UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript is provided in its raw, unedited form and may contain errors. We have not proofread this transcript, so it may include typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this rough transcript as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is David Whyte, an internationally renowned poet, author, and speaker. Let me tell you how it is for me when I listen to David present, talk, teach, recite his poetry. I feel disturbed, that’s the word, provoked, inspired, a type of soul-stirring. I feel shaken up. And I’m so pleased in that spirit to bring David Whyte to Insights at the Edge.
David talks to audiences of all persuasions from boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies to educational institutions to the stages of literary festivals and theological conferences. He weaves poetry, story and commentary into a moving, almost physical experience of the themes that run through all of our lives, joy and loss, vulnerability and vitality, courage and despair, beauty and necessary heartbreak.
David Whyte makes his home in the Pacific Northwest where rain and changeable skies remind him of the other more distant homes from which he comes, Yorkshire, Wales, and Ireland. He’s the author of 10 books of poetry, three books of prose on the transformative nature of work, a widely acclaimed book of essays and an extensive audio collection, which includes a gorgeous series from Sounds True, What to Remember When Waking. David, welcome.
David Whyte: Very good to be here and very good to see you again after so many years of not seeing you.
TS: Indeed great to be together.
DW: I’m glad to be here to disturb you as you-
TS: Yes. You already have disturbed me. You disturbed me in that I re-listened to What to Remember When Waking as part of the preparation for recording this. And one of the things I found on your website I think helped me understand the disturbance, which is a way that you describe poetry, language against which we have no defenses.
And I wanted to start there because in listening to What to Remember When Waking, it’s like my normal defenses, my rational processing, it wasn’t working. My defenses came down. Tell me what you mean, poetry, language against which we have no defenses.
DW: Yes, it’s that intimate exchange that we all know so very well when someone is trying to speak to us and inviting us to understand something that we don’t quite want to understand, but which is going to impact our lives.
So we have that particular combination when someone is bringing us terrible news of the loss of a friend or a death, and that person will often touch you momentarily before they start speaking. They’ll touch you on the shoulder or lean in, so the physical contact. And then they will often look you in the eyes and then they will give you the news. They will say it three different times and they will say it in three different ways and they will have silence between the way they tell you.
And probably, they will fall into iambic pentameter, which is how human beings speaking in English speak in an intimate way to another person. So there you have the natural substrate of poetry. And so poetry is not an abstract art, it’s the way human beings speak when they’re on their intimate edge, speaking of edges, the theme of your series. So it’s speaking from the live edge between what you think is you and what you think is not you.
I have a piece directly to what you were saying, and the first line is good poetry begins with the lightest touch. Interesting, I hadn’t thought about that, but there it is. So good poetry begins with the lightest touch, a breeze arriving from nowhere, a gifted, easy arrival. Then like a hand in the dark, it arrests the whole body stealing you for revelation. Then like a hand in the dark it arrests the whole body stealing you for revelation. In the silence that follows a great line, you can feel Lazarus deep inside the laziest, most deathly afraid part of you lift up his hands and walk toward the light.
Then like a hand in the dark, it arrests the whole body stealing you for revelation. That’s a very physical line actually. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across a hand in the dark that you didn’t know was there, but you can imagine what your reaction would be if you did, if you suddenly in the dark touched another hand that you did not know was there. And that’s the surprise you feel in good poetry, it’s that physical arresting. It arrests the whole body stealing you for revelation.
In the silence that follows a great line, you can feel Lazarus deep inside the laziest, most deathly afraid part of you lift up his hands and walk toward the light. So I wasn’t religious as a child, but I loved going to Sunday school just because the teachers there were such great storytellers and I loved the way they told all the biblical stories. So many of those stories are stamped right through me.
So in that poem, Lazarus came alive, literally, risen from the dead. So one of the things that occurs in that poem for instance, is it allows you to understand that you do have an incredibly lazy, deathly afraid part of you that’s reluctant to engage with reality.
And I always say every human being has the right to turn away from the courageous conversation because life is full of so much disappearance, death, loss, grief, ill health, and the loss of people and places that are so heartbreaking that every human being at one time or another in their existence says, “Listen, God.”
And even if you don’t believe in God, you say, “Listen, God, if this is the game you want me to play, I’m not going to play it. It’s too heartbreaking, it’s too painful. I’m going to actually turn my face elsewhere and I’m going to make a little artificial world of my own where I don’t feel life with the keenness that I did with my last heartbreak. I’m going to create a little insulated video game of my own.”
It’s one of the reasons video games are so addictive, especially for the young masculine psyche. You can restart the game if you feel you’re going to die. You can buy the invisibility cloak that allows you not to be seen, not to be touched. So all of us have our versions of that little video game at times in life because human beings need respite.
So the ability of good poetry is not to create some ideal world where you’re going to this perfect representation. It’s to be just yourself, this person who at times is not only scared of reality but terrified. When you’re sitting at the bedside of a loved one who’s dying, when you realize that you’re not just slightly unhealthy, you’ve really got something that is leading you down a path towards your own disappearance. Every human being experiences, not only those two qualities, but many other ones all at the same time.
TS: Now, David, as you’re talking, I thought, “David Whyte, the poet who brings you the news you don’t want to hear, the courageous conversation.” But I’ve pulled several lines-
DW: That’s one of the definitions of the courageous conversation, it’s the one you don’t want to have. So all you have to do is ask yourself, what’s the conversation I don’t want to have? And that’s it, that’s where you should go.
TS: Well, that’s where listening to What to Remember When Waking took me. And I pulled several quotes, and I want to talk about some of them with you, “A well-felt sadness in life can be just as generative as a well-felt joy.” Because that’s actually what I found through this process was that the difficult thing, there was some stuff I didn’t want to feel, the sadness. What makes a sadness a well-felt sadness? And talk about its generativity.
DW: Well, I often think that the only cure for grief is grief itself, that grief is its own cure. There’s no other cure for grief than grief itself. And it asks us to feel it fully, to feel the complete absence.
In a way, grief then turns to elegy. And elegy is always the conversation between loss and celebration that you had the privilege of being alive on the planet at the same time. I mean, how incredible is that? Of all the millions and hundreds of millions of lives there have been since the beginning of conscious time, we were alive together at the same time on the same planet for a brief span of years. We got to breathe each other’s air. How incredible is that? That’s the elegy to be able to speak. And you were able to actually be in the presence and witness of that gift.
So that’s a well-felt sadness. You could have turned away at the beginning and said, “Oh, he had a great innings. It was good,” and covered it over, but you would’ve felt that wound inside you without ever traveling into it. You would’ve felt that vulnerability without ever bringing it to its full consummation so it can heal itself. So a well-felt sadness.
Interestingly enough, the very first essay I wrote in my book, Consolations, came out of a request from the Observer Magazine in Britain to write for their philosophical column, but their request was very constrained. They said it has to be a single word title and it can only be 300 words. And I said to myself, “There’s hardly time for an Irishman to catch his breath with the 300 words.”
But I sat down and I wrote it and I realized regret has been the deeply unfashionable quality over the last 30 or 40 years. Lots of people are going around saying, “I have no regrets and you should have no regrets.” And I always say to myself, “Where have you been all your life? You should get out more and actually create some because there’s no life you can live without regret. The only question is, will you actually feel your regret to its fullest? Because a proper regret puts you into a better relationship to the future.”
If you’ve been a busy father who had no time for your boy or your girl, your child, if you retire and you fully get time to regret that, you can be a great grandfather, great grandmother to your grandchildren. Regret puts you into a proper relationship with the world. So regret is one of those great sadnesses that we often carry, but we never follow it and allow ourselves to feel it fully, that I missed a tide, a tide that will never ever come back again. But there’ll be other tides and I’m going to be there for that one.
TS: A couple of questions about this, David. Do you have a way of busting yourself, if you will, when you can tell that you’re not feeling something fully, that you have it at an arm’s length, that you’re not quite going all the way through? How do you sniff that out in your own experience?
DW: Well, it’s partly through the conversational identity I’ve shaped through writing poetry. It’s also the identity I’ve probably shaped on the black cushion facing a wall, sitting Zen. And that’s the sense when your mind is actually naming things. And you can feel it, it’s almost as if it’s keeping things at a distance by naming them. So when you feel that, then it’s time to bring it back into the silence of the body. And so you actually don’t reframe it right away. You just go back into silence and pay attention to what you were keeping at bay in a way.
So always with my work with leadership, I have seven elements in deepening any conversation, but there are seven elements for deepening any conversation in any part of our life actually, a relationship. And the first step in deepening the conversation is to stop having the one you’re having now.
So not to reframe it, not to reimagine it, not to rehabilitate it, not to re-articulate it, just to stop having it and go into silence. And you don’t do that from a puritanical mode or to keep people at distance. You go there so you can drink from a deeper well. You can have another foundation from which to actually approach what’s going on.
TS: And then whether it’s grief or it’s regret, I think oftentimes for many of us, we can find ourselves stuck in that experience. There isn’t a sense that, oh, now I’m going to be a different kind of grandparent moving forward. I just feel the regret of my terrible parenting and that’s that. What is it that enables us to move through and beyond into generativity with the experience?
DW: Well, I do think that you can talk about conversations, but you could just as equally talk about invitations. I talk about conversational leadership for instance, but actually the essence of conversational leadership is being an invitational leader. So the whole of creation seems to be made up of endless invitations, things meeting us that are inviting us to be a certain way in their presence. And so everything’s an invitation to the next step, to the next emancipation of your life.
So I don’t think you can fully regret something without immediately precipitating out this sense that you’ve actually entered a new epoch in your life. You’ve emancipated yourself from that imprisonment you were in before where you thought you had to choose between your work and your children. It’s just happened because you felt the regret fully. You’ve examined it, you’ve felt it in your body, you’ve felt the pain of it, and you said, “I’m not going to do that again, and I am going to be aware when I find myself in that mode.”
So sometimes that happens over time, it’s a gradual awakening. And sometimes it happens unconsciously behind the scenes in our own mind and then suddenly precipitates out in what looks like a kind of Kensho as it’s called in the Zen tradition or a breakthrough or enlightenment.
And I think actually that enlightenment is just being in a real conversation. That’s what it means. It’s not some heavenly place with the 15,000 Buddhas. It’s the fact that you’re in the conversation as far as you can go and you’re meeting something other than you, and that otherness will actually invite you into the next stage. And there’s no other place you can actually be except that edge of maturation, that edge of emancipation, that edge of becoming, of seeing.
TS: I’m not sure that everybody will track with you when you say enlightenment is being in the fullness of the conversation. The way that you use the word conversation, I’m not sure that it’s the way most people associate with having a conversation. So can you say more about that?
DW: Well, the lovely thing about conversation is that it’s a word that’s uncoercible because it exists along a whole spectrum. So if you notice, it’s very hard to jargonize conversation. You can jargonize dialogue. That’s a word that’s become a jargon word actually. But conversation means everything from a little chat around the water cooler to a life-changing marital conversation at the kitchen table at midnight. So it’s the whole spectrum from beginning to end.
So you can be present fully for that chat around the water cooler, absolutely with the broadest background context as well as the foreground of the person there. So it could become actually a moment for the other person, just as much as you can be fully present at that kitchen table for your spouse or your partner so you can take a vulnerable step together.
I had this amazing moment, I was in Dublin. This is many years ago, but I’d just come out from a barbershop. I just had my hair cut. It was a bright day. I had my sunglasses on, I had a jacket. And I must’ve looked incredibly cool because I was standing at this bus stop and this young lad came up to me and he said, “Are you Bono?” And my first thought to myself was, “I don’t think Bono would be stood waiting for the number 21 bus into Dublin.”
But there was such a longing, and I felt such a presence there because I had actually been emptying my mind while I’d been stood there just enjoying the day from behind my shades and just as present as possible. And I just absolutely felt that I should say yes. There was something that boy was needing at that moment. And I said, “Yes, I’m Bono.” And he took me by the hand and he shook my hand and he said, “I just want to thank you for all your work. Some of your words have saved my life.” I said, “Well, you’re very welcome. I’m glad to have such a good listener as you.” And off he went.
Now, normally I wouldn’t … If you’d have gone into the strategic mind and said, “Well, that’s a kind of disguise, you’re pretending to be something other,” no, that was what was called on in the moment. That was the invitation of the moment. And I’ve never regretted that moment. And I always felt I was exactly what I should have been for that young lad. And he will have carried that away. He actually did meet Bono. He didn’t meet me, he met what he needed to meet.
So it was a very strange eccentric moment, but it was one of those moments where if you’re just aware … I mean, you never know. You might think your life is all geared around and shaped around writing a dozen books of poetry and becoming a great philosopher-poet, but actually it could be that your whole life is shaped about being at a bus stop at the right time for the right person and saying exactly the right thing.
And that transformation might be the single best gift that you get from a whole lifetime of endeavor. Whatever our priorities are during our life, they always shift at the deathbed looking back, the understanding of what was there all along that we didn’t give full credence to.
TS: I think it might help me, David, if you’re willing, you mentioned that there are these seven steps of conversational or invitational leadership, and the first one is not to keep telling the same story, to open up to some silence. I think it would help me if I could just hear the other steps articulated. Because I think when I think of conversation, I think, I’m going to go into my mind and I’m going to talk to myself. No, that’s the conversation I’ve been having that I don’t need to keep having. So I wonder if you could just help me see the progression here.
DW: Oh my God, the seven elements, this is a year long program, but just very quickly, more or less, and I may not even [inaudible 00:27:09] seven.
TS: Sure, the gist of it, the gist of it.
DW: Yeah. So it’s stop the conversation you’re having now so you can drink from a deeper well. That immediately by definition puts you into a relationship with the unknown. So the second element, the second step, the second phenomenology is cultivating a friendship with what you do not know, getting used to not having easy answers.
Your strategic peripheral mind is constantly trying to name things, constantly trying to have answers to everything. You’ve been rewarded in your educational system all your life for having easy answers. Many of the answers I gave during my zoology classes at university are seen to be completely untrue now, but you were rewarded at that time for having those names and that understanding.
So stopping the conversation you’re having now, drinking from a deeper well, making a friend of the unknown, and then that brings you to ground in the unknown. You hit something new. It’s surprising. You’re not even fully aware of what you’ve made contact with in that unknown.
But this is the Dantean place at the beginning of the Commedia where Dante says [foreign language 00:28:39]. “In the middle of the road of our lives, I walk in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.” So this is a coming to ground. Dante in his outer life has been expelled from his home city of Florence. He and his family have been thrown out of power and he’s told that he can’t go home. And if he does go home, he’ll be put on trial and probably executed.
So for an Italian, even to this day, whose identity comes from their city that they belong to and the area around the city, this is like a living death. So you can go off and live in exile or you can come home in your grief, and that’s what Dante did at the beginning of the Commedia. He wrote those lines, which every Italian child now has to recite, [Foreign language 00:29:51], in the middle of the road of our lives. You don’t know where it began, you don’t know who’s to blame, you’re just here in this dark wood. But in that dark wood, there’s a narrow place onto which you can step and from which you can step into your new life.
And then the next element is following the path of vulnerability. And in the Dantean story that follows this phenomenon, he meets the lion, the leopard, and the wolf, which are representations of his own inner flaws and difficulties, the things you carry with you that sabotage you and sabotage other people all the time. And so he encounters those in that dark place.
But then following this path of vulnerability, and that’s what it is, he meets the ancient essence and representation of poetry, which is Virgil. I mean, we think nothing of Virgil today, but in Dante’s time, Virgil was the cat’s whiskers. He was the foundation of all poetry. And so he met the essence of poetry, and that’s where Virgil invites him through that famous doorway which says, “Give up all hope ye who enter here.” He said, “Will you follow me?” And Dante says, “Yes.” So this is following the path of vulnerability.
So we tend to think of vulnerability as a weakness, but it’s really interesting to think of it as the place where you’re open to the world where you want to be or not. You’re just made that way. You were made to create sounds true and to get the word out to people. That’s just the way you’re made. That’s your vulnerability. You’re vulnerable because you care about it. Your work makes you vulnerable because you care about it.
And the only way you can stop being vulnerable is to stop caring, and many people do that, of course, it’s one of our great defenses. I’m going to stop my dream because it’s breaking my heart, so I’m going to stop caring. And then you create the identity of the cynic. The cynic always has all the answers and all the evidence behind them. They’re very powerful that way. They’ve got all the evidence as to why you’re just going to get your heart broken, whatever you do.
In many ways, it’s true, there is no sincere path a human being can take where we won’t have our hearts broken. So we can only choose to take the path that we really care about. So that’s the path of vulnerability. It’s also the path of artistry. And out of that, we start making incredible invitations.
So the next element is making the invitation. And you can see how your work, for instance, has made invitations to millions of people around the planet. And I know intimately the way writing and lines and essays have gone into people’s lives. It’s the invitation. And then that makes an invitation to us in return to go deeper with what we’re doing. It’s a mutual invitation in a way that just deepens in a virtuous circle.
And then the last element is bringing in the harvest of your life, harvest, because we can be involved with all of these endeavors in such an incredibly intense way that life passes us by as we’re doing it. You’re not allowing yourself to enjoy what you’re doing.
So the greatest harvest, I think, is being happy as you go along the way right from the beginning. There’s a certain kind of happiness, even in knowing you’re in … I mean, if you do know, I mean, what’s wonderful about knowing this phenomenology of how conversation deepens is you can recognize where you are. You go, “Oh my God,” first of all, and then you say, “Ah, the dark wood.”
I’m not supposed to know what’s going on actually. In the dark wood, you’re just not meant to know. And if you did know something, it would be the wrong thing. And if you did find a direction to go, it’d be the wrong direction. You’re just meant to clear the decks. You’re meant to come to ground. And if you did know where you were going to go, you’d turn around, run a hundred miles in the opposite direction because you’re not psychologically ready for it.
We always hide our future from ourselves because that future is always slightly terrifying to the person we are now. We never think we’re big enough for it. We never think we’re equal to it. So we have to go to the deep part of us that actually is already equal to it and has been right from the moment we were born.
TS: One question I have, David, is when you talk about giving up all hope in order to go through that doorway, why do I have to give up all hope? I have a piece of me that is hopeful.
DW: This is a different kind of hope, actually. This is really notions, I would say. Give up all notions.
TS: Okay.
DW: Yes. All your ideas of what it would mean to be, in Dante’s case, a good poet. So give up those fancy ideas. And the incredible thing about the Commedia that Dante wrote coming out of this exile was that at a time in Europe when you only wrote in Latin so that every other educated person in Europe could read what you’d written, he chose his local dialect, which was Florentine Tuscan, which was really a very eccentric but also powerfully courageous step to take it.
It was literally the tongue of his mother. It was his mother tongue. It was what he heard from his mother and from his father and from the landscape here. But he wrote so stunningly in Tuscan that every other inhabitant of the Italian peninsula who spoke other dialects, started to learn Tuscan so that they could read Dante. And that was how the Italian language came about. So that was just an incredible invitation to the birth of a future nationality in a way, an understanding of identity.
TS: Okay, so let me ask you this other question, when you talk about grounding in the unknown. And during this time I think pandemic, post pandemic now, there’s been such a rise. The number one key keyword we find that people search often, it sounds true, is anxiety and anxiety relief. There’s such a rise in this free-floating sense of being out of control, not knowing what’s happening on so many different stages in the world. And being okay, grounded, at home, rooted in the unknown, it seems it’s harder than ever for people. And I wonder if you can talk about that, the time we’re in and that need.
DW: Yes. And in fact, I’ve written one essay for the new book of Consolations on anguish, and the other one which I’m just in the middle of is anxiety. And it has something to do with not being fully in your body or the real body of the world. And part of it is the magnification of the peripheral mind through our iPhones and our gadgets and Zoom. You don’t get the physical proximity which literally grounds you.
And I’ve just written an essay on background. One of the phenomena that happens in the deepening of attention in Zen, and actually we should just forget about the word Zen, but just the deepening of any form of attention, is that the background starts to become just as important as the foreground. And the physical background of the world is half of the necessity of our experience, and it’s half of the substrate of our belonging.
So we’ve co-evolved with the color blue, for instance, for millions of years, so that the color blue in the sky is incredibly nourishing to us. And my grandma used to say there was enough … I’d say, “How is the sky outside, grandma?” She said, “There’s enough blue to make a sailor’s bonnet,” she’d say, or a sailor’s shirt. But that was the reference, it was the blue that was coming through.
We’ve grown in companionship with all the different greens in the world. We’ve grown with the sound of the wind. So those kind of communal canopies beneath which we share and experience are incredibly powerful. So often we’re lonely, not only because we’re physically distant from other people, but we’re also physically distant from a real immersion in the sky, in the rain, in the moon, the stars, the wind, and the actual ground beneath our feet.
So there’s a lovely communal experience, for instance, in living in a village where you say hello to 20 people in the day who you only half know really. You get to know little bits more and more as you live longer and longer. But those things, research shows that those half acquaintances are incredibly important in your everyday happiness.
If you’re in a pub in the west of Ireland and your foot tapping away to a great music session with a pub full of fellow strangers who are fellow listeners, there’s a community there, which is incredibly nourishing. So part of it, I think, and it was certainly exacerbated as we know by the worldwide lockdown, this literal distancing that occurred, which magnified everything on top of everything else.
So we didn’t quite realize how wonderful it was just to hang around other people and how much we’re actually breathing other people’s air, which for those years was a fearful thing. But it’s actually a necessary thing in the long evolution of human beings to be snug together, breathing each other’s air. That’s part of it.
So I do think it’s this abstraction from physicality and therefore the care of physicality. We all know the way we are when we’re in a car and someone cuts us off slightly. You say things you would never say if you were just walking down the street with that person because you have this barrier between you. So that dynamic is certainly magnified by the internet where people are their worst selves quite often when they’re anonymous and they’re distant and they can get away with it. So I think all of those things together make us very anxious.
So I mean, that’s a very powerful representation of stopping the conversation just to go for a walk without your phone for 20 minutes. It’s radical for some people, and for many people, they feel as if a limb is actually missing from them. I’ve felt it at times. I have my phone with me because I write in it too, but there are always messages and things. But you sometimes feel as if a limb is actually missing when you go without your phone.
But actually, once you get through that, you find you’ve got another conversation knocking on your door. And it’s not the messages in your Gmail or your iMessage, it’s another message from deeper inside you and from out over the horizon in the world.
TS: So David, I’m going to get slightly confessional. I think this is a form of inhabiting robust vulnerability. I hope so. You use that term robust vulnerability.
DW: Yes.
TS: Maybe you can explain what you mean by it before I go on.
DW: I mean, one form of robust vulnerability is having a sense of humor about yourself. So you have a flaw you’re working with, and you’re so proud of yourself about the way you are with it, and then suddenly you find yourself in the limelight demonstrating that flaw to a large room. And if you’re present enough, you can laugh with everyone else and you say, “Oh my God, there I go again.” And it’s both a acknowledgement, but also it’s part of your practice. You won’t do it as easily the next time. So that’s one form of robust vulnerability.
And what’s robust about a sense of humor is that a sense of humor is a kind of spiritual practice in a way, because a sense of humor always tells you that whatever context you have arranged for yourself, there is always another context that makes your context absurd. And in Ireland, this dynamic is the basis of all conversation in a way. You try to bring that absurdity, the absurdity of what you’ve just said, or everyone around you will try to bring it to its full consummation within a few minutes, then they will move on to the next subject. So yes, robust vulnerability takes a lot of …
And then in the deeper vulnerabilities of writing, quite often in the early stages, you break into tears as you’re writing. And actually, that’s a really good sign because it’s the sign that you’ve broken through an edge. Whatever emotional container you had, it could only contain so much and you’ve just over overflown it. You’re now pouring into the next territory of your life. The river is running on. So that’s another lovely …
And we’ve had that breakdown. When you have a marital argument or a relationship and you end up in tears in it, usually it’s a good sign. If you can stay in that and not see it as a weakness, feel it more fully in your body, you can practice robust vulnerability. So you stop seeing it as a weakness, and then it becomes a kind of alertness.
So you’re in a meeting room, someone attacks you, previously, a few years ago, you would’ve curled up into a ball, you felt vulnerable. But you’ve got used to, “Oh, right, he’s going for that part of me. I used to go for that part of me myself too, so I know how to deal with that.” So the vulnerability’s still there, but you have a much larger identity around it. We’re trying to make ourselves bigger than the actual impact itself.
TS: Well, I do think that what I wanted to share did have this quality of tears and the river banks breaking. And just briefly, it has to do with the impact of your work, which is about 25 years ago, I was recording you, maybe 30 years ago, David. It was so long. I mean, here you are approaching 70 now, I’m over 60. We’re going way back here.
And here I am at some event someplace with my headphones on sitting in the corner, crying, crying, crying over the course of two days. Because in listening to you, I realized I had to let something very important in my life go that related to the way I had built Sounds True to that point in time. And I made the decision right there during the recording.
DW: Great.
TS: And that’s the way I felt listening now to What to Remember When Waking too, that there’s this something I need to let go of. And it was there, I could see it, but I didn’t really want to admit it. And so I wonder if you could speak to that directly and maybe you even have a poem I bet about this phenomenon of knowing that it’s time to let something go so that the new can come.
DW: Yeah, I mean, isn’t that life itself. I mean, I do think life is this constant invitation to a radical form of simplification, of giving away peripheral complications to get down to the essence of it and carry that essence into the world and to other people. And so there’s always something to be given away.
We’re seasonal creatures. So we take on the mantle of a certain season. I mean, spring is occurring now in the West and the Pacific Northwest as you know where you are in Vancouver. And so we’re all excited and we’re spring people suddenly. But the season moves on and suddenly it’s high summer, and then you move into that. And the most difficult ones are actually moving out of summer into fall.
Fall is actually quite attractive, but the winter, letting go of your previous joyous summer identity. When you’re actually being invited into a winter because of circumstances, because of difficulties, because of losing people, because of world circumstances, because of political circumstances, whatever it is, you suddenly find that you’ve refused to move on and you’ve refused to move with the season. And so there’s that giving away.
This is a piece I wrote, actually a springtime poem. It was written at this very desk where I’m sitting. Right in front of me are two French doors actually, and it was Easter. I had the French door open, and I heard the red-winged blackbird singing. And in this part of the world, the red-winged blackbird is a migratory bird. It comes at springtime and it has a beautiful song. And when you hear the song of the red-winged blackbird, you are hearing the essence of springtime. You say, “Ah, it’s here.” And I heard my first red-winged blackbird just last week, actually.
But there’s this old Irish meme, this old Irish koan actually, of a monk standing at the edge of the monastic precinct. And he hears the bell calling him to prayer, and he says, “That is the most beautiful sound in the world, the invitation to depth, to silence, to interiority.”
But at the same moment that he hears the bell, he hears the blackbird over the monastic wall, and he says, “And that’s also the most beautiful sound in the world.” And the interesting thing about the Irish koan, the Irish meme is you’re not told which way he goes. That’s it, that’s all you get.
While I was sat here, the French doors were open, and I hear the red-winged blackbird. At that moment through that door behind me, my wife comes with two Tibetan bells, and she hits them together. And you know half the time when you hit Tibetan bells together, you don’t hit it right and you get this awful juddery sound, but she hit it perfectly. The sound went straight through me. The sound of the blackbird went right through me.
And at the same time, I found a ground in this koan, this Irish meme that I’d puzzled over for years. And I had to put my hand behind me and say, “I’m writing. I can’t talk to you.” And I wrote this piece in one go. It’s called The Bell and the Blackbird, and it’s about letting go too, in order to be present in the moment.
The sound of a bell still reverberating, the sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. The sound of a bell, still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of the field asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper into the one that waits.
Either way takes courage, either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all, wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know you’ll have to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself without any meeting at all, that radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation crying hallelujah.
The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field asking you to wake into this life, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage, either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all, wants you to walk to the place where you find you actually already know you’ll have to give every last thing away.
The approach that is also the meeting itself without any meeting at all, that radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world, every corner of the world crying hallelujah.
TS: What a gorgeous poem.
DW: The Bell and the Blackbird. Hallelujah.
TS: I wrote down a quote from you that there are times when you feel abducted by a poem. What does that mean when you’re writing, when you feel abducted?
DW: Well, one of the great opening moments in my childhood towards poetry, I mean, I’d always been drawn to poetry because my mother was a natural. Being Irish, she had lots of poems memorized and Irish and English actually. So I grew up with it, and I always thought it was just a natural way of being in the world.
But when I was 12 or 13, I was in my local library in the little town of Mirfield in West Yorkshire. The poetry was on the top shelf, and I could barely reach it, but I reached up at tiptoe and I got my fingers around this little volume, and I pulled it off and it fell down into my hands. And it was a joint volume by Ted Hughes, and oh, who was the other poet? Oh, I’ve just forgotten his name. But I opened it and it was really my first book of adult poetry.
I’d read Walter de la Mare and Robert Browning’s poems for young people. And I started reading it, and I literally felt like a passing hawk had come down, put its claws in me, and carried me off into the sky. That was the physical experience of reading that poetry by Ted Hughes. Thom Gunn was the other fellow, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn.
And that sense of being abducted out of your present identity, stolen away, I think is necessary for all human beings. You need some place, it could be music, it could be dance, where you get stolen by the other world, you become a changeling child in a way. And that possibility is there at all ages, not just when you’re 12 or 13.
I always think there’s a particular species of youthfulness, which is germane to every epoch of our life. So there’s a certain youthfulness you can have probably in your 90s, which is not possible for someone in their 20s. It’s not possible.
TS: What would you say is the youthfulness now that you’re inviting in conversation with as you approach 70?
DW: Yeah, I rarely work in numbers. So it’s quite sobering when you say that. My self-image is not of someone who’s approaching 70. It’s one of increasing freedom actually around the essence of my work and giving that essence.
I had an experience in Copenhagen a couple of years ago of after a series of intense days walking in this beautiful rain-filled street full of puddles where the storm had passed and the sun came out and was reflecting in all. And I suddenly asked myself the beautiful question, “What if you’ve done your work, David? What if you’ve done what you needed to do actually on the planet?”
And the ancient intuition behind that is of course, is that if you’ve done your work, then you’re on your way out, you’re not long for this world. That’s the ancient intuition that human beings have if their work is done. So I allowed myself to actually feel that fully, and I said, “Well, what if you have actually not only done your work, but what if you’ve already died?” And I had this incredibly, very physical, very real experience of having come back into my body and my life and everything else being a bonus.
So I was suddenly able to let go of so many things I had been holding onto, part of steering a course and keeping your integrity as a poet and making sure it finds all the right ways in the world, that you can get over-controlling at times as an individual artist. And I was suddenly able to … everything now.
If I’m in a meeting with my wonderful people in Many Rivers, I feel as if, oh yeah, I get the privilege of coming back. They’d been making these decisions anyway without me. So I actually get to spin the wheel and actually influence it. I’m just privileged, but I can let everything go with a much larger freedom. So I’ve had that experience almost on a … And if I feel far away from myself, I will get back into that body again of having died, and then I feel fully and completely here.
So that that’s the robust vulnerability and this kind of innocence. I mean, William Blake saw innocence not as something that would be replaced by experience. Innocence is your ability to be found by the world in increasingly larger and larger ways. That’s my definition of what Blake was saying anyway. So I feel that. I feel, yeah.
TS: What you’re just describing leads beautifully to the last question I wanted to ask you, this phrase that I pulled out, apprenticing ourselves to our own disappearance. It sounds like you’re doing a terrific job of being an apprentice.
DW: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we all are disappearing in one way or another, even when you’re on the up and up and things seem to be, there’s a part of you, actually because of that success, is actually having to disappear. So just to stay aware of that. That’s what’s going to keep you real. That’s what’s going to keep you compassionate. That’s going to make you invitational. That’s what’s going to make other people want to be around you. That’s what’s going to make you generous.
TS: Can you just say more about that because I could see someone on the up and up saying, “What do you mean? I’m not apprenticing to my own disappearance. I’m right in the midst of making my mark.”
DW: That’s right. But there’s also part of them, which is not facing up to the consequences of their success and their responsibility and everything they’re neglecting at the same time while that’s going through. And it’s a necessary part of our youthful lives.
And so I always think that we don’t need to be lecturing people about this all the time because life will take care of humiliating you into your maturity. Of course, you can choose not to take the lesson and become this narrow, resentful, complaining person. But if we’re paying attention, then the natural humiliations of life will take care of our arrogance.
TS: Can we end, David, on some poetic note about our disappearance?
DW: All right. A poetic note about our disappearance? This is a poem called Santiago, and it’s the end of a pilgrim cycle. It’s with the theme of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, which so many people are familiar with, this 500 mile walk across Northern Spain. It used to be a Catholic pilgrimage. It’s now a worldwide ecumenical pilgrimage, including people who don’t believe anything at all. But this sense of finding something at the end of the road that’s going to change you and the intuition that you’re actually going to be changed as you go along. So this is about that supposed arrival at the end of our lives. Santiago.
The road seen, then not seen. The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding then revealing the way you should take. The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding then revealing the way you should take. The road dropping away from you as if leaving you to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up when you thought you would fall.
And the way forward, the way forward, always in the end, just the way that you came. The way forward, always in the end, always in the end the way that you came, the way that you followed, the way that carried you into your future, that brought you to this place. No matter that it sometimes had to take your promise from you, no matter that it always had to break your heart along the way.
The sense of having walked from deep inside yourself out into the revelation, the sense of having walked from deep inside yourself out into the revelation, to have risked yourself is something that seemed to stand both inside you and far beyond you. And that called you back in the end to the only road you could follow walking as you did in your rags of love, walking as you did in your rags of love and speaking in the voice that by night became a prayer for safe arrival.
So that one day you realize that what you wanted had already happened and long ago and in the dwelling place in which you lived before you began. And that every step along the way you had carried the heart and the mind and the promise that first set you off and then drew you on. And that you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach.
You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way. You were more marvelous in that simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach, as if all along you thought the endpoint might be a city with golden domes and cheering crowds.
And turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road, you found just a simple reflection and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back. And beneath that, another invitation all in one glimpse, like a person or a place you had sought forever, like a bold field of freedom that beckoned you beyond, like another life, like another life, and the road, the road still stretching on. Santiago.
TS: Thank you, David, for your deep generosity and being a guest here on Insights at the Edge.
DW: Well, thank you, Tami for your lovely invitational interview.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code Podcast to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True, waking up the world.
