The Call to Live Everything, Episode 84
We are so often afraid of our own aliveness that we'll cover it up with an image, a role, or an identity that's been handed to us by others. But what possibilities for encounter with life and with one another are born when we cross the thin divide between 'image' and 'realness'?
Here’s Episode 84 of 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. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify.
In this conversation we explore the call of our own wildness, that of ourselves that we so often cover up for the sake of fitting in with an image or identity we've been handed by our culture.
We talk about the difference between being honest about our own experience rather than being attached to our own version of 'truth', and how honesty and openness can bring us into compassionate and direct encounter with the aliveness and wonder of other people. And we explore how it's possible to turn just about anything in our lives into a way of keeping far from ourselves, including the very project of being real. It's a conversation about encountering life, and about returning home.
The Call to Live Everything
One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere — they have vanished… It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value, must be woven through the loom of one’s own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear.
One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.
– John O'Donohue
Excerpt from Walking on the Pastures of Wonder
John O'Donohue in conversation with John Quinn
Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash