You Are Big Enough to Hold It All, Episode 323

 

We can easily live as if we're 'skating over the surface of life'. Sometimes that's an intelligent strategy for protecting ourselves from the intensity and difficulty that life can bring us.

But our wider culture rarely helps us remember the depths of our lives - the depths that remind us of our mutual goodness, our pain, the ways we heal, the brevity of it all. And if we're skating the surface more than is necessary, we're barely being ourselves.

What would it be to live with openness to the depths? And to bring ourselves to that task with gentleness and kindness?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.



Here’s our source for this week:

Let the Leaf Fall

When this living breaks your heart, steals
your plans, when you miss the holy of here,
thinking thinking thinking something brighter

is over there, when there is no denying
how precious, how precarious
this aliveness is, let

yourself break again
and again, let
the cool, almost-autumn breeze

blow all the way in. Let
the fading light,
the falling leaf,

show you how short
it is, this life. How feather-fine
the line.

And then blow infinite kisses of kindness
to every dying-living thing, yourself
included. Always yourself included.

Whoever you think you are
does not even
come close.

You are big enough to hold every
break, every ache, every dark cloud,
every twinkling star too.

Let the leaf fall.

watch now—
watch how life
catches you.

Julia Fehrenbacher
juliafehrenbacher.com

Photo credit: Matt | Unsplash


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Taking Back Our Projections, Episode 324

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What to Love When You’re Running Out of Things to Love, Episode 322