Contemplify Podcast – Episode Summary

Amy Frykholm on Journey to the Wild Heart
Host: Paul Swanson | Date: September 6, 2025

Overview of Episode

In this episode, host Paul Swanson welcomes back author, scholar, and journalist Amy Frykholm for her third appearance on Contemplify. The conversation centers on Amy’s latest book, Journey to the Wild Heart: Four Invitations to Contemplative Living. Together, they explore the book’s foundational themes—drawing the creative and contemplative together, inviting listeners into practical, poetic approaches to deepening spirituality, and discussing vocation, poetry, and the interplay between contemplative and creative practice.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Catching Up with Amy Frykholm

• Amy reflects on what has become clearer since her last visit.

  • Stepped away from a 17-year career at The Christian Century driven by a vocational call to become a novelist.
  • “I’m definitely coming to clarity at this point in my life that I am a novelist, and I have a vocation as a novelist.” (04:11)

• Discussion of Novelist as Vocation by Murakami and what it means to Mine memory and the practice of writing.

  • “The novelist goes digging through the junk drawers of memory like they’re in the garage and they’re gonna build some kind of extraterrestrial or something out of these random parts.” – Amy (05:36)

2. Amy’s Debut Novel – “High Hawk”

• High Hawk was long-listed for the 2025 PEN Hemingway Award.
  • Amy describes the novel: “It’s about a priest on a reservation in South Dakota who goes looking for more than he wants to find. So it’s about his own struggle with vocation and with the landscape and the people and the history of the Catholic Church in relation to the reservations in South Dakota...” (08:05)

3. The Power and Practice of Poetry

• Amy reads and discusses W.S. Merwin’s poem “Gift.”
  • “O nameless one, O invisible, untouchable, free. That’s my favorite line.” – Amy (11:12)
• On using poetry as contemplative and creative practice:
  • Amy shares her ritual: picking poetry books at random and free-writing in response to the chosen poem.
  • The friendship of letting poems evoke, inspire, or be simply “taken and run with” as creative sparks.
  • Playful, democratizing approaches to sharing poetry (e.g., everyone at a reading finds a poem under their chair).

4. Introducing “Journey to the Wild Heart”

• The book is structured around four invitations: Discover, Behold, Bewilder, and Discern.
• Paul reads a key passage on the dual movement of the contemplative life as both introverted and extroverted pilgrimage, citing Edith and Victor Turner (20:40).
  • “Entering the wild heart of contemplative living can be as simple and as challenging as developing a particular form of attention wherever you are...” (20:40)
• Amy describes her approach as merging two rivers: creative and contemplative practice.

5. On Vocation, Pilgrimage, and the Inner/Outer Journey

• Tension between introspection and outward movement discussed via concepts of introverted mysticism (stay-at-home spirituality) and extroverted pilgrimage (active journeying).
  • Amy wrestles with guilt around “either/or” models and concludes, “There’s a journey in and there’s a journey out, and they kind of end up in the same place.” (24:42)

The Four Invitations Explored

Discover

• Practice: A writing-based, accessible exercise for all—not just “writers”—to discover what’s happening inside and around you.
  • “It can just be that simple. It isn’t deep, it isn’t profound. It’s just the stuff of life. But I find that when you engage that as a regular practice, it begins to deepen you.” – Amy (27:01)
• Writing as a tool of openness and humility; letting go of the inner critic (yetzer hara).
  • “Nothing stimulates that critic, I think, quite like the simple, simple, simple practice of putting a pencil down on a piece of paper or a pen.” – Amy (34:51)

Behold

• Practice: Extended observation and contemplative presence, familiar in centering prayer, moving beyond solely personal narrative.
  • “Behold is really just holding a position of observation for an extended period of time, for a longer period than what we’re accustomed to.” – Amy (36:10)
• The link between observation and love:
  • “Until you see the world with love, you’re not seeing it at all... Anything you love, you are beholden to. Anything you love begins to demand from you a certain responsibility or a certain response, even if that response is just simply love.” – Amy (39:57)

Bewilder

• Practice: Letting go of certainty, embracing the unknown, and acknowledging the limits of our own understanding.
  • “You think you know something. So the practice of bewilder comes in because you still don’t know anything.” – Amy (41:24)
• Etymology and wordplay: “Be wilder. Ment”—the call to be wild, to move beyond entrenched ways of knowing, mirroring the pilgrimage and transformation found in Amy’s studies of Mary of Egypt.
  • “I came to understand that she (Mary of Egypt) was a wild woman archetype. And what to me that meant is she is the part of me that’s willing to go beyond what is already known.” (43:52)
• Reframing “repent” (metanoiata) as “go beyond your mind.” (41:24)

Discern

• Practice: Playful, ongoing, open approach to spiritual discernment—less about getting “the answer right,” more about exploratory dialogue with the Divine.
  • “It did feel a little unfair to leave them only with bewilderment... I think I’ve always hoped...discernment is a whole lot weirder than that. And you, you kind of make some best guesses and you kind of test those and try them out in your life and you try to stay in dialogue with whatever it is you think is leading you.” – Amy (46:36)
• Drawing from Carl Jung: “Explore the will of God daily—not find the will of God.” (48:55)
• Discernment as creative collaboration with God: “I’ve heard God say, 'I don’t know, what do you think?'... God wants me to be a part of the conversation.” – Amy (50:29)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On vocation: “It was a vocational question that led me to quit, and that I’ve been exploring this last year...I have a vocation as a novelist.” – Amy (04:11)
• On poetry: “O nameless one, O invisible, untouchable, free. That’s my favorite line.” – Amy, reading Merwin (11:12)
• On creative writing: “There’s my favorite line, let’s go. And so, you know, both work and both have value...but I do agree that a lot of the ways we read poetry in our society is this kind of desperate need to master it and, like, beat the metaphors into the ground until we understand them.” – Amy (15:01)
• On community poetry: “We had such an explosion of love for poetry...as soon as he had that poem in his hands, he was like, that’s the one. So it was a kind of a magical experience.” – Amy (17:16)
• On creative-contemplative confluence: “I would say that this book is an attempt to bring those two rivers together as a confluence of creative and contemplative practice...for me, those two are incredibly interrelated. I really can’t separate them out.” – Amy (20:40)
• On discernment as playful exploration: “What I try to do for this book is create activities or ways of thinking about discernment that had that exploratory quality to them to return to that playful and discovering sort of place we started with.” – Amy (48:55)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:13] Amy’s location in Leadville, Colorado—nature setting, spring, and birdwatching.
• [04:11] Clarity on vocation; leaving her magazine role for fiction writing.
• [06:50] Publication and premise of “High Hawk.”
• [09:38–12:29] The role of poetry in Amy’s life; reading and discussing Merwin’s “Gift.”
• [16:10] Amy’s community poetry event: sharing poems to unexpected effect.
• [20:40] Key book passage: the four invitations and the dual movement of contemplative life.
• [24:42] Bridging introverted and extroverted spiritual practice; binaries in contemplation.
• [26:33] Deep dive into the four invitations: Discover, Behold, Bewilder, and Discern.
• [34:49] The inner critic / yetzer hara and creative practice.
• [41:24] Bewilderment; etymology and spiritual necessity.
• [46:36] Discernment; collaboration with God, exploratory quality.
• [54:47] The book’s design as a portable, practical guide for daily or pilgrimage use.
• [57:31] Amy’s drink for the conversation: “ginger lime spritzer” and homemade ginger syrup story.

Episode Tone and Takeaways

• The tone is warm, accessible, and playful—moving easily between deep reflection and practical encouragement.
• The spirit of the episode is invitational: all are called to creative and contemplative practices, and these invitations are “for you, whoever you are.” (25:51)
• Listeners are encouraged to take up practices of writing, observation, bewilderment, and inquiry—not to master or “perform” contemplation, but to enter the flow of discovery, love, and ongoing discernment.
• Actionable takeaway: The four invitations—Discover, Behold, Bewilder, Discern—can be practiced anywhere and by anyone, in daily life or on journey.

Suggested Listening Experience

Pair the episode with a ginger lime spritzer (or beverage of choice). Listen with a notebook at hand for spontaneous poetry, insights, or reflections as you listen. For book clubs or group study, Amy hopes for “surprise and delight that would emerge out of the practice as maybe new ways of thinking are developed or neural pathways or something” (53:21)—and for copies of her book well-worn, annotated, and beloved.

For more on Amy Frykholm, visit amyfrykholm.com.
Episode notes and additional resources are at contemplify.com.