Until it Flowers from Within, Episode 44
Here's 'Until it Flowers from Within', Episode 44 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by thirdspace coaching in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living.You can join our members-only facebook group here to watch future episodes live and join in the lively comment conversation on this episode. You can also watch previous episodes there, and on our YouTube channel.
So many of us are brought up in a culture that's essentially corrective, which has us pay attention to all of our shortcomings and what's absent in ourselves and in other people. And it is easy to spend a life mired in self- and other-criticism because of that. But, in order to respond with courage and grace - and even joyfulness - to the difficulties and challenges of our times, we think something else is called for. This wonderful poem by Galway Kinnell will be the starting point for our conversation about this on Sunday.
In this conversation we wonder together about what it is we're forgetting about ourselves and about other people when we take up a punitive, corrective stance, and we discover together that 'remembering' is, quite properly, 're-membering' - a putting back together of everything that's been left out. When we remember ourselves more completely, and when we remember others in this way, we very often find ourselves in contact with a deeper, more life-giving possibility for relationship than we'd been inhabiting. And this, in turn, can open profound possibilities for resolving differences and bringing qualities to bear that would otherwise be neglected.
Towards the end of our conversation Lizzie mentions an amazing radio series on BBC Radio 4, in which "Anne McElvoy asks figures from opposing sides of a political issue to listen to each other, and explore the roots of each other's beliefs, with the help of conflict resolution specialist Gabrielle Rifkind."
You can find more details about the series, Across the Red Line here.
Here’s our source for this week:
Saint Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell