205: Falling

Can we learn to live with the certainty that we'll lose the ones we love, and they will lose us, without tuning out, avoiding, denying or imagining that it's some form of punishment? Can we learn how to bring together the fullness of the joys of loving as well as the sorrows?

This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about how we might find ways to help one another enter into the fierce grace of living in a world in which love and loss are inseparable, 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 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 and Spotify.

Here's our source for this week, written by our dear friend and partner in Thirdspace, Neena Sims

Falling

There is a moment upon waking
full of grace
empty of knowledge, free of suffering
the length of a breath -

only

and then we’re falling,
thrown once more
into the certain heart-wrenching knowledge
that he’s dead
that she’s ill
that our beloved is leaving -

or we are

our greatest fears made flesh
our cherished tomorrows torn asunder -

we’re left grasping and gasping

Perhaps this is what it’s like to be born,
to arrive blinking and crying into the light

Perhaps this is what Eve accepted and Adam received:
that to be human is to know
to be human is to wake-up
to be human is to keep breathing -
big painful gulps of paradise

that to be human is to fall
again and again
not from grace,
but into it.

Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash