We begin with Ella Dessington’s poem “Where Words Kneel” and reflect on freedom, trust, safety, belonging and the limits of language. How language is always provisional, changing as we use it and inquire into its meanings. How fixed definitions can distance us from our living experience, and how relationships can remain alive through return, listening, apology, openness and the willingness to let one another change. An invitation to slow down, question what’s certain and stay with ourselves and one another until language becomes gentle and humble enough to meet experience.
This week is 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 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 in all the usual podcast places.
Episode Overview
00:00 Introduction
06:19 Ella's Poem: A Reflection on Language and Experience
10:20 The Challenge of Language in Expressing Experience
17:37 Speaking from Experience
23:12 Change and Relationship
29:25 Complexity and Reflection in Communication
34:04 The Practice of Slowing Down
Our source for this week:
Where Words Kneel
Freedom is a restless word.
The moment we believe we have found it,
it begins quietly building walls around itself.
Not because freedom deceives us,
but because language longs to settle,
while life refuses to stay still.
Trust follows close behind.
We speak of it as though it were something earned,
something possessed, something carefully placed between two people like a bridge.
Yet every bridge eventually becomes a structure,
and every structure forgets it was first imagined
to help someone cross.
I keep wondering whether words suffer
from the same temptation as empires.
They arrive to serve, then slowly begin governing.
Not with force, but with definition.
Not with violence, but with certainty.
Safety.
Freedom.
Trust.
Belonging.
Each begins as a living experience, until we ask it to carry more than any word can bear.
And still,
beneath all the naming,
life keeps escaping.
Relationship does not speak in nouns.
It speaks in returns.
In the hand that reaches again.
In the apology that arrives tomorrow.
In the silence that makes room instead of closing the door.
In the quiet decision to remain available after certainty has left the room.
So I wonder if freedom has never been the absence of constraint.
I wonder whether freedom is what becomes possible
when neither of us
is required
to remain
who we were
when we first began speaking.
And I wonder whether listening
has never been the search for better language.
Maybe it is the slower practice
of staying with one another
until language itself grows gentle enough,
humble enough,
to kneel
before experience.
Ella Dessington
Photo by jason hu on Unsplash
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