Don't Hold Me To This: Recent Episodes
Jeremy Reeves and Shaynor Newsome
What does our reaction to another person’s pain mean about us as humans? Why, when someone experiences something heightened, heavy, painful, or extraordinary, can we feel it in ourselves, in our bodies, in our hearts?
Responding to a poem called “A Retreat to the National Forest, Ostensibly to Pray” we reflect on all they ways we belong with each other as human beings, today on Don’t Hold me To This.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is produced by Shaynor Newsome and Jeremy Reeves. A big way you can support our work is by sharing this with your friends
or, you know, if you hate it, share it with your enemies. Music this week is by Enzo Orefice and we20fifty.
Like the podcast, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you are on. You can find out more, do some more reading, get in touch, and subscribe to our writings at dontholdmetothis.substack.com.
Here is a reading of the piece On A Retreat To The National Forest, Ostensibly To Pray that we discuss in the upcoming episode 15 of Don't Hold Me To This. You can read the piece for yourself at dontholdmetothis.substack.com
We humans were made to make a difference in the world, and each of us has somewhere maybe deep within us a sense of how we are designed to do that: a love, a longing, a gift we want to develop and deploy into the world for the common good. And each of us has or has had at some point a job—that thing we do to pay our bills, to feed ourselves or our family, to make ends meet. Often, maybe too often, who we are designed to be and what we find ourselves doing are mismatched, and we feel a dissonance, a friction in our souls and in our sense of our meaning in the world. When Who You Are and What You Do Don’t Match, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is produced by Shaynor Newsome and Jeremy Reeves.A big way you can support our work is by sharing this with your friends or, you know, if you hate it, share it with your enemies.Music this week is by Oleksandr Koltsov, The Turquoise Moon, and Gerardo Garcia Jr.Like the podcast, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you are on.You can find out more, do some more reading, get in touch, and subscribe to our writings at dontholdmetothis.substack.com
Here is a reading of the piece "Swinging a Hammer" that we discuss in the upcoming episode 14 of Don't Hold Me To This. You can read the piece for yourself at dontholdmetothis.substack.com
It is hard to be told the hard truth: that we’ve made a mistake, that we’ve hurt a person’s feelings, that we’ve wronged someone is some real way. But a harder truth than that, and maybe more unbearable, is to be told that we are good, true, and beautiful. Why is it so hard to hear that we humans are remarkably lovely, and why is it so heavy a name to bear? Ordinary Lives are Remarkable Lives, on this episode of Don’t Hold Me To This.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is produced by Shaynor Newsome and Jeremy Reeves. A big way you can support our work is by sharing this with your friends or, you know, if you hate it, share it with your enemies.
Music this week is by Boris Skalsky and Jon Presstone.
Like the podcast, subscribe, and comment. You can find out more, do some more reading, get in touch, and subscribe to our writings at dontholdmetothis.substack.com.
Here is a reading of the piece "The Most Fundamental Thing About Us" that we discuss in the upcoming episode 13 of Don't Hold Me To This. You can read the piece for yourself at dontholdmetothis.substack.com
I think it is right to say that we all want to help in times of deep need—when a friend is hurting, we want to be a healer. But sometimes the tragedy seems too big, too far beyond our ability to help. And sometimes the tragedy is us, is in us, and worked too deeply into our story. What then, what do we do then?
Tragedy, Empathy, and Withness, on this episode of Don’t Hold Me To This.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This. Music this week is by Humans Win, CJ Harris, and Q Hef 777. Like the podcast, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you are on
You can find out more, do some more reading, get in touch, and subscribe to our writings at dontholdmetothis.substack.com
Here is a reading of the piece "An Encounter with My Attorney--an Accidental Ash Wednesday Reading" that we discuss in the upcoming episode 12 of Don't Hold Me To This.
In a poem called “I Happened to Be Standing” Mary Oliver said
“I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do”
And maybe that is as true of any of us as it was of Mary Oliver--that we don’t know a thing about praying, and we don’t know what they do, and we don’t know what counts. Mary Oliver wondered if the sunflower’s blaze is their prayer, if the cat’s half sleeping is its prayer. And we wonder, from our ordinary lives through our ordinary days, what all counts.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This
Music this week is by Humans Win. Like the podcast, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you are on. You can find out more, do some more reading, get in touch, and subscribe to our writings at dontholdmetothis.substack.com.
In preparation for Episode 11, here is a reading of the poem The Only Way I Can Figure.
For me, as far back as I can remember, doubt and faith have always come as a pair; twin companions in a way, joined at the hip. That always made me feel uneasy— I think I must have been told sometime, somewhere, that the goal of faith was to get rid of doubt.
But what if doubt and faith are not adversarial? What if it is doubt that sometimes carries us to our faith? And what if our doubts are, at least in part, a misunderstanding of our faith?
Doubt and Faith, Doubt as Faith, today on Don’t Hold Me To This
If you are enjoying Don’t Hold Me To This, consider liking, subscribing, following, commenting, whatever makes sense on the platform you use, and you can also subscribe to our written pieces at dontholdmetothis.substack.com
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This. Music this week is by Marshall Usinger and C. J. Harris.
I remember as a child imagining a time as an adult when I’d know everything I’d need to know, with nothing left over. I’d have all the answers, delineated in black and white, I would have arrived at peak man.
I don’t know where I got that idea, but I imagine I’m not the only one who had it.
But what if growing as a human being is something other than no longer having anything to learn? What if black and white thinking is not a mark of having arrived? And what do we do when we’ve had that kind of thinking foisted upon us? How do we change? How do we heal?
Finding space in the gray, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This
Like the podcast, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you are on
You can find out more, do some more reading, get in touch, and subscribe to our writings at dontholdmetothis.substack.com
A new conclusion seems to have become fixed in our political, cultural, moral, and theological landscape.
An ever-shrinking narrowness, a tightening dogmatic exclusivity demands now that the foundation of our friendships must be lock step agreement in the minutest of details on an endless set of topics…and we’ve all just sort of agreed.
But what if it’s not true? What if our most important conversations and relationships can occur on a level beneath our conclusions? What if can talk freely, creatively, with exploration in our hearts, with improvisation at our core, with human commitment as our catalyst and with friendship as our guide and goal?
Don’t hold me to this is a cultivation of that sort of conversation, and an invitation into the possibility of that kind of friendship.
Thanks for being here. Subscribe, follow, leave a like, make a comment, if you are listening or watching on a platform where those make sense.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.
You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com
In much of our religious observance of God we might get the idea that whatever God is, he is out there, big, and distant in the universe. But during this Christmas observance, we seem to inhabit a very different sort of story.
What does the humanity of the Story of God tell us about God? And what does that kind of God tell us about us? Humanity, God, and the Humanity of God, today on Don’t Hold Me to This
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.
You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com
One person said that the central friction with the son in the Prodigal story is that he had forgotten where he belonged. Maybe at our core, to be human is to belong--to belong to a place and with that place, to belong with and for a community.
But why, then, is it so common for us to feel rootless and displaced? Why if belonging is part of what we are made for, do we experience so much exclusion? What is it we are afraid of?
Belonging and Fear, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.
You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com
I have a voice in my head (maybe you do, too; maybe we all do) that when faced with some moment of decision, some moment charged with possibility, the voice says “you’ll never make it,” “you will fail,” “who do you think you are to even try?”
Why is that? Who is that? And what does it take move despite that voice?
Shame, Imagination, and a Shared World, on this episode of Don’t Hold Me To This.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This. You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com
Maybe there’s not a good answer to the question of God’s silence in response to our longing and desperation. And maybe its a thing that we finally understand by years of experience rather than through some thorough analysis. But still, what do we do when God’s presence seems like an empty room?
The Silence of God part two, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This. You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com
Someone once described God as a God who can’t stop speaking, and maybe that’s right. But I think for many of us, especially in our most desperate moments and our most desperate prayers, we experience something other than that.
What do we do when, shouting into the ether, or begging for relief up into the sky, the only thing we get back is the echo of our own voices?
The Silence of God, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.
You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com
Most humans spend most of their life mostly working. One researcher found that over the course of a life a person will spend 90,000 hours at their job, and that doesn’t include all of the other responsibilities we have that don’t count as our job: parenting, neighboring, mowing the lawn, fixing the dishwasher, feeding the dog, having a hobby.
We all have work to do: a set of responsibilities that are ours, everyday, lying on our shoulders. But what does work mean? And why is it so central to who we are and loom so large on our horizons? And how do we value it well? And does it matter ultimately in the final sweep of all things.
Work, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.
Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This. You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com
All of our lives are an improvisation, an effort to live with integrity in a way that is fit to the world and what we ought to make of it, what we ought to make with it, and what we ought to make for it. And all of that is done into the unknown with real risk and we don’t have certainty about much of anything. How do we live in such a place? We improvise
Improvisation on Don’t Hold Me To This
You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com