Wisdom and Wholeness

Krista Tippett 
 

Join the WHU community this Sunday at 10:30 ET as we explore 3 practices for wisdom and wholeness with Krista Tippett.  It’s practical and imbued with the values we share at West Hill.
 
How do we stand before the pain and promise of the world and keep hope and courage alive? Journalist and podcast host Krista Tippett has spent a career interviewing some of the world's wisest people in search of answers to that question. Listen along as she offers three practices to help you make sense of what it means to be human right now — and how to live in a way that helps remake the world for the better.
 
With her groundbreaking "On Being" podcast, Krista Tippett takes up the ancient, animating questions for 21st-century life: What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? And who will we be to each other?
 
Readings

The TEDTalk speaker, Krista Tippett, will be quoting the poet Rainer Maria Rilke about embracing life even when it is difficult and we don’t know the answers.  In another passage from the same work entitled Letters to a Young Poet, he again urges that life be lived fully, with all its unanswered questions and unwelcome experiences, for that is the way to inner and outer wholeness. He tells the young poet:

“Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

The second reading comes from the work of an alternative medicine practitioner and author of several books including Lifestyle Wisdom and Sovereign Self, gives a vivid image of the necessity, and even the benefit, of being able to deal with the difficult as well as the easy, the challenging as well as the pleasant, so that we grow ourselves into someone who lives wholly and fully without feeling like a failure because we don’t have all the answers. Living wholly without all the answers actually is the answer.  Here are Shunya’s image for our consideration:

“The most favourite food of goats is a plant which has thorns all over it (for example, thorny blackberry vines and prickly pear cactus). But they munch on it so softly and artfully that thorns just add to the taste, just as heat adds to the taste of coffee. That is the only way to win over duality: Drink life sip by sip, one moment at a time.”