It opens up those dark and messy places, it brings them into the light, little by little, until they don’t feel so taboo anymore. To always try to have that courageous conversation. In the willingness to hold a dialogue with yourself or someone else, or in prayer or in meditation, and to ask the difficult questions, “the questions that have no right to go away” (David Whyte). And I think the real power lies in the conversation. I think fixating on the answer is a stalling technique. It sounds almost like just another mind trick to keep yourself stationary, doesn’t it? Safe in the obvious truth that until you figure out the answer… there’s nothing that can possibly be done differently. I think back to how many friends and former homeless shelter clients, and even fictional characters (which you know were based on real emotions) have said, if only I knew why I do this! Why do I have this pattern, this reflex, why do I keep myself here, why do I do this to myself… if I only knew why, maybe I could do something about it. A conversation with the scarier parts of the secret wishes and judgments that we try to keep locked inside ourselves so that the world stays properly balanced on our own self determined axis.Īnd I don’t think the power even lies in finding the answer. Through entering into a real conversation with yourself about how you’re making your home in the world and what is or isn’t nourishing you. So much can be healed through conversation with another. I guess, for me anyways, it always comes back to conversation. The need for, not even service and resources and organizing committees, but for one individual to sit with another individual and be able to hold a space of patience and honesty and unconditional love. And how overwhelming that need seems sometimes, and by that I mean the need in the world. It made me think about how so many people are in such desperate need for connection, whether they realize it or not. Those kinds of mind-boggling, open-ended, questioning thoughts about why the society is in the state and shape that it is, and how achingly delicate and impressionable the human mind can be, and how long we can hold on to healable wounds that we try not to realize are there. She interviewed a novelist, Diana Spechler in the one I listened to this morning, and I was so captivated by this conversation. I’m really here to do some IIN coursework, which I’m excited to get started (who ever predicted I would say that about school!), but I was listening to one of Jen Lee’s Retrospective podcasts, (where she has conversations with so many different people with different backgrounds and different kinds of work about how they got where they are, stories from their life and what drives, inspires and provokes thought in them.) on the way over here. Some of the furniture is quite hideous, and there’s a crazy red paisley rug on the concrete floor under the sofa, but these things make me want to camp out for hours all the same. A little industrial, a little mismatched and haphazard, and if you can’t have an outdoor patio, then yes please to the fireplace surrounded by booths and a couch. But I really just love this place, feel instantly at ease, cozy, and energized by all the visual eccentricities. I don’t come too often, because there are so many more that are closer to where I live. After the reinvention of Red’s coffee shop in Santa Barbara’s funk zone, Goleta Coffee Company has been my favorite coffee shop.
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