348: How Surely Gravity's Law

Turning Towards Life - a Thirdspace podcast

Because we are imaginative beings, we can imagine and call into being all kinds of better possibilities for ourselves and those around us. At the same time, our imaginations can have us pretend to ourselves about the reality of our lives and experience. It’s completely understandable that we do this - distracting ourselves with what Rainer Maria Rilke calls ‘empty freedoms’ is surely one way to try to avoid experiences and feelings we don’t want to have.

But those distractions, those ‘empty freedoms’ do little to help us plant deep roots, or to learn how to fly when called for. So how might we turn with courage and whole hearts towards the reality of what is, as a way of opening ourselves to the possibility of acting to bring about a better future?
Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.
Here's our source for this week:
How Surely Gravity's Law
How surely gravity’s law
Strong as an ocean current,
Takes hold of even the strongest thing
And pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing – each stone, blossom, child – is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
Push out beyond what we belong to
For some empty freedom.
If we surrendered to Earth’s intelligence
We could rise up, rooted, like trees …
This is what the things can teach us: to fall,
Patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
Before he can fly.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Photo by Cindy Tang on Unsplash