May 16, 2021

189: The Songs We Could Be Singing

34 minutes

As Maya Stein writes in her beautiful poem this week, our lives aren't 'a stage rehearsal where you skip the high notes to save your voice'. So this week we wonder together about what it is that has us hold back, and hold others back, from bringing ourselves fully into our lives... 'the songs we could be singing while the light takes its own sweet time to change'.

This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about, in part, an aspect of diversity and inclusion: can we welcome the 'otherness' of others and the 'otherness' of the parts of ourselves that have not yet had a voice? 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, written by poet Maya Rachel Stein:

press play

Listen, friend. This isn’t a poker game, some thick-smoked room to keep your cardshidden until the final ante. This isn’t the stage rehearsal where you skip the high notesto save your voice, or those practice runs in the parking lot with a map of orange conesguiding you into reverse and parallel. Yes, the tide will keep going out and back likeclockwork. We will always look to measure and mete out our efforts in incremental intervals, testing the recipe of our purpose, licking our fingers clean. We will wantto glimpse what is too much or not enough without the sacrifice of embarrassment or,worse, the fallen soufflé of failure. But my goodness, the songs we could be singingwhile the light takes its own sweet time to change. The dust we could be kicking up

as the dance finds us on inexpert legs, spilling out the door and into the waiting streets.

Maya Stein
mayastein.com

Photo by Jackson David on Unsplash

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