The Dakini Speaks, Episode 54
Here's episode 54 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.
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This week, in a week of further news about the mess we're in with climate change and the urgency and despair all of that can generate, we begin with the poem 'The Dakini Speaks' by Joyce Wellwood. We talk together about the various 'deals' with life that we take up - ways of being that we imagine will protect us - and how living in the midst of such deals can distance ourselves from our lives and from our contribution. We consider together the bracing possibility that owning up to the limits of our control, growing up into a more mature appraisal of life's losses and impermanence, can free us into a deeper kind of hope - one that's not contingent on how things turn out. And we explore together the necessary kind of wildness in ourselves that this all calls for.
The Dakini Speaks
My friends, let's grow up.
Let's stop pretending we don't know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven't noticed, let's wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It's simple - how could we have missed it for so long?
Let's grieve our losses fully, like human ripe beings.
But please, let's not be so shocked by them.
Let's not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.
Impermanence is life's only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child, she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion exquisitely precise.
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.
This is the true ride - let's give ourselves to it!
Let's stop making deals for a safe passage -
There isn't one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children anymore.
The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost.
Let's dance the wild dance of no hope.
– Joyce Wellwood
Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash