Catherine:
Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted Podcast. This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose. I'm your host, Catherine Cowell. So I'm really delighted to be joined again by Maria Garvey. Do you just want to briefly introduce yourself for people who haven't listened to you the last time that we chatted?

Maria:
Oh my goodness. Well it changes every time. I mean I could tell you a list of things that I have done with my life and done in my life But who I am right now, I think, is a woman who's on the cusp of retirement from all the work that I did over the years and in working with people with intellectual disabilities and others in the margins and revealing their gifts to a woman who is beginning to embrace the more marginalized parts in myself, I suppose the parts that when I was busy never had a space to come to the center So I'm really, I think, coming to know parts of myself that are wanting to be known at this time in my life. And some, you know, I think that might happen with aging anyway

Catherine:
Yeah.

Maria:
But it's certainly happening for me. Brilliant.

Catherine:
I'm wondering what you have been contemplating that you thought we might chat about today. But actually, I think

Maria:
What's really capturing my attention at the moment is love. How does love get defined outside and beyond? How we as human beings think about love. How I, Maria Garvey in the past have thought about love. Yes. How might love transcend any of my understandings of love? What has the unknown got to say to me about love. That which is as yet unknown. And I suppose one of the reasons that I'm drawing to that is that at the moment I have a spinal fracture that is compressing a disc.

Catherine:
Oh dear.

Maria:
I've had it for over a year. Which means that I live in a lot of pain a lot of the time. I also have my elbow that was replaced three years ago. It is really painful. So all the right side of my body is in chronic pain really. I mean I don't like saying out loud I live with chronic pain, but I do right now. I might not always, but I do right now. And all of my attempts to make it better or to heal it or to live with it or whatever have been in vain. I mean it just depends on the day, the hour, the moment. People say on a good day, when I have a good day, people say, Now what did you do to make that happen? 'Cause you could learn from that. But it defies my learning. It defies everything I knew about who I was, actually. It defies everything And the longer it goes on, the more I'm fairly certain that it has come, at a time in my life, to bring something new into my life that might have no other way of coming.

Catherine:
Hmm.

Maria:
Right. It's been really interesting to journey with this chronic pain and even to like not that I want to put it into any box or anything, but even to see how I am moving with it You know, all of what it brings up. And it brings up loads. It brings up fear. Is it always going to be like this? It brings up it. Am I doing something? Did I do something? Did I cause this? Could I have lived differently? Could I have paid more attention to my body? That brings up shame very quickly. You know, it's like I'm getting old and the body I'm living in now is not one that I wanted ever imagined for myself and I must have ignored my body in such a way that it now it's not able for the world. And uh like these are all thoughts obviously, but there's also emotions that a thought generates or the emotion generates a thought. But in it all, Catherine, for a long time there was nothing that I would say was love. Right? Maybe it's all love. Maybe love contains it all. But I didn't have them together for a very long time. And when I look back at 2025, the entire year was taken over by pain. There were things I would normally do that I can't do anymore. I flew to France on enough chance that it would work. And while I was in France for three nights I couldn't take my shoes off. I couldn't bend to take my shoes off I slept in my clothes and my shoes, right? Because my bath just didn't like the flight. And all of it is serving me. in something new emerging, just very slowly emerging. I go for acupuncture once a week. And I was in a really laid low state a few weeks ago and said to him, I can't, like I have eight months of weekly acupuncture and do you have any idea what it's like to be riddled with pain all day long? From the m moment I wake up To the moment I lie in my bed at night. Anyway, he said, Well, you know, that's probably not the way to be looking at it. And I just took um bridge and said, For God's sakes, would you just listen to me Can you just hear what I'm saying, please? I said, I can't hear myself. I need someone else to hear me saying how hard this is And he was a bit taken aback and he said, I said, Do you even know what it's like To live with pain all the time instead of giving me all your great ideas as to why I shouldn't think this way or how I'm getting better. And I just went on and a rant. And then he said, I know. He said, 20 years ago I was where you are now. And he said my book life fell apart. He said life as it was then no longer fitted me. And it squeezed me It was such an incredible image for me. It squeezed me to the point where I had to give up. That was really interesting. Like I kind of I thought yeah life as it was no longer fitted me and it had started to squeeze me so I had to give up And then he said to me, you know Maria, that incredible strength in you and that joy and that resilience that has done you so many favors In all of the adversities of life, in dealing with the traumas and dealing with all that you've dealt with in your life and dealing with them gracefully That strength and that resilience is no longer serving you. It's not serving you because it's making you stand up against the pain instead of leaning into it and just being with it and feeling it. and feeling the vulnerability of being in pain. You know, Catherine, it was sobering. Because it's not my image of myself. For all I talk about the power of vulnerability, and I do, and we have talked before about the power of vulnerability, my image of myself is that my vulnerability wouldn't come this way. That somehow or other I'd have control over it. That somehow or other it would be a concept more than a reality. And that's not how it is. Like I need help with unscrewing a bulb. I can't because my right hand doesn't work properly or arm, I can't even change the bulbs in my house. I recently tried to put up a picture on the wall using my left hand to hammer a nail and now you can imagine what happened. Like there's a gigantic hole in the wall. Because banging in a nail with your left hand and your right hand can't really hold it in place I was bang willy-nilly. It's like my will. I can do this by my will. My will is no longer it's not my will. I woke up this morning with the prayer in my mouth Let thy will be done, not mine. Like I finally am learning what it is to surrender to love. So rather than managing fear or controlling how I am in front of fear or with all my learned ways of doing that, the ways that I learned along the way was to make the best of it to look for the positive and everything, to learn from it. They were wonderful. For the time of my life that was then, they were amazing. They lasted me up till the age of 65. And then at 65 I fell one day and shattered my elbow and with it came a shattering of the ways of being. that stood me in great stead and are no longer available. And so it's a time of in between. In between what was and that which is coming into being in some way. And can like living in the in-between time.

Catherine:
Yeah, so we've talked a little bit about that before. It strikes me, Maria, that that relationship with vulnerability is really interesting because actually much of your life has been about creating space for other people who are very evidently vulnerable So that sense of vulnerability has been very real for other people, but you've not been the vulnerable one. You've been the one creating the space and for making vulnerability safe for others, I guess.

Maria:
Yeah. I hesitate to answer too quickly to that because I think I've been the vulnerable one but never willing. never able, never ready to allow that to be there.

Catherine:
Mm.

Maria:
It's not as black and white as that. No, it never is, is it? None of it is black and white. The reason I could make a space safe for anyone who has experiences vulnerability, including plants, including animals, like vulnerability is for me my natural state of being in the world. But over the years and over the years I learned ways to hide perhaps again I I don't even have the proper language anymore, but let's just say I learnt ways. to keep that which is most precious, most hidden. I absolutely believe that community is created through people who need people. I often say people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. And I've been lucky in the sense that I've been given people in my life You know, I've been given people at a time where I didn't maybe need them as much as they needed me, at least some of them Right. There were those who I probably did need but didn't know how to reach out to. Reaching out is my fragile part. I am not good at reaching out in general Probably the part of me that doesn't want to reach out is the part that's afraid that I won't get what I need. Reaching out is not my strong point. My survival instinct is to almost close the wound so that nobody can touch it. Not even me. Because vulnerability has its roots in wound. And who the hell wants to be walking around like wounded? Like I guarantee you now, what I know for certain is that I don't want to be walking around in pain.

Speaker 3
I don't want to have an arm that doesn't work. And I don't want to have a spine that I mean it moves me, you can hear it. It moves me to be so fragile. I'm afraid. of getting more fragile. It's like the next stage of my life is to really get what it is to be vulnerable. Maybe not for always, but at least for now, to really get it with all of what it is.

Maria:
Not just some notion, not just some idea, which isn't only a notion, like it's also The truth. Yes. We build community through our vulnerability. But it's much like all the big truths of life, it's way easier said than done.

Catherine:
And it happens at different layers, doesn't it? So I very much like creating spaces where people can kind of come and be themselves. And I know absolutely the truth of the fact that vulnerability is really important in that. As somebody who's facilitating that, you kind of make choices, don't you, about, well, I will be vulnerable in this way. I will open up this part of myself. I'm not gonna hide all of that, I'm not gonna pretend to be perfect. But before this conversation I'd not really noticed just how curated that vulnerability is. That doesn't make it any less precious and important, but it is So curated. Yes, that's what I'm learning.

Maria:
It's like as long as I have control over my vulnerability, I can share as much or as little as I want. When my control was taken away Which it was. Thanks be to God. Because the people I've lived my life with didn't have a choice, don't have a choice in their vulnerability. I never got that before. I mean I never thought that they had a choice. I just never thought about it at all. I never thought about surrender. Today is Ash Wednesday as we speak. Right? I never thought that that invitation, it's the book of Joel this morning in our tradition anyway, and what caught my attention this morning the the words in Lexio, because I do Lexio generally every morning with scripture. Let me just pull it up here. Yet even now, those three words, yet even now. I couldn't understand why God would be saying just those three words to me. Like I stopped and I was silent for quite a while and then I usually write. It's like I've had a conversation going on with God for forty years. Starts every single morning with good morning beloved. So this morning I said, what the hell Yet even now. Why those words, because there was a whole wonderful words following, but yet even now, return to me with all of your heart And further down it says, rend your heart, not your clothes. Right, it's from Joel chapter 2. And the thing that struck me is I would never be able to break my own heart open. I don't have that much control But it has been broken. Like with my bones, so also has my heart been broken.

Catherine:
Yeah.

Speaker 3
And the grief is the loss of my own control. It's not the grief of the loss of a beloved, although I wish my mother was alive. Next five years after she died. And I wish I had someone to say this is really hard to. At least I would said it to my mother and she'd have said, Oh loving Barn, of course it is.

Maria:
Darling, you and I talk about creating safe spaces and creating a space where people can access their own joy as well as their own sadness. But often it's to create the space where they can lay down the pain safely.

Catherine:
Yeah.

Maria:
Come with all of their hearts. Like maybe now I'm recognizing that the God of love that I pray to will do what it takes to enter my heart.

Speaker 3
Not have me out there entering other people's hearts, but really bring love to the center of my own heart. And my heart needed breaking

Maria:
But you know, I've been stoic in my life, you know, able, like strong, resilient, able to bounce back.

Speaker 3
And just in this moment of time, I know that what I have to give up is the bouncing back. and lean into this pain that in some way is breaking me open.

Maria:
Who wants to be broken open? Who wants to be broken in any way? And yet the people I've learned most from in my entire life were people who were broken. And now I'm becoming one of those. A broken open person. And what's interesting for me is that those I've loved so fully in their brokenness, I find it really hard to love myself in my brokenness.

Speaker 3
And I'm now learning, Catherine, that maybe I found it hard to love myself forever. Maybe this is the time of learning how to love myself. Because to be honest with you, I've always thought loving oneself is a bit selfish.

Maria:
Like I've had this background noise from my Christian upbringing, my Catholic upbringing, that has kind of said, oh well, you know, love others But now that line in scripture, you know, love your neighbor as you love yourself. Right? I've read love your neighbor and that'll be enough. And it felt like enough and it was wonderful and it certainly gave me a wonderful identity in the world. Like I looked good for sure And it seemed like I was loved and am loved by people, but I have not allowed any of that in. And I'm not sure that I'm alone in that. I suspect I might be just one of the human race. And that like I'm crying tears, but they're probably not only mine. Yeah. Yeah. Probably the tears of our humanity when we're not managing or controlling fear, but maybe allowing ourselves to let love in. I can't receive love until my heart is open enough to receive it. And while I've been protecting my heart, I haven't really been able to receive love. I've been able to give it. And I'm not minimizing that at all. I'm just saying Something new is happening in my life and in this new and in these tears I'm learning something about love. I don't even know if I'm learning it. I'm experiencing something about love.

Catherine:
Yes, I listened to a podcast this morning and they were talking about the spirituality of forest bathing and this guy was saying that he'd been forest bathing. He said one of the things that really struck him about that experience was that nobody was trying to find meaning in the forest for them. He said in his kind of evangelical Christian tradition it would have been about, well I I'll spend time in the forest and I will find some meaning. So we were just taken into the forest We were left there for it to do a number on us. And it feels like there's a bit of a a link.

Maria:
That doesn't feel a bit tangential to me. Because exactly that. I've been a great lady for generating meaning from everything. That's been part of my strength and resilience. Right? Yeah. Now it's like, oh, there's something about stepping into life Not needing to learn, just stepping into life. And let the unknown do its job on me. Let what I don't know. what I'm not in charge of, what I'm not in control of, do its work on me. I many, many years ago, oh, long before this day came, I fell in love with the scripture text and for those people from scripture isn't their world, forgive me, but it's not even that it's my world. I just find it Fascinating. The wisdom, not the the theology of it, not even the religious society of it. But more like just those words of wisdom and You know, the very end of John 21, when the disciples have gone back out and they've been on the ocean, and Peter, my beloved Peter, I love Peter, Jesus, his God, his saviour, his messiah, has gone, died the death of a criminal After all of the hope that they'd put on him, he died like a criminal. And God only knows what they felt. I don't know. I'm imagining a lot of it might have been shame and wondering why they'd ever followed him, and you know, wondering about a lot of things I suspect. And then Peter does Peter. Right? In the same way as Maria does Maria and Catherine does Catherine. Peter says, come on, lads, we'll go fishing. And out they go and out into the ocean and they look back and and Tiberius and there they see somebody around a fire cooking. And John, it's not Peter, John recognizes Jesus says it's the Lord. And poor old Peter, without grabbing his loincloth, just imagine. He ran for his life to get into the shore. So I love the peterness of Peter. the leader, the you know, the one who was unstoppable all the time, the one who denied. You know, like I I recognise all of that. I love lots of the conversation that Peter had with Jesus, the healing bit, you know, where Jesus gives him his ministry, not out of his strength, but then that third time when he says You know, do you love me, Peter? And Peter suddenly hears and says, You know everything. We know everything that that everything is full of my denial, you know it all. And you know that I love you. Right? I love the tenderness of that and the peterness of all of his big gusto blustering leader that put keep them all lifted up. And you know that I love you. In underneath all of that. And then Jesus said, you know, when you were young, you could do what you wanted to do, go where you wanted to go. Now that you're older, somebody will put a belt round your waist and bring you where you would rather not go. And then it says it in this, he indicated the manner of Peter's deck. And then he said, now you are to follow me after indicating the manner of Peter's death. He says, now you're to follow me. And years ago I thought, why is this text for me? Peter looked back and said, what about these others? And Jesus said, well they're not your concern. I'll be back for them. You are to follow me. And in a way, I think I've been living that journey through the years of being the Marianess of Maria, which is very like Peter, lift people up and really I have a capacity for Lifting people's spirits and hearts and always have had. And I'm fun and I'm joyful and all of those things. And in behind it all, that intimate line, and you know that I love you. And I now and have probably always thought that it's not the death of Peter, it's the death of Sinon. You know, before he took on his Peter name, like his identity was going to die. He was going to be brought where he would rather not go into that place that he named himself and you know that I love you. And that's not in any way getting taking meaning or anything, but there's a kind of a sense of I'm learning intimacy Not because of all the great things I can do, but because I have to ask people to help me. Just simply that

Speaker 3
I'm learning to trust that and you know that I love you without needing to earn it or to prove it or without needing to be who I was or to know who I will be. But at each moment. And I mean I make it sound like I'm always in need. I'm not, but but I'm more in need than I ever have been in my life before. And you can hear from my tears, and I don't know how this is going to sound in a podcast, I have no idea. And I don't like crying in front of people, but I'm very moved. into a kind of a tender, wet space in me, which you might call grief. But in that grief, I am encountering love

Catherine:
Yeah, yeah.

Maria:
And I think when you asked me about like what's on my mind at the moment, I I think I the reason I said rest Is that that is the invitation to rest into a love that's always present, that I don't have to do anything for.

Catherine:
At points in this conversation, Maria, you've sort of made it sound as if this is a completely new thing for you. And I I wonder how much this is a completely new thing, this kind of resting into love that was not earned, and how much of it is the deeper level of something that you've already spent many years kind of paving the way for and experiencing at least in part.

Maria:
Yes. That's a great observation. Yeah, it doesn't feel like it's brand new. I mean it's brand new in that I'm living it in a more extreme way. Maybe Catherine. I don't know, this is a maybe conversation. Yeah. This is all discovering for me. Maybe I always had the the sense of this, you know, the instinct for what it is to be fully human And it kind of drew me, drew me, drew me, and has been drawing me, drawing me, drawing me. Maybe along with it came the controlling of the fear of what it is to be fully human. So both the possibility of it being so fully together that we can be together in our joy, in our sorrow, in our pain and our all the parts, like all the Peter parts, the Simon parts, you know, the the denial, the love, the all of it. Like the messy com complexity of being a human being. Maybe I've always been drawn by that. And at the exact same time, maybe there was a part of me always that was afraid of it. So they were going together who are weaving their way together. I think what's happening now is that my capacity to manage the fear of it is way less because pain has worn me down.

Catherine:
Yeah

Maria:
Yeah.

Speaker 3
Do you know I don't have the strength or the resilience to manage the fear of.

Maria:
So I live by myself. I've always lived community in one way or another and still do in this village. Like I have lots of people that I would consider to be community. And yet I realized The other day I realized I lived by myself. I had a particularly bad day and I had vertical and I was really feeling out of sorts. And I felt really vulnerable Not just vulnerable, but vulnerable as in what will happen if I pass out here? How will I manage? And so before I could say to myself that'll never happen. But as it begins to happen, and I'm not saying it'll continue, hopefully it won't. I mean hopefully this is just my body tenderly or not so tenderly, certainly insistently. inviting me home to the reality of being fully human with limits. But as much as I'm in front of great fear, I'm also in front of the possibility of love in a new way Yeah. They're not separate. So you're right. It isn't new. It's just stronger. It's more closer to home. It's You know, I refer to this as my body calling me home in a way, and it kind of is. It's kind of like get out of your head garbs. Get out of your head. Pain is not something that can be controlled from your head. It needs to be felt in your body And the degree to which you allow it is the degree to which it will be healed. At least that's what I'm told in acupuncture circles and all the natural healing methodologies that I'm using. It's like there is no pill for this, but am I willing to allow myself lean into the wisdom of this body And see what happens. And I am, actually. That's the one thing I like about this time is I am courageous. Because I'm not get back into my life as it was Whereas what I'm doing now is sitting with it, as hard as that is for me, and trusting that it has its own wisdom. As much as I might be tearful as I talk to you, it is hard. I won't pretend it's not hard. On their days, like today's not a bad day. But on the bad, bad days, I wouldn't even be able to talk to you. Like I wouldn't be able to do a podcast. Yeah. So I'm not going to pretend it's not hard, but I am going to say there is a quality of intimacy that's arising slowly in this. And the intimacy is with me. You know, the intimacy is with me. It's like not finding it elsewhere, not needing to reach out for it. But to lean in and find it here. And I said to you earlier on, I don't know if I've ever known how to love myself. We all grow up in families, we learn things along the way. One of mine was to be responsible. Right. I was responsibilized, probably even before I knew love, right? So being responsible has been my love language. If I'm responsible I'll be safe and I'll be loved. That's fine. I like I'm not making anybody right or wrong. I grew up in a wonderful family. But had I learned very, very, very young was to be responsible. Dutiful probably. And it served me really, really well, Catherine. But it also in my work and in my life had me more active than sometimes I should have been. Because I had in my head, deep down beyond my own knowing, was responsibility and love were twins.

Catherine:
There is a grace, isn't there, in the fact that we can kind of get away with that when we're younger. Because I think many people would echo what you're describing, that sense of overriding what's happening in your body. Because when we're younger, for many of us I think it's true that we we don't have the kind of I don't know, the emotional, the spiritual, the soul capacity to deal with the fact that we can't be responsible all the time. So we sort of have bodies that will carry us through and then we reach this place where that's less possible. It's really interesting having this conversation with you this week because well, over the last few months actually, but particularly this week, I have been encountering some fragility in my own body. So I needed to go to the GP, I need to have some tests done. And I took a flight in the autumn and it was a long flight and I I just paid some extra money. to be on an aisle seat because I knew that if I had to sit still for like more than half an hour, this was gonna be really painful. It was like But there was an element of fear of please don't trap me where I can't move, because I don't think I will cope with that. And that is new, you know, that space of vulnerability.

Maria:
Yeah. And I don't know how this who listens to your podcast, young or old. But like I spent so many years coaching people through burnout. And I've been saying things like burnout isn't doing too much or doing too little. Burnout is quite often is that the whole of your heart is no longer in something. You're no longer wholehearted Now, in order to be responsible or in order to be in the world that I've lived in in the past, not necessarily all the time, but from time to time, being good was equated with keeping my promises, fulfilling the expectations of me. And there were times where I'd lost my wholeheartedness. You can return with all of your heart to today's scripture text again. You know, it's not too late The day I broke my elbow, I actually had a conversation with my financial consultant, because I worked for myself and I it was the time of accounts and she said, Are you busy today? And I said, Oh yeah, I have a boss. She's unrelenting And she said, Who's your boss? And I said, I'm my own boss. I said, and I said this as a joke, Catherine. I said, I'll tell you one thing. I am not listening to her now. I said I have a meeting at one o'clock I have one hour and the sun is shining and I'm going out for a walk. I went for a walk on a path that was isolated and away from the world. I didn't get back home for three more weeks and when I came back home I had an artificial elbow I fell in that hour and I have never come back to s where I was before I fell. I'm not the kind of person that ascribes to God creating these awful things so that we stop. Not at all Right? I don't believe in that at all. But I actually believe that for some odd reason it took that for me. And it's only now, like three years later, that I'm actually coming into the whole of my heart. My body is saying, no, you can't do that. Like I have to listen to my body before I listen to my excitement. I'm somebody that's enthused by so many things in life that I can say yes to twelve things. And then once I've said yes, I will fulfill them all because you can count on me that if I say yes, I will fulfill without listening to whether or not I've left my heart a mile behind. I'm now doing this solely out of duty because I am the magnificent dutiful Maria Anybody who'd know me would say, well when Maria says she'll do it, she'll do it. And so my whole identity has been about a joyful, dutiful, I'm going to say daughter, woman, or a child. And that's gone Because some days I have to say no even if I've said yes to you a week ago.

Catherine:
So that new intimacy with yourself that you mentioned is growing. You spoke earlier about your mother and the fact that when she was there you would be able to tell her how difficult things were. And you described her very loving, compassionate, embracing response to that. And it sounds as if that is part of what you are needing to offer to yourself more fully than you ever have. Yes.

Maria:
Yes. Yes. In her absence it means finding her interiorly. It's finding my mother in my own bones. So there are parts of my mother that I would prefer, perhaps Because duty was love. Duty was how you were meant to behave in the world. But her compassion when I would ring and upset about something That's when her duty fell away. She never said you should pull pull up your socks. She'd say, Oh you cratering.

Speaker 3
You know, in this lovely Carrie accent. You know, oh shouldn't God love us And she'd say, Oh shit, there's days like this until God help us.

Maria:
Um You'd kinda just I mean, you just feel like you fell into this bowl that could hold it all as much as well that's normal. Like it it normalized. what can feel awful. She said the Sacred Heart will never let me down, and he never will. With this absolute faith in God that she referred to as the Sacred Heart, because she's an Irish Catholic woman But I also want to ha be able to say love never let me down and it never will. If my surrender is to anything, it's to trust that I don't need to be the one who makes myself well or not well or I can blame myself. Like I my automatic go-to place I've discovered in this few months particularly is. I think everything is my fault, Catherine. And because I think it's my fault, I think it's my duty to fix it. And that would include my father's alcoholism. When I was a child, that's how I became really responsible. If I could love him more then he wouldn't need to drink. It was woven into my bones, like but my bones are saying no more of this. My bones are saying enough. We can't carry any more of your notion of what a good person is. If you'd said to me two years ago, what do you say a good person is, I wouldn't have said any of this to you. I'd have given you all the concepts. Now I'm realizing, oh Maria Garvey. I actually said today the osteopath So it isn't my fault that I'm not getting better. He said, you can't make yourself better. It's not your fault. So I heard myself saying, 68 years of age, talking like a little girl, saying, this is my fault. And I realized, oh now isn't that an interesting in the background noise

Catherine:
Yeah. You were talking about creating s safe spaces of vulnerability where people are safe to put things down, and I I suddenly have this image of your bones creating this safe space and love holding you in this safe space where it is safe to put down some of these notions that you've been able to carry but you can't anymore.

Maria:
Yeah. There's part of me still not wanting to offer you the whole of my humanity.

Speaker 3
There's part of me saying, I shouldn't be saying all this for a podcast. There's part of me wanted to clean it up and to sound strong. There's two energies. One is the freedom to step into what I really stand for. And the cost of that. I would love to hear this kind of podcast in a way like somebody will say it's hard And it's okay that it's hard. And it's not the end of the world that it's hard. And it's hard. And yet there's a part of me that's saying, I don't ever want to hear myself saying that in the world. And I'm very surprised that our conversation, that I'm so open actually. Like I'm thinking, is this who I'm becoming? Who I've always wanted to be Because you said to me, this isn't new for you. And you're right, Catherine. All my life I've wanted to be this courageous. And even as I'm doing it, there's a little other voice in me saying Wow, you're leaving yourself wide open here. And maybe that's vulnerability to be wide open And you might not even sound wide open to somebody else. I might not sound wide open to you, but I feel wide open to me, because I'm so used to protecting the parts that I don't want you to see And in that I'm willing to say that must be the most human I've ever been. And we all have parts we don't want anyone to see. And they're just small. human, vulnerable little parts that everybody else knows. You're not saying something brand new in the world. You're just saying it brand new because you've never shared it Yeah.

Maria:
I was thinking the other day about the power of twelve step programs because I was talking to a group that I work with and they're so the group is wonderful but human vulnerability isn't part of their imagination for the world. And I happen to say, you know, we could offer people what twelve-step programs offer people, which is A fellowship of fragile humanity and fragile humans together finding each other And as I'm sitting here with you, I suspect I'm sitting with another fragile human, just like me. Yeah. I think I couldn't have spoken as I'm speaking if I hadn't picked that up from you. Like you may be holding the space. As I look at you and speak to you, I realize I'm not alone. Yeah. And it isn't that I'm not alone that you can fix me or make me better or help, but that I think I'm speaking to someone who knows. And I have a hunch that all of us know. Catherine, it's I'm stunned at how much of me has been worn away You know, rend your heart, not your clothes. It's like, let your heart be rent rented open. I looked up the word rend today 'cause it's an unusual word. I didn't quite know the meaning of it, and it means violently opened. They're tone open. And that's today's scripture from Joe on the on Ash Wednesday. And I got to thinking, you know, I wouldn't open my heart this way voluntarily. I deserve to be protected and to look good, you know, when I'm feeling crapped. You know. I'd better look good and I no longer have much choice in that. Like there's I'm leaking everywhere. I'm leaking my tears are leaking. My pain is leaking. All of it is leaping. I am becoming who I've always said I'd love to be. But not in the ways that I thought I would.

Catherine:
Yeah. So tell me about this love that you are encountering.

Maria:
Well, it's like there are two things. One is When you live alone, it's easy to think, oh my god, I don't have a spouse, I don't have a child, da da. Like I have lots of stories about what love looks like in reality. But recently I've been thinking about microdoses of love. That's my brand, really, in a way. I was coaching somebody this morning, an Israeli man who was living with Palestinians in community, and life is You know, doing that is huge. He was talking and he said, I have an image of you sitting on a beach with a coconut shell And I have an image of you chatting to everybody who passes you. And every time you chat to them, their hearts get bigger and bigger. And I just thought, oh, what a lovely. Image from this young man. I've been thinking recently about love not being anything to do with the status of relationship. You know, marry, not marry, parent, not parent but everything to do with the moments where your heart rises up. Like an encounter with somebody in the post office. And I realized that my life is filled with micro doses of love All the time. Like this is one of them. So my heart is alive. It's going through all sorts of as you can see energies in this conversation And I was thinking about years ago when I read about the people most at risk of dying by suicide were toll booth operators. And I was really surprised and the second people most of us were dentists as it happens. But to all the booth operators was interesting to me So I decided that my way of intervening would be that every time I passed a toll booth, I'd give the toll booth operator a bar of chocolate. Brilliant. And thank them for being so good, right? For being so nice to me. So I did, and I had multiple conversations with Tollwood operators. Over the years. Right now, unfortunately, I have a one of those things on my carved so I can go through without stopping. But at the time I just thought this was my way of changing the world. That bars of chocolate in the car patrolled with the operators was my way of making a difference. And it got me thinking actually just recently I was laughing at the whole idea, how do you walk in the world with the possibility of being a microdose of love? Like you walk as a microdose Right? You don't give a microdose, you just are a microdose of love. So it's much less onerous. The whole thing about the microdoses is that The theory uh behind it it's not just my theory, but I've heard I've read about it. If you give it or if somebody receives a microdose, it automatically comes back to you. It's not like you're going around doing this. It's like you're creating it each time you're in an encounter. So it's for me it's really magnificently enticing to walk in the world as a microdose. Because if there's no pressure, it's no like nothing to do You don't earn it, you don't do it, you don't choose it, you don't control it, you just are it. And so I've been thinking a lot about just the freedom of knowing just simply that love is microdosing everywhere. We don't talk about it, we don't notice it because we think love is something different. I think love is something different. Maybe I said earlier, responsibility. I had it equated with love. Safety can be equate equated with love. Security. Feeling something good. Like feeling joy. But what if love was all of it and held together, made possible by microdosis. What did all of it, the grief, the sorrow, the anger, the joy, this loneliness Every bit of it all existed and was woven together with my doses of love. Just I had great fun having these thoughts because I had great fun thinking like how could I do it today? How could I Like if I'm passing a stranger in the street, I make eye contact and that's my microdose. And I'm amused by it all. I've just discovered that one of my greatest gifts in life is I'm amused by life. I find life entertaining Now, you would never have known from the first part of this conversation, but I even find this entertaining. I find the fact that I can be talking to you about microdoses and talking to you about be completely vulnerable. I can be saying I'm showing you a side of myself I don't want anyone to know and I can at the exact same time be thinking this is just another microdose Well, you know, there's an amusement going on in the back of my head a lot of the time.

Catherine:
Yes. I had a moment yesterday I was st struggling a bit yesterday, just life was feeling quite a lot. And I'd I'd gone to study at uh somewhere where I was having a bit of lunch and it just hadn't worked. As I was leaving this pub, I managed to confuse some people who were at a pool table because the door was sort of past them. And there was just this moment when they were looking at me, I said, I'm no it's alright, I'm just leaving through the door. And this guy grinned at me and said, I find that That's better than the window, isn't it? And I said, yes, absolutely. I find that generally to be the case. But it simply lifted me. You know, the that moment of humour was absolutely the microdose that I that I needed and my energy just shifted. in that moment. Completely shifted.

Maria:
And my health and my pain and everything shifts with microdosis. Is that both giving them and receiving them? Oh yeah. Yeah yeah. Something funny will happen. Somebody will say something funny. Like they mightn't be offering a microdose. It's I'm listening for microdoses. I'm constantly amused. Like my microdoses are usually amusing. Like I don't know if you can see I've dyed my hair purple. Oh brilliant. I'm now just about to get a tattoo on my wrist of an elephant. It feels like fun I'm I'm actually doing the tattoo on my right arm, which is the one that's really sore. I don't know if it'll tolerate the pain, but I'm doing it because elephants I'm I'm I have a close connection to elephants and always have had for years and years and years. But that's that really is another story. But Anesha's the Hindu goddess, she's known as the remover of obstacles And so when I look at it, I can see this arm is in itself the remover of obstacles. Maybe it has caused obstacles because I can't use it as well as I could, but maybe it also removes obstacles. I just want to love my arm. as it is, with all that it is. And that for me is amusing. It's like, imagine having a white elephant on my wrist. Like it feels like, oh this is so much fun. Yeah. Because fun has been always for me a big micro doser of love. Yeah, there's a local man who is a very old man and he's living in sheltered housing and he comes his name is Brendan in the village and he comes out and sits on a seat on a sunny day and just sits. I'd sometimes drive down the village just to sit beside him because he's magnificent. He's a wise, wise, magnificent man. Doesn't speak much now speaks really slowly, walks really slowly. But I sometimes like to think that just being a companion on the bench with him, if it's as good for him as it is for me, then it's really good. 'Cause I love being with him And it's tiny, like it's it's a microdose. So I think my life is really given by microdose and my lack of life or loss of life And I don't mean death, but like the loss of life, is when I start thinking that anything I do is important. Microdose magnificent. I can be that any time and I'm fully alive. When I think I have to be responsible for somebody else's well being. It can drain my life, even though I don't see it happening. As we finish this, I think what you've helped me to come to see is that I'm learning in this time What really gives me life, not what gives me identity or gives me a good reputation or gives me comfort or security, but what really gives me life is the encounters where our lives rise up together.

Catherine:
Yeah. That sense that there is love through all and in all and popping up all over the place and and we are reminded that we are held By this magnificent infinite love through what you're describing as microdoses that we are both giving and receiving.

Maria:
Love is actually at work And it's great when I can enter into the game of it. But it's not mine. I don't own it. I can't control it. I can't shape it. I can do nothing at all other than to participate.

Catherine:
Yeah

Maria:
And to do something as crazy as have bars of chocolate in the car for toll booth operators gives me so much even as even telling you about it, I feel my stomach. Heightening with joy. You know that kind of like. Oh how crazy and how wonderful and how unexpected. And it has nothing to do with doing anything.

Catherine:
Yeah, yeah. Probably can't take the chocolate to the dentists. They might look ascant at that.

Maria:
Probably not. That might that might not be the appropriate intervention.
Oh Catherine, thank you. Thank you so much.

Catherine:
It's been a beautiful conversation. Thank you very much.

[Music]
Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted Podcast. If you'd like to get in touch, you can email lovedcalledgifted@gmail.com. You can find a transcript of this podcast at lovedcalledgifted.com And that's also the place to go if you're interested in the loved called gifted course or if you'd like to find out about spiritual direction or coaching. Thank you for listening.