Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

In a culture that values 'keeping it all together', it is no small thing to trust ourselves - to welcome the parts of ourselves that are scared, or confused, or unravelling. When we remember that there's always something of ourselves that we can trust, perhaps we can turn towards those parts of us - that we might otherwise try to push away - and hold them in just the ways in which they long to be held. And when we do this for each other, we strengthen the bonds of trust in one another that support us as we voice our differences, our lostness, our gifts and and our grief.

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:

Above the Paradox Valley
/after Ocean Vuong, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”/
You do not need to know what comes next.
There is always another storm, and you
cannot hang the tent out to dry before
it has gotten wet. You cannot shovel snow
that has yet to fall.
Put down the shovel. Breathe
into the dark spaces of your back,
feel how they open like cave doors
to let in the light.
Let your face soften. Let the creases
fall out of your brow. The mind,
no matter how clear, will never become
a crystal ball.
The wisest part of your body
knows to run when it hears
the first crashes of rock fall.
It does not pause then to consider
metamorphic or igneous,
nor does it hesitate to wonder
what might have pushed them down.
It is no small thing to trust yourself.
It’s okay to cry. It is right
that love should shake your body,
that you should find yourself trembling
in the rubble and dust
after all your certainties come down.
Your breath has not left you.
Here is the morning rain. It opens
the scent of the leaves, of the air.
All around you the world is changing.
What are you waiting for?
Here is the cup of mint tea
growing stronger in itself.
Here on this cliff of uncertainty
there is a stillness in you
so spirited, so alive
the wisest part of your body
is dancing.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/

Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash

Whenever we speak, there's a something from which speech arises which is not itself yet, quite, words. And when we make art, there's a something from which the art arises that is itself not yet, quite, art. And it's in this vast unspoken background of before and between, of body and world and story and imagination, that so much of who we are and who we can be is found. Can we learn to see and hear each other as the unfolding, budding, opening works of art and worlds of possibility that we are? And might not this be a greatly powerful act of dignity and care, countering the narratives of fear and separation of our times?

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’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate.  Great art occurs - or doesn’t - in that instant.  What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we ‘know’ something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple.  But the ‘knowing’ at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.

George Saunders
From A Swim in the Pond in the Rain


Photo by Inge Maria on Unsplash

We've often internalised a particularly destructive story about what it is to be human - that we're inherently selfish, grasping, and inevitably violent to one another. And that because of that we ought to live very warily indeed. But, as the writer David Graeber reminds us, the 'common-sense' story of what it is to be human is just one story out of many. And we are filled with many different kinds of qualities and capacities, some of which we choose to prioritise over others - and some of which we've practiced more than others. But which qualities we bring to the world is a choice - the unique gift of being sentient, choosing humans. And the real question is which qualities we choose take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilisation.

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:

“Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:
‘Up in our country we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.’
… The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It’s not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn’t aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization.”
― David Graeber,
Debt: The First 5,000 Years


Photo by Darrell Chaddock on Unsplash

In the choices about what to pay attention to, the wider culture many of us inhabit tells us - be afraid, be in a hurry, get things done, be productive, panic about the future, distrust your own senses, distract yourself. So much of the media that comes our way reinforces all of those messages. But what if we turned towards the beauty and wonder that is, alongside all there is for us to worry about, always here? And what if our attention to the beauty, wonder, mystery and relationship could spur us to take care - of ourselves, of those around us, of the wider world - with eyes and hearts of a deeper love and courage than any fear and any panic could ever generate in us?

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:

IN THE MEANTIME
Tom Hirons

Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.
The moon rises, and the sun.
Babies smile and somewhere,
Against all the odds,
Two people are falling in love.

Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.
Light plays on the surface of water.
Grace occurs on unlikely streets
And we hold each other fast against entropy
And the struggles of our time.

Life leans towards living
And, while death claims all things at the end,
There were such precious times between,
In which everything was radiant
And we loved, again, this world.

IG: @bearspeakstothestars


Photo by Daniel Thomas on Unsplash

In the choices about what to pay attention to, the wider culture many of us inhabit tells us - be afraid, be in a hurry, get things done, be productive, panic about the future, distrust your own senses, distract yourself. So much of the media that comes our way reinforces all of those messages. But what if we turned towards the beauty and wonder that is, alongside all there is for us to worry about, always here? And what if our attention to the beauty, wonder, mystery and relationship could spur us to take care - of ourselves, of those around us, of the wider world - with eyes and hearts of a deeper love and courage than any fear and any panic could ever generate in us?

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

So many of us have been taught to flatten our imaginations, and in the space that is left we so easily feel as if we somehow have to magnify our experiences of life, always striving for something more intense or more meaningful or more vibrant. And, while there are times for that, we wonder what would happen if we allowed ourselves to kindle our radical amazement (itself an imaginative act) with what or who is right here with us in this moment. What new wonder could we then find gazing into the eyes of a friend, lover or child; or mopping the kitchen floor; or allowing ourselves to be playful in the midst of the ordinary every-day?

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:

MAGNIFIES AN OBJECT TEN TIMES
is what it clearly said
on the handle of the magnifying glass
my father received on his fifth birthday.
He took it as a warning; the birthday gift
would only work its magic ten times
and no more, becoming, after that,
just a small round window with no miracle,
toy giant’s monocle, a circle of simple glass.
And so he went about his days with curious thrift,
weighing how much he needed to see any part
of the world up close, observing as best he could
with his own eyes first, thinking, Do I need to see
that dead bug big? That dandelion, that blade
of grass, that wriggling moth in the spider’s web?
I can imagine most of nature’s gifts and crimes.
Best not to waste one of my ten precious times.
He lost count of how many miracles he’d left,
and for weeks after half-expected the magic of the glass
to simply stop. And I have asked him to tell me
of the thrilling moment he realized, or was told,
“ten times” in this context simply meant tenfold
and not ten instances, but he cannot remember.
Likewise the joy that must have come with such
a limitless epiphany. But what he does recall
and says most he misses still is the way the magic
made him see the world the rest of the time,
not through the glass, but all the time
he thought that magic would not last.

Taylor Mali

Photo by Stephen Kraakmo on Unsplash

There are moments when we suddenly find out that we're not separate from one another or from life... and in those moments we discover that what we're here to do is to love. Isn't that a possibility we all long for, and sometimes find so difficult to entertain - the opportunity to give love, to receive love, to have love flow through us into our work, into our relationships, into our friendships, into the street?

Perhaps if we quieten down our striving and inner chatter enough, we'll find deep rivers of love waiting to be expressed. Or maybe we could put ourselves in situations where - because of what we're practicing, or opening to, or how we're softening - we might be reached by the grace of the moment and discover all of this from what and who is around us.

Whichever way, it's our contention that to love and to trust in the capacity to love this heartbreaking and beautiful world, with all its tragedies and all its possibilities, is a necessary act of great faithfulness in 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.

Here's our source for this week:

Grace 

It was GraceStunned by the last light of the sunWe were swimming in a green sea, as deep as a drumThere are things I must record, must praiseThere are things I have to say about the fullness and the blazeOf this beautiful lifeThe beloved watched the world on its knees with an infinite degree of separationThat was something to seeAnd my friend told me death is like taking off a tight shoeAnd when I stopped looking for meI was able to find youRight there where everything is transcendentI can feel myself opening up, getting closerNo hope is enoughI've stopped hoping, I'm learning to trustI came to under that red moonI was completely crushedPlease use mePlease move through mePlease unscrew mePlease loosen me upMake music with meMake everything stopMake noise and make silence with meMake loveLet me be loveLet me be lovingLet me give love, receive love and be nothing but loveIn love and for love and with loveIn love and for love and with loveSurrender, I do surrenderMove through me and feel me get out of the wayAnd tune into something more deep and reflective than what's to be achievedOr perceivedOr affectedWhat's my problem?I'm always drawn back to that wrestling matchTen thoughts in the ring of my mind playing catchI can't live for the noise in my headI just want to dig a big ditch in the soil of my breath and bury my brain thereBut love said"If you bring forth what is within youWhat you bring forth will save youBut if you do not bring forth what is within youWhat you do not bring forth will destroy you”It was GraceStunned by the last light of the sunSwimming in a green sea as deep as a drumThere are things I must record, must praiseThere are things I have to say about the fullness and the blazeOf this beautiful life, of this beautiful life

Kae Tempest
www.kaetempest.co.uk

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

We can change - that much is certain. But change doesn't come by magic, and rarely does it come alone from a moment of inspiration, but instead by the steady, faithful application of practice - the walking of a path, step by step. The magic is that even practices that turn us by just a degree or two can, when held with dedication and consistency, make a huge difference in our lives and in the lives of those around us. And the second magic is that changing ourselves is best done with others - in a spirit of 'it's never too late, and we are not alone'.

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:

Holding the Angle

Things change slowly, over time, through incremental shifts. Human beings are complex, living systems where a small change can have far-reaching effects. I liken the process (…) to turning a cargo ship at sea. A large vessel with that much momentum can’t make sharp turns. However, a one- or two-degree course correction of the rudder, if held steady, will take that ship in a very different direction over time.

This process of change often occurs in two stages. First, we gain an insight or new understanding into some aspect of ourselves or our world. This is the initial spark that sets the cycle of transformation going. Insight turns the angle of the ship’s rudder.

Insight can feel great. Clarity dawns, and a weight has been lifted. Seeing things in a new light often comes with a rush of inspiration, a sense of freedom or spaciousness. (…)

Many practitioners make the mistake of stopping there. Insight is the beginning of transformation, not the end. It opens us to a new possibility, but as quickly as we change the angle of the rudder, the currents of our life come rushing in. The tyranny of habit exerts its force, pushing us back toward our old ways.

This is the second stage: holding the angle. It’s what turns a moment of insight into lasting change. We work in a patient and steady way, applying effort to integrate this insight. Each day, we recollect the new perspective and practice this new way of being. Inevitably, we lose our grip and the rudder slips back into its old position. We course correct, readjust, and work to hold the angle.

The second stage of change isn’t glamorous or exciting, yet it’s where real transformation takes place. It takes dedication, patience, and genuine interest to sustain. It’s the meditator showing up at their mat each morning, come what may; the artisan diligently throwing another pot on the wheel.

Over time, the steadiness of that effort takes root, and a new way is forged. (…) The transition often occurs so slowly that we only notice it in retrospect. One day we turn around and realize something is different.

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

What we long for, what we most need, is the simple kindness of others. But the world teaches us otherwise - that what we need most is away from one another. What a tragedy unfolds for all of us when we live in forgetfulness of our deepest longing. We think the world can be different - and this conversation is about just that.

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

Here's a link to the details of the new Thirdspace Coaching For Development programme for people who work in organisations, which we talked about a couple of episodes ago.

Here's our source for this week:

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

Naomi Shihab Nye


Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash

Holding on too tightly to expectations of just about anything can trap us in a cycle of frustration and despair. And often our expectations are really ways we're trying to be in control of a situation rather than surrendering ourselves to the unfolding moment. Of course, our ability to control many circumstances so they will be just the way we want them is often beyond us. And so perhaps we might cultivate a kind of openness to the way things actually are combined with a fierce kind of intention to bring ourselves to whatever is happening with as much of our essential goodness as we can, whether that be courage, tenderness, creativity, love, truthfulness or any other of the many virtues available to human beings.

This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about meeting the always unexpected happenings of life with grace and presence. It's hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Here's a link to the details of the new Thirdspace Coaching For Development programme for people who work in organisations, which we talked about a couple of episodes ago.

Here's our source for this week:

Knee Sounds

The older I get the more I noticeknee soundsmy own quiet desiresdumb egosbaby’s sharp intuitionthe return of the blackberriesboneheaded binaries.Sometimes I long for an organized draweror a morning without the realization that one went to school with unbrushed teethbut then I remember how short life ishow wide my forgivenessmostly of othersmore and more myself.The noticing is mostly small.Sometimes it’s big.This life I walk throughis not what I expected.How could I have imagined her first questions upon waking or his tender body?How could I have known I would birth my own much-needed teacher on solitude?Or care so much about those two red poppies?Aging is a long, drawn out experiment in being wrong about how you will live, who you will be, what you will love and seeand love and see and love and seeand that’s okay.It’s more than okay.Each day unpromised and fecund.
I am worse than I thoughtand also better.Humanity, too.When the violence is too muchI touch a lot of tree trunkseat some more bread.watch my kids sleep their sweaty sleepand try not to let any of ittragic or tenderfeel inevitable.

Courtney Martin
courtneyemartin.com/writing/

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash