Speaker 1: When you haven't been introduced to the joys and treasures
Speaker 1: of silence earlier in your life, you actually start to
Speaker 1: see it as the enemy, because actually it is the
Speaker 1: enemy to your established identity, is going to undo and
Speaker 1: break down the perimeter and edge that you've set out
Speaker 1: for yourself. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time,
Speaker 1: great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
Speaker 1: quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 1: you think, ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is David White,
Speaker 1: a poet and author who also leads the Many Rivers
Speaker 1: organization and ENVITAS, the Institute for Conversational Leadership, which he
Speaker 1: founded in two thousand fourteen. David is the author of
Speaker 1: many poetry collection books and prose books, including the one
Speaker 1: primarily discussed here with Eric Still Possible. Hi David, Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Very good to be with you, all right.
Speaker 1: I am really excited to have you on. Your poetry
Speaker 1: has been inspiring to me, actually, your poetry and your
Speaker 1: prose for a long time, so I'm really excited about this.
Speaker 1: We'll start with a poem from your new book. But
Speaker 1: before we do that, let's start like we always do,
Speaker 1: with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their
Speaker 1: grandchild and it's in life. There are two wolves inside
Speaker 1: of us that are always a battle. One is a
Speaker 1: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 1: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
Speaker 1: and thinks about it for a second and looks up
Speaker 1: at their grandparents as well. Which one wins, and the
Speaker 1: grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
Speaker 1: start off by asking you what that parable means to
Speaker 1: you in your life and in the work that you do. Well.
Speaker 1: I think the parable is just the beginning of an
Speaker 1: interesting conversation. Start off by identifying, you know, one bad
Speaker 1: walth one good wolf. But actually it's more hierarchy of function.
Speaker 1: The bad wolf is really the strategic mind when it's
Speaker 1: left to shape your identity and greed and fear, and
Speaker 1: it's the naming mind bereft of the faculty of belonging,
Speaker 1: which is really the other wolf. So I'd say the
Speaker 1: bad wolf is meant actually to be a good servant
Speaker 1: to the first wolf's desires, and then there isn't a
Speaker 1: bad wolf and a good wolf. You get a better
Speaker 1: arrangement of things. That's my experience of it. So the
Speaker 1: ability to drop down to a foundational self that is
Speaker 1: paying attention in a way of direct perception rather than
Speaker 1: intermediate naming. And we often name things in order to
Speaker 1: keep them at a distance, to keep them in the abstract,
Speaker 1: to diminish them, to have power over them. But there
Speaker 1: are useful times to name things when you're in conversation
Speaker 1: with other people, and and so you learn discernment about
Speaker 1: that naming. So a useful way to start, but in
Speaker 1: the end, I don't think the parable is accurate for
Speaker 1: the dynamic, but a very good place to start. Just
Speaker 1: in the way that people perceive different parts of themselves
Speaker 1: as good and bad, but if we have a different
Speaker 1: relationship with them, then we find that the bad part
Speaker 1: is just misaligned. Yeah, there's a lot of instances in
Speaker 1: your work where you know something is necessary skill for
Speaker 1: one part of our journey and then becomes an unnecessary
Speaker 1: skill at another part of our journey. You know, it
Speaker 1: comes to mind hearing you talk about ambition, right, saying like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, for the youth, that's pretty important. It's good,
Speaker 1: but ultimately becomes an obstacle for someone who's fully mature.
Speaker 1: But I'm getting ahead of ourselves here. Why don't we
Speaker 1: start with a poem from the new book from Still Possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this book came out of the heart of the pandemic.
Speaker 1: And of course, I don't know if you remember at
Speaker 1: the beginning of Lockdown, but everyone was going to be
Speaker 1: writing the great next American novel, or the great next
Speaker 1: Irish or British novel, or learning Italian are becoming a
Speaker 1: great Parisian baker, and some of the as did. But
Speaker 1: I had my traveling life stopped and I was suddenly
Speaker 1: at home, and being a home was like a radical
Speaker 1: travel in itself, I mean over extended times. So I said, no, David,
Speaker 1: don't give yourself any goals or ambitions apart from my
Speaker 1: creating a community online, which took up most of my time.
Speaker 1: So I went into the pandemic just wanting to give
Speaker 1: myself a real rest actually from that kind of endeavor
Speaker 1: and goal oriented seeking. But in the middle of it,
Speaker 1: I was watching a BBC documentary called Brotherhood, The Secret
Speaker 1: Life of Monks, which concentrated on the small community of
Speaker 1: Carthusian monks in the north of England and an elderly
Speaker 1: group of men who were actually starting a brewery in
Speaker 1: order to attract a younger group of men into the ministry.
Speaker 1: Ostensibly this was this was what the documentary was about,
Speaker 1: but really it was really about the inner life of
Speaker 1: this remarkable body of monks who had been together for
Speaker 1: decades actually, And the documentary began focusing on the man
Speaker 1: who was obviously very ill in bed and who was
Speaker 1: having actually difficulty speaking, and it took a while to
Speaker 1: entrain into what he was saying and how we were
Speaker 1: saying it. And then after a while you realized he
Speaker 1: wasn't only on his sick bed, he was actually on
Speaker 1: his deathbed, and he was talking about his life at
Speaker 1: the monastery and all the years he'd been there and
Speaker 1: coming in as a young monk, and the illusions he had.
Speaker 1: And then suddenly, out of nowhere, Eric, he says, you know,
Speaker 1: I gave up praying years ago. And the immediate catch
Speaker 1: in your heart listening was all he lost his faith,
Speaker 1: you know, he just found a comfortable place to be
Speaker 1: where he'd be looked after, you know, and he just
Speaker 1: got with the program and lived his life. But there
Speaker 1: was a beat, you know, of silence for a little while,
Speaker 1: and he said, I gave up praying years ago because
Speaker 1: my whole life became a prayer. I was living and
Speaker 1: breathing the atmosphere of prayer. And it was such a
Speaker 1: powerful statement. And then the very next scene was the
Speaker 1: man in his coffin actually after he died, surrounded by
Speaker 1: his fellow monks, reading the officers, you know, in the
Speaker 1: chapel around him. And I was so struck and so
Speaker 1: poignantly affected by both his testament on his deathbed and
Speaker 1: also the intimate invitation that he and his fellow monks
Speaker 1: had made to accompany him in his death. So I
Speaker 1: wrote this piece for him and it's called your prayer.
Speaker 1: Your prayer only began with words, each one, each one
Speaker 1: just a hand on the door to silence, each one,
Speaker 1: just you putting your full weight against everything you thought
Speaker 1: you could never deserve, even in your gathered, chanted strength
Speaker 1: in the chapel. What you said in the end was
Speaker 1: just a shoulder against the grain of wood, trying to
Speaker 1: keep the entrance open until that door, which had been
Speaker 1: no door at all, gave way to necessary grief, which
Speaker 1: is really just you understanding everything you had been missing
Speaker 1: all along, which is really just you feeling that raw
Speaker 1: vulnerability you needed to make a proper invitation, which is
Speaker 1: really just you feeling the full depth of your love
Speaker 1: at last, the heartbroken heart coming to heart felt rest,
Speaker 1: the opening inside you filled to the gleaming brim and
Speaker 1: casting its generous being, the part of you you thought
Speaker 1: was foolish, the wisest voice of all, The part of
Speaker 1: you you thought was foolish, the wisest voice of all.
Speaker 1: Such a beautiful poem. There's an image that runs through
Speaker 1: multiple poems in your new book about this idea of
Speaker 1: a door. You sort of use it. It's sort of
Speaker 1: a shoulder against a door. Do that have a special
Speaker 1: meaning to you. It just shows up. I noticed multiple times. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's you know, we can have the door as a
Speaker 1: barrier and a door that we're afraid to approach, and
Speaker 1: a door that we feel is locked. But a door
Speaker 1: is also by its own definition and opening. And so
Speaker 1: the idea of your weights against the door, whether it's
Speaker 1: a shoulder against the grain of wood, are you putting
Speaker 1: your full weights against everything you thought you never deserved.
Speaker 1: It's this experience of real contact with what seems like
Speaker 1: a barrier that usually when you put your full weight
Speaker 1: against it, swings open. It's very powerful. And we've started
Speaker 1: with a kind of fairy tale parable and one of
Speaker 1: the powerful images in Northern European fairy tales, that's when
Speaker 1: the children are taken out at the behest of the
Speaker 1: false mother, usually by the hunter, and he's supposed to
Speaker 1: kill them there in the woods, but he can't do it,
Speaker 1: actually can't bring himself to do us. So it just
Speaker 1: leaves them in the dark and says they and says
Speaker 1: they'll they'll have to fend for themselves. They probably won't
Speaker 1: make it, so that will do it, you know, and
Speaker 1: the child, the boy or the girl eventually starts crying,
Speaker 1: and in their grief they fall against a rock or
Speaker 1: a tree, and it's only when the rock or the
Speaker 1: tree takes their full weight that it says to them.
Speaker 1: It actually speaks back to them, It says, how can
Speaker 1: I help you my child? More or less? And it's
Speaker 1: just as if it takes you the full weight of
Speaker 1: your grief and your exile for the world to speak
Speaker 1: back to you. So sometimes the doors already open actually
Speaker 1: and you were just afraid of leaning against and you
Speaker 1: find you actually all through to the other side. You know.
Speaker 1: Other times your way to your contact against it actually
Speaker 1: as a kind of conversation and it starts to change
Speaker 1: it into something else. And I'm thinking of the doors
Speaker 1: outside in the world. Of course, in many ways, you know,
Speaker 1: perhaps a difficult conversation with another person, but it's quite
Speaker 1: often a kind of physical barrier in the body that
Speaker 1: we feel between our peripheral surface self that's always complaining
Speaker 1: and misnaming the world and feels pity for itself and
Speaker 1: the foundational part of you that feels as if everything
Speaker 1: in the world is actually quite miraculous and perfect here.
Speaker 1: And the ability to get to that foundational core is
Speaker 1: not the ability to find some kind of elazy and perfection,
Speaker 1: you know, where we won't be touched as just being
Speaker 1: able to go to a place where we can have
Speaker 1: a proper conversation with things that are misaligned in the
Speaker 1: world and aren't making stense. It's the barrier between you
Speaker 1: and what's called in many of our traditions the essential self.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the part of you that can hold
Speaker 1: a proper conversation with the world. And when that part
Speaker 1: of you holds the proper conversation, which is a kind
Speaker 1: of direct perception. I mean, in the Zen tradition or
Speaker 1: the Buddhist tradition, it's called Buddha nature, that place where
Speaker 1: what you think is you and what you think is
Speaker 1: not you disappears and becomes just the meeting itself, the
Speaker 1: conversation itself. And we have this in extreme moments of
Speaker 1: our beautiful forgetting, whether it's in pleasures of intimacy with
Speaker 1: one of the person you know, or whether it's when
Speaker 1: you're ravished by an ocean view you know, or you're
Speaker 1: on the beach with the wind in your hair and
Speaker 1: your feet in the water and you just get out
Speaker 1: of yourself and into yourself at the same time. So
Speaker 1: that's the doorway. It's what you think is a barrier
Speaker 1: or an opening, both through a play if you actually
Speaker 1: want to go, or a way you actually want to be.
Speaker 1: The classic Zen phase of the gateless gait, Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: that door, which is no door at all, gave way
Speaker 1: to necessary grief. There is a kind of perception and
Speaker 1: austere perception of Zen whereby you know, when you're enlightened,
Speaker 1: you're not going to be touched by the heartbreak and
Speaker 1: difficulty of life, and you're not going to be awkward
Speaker 1: and make mistakes. And but no, I mean, if you
Speaker 1: look at all the way enlightenment is actually described, it's
Speaker 1: really just saying enlightenment is when you're in a real conversation,
Speaker 1: when you're in a real meeting with something other than yourself.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean to say you're protected, doesn't mean to
Speaker 1: say you're insulated. You know you're at this arrived place
Speaker 1: of perfection. No, you're just in a real conversation. And
Speaker 1: that's what makes all the difference. That's a beautiful answer.
Speaker 1: And actually you answered a question I was going to
Speaker 1: ask before I even asked it, which was you know,
Speaker 1: looking at a couple views of spirituality, there's enlightenment, right,
Speaker 1: And another is a mature view of spirituality is the
Speaker 1: ten thousand joys and the ten thou sorrows, which I
Speaker 1: think your work speaks to so well. And I love
Speaker 1: the way you just sort of brought them together because
Speaker 1: I was going to ask you where the crossover point
Speaker 1: is for you, and I think you just answered, which
Speaker 1: is real conversation. Yes, yeah, And that's why there's a
Speaker 1: very powerful kind of companionship between the apprenticeship to poetry
Speaker 1: and deep states of intentionality and zen or are any
Speaker 1: contemplative tradition. I mean, you could say that prose is
Speaker 1: really about something, poetry is the thing itself, or it
Speaker 1: should be good poetry as at least, and you could
Speaker 1: say theology is about something. But the practice of zen
Speaker 1: is about direct seeing. The central practice, even in the
Speaker 1: Christian tradition, is about this direct perceptionist cloud of unknowing.
Speaker 1: There's a spiritual teacher by then of Adi Ashanti whose
Speaker 1: work is meant a lot to me. And he said
Speaker 1: once and I just thought this was so good. He said,
Speaker 1: you know, awakening is not freedom from feeling things, it's
Speaker 1: freedom to feel things. And I thought that was a
Speaker 1: beautiful way of thinking about it, like we are in
Speaker 1: a space that's big enough, strong enough, solid enough that
Speaker 1: we can encounter life in all of its beauty and terror. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's lovely. That's an echo of what the French philosopher
Speaker 1: came you said. He said lived to the point of tears,
Speaker 1: which is not an invitation to modeling sentimentality. You know,
Speaker 1: it's to say to feel everything fully so it can
Speaker 1: actually flower and transform into something else. You know. That's
Speaker 1: when we don't feel things fully is a Jucianti was
Speaker 1: intimating that things get stuck. And I do think depression
Speaker 1: is a form of stuck nous. It's just sorrow which
Speaker 1: is immobilized in a way. Not that we're not supposed
Speaker 1: to feel sorrow, but it's supposed to just have its
Speaker 1: season and then be allowed to move on. Depression, I think,
Speaker 1: is where you get that kind of gray immobility around it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's not to say that there isn't a clinical
Speaker 1: form of depression which needs medical help in order to
Speaker 1: help you shift. But I think it's the same dynamic.
Speaker 1: It's this drawing of the circle around us in a
Speaker 1: kind of fortified way. I mean, one of the dynamics
Speaker 1: of depression is it's self reinforcing nature. You start not
Speaker 1: looking out the window, you start not going out the door,
Speaker 1: you start not believing, not thinking there's anywhere to go,
Speaker 1: or anything to do, or anyone to be with. I
Speaker 1: think direct perception always leads one to this experience of
Speaker 1: the invitational nature of reality. When you start paying deep,
Speaker 1: scintillating attention in silence, you realize everything is inviting you
Speaker 1: to its door. Strangely enough, you find that you're a
Speaker 1: part of everything too, and you, whether you want to
Speaker 1: or not, are inviting everyone to your door. So you
Speaker 1: could say that real conversation is a mutual invitation, and
Speaker 1: you could say that enlightenment is a mutual acceptance of
Speaker 1: the invitation of being hospitable. It's a great, beautiful and
Speaker 1: disturbing question to ask yourself, as how invitational am I? Actually?
Speaker 1: If you're in a relationship, how invitational am I to
Speaker 1: my partner, to my wife, my husband, and my partner,
Speaker 1: whatever name I give them? How invitational am I to
Speaker 1: my children? What invitation did they think I'm making? To them?
Speaker 1: How invitational am I to my friends? How invitational they am? I? Just? Actually?
Speaker 1: When I walk into a room, it's interesting to think
Speaker 1: that unconsciously human beings are constantly trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what the invitation is in almost every situation. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: invitation is to go away, and we have to be
Speaker 1: alert to that, which is why we're so wary much
Speaker 1: of the time. But quite often that's a really powerful
Speaker 1: invitation that we're equally afraid of, which is to be
Speaker 1: more of yourself and to give your gift from that
Speaker 1: hidden self. So the doorways a door between what is
Speaker 1: spoken and what is not spoken, what has not been
Speaker 1: spoken yet, between the world in which we live and
Speaker 1: the hidden place in which we will give our gift
Speaker 1: into that world. I want to move a little bit
Speaker 1: into one of your works that is meant the most
Speaker 1: to me, which is The Three Marriages, and you basically say,
Speaker 1: we all have, you know, three marriages to work to
Speaker 1: another person and to ourselves. And my favorite line in
Speaker 1: that book is you're talking about how we meet ourselves,
Speaker 1: and you say, if we were really aware of the
Speaker 1: particular brick walls and unending difficulties that lay ahead of us,
Speaker 1: and finding just a little of that true self, we
Speaker 1: might lock ourselves up in a padded room with a
Speaker 1: towering pile of hello magazines, and never have a profound
Speaker 1: thought again. I always do think, Eric, that everyone has
Speaker 1: the right to say I don't want to have the conversation,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. I don't want to respond to
Speaker 1: the invitation, because life is full of so much loss, difficulty,
Speaker 1: and heartbreak that almost all of us have been in
Speaker 1: despair or bereft at one time or another. And we
Speaker 1: can't quite believe that we have to have our heartbroken
Speaker 1: so many times, never mind just once, And we can't
Speaker 1: quite believe that there's no sincere path you can take
Speaker 1: without having your heartbroken. And so everyone goes through the
Speaker 1: period in their life where they say, no, thank you,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to stay in this, in this insulation,
Speaker 1: I'm going to narrow down the bandwidth of my experience.
Speaker 1: Just as if you've got a piano but you only
Speaker 1: play the middle keys of it. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to feel extreme joy, you don't want to feel
Speaker 1: extreme sorrow, and so you do get this effect the
Speaker 1: human beings have inhabiting this bland middle where actually you're
Speaker 1: you're afraid to break out along the edges, so only
Speaker 1: the bland middle of life can find you. You know,
Speaker 1: it takes one to recognize one in a way, to
Speaker 1: expand the cordal structure of our existence. To have, you know,
Speaker 1: a part of the day which is music, whether you
Speaker 1: can play or not, but listening to it or witnessing it,
Speaker 1: you know, to have a part of the day which
Speaker 1: as you attempting to say something you haven't ever said
Speaker 1: before in your life, to ask a beautiful question, to
Speaker 1: do something physical that pushes your edges. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: I run my own walking and portrait to us in
Speaker 1: different parts of the world, and we have good companionship,
Speaker 1: good food. We have poetry in the morning and the
Speaker 1: conversations that come out of it, so you get a
Speaker 1: kind of imaginative intellectual stimulation. Then you have more good
Speaker 1: food at lunch, and then you go for a long,
Speaker 1: long walk out in beautiful places with the conversations you hold.
Speaker 1: In those places, you get wet, you get cold, you
Speaker 1: get hot, and then you arrive and you have a
Speaker 1: wonderful dinner and wine or guinness, depending what country you're in.
Speaker 1: And then you rinse and repeat, you know, for six
Speaker 1: days in a row, and people's caudal structure starts to
Speaker 1: open up. You know, you're getting all the different parts
Speaker 1: of yourself addressed and you do feel these deep cords
Speaker 1: being played inside you. How would you shape a life
Speaker 1: like that for yourself? And that's always my question at
Speaker 1: the end of those I used to sit with the
Speaker 1: zen teacher and when we completed a seschine, you would
Speaker 1: know sechines, you know, the intensive week long sitting. He'd
Speaker 1: always say, sechine starts tomorrow when you leave, you know,
Speaker 1: after seven days of fierce kind of physical and emotional agony.
Speaker 1: And I often say to that themselves. You know, if
Speaker 1: you've had a marvelous time in the West of Ireland,
Speaker 1: how do you create that? You know, get out in
Speaker 1: the elements every day, spend time with friends, have some
Speaker 1: music in your life, read a poem, and as you
Speaker 1: probably know, you're obviously a lover of poetry. Quoting my
Speaker 1: own back to me, eric um, you only need one
Speaker 1: line of poetry day. Actually, you can travel a thousand
Speaker 1: miles in a single line of poetry. So is that
Speaker 1: how you encourage people to engage more deeply with poetry
Speaker 1: is to engage with less of it, but more deeply
Speaker 1: with each piece of it. Well, I would you know,
Speaker 1: if people were asking how do I bring poetry into
Speaker 1: my life. But I mean I work with it when
Speaker 1: i'm live by bringing a lot of it into their lives,
Speaker 1: you know. But that's my art form. There's my jobs
Speaker 1: to get poetry to as many people as possible because
Speaker 1: it's such a life saver. Yeah, so that's why I
Speaker 1: memorize it. Um, That's why I build narratives around the stories.
Speaker 1: That's why I delight in all the details and also
Speaker 1: the biographical details of the poet, the man or woman
Speaker 1: who wrote them. And when you start to bring it
Speaker 1: all alive with storytelling, people find learned kind of qualities
Speaker 1: that are being spoken to the poetry. I often say
Speaker 1: potrays the art of saying things you didn't know you
Speaker 1: knew you know. It's language against which you have no defenses.
Speaker 1: You write poetry so other people have no defenses against
Speaker 1: it when they're reading it. But for that to happen,
Speaker 1: you first of all have to write a line against
Speaker 1: which you have no defense. It kind of undos you
Speaker 1: unbuttons you opens you up, and you find yourself saying
Speaker 1: things you didn't know you knew, and quite often things
Speaker 1: you didn't want to know. Thank you very much, because
Speaker 1: you were quite happy in your old, settled identity behind
Speaker 1: the place where you drawn the line where you close
Speaker 1: the door unlocked it from the inside. Is there a
Speaker 1: poem you would like to read or recite now that
Speaker 1: feels appropriate to where we are in the conversation. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've got my favorite, but I thought i'd open it
Speaker 1: to you. I'll start with the little one and then
Speaker 1: you could make a suggestion. But this is the first
Speaker 1: poem in still possible. I didn't write it at the beginning,
Speaker 1: but it's an invitation to the journey that the book
Speaker 1: involves you in. And this is called for the Road
Speaker 1: to Santiago. And most people know now that Santiago is
Speaker 1: the of the pilgrim trail that goes across northern Spain
Speaker 1: for five miles Camino to Santiago de Compostella, which has
Speaker 1: become this beautiful ecumenical track. People of all persuasions and
Speaker 1: no persuasions at all are doing it. But it used
Speaker 1: to be just a Catholic pilgrimage. So it's lovely the
Speaker 1: way it's opened out in the postmodern world. Like many
Speaker 1: things have. This is about setting off on the journey
Speaker 1: to Santiago and what you need to take with you.
Speaker 1: But it's of course, it's for any goal you set
Speaker 1: yourself that's precious to you in your life. For the
Speaker 1: Road to Santiago, for the Road to Santiago, don't make
Speaker 1: new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind.
Speaker 1: Bring what you have. You're always going that way anyway,
Speaker 1: you were always going that way all along. I love that,
Speaker 1: Bring what you have, Bring what you have. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that was a disturbing line at the beginning when
Speaker 1: I wrote for the Road to Santiago, don't make new
Speaker 1: declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind.
Speaker 1: I mean, my whole art form is about making new declarations.
Speaker 1: And a lot of my poetry is in declarative sentences. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a lot of my prose, my essays a declarative
Speaker 1: sentences are very unfashionable, you know, in the writing world.
Speaker 1: So this was quite a both amusing and disturbing line.
Speaker 1: And I said, what you mean? I said to myself,
Speaker 1: what do I meet? What do you mean by that?
Speaker 1: You know? And when I say you, I'm talking about
Speaker 1: this deep stranger inside you, that it's you. But you
Speaker 1: always meet yourself the deepest stelf as as a stranger.
Speaker 1: First of all, who's speaking to you? Don't make new
Speaker 1: declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind.
Speaker 1: Bring what you have. You're always going that way anyway.
Speaker 1: You're always going that way all along. First this invitation
Speaker 1: to have faith in the way you made and the
Speaker 1: way you hold the conversation of life. There's no one
Speaker 1: out can walk the camino in the way you can,
Speaker 1: and sometimes you literally have to crawl it on your
Speaker 1: hands and knees metaphorically. Sometimes in your life the only
Speaker 1: way to go through the door is on your hands
Speaker 1: and knees, or to fall flat through it. Where are
Speaker 1: you in your life? Don't try to be anything other
Speaker 1: than you are. If you're just hanging on, then just
Speaker 1: hang on. That's your conversation at the moment. You're going
Speaker 1: to get there by just hanging on to begin with,
Speaker 1: not by being some kind of spiritual athlete. So have
Speaker 1: faith in the way you're just hanging on, actually, and
Speaker 1: learn to talk about it and ask for helping. You're
Speaker 1: hanging on visible and invisible help. There's a lovely story
Speaker 1: in the ancient Polytechts, which are the earliest descriptions we
Speaker 1: have of Buddha's talks and his community that he gathered
Speaker 1: around him, you know, and there's a lovely story about
Speaker 1: one fellow who was a bit of a rogue. You know.
Speaker 1: He really loved what Buddha had to say, but after
Speaker 1: the talk was over, he be off, you know, having
Speaker 1: a drink and hanging out with the wrong kind of
Speaker 1: crowd and getting into wonderful trouble. But he would turn
Speaker 1: up faithfully every day to the sanga, you know, and
Speaker 1: hear the talk. But at the end of one of
Speaker 1: Buddha's talks, and you've got the courage to stand up
Speaker 1: and say, yeah, you know, buddy, you're a great, You're
Speaker 1: a wonderful You never put a foot wrong, You're totally authentic,
Speaker 1: you're virtuous, you know. But I try to take a
Speaker 1: step and I fall down. He said, do you have
Speaker 1: any advice for me? And Buddha looked at him and said, yes,
Speaker 1: just fall in the right direction. So it's really lovely.
Speaker 1: You know, it's an invitation. If you're going to come
Speaker 1: home drunk, you know, just make sure you fall into
Speaker 1: the kitchen, not out, fall through the door into the
Speaker 1: kitchen floor, don't fall out into the cold and the snow.
Speaker 1: It's very compassionate, it's beautiful. It's really an invitation. Wherever
Speaker 1: you are, your moment of transfiguration is just you taking
Speaker 1: a step towards a larger context and towards the context
Speaker 1: that is good for you. I want to hit on
Speaker 1: this because I think this is right what we're sort
Speaker 1: of talking about here. You say that one of the
Speaker 1: great necessities of self knowledge is understanding your own reluctance
Speaker 1: to be here. All the ways you don't want to
Speaker 1: have the conversation, all the ways you don't want to
Speaker 1: be in the marriage, you don't want to be a parent,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be visible in a leadership position,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be doing this work. So I
Speaker 1: think that's absolutely true, and I'm curious, though, where the
Speaker 1: line is in doing that acknowledging our reluctance in a
Speaker 1: deep and honest way and what passes for just sort
Speaker 1: of normal complaining. A lot of the time that we
Speaker 1: hear from people, which is they're they're talking about all
Speaker 1: the things they don't like, but it's not transforming. What's
Speaker 1: the difference there in your mind? Well, it's the naming
Speaker 1: mind that's complaining. You know that things aren't conforming to
Speaker 1: a way you'd like them to be. In your abstract
Speaker 1: notion of perfection. So coming to terms with your own
Speaker 1: reluctance is just understanding how difficult it is to be alive, really,
Speaker 1: I mean just even to be alive, never mind be
Speaker 1: a parent or a partner, or a colleague, or a
Speaker 1: member of society or a community, with all the responsibilities
Speaker 1: involved in all those different levels. So you pay attention
Speaker 1: to your reluctance in a kind of direct way, so
Speaker 1: it can speak to you both in a sense that
Speaker 1: it will give you a sense of humor. And there's
Speaker 1: nothing that will help you in parenting or in a
Speaker 1: marriage than having a sense of humor. If you have
Speaker 1: no sense of humor, you don't stand much of a
Speaker 1: chance in relationship. You will be humiliated in relationship. You
Speaker 1: will be humiliated in parenting. In fact, parenting is one
Speaker 1: long apprenticeship to humilia. I would agree. I agree. And
Speaker 1: you will be humiliated by the person look back at
Speaker 1: you in the mirror. You will say the wrong thing
Speaker 1: at the wrong time in public. You know, So you've
Speaker 1: got to be able to understand, you know, why you're
Speaker 1: reluctant to appear and become visible. It's natural, and so
Speaker 1: you start to address it. You know, you start to
Speaker 1: be able to speak it out loud actually, and it
Speaker 1: transforms it immediately. I mean, there's nothing more endearing than
Speaker 1: someone on stage who just confronts their nervousness directly, and
Speaker 1: there's nothing more inauthentic than someone who tries to cover
Speaker 1: it over with some kind of manufactured charisma. On stage,
Speaker 1: when you articulate how difficult it is to be here,
Speaker 1: you actually create both a direct contact with the difficulty itself,
Speaker 1: which starts to then transform, but you also make an
Speaker 1: invitation to others to join you in that understanding. So
Speaker 1: if I'm reluctant to be on stage and yet might
Speaker 1: know that my work involves that kind of visibility, I've
Speaker 1: got to really pay attention to all the ways I
Speaker 1: don't want to be there. And then this wonderful dynamic
Speaker 1: starts to occur, which the Greeks addressed, and they had
Speaker 1: a specific name for it. It's called an nto your DRUMA,
Speaker 1: which is the dynamic whereby something that becomes fullier and
Speaker 1: utterly itself immediately starts to change into something other than itself.
Speaker 1: In other words, it starts to get a seasonality, it
Speaker 1: stops being stuck. So almost always when you actually feel
Speaker 1: you're one particular form of reluctance. Fully, it immediately transforms
Speaker 1: into something else. So you find, for instance, you know
Speaker 1: on stage that your reluctance has to do with the
Speaker 1: way you were perhaps shamed as a child whenever you
Speaker 1: were visible, either in your school or in your family,
Speaker 1: or in the playground wherever it was. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: start to actually allow that to give you a sense
Speaker 1: of compassion for others that are shamed in those and
Speaker 1: suddenly your reluctance becomes this articulation of something that everyone
Speaker 1: is feeling but never can say completely. So our reluctances
Speaker 1: are always doorways of connection and compassion and invitation to
Speaker 1: other people eventually, but people will just actually name their
Speaker 1: reluctance and then turn away from it. Yeah, I'll use
Speaker 1: it as a kind of foundation of cynicism, a way
Speaker 1: of indulging in the reluctance itself without actually moving it along.
Speaker 1: It strikes me as similar to when you talk about
Speaker 1: despair being a natural and normal place to be as
Speaker 1: long as you've used the word seasonality, right, if you
Speaker 1: fully inhabit it, it will transform. And that's I think
Speaker 1: what you're sort of saying here. If you fully inhabit
Speaker 1: your reluctance. I know for me, when I start to
Speaker 1: feel reluctance towards something that is central in my life, yeah,
Speaker 1: it scares the ship out of me, right because you're like, well,
Speaker 1: what if I don't want to be this thing anymore?
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, and so yeah, yeah, it's turn away
Speaker 1: from it. Turn away from it instead of, as you're saying,
Speaker 1: really go deeply into it and go okay, this is
Speaker 1: what's happening. Yes, and what you're articulating there is this
Speaker 1: fear that you'll find out that you don't want it actually,
Speaker 1: and you've been shaping your whole life around it, and
Speaker 1: so you're afraid to find out. And of course this
Speaker 1: is a very accurate description of what happens when you're
Speaker 1: in a relationship and you don't have certain conversations because
Speaker 1: you don't want to find out that you actually don't
Speaker 1: want to be in it. So this is a piece
Speaker 1: actually that's in still possible, and it's called you know,
Speaker 1: when it's time to go, And this is where you
Speaker 1: do find out that actually you're reluctant because you actually
Speaker 1: have to leave. And that's another kind of flowering where
Speaker 1: going fully into all the ways you don't want to have.
Speaker 1: The conversation tells you. Actually, I wrote this during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: Good friend of mine was going through the throes of
Speaker 1: that separation and facing that he wanted to separate, and
Speaker 1: we had lovely conversations, but we were literally talking every
Speaker 1: day because he was really going through the emotional ringer.
Speaker 1: And there's a lovely male moment actually where he said,
Speaker 1: I want you to be my coach. I mean, we've
Speaker 1: been friends for decades. And I said, really, I said,
Speaker 1: you want to be my coach. I said, okay, I'll
Speaker 1: ask you the classic coaching question. He said, what's that?
Speaker 1: I said, what kind of coach do you want me
Speaker 1: to be? He thought for a moment, and he said,
Speaker 1: I just want you to tell me what to do?
Speaker 1: Very masculine way, don't we all want? I said that
Speaker 1: doesn't work. I said, I'll tell you and you'll just
Speaker 1: said no. So anywhere I wrote this for him, but
Speaker 1: it's for all of us in that situation. It's called
Speaker 1: you know when it's time to go. You know when
Speaker 1: it's time to go, that involuntary sense of hesitation discovered
Speaker 1: inside what only looks like your own body, hesitation like
Speaker 1: a movement in itself, your reluctance to hear the call
Speaker 1: as much an invitation as if a door had opened
Speaker 1: in the broad heavens and called you through. You are
Speaker 1: unwillingness to hear the bird song another kind of listening,
Speaker 1: and the complete inability to speak such a clear and
Speaker 1: articulate understanding of what you want, even in the midst
Speaker 1: of thinking you'll never be ready, even when you feel
Speaker 1: you have never deserved that freedom to go, even under
Speaker 1: the comforting illusion that you never had a single speck
Speaker 1: of faith in what you want, You've already packed your
Speaker 1: silent reluctance away, lifted your ear to the morning bird song,
Speaker 1: and before anyone can wake, you're out the door, down
Speaker 1: the road, around the on a and on your way.
Speaker 1: I have a really good friend who is in a
Speaker 1: similar situation to your friend. Uh when you wrote that poem,
Speaker 1: and she immediately was like, I have a favorite poem
Speaker 1: in that book, And I was like, I know which
Speaker 1: one it is. You really only need the title exactly exactly,
Speaker 1: but if it speaks to you, it speaks to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a really beautiful idea. So I want to go
Speaker 1: back to this idea of the three marriages. For a second,
Speaker 1: one of the things that you do is you talk
Speaker 1: about a dynamic that is common to each of them.
Speaker 1: You say, in the pursuit of all three marriages, there
Speaker 1: is one essential human experience an individual brings to each
Speaker 1: of them. We hear more and more about it in
Speaker 1: our modern world. And the word is anxiety. Yes, you say,
Speaker 1: are to do list to become the postmodern equivalent of
Speaker 1: the priests Rosary, the Lamas Sutra or an old prayer book,
Speaker 1: which I just think is is great. Say a little
Speaker 1: more about anxiety and working with it skillfully. Yes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Anxiety is being far from home. Anxiety is feeling distance
Speaker 1: and exile without feeling it fully enough to actually be
Speaker 1: on your way back home through feeling it. So again,
Speaker 1: it's a kind of static nous. And I have this
Speaker 1: piece called what to Remember When Waking. It looks at
Speaker 1: the way when you emerge from this imaginative and physics
Speaker 1: iological transfiguration called sleep, you've actually got an opening into
Speaker 1: the world that closes very quickly, actually, but it's an
Speaker 1: opening that's free from wary if you've slept properly. So
Speaker 1: there's a discipline of entering into sleep, you know, through
Speaker 1: the breath and the body, so that you're not falling
Speaker 1: asleep in anxiety. The way we fall asleep is often
Speaker 1: the way we wake. But sometimes you can have just
Speaker 1: a transformative sleep out of nowhere. Everyone has one night
Speaker 1: a year when they wake up and they say, oh
Speaker 1: my god, if I slept like that every night, I'd
Speaker 1: be ten years younger. So this is the piece. It's
Speaker 1: about the discipline of waking. You know, to think that
Speaker 1: if you go straight to your to do list, that
Speaker 1: to do list was actually put together by the person
Speaker 1: you were yesterday before you had this transformative sleep. So
Speaker 1: those are your set of waries from yesterday actually, So
Speaker 1: to wake into a kind of not to do list
Speaker 1: begin with, and then rewrite your to do less out
Speaker 1: of that later on completely transforms the day ahead. These
Speaker 1: are the opening lines of the Pomb. What to remember
Speaker 1: when waking in that first hardly noticed moment in which
Speaker 1: you wake coming back to this life from the other,
Speaker 1: more secret, movable and frightening, lee honest world where everything began.
Speaker 1: There's a small opening into the day that closes the
Speaker 1: moment you begin your plans. There's a small opening into
Speaker 1: the day that closes the moment you begin your plans.
Speaker 1: What you can plan is too small for you to live.
Speaker 1: What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for
Speaker 1: the vitality hidden in your sleep. To become human is
Speaker 1: to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a
Speaker 1: gift to others. To remember the other world in this
Speaker 1: world is to live in your true inheritance. You are
Speaker 1: not a troubled guest on this earth. You are not
Speaker 1: an accident amidst other accidents. So this starts to address
Speaker 1: the anxiety and that line troubled guest. I take it
Speaker 1: it's stolen actually from a Gerta poem, the great German
Speaker 1: scientists and poet all around, a big hitter, both gang Gerta.
Speaker 1: He has this incredible poem called La Gazenzo the Holy Longing.
Speaker 1: The powerful line is so langni hastess stab unt d
Speaker 1: and beast and trouber gast out there dunklin Eden and
Speaker 1: so long as you have not experienced this to die
Speaker 1: and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest
Speaker 1: on the dark earth. M So there's trouber gusts, there's
Speaker 1: troubled guests. It's a brilliant description of the human condition.
Speaker 1: Someone who doesn't know how to receive the hospitality of
Speaker 1: the world. And there's nothing worse than a troubled guests
Speaker 1: someone you invite to dinner or at the house. They
Speaker 1: don't know where to put themselves there, too nervous, they
Speaker 1: don't think they deserve it, or they don't know how
Speaker 1: to hold the conversation. We can often be like that
Speaker 1: in life, and so there's a necessary shyness in a
Speaker 1: proper guest. You know, when you first come to the door.
Speaker 1: You don't walk into someone's house, you know, and kick
Speaker 1: your shoes off and open the refrigerated door and scy
Speaker 1: if they've got a beer, you know, and take it
Speaker 1: out straight away. You should be shy. You should be
Speaker 1: looking to how you actually begin the conversation in a
Speaker 1: way that's appropriate to displace of hospitality that you've been
Speaker 1: invited into. The ability not to be a troubled guest
Speaker 1: on this earth, to go to an untroubled place inside
Speaker 1: yourself from which you can look at your troubles and
Speaker 1: your anxieties and your difficulties. There is a part of
Speaker 1: you that feels that the world is exactly right and
Speaker 1: exactly miraculous, just as it is, and we're quite often
Speaker 1: operating from the part of this that feels there's always
Speaker 1: something wrong with the world unless we go and put
Speaker 1: it right. Yeah, so our life is really a conversation
Speaker 1: between the two. But if you don't have that foundation
Speaker 1: inside yourself, you will always be imprisoned by your anxieties
Speaker 1: and your worries. Yeah, you talk about this anxiety when
Speaker 1: we sort of create this relationship with ourself, and you
Speaker 1: see there's a way of holding ourselves that is larger
Speaker 1: than any particular worry. I love that. And you also
Speaker 1: talk about a way of being that's so alive to
Speaker 1: the phenomenon of existence that it stops distinguishing so much
Speaker 1: between what is winning and what is losing. And that
Speaker 1: gets back to what we talked about earlier, the zen
Speaker 1: and the direct perception. I'm with things as they are
Speaker 1: without all my concepts about the way they should be. Yes,
Speaker 1: And I think this is really necessary to deepening any
Speaker 1: relationship or conversation in a relationship, because the way we've
Speaker 1: named someone else and the way we want them to
Speaker 1: behave all the time. I mean, we get anxious about ourselves,
Speaker 1: but we get anxious about people who we live our
Speaker 1: love with, you know, and they're not conforming to the
Speaker 1: way we think they should actually behave So the relationship
Speaker 1: with silence, with their sun troubled place allows you to
Speaker 1: let the person have their own life more, not holding
Speaker 1: them hostage to a paragon of perfection that you set
Speaker 1: for themselves, not holding yourself hostage. There's a beautiful story
Speaker 1: in the Zen tradition about a monk called Hogan. That's
Speaker 1: his Japanese name, actually as Chinese name was Jafen. But
Speaker 1: Hogan was a theological monk who lived in one of
Speaker 1: the great cities in China, and he prided himself on
Speaker 1: being the hippist theological kid in town, I suppose, and
Speaker 1: he decided that he and a coultry of monks would
Speaker 1: go out to all the rustic monasteries and take the
Speaker 1: latest Buddhist theology to them. But in his journey he
Speaker 1: pretty soon realized that when he was confronted with many
Speaker 1: of these abbots, you know, who had been living the
Speaker 1: practice for decades, you know, he actually didn't know very much.
Speaker 1: And eventually he came across an abbot called Giso too monastery.
Speaker 1: He had a couple of confrontations with him in which
Speaker 1: he didn't come off very well conversational conversations, where again
Speaker 1: he realized he didn't know much. And then, finally, very compassionately,
Speaker 1: Geso asked, Hogan, by the way, where are you going
Speaker 1: on this circuit? You know, what are you doing? And
Speaker 1: Hogan said, I'm going on pilgrimage. And then Jesus said,
Speaker 1: what is the pilgrimage? He said, looking at him directly,
Speaker 1: and Hogan looked at him, and this parent said, do
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know anymore what a pilgrimage is.
Speaker 1: And Jesus said, not knowing is most intimate. Not knowing
Speaker 1: is most intimate. And really, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: you know, in the kitchen with your loved one, not
Speaker 1: knowing is most intimate. You know, when you stop thinking
Speaker 1: you know who you're with, when you stop using those
Speaker 1: affectionate nicknames you have for them in order to imprison
Speaker 1: them in certain kinds of behaviors, or when you look
Speaker 1: at your wife, your husband, your partner, your child as
Speaker 1: if you've seen them for the first time and that
Speaker 1: you actually have to get to know them, and you
Speaker 1: let go of the illusion that you know who you're with.
Speaker 1: I mean, your child doesn't even know who they are,
Speaker 1: So how could you know who they're growing into being. Actually,
Speaker 1: your husband, your wife, your partner doesn't know who they are,
Speaker 1: so how could you know who they're growing towards being?
Speaker 1: You know, there's a shyness at the beginning of a
Speaker 1: relationship where we don't quite know what to say, you know,
Speaker 1: or how to say it. We don't know what to wear,
Speaker 1: you know, all of those things that are those beautiful
Speaker 1: shyness is on a first date where you're really really
Speaker 1: fascinated by someone. But there's another shyness when you've been
Speaker 1: with someone for a long, long time, for many years,
Speaker 1: and that shyness can be even more difficult than the
Speaker 1: first shyness you felt when you met them. And the
Speaker 1: ability to break below that level of shyness, I mean,
Speaker 1: when you think about it, it's a parable. It's a
Speaker 1: metaphor for your relationship with yourself. You've lived with this
Speaker 1: person in the mirror year after year after year. You've
Speaker 1: given yourself names. You think you know who you are.
Speaker 1: Actually you can be very shy about getting below the
Speaker 1: surface of who you actually might be now. So the
Speaker 1: ability to actually drop below that line of shyness with
Speaker 1: a long term partner, this is a measure of our
Speaker 1: ability to stay intimate with the other person. We all
Speaker 1: know the difficulties in and keeping intimacy alive, sexual intimacy
Speaker 1: in a long term relationship, but also conversational intimacy, a
Speaker 1: sense of intimacy with a shared horizon. These are all
Speaker 1: difficulties in a long term relationship. They all have to
Speaker 1: do with not knowing. Not knowing is great intimacy, of enquiring,
Speaker 1: asking beautiful questions of the other person and of yourself.
Speaker 1: That's beautiful and so true. It makes me think about
Speaker 1: the cycles that you talk about. You say that common
Speaker 1: to all three marriages, right, which is this sort of
Speaker 1: recognition of what we want, and then there's a pursuit
Speaker 1: and then the hope to circumvent the difficult but necessary disappointments, um,
Speaker 1: which is where I think a lot of us get stuck.
Speaker 1: And then ultimately, in the face of that disappointment, the
Speaker 1: full recommitment to the vows we have made, which is
Speaker 1: that full recommitment to continuing to get to know either
Speaker 1: that other person in our our own work or ourselves. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I had I remember, I must go back and reread
Speaker 1: that book. Actually, you're reminding me of many many phenomenon
Speaker 1: dynamics in it that i'd forgotten I had addressed, you know,
Speaker 1: But I really loved actually following the lives of the
Speaker 1: people I chose out Robert Lewis Stevenson and Jane Austen,
Speaker 1: and following their lives through these different stages of the
Speaker 1: romance with what they wanted in their lives. Often something
Speaker 1: you don't know you want that you're actually unconsciously pursuing.
Speaker 1: So I must go back. Thank you for the reminder
Speaker 1: to reread the three marriages. It's beautiful and I see
Speaker 1: it's echoes in all your work. Yeah, particularly the constant
Speaker 1: sort of engagement with the self. The perhaps hardest of
Speaker 1: the marriages in some way. Well, I don't know if
Speaker 1: i'd I've been in some pretty bad marriages. So maybe
Speaker 1: I'll walk that statement back and just reminded of the
Speaker 1: image of that Robert Lewis Stevenson creates h kidnapped, where
Speaker 1: he's marooned on the island, the island of ver Aid,
Speaker 1: actually that he spent Robert Lewis Stevenson spent his childhood
Speaker 1: on because his father was an architect for building the
Speaker 1: lighthouse and the lighthouse houses that are still there. To
Speaker 1: this day. I don't know if you remember the story
Speaker 1: and kidnap, but he's gone the island and things just
Speaker 1: get worse and worse, and he has a purse full
Speaker 1: of money and he's he's wandering around this island trying
Speaker 1: to find a way off it. You know, he loses
Speaker 1: his money at all, falls out of his purse, so
Speaker 1: now he's broke on the island, you know, and he's
Speaker 1: trying to get the attention of the fishing people who
Speaker 1: are around and who just speak Gaelic, and they're waving
Speaker 1: to him and they're trying to communicate something, but he
Speaker 1: can't figure out what it is, but none of them
Speaker 1: are coming to get him. And then eventually, finally when
Speaker 1: he wades into the water after a number of days there,
Speaker 1: he finds that actually, at low tide he can wade
Speaker 1: off the island to the mainland. And that's what the
Speaker 1: fishing people have been pointing and telling him he could do.
Speaker 1: You know. It's a perfect parable actually of when Robert
Speaker 1: Lewis Stevenson was pursuing his love this woman who had
Speaker 1: in many ways fled away from him because she was
Speaker 1: half in a relationship with her husband who she wanted
Speaker 1: to leave, but it was at a time where you
Speaker 1: were under tremendous shame if you did, you know. And
Speaker 1: she moved to Oakland, and Robert Lewis Stevenson was in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, and there was no bridge at that time,
Speaker 1: so it was actually quite difficult to get across to
Speaker 1: Oakland from San Francisco. He hardly had a penny in
Speaker 1: his pocket to pay for the ferry fair to go across.
Speaker 1: So as this writing, Kidnapped was the perfect parable of
Speaker 1: what he had gone through when he was in love
Speaker 1: with this young woman who eventually became his wife, actually
Speaker 1: in partner. And it was lovely to discover that image
Speaker 1: in Kidnapped. I'd never drawn the parallels to it before,
Speaker 1: but that was one of the most pleasurable parts of
Speaker 1: the book. And of course we're always discovering ourselves, these
Speaker 1: invisible and visible parallels inside ourselves, between our behaviors out
Speaker 1: in the world that we think have often no real
Speaker 1: meaning to them, that you find are perfect out of
Speaker 1: representations of the dilemmas and doorways that we have to
Speaker 1: find our way through on the inside. So shall we
Speaker 1: do one last poem from the new book? Yes, So
Speaker 1: I've got a couple of suggestions, and you tell me
Speaker 1: which you'd rather do or neither. But I love perfectly
Speaker 1: made and the edge you carry with you or two
Speaker 1: that came to mind from me. Yes, let's do the
Speaker 1: edge you carry with you. So I've been working with
Speaker 1: that quite a bit. I do love perfectly made too.
Speaker 1: I think we could spend the whole hour on perfectly made,
Speaker 1: and I think we are like keeping away from I
Speaker 1: think we could. It was that was sort of my plan.
Speaker 1: And so the edge you carry with you again, this
Speaker 1: is one of those titles where that's all you need.
Speaker 1: Actually the first sentence, The edge you carry with you,
Speaker 1: all intuitively know what that is. It's from our inheritance,
Speaker 1: you know, those edges that we haven't fully resolved, you know,
Speaker 1: from the traumas of our childhood in or out of
Speaker 1: our family. I mean, we're traumatized just by birth itself,
Speaker 1: independent of who we come in with. So this is
Speaker 1: looking at what we carry within us and the way
Speaker 1: it can actually become our gift. The edge you carry
Speaker 1: with you? What is this beguiling reluctance to be happy?
Speaker 1: What is this beguiling reluctance to be happy? This quickness
Speaker 1: in turning away the moment you might arrive, the felt
Speaker 1: sense that a moment unguarded joy might, after all, just
Speaker 1: kill you. You know so very well the edge of
Speaker 1: nus you have always carried with you. You know so
Speaker 1: very well your childhood legacy, that particular inherited sense of hurt,
Speaker 1: given to you so freely by the world you entered.
Speaker 1: And you know too well by now the body's hesitation
Speaker 1: at the invitation to undo everything others seemed to want
Speaker 1: to make you learn. But your edge of darkness has
Speaker 1: always made its own definition secretly as an edge of understanding.
Speaker 1: And the door you closed might, by its very nature,
Speaker 1: be one just waiting to be lent against and opened,
Speaker 1: and happiness might just be a single step away on
Speaker 1: the other side of that next unhelpful and undeserving thought.
Speaker 1: Your way home understood now not as an achievement, but
Speaker 1: as a giving up, a blessed undoing, and arrival in
Speaker 1: the body, the full rest in the give and take
Speaker 1: of the breath, This living, breathing body always waiting to
Speaker 1: greet you at the door, always, no matter the long
Speaker 1: years you've been away, still wanting you to come home.
Speaker 1: That is so so beautiful, a blessed undoing. I feel
Speaker 1: like so much of my spiritual practice, that's what it
Speaker 1: has become exactly. Yeah, we're just afraid in that undoing
Speaker 1: that we won't find anything underneath because we've lost our
Speaker 1: necessary friendship with silence. I often think, you know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of angry men in North America at the moment.
Speaker 1: It seems to be the fate of most American men
Speaker 1: to become angry in their middle and late life about
Speaker 1: one thing or another, or just walking down the road
Speaker 1: or driving a car. And I do think it's because
Speaker 1: there's no discipline of silence, and when you haven't been
Speaker 1: introduced to the joys and treasures of silence earlier in
Speaker 1: your life, you actually start to see it as the enemy,
Speaker 1: because actually it is the enemy to your established identity.
Speaker 1: It's going to undo and break down the perimeter and
Speaker 1: edge that you set up for yourself. In all of
Speaker 1: our great traditions, that midlife you're supposed to actually turn
Speaker 1: towards silence. It's very powerful. In the Hindu society. You
Speaker 1: became a forest dweller after you've raised your family. In
Speaker 1: medieval Europe, after you've had your time as a knight
Speaker 1: or a man at arms. You would become a hermit
Speaker 1: in the woods. I mean, this is a classical kind
Speaker 1: of image of perfection. Not everyone got to do that,
Speaker 1: or to even entertain it, but it was in the
Speaker 1: literature and it was seen as the ultimate pattern. So
Speaker 1: I often think, you know, the anger that we see
Speaker 1: in our society is most especially because there's no rest,
Speaker 1: there's no rest into the silence that will open the
Speaker 1: door to you to a greater understanding, to a greater
Speaker 1: sense of ease in the world. So we hold ourselves
Speaker 1: to hostage. We hold, but rather than accused ourselves, we
Speaker 1: accuse others. You know, we name people in ways you know,
Speaker 1: right wing are left wing, a liberal conservative, and we're
Speaker 1: creating a civil war because of that very simple reluctance
Speaker 1: to make a friendship with the unknown and with the
Speaker 1: intimacy of the unknown, and the beauties and nourishment of
Speaker 1: silence in a in an everyday life. Well, I think
Speaker 1: that is a beautiful place to wrap up with an
Speaker 1: invitation to what I think we could all agree we
Speaker 1: need more of, which is silence. I know I do.
Speaker 1: I try and prioritize it, and I could always you
Speaker 1: can always have more of it, David, I want to
Speaker 1: thank you for coming on. Your poetry induces a sort
Speaker 1: of inner silence in me, and for that I'm grateful.
Speaker 1: So thank you. Eric. Yeah, I'm so glad that we've
Speaker 1: been able to have this conversation lovely, and I look
Speaker 1: forward to the next one. Thank you very much. If
Speaker 1: what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider
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