Episode 44 - One Wild Life: Body (Part 4)

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[Music] what are you you might answer that you are a body but that's not all you are corpses are bodies some might respond that you are the functions of your body and not simply the form but what are the functions of the body why do the early nerve cells in the human brain sacrifice themselves for the good of a greater whole why does the body heal itself i don't mean what are the functions of how the body heals itself i mean why do any of those functions exist in the first place one could answer because natural selection rewarded the life forms that developed those functions with reproduction but that still doesn't get to the answer of the question down at its core why does life reward itself like that why the persistence to stay alive or to be in the first place why the unshakeable determination of reality to conform to the laws that give it order why the incredible orchestration that all things exude from in order to be what if the mystics are right what if the answer to that question is love some may roll their eyes at that it sounds romantic and sentimental and unscientific but that's because the way our culture often uses the word love is anemic romantic sentimental and unscientific god is love the all behind the all is love that in which we live and move and have our being within is love the reason cells give themselves for a greater good is love the reason mutation and natural selection dance together to give rise to life love the reason gravity keeps pulling and light keeps moving at 186 000 miles per second love so what are you your love love that has given rise to ego and illusion and suffering and body but love nonetheless love that eventually offers your body back to the earth sort of like your cells have been offering themselves back to your body love without beginning without end infinite eternal [Music] there's no need to anthropomorphize this love this love anthropomorphizes itself as you having be the love follow free uh kind of pricking this issue of perspective making a little more universal in every man and every woman and every person and what we all go through and then the response i found a response to that that proclaiming of freedom in the idea of be the love and how incredibly difficult that is you know it's like i i can sing be the love all day and and feel like a great enlightened person um and then i see a you know a post from someone talking about why they're gonna vote for donald trump and i i stopped being the love immediately um you know today literally today i saw a tweet like scott adams who created the dilbert comic um it was explaining like why trump is the only rational choice for president and i but i i mean the the tension we face of working for tomorrow and not worrying about it it's so challenging yeah like so i want to work for a a verdant peaceful just society i want to make that happen i want to do everything i can to contribute to it and i want to be the love but then there are times where there are things i don't want to love which becomes manifest in people i don't want to love [Music] welcome to the liturgist podcast today is part four of a five part special series we are doing discussing the themes one wildlife body welcome thanks for joining us [Music] you know i thought it was interesting how you've sort of shown the growth of the person and the species up to now from this this ego fixation to an embodiment of love um so be the love there's also this tie back to the to the soul record to moonsault and not only in the moon the sun the moon lyrics but the bridges actually just sampled the other bridge and kind of remixed it and created this new bridge [Applause] to me when you're looking from this soul perspective when we're where we were writing from with that soul perspective in that song and that part of that record where you're looking for love to save you which is a legitimate thing like from this from that plane from the soulish plane you're this human being and love is going to swim the ocean deep and blue you're seeing it from this third person perspective or maybe second person's perspective and then now here within this body as spirit has been incarnated into flesh the universe has taken on eyes and and mouths and hands and now what does that love look like that's coming to save you it's you're at this point where you can actually start becoming that love that you've been hoping for and it becomes more existential in first person we've talked about it it was head knowledge and now be the love it's real easy to learn something recently we've been listening to ramdas and it's easy for me to listen to this and then the very next day explain it to my friend this is how we should live this is peace you know and i'm realizing like i don't need to just turn right around and teach someone else i need to let it sink into my very being and let it become me and to me that's what this song is like let it letting like the love has become you and it's just is how you are living like we you know like we say love love your enemy love your neighbor as yourself all these ideas they're just ideas and head knowledge until it becomes you and until it is just the way you live and you're not looking for the attention of it you're not looking for the golden star it's just the kind of human that you are so now we'd like to present to you be the love in its entirety [Music] everywhere [Music] we die [Music] as we learn and we suffer for belief for a lover we can taste it [Music] in the sun in the moon is love [Music] out of the ground is love [Music] we are revolution love everyone [Music] it was all right here oh feel it all [Music] in the sun the moon is [Music] we are a life revolution be the love be the love be love [Music] is [Music] is [Music] revolution [Music] [Music] to live in love we see the the remnant or the echo of ego [Music] instead of see me remember me um and so i feel like this was kind of the first time we really start to contemplate mortality and true ego death as we move in to live and love uh and it it is it is melancholy but sweetly um because it it still it pulls forward that perspective of the value and the worth of love but you can almost see that as we move on in years and this certainly happens to me sometimes it is hard to keep the self shaken off and um the the fact that our days are numbered almost lets us see our the reflection or the the you know see our see our ego from the other side of the reflection in the pool yeah yeah yeah this was kind of moving into the second half of life like richard rohr talks about to me like this starting to look at death starting to really take stock of what is important in life after a while you you've stopped chasing your tail over and over and scrambling to get at some point you know most uh people in the second half of life aren't like really worried about how many likes they're getting on instagram um but they start you're right they start thinking about longer when i die and what what kind of life did i want to say i lived how do i want to be remembered what what do i want to my legacy to be and there can be an egoness to that but i think there can also be just a healthy taking stock of what am i what am i going to spend the rest of my life on we had a nice moment lisa and i when we wrote this together we were uh it was late and we had tucked in anomaly and it was one of those it was just dark in the house we heard they had a candle burning and we were just kind of playing on the piano together thinking about like how many times we're gonna get to do this where are we tucking emily in bed and and and being pretty present in that moment like with her i think sometimes it's easy to go like just get the kids in bed and let's get on with whatever else we need to do tonight and um i think especially that night it was really really sweet and we always try to have these sweet moments with our girls at bedtime and value show them show i'm like that we really value like we are really grateful that we get to do that i get to help her brush her teeth i get to help her put her pjs on i get to put her in bed at night because a lot of people don't they don't get that or they've lost children or their children are grown or they're not able to have that and so just with anything that you have like see the value in it see the value in your kid in that moment that you've got so that night even yeah i think we were both pretty i was a little teary-eyed and feeling the weight of um the value that we have these two little girls in our house and how long how long do we get to do this with them that idea of kind of towards the end of the song of almost the the counting an unknown number yeah and you don't know how many more times you'll have these moments and because man you know all the time i'm real tempted to just put the kids in bed as fast as possible because at that point in the day even my delightful daughters have gotten on my last nerve yeah and i'm ready to just like like what would it be like for me and jenny to have 30 minutes and instead of me falling asleep immediately after the children go to bed and but those you know it kind of calls back to that earlier themes in the record of uh it's it's that that's that mirrored reflection the opposite the same idea but through the opposite lens of life yeah of of when there's enough when there's enough and um you know it's interesting to me my grandparents had a living room that my mom wasn't allowed in and then when we came around it was called the no no room because no no you can't touch that we could go in there with supervision but we couldn't touch anything and then when my kids were born i remember madison started walking and she pushed open the door to the nono room and walked in and i went massive no no you have to stop and my grandfather looked at me and he said it's just stuff [Music] and he had to get into his 90s before he realized that he really knew there were very few times little feet would run around the floor of his home and that that that's what i've heard in this song is the wisdom of people in their last years of life [Music] which is so clarifying and gives us such a perspective that we need this is to live in love when i'm at the end and the last of time is spent what will i see of the breath and memory how will you remember [Music] me [Music] [Music] to gain improve my worth make my mark upon the earth it's the same funny unheard [Music] of all of my life in love [Music] better love [Music] this day than a hundred years [Music] is but an open heart remains oh [Music] all of my life [Music] all of my life [Music] is how many times will your hair be held in mind [Music] many times many skies to save [Music] how many times is see [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better health that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's better help h-e-l-p dot com slash liturgists now some people on the internet approximately i don't know a third of one percent real concern the word jesus isn't mentioned uh enough on this record that it should be happening uh all the time because i you know i i did go look at a facebook comment thread because you have that beautiful ad of uh i call it the baby seals ad yeah and one one person comment on that was like you know i just i was real upset i thought they would talk more about jesus on this record which i was thinking where have you been like what oh but the song tree is if not a theological treatise i don't know what could be [Laughter] yeah it always surprises me when people say have comments like that they're you know okay it actually makes me sad because i think oh you're not you can't hear or you you you can't hear it you can't see it yeah you're i don't know jesus is pretty small i don't get i don't get mad i'm like oh bubba it actually like oh i felt an ache in my heart of like well what you've been taught is is jesus um it's a name is just this name yeah so in tree you peel back the age of enlightenment and reclaim the body-centered spirituality that is the genuine root of the christian faith in what i think are some of the most clever lyrics i think i've heard in quite a while um the the the imagery of the tree of life uh wanting to save its soul but hate the bark oh my gosh one sentence like what i spent 5 000 words trying to cover in part of my book yeah that's uh that's michael all the way like he he wrote this song and it's it's my favorite song on the album i love this song i cry every time i listen to it and i just always want to be by myself listen to it so lyrically it's so like it's so rich so well said and sonically i mean it it's like my soul is just coming undone like like being turned inside out like over and over again when i when i feel this and then the bass coming in and just where the beat hits it oh it's one of my favorite songs he's ever written oh well thank you guys i mean just even the idea of like the the shame of needing sunlight oh my gosh that's who we are yeah we have been i think before we we were talking about this and body shame and um well yeah obviously we were especially with women you know the body shame of women and so after he'd written this yeah it had me in tears because i don't even think i realized fully how much i just accepted that this idea of being okay with these parts of my body and this even growing older you know as a woman and what our culture expects of of me or what i feel like culture expects of me how i should still look and i don't think i realized the parts that i was buying into we wanted to address body shame on this record and the idea of how strained human beings can the relationship with our bodies can be rocks don't judge rocks look at that jagged rock little jagged in and and humans don't judge you don't judge blades of grass for being short or tall or whatever you just experience them as they are i was really wrestling with like the question of why do we do this why what is it about humans that makes us so we have this strange relationship with these bodies that we live our whole lives in why do we repress our sexuality and and feel shame about what we are and about our desires and our needs i mean where does that come from it made me think of the story of the garden of eden it's funny because as much flack as i've gotten from that from my interpretations of that story there's so much profound stuff in that story i think like uh man the fall happening because we eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil what a fascinating thing we we have all these judgments all of a sudden and perhaps they're necessary judgments but these judgments are what create this sense of what we want out of the world and what we want out of our lives and then our bodies come up short they die we don't want them to die we have these sense of morals that we want to live up to blah blah and all of that like judgment that happens from from something we assume is good this knowledge of good and evil which are perspectives but this they create this separation of the world into categories into constructs into ideas that ultimately creates uh suffering and i think that strained relationship with our bodies but then through the back half of the song it becomes part of the necessary journey so it's like are we just doing this because we're afraid of death or we're just doing this but then towards the end maybe maybe we can learn to love our bodies while still separating good and bad and while still moving forward and still trying to move towards the light and towards justice and again going back to that tension in the paradox that we've been singing about in the last part of the record your spirit soul and body it finally says which kind of ties up the trilogy a little bit and beneath it all that all is won that's how it ends and so it it's saying like this is all part of the game the illusion of what it is to be a human being within the universe and maybe our wrestling with our bodies it's just all part of the process but let's get to the point again where we're okay if we can't i mean at some point we become home again in our bodies and as we've you know we've gone through some learning how to control ourselves and our impulses and our passions and our desires and that can get unhealthy and weird and repressive and dark but there's also a gift that comes with that where you become a master of your body rather than owned by it and at that place you can you can see it again from the other side of life from the other side of the lens where this body is not something you have to battle but it's it's it's a gift it's grace it is god taking root in the world it is spirit made flesh and um i don't know that to me sounds like a mature human somebody that's at home with her body see going back to when we were talking about you know realizing the magic is everywhere the intricacies of your body and what is keeping it going and how it is constantly healing itself constantly renewing itself i used to think about that as a child it's kind of funny because i got hurt a lot and i one day told my mom i was like you know what mama to me like look at this my skin like i've always wanted a superpower i always wanted to fly and i remember this day coming in i was like my body has super powers it heals itself that's amazing i was like i would be as a child i told i was like i would be dead mom if i'd be like this bloody mess with all these cuts and open wounds everywhere and like that's we we start again it's a thing that we start realizing is normal or a thing that we start wishing it was different where it's like it is this magical wonder in and of itself that we so often don't realize and are grateful for when cells are ruptured and some of the chemical components that belong inside of a cell suddenly are not if that happens in sufficient volume that actually gets picked up by surrounding cells in the area and in your dna you have basically four different on switches plus one break that will determine like if you've been cut or an organ has been damaged that the cells surrounding that area have to go into a rapid phase of multiplication and so they turn on one of these switches that say grow really fast and release their break and just start dividing until they fill in the area that should be filled at which point chemical changes happen that put the brakes back on so you don't end up having a cut that grows into you know a giant mound of flesh or a torn artery that gets clogged by an arterial wall that's growing too much the the sophistication and that process really is miraculous and calls out the travesty of belief systems and theologies that demonize the miracle of the body and i i think so much as someone who grew up white and conservative evangelical it's like three strikes against the body and it of everything we've ever talked about on this podcast and every theme you've ever explored in the record the idea of i i'm comfortable in my skin but i don't dwell within my body and i realized that recently when we were all in denver together and you were calling people to physical movement as part of our liturgy and i along with most of the white people in the room was not able to and i thought tree really answered that tension well [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] did the tree of life divorce its body seek to save the soul but hate the bark [Music] long for freedom from its branches [Music] despise the roots i trees killed for being what they are [Music] why does man despise the body are we just afraid [Music] is oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] seek to save [Music] [Applause] is [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] a man can learn to love his body [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] one you