“This is travel writing at its most luminous. Theodore Richards combines the storytelling gifts of a bard with the limpid seeing of a contemplative. His social commentary is penetrating without being violent and his advice to his three beloved children is exquisitely unsentimental.“
– Mirabai Starr, Author of God of Love and Caravan of No Despair
To begin, I want to share the somes lines of Theodore Richards latest work’s A Letter to My Daughters: Remembering the Lost Dimension and the Texture of Life.
‘Before you were born, I went on a journey that would take me around the world completely, a spherical, three-dimensional journey. A journey of dirt and blood. A journey of taste and bodily sensation. A journey of texture.
I am writing you because I want you to live in this world, to feel it in its fullness, its depth. I want you to fall in love with the world, flawed and sorrowful as it is. Your lives and the world as a whole—these are indistinguishable to me—depend on this.’ (p.3)
A Letter to My Daughters transported me back to my own traveling days. Richards’ apt ability to describe the texture of his travels brought me back to my journals when I was hitching hiking in Norway, sleeping on beaches in Israel, and stumbling upon a political rally in Haiti. With the eye of poet, Richards connects the throughlines of impact on his journey across global and textured landscapes, to actually be in place and feel its pulsing heart when faceless interests are trying to flatten it. This is a conversation on the richness of life to be found in diversity and curiosity, cultivating a textured life, parenting in times such as these, and the golden mystery of paying attention to darkness within and without. You can get your own copy of A Letter to My Daughters: Remembering the Lost Dimension and the Texture of Life wherever beautiful books are sold.
Theodore Richards is a philosopher, poet and novelist. He has won numerous awards for his writing, most recently winning the Nautilus Book Award for his book The Great Re-imagining: Spirituality in an Age of Apocalypse. As the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project, editor of the online magazine Re-imagining: Education, Culture, World, and a board member of Homebound Publications, his work is dedicated to re-imagining education and creating new narratives about our place in the world.
You can learn more about Theodore Richards at theodorerichards.com, on Facebook, and Twitter.
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EPISODE SHOW NOTES
Resources by Theodore Richards
- A Letter to My Daughters: Remembering the Lost Dimension & the Texture of Life
- The Great Re-Imagining: Spirituality in an Age of Apocalypse
- Handprints on the Womb
- Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism, and the Birth of a New Myth
- The Crucifixion
- Creatively Maladjusted: The Wisdom Education Movement Manifesto
- The Conversions
Resources Mentioned
- Original Blessing by Matthew Fox
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
People
- Matthew Fox
- James Baldwin
- Cormac McCarthy
- Brian Swimme
- Thomas Berry
- Wendell Berry
- Rainer Marie Rilke
Drink Pairing
- Spanish Red Wine
Highlights
- Where do I find you today?
- This podcast focuses on the contemplative posture by kindling the examined life. When you hear the word “contemplative”, how does that moniker relate to you or work, if you think it does at all?
- How does that manifest in your day-to-day life?
- If someone were going to teach a class on the formation of Theodore Richards what 3 works that formed you would definitely be on that syllabus?
- You vividly document your experience at Altamira in both The Great Re-Imagining: Spirituality in an Age of Apocalypse and A Letter to My Daughters. What was that experience that ‘tore open your soul’?
- So from the get of A Letter to My Daughters I was struck by quotes you chose to engage the reader. One from Howard Thurman, Van Gogh, Dante and Kazuo Ishiguro. I found the themes of your book laid out in those quotes that harken the importance of love, memory, texture and usefulness. Were these quotes guiding you as you wrote this?
- Your use of the word ‘texture’ is what really gripped me. You tell story of the man you met who was trying to flatten the world so he could consume it. What does ‘texture’ and ‘flattening’ mean to you?
- In a world light up by screens, you emphasize the importance of knowing darkness and being in dark places…why does intimate interaction or stepping into darkness matter?
- We always pair an episode with a drink, what drink of choice goes best with this conversation?
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