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Hello everyone, I’ve just spent the night with our colleague Lizzie, her husband and their beautiful new baby girl who greets everyone with such trust and delight: every face she encounters brings the most enormous smile to her face. It’s like she’s saying ‘hello, it’s so good to see you - so good to see your goodness…’ And in that moment, I feel it - my own goodness. I feel lots of other things too: my envy, my ageing body, my joy, my loss, my longing to hold my own small ones who aren’t small anymore. I feel my searing grief that my own parents can’t hold me like she’s being held ever again because both of them died last year. This maelstrom of emotions wells up and somehow it is all welcome in this little girl’s gaze. She doesn’t turn from it and so I don’t turn from it either. We are simply here together, safe harbours in each other’s worlds. As I write this travelling back on the train after several days teaching on our year-long professional coaching programme, it strikes me afresh that this is exactly what our work at Thirdspace is dedicated to uncovering and cultivating; the capacity to greet each other as Lizzie’s baby girl greets us, the willingness to generate safe relationships where we can all grow and discover how to attend more wisely and passionately to the people and work we most care about. What a thing it was this past week to be in the company of a group of people who are committed to developing this way of being in the world. It can be stretching, confronting work and I was overwhelmed with gratitude as I looked around the room beholding our current group of students, remembering all our graduates and imagining the precious souls who we are yet to meet and learn with. But of course it isn’t only in the Thirdspace community that this way of being and relating is happening. I see it in so many places and it gives me great hope. All around me, even on this short journey home I’ve witnessed – right there alongside the pushing and shoving, the rushing and complaining - countless loving, tender, humorous interactions: people simply being, like Lizzie’s baby girl, a safe harbour for one another. And all at once, I remember to keep seeing and being that kind of welcome in the world. Below is a link to a poem I wrote, inspired by time spent in the gaze of Lizzie’s little girl, and one to a conversation Lizzie and Justin had about it on their weekly podcast Turning Towards Life. With love,
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