Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

Change is everywhere. Within us. Around us. And, sometimes, in our longing for some stability, some centre of ‘no change’ in the tumult of our lives, we’ll close ourselves off from the truth of things, numbing ourselves, distracting ourselves, and pretending it isn’t happening.

But the truth is that everything changes. And although we might try to fight it, we human beings long for what is true, what is real, and for intimacy with the world. So can we instead ‘make an altar to change’, and turn towards its ever-presence as a way of deepening our engagement with life, and with one another?

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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:

Become The Wind 

What if we built an altar to change?
Dedicated ourselves to the idea,
bowed down to that which
is not steadfast.

Perhaps there would be an empty bowl
in the middle that might break
at any moment.

Perhaps in the center there is only a shard
that we must learn to worship.
We don’t come to this altar begging,
we come to be reminded
there is nothing to beg for.
We are happy. We are devastated.
We are whole. We are broken.
It rains. It clears.
All at the same time.

Or maybe in the center there is a mirror
Which reflects only what is,
not necessarily what is wanted.
An altar where we come to meet truth,

to bow down to it.
To open the window of the heart
and accept that there is no choice
but to be changed.

Penny Hackett-Evans

Photo by Colin Watts on Unsplash

We often go searching out in the world, far and wide, for qualities that already live in ourselves.

And, fuelled by the story of our wider culture that our longings are best met always by ‘more’ and always ‘away from ourselves’, we can forget the treasures that live right here within us, in this living, beating, life-filled heart and body that we are never separate from.

So how can we open ourselves to meeting the deeper something that we long for, that we already are? And how can we help one another home?

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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:

I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.

But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.

Lal Ded (Kashmir, 14th century) 
[translated by Jane Hirshfield]

Photo by Valentina Locatelli on Unsplash

How can we come to know the vast stores of goodness, care and benevolence that are in each of us simply by being human? What makes it possible for us to bring this goodness to bear on the many difficulties and realities that face every single human life? 

How can we do this without minimising or explaining away the dark sides of human life, and the genuine pain and confusion we can experience at what happens to us? And how do we at the same time cultivate a deep faithfulness our individual and collective capacity to respond in ways that care ever more deeply about the world?

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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:

That I Would Be Good

That I would be good even if I did nothing
That I would be good even if I got the thumbs down
That I would be good if I got and stayed sick
That I would be good even if I gained ten pounds
That I would be fine even if I went bankrupt
That I would be good if I lost my hair and my youth
That I would be great if I was no longer queen
That I would be grand if I was not all knowing

That I would be loved even when I numb myself
That I would be good even when I am overwhelmed
That I would be loved even when I was fuming
That I would be good even if I was clingy

That I would be good even if I lost sanity
That I would be good whether with or without you

Alanis Morisette

Photo by Arthur Poulin on Unsplash

Right when we’re in the mess and complexity of things - for example when raising children, or being in a partnership, or working alongside others - we can learn so much about what it is to be human. And it’s where we also learn the most about our own power to make a world that is better for others to live in, or worse.

In this week’s conversation we explore how we might turn everyday complexity into a deeper care for the world and the use of whatever power we each have for the benefit of those around us.

We refer in this week’s conversation to Lindsay Green and Charlie Lyons’ wonderful podcast ‘Made Possible by Parenthood’ which you can find on Spotify here.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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:

Bless This Dirty Sponge

My spiritual path is not marked out by rose petals, but dirty sponges, baby wipes, frozen peas and car keys. 

Washing up is my daily Zen practice. 

Leaving parties early to get everyone home to bed is how I learn self-discipline. 

My meditation happens while I run the bath. And sometimes at 4am while I try to get back to sleep after waking to help someone use the potty. 

My masters are unusually direct and demanding. They teach me how to live without apology and how to be right where I am. Because they know there is nowhere else. 

And at the end if the day, I give myself a cup of Hail Mary tea as I forgive myself for all of the ways I felt I fell short. Again. 

And I kiss my gurus on their tiny, wise heads and prepare myself to start all over again.

Hollie Holden

Photo by Imani on Unsplash

In a time of global distress, we’re often faced with news of dire situations far from us that we can do little to affect directly. But we can learn to respond to the world that is more immediately around us with the kind of patience, wisdom, care and love that makes a genuine, tangible, and life-giving difference.

In this week’s conversation we explore how we can observe and undo the barriers inside us to being this way. And how we enroll others in helping us to do that.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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:

Your Task

Your task is not to seek for love
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.

Helen Schucman, from A Course in Miracles

Photo by Paul Mocan on Unsplash

How can we be the ones who create safety for other people to bring their troubles, longings, hopes, pain and fear our way? And how can stay long enough, and not turn away? And how do we then accompany one another as we address what we find - with love, truthfulness, patience and exquisite care?

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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:

Like the Trees

You have been waiting for the body to say,
This is not an emergency, you are safe.
And when it finally does, in a whisper
you almost don’t believe, you can breathe
a full breath again, and then another,
at last trusting the open arms of trees,
even their menacing shadows at midnight.
Now you know everything that grows must
also feel pain, must fear and doubt until they
sense this same quickening, like sap rising
up in the trunk and spreading through
each limb. You have lived as if underground,
but now you are breaking open, breaking
free, becoming so vast and green, you make
a shady place for others to rest in.

James Crews

Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash

On the ways comparison can steal the actual living of life from us, and on finding ways to appreciate and live in the midst of the ordinary everydayness of things.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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:

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Marie Howe

Photo by Marcus Ganahl on Unsplash

On acknowledging experiences rather than moving away from them or interrupting them. How we might experience our feelings without ‘acting them out’ when they’re intense or overwhelming. And the gifts and blessings of being gentle with ourselves and one another.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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:

This Small Space

I’ve curled in.
Observing the paned frame of freckled rain,
Trickling down the window.
Steam falls from my clay cup.
Hugged in cast shadows and held in fresh sheets I try to find home within myself.
Complex cluttered colours shine on difficult days,
one part still waits for a calling.
She is soft, broken, real and trying,
A frame for the rain to run,
A window for truth to-shine.
Cracks of comfort come with falling,
folding into the wisdom calling.

Roberta Morrow

Photo: Unsplash | Madi Doell

How do we take up our right size in the world? Not in some fixed, rigid way but as a responsive way of engaging with what is called for in each situation and context?

When we see that in some way ‘too big’ and ‘too small’ are both ways we try to control situations, maybe we can open to the emergence of something more fluid, more adaptive, and more sensitive in us. Something that asks of us to be of service to life, and responds accordingly.

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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:

Right-Sized

A response to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s Big

What if this the year to learn to be right-sized?

I learned on the playground to 
Flinch from arrogance.

‘Please – don’t leave me. 
I promise not to get Too Big.’

But the cost, I’ve learned, is dear. 
Trading potential for false modesty, 
Dampening power with every apology, 
Neglecting my impeccable edges 
With every hedge.

But then I remember 
What the rabbis knew.

They stretched wide a red silk thread. 
At one end: Arrogance. 
At the other: Not humility – but 
Playing Too Small.

They knew playing small was just arrogance by a different name. 
Placing comfort above contribution. 
Our gifts withdrawn from the world, 
For the price of fitting in.

‘What if holding back is stealing?’

So in the middle, they placed a pair of right-sized shoes. 
Yours. 
Mine. 
The right-sizing that awaits us all.

What, I wonder, will it take for you to grow into your right size 
The one that seems Impossibly large, and 
Obnoxiously loud?

Clownish as these shoes seem now, prone to stumbling, 
At first you’ll feel the fool. 
Some People will have Things To Say. 
Some may even walk away. 
(In this modesty-mad world, they’re yet to clock 
that claiming your shoes 
does nothing to keep them from theirs.)

But every now and then you wake up to the truth. 
That it's the world that's wrong - not you. 
These too-small shoes will no longer do.

So take your credit where it’s due. 
And when no-one offers it – give yourself a spoon daily.

Take your space 
Trading in the apologies for gratitude.

Minimise your emotions no more – 
They too deserve to expand to the full.

Fill your circle with champions 
And learn to see yourself with the wonder of their eyes.

And when you hit your stride, and weather whatever, 
Give up the surprise.

When those shoes once vast grow snug, 
Be sure to celebrate well. 
Acknowledge yourself, and your people, and the view.

Until another pair of shoes calls to you 
Between arrogance and avoidance 
On that red silk string…

You Are Needed. 
And this is no time, no world, 
For stealing. 


Debbie Danon, Jan 2023
www.debbiedanon.com


Photo by Michael Wright on Unsplash

So much changes in the course of a day, a year, a life. We can be mysteries to ourselves and to others - confounding, confusing - as we turn this way and that, trying to find our way together through this changeable complex world. It’s very easy to feel lost and confused.

But even in the midst of all of this, is there something we can learn to trust… a thread we can reach for that runs through it all?

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Join Our Weekly Mailing: www.turningtowards.life/subscribe
Support Us: www.buymeacoffee.com/turningtowardslife

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 Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford

Photo by Stephane Gagnon on Unsplash