Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast 322: What To Love When You're Running Out of Things to Love
Dec 10, 2023
35:35
It’s not surprising, when we’re in difficulty or overstretched, to find ourselves tuning out of the world, distancing ourselves from what and who is around us. The stories we’re handed by our culture - that life is essentially meaningless - don’t help.
Who do we become if this is what we do? How might we, instead, learn to love again when we’re ‘running out of things to love’? And how might we - as the poet Maya Stein invites us - ‘narrow the distance’ between ourselves and the world, ourselves and one another, so we can let life flood in once again?
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 to love when you’re running out of things to love
Pick any landscape—a kitchen counter, a waiting room, that part of your body you shield from photographs—and narrow the distance between you. At first, the stains will monopolize your eye. Each blight and crack and overgrowth, a seismic disruption. If you can bear the stillness of not looking away, if you step even closer, the contours will begin to lose their meaning. The noise of an old story will fade. New shapes will emerge, like petals after a hard rain. I’m not saying you will desire, suddenly, the pits and pores of the world, or that your hands passing over every rough surface will feel fresh tenderness. But you’ll notice your breathing has softened, your heart a door you can open past the jambs. How there’s room for what you see, and everything you can’t.
Maya Stein
mayastein.com
Photo by After Exposure Studio on Unsplash
Who do we become if this is what we do? How might we, instead, learn to love again when we’re ‘running out of things to love’? And how might we - as the poet Maya Stein invites us - ‘narrow the distance’ between ourselves and the world, ourselves and one another, so we can let life flood in once again?
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 to love when you’re running out of things to love
Pick any landscape—a kitchen counter, a waiting room, that part of your body you shield from photographs—and narrow the distance between you. At first, the stains will monopolize your eye. Each blight and crack and overgrowth, a seismic disruption. If you can bear the stillness of not looking away, if you step even closer, the contours will begin to lose their meaning. The noise of an old story will fade. New shapes will emerge, like petals after a hard rain. I’m not saying you will desire, suddenly, the pits and pores of the world, or that your hands passing over every rough surface will feel fresh tenderness. But you’ll notice your breathing has softened, your heart a door you can open past the jambs. How there’s room for what you see, and everything you can’t.
Maya Stein
mayastein.com
Photo by After Exposure Studio on Unsplash