213: Knowing Now You'll Never Be a Clown

'Imagination is everything', we were once taught by a teacher of ours. And so in this episode we take up the imaginative possibilities of play and laughter, wondering together what possibilities can come from holding the 'darkness and vulnerability in the heart of everything' alongside the joyful, expansive possibilities of play. Along the way we laugh a lot, imagine what it would be to welcome the joy of others, and consider how 'authenticity' always involves some measure of playfully cultivating what's been so far marginalised or not included. 

This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about living in the big 'and' of life rather than splitting life into opposites, hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify.



Here's our source for this week:



Knowing Now You’ll Never Be a Clown

But if you were, and if your grin
were painted red as a Coke can, a fire
engine, red as the Tabasco sauce
you spilled on your mother’s carpet, and
if it lifted itself from the inside of one huge ear
to the other, and if your nose were a ping
pong ball almost begging for a swipe, and if
your feet slept within white shoes, three feet long
and flapping, would you be able then to talk
to everything you really want to talk to: the
chickadees who come closer than your nieces,
that piece of paper blown across your lawn,
the rain, each nudge of green in your garden?
And when you put on your coat, that U.N.
of colors and scraps, that coat that would
make Joseph feel he had folded himself
into the pages of GQ, the one with the shoulders
rolling up to your cheeks, with buttons the size
of pancakes, and a hem like the border of
Czechoslovakia, would you want to walk
into church, quietly take your place with
the choir and just as the minister finishes
the benediction, honk your horn? 
And
when you put on your polka dotted tie, wide
as a summer afternoon, would you
want to pin the squirting yellow daisy
on your lapel, sit in the business meeting,
and after the ayes have it, squeeze
the rubber bulb in your pocket? 
Then
again, maybe you would just stay home,
listen to jazz, the blues, or some swing,
open each of your cupboards and talk
about Tuesday or the way the light falls
across the counters, invite Lou Jacobs,
Emmett Kelly, Felix Adler, Otto Griebling,
hell, the whole clown alley, rent a calliope,
a center ring, one elephant, and get out the pies.

–Jack Ridl

Photo by Rex Pickar on Unsplash