The Burning Questions: Recent Episodes
Steve Wasserman
Psychotherapist Steve Wasserman and a guest sit down to have a chat about a question that is burning for them: be it a personal issue or one related to a topic close to the guest's heart.
Some kind of creative intervention is applied to each question (a tarot card , a poem, a piece of music or art) in an attempt to "try to love the questions themselves - like locked rooms, or a book written in a foreign tongue (Rilke)", but also with the hope for some magic, some insight, and an interesting conversation.
Email stevewasserman AT gmail DOT com if you'd like to talk about one of your BQs!
In this episode, Karishma and I talk about the kinds of spats she gets into with her sister and how these might be more peacefully, as well as expeditiously, resolved.
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This episode of TBQ is sponsored by the following poem by Adrienne Rich:
WOMEN
My three sisters are sitting
on rocks of black obsidian.
For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are.
My first sister is sewing her costume for the procession.
She is going as the Transparent Lady
and all her nerves will be visible.
My second sister is also sewing,
at the seam over her heart which has never healed entirely.
At last, she hopes, this tightness in her chest will ease.
My third sister is gazing
at a dark-red crust spreading westward far out on the sea.
Her stockings are torn but she is beautiful.
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Music used in this episode: "I Love You, I Hate You" by Little Simz (Tiny Desk Concert version)
In this episode Sophie (psychotherapist, single) asks a burning question that her friend Steve (psychotherapist, also single) might also like to have answered: "Will It Ever Happen For Me?"
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This episode of The Burning Questions is sponsored by two poems:
REQUEST
Please love me
And I will play for you
this poem
upon the guitar
I myself made
out of cardboard and black threads
when I was ten years old.
Love me or else.
-Franz Wright
THE HOUSE OF BELONGING
I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.
But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.
And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.
This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.
-David Whyte
Why do our burning questions burn in the way they do? I try to answer this by looking back at the phenomenon of PostSecret, and how burning questions often tap into core needs, longing, and yearnings such as the yearning for orientation, meaning, coherence and understanding, as well as self-direction, competence, belonging and connection.
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This episode of TBQ is sponsored by the following passage from Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (translation: Charlie Louth):
“But all the same I believe that you need not remain without solution if you hold to things like those now refreshing my eyes. If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor – then everything will grow easier, more unified and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the intellect, which, amazed, remains a step behind, but in your deepest consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge. I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear one, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually,, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future."
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Music:
Hania Rani – Live from Studio S2
Sting - Fragile (Piano Cover)
Celestial Sphere by David Crowell