327: Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

English - January 14, 2024 10:17 - 34 minutes - 32 MB - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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Previous Episode: 326: Urgent Message to a Friend in Pain

Next Episode: 328: This is Hard for Me

“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” writes Rainer Maria Rilke. While we might ask one another in our more difficult moments “How are you?” or perhaps “How are you doing?”, we less often ask Rilke’s deeper question, a question that helps us and one another make contact with the aliveness and mystery of our being human.

And so in this week’s conversation we explore together what it is to treat our own experience of ‘the happenings of life’ with reverence and respect, and start to see how this reverence and respect can help us inhabit the coming and going of all kinds of experience as a vibrant and necessary kind of gift for ourselves and for those around us.

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 THIS DARKNESS BE A BELL TOWER

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing

makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo credit / Arturo Rey on Unsplash