigan Lake?” It’s one of the most common questions I get from people I encounter in the tiny village I moved to at the edge of a lake on Vancouver Island. “It was time for a change,” I say, or “I’ve been wandering since I sold my house in Winnipeg, and this felt like the next right thing,” or “My kids all grew up and moved away so I thought it was my turn for an adve...

My name is Krista and that, over there on the left, the one smiling at you kindly from her writing desk on the West Coast of Canada, is Heather, my business partner-slash-work-wife. I’m holed up right now in the office I have at my church here in Winnipeg (located almost in the dead-centre of Canada, a couple hours drive straight north from North Dakota in the  U.S.A.). In addition to helping run...

“I don’t know who I am. I’ve shaped my life around other people for so long that I’ve lost sight of myself.” I used to hear some version of that sentiment quite regularly, ten years ago when more of my work involved coaching people. It was especially common among women in the 40-60 age range – women who’d spent years raising children, holding a marriage together, and/or building a career. Read mor...

“You need to pause to let joy in.” Those words popped into my head one day last week while I was sitting on the couch, weary after a long day of book-launch-related tasks, which followed several long days of gathering the things I need to make a home and unpacking them into the cupboards and closets of my new place. Pause to let joy in? I was puzzled at first, and then suddenly I understood what m...

I’m not going to lie. I am nervous about you. No. More than that. I am anxious and border-line dreading you. It’s not your fault, really. You just happen to be the year of another U.S. election cycle, my kid starting with a new volleyball club, a reduction in my income for the next six months, me finishing up my position with my church at the end of June (and a likely further reduction in my incom...

“By the end of the week, we’ll have turned you into a blues band.” Gulp. I could feel the anxiety rise when I heard those words. A blues band?! Me?! I have no musical talent and my Mennonite body is rhythmically stunted from all of those “dancing is sin” messages I heard growing up. How could I contribute to a blues band? That statement still stands as one of the most intimidating things I’ve ever...

For many and varied reasons, 2023 was a hard year. I’m fairly confident that that was true for a lot of people. The first ‘post-pandemic’ year marked what felt like a desperate fervour to ‘get back to normal’ – despite the war in Ukraine grinding on, despite the climate crisis becoming more obvious and keen, despite growing political division and fascist ideologies becoming accepted and implemente...

I had a dream once, that my body had become part of the landscape. The curve of my belly was now a hill that people and animals were walking across. Small children were playing on my forearms and trees were growing in the soil between my fingers rooting my hands to the ground. It was not an unpleasant dream – in fact I found it quite comforting to witness my body sinking into the soil and becoming...

“He was a poor man in a criminal justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.” – Anthony Ray Hinton For nearly thirty years, Anthony Ray Hinton was in solitary confinement on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Largely because he was Black and poor, the justice system failed him. Despite the fact that there was convincing evidence that sho...

I wake up among the treetops. I peek out the window near my head and I see the shadowy lake below, surrounded by the shadowy trees. Across the lake, I hear the train that was probably the reason for my waking. I close my eyes and a smile creeps across my face. I love the melancholy sound of a train passing through wild spaces. I don’t care for it much in the city, but out here, away from civilizat...

Sometimes, when it has rained all day and everything is damp, it’s nearly impossible to start a fire, even if the wood was under a tarp. Last night was one of those nights. The challenge was compounded by the fact that the only paper I had on hand were the pages of my journal and I was reluctant to tear out too many. Read more...

I came here, to the lake, feeling discouraged and a little burnt out from putting so much free content into the world. This is the time of year I have to be the most active on social media because we are marketing our Fall programs, both online and in-person. I always find myself getting knocked off my equilibrium in times like these. I start seeing social media as a monster with insatiable hunger...

Two months following my mother’s passing away, the grief was still raw and painful. I had these sudden waves of intense sadness that flooded my inner organs and brought me to tears – the kinds of tears I had to clench my teeth to hold back while being on the subway full of people. My friend came to visit and stayed at my apartment for a night. I asked him to walk with me to the nearby park. It was...

I can’t fix it. I want SO BADLY to fix it. My daughter is in distress, she’s far away, and all I can do is be here, listening, at the other end of a FaceTime call. I feel so helpless. My words feel empty and void of purpose. My emotions swell into desperation as my nervous system sends my brain scrambling to find at least one small thing that is fixable by me, her mom. There is nothing. This is th...

I wonder sometimes if I still have hope. Every time I read the news (and those times are becoming fewer and fewer) there are more reasons for despair. We hear dire warnings of what will happen if our global climate increases by yet another degree. All around us, there are more and more massive climate-related catastrophes flooding cities, heating the oceans, and burning up big swaths of forests (a...

I’ve come to the woods to remember who I am. As I write this, I’m off-the-grid, offline and unplugged, tucked into a tiny cabin by a lake, with just enough solar power to occasionally charge my laptop so that I can write. I cook over a propane stove and haul water in a bucket to wash my few dishes. The only bathroom facility is a compost toilet in a little outhouse just a little further up the hil...

I was crying in the church basement while my toddler ran circles around the room. I was certain I must be doing something wrong as a parent. My brother’s two sons were upstairs, sitting in cherubic silence on the hard wooden pew, while all the grownups around them listened to their grandpa (my dad) deliver a sermon. But not my child – my child would never sit still in church, no matter how I bribe...

There’s a place I love to walk. I discovered it at the beginning of the summer, when my daughters and I rented a little house in a different neighbourhood of the city than where we’d lived before. It’s a low-lying area along the Red River, ending where it meets the Seine River. It’s an area that’s frequently flooded in Spring when the rivers swell their banks. You can see the marks of past floods...

I was lying on a table and the practitioner holding my arm with both hands was saying “relax your muscles and let me move your arm for you”. With all of my will, I tried. I wanted to do what she asked, if only to make my inner people-pleaser happy. I wanted to be completely relaxed, trusting her to manoeuvre my arm the way she was trying to do it. But I couldn’t. I just COULD NOT. Every time she t...

I noticed his shoulder shaking hard from the news. My dear friend confessed to me, “My grandma passed away.” He asked me to give him a hug. “That was such a courageous and kind thing to ask at this moment,” I thought. I noticed how he held on to me, the sensation of grief came like waves through our bodies. I couldn’t help but hug him tightly. There was nothing that could be said that could reliev...

My social media feed is filling up with images of grinning college students settling into dorm rooms. Sometimes the parents who are posting those images are in the photos and grinning too, but beneath the grins and cheery captions… well, there’s a lifetime of stories and a whole host of other stuff. I can see it in their eyes. (Let’s face it, when your child moves away, it’s hard to keep it from s...

There’s an older man I often encounter on the path when I go for my morning walks. We’ve become path-friends, always stopping for a brief interaction when we happen upon each other. Once, he showed me how the inside of his hat was falling apart, but “I just can’t bear to throw it away,” he said, tucking the broken bits in as he pulled the hat back onto his head. Another time he was laughing about...