I’ve lived my life outside of religion, and inside love. Well, that’s the aim. The story of Jesus has enthralled me since childhood scripture class at my little secular primary school. I see him as a healer and way shower, whose teachings about compassion, forgiveness, loving your neighbour, looking within, and making room at the table for everyone, have been pillars I’ve tried to build my life upon.

More recently (perhaps since watching the 2018 film by Australian director Garth Davis), I’ve also been moved by the story of Mary Magdalene, his first follower (though a teacher herself) to witness the resurrection, it is said.

Resurrection? For me it’s about the sovereignty of life. And perhaps there’s a message here that we can hold onto as tyrants subject innocents to atrocities across our earth. Oppressive powers will crush the peacemakers, but the pervasive Love that paints itself upon the earth as a wildflower, an ocean, a mountain, an owl, a human, or a hand to hold, will prevail.

This poem was born on the Easter weekend of 2025. I remembered it today, as I contemplated Mary Magdalene’s feast day this morning (July 22) and thought I’d share it here. I also wrote a poem today, and when I re-read my Easter poem, I noticed that it contains a similar theme, about the kind of Love that’s woven across eternity.

Soul love.

Divine Union

A man and a woman were
beloveds.
She watched, her soul bleeding across time,
staining eternity,
as they hung his shredded body in the jagged heat of noon.
She stayed until the last breath kissed him goodbye,
when she could not,
and his precious head sagged beneath the weight of the Love that crowned him.
She wept wept wept.
Days later, carrying her oils and herbs to bless his skin of amber and gold,
she rushed to the hollow where
he slept slept slept
And yet –
Where darkness had held him
blazed
a bonfire of sunlight,
the boulder set aside,
as if blown by the gentlest breeze,
And there stood a stranger whose eyes were beams of devotion and peace.
The gardener? thought the Magdalene,
What lovely flowers he’ll grow.
Closer now, their eyes latched and every wound was mended
space and time upended –
In Gethsemane, the olive trees knew and joined ancient arms to dance.
Their song went like this: there is only life.

Dear friends,

I am writing to share an important update regarding Words Along the Way. This week, my Substack page will become entirely free for all readers.

What this means for you:

• Free Subscribers: You do not need to do anything. You will continue to receive my posts directly in your inbox just like before.

• Paid Subscribers: Your paid subscription will be officially cancelled. Substack will automatically issue you a prorated refund for the remaining time left on your monthly or annual billing cycle. You should see this refund in your bank account within the next few days.

Why I am making this change:
Writing is my steadfast companion, my passion, my comfort, my medicine, my joy. Yet, the midlife Camino has been a winding one for me, stormy at times, and navigating this huge life shift has been overwhelming. I tend to freeze in the face of overwhelm and I have not been writing here as much as I’d intended or as much as I want to, so I’ve decided to take some pressure off. My hope is that this will bring me to Substack to share more often and more freely, and that removing the paid tier will make my writing more accessible to new readers.

This is step one of a strategy to streamline my offerings (which I have realised were too ample – ideas flow and I get excited!) For now, I’ll keep going with my Spirit Sisters podcast and writing my first novel. I plan to begin to share more here about the fiction process (it’s been surprising, as I work with my own app). I’ll also continue publishing my poems and excerpts from my journals and books on Substack.

In the meantime, I am sincerely grateful to everyone who has financially supported Words Along the Way. Your contributions have been invaluable and helped me grow this space. I am excited to continue this writing journey with all of you.

Thank you for your care and continued support, and stay tuned for the next post!

Love,

Karina

I write to see what’s inside myself.

That’s why I’ve kept a journal for most of my life and why I started the practice of ‘writing to the divine’ ten years ago. Some mornings, I write to the Divine. Other mornings, the Divine writes to me, and sometimes, a dialogue takes place - where I ask a question and an answer follows.

The entry below is an example of the latter, and of the unexpected messages that occasionally flow through my purple pen.

Some might call this ‘automatic writing,’ and maybe it is. Certainly, for me, this practice is a way of tapping into a dimension of myself that isn’t readily accessible to my everyday awareness. It’s about loosening my imagination and expanding my creativity. I’m often surprised by what emerges and, in part, launched my Substack page to share these perspectives. The fact I haven’t done enough of this shows me I’m still tip-toeing into the courage to share the full breadth of my creative self.

In the pages of my prayer journal, I find steadfast support, companionship and fresh creative pathways. My hope is that there is something here to light your way, too.

Have a beautiful week.

Wednesday 21.1.26

Dearest Source of Love,

Tell me – what would you like to speak of this morning, as the palest gold light peeps through the magnolia trees?

Ah, mi amor, it is thus: Life Is, Love Must, God Is. Can you take to heart the essence of these words? Life, Love, God, all are threads of the one strand and all speak of eternity.

In the years to come, your world will begin to understand that communication is not of the body – though, of course, the body and the body’s senses are effective tools for communication, but communication is beyond the physical. Think of a mother’s sense that her child is in danger, think of lovers feeling each other across vast distances, think of friends intuiting each other’s needs – these are accepted examples (though considered somewhat extreme) of communication beyond the body. More and more, your comprehension of what’s possible here will expand.

Art, of course, is communication beyond the body. The artist writes, paints or expresses in whichever way, and they are transmitting a message – a refined message from their heart – to the reader, to the audience.

The love that fuels their passion for their art is the conductor – for love is always the conductor of communication beyond the body.

Thus, a being who has left their body can reach a beloved one still in the body – love is the ‘phone’ as well as the impulse to dial. You will understand this more and more as what you call the Age of Aquarius unfolds.

The near-death experiencers with their traveller’s tales of telepathic communication are also an important part of this stage of human evolution, and ‘love’, as you see, is present in the first half of ‘evolution’.

We love you.

Autumn always squeezes tight my heart.

The feeling is close to nostalgia, yet beyond it. Perhaps the mournful Galician and Portuguese word ‘Saudade’ comes closest. Saudade is a lament for home, a visceral experience of missing a place or person, a word that would have down-turned the mouths of my Galician ancestors. Saudade has parallels to the Welsh word ‘Hiraeth’, too, which describes a longing for a place you might never have experienced - another glowing ember of a word.

All to say that I write poems about autumn every year to try to express this melancholia of mine for a golden season that may drift outside of this lifetime, even.

This one arrived last week. I hope you enjoy it. May your days be golden.

At the Edge of Winter

Even my favourite season falls away
eventually
To shatter into the clean light of
winter,
To become again the old-gold
quadrant on the wheel of the season
An endless churning of colours
And qualities
of light
air
scent.
When wood-smoke flavours the rose of dusk,
my soul returns to moments
Out of this light
Out of this life
When a gilded autumn like this one
found me in full flight
sky-high in love
with the moment
with the one whose hand encased my own –
Heart afire with gratitude this morning,
A different though same self, somehow,
I give thanks for the blessed break of day
Emboldened am I to create
Cast my cards
Stand naked at the edge of fate
Knowing, knowing, all the while
Of the wheel that turns
The time that churns
And the crisp leaves kissing
Tenderly
The ground.

One night, when I was eight years old, I saw a man in military regalia standing in my bedroom doorway. In the dim light of the hallway of our two-bedroom apartment in Sydney’s Eastlakes, I could see his medals gleaming and the broad bulk of his silhouette.

Or could I?

Almost three decades later, if I close my eyes, I can see him again – ‘the Colonel’, as he came to be known in our family folklore. My enduring fascination for the paranormal owes much to seeing, dreaming, or – will I ever really know? – imagining, the Colonel. Yet it goes deeper than that. I grew up hearing stories of my mother’s sixth sense, including the time that, as a young woman making tortas fritas at home in her native Uruguay, her belly blooming with me, she blurted, ‘Turn off the radio. Uncle is dead.’

The words made no sense. Her forty-four-year-old Uncle Americo, a dead ringer for Errol Flynn, had just finished helping her dad build a room out the back. He’d worked hard and had only just returned next door to his house, keen to relax and watch the bull fight on TV. When his wife began calling for my grandfather, her voice calm at first, then ever shriller, like a gathering storm, my mother and her parents rushed over. There lay Americo, felled by a massive heart attack. The family watched in mute horror as my grandfather – furious with grief, tears fleeing his face – stubbornly massaged his dead brother’s heart until he’d rubbed every hair off his chest.

Around the time of the Colonel, we’d visit friends in inner-city Dulwich Hill, run rampant with the family’s four children up and down the hallway and through the bedrooms of their rambling Federation home, squealing and spooking each other while our parents held impromptu séances in the living room. We’d spy on the grown-ups, hear their laughter or sense their nervous silence, watch in awe as an upturned wine glass glided around the dining table, spelling out messages from an unknown world …

Those are the opening lines of my first book, Spirit Sisters, which was my love song to all things mysterious, and to the solace I drew, as a child, from stories that hinted at wondrous possibilities dancing outside my senses.

I had no idea back in 2009 when Spirit Sisters was published that I’d go on to write two more books about the extraordinary experiences of ‘quote unquote’ ordinary people. Or that I’d still be joyfully telling these stories in 2026 – in new ways, but for the same reasons.

Sharing our sacred stories is like offering a bouquet of comfort, one to another.

I know this is true from emails I receive from listeners of my Spirit Sisters podcast, who say that the only thing that came close to blunting the edge of a great grief was a story they heard on my podcast.

Our sacred stories matter. Sharing them matters. In these times, perhaps more than ever.

On Saturday May 16, from 10 am to 5 pm AEST, I’m honouring these stories in yet another way. I’m hosting my first Spirit Sisters “Gathering Around the Virtual Hearth” online retreat with sisters, listeners and friends (the event is free for paid Substack subscribers).

Four guest speakers will lean in close to reveal how their encounters with the spiritual realm taught them how to live, boots on our beautiful earth:

· Near-death experiencer Ash Perrow

· Near-death experiencer (and my spirit sister) Sara Jayne

· Psychic-medium, my dear friend, and teller of heart-expanding true tales, Dani Hearn (check out her marvellous Substack!)

My fourth guest will co-host the opening session with me. I’ll be in conversation with my darling sister, author and historian Natalie Grueninger, about the mysteries and marvels that coloured our childhood. From ghosts we met in the corridors of our mother’s nostalgia for Uruguay, to seances we spied on in fellow immigrants’ smoky lounge rooms, and UFOs that hinted that not all was as it seemed in suburbia, the stories stoked our lifelong passion for stories and storytelling.

Learn more about Gathering Around the Virtual Hearth and register at this link.

Join us, one and all, to be warmed by the fireside of a story or four to rekindle wonder, hope and the memory of Love eternal.

Like millions of others, this week I had the misfortune of reading a crass public announcement from the man who purports to be the leader of the free world. Like millions of others, I thought, What is to be done? Who can stop this horror show?

I don’t have the answers, and I don’t know who does. My only response is to share words of tenderness - I call them 'Love Letters from Love - that bloom in my prayer journal.

One of my favourite passages in A Course in Miracles says, “The miracle worker is the presence of the alternative." This suggests that performing miracles is not for a chosen few, rather, that we all (even all of us who read those vile lines this week) can be miracle workers, simply by turning in a different direction. I wonder if that’s the idea behind the “turn the other cheek” teaching? An invitation to turn away from an expression of lovelessness and place our focus on love, instead?

Of course, what seems simple on the surface is usually anything but, as anyone who’s returned love for hate (or tried to) can attest.

All to say, here is my small act of self-love today, to take shelter in “the alternative” offered by these words that arrived in my prayer journal last month. They liken love to the force of creation and suggest this love “beats eternally,” beyond the physical.

We’re to share our creativity, says Love’s letter - that we’re guided to do so. If nothing else, that felt supportive today. If these few lines shine a tiny light somewhere in you, too, I’m honoured.

22 March 2026

Mi amor,

Let us soothe and warm you, little one — you are once more like a tiny rowboat tossed upon the waves of infinity. This image conveys solitude, yet that is not so, our hearts beat with yours, eternally. We hear your thought — ‘but you do not have hearts, do you?’

Not in the sense of the physical organ, true, yet the pulse of love beats eternally; you know this, you are a student of after-life stories and a sharer of wisdom that is born from what you call ‘death’. We want you to keep focusing on the idea that you can create your life, construct it like a house, brick by brick. Moments may feel slow; sometimes the rain hampers a build and the craftsmen need to pause until the weather passes. The weather is the collective agreements made manifest.

Together, you have all created what befalls you but most of you know it not. It is like the dreamer of a dream who fears the shadows that frighten her. Worry not. Keep digging down into the rich soil of your soul’s desires. Keep reaching for what you love and finding ways to bring it into form — we support you in this and are forever — forever — by your side as you play and build your house on the earth plane.

Love what you love, be the “soft animal” the poet Mary Oliver reminded you that you are. Keep looking up to the stars, look high, even if your neck aches from the strain. Then, look down to your work and pour the starlight onto the page, into your hopes made manifest in purple ink.

We hold your hand as you move your pen like an ocean wave — receding, building, swelling and arriving — across your page.

Te amamos.

The lines above are from my poem book, dated November 23, 2024.

Two months later, I wrote the poem I’m about to share with you. This one arrived at a time when I was missing a fundamental part of myself, the part that loves - and is loved by - a partner. ‘Missing’ is too polite a word here; ‘yearning’ comes closer but that’s not right, either. It was more like the ache for an experience I knew was part of me, but I hadn’t embodied yet.

They say that what you focus on grows, and I’d spent years under the spell of this void, so that the dearth of love grew monstrous – a stain that spread across my inner life and made showing up for ‘outer’ life a challenge. I’m forever grateful to the family and friends who held my hand throughout this Camino of sorrow.

For medicine, one summer’s day, the Author of Love prescribed this poem, which rushed like a river through my purple pen into my notebook. It arrived, to my surprise, in Spanish, and its themes of an enchanted forest hark back to my love of childhood books such as The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton and Lord of the Forest by the enigmatic ‘BB’. Books that became sanctuary for a sensitive child ever scanning for the subtlest shift in the soil of the adults around her.

When I walked the Camino de Santiago in 2023, I felt the beech trees bend their lovely boughs to me in greeting. Welcome home to Spain, they whispered, as I stepped wide-eyed into Roncesvalles, trailing a caravan of spectral ancestors, on that first long and brutal day following the Pyrenees ascent.

Later, the fairytale forests of my ancestral Galicia entranced me; I wove through them as if in an emerald dream. Oak. Chestnut. Eucalypt. Of course, in fairytales, the forest symbolises a place of danger and transformation - a threshold where the heroine crosses from one life into another. But first she must traverse the dim, leaf-dappled unknown.

For me, this shadowy path spanned five years, with the Camino as a central fork in the road, and I could never have imagined where it would lead. Mystery is always alive in the fairytale forest. In Blyton’s tales, the children never knew which world they’d encounter at the top of the Faraway Tree…

Today, as our world feels desperately heavy, and many of us mourn the dearth of love in the collective experience, I offer you this love song of hope from the forest of my soul. A year on from writing it, I can see how it promised a crossing into the sunshine of a new life.

After the dim, leaf-dappled unknown, the light.

English translation follows, with the original Spanish beneath it.

El Bosque Encantado (The Enchanted Forest)

There’s an enchanted forest in the soil of my soul
An enchanted forest, though my eyes may not behold

From here - where the whole of Heaven,
Endlessly blue,
Wraps me in shawl of a new life -

I hear the oaks singing
In voices woven of sunlight and innocence,
They sing in the green of ancient lifetimes,
Of centuries gone that wander on, eternal

This day -
Past and future braided into the now,
A silken ribbon trembling through the heavens;
Life, robed in love,
Love – well of life

Of these mysteries and more
Sing the oaks, the chestnuts,
In the enchanted forest - my nest, untouched by harm,
My home,
A mirror of consciousness
Hidden in a quiet chamber of my being

From here, across the oceans, I sing to you,
I answer your call -
My forests - my soul resounds within this song,
Telling you of my gratitude,
Of the tenderness that gathers in me
When I remember your colours -
Your light and your shadow,
Your whispers, your vast silences

And the secret gift
Hidden along your sacred Path -
Blessed by the weeping of centuries,
The pilgrim’s tears rising as a hymn to God

Arms open to the clouds,
Receiving the baptism of rain,
Giving thanks for the sun,
Receiving bread and wine
As night descends upon the Way

And the enchanted forest
Opens its arms
And in a voice of emerald leaves
Whispers:

“Rest.”

El Bosque Encantado

Hay un bosque encantado en la tierra de mi ser.
Hay un bosque encantado, aunque no lo pueda ver.

Desde acá, donde el cielo entero,
celeste sin fin,
me envuelve en una vida nueva,

en el bosque encantado los robles cantan,
en voces hechas de sol y de pureza.
Cantan en el verde de vidas antiguas,
en siglos pasados que todavía caminan, eternos.

Este día—
pasado y futuro abrazados en el presente,
una cinta de seda que aletea en el firmamento;
vida, vestida de amor,
amor, fuente de toda vida.

De esto y de tanto más
cantan los robles y los castaños
en el bosque encantado—nido mío, nido sin mal,
hogar,
espejo de conciencia,
en un rincón profundo de mi ser.

Desde acá, cruzando los mares, te canto,
te respondo,
bosques míos—mi alma suena en este canto,
y te habla de mi gratitud,
y de la paz que me enternece
cuando recuerdo tus colores,
tu luz y tu sombra,
tus susurros y tus silencios,

y ese regalo escondido en tu Camino hermoso,
Camino bendecido por los llantos de los siglos,
llantos de peregrinos cantándole a Dios,
con los brazos abiertos a las nubes,
recibiendo el bautismo de la lluvia,
agradeciendo el sol,
recibiendo el pan y el vino cuando cae la noche
sobre el Camino.

Y el bosque encantado
me abre sus brazos,
y en voz de hojas esmeralda susurra:

“Descansá”.

I bumped into an old friend the other day.

During a glorious long weekend in Hobart last weekend, my love and I took a walk around Arthur Circus, a famous circular street in the historic waterside precinct of Battery Point. In the chill of an afternoon gilded by autumn’s first leaves, I remembered that one of my all-time favourite stories from my books is partly set in a home in Arthur Circus, and we set out to look for it.

Kissed by rose bushes, the cottages looked camera-ready – dove-grey and white, with gleaming plaques flashing tales of colourful pasts, they exude an air of cultivated prestige. All but one. This one was weatherboard, in need of a little TLC and stood apart for its patch of unkempt lawn yawning from door to front gate.

I knew the home in my story was weatherboard and had the biggest front lawn of all the homes on Arthur Circus. We’d found her. The house seemed uninhabited but we couldn’t be sure. An eerie sense of … what (?) summoned goosebumps from our skin, as we gazed up at the top-floor side window.

Houses are storytellers, but it’s the people who live in them who weave the tales. In all of three of my books, I’ve written about haunted people, and the houses that host them. The story that follows is one of them – it’s called Memory Box, and is from my 2009 book Spirit Sisters. This is one of those yarns I’ve never been able to forget, no matter the passage of time. Read it to understand why (you might want to pour some tea, settle in…)

I once tried to track down the gently spoken Patricia, my subject, but with no success. Perhaps I’ll try again, now that I can tell her I stood outside her old house by the sea, peering through cloudy panes into her past.

MEMORY BOX

The man slithered on his elbows along the floor.

He was dead, of course, but there was something else askew

about him.

Lying stomach down on the wooden floorboards, he propped

himself up on sinewy forearms and shuffled forward, dragging

his flaccid bottom half. Closer he crept to Patricia Turnbull, who

studied him without fear, but with some pity. He lifted his face to

look at her, his mouth a mute slash, his black eyes howling. ‘He

was crawling towards me like he was paralysed from the waist

down,’ says Patricia. ‘I decided to go to him and tell him it was

okay to leave. I thought I’d try that. I went to the corner where this

man was laying, in this house that had been handed down through

generations, and said, “It’s okay for you to go . . .” ’

Patricia has a story to tell. It is a story of abandonment, hard-

ship, of grief and tragedy, of love and loss, of life and death. It’s a

story that will pin itself to the walls of your skull. And naturally,

it is a ghost story.

It was 2006 when she met the crawling spirit. At that point,

Patricia was in deep mourning for the loss of her son and husband

in heart-splitting succession, and had returned for nine months

to the quaint weatherboard home in picturesque Battery Point,

Tasmania, where she’d taken her first steps. If the sight of the

maimed visitor didn’t frighten her, it’s because he was by no means

the first. Ghosts of every variety populate her history, jostling for

space with the living and the beloved dead in the memory box in

her mind’s eye.

And it all started in an old house by the sea.

Patricia’s childhood home was built around 1803, when convicts

laid the first foundations in Tasmania.

It is part of Arthur Circus, the ring of historic cottages encircling

a park in the heart of Battery Point, the former fishing village that

is today one of Hobart’s most prestigious addresses. Since it was

one of the larger houses in the Circus, Church of England Sunday

School was held on its veranda for the local children every week.

With two bedrooms upstairs, and three on the bottom, the house

was a tight squeeze for twelve children and their parents, but the

family made do.

It was a time when life and death were housemates, and the

sight of coffins being carried to and from the cottages in the Circus

became a familiar sight to the neighbourhood kids. ‘Loved ones

should always be brought home to be properly farewelled,’ was

the lesson that burrowed into Patricia, the third youngest, whose

mop of unruly curls made her stand out from her sleek-haired

siblings. There was something else Patricia learned as a toddler:

when a spirit approaches, it makes a sound like the crackling of

autumn leaves.

‘In the house as I was growing up, I used to see spirits, a lot

of different sorts – some that were outlines and some that were

“sparkly” – and when they come towards you, they sound like a

rustling of leaves,’ says Patricia, fifty-six, who was three when she

saw her first ghost, a ‘white one’ floating down the stairs.

‘I’ve seen very tall spirits in white, like an outline, and spirits

in my bedroom that look human, but are doll-like; they have no

expression, and the room was always hot when they appeared.

The whole family used to see them, they just used to pass you in

the hallway.’

‘Was anyone in the house frightened by this?’ I venture.

‘Oh, some of the children used to scream at night when ‘they’

made a loud entrance. Sometimes, the door would fly open; there

was a crackling sound like a fire lighting up, then a rustling of

leaves as though they were coming into the room. So some of them

used to get scared, but as we got older, we tried to ignore it. We

knew it was there and coming, but we wouldn’t turn and look.’

Voices from the past also echoed in the halls. ‘We’d hear the

“Heave-ho!” of men in row boats, laughter, music . . . you had to

learn how to sleep in that house.’ Patricia’s elder sister remembers

it well: ‘The convicts! We could hear them rowing and laughing,’

says Margaret Kobylinski, sixty-two. ‘It was very hard. I was

shrewder than the rest of them. I knew there were things around,

but I was on my guard.’ Margaret stuns me with a detail that

speaks volumes about the haunting’s effect on their father, Ben:

in the mid-fifties, not long after little Trisha saw her white spirit

descending, he dismantled the stairway, forcing the family to cram

into the ground floor. ‘Entities would come down the stairs, and to

stop that, Dad just thought he’d take them out,’ recalls Margaret.

‘They were beautiful stairs, but that’s the only way he could handle

it. Problem is, that didn’t stop them.’

The strange happenings only intensified after a shattering event:

‘When I was about nine, my mum left,’ reports Patricia, who never

saw her mother, Doris, in the flesh again. ‘She just left the house.’

Patricia can only speculate as to why her mother would abandon

her husband and twelve children, ten still living at home, the

youngest only seven. ‘I think the children were just too much,’ she

says quietly. ‘We never had hot water, we could only have a bath

once a week, we never had a stove or fridge. If we had fresh milk,

we had to keep it in cold water. Our cooking was done on the

fireplace, so it was pretty basic.’

For Ben, life became a struggle. ‘It was very sad. We couldn’t

talk to our dad about certain things. There were eight girls, we

weren’t allowed to sit on his lap anymore, he put some distance

between us, but he was very loving,’ says Patricia, who was in and

out of hospital with rheumatic fever, causing her to miss much of

her primary schooling. ‘That was probably why I never learned to

read and write,’ says the articulate, gently spoken grandmother.

Masking his devastation, the fisherman remained a steady,

reassuring presence, tending his vegetable plot or polishing ten

pairs of shoes by the hearth in the chill of the morning. He could

not have known that another ghostly voice would soon be joining

his household, and this time, it would belong to one of his own.

When Patricia was thirteen, her brother Jimmy, sixteen, was

involved in an horrific car accident. Jimmy decided to join his sister

Lyn and her boyfriend, who’d offered to pick up a young couple

and their three-week old baby from hospital. The car slid in the rain

and, in the days before mandatory seatbelts, the baby was thrown

from the car and killed. Jimmy suffered terrible head injuries.

For three months, Jimmy lay in a coma, and yet the sounds of

his wailing pummelled the cottage’s whaling-board walls. As if

that’s not astonishing enough, Patricia says Jimmy wasn’t alone: a

baby’s high-pitched cry accompanied him. ‘We had the baby and

my brother in that house,’ she states. ‘We’d hear them crying. We’d

hear him yelling – it was very loud.

‘Very loud! Loud enough for anyone to jump up and take

off,’ seconds Margaret, who believes her father and siblings were

all psychic, which created a kind of energy trap in the house.

‘The young ones suffered badly . . .’ Then, when the boy died on

November fourth, 1965, it was utter bedlam. His phantom voice

would shriek, pleading for his sister Lyn, who’d survived the crash.

Bright random flashes lit up the house, and music seemed to ‘come

from nowhere’, says Patricia. The walls played his favourite song,

‘Donna’, the 1958 ballad. ‘We’d all just stop and look at each

other. And run.’

It reached the point where the siblings refused to be in the

house after their father left for work. Instead, they’d line up on the

path outside and wait for his return. They even stopped going to

school. ‘We were losing sleep,’ says Patricia. Jimmy’s pitiful cries of

‘Where are you, I can’t find you . . .’ kept the clan awake at night

and made them a jittery mess in the daylight hours. Finally, a group

of neighbours reached out to the splintered family. ‘They decided

to come in and do the housework,’ recalls Patricia, a tiny smile

turning her lips. ‘As he started to scream, those ladies were the first

to leave. We turned around and they were gone. We ran out after

them but they swore they’d never go back into that house.’

Ben didn’t ever deny that his son was haunting the place, he’d

seen and heard too much, but the stress consumed him. ‘It was

worrying the hell out of him; Dad went white overnight,’ remembers

Margaret. ‘Completely white.’ He sought the help of a psychiatrist,

who listened to each child’s account individually, ‘to make sure we

weren’t making anything up,’ says Patricia. His verdict? ‘He called

us all in together and told my dad that my brother was actually

trapped and all he needed to know was that Lyn was okay.’ They

were instructed to head home and calm Jimmy in their thoughts.

‘We had to tell him that Lyn was okay, she was with us and it was

okay for him to go. And he did.’

The house wiped its tears. Jimmy hushed.

A photo arrives of Patricia with eight of her brothers and

sisters on the lawn outside their house. I easily spot my subject,

aged around three, for her springy curls. She’s exploring her shoe.

Jimmy is at the rear: the sun spotlights his white-blonde hair and

he wears the littlest of grins for the camera. The elder kids stare

out of their eyes with ancient souls.

The grainy black-and-white snapshot enchants me. It reminds

me of my own ancestors’ big clans; my maternal grandmother – mi

abuela – was one of nine, my grandfather, one of twelve, until time

felled them, one by one. Over and over, I dig out Patricia’s photo

from underneath piles of interviews and clippings, just to pore over

the children’s expressions. Patricia also sends me ‘then’ and ‘now’

views of Arthur Circus, and I think of the tourists who stroll the

postcard-pretty area today, ignorant of the layers of life and death

each charming façade conceals. Especially one.

Though somewhat hypnotised by the pictures of Arthur Circus

– its circular green is like a whirlpool I’ve fallen into – Patricia

eventually left it behind, so I’m obliged to follow. As she told me

when we first spoke, early in 2008, ‘We grew up with ghosts, but

that’s not the story I want to tell you . . .’ In 1974, she had her

first child, Amy, with a volatile man who would belittle her for her

illiteracy, so that when she met gentle, caring Wayne Turnbull, she

was keen to start a new life with him. They moved to Queensland

in 1980, and had their boys, Brett and Sam.

Wayne worked in the mines so the family moved around the

country. Patricia was content tending to their quiet lives, setting

up house where the work led them. The spirit world slept, her

memories of growing up alongside ghosts faded. That is, until 1998,

when Patricia realised for the first time that she would be warned

when a loved one was about to die.

The first time it happened, she was sitting at the family’s home in

Darwin, watching television, when a large black shadow stalked in

front of the set, the Venetian blinds rippling in its wake. ‘I thought,

“What the hell was that?” but I felt it was a warning so I marked it

on the calendar and started ringing around, telling family members.’

Then she forgot about it, until six weeks later, when a phone call

brought the news that her eldest brother had died. ‘He had fallen

down the stairs and his ribs went through his heart,’ she says. ‘His

name was Robbie.’

Sam inherited his mother’s uncanny foresight. Not long after

the sixteen-year-old casually mentioned ‘a man standing behind’

his mother, Patricia heard that her father, Ben, lay critically ill. She

rushed home to Tasmania, to her Apple Isle house of the spirits,

to say her farewells.

In the early hours of the morning, just before he passed, he

came to Patricia as an explosion of light, ‘like somebody putting

a flashlight in my face,’ she reports. Simultaneously, the television

sprang to life. It was an old-fashioned set, where you had to pull

a button to turn it on. That sent one of Patricia’s sisters quaking

to her doorway, but Patricia felt the opposite of fear. ‘I felt so

overwhelmed with love, that I felt like laughing,’ she says. ‘He’d

never told me he loved me, but I think he came and gave me all

the love he could in that flash.’

It had been six weeks since Sam’s vision.

The next time it happened would sear Patricia with fright. In

2003, she and Wayne were living in Parkes, New South Wales. They

lasted two days in the rented house before Patricia experienced the

most terrifying event of her life. Sleeping alone in bed – Wayne was

on night shift – Patricia’s eyelids flicked open. ‘There was this thing

hovering a couple of inches above my face. It was like a big, black

mass, it had streamers or ribbons floating, it was all uneven . . .

‘All I could think of was that I wasn’t meant to look at it, I

should run. I ran to the lounge room and wouldn’t go back into the

bedroom.’ Without hesitation, the pair moved out. Patricia didn’t

think to mark it on her calendar.

‘A phone call came six weeks later,’ she sighs. ‘It was my sister;

she was crying. My youngest brother, Peter, was dead.’

My mind summons again the blanched family picture, where one of the big children

cradles an infant like a doll in her arms. ‘He was the baby of the

family,’ says Patricia, as if reading my thoughts.

To her dismay, in 2004, her own baby, Sam, accepted a post

working with explosives in mines in the New South Wales city of

Armidale. Patricia didn’t want him to go and told him so. Every

part of her lurched against the idea, but it was a good opportunity

and Sam’s mind was made up. In bed one night in the days before

his departure, Patricia heard a calming male voice say, ‘The Lord

Giveth, the Lord Taketh. You are strong enough.’ Instead of being

afraid, Patricia was lulled to sleep by the soothing tones. ‘Then, on

our last meal together before he moved to Armidale, Wayne and

Sam were having a joke that they were going to cook tea tonight,’

she tells, lost in the sweet memory. ‘They were making veggies and

patties and having a really wonderful time together.’

‘Every time I tried to go into the kitchen, they’d shoo me out.

I found myself standing outside in the garden, watching them.

I thought, Is this what it feels like on the other side? Looking

through a window at us? Her musings sparked a memory of the

voice. She wondered if it was a warning of her own impending

death. The message had deemed her ‘strong enough’ and now,

standing at the glass, she thought, I’ll be okay. I’ll be able to come

back and look at my boys.’

The dinner the boys served up would be their last

family meal together.

Not long after Sam left, something began to stir in and around

Patricia. She was packing up the Parkes house to move again;

Wayne, who’d been feeling unwell, was heartened at the prospect

of managing a mine in Tasmania. It should have been a sunny time

in their lives, but the atmosphere around them seemed to crackle

and spit, suggesting otherwise. ‘Things in the house started to play

up of a night: the video would turn on, the lights would flicker, the

music would be playing – like violin or piano,’ says Patricia. ‘It was

like somebody or something was trying to get my attention. I was

jumping out of bed to turn the power off, the video was screaming,

its insides were going but there was no tape inside it. I couldn’t

work out what was happening.’

Could it have been a warning? The spirits’ brusque way of

announcing that her world was somersaulting – that the careful

life she’d built around ‘her boys’ was spinning out of control? As if

to prove her suspicions correct, Wayne was diagnosed with bowel

cancer and given only three months to live; their hopes dashed,

the couple moved back to Western Australia to be closer to their

daughter, Amy. ‘He had to give up his dream job,’ she whispers.

‘When the surgeon told him, I couldn’t see. He was a blur in front

of me because the tears would drop.’

Amid the shock of Wayne’s prognosis, the couple couldn’t shake

a nagging worry for their youngest son, who’d lost his licence in

Armidale for drink driving. ‘Sam was always telling us he was going

to die on the bike,’ recalls his mum. ‘When Wayne recovered from

his operation, we decided to fly over and drive back, bringing Sam

and his motorcycle with us.’

They booked a flight to Armidale on Monday, the thirteenth

of December, 2004.

‘On the 10th of December, Sam called us up and said he was

just letting us know he was going to be killed. He said, “I am

definitely going to be killed on the bike.” ’ His parents begged him

to keep away from it, repeating that they’d be there on Monday.

He had only to wait out the weekend. ‘But he just kept insisting it

was going to happen.’

The twenty-four-year-old was killed the next day. He’d been

doubling friends on his bike around the block when he veered

off course and slammed into a picket fence. His passenger was

only mildly injured. When Patricia spied the two police officers

approaching her door, a wave of ice and heat engulfed her. Her

handsome boy, with his dancing hazel eyes and blonde curls, was

gone.

From somewhere within her well of grief, Patricia found determination.

After flying his body home to Perth, to lay at a funeral

home in suburban Northbridge, Patricia felt her son was too far

away. She asked Wayne and her eldest son, Brett, to do something

she hadn’t seen since her days at Arthur Circus: ‘I said, “You’ll

have to go and get Sam from the undertaker’s. Sam is coming home

for Christmas.” ’ The men put Sam’s coffin in the back of the ute,

and with dead rapper Tupac Shakur blasting from the stereo, they

brought their boy home, where Patricia waited with open arms. ‘I

put a bed beside Sam and I slept there the first night. Wayne got

the courage to come in for the last two nights. I used to comb his

hair and talk to him.’

For four days and three nights, the mother kept vigil by her son’s

body. Her family left her to her mourning, occasionally setting a

cup of coffee beside her. Even though Sam had been embalmed,

his body began to discolour and an odour permeated the

room, but Patricia didn’t mind. ‘Doing that showed how much I

loved him,’ she says. ‘I never got to say goodbye to Jimmy, or to

Peter, so I think I knew what I had to do. It was heartbreaking

when they took him away.’

Eight months later, Wayne, with a secondary cancer on his liver,

was drawing his last, ragged breaths. As she sat by her husband’s

bedside, he suddenly became lucid. ‘He grabbed my arm and said,

“Trisha, I want to tell you I love you.” I started to cry. I looked at

him and said, “Please don’t leave me.” He said, “Trisha, you don’t

realise how strong you are. Remember, I’ll always be with you.” ’

The gentle miner with the lopsided grin died shortly after. He

was fifty-one. Patricia’s premonition at the kitchen window had

come true: she was now an outsider to her boys’ world – because

her veins still throbbed with life.

As she did with Sam, Patricia laid out Wayne at home. In the

whirlwind of those fractured days, she had a visitor from her past.

‘One night, I was just laying with the light on in the bedroom. I

had the feeling someone was standing behind me in a coat, hat,

handbag, old shoes that laced up with heels, and old-fashioned

stockings. I could see what she was wearing.’

Who is that? she wondered.

‘The next night, I was asleep, and I woke up and I saw the same

lady, but she was younger, in a spotted dress, combing her hair.’ On

the third night, the woman appeared ‘. . . sitting in a hospital chair.

There were tanks beside her and she was trying to breathe. She had

a mask over her. Somewhere in there, I realised it was my mother.

I remember yelling out, “Mum! My God that’s my mum!” ’

Patricia believes that she was clairvoyantly shown select scenes

from her absent mother’s life, from her youth to her lonely death

in hospital. I wonder, in her final days, did her mother reach out

in her dreams to kiss a dozen forgotten cheeks?

Soon after she saw the final vision of her mother, Patricia woke

to the sight of a young soldier squinting down at her, a bullet hole

where his eye belonged. ‘He wore an old uniform in heavy khaki

with silver buttons, real old boots and a big hat. He was very

young.’ The boy digger was there, and then he wasn’t, leaving

Patricia to ponder if the trauma of losing her adored husband and

son had somehow resurrected her ability to see dead people?

‘I don’t know how to explain it,’ she says, shrugging. ‘It’s like,

“Oh, who are you?” and then all of a sudden, they just disappear.

I think I’m just trying to develop what I’ve got, but I’ve got no

idea what I’m doing.’

Which is why, when she returned to Battery Point, to the old

house by the sea in Arthur Circus, she thought she would try to

help the spirit of the paralysed man who squirmed towards her

one night. She hopes it worked because he vanished. She hopes he’s

where he’s supposed to be.

Today, Patricia is back in Western Australia. She has sold the

home where she mourned her ‘boys’ and is living in a new house

she had built forty-five minutes from her children Amy and Brett.

‘I just know all these spirits are encouraging me to go forward,’

she says. ‘I’ve lost my two loved ones, but I’ve still got two children

and my grandchildren. I’m going to a quiet life.’

In a new house, by the bush.

When I was in the first or second grade, we had to attend compulsory swimming lessons. I must have been absent for a few of them because when it came time to test our progress, I pushed off from the edge, splashed a bit with my jelly arms and promptly sunk. Not sure who rescued me but I do recall the certificate proclaimed that I’d swum “1 metre,” which I might have asked Mum to enhance with a zero to make it a more respectable document.

Obviously, I’m no swimmer, and yet, I’ve always been fascinated by the sea, ever drawn like a magnet to its secrets. Now that I’m researching my great-grandmother’s life, and know that as a young woman she crossed the Atlantic for love, for the promise of a fresh start in a new place, I wonder about the impact of that journey on my field-tilling ancestor. I imagine her clutching the rail as she peered into the abyss, hands bronzed by the Galician summer and the soil of her homeland mourning dark dashes beneath each fingernail.

I wonder if her fear and wonder somehow found a home in me.

When I was around 7, I wrote this poem, and my Year 3 teacher Miss Griffin did me the great honour of sticky-taping it to our classroom wall.

The Hungry Sea

The sea, waiting for boats
to come down and sink
into its hungry mouth
all sorts of creatures, great and small
waiting for their prey to come
nobody knows and nobody cares
what is the mystery of the sea?

Going through my oldest prayer journal today (really just a pad of thin, lined paper, one of those where all the sheets eventually drift free of their sticky binding), I came across this entry, which made me think of my early poem.

While I often share my Love Letters from Love, this is a Love Letter to Love.

Reading it, I also realised that it paints a clear picture (to me, at least) of where I was at in my process of awakening to the dance between my inner life and the Great Mystery. It was a porous place, that stage, a boundaryless plain where I would all too readily mould myself into whatever or whomever was asked of me. My agency screams its absence in these lines and events that followed confirm it (a story for another day).

Praying with my pen that spring day a decade ago, I forgot the ferocious might of the sea - and the sea inside. I was yet to realise I could – indeed, must – balance the impulse to flow and give, with the remembrance of the well of quiet power deep in the heart of the ocean.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

A heart that is open, as the sea is open to the sky – that is my heart.

I close my eyes and see the velvety denseness of eternity in shades of inky purple, a beautiful bed of moving light. In my very aim to see beyond that light lies my undoing – for that aim, that reaching, can only be of the ego, which always wants wants wants. I must be an empty vessel, only then can I be filled with that exquisite light, which is alive with life and wisdom and love, which pulses with the secrets of the universe.

Therein lies the paradox – the more I reach and ache, the less I can receive. I must be free of desires and expectations, as free as the sea, as humble as the sea, as it prostrates itself – infinitely – at the foot of the cliffs, at the edge of the shore. The sea does not search for anything – it just flows, endlessly and lovingly, and in that endless flowing, it is filled with life.

In its endless flowing, it nourishes the life that teems within it. For others are drawn to shelter in its depths and feed at its heart. The sea gives endlessly – and so must I.

I must not seek and reach, I must only give – be open open open, for how else can I be filled?

A holy trinity of magnolia trees stands outside my bedroom window.

They are the “Teddy Bear” variety, so named for the velvety backs of their full, glossy leaves. We planted them when they were barely 50 cm tall close to 14 years ago, and now they try to kiss the clouds, it seems to me, obsessed on the other side of the glass.

It took years (maybe seven?) for the first dinner-plate sized flowers to appear, and when they finally did, I’d lose myself in the love story that unfolded between the bees and the creamy bloom, each petal subtly veined like a human palm.

All these years later, much has changed. The one who planted the trees with me is no longer by my side, and the Author of Love writes me a new chapter on this patch of Dharawal Country where the magnolias’ roots hold hands with mine as they plunge low for the soil-soul of home.

We journey together.

Magnolia, 11.11.2020

Aflame with love,
keen and coaxing,
the bee woos the magnolia
not yet awake to the wonders of its fullness;
Maddened by the fettered
song it so needs
the bee
crazes a circle around the crest of white,
plump as a hen’s breast,
hiding its gift
within the folds of smooth light;
Sweetness withheld
from the insect that dwells
already
in its sated imagination,
inside the crown of the flower
in full bloom;
I wonder – is this how the angels dance around us,
quietly appalled by the Love we shut in?
Drink, one and all, from the well of the sun,
So that, one and all,
We may feed each other.

I launched this offering on Substack with the aim of regularly sharing pages from my prayer journal, as words can help us heal and it is my intention when I sit with my prayer journal that the words flow through me, not from me. These are my dialogues with Divine, or my Love Letters from Love.

I am convinced that the force that grows the trees can grow me - and you - too, and so I’m happy to take dictation, and to share what emerges, in case something on the page may support a fellow dear one making their way along the holy Camino of Life.

And yet.

I have not shared these regularly because 2025 was rough going (for so many of us, I know) and I couldn’t seem to gather momentum. The year sped by as it squeezed me, so that I felt stuck in the stifling push-pull of an awkward embrace. I wanted to rush forward with my ideas and creative pursuits, but it felt hard to move.

Then, a burst of creativity - the birth of my app - followed by a fallow time and a Christmas season of lows and highs. But I’m back with renewed determination to share words, both fresh and those that have made the crossing across my pages. (If you’d like to join us for gatherings around the virtual hearth, I’ve made a huge cut to the subscription price).

For now, here’s a page from my prayer journal, chosen “at random”. It came through in Spanish, so I’m including the translated version first, and the original Spanish below for anyone keen to read it.

May some of these words walk with you into the week.

Thursday 28 August 2025.

My love, beloved,

Cerulean skies sing and the ardent wind dances, mischievous, like you.
You are an eagle, a butterfly, wings open to the sea, to the sky, to the light - you are light.
How does it feel, to be born?
A new life finds you; it no longer waits, but kisses you already.
Your skin receives this new life and celebrates it, and your soul does too.
Soul.
Life.
Sun.
Earth
Stars
Sea
You are all; all is you.
The little dog who loves you; she, too, is you.
The coffee you drink comes from the earth you love, that loves you, and that you are.
Light of day, sing to my beloved.
Tell her of dreams coming true, of the breeze that caresses her, and of the world opening to receive her.
All is soul, beloved, and all is you.
How we love you, for we are you as well, and you are us.
Love is a wheel of eternal life, the hearth of the universe that softens and embraces all beings who live,
all beings so dearly Loved by God.
Life is a wheel of Eternal Love, turning as flowers
search for the sun, burning for its warmth, its light.
All our beloved ones on earth burn with love.
Saudade.
They bear saudade for the love that raised them, the love they are.
They forget this, because the veil has fallen, and the task is to remember.
Awaken and remember, and serve from the endless depth of love that heals, that caresses, that sets fire to life -
divine flames leaping for the Sky.
Always love.
Always light.
We love you.

Mi amor, querida,

Los cielos celestes cantan y el viento ardiente baila, pícaro, como vos. Sos una Águila, mariposa, alas abiertas al mar, al cielo, a la luz, sos luz. ¿Cómo te sentís naciendo? Una nueva vida te encuentra, ya no te espera más, ya te besa. Tu piel la recibe, esta nueva vida, y la celebra, y tu alma también.
Alma
Vida
Sol
Tierra
Estrellas
Mar
– todo sos, todo es ti. La perrita que te ama, también ella sos. El café que tomás viene de la tierra que amás y que te ama y que sos.
Luz del día, cántale a mi querida, cuéntale de los sueños que se realizan y la brisa que la acaricia y el mundo que se abre para recibirla.
Todo es alma, querida, y todo sos. Cómo te amamos, ya que somos ti, también, y ti nosotros. El amor es una rueda de vida eterna, fogón del universo que enternece y abraza a los seres que viven, todos los seres tan amados por Dios. La vida es una rueda de amor eterno, girando como las flores buscan al sol, ardiente por su calor, su luz.
Todos nuestros queridos en la tierra arden por amor. Saudade. Saudade llevan por el amor que los crió, el amor que son. Se olvidan de esto, porque la tela cayó, y el objeto es acordar. Despierta y acuerda y serví desde el fondo sin fin de amor que sana, que acaricia, que prende fuego a la vida, llamas divinas saltando al Cielo.
Siempre amor.
Siempre luz.
Te amamos.

Thank you for walking with me through 2025, a year of immense change and challenge. I am relentlessly optimistic that the remembrance of Love can heal us, personally and collectively. And so onward, I go, down the winding of Camino of life, writing all the way, wearing a backpack full of gratitude.

Much love to you and yours for 2026.

Here’s a poem I wrote yesterday.

Wings

Poised for flight, I perch
on the sill of the year to come,
humming, thrumming
with potential;
Far ahead, a bolt of silk rippling out to eternity,
stretches the horizon of my soul,
beyond 2026 to the nameless place
of Forever Light;
Poised for flight
on this liminal edge
I wait for fate
to call me onward
glide I will over the skies of
my new life,
pulsing – feel it –
with laughter, creativity
and ever the love, told – this time –
through the language of
Eyes and hands and lips that hold me safe –
words sweet as tumbling puppies,
soft as Mimi’s ears,
peaceful lake of a heart;
Such is the picture painted with
strokes of love on the canvas of
my soul;
Lifetimes I’ve searched for the remembrance
of my worth
that unlocks this scene;
Now see me
open wide the wings of my heart
and fly.

Somewhere in the winter of 2014, I opened an issue of Oprah magazine, hardly expecting it would change my life, but moments of profound transition are usually only recognised in hindsight. Back then, I was deeply curious about spiritual authors and teachings, and was, I suppose, open to instruction. In her magazine, the world’s most famous talk-show host had listed her favourite spiritual books. I still have that crumpled photocopy of the article somewhere, a relic from another time.

Alongside Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening (which I also came to adore), Oprah included Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love. I borrowed it from the library and then purchased it. In her book, Williamson wrote about how all emotions stem from either love or fear, and how only one is real… This teaching, she explained, was from a book called A Course in Miracles.

As this enigmatic title steeped in my consciousness, popular spiritual teacher Wayne Dyer was quoting A Course in Miracles in his lectures. I saw Wayne Dyer at a live event in Melbourne a week before he passed away. I remember he read out this quote:

These beautiful lines stirred something in me. They began to pry open a weathered door to an inner room that had long been sealed shut. Sunlight poured in through the seam.

I tracked down a second-hand copy, and began. It was December 2015. This month marks ten years of my study of A Course in Miracles, a teaching I hold close to my heart (sometimes, literally). Have you heard of it?

The genesis of A Course in Miracles is a story as intriguing as its teachings. It always gives me shivers to retell it. A pair of medical psychologists – Dr. Helen Schucman and her colleague and supervisor Dr. William (Bill) Thetford – worked at the prestigious Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. Their academic environment was a battleground of conflict, competition and clashing egos. One summer’s day in 1965, as both steeled themselves to attend a weekly research meeting characteristically rife with discord, something changed.

“There must be another way – a better way,” Bill said to Helen, who responded as follows, as she later recalled:

“He was going to cooperate rather than compete. We had obviously been headed the wrong way and it was time to find a new direction. Then he waited in some discomfort for my response. It was not the one he expected. I jumped up, told Bill with conviction that he was right, and said I would join in the new approach with him.”

This “joining” launched a series of remarkable events that led, three months later, to the emergence of the first words Helen received of what is arguably the most extraordinary channelled text of the 20^th century (though Jane Roberts’ Seth material is a strong contender):

“This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.”

Helen, who was an atheist, feared for her mind but Bill soothed her and encouraged her to follow the instructions of this “inner voice” (she later identified Jesus as the “author” of the Course). Bill promised to help by transcribing her shorthand, and for the next seven years, they worked together to scribe a dense foundational text, a practical workbook with 365 daily lessons, and a Manual for Teachers. Published in 1975, A Course in Miracles (ACIM) celebrated its half-century this year.

What is the Course? According to the tattered pamphlet that came with my copy: It’s “a comprehensive spiritual teaching, a thorough and radical guide to a re-evaluation of ourselves and the world, in the form of a self-study manual… although it uses Christian terminology, it deals with universal spiritual themes. It is a restatement of the perennial philosophy in a form that is practical and applicable to our everyday lives.”

Its concepts include:

At a fundamental level, we are all one, and we’ve never been separate from each other or our source.

We’re each a Thought in the Mind of God.

Our ego stands in the way of our full remembrance of the Love that we are.

Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love.

We heal through relationships.

To forgive is to heal.

On that day back in December 2015 when I first opened my vintage copy of ACIM - an emerald-green brick of a book, at more than 1100 pages - the introduction alone had me awash in goosebumps:

“This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary… The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance…”

The introduction concludes with a mystical riddle one might spend years unpacking, and I guess I have:

“Nothing real can be threatened.

Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace of God.”

The Course is a masterpiece, no question, and the lyrical language is a key piece of what makes it the right path for me (it talks about there being many paths to one truth). Much of the Course is written in iambic pentameter, the poetic structure employed by Shakespeare, and the soul-stirring beauty of some of the passages often leaves me in tears.

It’s said that A Course in Miracles will find you if it’s for you, and wonderful stories abound of the book literally diving off a shelf to land at a person’s feet. For me, it arrived via Oprah’s pages to hold my hand at a time when my Camino of life was about to take a series of world-shaking detours. In 2015, I was on the precipice of becoming deeply immersed in a project that was not in my best interests, with a person I thought was a friend. Oof, how that ended up is a book in itself, but throughout, ACIM stood steady as an oak by my side, reminding me to view this person and the situation with love and forgiveness. I’m certain that doing so ensured the peaceful dissolving of the association.

Simultaneously, in 2018, I was made redundant from my longtime job in the senior editorial team of a magazine. Once again, the gentle rhythm of ACIM every morning, coffee by my side, reminded me to trust that I was not alone, and encouraged me to keep listening for my inner voice of guidance.

Then, two years later, the biggest earthquake of all – Covid, swiftly followed by my husband’s diagnosis of depression, and the beginning of the end of my marriage. We’d been together since our teens and I felt adrift on a vast ocean beneath a starless, storm-beaten sky, bobbing between mountainous waves. Through the five years of unravelling that followed, ACIM journeyed with me, offering light and hope where little else could.

In the last decade, I’ve reread the 622-page foundational text at least three times, and I work through the lessons every day. For me, the aim is to keep undoing patterns of societal and cultural conditioning that pit us one against the other, and tell us continuously that we are lacking. The big book is a companion on my path, affirming what I’ve always felt to be true. I used to feel very lonely, born without a competitive bone but with a heart full of stories and a repulsion for shouting and conflict (did I mention I worked in journalism for decades? That was fun.)

One of my favourite ACIM lessons is “Love holds no grievances.” As soon as I’m brave enough, I’ll have that line tattooed, probably on my wrist, where I can look down at it and remember. Another lovely part of the teaching refers to the “mighty companions” walking with us, some unseen. For me, the Course itself is a mighty companion that deepens my understanding of my mission to understand life and what lies beyond.

What it’s helping me to learn is that there is no beyond, because there is only now, only life. As Helen’s inner voice poetically put it: “Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever.”

Greetings, friends. It’s been a while since I’ve shared here and I’ve missed this community, though I’ve tried to keep up with all of your wonderful pieces as best I can.

Since the beginning of September, I’ve been head down on an unexpected project. A wonderful opportunity came my way to create an app and I pounced, and kept going even when unkind self-talk pinched the tender skin of my hopes.

The antidote was to keep creating, as always it must. I built this app for women in midlife who are craving a way to reconnect with their spirituality and creative spark. God knows, it was prayer and writing (usually at the same time) that got me through the last few years.

If you’re interested, you can learn more about my app at studio.com/karina. For now, I hope you enjoy Ember, another love song to the healing power of our creative core.

In the tumbling depths of your memory
lies a seed of a time that
cracks open
to bleed
into this ocean of reality
where your focus beams,
ripping open the seams
of time and space;
Time is an idea that serves
neatly
now
to cradle your knowing
that it is' ‘time’
to remember
the ember, deathless light,
of the eternal
pulse of your soul’s mission.

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It happened in a hotel room in Ravello, Italy.

This is a place where the sky and the sea are a bolt of blue silk unfurled with a flourish over the cliffs. The beauty of Villa Cimbrone will make you sway like a drunk and swoon like a lover.

For Rod, who holidayed there in 2007, this is peripheral – a handful of seconds in a moonlit room are what stand out. The morning after, he was a different man, a lighter man, unencumbered by his old outlook on life and its limits.

Ghost stories crowd the twilit threshold between October and November, even in springtime Sydney, and one of my favourites is in my second book, Where Spirits Dwell (those are its opening lines above).

My interviewee, Rod, was a geologist and the managing director of a mining company. He was not the kind of man who was interested in ghosts, so you can imagine his surprise when one woke him up (rather forcefully) one morning.

It was August 2007. Rod and his wife, Stephanie, were on honeymoon in the exquisite Villa Cimbrone.

“I was lying facing towards the centre of the bed and I felt this physical bang on my right shoulder, twice; ‘tap tap,’” Rod told me in our interview. “I didn’t think much about it, I sort of half woke up. I can remember half coming out of a deep sleep and thinking, ‘What was that? Oh no, that’s just not possible,’ and starting to drift back off. Then there was another physical ‘tap tap’ on my shoulder! By this stage, I was fully awake and I turned halfway onto my back, leaning on my left shoulder and looked over and there was a little girl standing there.”

The visitor looked about 10 years old. She had “long, light-brown hair, with a little ribbon in it. She [wore] sort of a little skipping dress, you know, that girls would wear, bowed at the bottom and skinny at the waist.”

It had taken some gentle prodding on my part to encourage Rod to dig for details of what the little girl was wearing. I remember that his descriptions of “a little ribbon” and a “little skipping dress” caused a pang of tenderness within me. It was clear that she had the same effect on him.

Feeling “very calm,” Rod wondered what she was doing there, and she answered his unvoiced question by walking over to the TV and smiling. In that way of wordless communication that often characterises dreams and near-death experiences, Rod understood that she wanted him to turn it on!

“This is at about 2:30 or 3:30 in the morning. I looked at the television and I looked back at her and she had a little smile on her face … I looked past her and there was a woman standing maybe six metres behind her. She was very vague and indistinct but I understood that she was a nanny or nursemaid,” he said.

(Remember, he was “fully awake.”)

“The overall impression I got was that she was watching a mischievous little child wake up one of the guests because she’d discovered this new fang-dangled thing called Foxtel.”

He looked once more at the child, who looked completely flesh and blood. She was carrying something, not a teddy or a doll, rather, “something she just would have taken out of her little room… a cloth, a type of security blanket, no doubt,” murmured Rod.

He paused then, lost in thought. He was on the phone at Perth airport, where he was about to board a business flight to Greenland. I remember being hyper-conscious of the clock ticking as I spoke to this busy executive, and of this treasure-chest of a memory he was gifting me.

“She was very distinct, with a little button nose and chubby cheeks. She was a real little girl, a very jolly, joyous, vibrant young little girl,” he said, in a voice rich with affection. “I turned over to wake up my wife, to tell her, ‘Look, there’s a little girl in our room,’ and I turned back and she was gone.”

Nothing like this had ever happened to Rod before. That morning, he mentioned the encounter to the hotel manager, who smiled knowingly and said, “Oh, you met Violet!”

Later, after breakfast beneath a wisteria-strung pergola, Rod and Stephanie strolled the hotel courtyard, where photos dotting the caramel-coloured stone told the tale of the Villa and its famous visitors, including the likes of Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill and Greta Garbo.

“As soon as he walked into the courtyard, something happened to him,” recalled Stephanie. “I said, ‘What is it?’ and he said, ‘That’s the girl who woke me up in the middle of the night.’”

Rod was staring at a large sepia photo of two little girls, one aged about ten and the other about four. To Stephanie, it seemed that her husband left his body for a few seconds, perhaps in search of the rip in time that had let Violet slip in and out of his world. He was so shaken that Stephanie photographed it.

She emailed it to me and then I was the one lost in time, staring at it. It shows a little girl looking down pensively at a smaller girl. The elder of the two has long, thick wavy brown hair, part of which is gathered at her right temple by a ribbon. Her dress is white and high-necked. Its sleeves end at the elbow in a pretty trim of broderie anglaise, which also adorns the bodice. A sash is drawn around her waist, from which the skirt billows out, tightly pleated.

The skipping dress.

Here’s where the story crosses the threshold from ghostly apparition to impenetrable weaving of past and present: according to the photo, the “ghost” Rod saw was Violet Trefusis, a darling of British high society who holidayed at the Villa during her childhood, and died, not as a child, but as a 78-year-old woman in 1972. Violet was a novelist but is best remembered for her long and scandalous affair with the writer Vita Sackville-West.

There’s a theory that spirits can materialise as they were during their happiest years. Did Violet show herself as she was during a favourite, carefree phase of her life, before the launch of the grand romance that engulfed her life? Or did Rod somehow catch a glimpse of the past? If Rod witnessed a kind of time slip, or static replay, it doesn’t explain his interaction with the sentient Violet, blooming on this earth plane as a child, “jolly, joyous and vibrant,” and fascinated by modern technology.

And what of the nanny, hovering apologetically in the background, guarding her cheeky charge with what might have been exasperated resignation? What do you make of this delicious mystery?

In place of answers, I’ll leave you with Samhain blessings for these days when the veil is ribbon thin, and the closing lines of my story, as published in Where Spirits Dwell.

It is no surprise that it happened at Villa Cimbrone, a magical castle in the sky where the past dances in and out of focus, like dust motes glinting in a shaft of sunlight. Sometimes, the future is also illuminated, to those who care to see it. Two years after their honeymoon, Rod and Stephanie’s daughter was born.

Her name, of course, is Violet.

I began to write this more than a year ago, but still it sat, a mute Word doc on my computer. I found it by chance today, and thought perhaps the time is finally right to share how Miracle came to join our family, blessing us with the kind of healing love I might have previously only associated with stories of angelic intervention. That sounds dramatic, I know, but read on!

(I have shared excerpts of this on social media, but this is the full story).

Cast back to the early months of 2023. I was a teary mess; it happens to all of us sometimes, and this day was a shocker. In the middle of the mess, I received a text message from a dear friend and mentor I hadn’t heard from in years. It was the marvellous Maggie Hamilton, inviting me to her workshop on tapping into our intuition. The energy immediately lifted. I sensed a helping hand at play.

“I’ll be there,” I wrote back.

At the workshop, I met a lovely lady called Sharon who felt like a distant sister. We exchanged numbers but no further contact ensued. A couple of months later, in May, I left to walk the Camino, with no idea of how everything was about to change…

I quickly found out that Mother Camino ever so lovingly ensures you look at your fears and foes square in the face. Up came the old battle with self-love and self-worth. At breakfast stop one morning, my soul sister Sara enfolded my hands in hers and prescribed mantra-medicine for me to take daily: “I am loved. I am lovable. I AM love.”

I began that day.

Later, boots back on the winding path, I stepped through a landscape so colour-drenched, I stopped, awe-struck, and took a photo. When I posted it, my friend Asta commented on the “benevolent being in the sky.” I took a closer look. Oh yes, something there, but who or what?

I kept walking, kept up the mantra, even when it felt like a lie. Especially when it felt like a lie. Crossing into Galicia, I found welcome, warmth and ancestral belonging. More medicine for my heart.

They say that miracles happen on the Camino de Santiago. I thought mine was finding a nest for my soul in the fairytale forests of Galicia.

Back in wintry Sydney, I was processing the journey, a little lost without the yellow arrows to point the way, when my phone lit up. Somehow, I’d been added to a WhatsApp chat called “Poodle puppy for sale”. With no plans for a pet, I thought it must be a mistake, but clicked anyway. “Oh, Sharon!” I thought, remembering the luminous lady from the intuition workshop. Sharon had added me. It was our first contact since the workshop.

I wrote back, explaining that it wasn’t the right time. We’d lost our old dog, Remy, only the year before and there was not a glimmer of a plan to replace him. I also kept waking at 3 am, googling accommodation in Spain, ready to jump ship. Not a puppy-friendly scenario.

“Thanks for thinking of me,” I wrote to Sharon.

That should have been it, except that the tiny snowball in the photos kept hijacking my thoughts. Staying abreast of the chat, I knew there was no home for her yet, and remarked as much to the man of the house.

“Just get her,” he said, in his economical way.

Ok, I thought, I’ll just ring Sharon and ask a few questions, it can’t hurt: how big she’ll grow, whether she’ll shed, practical things, you see. I messaged Sharon: how big will she grow? Will she shed? I’m just gathering information, just a few questions ...

Sharon responded to my text with a phone call. “Karina, I’ve never seen a puppy like this! There’s something about her. She’s the most beautiful creature,” she exclaimed.

“Her name is Miracle.”

That’s the moment I knew. A glow like a lit hearth inside me. How she found us is a mystery, because they say that dogs find their owners. Did my late mother-in-law have a hand? What about my Spanish ancestors? For Mimi – as we call her – did appear in the skies over Spain as I made my way across the Meseta plains on the Camino Frances. Remember the photo? Around six months later, I put the pieces together.

I was having my coffee one morning, when Mimi, who was sitting at the end of my bed, turned around and looked at me. Something about her posture made me think, ‘I’ve seen this before,’ and I snapped a pic. I went through my phone to find the photo of the Camino landscape that had so captivated me. There she was – Miracle appearing as a cloud formation on the Meseta days before her birth in Sydney. The comparison is uncanny.

How ever did this come about? That a dog called Miracle announced herself in the blue skies above the path paved with prayers in Spain? What part did my own prayer for love play – the daily affirmation Sara gifted? Did the mantra-medicine manifest as a being of unconditional love that embodies the words I speak, that reflects them back to me in the most tangible (and cutest) way every day?

One thing is certain. There is something grand at play here, a Divine Intelligence that is ever knitting us together in her vast story shawl.

In the days after I found out our new addition was called Miracle, I was corresponding with Sharon about puppy papers and other logistics. “Oh, by the way,” I threw in, at the end of one of our exchanges. “I’ve been meaning to ask, what made you add me to that WhatsApp chat?”

The phone rang. It was Sharon, because sometimes, only a phone call will do.

“Oh Karina, it was the strangest thing.”

I settled in…

“I was trialling a new method of accessing my intuition,” she explained. “Holding the intention of finding the right home for Miracle, I closed my eyes and let my finger work its way down my contact list until it stopped. When it did, I wrote that name down, and so on.”

Of the handful of names Sharon gathered through this modern method of divination, one was mine.

Lastly, I learnt that only one other person on Sharon’s short list came close to buying Miracle. Her name? (Also) Karina.

As I perceive them, each moment I’ve described is like an alarm clock broadcasting ‘Wake up – life is more than you think!’ And yet, it’s the bigger story behind the chain of improbable events that’s the real miracle, and that has only become clear to me now, more than two years down the track. I didn’t know then, in 2023, or wasn’t ready to see, that my marriage was beyond saving, and that when I returned from Spain there would stretch before me a long, cold, fog-dimmed Camino of confusion until I arrived at the Cathedral of clarity and resolve.

Yet, at some level I can’t readily access, this was known, and with the tenderest care, Life handpicked the perfect companion to walk with me, to mould herself into the hollows of my sleeping form, to offer steadfast love as I navigated this rough stretch of the path. And, as I touched on at the beginning, she wasn’t just for me.

For years I felt that Love had turned her face from me. Then a dog called Miracle proved me wrong.

They say that every Camino has its love story. Well, this must be mine.

Last night, I sat in a circle of women to celebrate the Spring Equinox festival of Ostara, honouring nature’s rebirth and the greening cycle of the seasons.

On this day last year, I also joined a handful of beloved women to acknowledge the balance of daylight and darkness, and invite an echo of that energy into our lives.

I recited this poem for the group last year. It’s inspired by that windswept day, the beloved circle of sisterhood and the creative impulse represented by the suit of Wands in the Tarot deck. I hope you enjoy it.

Happy Spring Equinox. May light, reciprocity and balance bless your days.

Winds of Change

Celebrate the Winds of Change,
My Sister-pilgrims,
Birthing in the crucible of
what is becoming,
sprouting from the warm
depth of your soil,
your Soul of Creativity;
Life’s force
birthing a new horizon
to dance upon,
your joy will light up the possibilities
being knitted now
bound
together on the great loom of Love.
We are the unfolding of the
Heart of Life,
We are the healers
and the story-keepers;
together we walk along the winding
Camino of Life,
holding each other’s hands
rooted we stand
Strong as oaks,
as the Blessed Storm blows,
wielding our Wands of Change.

The day outside the window is spring perfection; cherry blossoms, azaleas and camellias are pretty in lolly-pink against the deep green of leaves and lawn. The sky, cloudless pale blue.

Inside me, the landscape was grey.

I’m looking after a friend’s beautiful country home and it has been a peaceful retreat – a writing retreat, most of the time, but today it turned into a grief retreat. My energy was dim upon waking, and tears fell, as a wave of post-divorce grief knocked me over.

In this sacred space of restoration, it makes sense that layers of pain will surface, and I’m doing my best to welcome them, as Rumi’s poem The Guest House encourages. As part of that welcome, my pen found its way to my poem notebook, and these words arose:

Clear Waters

My cup of tears runneth over
Rivulets of salt sorrow,
stream rippling with the clear waters of loss;
Sunlight pours diamonds on its surface
So much beauty dazzles upon this scene of
emptiness
absence
solitude
Soul-itude
Sol-itude
For the soul beams through the lonely hand
And the sun shines on it, too;
this hand that holds the pen when it longs to hold a gentle palm,
feel the warmth of its beating pulse
spelling togetherness;
And yet, for now, hand wrapped around the cool, lean pen
tells of a cup full to the brim with the briny waters
that nurture
nourish
the tender new life
- curved and silent sea shell that sleeps -
within the womb of its arrival.

The Love Letter from Love I’m sharing today is from autumn 2024, received as I prepared to embark for the second time on the Camino de Santiago. I chose it because it speaks to moments when sadness arises, and offers the consolation of steadfast companionship and creativity. (It references my novel in progress and a dream of “the chapel” I had in 2020, the year life as I knew it began to crumble - I explain the dream here.)

I hope this Love Letter supports you to remember you’re not alone, even when clouds crowd your inner landscape and you feel as if only the opposite could be true.

Sunday, April 28 2024

Mi amor,

The earth turns and I am with you.

You hear the songbirds in the quiet morning – symphony of peace – and I am with you.

Tears fall from your eyes in prayer or in despair, and I am with you.

Through it all, I am with you. Know this. Feel my Vast Love enveloping you in its shelter, its warmth, its unbound circle of peace. See Miracle Mimi curled up asleep at your feet? I would have you be so at peace, at ease, at rest. In Truth, this is your state.

I am pleased with the flourish of creativity, the story of your life taking shape beneath your keyboard. Yes. We are rejoicing – angels laughing gleefully at this turn of events. They have been blowing on your fingertips for a long time, urging you to WRITE. You are so much closer now; what role has the “chapel” played? I think you know very well.

The chapel dream was a call to creativity – and you are realising this now and stepping into it. Inhabit your wild creativity enough and all need for external validation will fall away, gently as autumn leaves, because you are the engine fuelling your life, and you come to terms with this holy play dough that is your life.

‘You are made in My image’ means you must create as I do, endlessly, joyously. Of course, you are all creating all the time but most know it not …Rest in me, belleza, and Love Love Love as I feel you are. There is much to celebrate. You return soon to the sacred ground of your soul – your Galicia, soil of your soul.

Buen Camino, querida. 🧡

Outside, it is a luminous spring day here in the picture-perfect Southern Highlands of NSW, where I’m based for a few weeks. But last night, it was, as they say, a different story.

Last night, fear found me, and it ran my heart ragged. Somehow, in the midst of that, I remembered to pray.

This is my story of what happened last night …

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