Remembering Ourselves Whole Again, Episode 307

The wider culture of the world doesn’t teach us much about how to see and name the goodness of people. But we quickly learn how to compare, criticise, and find all the ways we’re wanting or falling short, or how other people are.

What does it take to start to see the goodness that underlies even the mistakes we make, and be ones who can help liberate that goodness into ever fuller expression?

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:

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

Photo by ali mahmoodi on Unsplash

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