How does it feel to know that God cares for us and wants to protect us from such things? How do we do the same for the ones we love? We do not assume to have all the answers to this ancient text, but we can see how God as creator and parent has some connections to Maggie’s poem Good Bones. We want to keep our children innocent of the knowledge of pain, suffering, embarrassment, and shame just as God wanted to keep such knowledge from Adam and Eve.

The book of Genesis describes the story of Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge ( Genesis 3), this story has generations worth of interpretations and translations.

How does it feel to know that you still contain the teenage version of yourself and the childhood version of yourself? What might you learn from one of your younger selves about how you deal with pain, loss, or things that scare us?

Kate and Maggie talk about our lives as being different iterations of our life stories, rather talking about our lives through before-after dichotomies.

You can get a copy here.ĭiscuss this episode with a book club, friends, or bible study group. The blessing at the end of this podcast is “for stretching your heart” can be found on page 18 in the book The Lives We Actually Have. The American Stress Institute has lots of other ideas and ways that you can relieve stress.

Kate and Maggie talk about a quote from Zora Neal Hurston, from her book Their Eyes Were Watching God.Īre you looking for a hobby that engages your senses and allows the stress to escape from your body? Maggie talks about her hobby of running and her good friend who got into birding. The idea of our previous-selves or iterations of ourselves inside of us is also described in a short story by Sandra Cisneros called Eleven. Maggie and Kate talk about how the years are inside of us like nesting dolls or a foil idea. Maggie’s poem Good Bones, went viral and was featured on the television show Madame Secretary.

Read Maggie’s memoir, You Could Make this Place Beautiful. Gretchen and Kate’s great conversation about ketchup can be found on the podcast episode, Can We Be a Tiny Bit Happier? At the beginning of this podcast, Kate shared about her friend Gretchen Rubin’s new book, Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World.

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