The Telling Itself

By Steve Tell

There’s a bird crying outside, or maybe calling, anyway it goes on and on without stopping."

-Kim Addonizio

“If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth abo... more

· Arts

FAQs about The Telling Itself:

How many episodes does The Telling Itself have?

The podcast currently has 34 episodes available.

The Telling Itself episodes:

January 03, 2021 DMOG 3: Sunday 3 January, 2020.
The Joy of Gullibility | This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=48785
...more
6min
January 02, 2021 DMOG 2: Saturday 2 January, 2020 - Ellipsis/Ellipse
An ellipse-focused moment & Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching.
...more
3min
January 01, 2021 Digging My Own Gravy on Friday, January 1, 2021 - Incant Against Suicide
Digging My Own Gravy is a year-long, durational project where I record a couple of minutes of material each day in which I am able to stay present, let go, and enjoy something happening to or around me.
--
This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem:
INCANT AGAINST SUICIDE
Buy neither gun nor blue-edged blade.
Avoid green rope, high windows, rat
poison, cobra pits, and the long vanishing point
of train tracks that draw you to horizon’s razor.
Only this way will another day refine you. (Natural death’s
no oxymoron) Your head’s a bad neighborhood:
Don’t go there alone, even if you have to stop
strangers to ask the way, and even if
spiders fall from your open mouth.
This talk’s their only exit. How else
would their scramble from your skull
escape? You must make room first
that the holy spirits might enter. Empty
yourself of self, then kneel down to listen.
-Mary Karr

...more
4min
December 31, 2020 Digging My Own Gravy on New Year's Eve (Thursday 31 December, 2020) - Stay Present, Let Go, Enjoy
Digging My Own Gravy is a year-long, durational project where I record a couple of minutes of material each day in which I am able to stay present, let go, and enjoy something happening to or around me.
This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem:
THE WAY

the way I could tell
today
that yesterday is dead
is that
the little gray bird
that sat
in the empty
tree
yesterday is gone:
yesterday and
bird are gone:

I know there's no use
looking
for either
Of them, bird
running from winter,
yesterday
running downstream
to some ocean-pocket of
rest
whence it may sometime
come again (changed), new
as tomorrow:

how like a gift
the memory
of bird and empty tree!
how
precious
since we may not have
that configuration
again:
today is full of things,
so many,
how can they be managed,
received and loved
in their passing?

-A.R. Ammons
...more
5min
December 26, 2020 Together In Electric Dreams (iii): On The Second Day of Christmas My True Love Sent To Me CEASE AND DESIST COMMS!
This is a telling about me examining my conscience.
--
TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON
I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020!
The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now.
Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.
--
Today's Telling is Proudly Sponsored by This Poem:
GRAMMAR

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

—Tony Hoagland

...more
51min
December 21, 2020 Together In Electric Dreams (ii): Dog Ate My Homework
A telling about the delay to the next instalment of Together In Electric Dreams/The Twelve Daze of Christmas.
--
TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON
I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020!
The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now.
Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.
...more
28min
December 20, 2020 Together In Electric Dreams (i): On The First Day of Christmas My True Love Sent To Me A FULLY ENLIGHTENED HUMAN BEING!
This is a telling about how (un)enlightened I am.
--
TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON
I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020!
The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now.
Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.
--
Today's Telling is Proudly Sponsored by This Poem:
ENLIGHTENMENT

“It’s all empty, empty,”
he said to himself.
“The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.”
So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,

thinking maybe that would help.
He taught a little kid to build a kite.
He found a cure,
and then he found a cure

for his cure.
He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather
his umbrella, even though
icy rain fell and he had pneumonia.
He settled a revolution in Spain.

Nothing worked.
The world happens, the world changes,
the world, it is written here,
in the next line,
is only its own membrane—

and, oh yes, your compassionate nature,
your compassion for our kind.

VIJAY SESHADRI
--
CREDITS:
The Twelve Days of Christmas (Performed by the Pudding Symphony TV Orchestra, featuring Uncle and The Bacon [seriously, I'm not making this up!] . Arrangement by Ulf Langsrud: https://youtu.be/ARu71XKZ3KM
Piano cover of Electric Dreams: https://youtubetomp3music.com/en5/download?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTQMlpab5A2w%26ab_channel%3Dstevechristiepianist
Haunting music for poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DKiPY6w8rE&ab_channel=LukeFaulkner
Uncle Caveh (Zahedi) talking about Steven Forrest's The Inner Sky and then dancing to Pavement's In The Mouth A Desert :https://youtu.be/2PlpN_5GKTI?t=2427 (from the film In The Bathtub of The World)
The Enlightened Beings Quiz: https://www.enlightenedbeings.com/quiz/

...more
40min
December 14, 2020 If You Remind Me of My Dog, We'll Probably Get Along (Max & The Pine Cone)
This is a telling about my beloved soulmate Max, and his recent quixotic adventures with a pine cone.
--
We have no choice in the bodies that hold us

Thing of dirt and water and oxygen marked by thinking
and reacting and a couch
one may or may not be permitted
to sleep on. He may not permit me
to touch him or to take the bone
from his mouth, but he does, and that’s a choice
based on many factors, not the least of which
is his own desire to let me
do these things. How I could ever
think or feel myself more
deserving of a single thing than
this being, whom I call by a name the same way
my parents chose a name for me. The same way my genes
went expressing themselves to make my face exactly
my face. This isn’t special. Or this is special. But it’s one
answer, the same, for us both.
Holly Amos

--
Burl Ives version of "I Know An Old Lady" (the version of the song I know from childhood): https://youtu.be/zQHmZMf6zwo
Video of Max that I mention in this telling: https://photos.app.goo.gl/j4eJn8qhS4QsPfkg7
Jose Feliciano singing "I Know An Old Lady" to a bunch of kids on Sesame Street (Episode 763/March 19, 1975): https://youtu.be/Ys-42_FKDDs
Cat Stevens' "I Love My Dog" (Live, 1971): https://youtu.be/ET5drt_utUY
Jane Siberry's "Everything Reminds Me of My Dog" - beautifully animated by Richard Raxlen: https://youtu.be/Y22Ityt7n6Q
...more
36min
December 07, 2020 Apologizing Is Actually Part of Violent Communication (Elle's review of my last Telling)
This tellings consists of Elle's one-line review of my previous telling (which was written and performed for her the week before).
Elle's review was delivered to her therapist Rob on Monday 7th of December, 2020 at 2pm GMT. She then shared the review with me so that I could incorporate it into my telling.
--
CARRYING A LADDER

We are always
really carrying
a ladder, but it’s
invisible. We
only know
something’s
the matter:
something precious
crashes; easy doors
prove impassable.
Or, in the body,
there’s too much
swing or off-
center gravity.
And, in the mind,
a drunken capacity,
access to out-of-range
apples. As though
one had a way to climb
out of the damage
and apology.

Kay Ryan

...more
1h 6min
November 22, 2020 And Our Ears Are Formed Of The Sea As We Listen (Affinity, Kinship, and The Difference Seeking Machine)
COMING TO THE MORNING

You make me remember all of the elements
the sea remembering all of its waves

in each of the waves there was always a sky made of water
and an eye that looked once

there was the shape of one mountain
and a blood kinship with rain

and the air for touch and for the tongue
at the speed of light

in which the world is made
from a single star

and our ears
are formed of the sea as we listen

W.S. MERWIN
...more
1h 34min

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How many episodes does The Telling Itself have?

The podcast currently has 34 episodes available.

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The Telling Itself

FAQs about The Telling Itself:

How many episodes does The Telling Itself have?

The Telling Itself episodes:

FAQs about The Telling Itself:

How many episodes does The Telling Itself have?