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Begin Again is for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Host Winston Faircloth — spiritual director, daily poet, and fellow traveler — brings honest conversation, personal story, and original poetry to the journey of remembering, releasing, and returning to who God created you to be. Visit www.myreuniontour.com for more resources.
It's not quick. This is slow cooking and requires a lot of water and grieving And speaking and community. I need to make tear soup. True. That's why churches properly have a grief group or they have a divorce recovery.
Sybil Towner:They get people together in some ways where there's some common yet different sorts of things going on. But one eight week course doesn't end it. And like with the maps, you keep coming back.
Winston Faircloth:That was Sybil Towner, and this is the Begin Again podcast. The word Sybil used, tear soup, has stayed with me since we've recorded that conversation weeks ago. I want to pause between movements today. Not because there's nothing left to say, but because the work of the Remember movement, the honest mapping of your story, the peak experiences in the valley seasons, the naming of what you've been carrying, that work doesn't end when you close the last map. It needs time to settle.
Winston Faircloth:The next movement we call recognize. And recognize is its own kind of threshold. The movement when you begin to name not just what happened in your stories, but what those events produced in you. The vows, the coping mechanisms, the identity that formed around a wound that you may have carried for decades without ever looking directly at it. This is deep work, and it deserves preparation, space, and grace.
Winston Faircloth:In the Christian tradition, this space has a name. It's called liminal, from the Latin lemon, meaning threshold, a doorway, the place where you're no longer where you were, but not yet where you are going. Liminal space is confusing, disorienting by design. Everything that once gave you your bearings, the role, title, routine, certainty, been identified, called out and named in the remember movement. But you haven't released it yet.
Winston Faircloth:You're standing in the doorway. This episode is an invitation to stay right there a little longer. To not rush past the naming and lessons from remembering. To let the slow cooking do what slow cooking does. There is a lie of scheduled transformation.
Winston Faircloth:I want to say something that might land differently, depending on where you are in your own journey. There's an entire industry built around the promise of transformation on a schedule. Six week programs, ninety day sprints, year long masterminds that guarantee a new version of yourself by December. I've been in many of these rooms. I have bought some of those promises.
Winston Faircloth:I've sat in on those calls with a notebook and a highlighter believing, genuinely believing that if I just followed the system, the transformation would arrive right on time. It didn't. It never did arrive on time. And for the longest time, I thought it was my fault. I hadn't worked hard enough.
Winston Faircloth:I hadn't fully committed to the program. I hadn't applied the framework correctly. And what I understand now, some five years into a journey that I did not plan and could not have engineered, is that real transformation doesn't come on our schedule. A seed planted today never bears fruit immediately. You can water it.
Winston Faircloth:You can tend it. You can give it light. But you cannot make it grow faster than it's going to grow. The timeline belongs to the seed, not to you. And what I've experienced since 2020 is not a program I've completed.
Winston Faircloth:It's been a slow, gradual, accumulating series of small letting go. A vow I didn't know I made, quietly loosening its grip. A story I'd been carrying, finally given room to breathe. A question. Who are you when the title falls away?
Winston Faircloth:Slowly, over years, beginning to answer itself. Not because I followed a single framework, but because I stayed in the question long enough for something real to surface. Sybil says, it takes slow cooking. And she's right. And the In Between Place, that liminal space where you're no longer where you were, but not yet who you're becoming, that's the field where slow cooking happens.
Winston Faircloth:You cannot rush it. You can only tend it. So my own liminal experience. For me, the In Between Place lasted five years. Now I'm not saying your in between space will take that long.
Winston Faircloth:For some people, it's months. For others, it's years. What I can tell you is the duration is not something you can control, and trying to shorten it usually doesn't work. What does work, what I have found slowly and perfectly, is learning to inhabit the questions instead of running from them. Over this time, I wrote poems coming up on nearly a thousand of them now.
Winston Faircloth:Not because I'm a poet, but because poems were the only place where I could put down what I was feeling without trying to fix it or move past it. One poem, one day, one photograph. That in between place made it into language one morning at a time. I didn't know I was doing anything significant. I just knew I needed somewhere to put what I was feeling.
Winston Faircloth:Slowly, over months and then years, something began to clarify. Something began to emerge. Not an answer, more like a direction. A sense, however faint, of who I was becoming. That's the gift of the in between space.
Winston Faircloth:If you stay in it long enough, you can receive it. Not a resolution, not a graduation certificate from a program, but a direction, a path. And that's what the Recognize movement will help you begin to name. But we're not ready for that quite yet. For now, wherever you are in this in between space, I want to offer you a poem.
Winston Faircloth:This is from tour day nine forty six. This poem is called Left. You teach us to treasure and number our days. Believing in countless more allows us to throw them away. Each remaining one more precious than the last.
Winston Faircloth:No time like the present to learn from our past. Some are entering seasons, stepping away from the known. Looking back, we can see just how much we have grown. How many more years were there nine or twenty threes unknown? Let me live this one single day, not taking for granted or ever disown.
Winston Faircloth:Treasure each moment and day, not to be treated as debt. Let me savor and serve with the time I have left. And here's a question I'd like to leave you with as we stand in this in between place together. What are you learning in the waiting that you could only learn here? Don't rush this question.
Winston Faircloth:Let it travel with you. What are you learning in the waiting that you could only learn here? Next episode, we're going to begin to unpack the recognized movement of the My Reunion Tour. But first, stay here a little longer. Tend the seed.
Winston Faircloth:This in between place is not a failure. It's a field. For links to learn more about this journey, to read some of the hundreds of poems from my daily practice, or to schedule a conversation, check out the show notes below. I'm Winston Faircloth, and you're right where you're supposed to be.