July 21, 2024

354: The Life in Our Resistances

35 minutes

When the differences between us come into play - in a relationship, in a community, at work, in a friendship - it can seem tempting to search for some kind of false harmony, or to try to either ‘win over’ others or ‘lie down’ in the face of their will and wishes. But what if we started to see our differences, and our conflicts, as exactly the place where our freedom and our unique shape gets born? What if we could differ ‘for the sake of our becoming just who we need to be’?

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:

The Life in Our Resistances

I have come to feel that we live in a universe of spirit, which materialises and de-materialises grandly; all things seem to me to live, and all acts to contain meaning deeper than matter-of-fact; and the things we do with deepest love and interest compel us by the spiritual forces which dwell in them. This seems to me to be a dialogue of the visible and the invisible to which our ears are attuned.

There is, first of all, something in the nature of the clay itself. You can do very many things with it, push it this and and pull that, squeeze and roll and attach and pinch and hollow and pile. But you can't do everything with it. You can go only so far, and then the clay resists.

We know ourselves by our resistances [...] You can do very many things with us: push us together and pull us apart and squeeze us and roll us flat, empty us out and fill us up. You can surround us with influences, but there comes a point when you can do no more. The person resists, in one way or another (if it is only by collapsing, like the clay). Their own will becomes active.

This is a wonderful moment, when one feels one's will become active, come as a force into the total assemblage and dynamic intercourse and interpenetration of will impulses. When one stands like a natural substance, plastic but with one's own character written into the formula, ah, then one feels oneself part of the world, taking one's shape with its help - but a shape only one's own freedom can create.

from Centering, by the potter and writer MC Richards

Photo by Grant Durr on Unsplash

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