How to Be More Alive with Cole Arthur Riley
June 9, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. So here’s the deal. I am a writer.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, we know.
Glennon Doyle:
At this point on the planet, everyone who is a writer is expected to have a book club. It’s just like, “Where’s your book club? Why don’t you have a book club?” It’s like, I’m not going to have a book club. I’m not going to have a book club because, club, I feel like there’s going to be meetings. I feel like there’s going to be things expected of me. Plus, I treat books like I used to treat booze. I read six books a week.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
So by the time I’m in love with a book, I can’t wait for everybody else.
Abby Wambach:
No, that’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
No. That’s not going to happen. So I am not going to have a book club. What I am going to have, I’m announcing right now, and only because I read a book that is so effing beautiful that I have to demand that everyone reads it. We’re starting something today called the next right book because that’s how I live my life is the next right thing. I didn’t make it up. It’s a recovery thing.
Glennon Doyle:
Today, I announce the next right book. Now, no one is allowed to expect anything of me. This might be the only next right book I ever choose in my entire life. No one is allowed to ask when the next right book is. The next, next right book, the next, next right book. This might be the only next right book you ever get. Okay? So pay attention.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m looking at the person’s face who we’re interviewing right now and I just realized, I forgot to mention to her that I was announcing her book as the next right book.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. You also forgot to mention it-
Glennon Doyle:
Who it is.
Abby Wambach:
… to me and Amanda.
Glennon Doyle:
No, I told sister. I just didn’t tell you. All right. Today, we announced the next right book of the world. Everyone must read this book. It’s not even a book. It’s a sacred text. It’s a spirituality. It’s a whole thing. The book is called, This Here Flesh. It is by Cole Arthur Riley. Cole Arthur Riley is a writer and poet.
Glennon Doyle:
She is the author of the New York Times bestseller, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us. Her contemplation writing and spirituality embody her lived experience as a black queer woman who lives with autoimmune disease. Cole is also the creator and writer of Black Liturgies, which she describes as a space for black spiritual words of liberation, lament, rage, and rest. Welcome Cole to our first episode of the next right book.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Hi, thanks for having me and for calling my book the next right book.
Abby Wambach:
Well, if you have been present in my home and on the Zoom calls with Amanda, you would understand why this is the first.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It’s-
Abby Wambach:
And maybe the only next right book. The conversations that we’ve been having about this book and you, they will continue beyond this conversation that we’re having today. Thank you for being here and thank you for freaking you and putting your spirit and your love, and your mind into this book. It is unfreaking believable.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Sometimes when I love something so much, my entire life is about telling women to trust themselves, so I constantly doubt myself all the time. So I was reading it and I was like, “Wait a minute. Is this as freaking beautiful as I think it is?” So I call my sister and I say, “I’m reading it. Are you reading it?” And before I say anything, she says to me, “I think this is the most beautiful book I’ve ever read.”
Abby Wambach:
Glennon, we’ve been talking about the word contemplative. We’ve been calling you that. I don’t really understand it because I am not one. I need you to tell me what is it? What is a contemplative?
Cole Arthur Riley:
I’ll tell you what I thought a contemplative was because maybe some people have this in their minds. To me, I thought a contemplative was like the people who go off and sit and silence in a empty room and just think for hours on end. I think I had that impression probably because I was operating in a lot of white intellectual spaces that kind of co-opted true contemplative practice from eastern spiritualities and made it this complete practice of the mind. So that’s what I thought it was. When I went to write This Here Flesh, I started to really have to put language to what does contemplation mean for me?
Cole Arthur Riley:
And the best way I can describe it is a sacred attention. And maybe that happens in thought and in silence and solitude, but I think it doesn’t necessarily need to. It can be attention to the body. It can be a presence. Incidentally, we had this mantra in my family growing up. My father would always say to us, “Pay attention. What were you paying attention to? Look up.” He would quiz us like, “What was the waitress’s name? Were you paying attention? Where is home from here?” I think that was so in me that by the time I started a contemplative practice, it really melded really naturally into just who I am because of that kind of family upbringing.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I’ll also say that there is some connection to one’s interior world and just like a nearness to one’s self. It’s not just the attention to the exterior or the interior, but it’s like a bridge or at least that’s how I think of it.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. It’s funny because the thinking thing, most people think the contemplative is somebody who thinks all the time, but it’s the opposite of that. The mind is the least contemplative place. Is that true? Is it paying attention for you to your surroundings, to your body, to your spirit, and getting out of your head?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Listen, I’m with you. I think other people might disagree with us, Glennon, but I’m with you. The mind is interesting to me as a form of contemplation, but I think there are so many forms and the one we’ve tend to neglect is a connection with one’s physical self in one’s body and a kind of presence. I’m an escapist. I’ve always been an escapist from the time I was a child. So I think I was drawn to a false contemplation that was about kind of disconnecting. Let’s live up here. This is safe.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I can’t be hurt here. I can be analytical and not feeling because feeling is such a risk. I had to unwind a lot of that. I really did this by thinking about the people who had come before me and the spiritual practices that they contained and had access to. I talk about this a little bit in the book, having this imagination for the spiritual lives that say my ancestors who were enslaved had to have, and this restraint of expression, this restraint in articulation. They couldn’t say what they wanted to say always. They didn’t have control over everything.
Cole Arthur Riley:
But what they did have control over is this connection to their interior life and this kind of hiddenness of self that I think is so special and sacred and such a part of my contemplation is where are the secret places in me? I go there not because I think everyone needs access to them, but because I deserve that union with myself. So I’m trying to adopt some of that as well.
Amanda Doyle:
Do you think that secret places in you and that need to protect yourself had anything to do with, you were selectively mute until you’re about seven and you have dealt with anxiety over your entire life. I’m wondering how that all fits together and whether it was kind of an innate protection of what you knew was the sacred in you not wanting to share it or was that about anxiety or is it all just a need to pay deep attention and shutting off your voice was a way to keep paying closer attention?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Oh, that’s interesting. I think the kind of shadow side I think of contemplation can be anxiety, can be like an overactive imagination of what could go wrong or what’s at risk, what’s at stake. When you’re so close to your interior world and your physical body, you become so aware of everyone else’s and what’s going on inside you because I know everything that is going on inside me that I’m not necessarily presenting.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So imagination, it’s a beautiful thing, but there is this shadow side of what can this do when it’s kind of put into hyperdrive and when it’s the only way of existing. As for silence, I think maybe it definitely has something to do with why I’m drawn to a more contemplative life is because I’ve had to honor that I’m distinct, that I have needs and that I’m not always incredibly verbal, and I’m not someone who’s going to process as I speak.
Cole Arthur Riley:
There are these brilliant people who can just speak and say really profound things that they’ve never said before. I’m not one of them. I need that pause. I think I was resisting that for so long because I was ashamed of how I appeared in the world as this kind of shy and quiet girl. I tried to force myself into this character of the witty kind of charming. I did that for a few years in college.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It required so much energy that I didn’t have to give. So contemplation was just this form of spirituality that I could just rest and say, “It’s imperfect.” Are there times when I’m silent not because of choice, but because of oppression, because of insecurity, because of anxiety? Absolutely. But are there times where my silence is actually a sacred path that frankly other people could learn from? I think so.
Abby Wambach:
For sure, I could.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re going to talk about awe later, because you have such a beautiful perspective on awe, but do you ever think that awe and anxiety are connected because it’s like if you’re paying deep attention, I get a little bit just a smidge awkward in social situations. Okay. Abby, just… Like often, Cole, my thing is when someone introduces themself to me, I panic and introduce myself as them. So if a person named Joel walks up to me and says, “Hi, I’m Joel.” I panic every time and say, “Hi, I’m Joel.” And then it’s like this moment it’s just off. Okay. So what I try to describe social anxiety sometimes is it’s like being starstruck by everyone. Okay?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
If you’re really paying attention, you’re like, “Wait, look at all these bodies walking around with all of these worlds inside of us just so exposed. We’re just looking at each other. We’re just like naked out here.” Do you think being in awe of things, I guess you would say the shadow side of that?
Cole Arthur Riley:
I’m with you. I agree that there’s something about awe and fear that I think are really intimately tied, if you’re a person. I mean, I say this and I’ve said this in an interview a few weeks ago. And the person who was interviewing me was just like horrified. But I said I’m a scared person. I don’t say that to be self-deprecating, but I think there are just those of us who live with a greater day to day fear. I’m always assessing risk and I’m looking around. I was a very scared little child as well.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Of course, fear and anxiety are close, but also I do consider myself a person of awe. I’m so anxious to get on this podcast call, but beforehand I’m sitting here listening to the barn swallows outside and I’m grounded in maybe both for better or worse. But I think there’s something about awe and fear that they’re operating the same muscle, almost. That sacred attention can do really scary things as well.
Glennon Doyle:
And isn’t that fear and awe… Even in the Bible, like fear God, wasn’t that original word, awe? It’s like those are always-
Cole Arthur Riley:
Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
Those are always swimming together, fear and awe.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
First, it should be said that your work, you have always said, and your work is clearly for black people in black liberation. I thought it would be okay to celebrate your book because you sent it to me.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
I felt like it would be okay. But what do you think of white people celebrating your book and celebrating your work? What is your reaction to that?
Cole Arthur Riley:
There’s a tension in me. I’ve lived with what Toni Morrison calls the white gaze. I’ve lived with that over my life just looming for so many years and certainly have lived with that in my writing. And while I was writing This Here Flesh, I had to keep asking myself, “Who’s in the room with you, Cole?” I’m almost embarrassed to say how many times the answer was some white intellectual man that didn’t care about me, didn’t care about my body or my words. Who invited you? I’m trying to write. I’m trying to write something for my family. I’m trying to write something that matters and these different people I would find, they’re not completely imagined. They’re real. But these kind of specters, these haunts were just looming over my writing and I had to kind of keep exorcizing the room and say, “No, I know who I want in the room with me. I want my ancestors. I want my own voice, my own soul.”
Cole Arthur Riley:
So anyways, when white people approach black liturgies or This Here Flesh, I’m always a bit cautious. I’m a bit wary because I know there are times when the white gays won, and I can be honest about that. I think my journey will be as I continue to write books, hopefully to continue to do better and better and be clearer and clearer about who I’m speaking to.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So I worry, but at the same time I don’t really feel the need to gatekeep. It would be foolish of me to think that there’s not something of my human experience that’s worth experiencing by a white body. I’m not really interested in that. I don’t really have the energy to gatekeep my work in that way. Some people do. I don’t. And so if I think of a white person can approach either black liturgies or the book and decenter themselves, I’m giving them a gift. You’re welcome. That’s how I think about it is this is a gift, if a white person is capable of decentering themselves.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I’ve had this question so many times. Who do you want to write for? Who’s your audience? At first it was just black, this generalized black people because that’s what you’re supposed to say. It’s black people. And whatever, that’s fine. But when I’m most honest, I’m writing for my grandma. That’s who I want my audience to be. My grandma, my father. Those are the people I’m thinking of. And when I think of particular people and not just this generalized notion of blackness and this allegiance, I think it helps. I think it helped my writing if I’m honest. It helped my writing to seem compassionate because I’m not talking to you and I’m not talking to a stranger. I’m writing to honor the people that I love and who have held me.
Amanda Doyle:
You said you’ve always been an escapist. And I really loved your interrogation in the book about escapism, both internally, but also in the Christian faith. So often it’s set up as we don’t have to worry about now. We don’t have to worry about bodies right now. We are worrying about later and all our efforts are for later.
Amanda Doyle:
You just mentioned your grandma. You said, “I don’t know much about heaven, but I have no reason to believe it won’t be made right here and everything will smell like my grandmother’s perfume.” Why do we do that? And what is the power of reclaiming right now the idea that heaven could happen right now?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah. I think the kind of illusion of the someday heaven, I don’t want to demean it because it’s given so many people hope. It’s how so many people have survived by thinking of the someday. But I think it’s been manipulated by the powerful and by people who are insecure in the way they are in the world. The things that they do, the people that they’re pressing, the wealth that they have. And so it’s kind of this cognitive escapism because you don’t really want to pay attention to the very present material injustices that are happening to a person or the really present pain that exists in the world.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Some people don’t have the practice in attuning to that. And so the only feasible answer I think is escape. Let’s talk about someday. It’s all going to be okay and we’ll be floating blissful spirits around. I have no idea if that’s true or not. So why expend so much energy trying to force myself into this someday thing or live for this someday thing. And maybe that’s because I’m just a past-oriented person. I don’t know. I’m a memory-oriented person, but I think what happens when we are able to, I don’t know, interrogate that inclination to the someday heaven is we start to… Well, I think we get closer to ourselves.
Cole Arthur Riley:
We get closer to our sadness. I think we get closer to our anger. Really every felt emotion I think is probably amplified when you bring yourself back in to what is happening now. I wonder if it doesn’t also make people more active. There’s a kind of urgency that changes. I don’t love the word urgency, but there is some kind of… There’s an emotional urgency whenever you’re able to say, “I want goodness for you now. I want peace. I want healing for you now. I want clean water for you now. I want good relationships for you now.” It creates this kind of urgency in our relationships and our emotions, I think.
Amanda Doyle:
I think it’s beautiful because of the change that we don’t wait upon. Also, you said that that structure of escapism means that they’ve set up a system where the only holy things are invisible.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yep.
Amanda Doyle:
Because if only the holy things are those things we cannot see, that means that all the things we can see our bodies, our love, our partners.
Glennon Doyle:
Our planet, our planet.
Amanda Doyle:
Are not holy. And so that reclaiming of no holy is now and these things that I’m looking at and these people I’m looking at and myself are holy, that was really beautiful. So thank you for putting that in my head.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
We are addicted to it though. This whole like, “I’ll be happy when. I’ll be happy when I’m a grown up. I’ll be happy when I have a job. I’ll be happy…” So the escapism religion is just like the ultimate arrival fallacy. It’s like, “Okay. How about we’ll start living after we’re dead.”
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s really a bit wild. That’s what it is. Save yourself. Save yourself, literally. Save yourself until after you’re dead. And it also relieves us of doing anything hard. Like of fighting for justice now. It’s okay. Everything will be fair later of fighting for the planet now. It’s okay there’ll be some other planet later. It’s fascinating. And so you, your book to me, I think that there’s so many books that are about sacred text or reflections. Your book feels to me like a new sacred text and as such, people are going to try to figure it out.
Glennon Doyle:
So we’ve been thinking about reading a book is different than planning a podcast. So how do we talk about your book in a language that all people of all faiths and no faith are understanding? We started talking about your 15 categories in this book and then how they are ways of not of redemption, salvation now. Not waiting for redemption salvation later. Does it track for you to also call these ways to be alive? Are these ways to be alive? Are these 15 things different ways to be alive? Or are we getting that wrong?
Cole Arthur Riley:
No, I see that ways to be alive. Yes. And maybe the beginning. We begin with dignity. Maybe that’s the one that’s distinct that there’s something inherent about it. It’s not a way, it just is. And that can offer maybe some stability as you’re approaching the other things. That’s a constant. At least in my belief system I don’t think that it’s your dignity is predicated on anyone else’s belief, on your own belief. I don’t think it requires that it just is. And maybe liberation is just the… I don’t want to call it the ending because it’s not linear, but liberation maybe functions in the same way.
Cole Arthur Riley:
That’s the last chapter in the book of it’s, this kind of form throughout the book. I think you’re liberated into lament. I think you’re liberated into rage. You’re liberated into belonging and then everything in between. I like that language, ways to be, ways to live.
Glennon Doyle:
And you said dignity is the bedrock. Can you tell us the story about when your hair started turning gray when you were little?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. So I started getting gray hair when I was like, I don’t know, early six, seven. It was getting worse and worse with each year. I developed this ritual standing on my little stool in the bathroom. I would part my hair and I would try to find the perfect part where the least amount of gray was showing.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Again, I’m a completely shy child. I’m just praying for my own invisibility. I’m already distinct because of my blackness, distinct because of my silence. Here’s this other thing that’s making me distinct. I mean, anytime a classmate would even look at me, I’m trying to duck and dive. And this thing was just screaming out. At least in my impression. So by the time I was maybe 11 or so, we were getting ready to go somewhere, my whole family. Everyone was waiting downstairs for me. And I’m upstairs parting, parting, re-parting, trying to pluck out hair. I was using my stepmom’s mascara to try to cover up some of the grays.
Glennon Doyle:
I do that now. I do that now.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And, finally, my dad sends everyone to the car and he comes to the bottom of the stairs and very simply he asks, “How much longer is it going to be, Nicole?” I don’t know what happened to my little body, but I just lost it. I started yelling, “I hate my hair.” I don’t even remember what I said. I threw the comb against my brother’s door. It was just not the kind of expression you would usually find out of me. I felt like a spectacle.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Finally, I look at my dad who’s just standing there calmly, face completely calm. And I say, “I can’t do this anymore. I have to dye my hair.” And he told me to come down the stairs and I came down afraid of what would be the consequence of my outburst. He just takes my head and tucks it into his chest and he says, “Okay, we can dye your hair.” I was so confused, so completely confused that I just stopped crying and I’m looking at him like, “That’s not what you’re supposed to say.” What’s the script that we’re told, that we’re supposed to say? We’re supposed to try to rally someone’s beliefs. Tell them you’re beautiful. All of the language. All of the articulation.
Cole Arthur Riley:
My dad very wise, I don’t think he even understood the moment, knew that’s not what I needed. He would do whatever he needed so that I could stand unashamed in front of him and my family, that he had to do that. And it was a physical act, right? He tucks my head into his chest. He doesn’t say, “You’re beautiful,” but we draw near to beautiful things. He kisses my head. He puts my hair into a bun himself. He takes on the labor. He puts my hair into a bun, so I don’t have to do it.
Cole Arthur Riley:
We just walk to the car and get in. We didn’t talk about it again. We never went and bought hair dye. I never asked about it again, which is the strangest part of this story. Something mysterious happened on those stairs where it changed me. It’s something that you don’t know has changed you until after. It comes to you in memory. You realize that was a real shift. Why? Because I didn’t need the lecture. I didn’t need the three point reason as to why I’m beautiful. I needed someone’s nearness and I need someone to say, “It’s okay. What can we do? What can we do to kind of stop the bleeding before I try to get you to March out and strut a runway? What can I do?”
Glennon Doyle:
You said sometimes you can’t talk someone into believing their dignity. You do what you can to make a person feel unashamed of themselves and you hope in time, they’ll believe in their beauty, all on their own.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Just this past weekend, Cole, I gave a friend who was staying with me, I gave her your book. She went downstairs. She came upstairs to the kitchen, crying and saying over and over again, “God made them close.” They were ashamed, Adam and Eve who throughout the book, you also switched to Eve and Adam every other time. Appreciate you.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Good job.
Glennon Doyle:
But they were ashamed of their naked selves and God didn’t give them the three-point speech. God just made them clothes like your dad. Why do you think dignity is the bedrock of all of the forces of liberation or ways to be alive in your book? Why is dignity the bedrock?
Cole Arthur Riley:
If you don’t understand that there’s something inherent that can’t be taken from you, it makes it very hard to even want liberation. And thinking of that Assata Shakur quote that she talks about, “You can become so used to your chains that you don’t have an appetite for liberation anymore because you start to think that’s what you’re meant for. So how could I take someone on a journey of liberating spirituality if they don’t believe they’re worthy of that.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And that moment in Genesis with God and the clothes, it complicates the story in so many beautiful ways. I was taught when I went to college, this very unnuanced, and frankly boring story about just this curse, this doom and gloom, and the dark clouds rolled in. And there’s just this very simple, beautiful line that just complicates everything that’s happening in the moment. Did God have to kneel? Did he kneel down in the dirt? Did he make the first kill?
Cole Arthur Riley:
He made the clothes out of skin. What did that cost him? So it complicates the story I think of shame and attunement and care in a way that’s really beautiful. It’s tenderness. It’s tender, but it’s painful as well.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, because your dad, because it cost him something. Because he probably wanted to say, “My darling perfect daughter. You’re perfect.” You’re blah, blah, blah.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
But he chose you.
Cole Arthur Riley:
If you hate yourself, what does that mean about me? My dad, he’s a very young father. He was a teen dad. What does that mean about what I’ve done? I can only imagine the thoughts going on in his head. I think this is how shame often works. It doesn’t just stay where it’s meant to go. My shame activated something in him, I’m sure of his own questions.
Glennon Doyle:
Of course.
Cole Arthur Riley:
What does that mean about my face? You bear my face as well. You hate your face? What does that mean about mine? What does that mean about the things I’ve told you? What does that mean about me greasing your scalp every morning? The shame in a way can be a kind of contagion. But I think there are people out there, wise people like my father who are able to take that and center themselves in a way that allows them to care even though it can be costly.
Glennon Doyle:
What do you say to someone who was not loved like your father loved you, who is needing to find dignity as a bedrock in order to begin living? There’s so many times that you say dignity isn’t something we offer to people. We just affirm it. How does someone find dignity when they haven’t been loved well.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Right. I mean, I’m biased, but this is where I think the spiritual should come into play. Whether or not that’s a Christian spirituality and I don’t really care, but just an attentiveness to the mysteries of the world. How about we use that word? I’ll speak from my own experience when I’m drawn into the mystery of being, I don’t always need the clarity of someone else’s affirmation or my own affirmation. There’s this really cruel rhetoric out there that I’m sure you’ve heard it that says if you don’t believe that you’re beautiful, no one else will.
Cole Arthur Riley:
How cruel. I mean, leave it to us to decide we’ll meet self-hatred with self-hatred. We’ll meet self-hatred with blame. If you don’t believe that you’re beautiful, no one else will. You just have to muster belief. I think it’s so impractical. And right now we have a ton of people on social media pretending that, that self-love is there. It’s a theater because that’s what’s you’re supposed to say, that’s what you’re supposed to believe about yourself.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I just feel so sad about that. I feel so sad about that kind of theater that we’re all kind of forced into. Instead, I think we have a kind of… We can have a mysterious framework for existence that says your beauty, it actually is not predicated on you. I don’t have to believe it when I wake up in the morning. You just are. You can choose to breathe the air or not breathe the air, but the air is there.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It’s there. It’s more of an awareness than anything else. I think that’s been so healing to me instead of trying to contrive this really triumphant form of dignity that says I deserve to be honored. I now say I possess honor. I possess that. I’m not waiting. I’m not waiting for anyone to give me the honor that I need. It’s in me. And that changes how I’m able to survive frankly in a world that doesn’t love my body, that doesn’t love black women bodies. It changes things.
Amanda Doyle:
Wow. Cole, you originally thought you were going to write a book of spiritual contemplation. But you grew up in a family that you call not overtly spiritual, but had a very strong commitment to storytelling. So you had these stories of your family that you were compelled to write. You wrote those and now you have this gorgeous book of stories that isn’t exactly the spiritual contemplation book that you originally planned.
Amanda Doyle:
Yet it seems to me that in writing your intergenerational stories of lament and joy, and struggle, and wonder that you compelled into spiritual contemplation, the missing piece, right? The dignity and wisdom of you and your people. It makes me think of Jesus was called the word made flesh, how it was imperative that the message became the body. And it’s likewise imperative that the body become the message. So faith can’t be embodied without the story of our bodies, right? It must take on account of our stories and our bodies.
Amanda Doyle:
What does it mean to you to have your faith integrate and take account of your story and your body and your father’s story and your father’s body and your grandmother’s story and your grandmother’s body?
Cole Arthur Riley:
I, mm. I mean, it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying. I could have written a book that’s just purely contemplation and philosophizing, but this book, there was something about connecting it to the stories that forced me to tell the truth about things that I think I could have really gotten away with lying about. People say they believe all kinds of things. We can say we believe all kinds of things. I think the percentage that we really believe those things is probably really slim for most people when you take account of their lived experiences and their stories.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I can go on social media and say love your body, listen to your body. But the more honest thing would be to say, “I’ve been outside of my body for over a decade. I’m telling you to listen to yours because here’s the story of, I don’t share this in the book. Here’s the story of me having bulimia for 10 years. Me living with bulimia for 10 years, that has the message. There’s something behind that story. I agree with people who say we carry our stories in our body.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So I couldn’t tell the stories without talking about the body. I couldn’t talk about contemplation without talking about its effect on the physical material world, including me. Yeah. It was always going to be connected, but it was hard.
Glennon Doyle:
And the body living in a body, or body I should say is another way that you tell that you write about a way of being alive. So like dignity body is another way of being alive. As you write about, and as we all have experienced in different ways. We are often cut off from that way of being alive through shame. So can you tell us the story about your grandmother as a child and this note she got home from school, from her teacher.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. So my grandma, I can’t remember her age, but she was young like this was elementary school. She just had a chest. She’s always had a big chest and she was starting to mature. She was a teacher, wrote a little note and tucked it in between her sweater and her backpack strap that said, “Phyllis can’t run in the playground. Needs bra.” Or something like that.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Now my grandma, she was living in… I mean, all kinds of abuse were taking place in the house that she was being raised in. But yeah, verbal abuse being no small part of that. She then had to look at the woman who was not her mother. She had to look at her face and watch that person hate her even more because of her body. So she was also enduring sexual abuse, surviving sexual abuse as a child. She talks about being so disconnected from her body. She did stop running on the playground.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And even though they bought her a bra, but she said she would sometimes look down and think, “Is that my hand? Is that hand mine? Because she was so disconnected or she would pass herself in a window and do a double take because she was so disconnected from her physical appearance, from the side of her own face and the side of her own flesh for a number of reasons.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And her journey was kind of… I want to say to overcome, but I think it’s probably more complicated than that. I think her journey is maybe partially overcoming, but partially learning to exist with what everything that happened to her in childhood did to her relationship with her body. I think many of us have had similar experiences of the shame that begins at childhood and it finds a place to rest in your body and it just grows and grows and grows.
Cole Arthur Riley:
There are seasons where you’re maybe able to cut out the cancer a little bit and then maybe it grows again. But I think it’s just a journey and it was hers and it’s mine, for sure.
Glennon Doyle:
It is an expulsion. It feels like an expulsion. It’s like if being in our body is a force of liberation is a way of being alive than the shaming of our bodies that happen so early. It’s just ejects us. It’s like an Eden ejection. Eden ejection, it’s a… And then we don’t get it.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Exile.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you. It’s an exile.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
And then we don’t get it anymore. The line where you said that your grandmother was the lone body that required bondage when they said she has to have a bra that then your grandmother in that class became the lone body that required bondage and it changed the way she moved forever. Do you have any clue? What the hell, bulimia? How do you understand bulimia with your contemplative self?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Well, here’s the thing. It begins with the body, but it’s not solely embodied. Of course, it has to do with shame. We know this. I had a pretty distorted relationship with my body from the time I was a child, even before I had developed bulimia as a way to cope with the world. I already was living in my head and leaving my blackness behind in certain spaces or feeling kind of alienated because of my bigness. I was a chubby child.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So there were all these… And I mentioned this very briefly in the book, but I also survived ongoing sexual abuse as a child. So I learned. A time when kids are learning how to move in their bodies, their agility, the age that they were learning how to be free and that they can jump from here to there, I was learning how to leave my body to survive. That was my strength. You need to leave. I’m certainly no expert, but we know that’s a very common and necessary trauma response. Dissociation gets a bad name, but in the moment, it’s a mercy.
Cole Arthur Riley:
In the presence of trauma, it’s a mercy, sadly for me and for many other people. It just happens to be that we take that mercy and we extend it even though the threat is no longer there anymore. We extend it. And I think that happened for both my grandma and I. We learn to dissociate even when we don’t want to and we don’t need to necessarily for survival.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I was already at a distance at a distance from my body, and that was my gift. That was my strength to leave to escape if you want to connect it there. Then as I go into adolescence and I’m dancing, I’m in front of a mirror, however many hours a day, pretty much every day of the week, I’m in front of a mirror. I can’t escape the sight of my own face. I can’t escape the relationship with my body. So what do I do? I turn against it.
Cole Arthur Riley:
That distance becomes then really disdain, self-hatred. I mean, maybe it begins with neglect, but it ends with self-hatred. For me, at least I think that was the story of my bulimia. A hatred of my body. But more than that, a hatred of me, a hatred of myself, which I think is so sinister. It’s so imprecise that I think it’s really difficult because it felt so necessary to my survival in the same way that leaving felt necessary to my survival. This new ritual of purging felt necessary for my survival. I wonder if you resonate with that kind of desire to leave becoming a desire to annihilate.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I mean, you just said distance can become disdain. That’s it. I feel like I’ve figured it out now. And I’m going to have it figured out until at least you get off this podcast and then I’m going to forget again. But yes, and I’m wondering if that’s why the only things that really truly help me besides my medication are practices where I’m-
Abby Wambach:
In your body.
Glennon Doyle:
… in my body. Presence becomes love for me. When I’m forced to be present in my own body, and that makes sense, right? Because the truth is love. It’s there. Like you said, we don’t have to earn it. We don’t have to have self-love. We don’t have to feel self-love, it just is. So when you’re forced to be present, it is, but when you stay distant, hate grows which is true for everybody and everything, and every place. Being divorced from, which gets us to place.
Glennon Doyle:
So place you talk about, as you write about as another way for us to be alive, that we have been separated from in a million different ways. And one of the lines you introduce the idea of place being something we need to reconnect with in order to be alive is you say, “Did you know that birds do not land because they are tired? They know and they have always known that their liberation depends on their ability to recall the ground.”
Glennon Doyle:
I’ve read it 60 times. I still get… Because it reminded me of immediately, which then you wrote about. All of my strategies with my therapist and all the people about when I’m freaking out or any sort of panic or big anxiety immediately go to, “Okay, what’s one thing you smell. Tell me what you can hear.” Fear, that kind of anxiety or fear, is a way of not being alive. And a way of returning to life is to to remember the place I am in where things are usually okay. Right?
Glennon Doyle:
So you say there is a mysterious entanglement between our welfare and our capacity to ground ourselves in a certain place. So can you talk to us, because we often don’t think about where we are at all. So what does place to you have to do with being alive like being liberated?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah. I mean, I think it has to do exactly what you’re saying with the sensory, the very real sensory. What’s one thing you hear, tell me three things you see. But for a long time, I was reflecting as if it was only people who were forming me. More than that, I would say circumstances. And when I left home… I mean, I didn’t go far. I went to school in Pittsburgh. I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, but in very different parts of Pittsburgh.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So when I left home for college and I was in this new place, I think I knew that something in me had shifted, but it really wasn’t until I started to return home. And I, for the first time in my life had experienced this homecoming that many of us experience, that I realized just how much of me comes awake depending on the place that I’m in. I don’t think it means I’m faking it at college, it just means I can access.
Cole Arthur Riley:
There’s an entrance into parts of me that I don’t have easy access to when I’m in a room full of academics. But when I would walk the streets of Brookline when I’m walking down the boulevard, there’s some kind of nearness that I’m able to, I don’t know kind of move toward. But I think it’s easier not to pay attention.
Cole Arthur Riley:
The jury is out really on why this is. I’m sure it has to do with dissociation. So many people living in their minds are living to kind of play out whatever conversation they thought they were supposed to have or consumed with each other, consumed with their own thoughts and lack a kind of awareness of, “Okay, where are the lights in my room.” What are the shadows doing to that wall. And it’s a very privileged thing to be able to pay attention to, to be able to take a minute and really ground yourself and see where you are.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And for different people, I think I’m sure that grounding and that attunement is costly in a different way. And I can say this for myself, at the homecoming, it wasn’t all warm, fuzzy feelings. Those entrances, it wasn’t going to necessarily beautiful places in myself. I was going into hard places and realizing, “Maybe that’s the reason why you flinch?” What happened to that door? You remember someone pounding on that door. That’s why you don’t like loud knocks. I’m passing the door, and now I have a little bit more of an awareness for about who I am in the world.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. You’re saying it’s a way of being alive. Nobody is promising that being alive is all touchy feely good stuff. I mean, I have had moments where I walk back into my childhood home and I find myself in the pantry shoving food in my mouth in the first 20 minutes. And I’m like, how did I… Binging like that? And I’m 45. It’s just awakens. For better or worse, you can be alive in different places.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. And it absolutely has to do with your body. I’ve completely resonated with you saying where I just end up a place and I’m like, “How did I get here?” I’ve started to tell myself, “Cole, if you are not in your body, someone else is.”
Abby Wambach:
Oh.
Glennon Doyle:
Ooh.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So who is it? Who is it? How did you get here? You’re not just walking around empty, something is… Who’s at the helm? It’s not you. You’re not leaving behind an empty vessel. Something about that I think has really changed me to think, “Hello, it’s risky. Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to eat until 6:00 PM? Are you sure you want to… Because someone else, something else.” And I think that’s something is probably different for different people whether it’s capitalism or the patriarchy or whatever, a white supremacy.
Cole Arthur Riley:
If we leave our place, if we leave our bodies, if we lose our connection to the sensory, it might seem like survival is what I’m learning. It might seem like survival, but really it’s a death. And it’s very dangerous. Changes, changes how I relate to it now. I feel this kind of fierce protection over my body in a way that maybe I didn’t before.
Glennon Doyle:
One of the many gorgeous things is that it feels like every chapter that you have or every way of being alive seems to be discussed as a way of being personally more alive. And then also a way of responsibly living among other people or the planet that is a shift in our understanding of that thing. So for example, you talk about place as a way for us to be personally more alive. And we’ve just discussed that. But you also talk about respecting place in a way that shifts our understanding about our relationship to place.
Glennon Doyle:
For example, when you fell in love with Wisewood, your home and you buy this place. You have land ownership, whatever that means you said of Wisewood, “It never felt as if it belonged to us, but my own sense of belonging became magnified. Something was restored in me. I am reconciled to the land by this place, and I have known no greater reconciliation to date.”
Glennon Doyle:
And then you go on to describe your ownership of that land being your responsibility to nurture it. This land is mine, but this land is my responsibility to nurture.
Abby Wambach:
I love this so much.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us about that and that shift in how all of us in this Western world, because this is part of the reason why our planet is on fire and everyone has moved off their land. Right? So talk to us about that shift in thinking about land in place.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I was raised in the city. I know people say this. I truly never had an imagination for land ownership. It was the furthest thing from my mind. The reason why we were drawn to the house actually wasn’t the land, it was the beautiful brick of the house. And it just happened to come with eight or so acres. We were like, “What are we going to do with this?” It used to be orchards.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It’s so interesting the shift that’s occurred. And really the whole household’s heart is really toward the land. I started to walk around in the kind of reeds that lead to… We found a pond during the pandemic. We have a pond on this land.
Glennon Doyle:
You found a pod.
Cole Arthur Riley:
A full-on pond. It’s not a small thing. I’ll walk through the reeds and I’ll discover something new or I’ll stop at a tree, and I’ll think, “Man, you are allowed to be here.” I thought how interesting that my first thought isn’t, “I own this. This is yours.” I really didn’t have that thought in my mind. Other people would say that to me, “Can you believe you own a pond?” I thought that’s interesting. That’s not really the first thing that came to my mind. I thought you can be here. You’re safe. No one is going to kick you off of this land, which I think is really… I mean, that in me is maybe some of my own formation, but that desire to get away from the idea of owning and possession, I think is far more rooted in kind of indigenous wisdom than my own. And knowing that this house exists because this land was stolen. That’s complicated when you’re walking down these halls.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And because the house is so old, it was built in 1840, we have some historical documents. So we’re a little bit closer to the story because we have it in writing. This land was granted to… So he who shall not be named for serving in this war, they just gave away land as if it was something to be owned. Here I am walking through this tragedy. I have to find a way to contend with my own shame, guilt, whatever you want to call it, but I also have to find a way to engage the beauty and the way that the land demands and to take… Not completely take the human experience away, but are we able to decenter humans for just a moment?
Cole Arthur Riley:
We truly are small. And not in a self-deprecating way. Not in a degrading way, but there’s a smallness to us and there’s a youth to us in the grand scheme of history and the cosmos. There’s a youth to humanity that I think we’re not really aware of because we’re kind of just little bit, I’ll say human centered. Whenever I go outside and I’m walking the perimeter of my house or walking to the land, I need to find a different word besides smallness.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Perspective may be a better word. It allows me to connect in a way that I never, I mean, never thought I would. And it doesn’t just extend to these really beautiful landscapes in the pond. Now, when I go to the city, I was able to go back to Pittsburgh for a while. I’ll look at the buildings and I’ll think what a miracle. How did we do this? How were we able to construct these things? There’s beauty here.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Not a huge fan of sidewalks, but is there beauty there? Is there history? Are there little marks? Are there people’s names written in it? But going back to Wisewood, it’s hard to put language to it. The land was given in 1820. The house was built in 1840. We all know what was happening to my ancestors in 1840, and 1820. Right?
Cole Arthur Riley:
When I think about it kind of intergenerational self, not just me, what a beautiful kind of mysterious thing. And I’m not trying to romanticize it, but to think that I now am able to belong to land, belong to the land that I live on, not out of bondage, that I get to choose that I’m safe. That I’m free to be here. I’m free to leave. But whenever I prune the path, whenever I bend down in the reeds and start picking the reeds to clear the path, I do that out of my own love.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It’s a very mysterious restoration. I think that happens. I’m all for black land ownership because I’ve seen it in my own life. I never thought it’d be something that just sits outside and listens to birds. What is that? Why? But there’s this connection and there’s this responsibility that I feel that I’ve never felt before.
Abby Wambach:
I was so taken by this part in your book and that what really jumped out at me was the impermanence of it all. Because as me in my white body it has been my goal in life to be an owner of things. And this completely shifted my mind around that, that, “Oh, no, I don’t and I can’t own anything. It is all impermanent.” I will have to let this go. So the idea of nurturing this thing for whenever I’m here, however long I get to be lucky enough to be on this land or in your case at Wisewood, that is my joy. That is my responsibility.
Glennon Doyle:
And you only take as much also as you can nurture. And you can be in wonder. It’s a huge responsibility, which takes us to wonder. Ugh, wonder. Cole, Your discussion of being alive through wonder.
Amanda Doyle:
You talk about how wonder includes the capacity to be in awe of humanity, even your own. Can you talk about that, the way that we have set up our worlds to kind of like an amusement park where this is stuff that is worthy of wonder. This is just normal stuff that is… And how you so beautifully integrate that.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I have done some traveling and I hiked in the Himalayas. I try not to brag about it. But I hiked the Himalayas. I’m trying to find a different way to say it. I’m like, “Just say it, Cole.”
Amanda Doyle:
Good job, good job.
Cole Arthur Riley:
One of the most beautiful experiences that I’ve had seeing the snow on the mountains and watching the transition from warmth to cold. So beautiful. I started to review my journal from that track. It was about three weeks. I was just talking about people. I was writing poetry and the images were so often about the people that were with me. The image of a young girl picking these purple flowers that would burst through the earth. It’s a zoom in moment. I wasn’t writing the image of the majesty, the mountain tops.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I wrote very little about on the days that we were at a peak and we were camping at a peak. Very little written. So much attention and so much interest in the people that were around me, the people we would bow and say namaste to as we passed and the tops of their heads. They’re images that were just as much grounded in the earth as they were humanity.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It makes you wonder what is it that we see in a landscape that we’re so unwilling to see in each other. I had this friend tell me one time. He was joking, but he said, “Let’s look at each other like we’re art for 30 seconds.” Everyone look at your neighbor. I’m like, “Oh my goodness. It’s one of those weird-“
Glennon Doyle:
Intimacy exercises.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Like, no, thank you. I didn’t do it, of course. But I started to do it on my own in practice. I’ll find myself just drifting off, staring at someone and think, “Wow, look at the way their hair grows or look at those spots. I mean, if I’m honest, it’s difficult to do it myself, but what a practice to believe that whatever is in the mountaintop is also in the face of your neighbor, in the face of your child, in the face of the person you love, or the person you hate, that there’s something beautiful in that.
Amanda Doyle:
Do you think Cole that has something to do with the same discussion we were just having about ownership because I feel like people and their bucket lists and their acquisitions of places and majesties and it’s-
Glennon Doyle:
I’ve done Aruba. I’ve done Hawaii. I’ve done, da, da, da.
Amanda Doyle:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
We’re collecting them for our ownership, for our own portfolios. And so therefore it has to be things that are on that list and not things that can be found in the every day because that isn’t something worthy of ownership and acquisition.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. Absolutely, I think it’s absolutely tied. Man, not everyone. I think this of whiteness. I think whiteness loves the conquering of beauty, loves the collecting. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that in white supremacy. I mean, it wants to be supreme. It wants to have the supreme. But you see this in whiteness in general just like this desire to reach the mountaintop. That’s the goal. Here I am. You can reach the mountaintop and that can be a beautiful thing. Nothing against hikers or people who trek in that way.
Cole Arthur Riley:
But what do you feel when you’re at the top of… I want to ask people, what do you feel when you’re at the top of that? Does it feel like a conquering?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Why? Why? Why do you need to feel like you’ve conquered something or the people who they’re able to practice wonder, but only so that they can, like you said, acquire it. They want the beauty. They want the beauty for themselves as opposed to bearing witness. It’s not enough to bear witness. How can I have this? How can I take it?
Glennon Doyle:
So the discussion of wonder is life-changing. And there’s a few different levels of what wonder can do for us and for the world in your discussion of it. One seems to be a personal liberation, a personal way of being alive. And you use the description of… I think you used the color purple, right? Talk to us about that iconic moment in the color purple and what she was doing, what she was reclaiming in that moment.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah. That iconic line. I think it pisses God off anytime you walk past the color purple and don’t appreciate it. I mean, talk about a complicated character talk about writing a very human character. There’s something in, I mean, the story, the color purple. If you’ve read it, or if you’ve watched the film adaptation so much tragedy, right? It would be very, very easy to reduce that story to mirror tragedy.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I think we’re inclined to that sometimes, especially in relationship to black stories. We’re inclined toward the traumatic. I think there’s a really sinister curiosity around black death, around black pain. Everyone. I mean, even if you don’t necessarily crave it, there’s this interest, right? What does it mean to have a spiritual practice that’s grounded? That doesn’t begin at the site of trauma, but begins at the site of beauty and attentiveness.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I mean, how liberating to be able… Like I said, to listen to the barn swallows outside of my room, instead of getting wrapped up and what you, really smart people will think of me. That’s a liberating act. That’s a liberating access that I have to the beauty of the world that it’s not escapism. And the way that I think you can use it as, it’s not escapism.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It’s actually really unapologetic presence to the nuance of the world, that there are terrors. But there is also beauty and to be unapologetic in witnessing that and communicating that, I think is what Alice Walker was doing.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It’s like wonder. Every time we behold, what you say is we behold something. We look at it as a piece of art, or we just feel the aliveness in us that comes when we have wonder. We are asserting what you say that we are more than a grotesque collection of traumas. Right? It’s like suddenly you are something else.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And then you talk about wonder as not only a personal way of being alive, a personal liberation, but a way to save the world really because you talk about, I think you said, we can’t destroy things that we’re beholding, something like that.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah, I think it’s really difficult. I mean, if you’re witnessing beauty, I think you’re going to be inclined to protect it. You could be inclined to take ownership over it, claim it, acquire it, but there’s this other very true, I think women us that wants to protect beautiful things. So if you’re witnessing beauty in the world, that’s what’s going to kind of cultivate a love in you and cultivate this sense of how can I keep this safe? How do I protect the flame?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I don’t know. We went back and forth about the most beautiful lines in this book and we have 40 million, but one of them has to be the northern lights are one thing. But when I die, tell them, I went to Nome, Alaska only to find God in a Minecraft parody. And you’ll just have to read to understand that. But ugh, burst out crying. Yeah. She burst out crying when I read that.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, she did.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. By the way, Cole, if you ever need a full reading guide of your book, please just email me because I have all 15. But what we will do is end with calling because that’s the next one. Oh, God. Just as a complete control freak who was always talking about God and not even ever sure she believes in God. I’m just like, “What am I talking about?” Am I making all this? I don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So you’re talking to your brother about your lucid dreams. Okay? And these are dreams in which you are making… You know you’re dreaming. So you’re calling the shots in your own dream. Okay? You’re changing your dream. You’re deciding what’s next. You’re controlling your dream and your brother says, “You live and sleep in control. I want to know how to know.” And you say to him, “I wanted to know how not to know, how to feel like there is a calling from outside of you driving you to that door until you walk through it like there is no other way.”
Glennon Doyle:
Sometimes you want to believe the dream. I’m not one given to believe. I don’t know if I’ll ever love anyone as much as I loved you after those lines because to me, I just felt like, “Okay. Sure things are beautiful and magical because I make them that way.” I want God. This God that I’m… A great PR agent for. To show up and do something so, that I will feel called to that and know that I’m not controlling all of this, that magic is real.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
And that was the first one I ever got like that was this one, was Abby. When Abby walked into a room and I suddenly, God was like, “Here she is. And also you’re queer, honey. Surprise.” This is a plot twist that I can say for sure I didn’t control.
Amanda Doyle:
That was a calling from outside.
Glennon Doyle:
That was a calling from outside. But was it? Because then I’m still reading from Cole, right? Then I’m like, “You know what, what if it wasn’t even a… Well, I mean, because one of the things that’s so important to me about your work is your refusal to decide whether God is just outside or inside. Because in the Christian… People get so freaked out if you ever even begin to consider that the deepest self is God.
Glennon Doyle:
Do we even have to decide whether it’s coming from outside or inside or whether it’s God on some phone outs call in the sky or whether God is the self calling to itself.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah. Whether going into yourself isn’t going toward God, going toward the divine. Howard Thurman talks about that beautifully. I don’t know if I quote him in the book, but he talks about that beautifully. The sound of the genuine in you. He says, “Who are you? You have to find out who your name is.” And he connects that too. If you’re not, you’re just going to end up like some marionette on the strings that someone else is pulling ultimately.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Who are you? And that call to self being, a call toward the divine, I think it’s one of those mysterious things that I don’t feel pressured to distinguish. If it’s true, it’s true. My dad says this, “The truth is the truth. Whether or not you’re prepared to tell it, or you just tell it, if it’s true, it’s true.” Any kind of fidelity to something that’s true in me, I think is a fidelity and to a truth in the divine and to a truth in who God is.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So yeah, maybe the call. Maybe the call was both. Coming from inside the house and outside. And there’s beauty in both, and you don’t need it to come from outside in order for that to be valid. You don’t have to wait for that to seem like it’s… Although I want that. I want the magic. People say they hear God. I’m like, “I’m waiting. It hasn’t yet happened to me.” But have I met the face of God? Have I met the face of God in the person I love? Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
You said, “I’ve accepted that the whole of my life will be a pilgrimage toward the sound of the genuine in me.” But also if practiced right, you’re calling into selfhood, may enhance the sound of selfhood in someone else. Meaning? This is the kind of God pyramid scheme I can get into. Because usually it’s like, “Oh, I’m collecting people for God.” And it’s just kind of like Mary Kay. It’s like a pyramid, “I brought him and I brought her, and we’re all getting points.”
Glennon Doyle:
But maybe this is a sort of evangelism I can believe in, which is like the closer we get to God, which is the closer we get to our deepest self, freeze, somebody else to get the closest that they can get to God and to their deepest self, and this is a real ripple liberation.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. In that speech that Thurman gives, the sound of the genuine, he gave it to Spelman College. There’s this line where he says, “It’s possible if I go down in me, go toward my true self, I can go down in me and come up in you. And having made that pilgrimage, I can see myself through your eyes and you can see yourself.” There’s this intimacy with the self. There’s this intimacy with another person. Is that not what love is? I can go down in my true self, come up in you and make that pilgrimage of mutuality of mutual love and mutual beholding.
Glennon Doyle:
Mutual beholding.
Amanda Doyle:
And in fact, maybe that’s the only way, because as you say, can you describe your father looking in the mirror and your revelation about what he saw versus what you were able to see?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I don’t know. Maybe someone listening has had… If you’ve seen someone else’s face in the mirror and you just know it’s not lining up quite right. I don’t remember how old I was, but I had this experience with my dad. He’s doing his hair, getting his curls with his vital point and I’m looking at him and I’m like, “Do you think that’s what you look like?” And he is looking at me like, “What are you talking about?”
Cole Arthur Riley:
I’m like, “That’s not your face. I want to shake him and say, “That’s not your face.” What I wanted to say is your face is way better than what that mirror is translating, what that mirror is communicating. But instead I just grabbed his face and stared at him in the way that a very queer little child would do. I just kind of grabbed him and stared and was like that’s not your face because… I mean, even with mirrors, you’re seeing this projection. You’re seeing everything kind of new and out of alignment.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It’s not actually showing what you truly look like. It’s showing an iteration of it maybe, but not your true face. I mean, how mysterious that we were made, that we cannot see our own faces. I will never see my own face.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my gosh, this part really.
Cole Arthur Riley:
You’re seeing it.
Glennon Doyle:
I will never get over it. I will never get over you telling us that we will never see our own faces.
Abby Wambach:
It’s scary.
Glennon Doyle:
If you could see me, Cole, like literally crossing my eyes, trying to find some way. How beautiful is that?
Amanda Doyle:
It’s the most beautiful thing. We will never see our own faces, which is why we need to see other people’s faces for them. And why other people need to see our faces for us and why we need other people to see the face of God because God is made in our image, which we are not able to see.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I need you. I need you to look at me for all the people who want to live in invisibility, all the little children, I needed other people to behold my own face. My dad needs that. You need that. I mean, it’s the best case for belonging that we have, these pseudo wise people who think they can lead, live a solitary life. It’s just not true. There’s something missing. People always say, “You have to know yourself.” They say these things.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It’s the same with the beauty. They say, “You have to know yourself. You have to really know yourself before you can be with someone.” I’m like, “Okay. Yes, and…” You have to really know how to be with someone in order to really know yourself. It’s not either or. I have to really be able to stand and not cover my face while I’m talking to my spouse. I need to be able to stand before them and have that very strange and scary experience of being seen in order for me to go into our nice little meditation space and then try to encounter myself.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It’s not how it works. I reject that. I’m a big evangelist for belonging in the sense that I think we were made for that kind of mutual witness.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s not right that we… It can’t be that we know ourselves before we go knowing anyone else. It’s like place. People are like place. They will bring stuff up in us that we have never seen of ourselves before. They will show us part of our face that we have never seen before. Every new person, you cannot know yourself. Just like every place brings us a new part of ourselves out. Every person does. That’s why it requires presence and aliveness.
Abby Wambach:
It’s like the first time I’ve struggled with faith, religion, Christianity, being brought up in the Catholic church, being a little queer kid. Didn’t have the language for it until I was in my teenage years. And Glennon has allowed me and I’m now putting these pieces together throughout this conversation. You’ve allowed me to see God because I see it in your face.
Abby Wambach:
It has allowed me to feel God inside of me. I don’t know. I just think that this is one of the most beautiful things that a person can experience, especially when you feel like you have to reject God because they rejected you first. So I’m like, “No, I reject you first.” And so to be able to come back into it in a witnessing way, when I look at my spouse and I can see God, I can see the divine in her. And it’s my job to mirror that for lack of a better term right now, back to you.
Glennon Doyle:
You just mentioned belonging, which is a whole nother, unbelievable way of being alive that you discuss in the book. Okay. And you said each year, I know love and belonging, a love that does not require a sacrifice at the altar of acceptance. Okay. Pod squad, did you hear that? That belonging is a love that does not require a sacrifice at the altar of acceptance. What parts of yourself, Cole, do you continue to feel that the world wants you to sacrifice at the altar of acceptance?
Cole Arthur Riley:
I mean, my blackness, my queerness, but I mean, in a different way, I think my silence, my nature, my person, my disposition. I’m a writer/ I’m doing podcasts. How can you be interesting? My intellect. Not all belonging is good belonging. And I have belonged to spiritual spaces that were so concerned with what I thought about God, with any given belief or any given doctrine or creed that if you fall out of line, then you’re bad. You’re the bad one. And your belonging is at stake.
Cole Arthur Riley:
How terrifying for young people trying to grapple and make sense of who they are in the world and who their people are in the world to demand a kind of belief. That means you belong. So anyways, I’ve decided that if it’s a kind of belonging that demands, I believe any given thing, I don’t want it because I know what that does to us.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I know we will say that we believe all kinds of things if it means that we can have a place at the table, a place, a warmth, if it means we can have company. Everyone is looking for that. So I’m very skeptical of spiritual spaces in particular that are like that. I think that’s why many Christian spaces probably wouldn’t claim me even because I don’t have an allegiance. I don’t have an allegiance to Christianity that terrifies people.
Glennon Doyle:
The prophet has nowhere to lay her head, Cole. A prophet has nowhere to lay her head.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah. I have an allegiance to the questions of what it means to be human and what it means to be a spiritual human in the world. And Christianity is one way I make sense of that. I might wake up some days and think, “Yeah, God exists. Maybe it has something.” And I might wake up many other days and think, “No way.” But my fidelity is to the questions. It’s finding the people who are okay with that. Not just okay with that, but welcome that and know that they actually need that in order to be whole and not whole be full themselves.
Glennon Doyle:
Be full. I love that. Cole Arthur Riley. Thank you. Just thank you.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
The rest of you, your next right thing is to get the next right book, and you might want to do this, because I don’t know that there’ll be another one for the next decade. The next right book, which must belong in any human being who loves life, who loves other people who loves spirituality. Who has a fidelity to the questions.
Abby Wambach:
I was just going to say that.
Glennon Doyle:
Must have this one. This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley. Thank you, Cole.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Thanks for helping us do the hard things. The hardest thing, which is fully being alive. We’ll see you next week.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Thanks for inviting me into your space and trusting me with your people.
Glennon Doyle:
The rest of you, get the book and then we’ll see you here next time. Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it. It’s fine.