Episode Transcript
Hi there, dear listeners. My name is Cameron Conaway and this is 3-Minute Reframe. Today we’re diving into darkness as bell tower. The Austrian poet Reiner Maria Roca, who lived from 1875 to 1926, wrote a line that continues to move me. Feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. For me,
This has helped me reframe some of the darkness I have felt in my life. It suggests that darkness isn’t a comprehensive veil covering everything, even if it feels that way. It’s a bell tower, a structure, a container, and a place where you can ring. In some way, it reminds me of the anatomist Julius Wolff, who is often credited with coming up with the idea that even broken bones, when put under mechanical stress, can become stronger than they were before.
For many years, the darkness of my father’s abuse hung over me. I fought through it, literally, by becoming an MMA fighter, but that fighting was a band-aid. It wasn’t until a meditation retreat that I realized I couldn’t heal through physical fighting anymore. My next step was to breathe through it, to create space, and to hold what happened to me differently as a result. When difficult memories arose, I learned to pause, come back to my breath,
and not jump up to push my body to the extreme. The darkness did not vanish, but it became a context, not a cage. The bell tower did not disappear, but through meditative practices, I was able to begin to feel my bell inside of it. The idea here is that the resiliency we can build by creating space around our life’s hardest moments can be what transforms what batters you into your strength. In this way, the darkness is not so much a void
as it is a place where you practice the breathing that eventually moves you out of it, ringing your bell as you go. For this week’s resource, the full poem, Let This Darkness Be A Bell Tower, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, was published by On Being, a podcast by Krista Tippett I’ve enjoyed for years. can find a link in the show notes or transcript. And finally, here’s your inquiry. Bring attention to two or three of your life’s bell towers, the past struggles
that have felt defining. How have you found ways to ring your bell inside them? And is the resiliency you built a core part of the story you now tell yourself about who you are? That’s this week’s three minute reframe. Explore it, live it, and keep wringing every last drop you can out of this wild and precious life. I’ll see you next week.
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