Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower, Episode 327
“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” writes Rainer Maria Rilke.
While we might ask one another in our more difficult moments “How are you?” or perhaps “How are you doing?”, we less often ask Rilke’s deeper question, a question that helps us and one another make contact with the aliveness and mystery of our being human.
And so in this week’s conversation we explore together what it is to treat our own experience of ‘the happenings of life’ with reverence and respect, and start to see how this reverence and respect can help us inhabit the coming and going of all kinds of experience as a vibrant and necessary kind of gift for ourselves and for those around us.
This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
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Here’s our source for this week:
LET THIS DARKNESS BE A BELL TOWER
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing
makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Photo credit / Arturo Rey on Unsplash