323: You Are Big Enough To Hold It All

We can easily live as if we're 'skating over the surface of life'. Sometimes that's an intelligent strategy for protecting ourselves from the intensity and difficulty that life can bring us. But our wider culture rarely helps us remember the depths of our lives - the depths that remind us of our mutual goodness, our pain, the ways we heal, the brevity of it all. And if we're skating the surface more than is necessary, we're barely being ourselves. What would it be to live with openness to the depths? And to bring ourselves to that task with gentleness and kindness?



Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.



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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  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, Amazon Music and Spotify.



Here’s our source for this week:



Let the Leaf Fall



When this living breaks your heart, steals

your plans, when you miss the holy of here, 

thinking thinking thinking something brighter 



is over there, when there is no denying 

how precious, how precarious 

this aliveness is, let 



yourself break again 

and again, let 

the cool, almost-autumn breeze 



blow all the way in. Let 

the fading light, 

the falling leaf, 



show you how short

it is, this life. How feather-fine

the line.



And then blow infinite kisses of kindness

to every dying-living thing, yourself 

included. Always yourself included. 



Whoever you think you are 

does not even 

come close.



You are big enough to hold every 

break, every ache, every dark cloud, 

every twinkling star too. 



Let the leaf fall.



watch now—

watch how life

catches you.      



Julia Fehrenbacher

juliafehrenbacher.com



Photo credit: Matt | Unsplash