245: The Light Is The Context

The background culture that surrounds us very often makes the unspoken claim that what's most true about existence is cold, hard matter, and that anything else we encounter - meaning or love for example - is just something we humans invented. But what would happen if we trusted instead that there is an ancient light doing its best to shine forth through us and between us? And what would happen if we could treat the most difficult aspects of our experience, and the most challenging and painful parts of ourselves, as if they were right next to this source of light that could illuminate them? And if we treated ourselves and one another as if the light was the very surrounding in which we move and which wants to move within us?

This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about what opens when we understand the context of our lives and our experience to be an ancient light that's trying to find us and shine through us. It's hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Here's our source for this week:

How the light comes

I cannot tell you how the light comes.

What I know is that it is more ancient

than imagining.

That it travels across an astounding expanse

to reach us.

That it loves searching out what is hidden,

what is lost, what is forgotten or in peril

or in pain.

That it has a fondness for the body,

for finding its way toward flesh,

for tracing the edges of form,

for shining forth through the eye,

the hand, the heart.

I cannot tell you how the light comes,

but that it does.

That it will.

That it works its way into the deepest dark

that enfolds you,

though it may seem long ages in coming

or arrive in a shape you did not foresee.

And so may we this day

turn ourselves toward it.

May we lift our faces

to let it find us.

May we bend our bodies

to follow the arc it makes.

May we open

and open more

and open still

to the blessed light

that comes.

Photo by Rene Böhmer on Unsplash