Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, Episode 438
A call to our imaginative capacities when we are caught in conflict with one another... our capacity to uncover new stories and new ways of understanding that bring us into a different kind of relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with the something we seem to be in conflict about. Imagination as a path to choice, invention, discovery and as a counter to our familiar ways of keeping ourselves safe, habitual and automatic. All inspired by a luminous poem by Joy Harjo.
In our conversation we talk specifically about Turning Towards Life - Live - Season 2, which begins in March 2026.
This week's Turning Towards Life hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Our source for this week:
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
Part 4
REDUCE DEFENSIVENESS AND BREAK THE DEFENSIVENESS CHAIN:
I could hear the light beings as they entered every cell. Every cell is a house of the god of light, they said. I could hear the spirits who love us stomp dancing. They were dancing as if they were here, and then another level of here, and then another, until the whole earth and sky was dancing.
We are here dancing, they said. There was no there.
There was no "I" or "you."
There was us; there was "we."
There we were as if we were the music.
You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries—
—Or poetry, or art, or anything that is of value or matters in this world, and the next worlds.
This is about getting to know each other.
We will wind up back at the blues standing on the edge of the flatted fifth about to jump into a fierce understanding together.
Part 6
AND, USE WHAT YOU LEARN TO RESOLVE YOUR OWN CONFLICTS AND TO MEDIATE OTHERS' CONFLICTS:
When we made it back home, back over those curved roads
that wind through the city of peace, we stopped at the
doorway of dusk as it opened to our homelands.
We gave thanks for the story, for all parts of the story
because it was by the light of those challenges we knew
ourselves—
We asked for forgiveness.
We laid down our burdens next to each other.
Joy Harjo
Photo by Alexey Demidov on Unsplash