Podcast

Contemplify kindles the examined life for contemplatives in the world

Thumb through the conversations, show notes, and drink pairings below. For a certain type of contemplative, a trove of inspiration awaits.

Contemplify_LogoTest10

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, or Overcast (any podcast player worth its salt really). Check out the Contemplify Listening Guide here.

Season Four

EPISODE THIRTEEN / BONUS
Lo-Fi & Hushed / 2023 Winter Solstice Session / To Know the Dark

“To know the dark, go dark.”

Wendell Berry

EPISODE TWELVE
Listen to the Rice, the Rice Will Teach You Everything with Lucien Miller

“Oshida’s life and legacy is an experience of the spiritual senses knowing the mystical voice. Biblical in sources and Buddhist in form, reading this book took me as a reader to the great pause of silence.”

Sister Meg Funk, OSB

EPISODE ELEVEN / BONUS
In Hard Times, In All Times, Eat Sacred Words

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”

Wild Geese‘ by Mary Oliver

EPISODE TEN
Kim Haines-Eitzen on Practicing the Cello in the Dark and Sonorous Deserts

“A meditative blend of history and travelogue . . . brings the soundscape of the desert to life.”

New Yorker

EPISODE NINE
Lerita Coleman Brown on Waiting for a Word in the Heart

“I highly recommend What Makes You Come Alive to churches, religious and educational institutions, and spiritual seekers everywhere who are looking for an inward journey that finds its home in the world of nature, people, and things.”

— Walter Earl Fluker

EPISODE EIGHT / BONUS
Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practice Session (September 2023 / Autumn Equinox)

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

— Mary Oliver

EPISODE SEVEN
David Shumate on When Words Become Thunder

“David Shumate’s High Water Mark is absolutely fresh and unpredictable. . . . You will be surprised by your confrontation with the utterly first rate.”

— Jim Harrison

EPISODE SIX
Douglas E. Christie on Depth Without Resolution

“I have been pursuing the love ‘born of and nurtured by darkness’ all of my life. In The Insurmountable Darkness of Love, Douglas Christie invites readers to embark on a journey of ‘silent attention’ awakening, shedding, and finally the embrace of what cannot be known. So, how do you write about something that cannot be captured in words? Christie uses vulnerability, life stories and memories as well as excellent scholarship. The end result is breathtaking!”

— Barbara A. Holmes

EPISODE FIVE
Carmen Acevedo Butcher Follows the Mystical Tugs on the Heart

“Everything is possible for those who believe, even more for those who hope, still more for those who love, and most of all for those who practice and persevere in these three powerful paths.”

– Brother Lawrence

EPISODE FOUR
Lisa Wells on Holding a Fierce and Loving Gaze

“We are living in an extreme moment, and one where it’s very hard to know what effective action looks like against crises of a scale we’ve not before encountered. These accounts of people trying to grapple with that reality are sometimes inspiring and often cautionary, and always a spur to thinking about how the rest of us might accomplish the most we can.”

– Bill McKibben

EPISODE THREE
Scott Avett on Being Here for the Feast

“When you look out his [Scott’s] window he’s painting for you.”

– Eric Fischl

EPISODE TWO
Haleh Liza Gafori on Putting Mystery in the Middle

“Haleh Liza Gafori’s ecstatic and piercing translation has lifted a veil, bringing Rumi closer into the quick of our present. Each poem is a divine invitation. Free your mind. Drown in love.”

— V (formerly Eve Ensler)

EPISODE ONE
Belden Lane on the Unbroken Desert of God

“[Belden] Lane invites us to see the world around us as nothing less than God around us.”

— James Martin, S.J.

SEASON FOUR TRAILER
Your Naked Freedom

“Your naked freedom
is your shield.”

— Rumi

Season Three
Bonus Episodes

BONUS / EPISODE FOURTEEN / MUSING
Spare Me Nothing

“I asked God to spare me nothing but life.”

— Teddy Macker

BONUS / EPISODE THIRTEEN / JIM FINLEY!
James Finley on the Healing Path

“The beauty and illumination of Jim’s language, whether he is writing about trauma or God’s presence, open the heart. To read this book is to be changed forever.”

— Bonnie Badenoch

BONUS / EPISODE TWELVE / MUSING
It’s Not About the Beer, It’s About the Beer

“It’s not about the chocolate, it’s about the chocolate.”

Shawn Askinosie

BONUS / EPISODE ELEVENSIES / MUSING
Prairie Eye & Woods Eye

“There are two eyes in the human head–the eye of mystery, and the eye of harsh truth–the hidden and the open–the woods eye and the prairie eye.”

— Bill Holm

BONUS / EPISODE TEN / MUSING
Sitting on the Present Moment

“The gift of becoming aware of the simple, astonishing beauty of anything, even as we recognize that it, and we along with it, will one day be no more. This moment of awareness holds everything.”

— Douglas Christie

Didn’t find what you were looking for?