Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

How do we find our way back to remembering who and what we really are, in the midst of lives that so easily call us into busyness, distraction, fear and the gnawing sense that something is always missing? How might we speak with one another, and write, in a way that evokes one another's depth? And why it is that, in these days of an new explosion of machine-writing software tools such as ChatGPT, we need the honesty and generosity of writing and speaking to one another that can come only from our humanity - from the inside of this one, mysterious and infinitely precious experience of being alive.

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

One Stubborn Layer at a Time

Peace finds me today, meets me 
in the clear waters of poets' words,
in the distant call of mourning dove, 
in the bursting buds of the old mossy oak. Even 

the black fly is an almost-welcome visitor, 
its relentless buzz challenging me to meet it again
and again. It flies up close to my open eyes
and asks—even this? 

The young men painting the house next door 
play their festive music and sing and sing, 
they sing as if not a thing in the world hurts, 
as if this singing moment is guaranteed.

Or maybe they sing because 
there is so much hurt 
in the world and none 
of it is guaranteed.

I love how, for once, I feel no need to justify
this not-doing, afternoon spent cradled 
in hammock's kind lap, pen and notebook close 
for when words decide to come—

and when they do, I catch one 
at a time, like a child catching snowflakes 
on her tongue. I say thank you 
for each one—

for what else but words point me back,
show me how to, one stubborn layer 
at a time, undress myself—how to dive naked 
into the clear waters of what is here.

Julia Fehrenbacher
www.juliafehrenbacher.com 
May 16th, 2023

Photo by Radek Grzybowski on Unsplash

How do we face life as it is, with all its inevitable difficulty and with all the meaning and love we might be able to bring to it? And how do we find that in ourselves that is life itself, and live more often from there so that we can meet life with life?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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.

The Facts of Life

That you were born
and you will die.

That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.

That you will lie
if only to yourself.

That you will get tired.

That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose.

That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.

That you will live
that you must be loved.

That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of
your attention.

That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg
of two people who once were strangers
and may well still be.

That life isn’t fair.

That life is sometimes good
and sometimes better than good.

That life is often not so good.

That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.

That you will learn to live with regret.

That you will learn to live with respect.

That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constraining.

That you will probably be okay.

That you must accept change
before you die
but you will die anyway.

So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.

Pádraig Ó Tuama
www.padraigotuama.com

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

How much of each us gets excluded when we constantly compare ourselves to one another, and to the expectations we're handed by our culture. And how much we exclude the gifts of others by the very same process. Is there a way we could give up inappropriate comparison and in so doing learn to include so much more everyone's talents and gifts, and the supportive ground of life itself?

In this conversation we talk about different kinds of learning, mischief, the attitudes we take that portray us as 'better than' or 'worse than' others, and what it is to deeply and gladly welcome the many kinds of difference and intelligence that are available in the world.

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

People ask me
why I am happy.
What can I say ?
I stopped trying to be
the sharpest tool
in the shed.
Once I gave that up,
I could rest in all this love.
Relaxed, I opened the door,
stepped out and discovered
the whole bliss garden
I'd been missing.

Ingrid Goff-Maidoff
ingridgoffmaidoff.com

Photo Credit: Lizzie - Picture of a House that Vesper built.

When we stop walling ourselves off from the suffering of the world - our own, other people's - we give ourselves a chance to meet one another's moonlight beauty in the midst of the inevitable undoing that is part of every human life. In this week's conversation we wonder together about what it is that makes this possible, and the relationships with one another that can grow as a consequence.

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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 Ruined House 
Last year, the poet Jane Hirschfield shared with me that her life broke open when she first read a haiku by Izumi Shikibu. Izumi was a tenth century Japanese poet of the Heian period. This beautiful haiku is about risk, suffering, permeability, tenderness, and courage, the inner integuments of altruism.

Izumi’s haiku:
Although the wind
blows terribly here
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Jane later wrote, “Wall up your well, and you will stay dry, but also stay moonless.” I believe that we have to let life into our lives, let others into our lives, let the world into our lives, let love into our lives, and also let the night into our lives, and not let the roof over our head, our knowing, our fear, keep out the moonlight. Altruism is exactly this permeability, this wall-less wilderness of the world, this broken roof that lets the moonlight flood our ruined house, our suffering world.

Roshi Joan Halifax

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

What happens when we stop demanding of one another that we change, and instead generously come alongside one another with a measure of faithfulness in what John O'Donohue calls the 'hesitant light' which is still present in us even in our greatest difficulties?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace. 

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 is the time to be slow

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.

John O'Donohue

Photo by Maria Lupan on Unsplash

What if we could hold gratitude and sorrow together in us, rather than reducing ourselves to only one or the other, and rather than tuning out of life so as to avoid losing things? What might it be to honour and experience the gratitude that is inside all sorrow, and the sorrow that is inside all gladness, and in so-doing come to honour the exquisite and extraordinary depth and inner multiplicity of being a human being?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

(the audio of Justin's voice this week is not the usual recording quality we'd hope for... we'll be back to our usual clarity next week) 

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:

Losing It

This morning, after swimming, I overhear a conversation between two men who are sitting by the water. One has lost his sunglasses on an earlier swim and is quite distressed.

‘They were expensive. Armani.’ he says. ‘I paid a lot of money for them. And they are the third pair I’ve lost this summer’.

He is too agitated to be present with his friend who, after some minutes of listening, says ‘You seem really shaken up by this, too shaken up even to really be interested that I’m here with you. You’re saying the same thing, over and over again. But,’ and here he pauses, ‘tell me something. Did you enjoy having them? Did they bring you pleasure? Because although you’ve now lost them, for a while you did have them too’.

For a while, you did have them. And having them, while it lasted, was a gift.
And at that moment it occurs to me that this is true for everything, and for all of us. We wail and fret about what we lose, and rightly, because our loss is so often a source of suffering for us. But we will all lose our sunglasses, eventually, just as we will lose all our possessions, our friendships, our bodies, and everything we know.
And because losing is terrible and difficult to bear, we can spend our lives fretting about what’s yet to lose, and clinging madly to it, or becoming consumed with longing or remorse for what we’ve lost.

And all the while forgetting that, for a time, we did have all of this, and missing the wonder that there is anything at all – sunglasses, friendships, work, life – worth having enough that its loss matters to us in the first place.

Justin Wise
justinwise.co.uk

Photo by Sergey Chuprin on Unsplash

We greatly misunderstand ourselves and other people when we take ourselves to be 'fixed', just ‘one-way’. However stuck we've become, there is something of us that is always changing, and even when we can't see it there's always the seed of change waiting for the right moment to burst forth.

So how do we learn to trust that in ourselves and others that is life's never ceasing unfolding into itself? How do we undo the rigid stories and judgments that increase the distance between us? And how do we take up an understanding about ourselves and other people that allow us to be faithful to, as our dear friend Rosemerry writes, 'uncertainty as a sacred path'? 

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

Never the Same

Sometimes a person wakes
believing they are a storm.
It’s hard to deny it, what,
with all the rain pouring out
of the gutters of the mind,
all the gusts blowing through,
all the squalls, all the gray.
But by afternoon, it seems obvious
they are a garden about to sprout.
By night, it is clear they are a moon—
luminous, radiant, faithful.
That’s the danger, I suppose,
of believing any frame.
Let me believe, then, in curiosity,
in wonder, in change.
Let me trust how essential it is
to stumble into the trough
of the unknown, marvel how
trough becomes wings becomes
faith becomes math. Let me trust
uncertainty is a sacred path.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
ahundredfallingveils.com

Photo by Lizzie Winn

We can make a whole life around avoiding the tender places inside us, our ‘sore spots’, and in doing so keep ourselves away from many of our gifts and deepest longings.

So how might we, instead of turning away, turn towards that in us which longs to sing, dance, speak or feel? And how might we help one another work compassionately with the sophisticated ‘protective patterns’ that keep us away from feeling our own longing, shame, grief and tenderness, so that life can come bursting through?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

Protecting the Sore Spot

Everyone has one. It’s the part of ourselves we won’t look at, acknowledge or risk disturbing. It’s the story or trauma or situation that must be avoided at all costs.

People will choose careers, families and opportunities simply to avoid confronting the little tiny voice that is hiding inside. And marketers with low standards will brazenly manipulate us to extract money spent to protect the sore spot.

It’s almost impossible to make it go away. But if we’re brave enough to acknowledge it exists, it’s possible to help it take up far less room.

Seth Godin
seths.blog

Photo by Sven Brandsma on Unsplash

We really don’t have long. And the world keeps telling us that the answer to that is to hurry. But our hurry and fearfulness, our sense that we always have to be in control, distracted and in action, obscures a different kind of attention that is greatly needed in the world - the kind of attention we would call ‘love’.

So what becomes possible when we turn ourselves truthfully to the world with the attention of love? Not a syrupy or shallow love, but a love that’s courageous enough to receive the world and to care for it in a much deeper way than our hurried minds make possible?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

We Have Not Long to Love

We have not long to love.
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those
we fold away.
Coarse fabrics are the ones
for common wear.
In silence I have watched you
comb your hair.
Intimate the silence,
dim and warm.
I could but did not, reach
to touch your arm.
I could, but do not, break
that which is still.
(Almost the faintest whisper
would be shrill.)
So moments pass as though
they wished to stay.
We have not long to love.
A night. A day...

Tennessee Williams

Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

It’s so easy to feel separate from the world - indeed we’re taught in many ways that human beings are in some profound way separate, different, and apart from nature. So what happens when we start to allow the world around us to be our teacher... when we look within us to find resonance with that which we find around us? And when we let the living and non-living world teach us new ways of relating, understanding, acting and loving?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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:

Nature is Imagination

[The phrase] the ‘more than human world’ refers to a way of thinking which seeks to override our human tendency to separate ourselves from the natural world… the erroneous idea that there is a neat divide between humans and non-humans, between our lives and the teeming, multitudinous living and being of the planet.

The ‘more than human world’ acknowledges that the very real human world - the realm of our senses, breath, voice, cognition and culture - is but one facet of something vastly greater. All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else. This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere: the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us. These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us and have already taught us a great deal. We are who we are because of them, and cannot live without them…

[These] things are beings: not passive props in the drama of our own preoccupations, but active participants in our collective becoming… Everything is really everyone, and all those beings have their own agency, points of view, and forms of life...

[And] Being itself is relational: a matter of interrelationship. All that is required for sticks and stones to leap into life… is our own presence...

There is only nature, in all its eternal flowering, creating microprocessors and datacentres and satellites just as it produced oceans, trees, magpies, il and us. Nature is imagination itself. [Let us] begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.

James Bridle, from 'Ways of Being'
jamesbridle.com

Photo by Hamish Duncan on Unsplash