Holding Space with James A. Pearson
I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did!
You can find James at JamesAPearson.com [https://jamesapearson.com/] or on Instagram @JamesAPearson [https://www.instagram.com/jamesapearson?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==]
And check out his fantastic newsletter here. [https://jamesapearson.com/sign-up/] There are so many beautiful insights each Sunday. We talk about one of my favorites towards the middle of this interview.
And of course, The Wilderness That Bears Your Name [https://jamesapearson.com/wilderness-book/], James’ book of poems. It is a fantastic gift, I have sent it to friends of mine during their own moments of winter or even spring.
MADISONJames, I’m so excited to be talking to you today. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for weeks now, especially because I have my new baby and she doesn’t stick to a schedule. Even the ones that she’s supposed to. So having phone calls is definitely not. On her radar.
JAMESI’ve been looking forward to it too. I just snuck away from my 16-month-old son and my wife is very generously taking him out to a park so we can chat. So I get it.
MADISON Oh my gosh. It’s like impossible. I’m usually very dependable. And I think one of the hardest things that I’ve had to deal with is not being as dependable and being a little flakier.
JAMESYeah. Losing that level of control.
MADISONYeah, I just want to be able to do the things I say I can do. I usually don’t overextend myself. Usually, I know what my limit is, and I’m like, oh, I don’t know my limit anymore.
JAMESYeah, I absolutely hear that.
JAMESI mean, I think I’m almost 10 or nine or 10 months, further along on the (parenthood) journey than you and I haven’t cracked that code. So if you crack it, then please let me know.
MADISONWell, that’s good that I have that to look forward to: feeling this way for the next… however long that’s going to be!
I was excited to talk to you because you’re going through this similar experience. I keep forwarding your newsletters to my partner because he is having the fatherhood experience too. And so much of what you’re saying, I feel like it so directly applies to what he’s going through.
JAMESOh, I’m glad I’m not alone in it.
MADISONYeah, he’s always like, thanks for sending these. He loves your newsletter.
JAMESThat’s wonderful, Thank you.
MADISON Maybe you can start by saying a little bit about yourself and how you got here, and what you’ve been up to lately.
JAMESYeah, totally. Well, let’s see. I am, what still feels like, a very new (Dad) at 16 months. And just before my son was born, I took about five years worth of poetry that I’d been writing and I compiled it all into a book that I published. It’s called The Wilderness That Bears Your Name.
So I’ve had this really fascinating like dual experience since his birth of the book being out in the world and my son being out in the world. And the book about, I think it was a month after I published it, the Instagram algorithm suddenly took it and blew up one of my poems. And so it’s just started to take off, which for me, my poetry reaching people out in the world is such a dream.
It’s like, oh my gosh, it’s happening. And at the same time, my son was born and I had less time and attention than ever to actually give to that. And so it’s just been this wild dual process of my time and my attention being so limited and my desire to engage with my other work in the world being larger than ever and kind of just living the tension between those two.
MADISONYou know, when you go into parenthood, that your time and attention is going to be so much more limited. But when you actually experience it, especially where there is something you’ve been working on for so long.
JAMESAnd it’s like I knew it to some extent, I keep telling people there is nothing anyone could have said that would have prepared me for the actual lived experience of it. Life just feels completely different
MADISONWhat do you think is like the biggest difference if you were to try to explain it to someone?
JAMESI was talking to my wife about how my experience of fatherhood, and it’s not so much a transformation of identity, it’s like a big addition to identity or a big addition to what my life is asking of me. But my actual time to give to my life didn’t grow at all.
And so I think the biggest change, or the change that I’m kind of dealing with is, my son is very… I feel very lucky. He’s very active. He’s developing great. He’s just a cannonball of a human being who does not care for sleep.
And so I get slivers of time where I can focus on anything other than him. Because when he’s awake and I’m with him, he is demanding my full attention almost all the time. And so it’s that dual thing of that can be so energetically demanding to just be in moment to moment relationship with this little creature. And at the end of that day or in the slivers that I have, there’s a decompression, and also there’s stuff I want to do, you know, like I still want to live the rest of my life too. There’s just no space for it.
MADISONAnd yeah, having the energy to do the things that you want to do. Like I’ve had the evenings free for the last two weeks, but I just keep watching. I’m like rewatching The L Word. It’s so mindless.
JAMESFor me, it’s The West Wing.
MADISONAnd my partner’s like sitting on the laptop writing, he’s been writing like every single night for those two weeks. But I’m just like, I can’t. I want to but it’s just so challenging.
But yeah finding time… like right now, you were saying that your wife’s watching your son.
JAMESYeah, she took him took him to a park.
MADISONYeah, my husband’s watching the monitor right now.
Yeah, you’re just like stealing this time whenever you can to be yourself.
JAMESYes. Exactly. To be yourself sort of undemanded by another person.
MADISONRight. Yeah. Cause you’re yourself all the time. Yeah. That’s so true. You’re yourself all the time, but you’re in caretaking mode.
JAMESYeah, totally. You’re the version of yourself that shows up for that relationship.
MADISONYes, exactly. All the time.
JAMESAll the time.
MADISONYes. Well, that’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about because your book is so inherently about grief. And I know that there are a lot of interviews with you talking about that experience. And I also would love to talk to you about that experience, but I’ve been sort of curious about the newsletters that you’ve been writing lately that talks about your grief in relation to your relationship with your child, but then also what we were just talking about now, kind of like finding space forall these versions of yourself.
One of the ones that really stuck out to me was a newsletter where you were talking about your son playing in the backyard and he’s like going to grab a weed or something he starts to put it to his mouth and as soon as you —well maybe you tell the story because you were there!
JAMESI know the one you’re talking about, yeah I think he was probably seven months old or something like that and we would take him down to a beach near our house, and it was the least relaxing experience of all time because it’s a beach that’s all little pebbles. It’s not sand. And when we would set him down, he would try to shove handfuls of pebbles in his mouth. And so it was just this constant vigilance, right?
So we were working with him, saying, “not for the mouth, not for eating”, you know, “here’s what we eat, here’s what we don’t eat”, all that stuff. And then one day we’re in our backyard and I see him pick up a weed or a rock or something. And, it was like his body was doing the, ‘I’m going to put it in my mouth.’ And then I just saw him like stop, like hit the brakes with almost a force of will slowly put it down.
And I had this dual feeling in my body of: one, I’m so proud of him for doing that. And then also feeling this grief come up that the just free animal of him just got mediated, just got moderated. And it was my voice and my influence that kind of—he brought in or came in and prompted him to put on the brakes.
And it’s like this, yeah, it’s beautiful.
It’s so beautiful that he’s learning, he’s growing, he’s becoming what we think of as human, you know?
And at the same time, there is this just free, carefree version of him that is being lost.
MADISONYeah, that hit so hard because that is gonna happen. And maybe you wouldn’t even notice it.
JAMESOh, 100%. I’m sure that sort of stuff is happening every day in ways that I don’t see.
MADISONYeah, absolutely. I know, it’s like wondering what they’re thinking or how they’re making their decisions. Are they making decisions? Are they just acting off of a complete impulse?
JAMESI just had a moment last night. So my son, from so early on, he’s just loved to throw things. And he’s getting better and better at throwing. And he throws hard now.
At dinner, I sit on his right side, which is his throwing side. Before dinner every night, I go and I “scrub-in” where I put on like an old ratty shirt and old ratty sweats because I’m probably going to get pelted with food. And so we’re slowly teaching him (not to throw).
And so last night he picks up a handful of food and rears back and I go and I kind of just softly put my hand on his hand, and say, “no throwing food.”
And he does this really funny sort of like— (recalibrating face) with my hand on his hand, (and) you can tell his body wants to throw so badly. And he’s kind of like, “how do I get it to do something else? I don’t, I don’t know.”
So, I mean, it is, it’s all, it’s happening all the time.
MADISONThat’s fascinating, actually. To think about like the… domestification… the same way that you would, you know, an animal. I mean, we are animals. I always think about that whenever I see a little kid, I’m always like, well, they’re just basically an ape right now.
JAMESOh, little primates. 100%.
MADISONYes. And you have to just keep… I was about say harsh way of saying it. I was like, you just got to beat it out of them. But not literally, obviously!
JAMESNot literally.
MADISONBecause if you didn’t, they would hurt themselves.
JAMESOh, all the time.
MADISONThey can’t be that'. And it is heartbreaking because there is such beauty in being completely present like that.
Yeah, I think that’s why that newsletter hit me so hard because I was just like, oh, man. What a sad thing that we can’t just… we truly can’t be free. And I think one of the things you said was, “We’re designed to be wounded.”
JAMESI heard that from a workshop on the Enneagram. I haven’t done a lot of Enneagram work, but I happened to go to this workshop, and that’s the only thing I think that really stuck with me from that particular workshop. The teacher said, “You come into the world to be wounded a certain way, and your parents, your family of origin, is your first world. So they will do the first wounding.”
And it’s just, oh, so brutal. Right?
And I think the best that we can do is to do that (wounding) with as much love and awareness as we can. There’s no way that my son is going to come through the process of growing up with me without my shadow encountering his vulnerable spots.
It’s just not… it can’t happen, right?
I saw a quote just the other day that said—I’m going to butcher it a little bit—but it was something to the effect of, “Deal with your shadow or it will raise your children.”
It’s just like, oh, gosh. Wow. Okay. Slow down, you know? Like, it’s 8 a.m. I’m scrolling Instagram. I don’t need that right now, you know?
MADISONYeah, well, that’s the beauty of Instagram. Whatever it is, it’s not what you need.
JAMESYeah. Oh my God.
MADISONI mean, obviously, that’s a dramatic way to say it, but it is true, you know?
JAMESYeah.
MADISONAnd I think being raised by your caretaker’s shadow is part of the human experience. It’s not all bad necessarily.
JAMESNo. I think that it’s the way that our stories become stories almost. Encountering our own wounding is such an important, essential part of being human and so much of the beauty—the sort of bittersweet beauty—that we get to experience in life comes from that encounter and comes from learning to work through whatever we find in that wounding and the way that it’s almost always intertwined with whatever gifts we’re trying to bring into the world.
You know, the whole hero’s journey thing, that’s where it begins, right? It begins with that first encounter with the world, which will undoubtedly wound us.
MADISONYes. I was thinking about the hero’s journey when I was thinking of questions to ask you because one of the first things I read when I was preparing for this was, “Heartbreak, Rebirth, and Homecoming,” which essentially is the hero’s journey.
I thought that was such an interesting thing that you had that right on your webpage because your poetry, your book, I think the reason it’s so relatable— even for people that maybe aren’t very deep into poetry, could really get something from the work that you do—is because it is following… that structure.
And I’m curious if—because your book has a cyclical element to it… when you get to the end, it’s not really over because then it just turns back to the beginning. But I was curious if that’s always how you’ve related or if it was from this experience?
JAMESYeah, it’s definitely not how I always related to the world. I grew up in Southern California in the early 80s. I remember having this image of Alex P. Keaton—he was like this kid with a briefcase who was going to go run the world in a sitcom. Right. And I was like, oh, that’s who I need to be. I need to be this super successful Alex P. Keaton style (person)…
And there’s an image in my mind of probably a stockbroker in a gray suit leaning on his Lamborghini. And it was like, oh, that’s the top of the world, right? That’s where we’re all aiming.
And the path that we’re supposed to walk is like they say, “up and to the right,” you know, a graph is always supposed to go up and to the right. And so I think what my experience was: I hit a point in my life where things stopped going up and to the right.
I was living in Uganda in East Africa, and I was working on this little social enterprise that I had started with my family. And the business kind of started to stall. It wasn’t going as well. And at the same time, I didn’t have language for it at the time, but I was sort of slipping more into what I can now see was anxiety and depression.
And I just kept slipping further and further, and nothing that I did seemed to help, seemed to work. And so eventually I just decided I need to make some sort of big change, or else I don’t know where this goes from here.
And so I spent a year getting kind of my life ready to move back to the States from East Africa and to hand my business off in a way that hopefully would make it sustainable.
And when I showed up in the States, I was completely broke. I had nowhere to live. I was more burnt out than I knew a human being could be. I had no sense of where to point my life.
And luckily, some good friends invited me to come and stay with them. They have property out in the Oklahoma countryside, and they had an extra room in their house. And so I showed up—I happened to show up in Oklahoma—it was almost like the day that fall started. They had an unusually late fall.
And I showed up, and the leaves just started falling. And I grew up in Southern California and spent my 20s in East Africa near the equator. So I hadn’t experienced seasons very much.
And I got to just sit and watch these seasons happen and sort of walk through the woods. And we go from fall into winter… in this really deep winter season of my life.
And so I think it was in reflecting on that that I started to see the potential for this more cyclical way of engaging with my life.
One thing that made the experience so hard is that I didn’t have a story. I didn’t have a cultural story in which something other than up and to the right was okay. In which something other than that was not just okay, but actually natural, normal.
And part of what we think of when we look out at the world is; Oh, that’s a part of a good cycle. The trees have to lose their leaves. You know, this is all part of the way it works.
But in a Western, you know, especially when you grow up as a white middle-class American male, the story that you have is: go up and just push, push, push. And that’s what you’re supposed to do. And then when that broke down, I was completely lost for a while.
MADISONYeah. Well, especially growing up—I mean, you were young in the 80s—but the 80s culture into the recession of the early 2000s, I feel like that was a hard hit for anybody kind of in that age range because you’re told if you do X, Y, and Z, you’re going to keep going up and to the right. Indefinitely forever.
JAMESYeah, totally.
MADISONAnd that didn’t happen for like… anyone. I mean, a lot of people are experiencing that with even buying a home, or especially with that. Where it’s something that everyone was told would happen. That you’d be able to do it if you just kept working.
And then it’s like, “Well, I guess I have to work this job that sucks because then I’ll get a home.” Right? And then you get to that part where you’re supposed to be able to (get the home) and it’s like, oh, no, that’s actually not… happening.
So then, it’s like, “Well, why am I working?”
JAMES"What’s this all about?”
MADISON”Why am I doing this?!”
JAMESYeah! I saw a thing recently that the average age of a first-time home buyer just went, I think, over 40 for the first time. And so it’s basically just keeping up with millennials as we get older. It’s like the rabbit on the dog racing track. It’s just a little bit ahead of you all the time.
MADISONYeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s brutal. Yeah, it really is.
And actually, that’s kind of what Holding Space came from, because you’re just being pushed into the next thing without being able to process the thing before it, you know?
And I think collectively anybody that isn’t… under 50 really, has been on this treadmill of what feels like calamity after calamity. Some people their entire lives, you know?
People that are 20 right now, they’ve basically been experiencing that since the early 2000s when the recession hit.
JAMES It’s true. My oldest niece just started college a couple of years ago and I remember sitting with her, and we were just talking about the state of the world. How politically, things are just heinous, and so many things feel so unsteady.
She was probably, I don’t know, 14, 15. And there were some younger nieces and nephews there too. I was like, how do I describe where we’re at in a way that is going to land for them?
What came to me was Richard Rohr, the Franciscan teacher, has this pattern of things change in the form of “order, disorder and reorder. [https://cac.org/daily-meditations/order-disorder-reorder-8-25-2024/]” And so I just kind of described what that meant, you know, like, yeah, we start with order, we go through periods of disorder, and then out of that, we find this new reorder that works better.
And there was kind of a pause. And then she was like, “Well, where are we now?” And I was like, “Oh… I’m sorry to say we’re deep in disorder right now,… And the problem is we don’t know how deep it goes or how long it goes.”
And it’s so scary to invite these young people into that, like, “This is your inheritance. This is what you were born into.”
And I don’t know how you’re feeling about bringing a kid into the world right now, but I’m just like, I hope it turns out okay. You know, it’s so scary and so tender.
MADISONYeah. And I think being able to be present with your child, at least for me, has required me to not be as engaged with the disorder of things. And I try to give myself a break. Like, okay, I’ve been engaged for so many years. It’s my turn to not be as engaged.
But I say that to myself regularly to make myself feel better, but I can’t help but still feel bad about it. But if I was to really focus on it the way that I normally would with this little creature—I mean, her due date was during the LA fires.
JAMESOh wow.
MADISONAnd yeah, so I was just like, hope she holds on just a few more days…
JAMESYeah, seriously.
MADISONIt was crazy… and this was literally her entry (into the world): climate change disaster. It’s like, what am I doing?
But I think ultimately, for me at least, when I think about “why would you bring somebody into this world?”—because it does feel like a selfish decision sometimes or just an irresponsible decision—but I just think about…
I’m trying to think of a cooler way to say this… There’s not really. It’s just: love is always good, you know? Like, love is always the answer. So to invite another person into this world full of love and caring just feels like it must be the right thing to do. And it’s not really a logical question, you know?
JAMESYeah, I think that’s it.
I don’t really have a good reason or a good answer to why bring a child into the world right now, except that that’s what life is doing. You know what I mean? And like, I think one of—I grew up in the evangelical church, and one of the revelations to me as I have sort of walked out of that, has been the sense that like, “Oh, I’m not—I’m not different from the world.”
There’s an Alan Watts line that’s, “You didn’t come into the world from outside of it. You came out of the world like an apple does,” you know? And just that sense of, oh, I’m a creature of this world. And this is what life is doing. This is what life does.
And I want to shepherd this as best I can now. I mean, now that he’s here, it’s like game on, you know. I don’t know. I don’t know why we’re doing this, but clearly we’re doing it.
MADISONYeah, exactly. I mean, that’s what we’ve been doing, and there’s been all kinds of moments where people have been terrified and there’s still life.
JAMESYeah.
MADISONAnd yeah, I mean, the Buddhist tradition, you hold both things—as much destruction and evil and terror there is, there’s also a baby laughing and a flower just starting to come out during the springtime.
So it’s like, how can you hold these things at the same time?
JAMESYeah. There’s a great Jack Gilbert poem called “A Brief for the Defense. [https://poetrysociety.org/poems/a-brief-for-the-defense]” He’s painting this picture of these women who live in a slum and are experiencing such poverty and they’re washing their clothes in this dirty water, and they’re together, and they’re laughing at the same time. And it’s all true. And he says:
“To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the devil.”
MADISONYes.
JAMESAnd that line has always just landed like a lightning bolt with me.
MADISONYeah, well, I mean, and I was also in Uganda for about a month, 2008, as we had talked about before we started recording. And I think you see that there so clearly.
You know, the like 2 a.m. ads for Feed the Children where there’s like a kid just staring off into the distance or whatever—they cut the camera before the kid just started running after a soccer ball.
JAMESYes, totally.
MADISONIt’s like so messed up!
There’s so much resilience and beauty and connectedness in any circumstance, even if you’re in a war zone. And it’s so easy to go towards the fear and sensationalize the terror.
JAMESThe suffering.
MADISONThe suffering, yeah. And it’s usually much more nuanced than that.
JAMESAbsolutely. And that doesn’t diminish the suffering, but it humanizes the person to recognize: these people also love and laugh and enjoy sharing food together. You know, it’s just like, yeah, we’re all peopling.
MADISONAnd while we’re going through this time of turmoil as well, like the fires and floods and things that are happening politically. People being (taken in) ICE raids or whatever the case is. JAMESPeople being disappeared by guys in masks. Like, it’s crazy.
MADISONIt’s crazy. And while that’s happening, there’s still—I don’t know—there’s just still moments… While that’s happening, maybe there was also something internally happening to that person that was profoundly beautiful. And one thing doesn’t take away the other. And it doesn’t mean you stop fighting. There’s a great book. Do you know Roshi Joan Halifax? She has this book called Standing at the Edge [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250101358/standingattheedge/]. It’s one of my favorite books. It’s about how to not burn out as an activist or as a person in a helping profession. And she takes these virtues and then says how they can be destructive.
So like empathy, for example. She’s saying it’s good to have empathy because it motivates you, it makes you think about how somebody else is living. But for you to think, “Oh, they’re in this terrible situation, so they must be sad all the time and here I am”, the white savior sort of thing. —Or whatever the case is.
So it’s finding the balance—the “standing at the edge” that she’s referring to. Being compassionate is the ultimate goal. Because when you’re being compassionate, you’re following truth instead of presumptions and instead of catastrophizing.
JAMESYeah, you got it. I think that was right—catastrophizing. MADISONThen it’s like: what can keep you honest? What can keep you compassionate? Acting toward that instead of going into a denial space where it’s like, “Oh, things are actually okay,” or going defeatist, “Things are so bad that I don’t know where I can go.”
JAMESI love that. It reminds me of Parker Palmer’s “The Tragic Gap [https://couragerenewal.org/library/chapter-10-standing-in-the-tragic-gap/].” He talks about the gap between the world as it is and the world that we know is possible.
And what we’re called to—it’s really easy to swing to either impotent idealism of just saying, “Oh, everything’s going to be fine, everything’s great,” you know, and you’re not doing anything with that. Or you can swing to corrosive cynicism of just like, “Well, nothing is ever going to change. So why do anything?”
Instead we’re called to stand in the tragic gap and to hold the tension of that.
What you said about compassion really lands because I think the reason we’re probably talking right now is we both have some sort of bent towards empathy. And empathy in the face of a world where all of the world’s struggles and pain can be beamed to my phone at any moment—empathy is a real double-edged sword.
And so what I’ve tried—I’m better at talking about it than I am at doing it—but the insight that has been helpful for me has been that empathy isn’t a place to stay. Empathy is like a little alert that says, “Oh, this is something that might be worth paying attention to.”
But in order to be in right relationship to it, I have to move into compassion. Because empathy is saying, my nervous system is subject to your circumstance, which is probably not going to be helpful to either of us. But compassion says, No, I’m in my place and I have my own resources, whatever those might be, and I can be in caring relationship with you from that place.
And that’s so much more—that helps me, when I can practice that, it helps me feel so much more grounded in relationship to the suffering that we are all witness to these days.
MADISONYes. And I do think that even though I’m saying, Oh, I turned myself off from the news,” or whatever—I do feel like what you’re saying right here, it’s like: my place right now is this caretaking place with a baby.
And that is the reality where I’m standing. And this is how much I have to give. And the compassionate thing to do is to focus on this tiny part of my little garden. That’s going to be the best outcome for everyone because the baby’s going to be taken care of, I’m going to be taken care of, and then everything else around me is going to be better off because this —no one else has to worry about this.
JAMESYeah, absolutely. And like you were saying, part of the gift of bringing a child into the world is that you are also creating this tide of love that’s gonna go forward from you, and doing that is powerful.
MADISONThat’s kind of what I was—you said it much better than… that’s why you’re a poet. I was trying to say, love is just always the answer. Trite but true.
JAMESYeah, it’s the best we got. It doesn’t always seem to win the day, you know, but hopefully the long arc of history it works.
MADISONYes. That’s what they say.
At Holding Space, we do these one-word prompts. So we have this soup of discussion. So I’m going to offer a one-word prompt. Whatever comes to mind, or if it’s a poem or if it’s just a story or memory, and how it relates to loss or love or whatever you’re feeling today in the context of grief.
It’s so rainy today in Los Angeles, let’s go with “River.”
JAMESIt’s so funny that you say that because as you were talking about the context of loss and grief, the lines that were in my head when you said “River” were the Khalil Gibran lines about how joy can only fill you as deeply as sorrow carves into your being.
And that has been—I mean, the whole bittersweet side of life has just been really intrinsic to me for as long as I can remember, because lines like that always just landed really deeply.
“River” … what comes up in relation to River?
What comes up as I think about those lines, are some lines from a poem that I wrote for my wedding. This is actually the poem that the book draws its title from.
The title of the poem is called, “The Space Between Us. [https://jamesapearson.com/the-space-between-us/]” This is the poem that really made me a poet because it was working on this for months and months and months that gave me a poetry practice that then turned into all the other poems that came after it.
So this was trying to—when I proposed to Elizabeth, my now wife, and we started talking about “What do we want a wedding to look like?” One thing that we both were really sure of—because we got married a little older, I think I was 37—and one thing we were both really sure of is that we don’t want this talk of “two becoming one” and that, like, “Oh, we’re supposed to give our entire selves to each other.” That didn’t land for either of us.
So we wanted—I wanted to write some poems to carry the themes of our wedding. And we wanted some sort of theme that would allow that sense of togetherness while also holding our own individuality.
So this poem comes out of that:
Don’t try to give me
all of yourself—
as if you would,
as if the wilderness
that bears your name
was yours to give.
Instead let’s live
like mountains: two worlds
rooted together but each
cutting our own shape
into the changing sky.
I’ll be the one to see you
radiant in the morning light,
and to watch as evening’s last glow
anoints your head.
I’ll be your companion
as the seasons paint you
green and gold and white
and green again.
And as the snows melt
and the rains fall,
carving ever deeper
the beautiful grooves of your being,
let them flow down into
the sacred space between us—
this quiet valley our bodies make,
where deep waters
and the dark earth
take everything we’ve lost
and everything we’ve given
and make new life
for all who call this place
home.
So when you say “River,” the picture that comes to mind is that carving, that process of carving, and the way that the sorrows of our life, the griefs of our life, do carve these deep channels in us.
And they carve them according to the contours of who we showed up as in the world.
And that is a huge part of where a sense of the depth of life comes from. And when there’s somebody who can look at you and you can just see in their eyes that they have this deep space of acceptance or okayness—almost always that comes through profound encounters with grief.
And I wrote that before I decided that I wanted to have kids. But there’s almost a sense in which I was inviting that in the poem of saying, you know, “for all who call this place home.”
And one gift that I want to give my son is—I want to give him the sense of acceptance and okayness with life not always going up and to the right, that I wasn’t able to give myself in my early adulthood.
And it’s only the carving process that I went through that leaves me with that depth of okayness to offer him. If that wouldn’t have happened, I would be holding him to the same kind of dangerous, damaging story that I was holding myself.
And so in that way, I can feel really grateful for that time that was so, so very hard.
MADISONI’m going to keep talking, never stop talking. That was so great.
JAMESI’m glad that landed for you.
MADISONYeah. Oh my gosh, your wife must have just… oh, do you hear the baby?
JAMESYeah, it sounds very familiar.
MADISONYeah, she’s alive! —Your wife must have just lost it. She must have lost it. It’s so beautiful. She must be a wonderful person to inspire that.
JAMESYeah, she’s such a good partner to me. I think partly because she doesn’t get wrapped up in my stuff as much. And she’s just so grounded. And yeah, she loves that poem and appreciates it.
And also, she brought so much of her own self to the ceremony at the same time. And it was very much like a meeting. And I always say that that ceremony—because we planned every aspect of it. We scripted the whole (thing), I wrote five different poems, and it was all ready to go. And then we just handed it off to our friends who were kind of running it, and we got to experience it.
And it was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to actual magic. It just felt like—yeah, I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. It was being held by this community that received our intentionality and held it for us.
MADISONOh, that’s so cool.
JAMESYeah, it was beautiful.
MADISONI feel like when things are so honest, that’s what happens. Magic starts happening.
JAMESThat’s such a good insight. I really appreciate that because I think that that’s something that—even our vows were not like, “Well, I’m going to love you forever.” They were very honest. And I think people were kind of shocked that you were allowed to be that honest, you know?
But people have told us since, they’re like, “Wow, that was the most impactful wedding ceremony that I’ve ever been to.”
MADISONOh, that’s so cool.
JAMESYeah, it was really beautiful.
MADISONThank you so much for talking to me today.
JAMESYeah, thank you for inviting me. We’ve had some fun back and forth over email over the last couple years, and I’m really glad to get the chance to meet you.
I have just a lot of admiration and gratitude for the work that you’re bringing into the world. So thank you.
MADISONThank you. Yeah, back at you. I mean, I think one of the things that I hope I’ve communicated clearly in maybe one of the first emails I sent to you, but it shows how much time and thought and energy and growing and pain that you’ve gone through in order to make something so honest and relatable.
And I know from my own experiences that that’s not easy, and you’re really pushing against everything to make that happen. So I appreciate not just this book, but all of the time and pain and energy that it takes to make something like that.
So I really just love your work.
JAMESThank you so much. And reflecting that back at you at the same time.
MADISONWow. So cool to meet you! What a great conversation!
JAMESI know. I really enjoyed this. Thank you.
You can find James at JamesAPearson.com [https://jamesapearson.com/] or on Instagram @JamesAPearson [https://www.instagram.com/jamesapearson?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==]
And check out his fantastic newsletter here. [https://jamesapearson.com/sign-up/] There are so many fantastic insights each Sunday, I’ve forwarded this to so many friends, family, my partner. It’s amazing.
And of course, The Wilderness That Bears Your Name [https://jamesapearson.com/wilderness-book/], which is a record of the ways in which James describes being, “carved and filled and carved and filled” over the course of his life. So I hope if you decide to get a copy and I hope you love it as much as I do.
Get full access to Holding Space LA at mindovermadison.substack.com/subscribe [https://mindovermadison.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
