The Truths We Can Tell Each Other, Episode 97
What if love isn't a feeling but the dedicated, liberating, sometimes painful work of learning to tell each other the truth?
A conversation about being courageous, turning towards one another, and honouring the complexities of being a human being, with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Here’s Episode 97 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.
For a while it seems obvious to many of us that it's self-protection that's the guarantee of an easy life. But before long we find that our wish to protect ourselves - particularly from those we are closest to - leads to a life in which we're distant from everyone and everything. So the alternative is to learn to tell the truth about ourselves, and to develop our capacity to listen while others tell the truth about themselves. It's a process that is never done, calling on ever-deeper refinement, sensitivity, and courage. And the reward is that we get to inhabit our lives and establish contactfulness with others.
Join us for a conversation about walking the hard, honourable and loving path together, which begins with this source from Adrienne Rich.
Refining the Truths We Can Tell Each Other
An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
– Adrienne Rich
From “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” first read at the Hartwick Women Writers’ Workshop in June of 1975 and eventually reprinted in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978
Photo by Richard Nolan on Unsplash