Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - David Whyte - ON LOVE

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Falling in love is a courageous, destabilizing, and deeply human act. In this Valentine’s Day special, Irish poet and philosopher David Whyte returns with poems of romance. He reflects on love’s power to transform a life. Through intimate stories of vulnerability, longing, and the willingness to step into the unknown to live and love fully. ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

tetragrammatine. In romantic love, there's this longing for an ideal. When I say ideal, I'm not talking about something that is meant to dissipate. We talk about contemplation, you know, really, contemplation is a word that says you're going to make a template of heaven here in your own body and your own life. That's a religious falling in love. in love. So to keep the ideal, but to allow the ideal to have its own life so that it can change with you. It's almost always larger than you could ever imagine when you first started. And in many

ways that's the same, it's the same dynamic that we have to follow when we're in love with a person. You do fall in love with an ideal to begin with, and rightly so. You need to be taken away from your non-idealistic, unimaginative self, yeah. But if you have any maturity about or your granted maturity in the path ahead, you're given to understand that this ideal you've fallen in love with that has its own life, actually, this person. And so there's a wonderful phrase from Simon Weil, the French philosopher, which she says, what we love in other people is the hope. for satisfaction of our desires. We do not love them for their desires.

If we love them for their desires, we should love them as ourselves. And so what you've got to fall in love with is the desires that are in the world, that are in the person you've fallen in love with. And you're being invited along that fiery path. There's beautiful lines by Pablo Neruda about him falling in love.

with poetry and with the world that poetry has the power to articulate. So he says, and something ignited in my soul, fever or unremembered wings, and I went my own way deciphering that burning fire. And I wrote the first bare line, pure foolishness, pure wisdom of one who knows nothing. Yes. And suddenly I saw the heavens. unfastened and open. You hear it in Spanish and you can feel it in the body.

And I'll go golpeab in my alma, I always perdidious and me I was saying solo, dishe frando, that camadura, and I the first line, vaguer, vaguer, vaguerre sin-cuerre, pure tontaria, pure sabredria, del que no sabi

nada. And I vidi, pronto, the sielo, descranado, and abietto. It's just, incredibly grounded at the same time that he's taking you out of your present body. So the powers of romantic love are to do with subversion of your present identity. And, I mean, we actually know from research that your brain functionality actually changes when

you're in love. Thank God, you know. And you can't see straight. You're not meant to see straight. You'd never leave your present life. your present house, your present circumstances. Logic has to be put in abeyance. Logic will be brought back in as a good servant to the relationship.

But to begin with, we raise our house down to the foundations. And hopefully the other person does the same. And we build from that meeting. This is a piece called Second Sight. Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you've never seen before painted through an evening sky. Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you've never seen before painted through an evening sky. Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitation and not a telling word of wisdom. Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitation and not a telling word of wisdom.

Sometimes you need only that first shyness that comes from being shown things far beyond your understanding so that you can fly and become free by being still and by being still here. And then there are times you need to be brought to ground by touch and touch alone, to know those arms around you and to make your home in the world just by being wanted, to see those eyes looking back at you as eyes should see you at last, seeing you as you always wanted to be seen, seeing you as you yourself had always wanted to see the world. Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you've never seen before

painted through an evening sky. Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitation and not a telling word of wisdom. Sometimes you need only that first shyness that comes from being shown things far beyond your understanding so that you can fly and become free by being still and by being still here. And then there are times you need to be brought to ground by touch and touch alone, to know those arms around you and to make your home in the world just by being wanted. To see those eyes looking back at you as eyes should see.

see you at last, seeing you as you always wanted to be seen, seeing you as you yourself had always wanted to see the world. And I think that's what we see in the lover's eyes, is ourself being seen as we had always imagined we could possibly see too at the same time. And this is also about, you know, in romantic love, there's this powerful physical, relationship to the gravitational field of longing. What's physically pulling you? It has a sexual power to it, but it's beyond sexual at the same time.

It takes the forms of ideal notions of living together, of sharing a life together, of going beyond yourself. But first of all, you have to shape this kind of invitational identity. And the interesting thing is you're all, inviting someone else to invite you. So it's this mutual invitation and this mutual vulnerability. You look at vulnerability, it comes from the Latin vulnium, meaning wound. So when you're vulnerable, you're open to the world,

and you're open in a way where you have no choice. That's just the way you're made, actually. So in meeting another person in love, you're, love, the way you're made is meeting the way the other person is made. In a proper love relationship, you can say, I love you, and the other person can say, I love you, yeah. But really, it's we love us. That's what's being said. We love us. That would be more accurate. Yeah. The union. Exactly. And the future that that union can bring about. Would you say that falling in love is an affirmation?

It seems like a word that's not powerful enough for what occurs, actually. This subversive falling apart and dismantling that occurs. Your previous notions of where you were going to live, how you were going to live, and how you were going to organize your life are gone. So it's affirming something, but it's affirming a future. A new thing. Exactly. And it's a different thing.

Exactly. It's a letting go of the past. Yes. Yeah. I had this very powerful experience when I left my second marriage. And I went, I'd recommended two friends of mine who were getting married a place in Ireland as a venue. They said, where should I go? I said, Gregon's Castle is the best place. And they had a half a dozen places on their list to visit to discover where they were going to get married in Ireland. And they went to Gregor's Castle first and they didn't go to any other place. They said, that's it. This is a then I had to go to the wedding, yeah. But there's nothing more poignant than attending a wedding when you are leaving your own marriage. And yet, there's something incredibly powerful about that brief ceremony, even if you're leaving. There's something that's very courageous about two people committing to a future together that's so unknown and has so much trepidation and difficulty in its undertaking.

And I was very moved like almost everyone is. But it was a three-day wedding and it was quite overwhelming, you know, the singing, the dancing, the drinking, the celebration. Meanwhile, I've got this underground movement where I'm actually floating out of a relationship. So I had to take a break away and I said to this lovely woman who worked at the hotel, Bridie, she was a childhood friend of a very close friend of mine. I said, tell me a place in this area, which I know so well that I actually don't know, you know, one corner of the Beron, the limestone mountains of North Clare. And she said, do you know Kajara and Adirish? I said, no. She said, well, it's up the back of Kappawalya mountain there. It's where I grew up. If you take the road around the back of Kappawalya, the little boring, the little lane, you'll come to this crossroads and you'll see a little farmhouse there on the right. That's where I grew up.

and there's a lane goes up the hill, a Boreen, as they say, in Ireland, the little lane. And if you go up there, there's the views over the Atlantic and the Aran Islands. It's a great place to blow the cobwebs away. I said, great, thank you. So I drove up there and I parked the car at little crossroads. I saw her farmhouse where she'd grown up and where my good friend used to come across and play, actually. And I started up this hill, and there were these two limestone. walls on either side of the road that met in almost perfect Italian Renaissance perspective at the top,

except they didn't meet quite at the top. There was a little doorway of light. And I walked up that hill towards that doorway of light. And when I walked through that over the hill, I felt as if I could just walk straight off into the thin air of my new life. Wow. And it was, in many ways, it was my falling in love with my life again. Yes. It was my new marriage and commitment to what lay over my own horizon. I wrote this piece. It's called Just Beyond Yourself. Just Beyond Yourself. It's where you need to be. Just Beyond Yourself. It's where you need to be half a step into self-forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet. Just Beyond Yourself. It's where you need to be. Half a step into self-forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet.

There's a road always beckoning. When you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time, that's how you know it's where you have to go. That's how you know it's the road you have to follow. That's how you know. That's how you know. know you have to go. It's just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be. When you think about it,

that's the description of how it feels falling in love with another person too. Half a step into self-forgetting. Yes. And the rest restored by what you'll meet. There's a road always beckoning. When you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time. That's how you know. It's where you have to go. That's how you know it's the road you have to follow. That's how you know you have to go.

It's just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be. And that's a poem clearly to yourself. It is, yeah, yeah. But it's amazing how parallel it is to falling in love with another person. And of course, there's no one is more of a dark, handsome stranger than your own unknown self that's about to appear in your life. Yeah.

And your new self is always, is always an attractive stranger. And that can happen after any event, any tragedy. It doesn't have to be after a change in a relationship. Yes. Yeah. I think one of the signal experiences of romance and falling in love is a almost parallel experience. of being unrequited or possibly being unrequited. It's those agonies we go through.

Today it's when your text isn't returned, you know, within 45 minutes or four or five minutes. And has everything gone, has everything disappeared? You know, is this person really there? Have I imagined it? Did they imagine something about me that I disappointed the men? So it's this appearance and disappearance. appearance and disappearance. I mean, sometimes it is a signal that this is not going to work, actually,

if it just keeps occurring without any kind of real consummation. But almost always, it's a rehearsal for what you'll go through in the years to come if you commit together, the appearances and disappearances and changes in love. I mean, I've been through a few marriages now in relationship, and my feeling is it's all love, actually. It's just all love. You still love the person you were married to previously. It's just that the seasonality of the love has changed.

It's a different kind of. We don't seem to live in a world that allows you to, except in rare circumstances, to carry on that deep love relationship in a changed way. The rest of the world somehow wants you to fight it out, you know, and doesn't want you to be comfortable in having a, an abiding friendship with the other person. But it's all love, really, and the love has just changed.

It's either changed radically for one person, or it's radically changed for both people. Think of it's changed for one. It has to change for the other. Exactly, yeah. It's the nature of, it only works in both directions. Yes. I always think every experience that a human being has, whether it's jealousy or fear, difficulty and envy, they're all dogs.

to some form of maturity actually. I set myself the challenge of writing a blessing for unrequited love, calling on my own experience on being unrequited at times. So this is a blessing for unrequited love. A blessing on the eyes that do not see me as I wish. A blessing to the ears that can never hear the far inward footfall of my own shy heart. Blessings to the life in you that will live without me, to the open door that now and forever takes you away from me. Blessings to the path that you follow alone, and blessings to the path

that await you joining with another. A blessing for the way you will not know me in the years to come, and with it, a blind, outstretched blessing of my hands on anything or anyone that cannot ever come to know me fully as I am and therefore a blessing even then for the way I will never fully know myself above all the deepest kindest wishes of my own hidden and untrammeled heart for what you had to hide from me in you from what you the deepest kindest wishes of my own hidden and untrampled heart for what you had to hide from me in you Let me be generous enough and large enough and brave enough to say goodbye to you without any understanding,

to let you go into your own understanding, to live fully in your understanding, and to gift your understanding. May you always be in the sweet, central, hidden shadow of my memory without needing to know who you were when you first came, who you were when you stayed, and who you will become in your freedom now that you have passed through my life and gone. What motivated you to write that? Unrequited love. In the moment.

It was so powerful. Yeah. When I felt agonies of any kind, I've always been interested in the phenomenology of it, in a parallel, I've always been saying, what is this, you know, and why does a human being feel these things? And what are you being drawn into? what larger dispensation of maturity is calling you through this portal and through this doorway. A blessing for the way you will not know me in the years to come. A blessing even then for the way I will never fully know myself.

Above all, the deepest, kindest wishes of my own hidden and untrammeled heart for what you had to hide from me. Let me be generous enough and large enough and brave enough to say good. by to you without any understanding. You never really understand why your love is unrequited, to let you go into your own understanding, to live fully in your understanding, and to gift your understanding to others.

May you always be in the sweet, central, hidden shadow of my memory without needing to know who you were when you first came, who you were when you stayed, and who you will become in your freedom now that you have passed through me. my life and gone. And, you know, I spoke about unrequited love as being a necessary experience in the courtship phase, even with someone who you are going to be committed to or marry or live

with, because you will go through those rhythms of knowing and getting to know and suddenly not knowing and being far, far from in the years to come with a person. We've all had the experience the beautiful experience at night, you know, being with your loved one in bed, and waking and coming close to them and moving away and coming close to them and getting too hot and needing to cool off on the other side, metaphorically and physically, and leaving the other person alone and moving away and coming back. So this is written about that experience of feeling love,

throughout a night, a dream like night, where waking and sleeping are one beautiful interchange and exchange. So this is love in the night. Definitely a Valentine's poem. Love in the night. Sometimes when you lie close to me, your body is so still in my arms. I find myself half in love with your barely breathing form and half in love with the unspeaking, silent source from which you come. I find myself touching your lips with mine to feel their warmth and bowing my head to hear your breath, instilling myself to listen far inside you

for the gentle rise and fall of the tide that tells me you're still free to come and go in life. So that I take your hand in mind to sense your pulse and touch your hair and stroke your cheek and move my lips to yours to feel the warmth emerging from your inward self, and to see we are still here and still pledged to breathe this world together. All night like this I find myself asleep and awake, turn toward the moon, then turn towards you, your warmth inviting me to bring you close and leave you alone. All night I find myself unable

to choose between the love I feel for you through closeness and the grief of having to let you go through distance so that it seems I can only breathe fully in the dark by taking you in and giving you away in your quiet rhythm of appearance and disappearance, letting you return only in your breathing and not breathing, or your half-side phrases spoken to the dark, or your half-side phrases spoken to the dark, whispered from the dream in which you live, so that I lie between sleeping and waking, seeing you are here and dreaming you are gone, wanting to hold you and wanting to let you go, living far inside you as you breathe close to me, living far beyond you, as I wait through the hours of the night for you to wake and find me again, the light in your eyes, half-dreaming

on the pillow, looking back at me, seeing me at last, not knowing how far I have traveled, through what distance I have come to find you, where I have been or what I have seen, how far or how near, not knowing how I have gained and lost you a hundred times between darkness and dawn. It's incredible. So that I lie between sleeping and waking,

seeing you are here and dreaming you are gone, wanting to hold you and wanting to let you go, living far inside you as you breathe close to me, and living far beyond you as I wait through the hours of the night for you to wake, and find me again, the light in your eyes half dreaming on the pillow, looking back at me, seeing me at last, not knowing how far I have travelled, through what distance I have come to find you,

where I have been or what I have seen, how far or how near, not knowing how I have gained and lost you a hundred times between darkness and dawn. It's interesting that we will often say that two people slept together rather than two people made love. There's something about the commitment and vulnerability of being in that unconscious, half-conscious state through the hours of a night. There's some kind of commitment that occurs where your will is not being engaged. And often if the relationship is unable to sustain that kind of relationship, that's when you wake up the next morning with regret at the person who's late next year. Because in that half-dreamlike state, you realize that you're in the wrong place with the wrong person.

The visitation and unvisitation is not. that's a visitation that you shouldn't have made. So this next one is about the powerful dreamlike experience that occurs in a truly consummated relationship, not just in sexual consummation, but in the half-dreaming state that occurs afterwards. I often think, you know, when I'm trying to come close to the essence of my power, partner, that it's a lovely thing to see them as a kind of oceanic coming and going, rather than a fixed platform that you're going to stand on or a fixed place you're going to name, and to

see them as a kind of tidal force. It also speaks to your first love, the sea. Yes, exactly. The ocean, the sea and you have a lot of water in my life. So this is a poem called The Sea in You, as in the ocean, yeah, the ocean in you, the sea in you. It's the title poem of the book in which it appears, actually. The Sea in You, when I wake under the moon, I do not know who I have become unless I move closer to you. When I wake under the moon, I do not know who I have become unless I move closer to you.

obeying the give and take of the earth as it breathed the slender length of your body, for that in breathing with the tide that breathes in you, and moving with you as you come and go, and following you half in light and half in dark, I feel the first firm edge of my floating palm touch and then trace the pale light of your shoulder to the faint moonlit shadow of your smooth cheek, and drawing my finger through my finger through. the pearl water of your skin. I sense the breath on your lips, touch and then trace the finest,

furthest, most unknown edge of my sense of self. I sense the breath on your lips, touch, and then trace the finest, furthest, most unknown edge of my sense of self, so that I come to you under the moon as if I had swum under the deepest arch of the ocean, to find you living where no one could possibly live, and to feel you breathing where no one could possibly breathe. And I touch your skin as I would touch a pale whispering spirit of the tides, that my arms try to hold with the wrong kind of strength, and my lips try to speak with the wrong kind of love. And I follow you through the ocean night, listening for your breath in my helpless calling to love you as I should. and I lie next to you in your sleep

as I would next to the sea overwhelmed by the rest that arrives in me and by the weight that is taken from me and what by morning is left on the shore of my waking joy when I wake under the moon I do not know who I have become unless I move closer to you

obeying the give and take of the earth as it breathes the slender length of your body so that in breathing with the tide that breathes in you and moving with you as you come and go and following you half in light and half in dark I feel the first firm edge of my floating palm touch and then trace the pale light of your shoulder to the faint moonlit shadow of your smooth cheek I'm drawing my finger through the pearl water of your skin I sense the breath on your lips

touch and then warm the finest, furthest, most unknown edge of my sense of self so that I come to you under the moon as if I had swum under the deepest arch of the ocean to find you living where no one could possibly live and to feel you breathing where no one could possibly breathe

and I touch your skin as I would touch a pale whispering spirit of the tides that my arms try to hold with the wrong kind of strength, and my lips try to speak with the wrong kind of love, and I follow you through the ocean night, listening for your breath in my helpless calling to love you as I should, and I lie next to you in your sleep as I would next to the sea. overwhelmed by the rest that arrives in me and by the weight that is taken from me, and what by morning is left on the shore of my waking joy. So I do often feel that in falling in love, we're constantly arranging for our own disappearance. If we follow the vulnerabilities of love, and that we have to apprentice ourselves to our own helplessness,

And I think particularly the masculine psyche has to apprentice itself to its own helplessness and disappearance. To invite your partner to help you find yourself in that helplessness. It's a mutually creative and loving act. But perhaps I'll finish with a piece that encapsulates the falling in love with a person, falling in love with a work, and are falling in love with your own life again. And I often think that life is this constant cycle of getting close, getting intimate, you know, disappearing, and then almost dying and having to bring yourself back to life again,

establishing yourself and disestablishing yourself, going out with a tide, coming in with the tide, being fully in the world, being fully as far from the world as you could ever get. And it's all part of the path of love, of being found by the world in ways that you did not think it was possible to be found. So this is a piece called The True Love. And it's a piece I wrote that came out of work, but it was also about committing in a love relationship. I worked with 144 Catholic sisters. On a three-day retreat, I was the only man now. And the theme they wanted me to work with was stepping out of the boat

when Peter has to step out of the boat in the middle of the storm on the lake in the New Testament and sees the Spirit of Jesus walking across the water towards him. So I was invited down to work with this theme for three days and three nights, you might say, in biblical terms, with these sisters. And I came out of that and I wrote this piece. And there's a lovely memory in the piece that when I used to study, go on marine zoological studies in the Western Isles of Scotland.

And we had a marine station out in the Hebrides. And in the Hebrides, there's this old Celtic form of Christianity there, still alive. You know, it's very much connected. to the ancient Irish form of Christianity. And in that tradition, they have prayers for every part of the day, just as they used to have in Ireland. So you'd wake up, you'd say a prayer for the light coming in the window.

You'd say a prayer for when you pulled the curtains, yeah. You'd say a prayer for unsmooring the fire and blowing the embers of light again. You'd say a prayer for going out of the door the first time in the day. And there was an old fellow used to come. down to the stone key below our station. I say station, it was just an old granite house, but it was our marine biology station. And he used to approach his fishing boat,

which was only probably 40 feet long or so, by himself when he was just doing maintenance on it. But he'd never touch an item of his gear until he'd taken his hat off, pressed it to his chest, and said, prayers and you'd see him standing there praying in front of the boat and he turned towards the sea and pray to the sea too and I used to be there with my coffee on my tea looking out to him and I say you know I have no equivalent of that in my

own life you know but what would it be if I had it here what would my own equivalent of that prayer be so this poem has been used at hundreds and hundreds of marriages actually most particularly for gay marriages where people have had to hide their love when they were younger. Now the laws have changed in many of our developed Western countries, but still in many parts of the world, you know, you have to hide that kind of love. And so it's become a, the stepping out of the boat has become an image, you know, and powerful arbiter of the feelings of both sides.

So it's been very satisfying to see this poem go out into the world and be used in such a marvelous way. I'm constantly meeting people who thank me for being at their wedding. The true love. Also, interesting that had you written it for that purpose, it could have never been as good. You're probably right, yeah. It doesn't work that way.

Yes. You wrote what you needed to write. Yes. Yeah. And it found its use in the world outside of you. Yeah. Very beautiful. Yeah, and it was something, many of them,

those biblical images deeply inside me because, you know, in English schools at that time, you had religious education, and at that time it was all Christian. So we learned all the biblical stories. And then I went to Sunday school, and I just happened to go to a Sunday school where the teachers were absolutely brilliant storytellers. So my sisters and I would love to go to Sunday school on Sunday morning because the teachers were so wonderful. And I loved all the biblical stories. They're still alive in me. I once had to give a, I inherited a talk on Jesus, actually, from my Irish priest friend, John O'Donohue, passed away. God bless him. But after he passed away, he had this talk he was supposed to have given. And they said, would you come and give

this talk on Jesus? I said, I'm not qualified. Oh, yes, you are. They said, and so I went back and I remembered my child's experience with Jesus and how powerful it was. And partly because of these stories and the images that are burned in my in my child's mind, you know, from those stories are so compelling. So in my work, biblical images are constantly erupting out of nowhere. Moses, you know, Herod searched for days, looking for the children, the minds, hunger for fame, will hunt down all innocence, you know, things like this. And so this is one of those images that just powerfully emerged from this deep core inside me. The true love, there's a faith in loving fiercely, the one who is rightfully yours.

There's a faith in loving fiercely, the work that is rightfully yours. There's a faith in loving fiercely, the life that is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited. years. There's a faith in loving fiercely, the one who is rightfully ours, especially if you have waited years, and especially if you never believed you could deserve this love and beckoning, hand held out to you this way. I'm thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness, and what we feel we are worthy of in this world. Years ago in the Hebrides, I remember an old man who walked every day on the grey stones to the shore of baying seals, who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind, and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water.

And I think of the story of the storm, and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water, calling to them, and how we're all waiting for that abrupt waking and that calling and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love. So that when we finally step out of the boat towards them, we find everything holds us and everything sustains our courage.

And if you wanted to drown, you could. If you wanted to drown, you could, but you don't. You don't because finally, after all this struggle and all these years, you simply don't want to anymore. You've had enough of drowning, and you want to live, and you want to love, and you will walk across any territory, however fluid, and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours. And if you wanted to drown, you could drown, but you don't.

You don't because finally, after all this struggle and all these years, you simply don't want to anymore. You don't want to anymore, you've simply had enough of drowning. And you want to live, and you want to love, and you will walk across any territory, however fluid, and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs. in yours. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammatin?

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