Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - David Whyte (Part 1)

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

David Whyte is a prolific Irish poet, philosopher, and speaker whose work that spans nearly four decades has resonated with audiences around the world. Beginning his career in 1986, Whyte has published three books of prose and ten volumes of poetry, including Still Possible and Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Through his Three Sundays Series, he creates immersive experiences for his audience that invite reflection on the complexities of human existence in 75-minute online sessions. His latest collection, Consolations II, continues his exploration of language and the choices that shape our daily lives. This month, Whyte is commencing the Consolations II England & Scotland Book Tour, which will move through Edinburgh, London, Oxford and Brighton. In January, he will speak daily at the Wisdom & Wellbeing Week 1 Intensive in Nosara, Costa Rica, alongside Henry Shukman, Leslie Salmon Jones, and Jeff W. Jones, building a foundation for each day’s conversation by sharing meaningful poetry and thought-provoking commentary. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tetragrammaton Blessing of the morning light. The blessing of the morning light to you. May it find you even in your invisible appearances. May you be seen to have risen from some other place you know and have known in the darkness, and that carries all you need. May you see what is hidden in you as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter. May what is hidden in you become your gift to give. May you hold that shadow to the light,

and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light. May you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance, this new morning, this being seen again, new and newly alive. It's so beautiful. Mm-hmm. Tell me how that poem came to be. I had a very good friend. He was quite well known, John O'Donoghue,

and he wrote on the Celtic world. I first knew him when he was poor as a church mouse, as a priest in the heart of Connemara. And he became a worldwide phenomena, really, with his book, Annum Cara. He was a philosopher poet. I'm a poet philosopher in a way. I came to philosophy through poetry. He came to poetry in a way through his studies to philosophy through poetry. He came to poetry, in a way, through his studies of the great German philosophers, actually, and actually had a postgraduate from Heidelberg and all the great German philosophers. But he and I were so close, very close friends. We spent a lot of time together. And I always imagined that he would have been the person who said the last words over me,

having been a priest for 17 years. But he passed away at the height of his powers at 52 years old. Wow. Yes. And it was really a terrible shock for me at the time. And it was like losing a part of myself. And every Easter, until he left the priesthood,

he would lead a mass at this ruined monastery called Cockham Rowan. So he'd be up depending what time Easter was that year, he'd be up before the light to get there, to greet the light and to lead the mass. And because John was so articulate, thousands of people would come actually and the ruins would be filled

with people. And so I used to think about him. I would be on the West Coast at 10 o'clock the night before, the same time as him, and thinking about him getting up and leading this mass. And then came the year when he was no longer alive and Easter came. And I thought of him and so that poem is dedicated to John O'Donoghue. So beautiful. The blessing of the morning light to you may find you even in your invisible appearances.

You know the way we can walk into a room and the person people are seeing is not necessarily the person who's actually appeared. We have something that we're carrying some grief or some difficulty with a loved one or our own health. And we don't feel like we should overwhelm people on the outside, so we create something of a mask. And quite often, it's not just in defense, it's in care for other people. But the great tragedy of the mask is you start to think that that's you.

So the ability to open a road between what I call the inner horizon inside a person to the outer horizon and to create a conversation between them. We're very aware of the effect on outer horizons on our life. We love horizons. And in fact, there's a lot of medical research at the moment showing that when you're looking at into the far distance, when you're looking at horizons, your physiology changes and you're actually in a much happier state than when you're looking at things that are close up, which makes a lot of sense when you think about the good that a good walk does for you when you're able to get your

head up and look. And we know what it's like to live next to the horizon of the sea or the mountains. And one of the beautiful dynamics of a horizon is that by definition there's something over it and there's something over it that you can't see actually, it belongs to the unknown. And of course mythologically the outer horizon represents the future. What lies over it is going to come into your life if you move towards it and more and more of the unknown will be revealed to you. But always there'll be another horizon ahead of you.

So it's a very ancient dynamic in the human soul. But it's really interesting to think about the fact that we also have an inner horizon. But we quite often have a very different relationship with that horizon. We often see it instead of a line of invitation, we see it as a line of resistance, almost like a barrier. And that's often where I keep my griefs below there and I won't allow myself to articulate

them. I haven't been taught how to speak from that unknown that lies below that horizon in a way. And in many ways, I've joined the communal social conspiracy of keeping it hidden, the things we learn in the family that are unspoken, that you learn unconsciously to keep unspoken. And they're almost always the things that we feel at the deepest level. That's what the great French philosopher Camus encouraged us to do, which was live to the point of tears, he said, which is not an invitation to modeling sentimentality, but an invitation to feeling everything as deeply as you can. And that involves going down below this horizon

that we normally feel as a line of resistance. So to be able to put the inner horizon in conversation with the outer horizon immediately is a very powerful thing for a human being. And other human beings recognize that it's happening unconsciously and are drawn towards it and they call it charisma.

And when you take another step and you put what is below the horizon inside you in conversation with what is beyond the horizon outside you, that's when we recognize spiritual power in another person. In many ways, it's the representation of mystical experience, the inner unknown inside a human being conversing with the unknown that lies beyond them. And so you suddenly get this enormous spectrum of experience. So that's all in that line, the blessing of the morning light, you may find you even in your invisible appearances. May you be seen to have risen from some other place you know and have known in the darkness,

and that carries all you need. There's the sense that always when you drop below that inner horizon, it's new territory, but it's also an old memory at the same time. Oh, this is how things should, this is where I came from. This is my true home in my body, in this life, in this incarnation. Would you say there's resolution there? Well, there's resolution in the sense of just being, but just being in relationship to all other beings. You've kept the road between this deep inner self open

and what lies over the horizon. So that's the whole invitation in the poem is for you to let the light find you at its deepest level. This is very powerful in the Zen tradition. Dogen Zenji in the 12th century, one of the great teachers, a great Zen master said, if you go out and confirm the 10,000 things, this is delusion. But if the 10,000 things come and confirm you, this is enlightenment.

It's a beautiful description of enlightenment because it's so practical in every day, actually, because it's really saying enlightenment is not some arrived platform where you're going to be immune to the griefs and difficulties of being human. No. Enlightenment is just being in a real conversation. At the edge, the furthest edge you can be at, there's no other place you can be actually. So you can be enlightened when you just actually stumble at the beginning of a path into something that's other than you and you sincerely engage with that.

That's a form of enlightenment. And of course, there's the path that goes beyond that moment. May it find you even in your invisible appearances. May you be seen to have risen from some other place you know and have known in the darkness, and that carries all you need. May you see what is hidden in you as a place of hospitality, of hospitality and shadowed shelter. May what is hidden from you become your gift to give. May you hold that shadow to the light and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light.

May you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance, this new morning, this being seen again, new and newly alive. But actually the most powerful line in the poem, because I often say poetry is the act of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. And I often say it quite often, didn't want to know, thank you very much. You were quite happy in your form of delusion, actually, not knowing.

It's a form of emancipation. And in emancipation, we always have to get used to. We're not used to a certain kind of freedom. So we'll go back into the and put the manacles on again. But the line I overheard myself saying was, may you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance, this new morning, this being seen again, new and newly alive. And I had this sense of just almost like remembering all at once all of the disappearances I'd been dragged through in my life, unwillingly. And most of the time human beings do go into their disappearances unwillingly.

There's no human life that isn't like the cycles of the moon where we're on the up and up for the first half of the cycle and then we're waning and then there's three days and three nights of every metaphorical month when the moon disappears and you don't know what's going on. And you think you're supposed to know what's going on all the time but no, no, you're just meant to not know. If you did know something, it would be the wrong thing. If you did say something, it'd be the wrong thing to say. If you did go in a certain direction, you'd be off the path you should be on. So you're not supposed to know. Most human beings tend to think, well, I'm only really alive when things are on the up

and up, when everything's illuminated, I can name things. And in the second half of the cycle, there's something wrong with me, there's something wrong with the world, and there's something wrong with God. And so I'm just going to wait until the cycle comes around, which means that most human beings are at war with reality 50% of the time. So what would it be like to get with the program and go willingly into the cycle of disappearance? So the great, beautiful question coming out

of those last lines for me was, what is the disappearance I'm going through now that I'm not aware of, that I'm subtly being dragged into against my will. I'm not looking at it, I'm refusing to look at it. And the longer I refuse to look at it, the more dire the circumstances become whereby I'm forced to look at it.

We all know that dynamic in our lives and have witnessed it in other people's lives. This new morning is being seen again, new and newly alive. And of course that last line is speaking to a kind of radical simplicity and almost always what's asked of us is a kind of undoing and some kind of radical simplification in our life. The human foot is a true marvel of engineering. With 26 bones, 33 joints, and over 100 muscles and tendons, it's built for flexibility, balance and natural movement.

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with the protection from the sharp edges of a man-made world. Natural movement for your feet. Sustainable choices for our world. Learn more at vivobarefoot.com slash tetra and embrace your human nature. Do you think we're always aware of the inner horizons? Unconsciously, I think we are, yeah. It's where our sense of inner disturbance comes from, which is the experience most human beings have most of the time of not feeling quite equal to circumstances. And we're trying to bring that inner horizon of not feeling quite equal to circumstances.

And we're trying to bring that inner horizon into conversation with what lies outside us. I did a whole series, one of my three Sunday series on shame earlier this year. And then one of the essays in my new volume of constellations is called shame. I think the first line is something like shame is not as shameful as it might seem actually. It's simply that abiding human dynamic whereby we're always trying to be equal to circumstances outside of us and naturally feeling as if we don't measure up

a lot of the time. And it happens along a spectrum and a gradation. Anything from me feeling I'm not equal to the questions, you're asking just even a slight sense of, how am I going to answer that? That's a tiny little bit of shame if I don't actually feel as if I'm really meeting you. Or just a conversation in a cocktail

bar and there was something you wanted to say and you missed it, you know, and afterwards when you're walking home you said, oh, I wish I'd have said that. That's a very mild, innocuous form of shame. But then the depth of shame proceeds along a whole spectrum to the point at which you'll feel you shouldn't actually be here and alive. You shouldn't be in this body. You're not worthy of actually meeting everything around you or the people you're with. So the ability to feel the vulnerability of shame completely transforms it. Because I can feel unequal to circumstances, but it can actually allow me to invite the learning and the understanding that that's giving me. In other words, I can apprentice myself to my reluctance. I can apprentice myself to my distance from where I am. If I'm in the presence of a really charismatic person and I feel charismatically challenged

myself. I find it hard to believe you ever find yourself charismatically challenged. John Rodonegu could do it to me. No, but I remember feeling it in the presence of Seamus Heaney in a very lovely way actually. I met Seamus Heaney three times in my life and one of the greatest poets of the last 70 years, the greatest poet in Ireland acknowledged in the last 50 years or so, and my hero from when I was quite young. So to meet him and I had three different meetings

during my life, each time I felt incredibly shy. But shyness is the whole way of presence. Here's another quality that we felt ashamed about. But actually shyness is an appropriate experience to have when you're in the presence of something that you desire deeply and you don't know how to begin the conversation at all. It's like being in the presence of someone you're deeply attracted to and you're suddenly

all fingers and thumbs and you don't know what to say, what to wear, where to put your body or that's a sign that you're in the presence the whole way of something you desire deeply. So to be able to feel that and apprentice yourself to your difficulties. Part of the test of these essays in the Constellations books are to rehabilitate words, but more particularly the quality that lies behind words that we use in pejorative ways. So regret, for instance, has been very unfashionable over the last 50 years or so. You're constantly meeting people who say, I regret nothing.

And my thought always is, you need to get out more. Where have you been all your life? I often think that life is just one humiliation after another and that's actually how we learn. But regret for being a bad father, for instance, true sincere regret of being a bad father can turn you into a very good grandfather so that you can have real love and affection, but also time, presence for

a grandchild that you realize you never gave to your own son while they were away with you. So regret can be this beautiful turning towards. So for instance, I haven't written actually a piece on this, but reluctance is an everyday part of human life. The reluctance to be here or to go somewhere. We're constantly being just the way human social life is. We're constantly finding ourselves in circumstances. My wife wants to go there, all my friends want to go there. But when you think about it, we were born in this beautiful form of reluctance to be here. That cry you hear from a child when they're born is not the sound of someone who is happy to be here. They've gone through this astonishing painful

trauma and they've been taken from this rent-free environment next to the midnight heartbeat of their mother and either squeezed out into the world or taken out of their mother's body. And then valves and tissues open and close in an infant's body that never open and close to the rest of their life. You go through this one physiological transformation in which you expel the fluid from your lungs that initially surrounded you and you take in what feels like poison, which is oxygen. You hear this cry which causes joy for everyone around. I was in Morocco and in Morocco, if you don't know who said anything, you always

say it was Rumi. So I was told in Morocco that Rumi said, we're born crying with everyone around us laughing. And the object is to go out laughing with everyone around you crying. So to be able to apprentice yourself to your own reluctance, for instance, and just to start to observe how much you feel reluctant about, and that there's actually nothing wrong with it. I often think that life is so full of difficulty, grief, and loss. Every human being, at one time or another,

has the right to say, listen, God, even if they don't believe in God, people say, listen, God, I am not having this conversation. It's too painful. It's too hard. It's too heartbreaking. I'm turning my face away. I'm going to look at things that are more pleasant. And so reluctance

is our birthright. But part of turning our face back actually is actually initially actually turning your face back to your reluctance. Because only you feel reluctance in this particular way. No other human being feels reluctant with the same coloration and the same background story as you do. So to be able to step into, oh, that's right, I feel reluctant about this. And it's fine being reluctant. I'm reluctant for a reason actually. And almost always my reluctance is actually an inverse calibration of the very necessity to go through that door. Because I know what I'll have to give up to go through that door.

We have this phrase writer's block, but that's what it is actually. It's the unwillingness to go through the door. Yeah. We call it writer's block, but it's actually a fear of dying. You're going to die. The intuition is, it feels like in your body you're going to die if you do that. And the intuition is correct in a metaphorical sense. Tell me more about that, about the idea of writing as dying. Well it's really dying away from the surface carapace that we've grown.

We know this very well in the zoological animal world, the way animals shed their skins. And one of my poems called Fire in the Earth has the image of Moses in it before the burning bush. And I don't know if you remember, but when the voice of God speaks from the flames and says Moses' name, the next thing that's said is God's voice says, take off your shoes. You're standing on holy ground. And I was once reciting the piece in New York City and there was a Hasidic man in full regalia at the front. And he came up afterwards, he was very excited and he said, do you know what the verb is in the original biblical language, what the actual Hebrew is, yeah.

For when God says, take off your shoes, I said, no. He said, God says, shed your shoes. And it's the same verb for an animal shedding its skin. So the idea is these shoes have brought you here, but now they're falling apart actually, so just step out of them onto the ground. The ground that's been holding you all along. So I do think the dying for human beings is a kind of shedding of a skin.

And we've all been through experiences where we go through a kind of uglification in our surface lives. We make ourselves deeply unattractive to other people. And it's this instinctual knowledge that we need to reset our relationship with the world. And our present dynamic of friendship is actually keeping us in place. Or even a relationship. We've all been through, you know, in our younger days where you wanted to end a relationship, you didn't know how to end it, so you indulged in bad behavior.

And you just hoped they'd find you deeply unattractive and go away because your axis of eros is actually looking for something else to come along it, you know. And it's not this person, but you don't have the courage to tell them that it just isn't right. So we have this way of shedding our skin for this new complexion to arise from the inside. Do you remember the poem? Yeah, I've got two Moses poems actually. This is the burning bush poem.

Yeah. So one of them is the opening of eyes. That day I saw beneath dark clouds the passing light over the water, and I heard the voice of the world speak out. I knew then, as I had before, life is no passing memory of what has been, nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far-off. It is the vision, a far-off

thing seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing, speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert, fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven, and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground. Beautiful. That's great. That day I saw beneath dark clouds the passing light over the water, and I heard the voice of the world speak out.

I knew then, as I had before, life is no passing memory of what has been. Now the remaining page is in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening of eyes, long closed. It is the vision of far off things, seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart, the heart, after years of secret conversing,

speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert, fallen to his knees before the lit brush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground. Yeah. LMNT. Element electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense night of drinking?

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Formulated with the perfect balance of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep you hydrated and energized throughout the day. These minerals help conduct the electricity that powers your nervous system so you can perform at your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmnt.com slash tetra and stay salty with Element Electrolytes. LMNT. Tell me about writing. How do these come to be? Does it start with a line? Does it start with an idea?

Well, when you're first apprenticing yourself to writing, it starts with ideas and almost always you've got to let go of the first idea or to deepen it. So I think real writing comes from actually getting below the horizon of the place where you mediate things through language. So in other words, you go to the unspoken. You tend to think when you're a young poet that you're going to go inside and eventually find this place from which you'll know exactly what to say. But my experience is it's almost the exact opposite. You're going to go to the place inside you that doesn't know what to say, and that's the place that's going to speak. And that's what's miraculous. That's what puts what's below the horizon inside you in conversation with what lies

beyond the horizon outside you. And that's the language that's going to speak to everyone. And it's language against which we have no defenses, which is one of my definitions of poetry. Tell me practically what that experience is like. You can't describe it practically. You have to say it in poetry, actually. You have to have the numinous because it is an experience of the numinous. It comes out of a very physical feeling of edge inside you. So, for instance, Seamus Heaney, he used a very masculine image. He called it the coal face,

where you're digging at this seam and you're getting all this astonishing fuel. But it's some edge inside you from which language emerges. I was in Grenada a few years ago, and Grenada is really in this steep valley with the Alhambra, the famous fortress palace on top of one ridge. And then that falls down to the river, I think it's the River Duro down below.

And then there's a steep facing hillside, but that's covered in small houses and alleyways and secret gardens. It's called the Albaisin. And I go there to write, actually, partly because any time of night and day you can go out and get a coffee or a tapas or you can be on your own rhythms, you know. But one of the things that I would do religiously every morning was go out to my favorite coffee house that I discovered, which was called Bariste Duran, I remember. And it's by the side of this little bridge over the tiny river.

So extremely hot in the city. But this river is coming out of the Sierra Nevada at 9,000 feet. So it's cool water, glistening water. And there are trees along the side of the stream and there are birds in the trees. But I was sat on the bridge waiting for the coffee shop to open. And I'm just aware of the complete stillness around me. Except I suddenly notice after a little while that there's a river or even a little rivulet of air which is passing along the top of the trees and disturbing the tessellations of leaves right at the top,

all the way down. But on the lower half of the trees, the leaves are absolutely still. So I'm realizing there's a parallel stream that's moving to the stream below, but in between there's absolute stillness. And I asked myself the beautiful question, which was why is that so beautiful to human beings? When you're looking at a moonlit lake and it's absolutely still,

and you're seeing the reflection, the full reflection of the moon in the lake, until a zephyr of air comes along and the whole surface breaks into a kaleidoscope and shards of shimmering moons. And then the Zephyr disappears and the moon reconstitutes. We always find that incredibly astonishing. So I took that into the coffee shop actually and I got my pen and paper out. I probably had about half an hour of just writing lines that were describing the surface experience.

And then suddenly the title came, which was A Seeming Stillness. And then suddenly a physical inner correspondence, a kind of inner experience. So the first stanza went something like this, a seeming stillness, we love the movement in a seeming stillness. The breath in the body of a loved one sleeping. The highest leaves in the silent wood, a great migration in the sky above.

The waters of the earth, the blood in the body, the first soft stir in the silence beneath the strident voice, the internal hands of the mind always looking for touch, thoughts seeking other thoughts, seeking other minds, the great arrival of form through all our hidden themes. So that was the hallway into the poem. Those were the first steps. It's just the physical descriptions of all the beautiful forms.

When your child is an infant, every parent has a moment where they say to themselves, oh my God, have they stopped breathing? And you put your hand against their mouth and you're so relieved when you feel that warm breath. And the moment in an argument when your loved one's voice softens and you hear forgiveness or you hear understanding in the voice, then the next lines came which took me deeper. And the next lines are, we're all a sunlit moment come from a long darkness. What moves us always comes from what is hidden, what seems to be

said so suddenly as lived in the body for a long, long time. So that is that description of what you're asking about, really, out of nowhere. But if you're physically in that place and you've learned how to stay in that place. I mean, one of the reasons we won't ground ourselves in the body is you're actually grounding yourself in the unknown. You're grounding yourself in the frontier of your next maturation, which is actually half known and half unknown. So we'd much rather stay up in the head where we can name things exactly and know everything

and not be surprised. So to drop down into the bodies properly is to immediately put yourself into the unknown. This body never stops maturing, never stops growing older. So you're actually engaging with your own mortality in an unconscious way. But you're also starting to engage with the seasonality of your experience, yeah. Instead of absenting yourself from that maturation. So for instance, in the Romantic tradition, Coleridge and Keats talked about the primary imagination, which is this,

the ability to go down to the central tonality of your body. For them, the ability to think up new things, which is what we normally talk about as the imagination. That's the secondary imagination, or the fancy, they called it, yeah. Very precise, yeah. The primary imagination is the ability to drop down into the part of you that is keyed into or central to the constellation of events and qualities that you're surrounded

by at any one time. So by going to that place, you're immediately in conversation with things as they are, stretching right out to as far a horizon as you can see or imagine, unconsciously. And then what you start to make conscious through articulation. Where all the sudden that moment come from a long darkness, what moves is always comes from what is hidden. What seems to be said so suddenly has lived in the body for a long, long time. So I suddenly realized, oh, we're talking about the breath here. Everything's breathing around us, but we've also got this breath which we turn away from.

One of the things I've always experienced in Zen retreats is by the third day, you suddenly realize no matter how many retreats you've done before, how much effort you're putting into the breath. That you're actually overriding this naturally rested autonomic system, which will, if you leave it alone, will breathe in the way it's meant to breathe, will be good for your body, and will give and take. It's an archetypal ground of generosity, knowing when to give and when to take. And the invitation is always to let yourself radically alone. So the next lines are, our life as a breath then, a coming and a going, a bridge between singing a separate self and learning to be

selfless. A bridge between singing a separate self and learning to be selfless. Breathe then as if breathing for the first time, as if remembering with what difficulty you first came into the world, what strength it took to take that first impossible in-breath and turn it into a cry to be heard by the world. Your essence has always been the first vulnerability of being found, of being heard, and of being seen, and from the very beginning, the one who has always needed, and been given, so much invisible help.

This is how you were when you first came into the world. This is how you were when you took your first breath in this world. This is the unspoken, unknown place from which you could live your life for the rest of your days. This is the raw vulnerability of your everyday. And this is how you will want to be and be remembered when you leave the world. So halfway through that poem, actually, I had my, oh my God, here we go moment, it suddenly dropping below the horizon and getting very fierce, yeah. Overwhelming your surface understanding

of parallels, of invisible. There's nothing technical happening, it's something else. Yes, it breaks open in two. Would you view it as a form of channeling? No. Because it's coming from in you, so it's not channeling. Yeah, no, it's a deep form of conversation.

So people always say, I didn't write it myself, I was written. That's not my experience. And I don't think actually it is an accurate experience of what, channeling is not what's happening. We're meant to be participants, yeah? So we're half of every conversation. So you're certainly in a meeting with powers

larger than yourself. But those powers, in some ways, strangely seem to, are asking you to make it real. Yes. And that poem is really about the invisible speaking into the visible. Yes. So it's literally asking me to make what cannot be seen, seen, and what cannot be said, said, to bring it out.

Do you feel like it's in service to something? Well, increasingly, yes. I mean, when I was younger, I felt it was in service to me becoming a great poet, you know, and being acknowledged for my powers and being kept in the manner to which I wanted to become accustomed. But with maturity, you realize that you're transforming lives actually. And that's actually the most satisfying thing when people come up to you and say, Oh, you helped me through a really dark time

or that poem, that line. all I needed was that line, and that line actually turned my life around. You realize the responsibility of that, and you realize also that that's actually the pearl without price, that ability to reach out and give to others. That's what's remembered in a human life. When you're at a memorial service, ability to reach out and give to others. That's what's remembered in a human life.

When you're at a memorial service, you're never really moved by their achievements. What you're moved by is by what they loved in their life, when you hear what they loved, and when you hear stories from others about how they were transformed by something they said or by the way they were. You said the word responsibility. transformed by something they said or by the way they were.

You said the word responsibility. I think it's a funny word to you. I suppose in its alive sense of not the weight and burden of responsibility, but literally the ability to come out and meet, to respond. I see. Yeah, the world says something to you and some responses is needed, yeah. So it could be deep silence sometimes,

the responsibility, yeah. In the first book, there are 52 essays. Yes. How did you pick the words? Well, I started in a very natural way, actually. I was, I remember I've worked in Paris with the big fashion house for years with their leadership. And I was walking through the streets of Paris.

I used to, on my day off, I would take this long circular walk through Paris. I called it my Sunward Walk. I set off in the morning near the Louvre and head towards the Marais, where the sun in the east. And then whatever would catch my eye, a little museum here, a little art gallery there, an oyster stand, you know, I would get caught up by it. Then I'd look at the sun again and see it had moved and I'd follow the sun.

So each time you did it, you go a different anti-clockwise circuit through Paris. So I was coming towards the end of this walk and the phone rang, it was my assistant. She said, oh, the Observer magazine, and Sunday Observer wants you to do a philosophical column. So I got very excited. It was two million people, you know, read the Observer on a Sunday morning. And she said, there's just two stipulations. And I said, what's that? And she said, it has to be a single word title and you've only got 300 words. Well immediately I felt that reluctance I

was talking about earlier. Why does it have to be a single word title and 300 words is barely time for an Irishman to catch his breath. So I walked you know a few hundred yards, few hundred meters meters, and I said, get over yourself, David, what is this? I just asked the beautiful question, which was, what if you could have a single word title and say it in 300 words? So I got to this restaurant where I'd booked in, and I sat down and I asked for some, if they had any paper, and I got my pen out.

I wrote, regret, across the top of the page and I think what that was about was all the strictures I'd put on myself about what I needed in order to write and it wasn't just length or title it was I needed to be home, I needed to be in my studio, I needed a proper two weeks at home. In fact, I needed four weeks, because I needed a week to transition, a week afterwards, all of these things. I said, what if you could just write anywhere? What if you could?

And then immediately, of course, what that brings up is all the times you never wrote, because you had all of these stipulations. Yes, self-imposed rules. Exactly. And we have the same thing in the, all the times I was never generous, all the times I never got over myself,

all the times, all the times, all the times. So I wrote regret. And I was so pleased with what it did for me and what I felt it would do for the reader in rehabilitating this word. As I said earlier, that ability to have a regret fully experienced puts you into a better relationship to the future.

Because when you fully experience it, as the Greeks said using this beautiful word, anantiodromia, which means once something becomes its absolute essence, it immediately starts to turn into something else. So as soon as you concentrate it into its absolute essence, it can no longer stay in that form. It starts to mature. So I sent regret off and I said, I'd love to do that for a lot of other qualities in my life that I'm struggling with. I'd love to do that for a lot of other qualities in my life that I'm Interesting that it went from something that you resisted We're almost Insulted by the suggestion. Yes, and then it turned into a whole new model for work for you. Yes

Yes, and of course, it's a daily experience in marriage and relationship The things we find ourselves in high- about. Is regret in the first book? It is. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus. So your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs.

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it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. So this was the piece that ended up inspiring the whole project, although at the time that you wrote it, you didn't know that. Yes, and I started right away writing. I was so excited about what had opened up from.

It's such a great feeling, isn't it? Yeah. When you make a discovery and see a new possibility that wasn't there before, it's a very exciting feeling, I love it. Yes. So I got 24 of them, and I, of different words, such as friendship and alone and shyness, giving, honesty,

longing, vulnerability. I started a reader's circle as a way of getting me to write more, so people signed up and paid a subscription. I think I got 100 people to pay $100 each. And it was like getting in advance on the book in a way. And then that was so successful, I then said, well, let's do another reader's circle. And before I knew it, another year later, I had 48.

And then I wrote another few and I said, oh, let's do the book. And so it was all, it was very organic, very natural. By sheer luck, when the book came out, every reviewer said, oh, 52 essays, you know, a pack of cards, one for each week of the year. And I said to myself, oh, that was sheer luck, because I did, I never thought of the 52 as representing. So there was something really natural and wonderful about the whole thing. So the second volume had to have 52, which seemed impossible at one time.

But here's regret from the streets of Paris. Regret is a short, evocative, and achingly beautiful word, an allergy to lost possibilities, even in its brief enunciation. It is also a rarity and almost never heard except where the speaker insists that they have none, that they are brave and forward-looking and could not possibly imagine their life in any other way than the way it is. To admit regret is to understand we are fallible, that there are powers in the world beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past, but of the very story we tell about our present. And yet strangely, to admit

sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins. The rarity of honest regret may be due to our contemporary emphasis on the youthful perspective. It may be that a true, useful regret is not a possibility or a province of youth, that it takes a hard-won maturity to experience the depths of regret in ways that do not overwhelm and debilitate us, but put us into a proper, more generous relationship with the future. Except for brief senses of having missed a tide, having hurt another, having taken what is not ours, youth is not yet ready for the rich current of abiding regret that runs through and emboldens a mature human

life. Sincere regret may in fact be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life. Fully experienced, regret turns our eyes attentive and alert to a future possibly lived better than our past. How high the stakes are.

Exactly. Very beautiful. Did you write it in that one sitting? I did, yeah. Many of the other essays were not written in one sitting. And this latest generation of essays in the Second Consolation books are a bit fiercer, edgier, and very few of them were written in one sitting, actually.

They were taking everything I had to write in a way. I would have to walk away and come back. I was having physical experiences too because I started really writing this. I had a go at them last summer and got a lot of rough versions, but really I only started writing in earnest this January. And so I've written 52 essays between January and July. And the effect, especially of going from word to word, if I hadn't finished one, I would look at another. If I reached an edge I couldn't get further on, I would then turn my face to another essay

I was working on. The cumulative effect was very fierce on my psyche and my body. So I was at a retreat, a place in the middle of Perugia actually, and I was writing an essay on time. And I had this astonishing out-of-body experience in the middle of writing, as if I was looking in on myself and as if my body was turned inside out. The experience of writing on time was turning me inside out. There's one line in that essay where I say, time is not slipping through our fingers. We are slipping through the fingers of time. And that was the moment where everything broke open. So very, very physical experience. Would you like to read time?

I could, yeah. So again, we often use the word time in very pejorative ways. There's never enough time we say, where am I going to find the time? I have to make time as if that would be impossible. He was like that. So the whole unconscious use of our word time

at the strategic surface of our lives is time as the enemy really. So this is trying to look at the actual reality. Time is on our side. Time is not our enemy. Time is our greatest friend. If we can come to know time in its own intimate unfolding way way, and not through the abstract measure we have made of it. Time starts to grant a greater, more spacious, more elemental and eternal freedom to every mortal seemingly time-bound human life. Time is not slipping through our fingers.

Time is here forever. It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time. Memory and the traces of memory grant me a sense of time passing and also enable me to learn. How I remember through time and how I learn and how I put those memories and that learning into conversation with the future shapes my identity for good or for ill. Time is at the center of my identity. Time only seems to be something in which I participate involuntarily, but time needs

me voluntarily to deepen my understanding of its multivalent nature and help to mediate its life fully in the world. Time needs me. Time needs me. Needs me to live through all its many appearances, to give it life and amplitude. Time exists in a field of possibility which I influence and partly determine. I may constantly cry that I need more time, but actually time needs more of me. More of our spacious, uninterrupted, timeless time to live out and understand both its extraordinary depths and its incalculable far-off horizons.

far-off horizons. Time teaches us that nothing at the surface is as it seems, but also that all the surface seemings of the world depend upon the all-embracing multi-level presence of time. Nothing could happen, and nothing could be remembered in our lives were it not for that strange multi-dimensional, multi-vel quality we reduce to calling time. Not the functioning of a single human cell, nor the vast weather systems passing through our skies or through the surrounding cosmos of our planetary systems, time is both the ground beneath our feet and the spacious sky under which everything is allowed to happen. Time may take a linear form in my mind, but only because my senses are narrow, my mind

given to defensive postures, to surfaces and unimaginative forms that restrict my understanding of the multidimensional, radiant nature of existence. Time not only invites me below all surfaces, but in all directions at once, including, frighteningly, when time seemingly turns back towards me and looks me in the face. Time may seem always to be flowing away from me, but in deeper states of attention, I and time are reciprocal partners in crime. We create reality together, and not only through memory, but through direct experience. Seeing the multitudinous face of time itself and courageously holding its gaze is one of the great thresholds of religious transformation.

When my sense of time breaks out of the linear, so does my identity. In the deeper, timeless states of love or being in love, time radiates out from the very place where I am standing, unbinding me from my well-fitted, previously time-bound manacles. The entrance into time is always the threshold where we are asked to loosen our grasp on our previous fearful understandings. Falling in love is time unanchored and let to be fully itself, where the hours are rich and spacious with a sudden sense that there is no immediate horizon to their possibilities. Without love and the all-round attention-love pace

to the world, time is where I feel most powerless, because time passes and I will die. So I hold on to a version of time mediated through control, exhausting my very power to live through the very force of my grip. Living fully means letting go of the way I hold time and all the ways I hold the people I love too strictly, too narrowly, and too unimaginatively

to my version of time. Whatever version of time we have arranged for ourselves, time always feels like a gravitational pull to our senses, always drawing us towards its compelling and unstoppable presence, to a clock, to an appointment, to our sense that something should be happening now, whether it is actually possible or not. Time in the physical world is actually part and parcel of gravity. Astonishingly, physics tells us that everything gravitates towards places where time moves more slowly.

And time seems to move more slowly, the greater the mass to which it is near. What physicists call mass, we call presence. And as in a human life, presence is invitational. Presence invites other presences towards it. Presence slows time down and opens up possibilities of experiencing the timeless and the eternal. The depth, amplitude, and invitational nature of my presence slows time for everyone around me. Timelessness is the foundation of real charism and real charisma.

By creating a centered, timeless presence, I invite everyone unconsciously to make the choice to join me there. Or should they be afraid of what might happen in that slow, spacious territory to run a hundred miles in the opposite direction? What is disturbing about time in my mortal human world is that my personal surface experience of it is irrevocable. The glass broken into a hundred shards cannot heal itself. The child I lost will never return to me.

The regrets I have are things I can only live and heal again in my imagination or with others in my future. But this arrow of time exists only at the surface of things. When I die, the individual atoms and molecules of my body experience not time passing, but merely a change of state. A transition from an ordered world to one at another level, newly disordered, but also full of equally new potential. The meeting of time and the timeless is the place of my inevitable transformation. Time tells me with some glee that we are all compost for future worlds.

Time never comes to an end. Even though my time will come to an end, time does not pass. Even though I will pass, time will carry on to eternity. Therefore, a proper relationship with the foundational nature of time is my own, everyday doorway into the eternal. When I stop counting time as a way of controlling it, I stop my addiction to naming the hours and what should occur in those hours. The single pathway across the field suddenly branches to a hundred more. No one has explored.

When we stop measuring changes, if we knew what measuring change actually meant, the human ability to measure time also stops. Therefore, on a silent retreat or in a monastery, we make all the outer hours repeatable so that day after day nothing on the outside seems to change. We stop time on the outside so that we can concentrate on the way things change and grow on the inside. We dwell in the deepening and broadening seasonal sense of presence we call the timeless. As our war against time quietens, we take joy in the increased acuity of the ears, the entrancing aromas of rain on fresh leaves that we previously never gave ourselves the

time to breathe. Time is left to itself, to be itself, and to grow what it needs to grow in every season of a human life. In that rested state, as we loosen our grip on what we think is time, our sense of bodily tension falls away too, along with the falling away of a falsely measured self, that joyful radiance we call timelessness growing through every cell of our previously time-bound body. Like now, as I write these last lines, listening to the miracle of hands moving over the keys

of a late-night piano, memory meeting the moment in each note, and then memory and moment both disappearing and reappearing in the onward music, each note exquisitely timed, but part of an onward unstoppable flow, this moment in time inherited from all previous times rippling into the future for all time. Very beautiful. I finished the essay in the bar of the Castle Hotel where I was staying. Beautiful pianist, actually. And I was in there alone with him. So, yeah. Welcome to the house of macadamias.

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Snack bars come in chocolate. Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacadamias.com slash tetra. Is it unusual for the surroundings to work their way into your writing? No, they do. I think they do color whether I mention them or not. I can write everywhere now. Where I wrote Timelessness was this beautiful castle retreat that I treated myself to.

And before I went there, I said, if I can get an essay every day, my conscience will be clear on having paid the outrageous amount to stay at this place. And it worked exactly as I, for once in my life, it worked out exactly as I wanted. And I just felt an incredible timelessness and spaciousness there. Someone else, I love to cook, which means I'm always spending too much time in the kitchen. So someone else was cooking, I had this glorious room. I had an amazing

horizon around me, spaciousness. If I wanted to go out and talk to someone, I could actually. There was music in the bar. And so I did write an essay every day for seven days. At the time, one was written in one day, actually. Are you changed by the writing? Yes. So the person who sat to write that and the person who completed it are two different people. Exactly, yeah.

And it's always the case. I think if you write from a depth, obviously if you're just writing above the horizon of the unspeakable, then you're not changed by it. You may have strategic changes in your life. Oh, I understand how that works now, whereas before I didn't. But as a person, you're being shaped at a deeper level.

Now you have to practice and catch up. So you may have an insight coming out of time, but you have to stay with it in order for it to mature in your body, because we are creatures of forgetting. We do forget. Can you write something and understand it in the process of writing it as it happens, and then after not fully understand it. Yes, you can sometimes, you go back and you go, oh my God, you know, I'd forgotten that experience. Yeah, I'd forgotten that.

And so it's an invitation to physically get back into the experience. It happens less now, but I just heard someone recite one of my poems back to me actually in Ireland. And it was a poem from very early in my repertoire. And I was really moved by it as if it was written by another person. And I remembered a certain coloration of innocence I had at that point, which I'd lost. And I've started, I've just started memorizing the poem again so I can actually walk back

into it and practice it again because it's something I don't want to forget. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it happens on and off the page. When I was in Scandinavia a couple of years ago, I was working with a big consultancy company, very creative company. I work in the organizational world in the same way I work anywhere else with a big repertoire of poetry and I use it to look at the phenomenology of conversation and deepening conversations with, in groups of people as well as in an individual heart and mind and work with that in very practical ways into organizational life and I have for years.

I got drawn into that world accidentally and have not yet escaped from it. But I was with this really creative group, but I'd been sitting intensively and I'd sit Zen and I could feel things maturing. That feeling of something is about to happen and you're just on the edge and you need to keep paying attention, It's ripening. It's ripening day by day. So I had this very intense couple of days in Copenhagen and then I was with a very intense friend.

He can't do anything without absolute total head banging intensity. I call him the head banger. That's his MO. That's his way of holding the conversation. So his intensity was also magnifying mine. And then we both got in the car and drove across the bridge, the long 12-mile bridge between Denmark and Sweden to go to this summer camp that his consultancy holds for all their people, it's all of these tents at this beautiful manor house in the Swedish countryside.

And I was working in this boathouse overlooking this lake for two days. And I was with him, our conversations were intense in the drive up there. The time at this listening to the other speakers at this conference was very intense. My working in the boathouse all the time I'm feeling this ripening, this ripening. Then we jumped in the car to drive back and in true to form he says to us, right, we're both going to tell each other on this drive, the deepest, darkest, most awful, difficult love relationship we've had in our lives. And I'm going to start. So it's that dark lady in each of our lives, the woman who you were totally gone for, but who was absolutely really, really bad for you at the same time. And so he starts, you know, and he goes a good half hour or so, 45 minutes, then I go

45 minutes, then we get out of the car on the way at the stone circle by the Baltic Sea. Except it's not a stone circle, this is a Viking monument, so it's in the shape of a Viking ship, you know, massive Viking ship. The sun's going down, the silhouettes of the stones, the silhouettes of people, things are getting very, very intense indeed and I can feel this building from the inside out. Then we get back in the car and we drive back across the bridge. We'd had a calm drive over but on the way back this enormous storm came in.

There were boats almost being turned over, sailboats in the water below us and we almost got blown off the road. There were rainbows in the middle of tornadoes and God knows what. And we come across the bridge and the storm passes. He drops me outside my hotel. And I go up, put my bags in my room and I go straight out in the streets because the streets are empty. Everyone's still in their rooms looking out through the window saying, has the storm stopped yet? And there's this gorgeous quiet on the back streets of Copenhagen.

There's all of this light reflected in the puddles along the water. And I stood looking along the street and I had this sudden question just to rise out of nowhere, which was, what if you've done your work, David? What if it's actually complete? What you came to do, you've done. And the songs you have sung are being sung

by the ones you would want, yeah? What if you've done your work? And I allowed myself to say yes, which is, you know, in the ancient human intuition, if your work is done, you're not long for this world, you're on your way. So I felt that trepidation of saying it. And then I had an experience of actually having died when I said that and having immediately come back

into my body. And it was just as if I had died and now I was able to come back in and witness the effect of my work on others. But I could do it from a point of totally letting it go and not controlling it so much. And that stayed with me ever since. But it's still something I have to practice. Most days it's with me the whole way, but there are times where, oh, I'm acting as if I haven't died. And then I get back into that physical bodily memory and it completely transforms everything.

You stop trying to make things happen. You're just privileged. Everything's a bonus, you know? I get to talk to Rick. The only thing that can go wrong is something can go wrong. And who cares if it goes wrong? So, and it's really changed my work too. I've started building things for the legacy. I've started, in the seven or eight people who work with me, I've started

letting go of my overbearing artistic control over the way things should be. Because you know how it is when you're an artist, everything counts, every last little syllable scintilla. Yes. Yes. So that tends to roll over into all the secondary emanations. But now I'm sat at the meeting table and say, oh, actually, this meeting will be going on without me, actually. So I actually get the bonus of being here and just giving the wheel a spin every now and again and actually just coloring it because people are going to be taking this work without

you, David. So just be there with it in a conversational way. But it's a very powerful experience that still needs practice, seating home, magnifying, conveying to others. Absolutely, because you're still you. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Tell me a little bit about the experience of hearing the poem read back to you. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Tell me a little bit about the experience

of hearing the poem read back to you. Well, it was being read by someone who had lived with the poem more than I had. And the poem had carried through very, very difficult times. So he was more of a companion to the poem. In many ways, when he recited it back to us, it was more his poem than it was mine. Understood. Yes. We see that happen with songs as well, when certain artists do a rendition of a song.

I see, yes. It becomes their song, essentially. Exactly, yes. Actually, it didn't stop me from realizing how I could improve the poem now, all these decades later, so I probably will make a slightly new version of it now with my experience. But it was just a beautiful sense. I have another poem about legacy, which is called One Day, where I say, one day I will say, the gift I once had has been taken.

The place I have made for myself belongs to another, and the songs I have sung are being sung by the ones I would want. Beautiful. Then I will be ready for that voice and the still silence in which it arrives. And if my faith is good, then we'll meet again on the road and we'll stop and laugh and drink together again from the deep well of things as they are."

So it was that sense of legacy. I suppose it's a reiteration of the work having been done at a certain level. The gift having been given and given back. Yes. And the way art lives on beyond the author of its origin. Yes. I wanna go back to the story you told of writing the piece, looking at the river flowing

and the parallel streams. It seems like you live in a state of attention that goes beyond the way many people do, and it sounds like you can do what you do because you live in that way. Would that be accurate? I would say so, and I can do what I do better because I've practiced. But it seems to me that it belongs to all humanity because you can recognize the disciplines

of attention and intentionality in almost every contemplative and artistic tradition. And then the corroborations that come back around, for instance, around being found by the world. The world always comes to find someone larger than the person who started the process of attention. And I started really apprenticing myself to that phenomena as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands. So I've written since I was little, since I was seven years old, and probably under the influence of my Irish mother with all her stories and poems. And you just get it by osmosis in the Irish culture. And then I wrote really seriously from when I

was 13 years old or so. I was a very serious young man and writer. But then I fell in love with Jacques Cousteau, the great French marine zoologist, and his series on the television, you know, following the life of the dolphin. And so I conceived a notion to do the same thing, you know. And so I gave up my art subjects and, as I always say, put myself into the salt mines of biology, chemistry, and physics, which were very difficult for me actually, but I, by working twice as hard, I managed to keep up with my peers. And then I got a degree in marine zoology, and I'd had to give up writing in a way, even though I kept reading poetry, in order to concentrate on biology, chemistry and physics.

And then I, by sheer luck of the Irish, I found myself in the Galapagos Islands with this extraordinary job. How I got that job is the story in itself. But the Galapagos are really, really astonishing. Galapagos Islands are like the world was before human beings appeared on the planet. Never mind took dominion over it. So it's a very, very fierce place. You're an interloper, you're a visitor,

you feel that too, yeah? And you're in the midst of all these cycles of life and death. When I'd been there three months, I said, thank you God, I've had the experience now, can I go home? It was very terrifying. And we lived on this death dealing medium called the ocean.

We were on small sailing yachts. I worked for, You work for both the National Park and for the company. You are a naturalist guide. People can't go ashore without being in the company of a naturalist guide. Every company needs one on every boat, but you have to be certified and trained by the guides institute there and the Charles Darwin station. So we were a company that had these sailing yachts. There was no GPS at the time.

Everything was done by dead reckoning. There's huge distances between all the islands. And most of the sailing was done by night. So we had quite terrifying experiences getting between the islands. And I had a number of near drownings. And then you were witnessing life and death, you know, animals that you'd get to know as individual characters. And

wild animals have definitive characters just like human beings have actually. You can tell one land iguana from another, just from their behaviors and on and on and on. So you'd lose these friends, you know, these creatures that you knew they'd be dead on the beach the next time you came. And they had no fear of humankind, so you got very close to them. So there came a time where I just had to turn my face towards that. The part of the world that didn't care whether you as a human being lived or died, it had much bigger fish to fry than your individual human life and to learn to live with that. When I started to do that, my identity started to change in a very foundational way, my way

of being. being and I realized very quickly that my identity depended not on my beliefs but on how much attention I was paying to things other than myself. So the first state of attention is no attention at all where we're not really hearing, looking or if we do hear anything it's all just passed through our own experience. How does this redound on me? How does this benefit me? Or you're projecting your voice into other people like a ventriloquist, you know, trying to get them to say what you want them to say.

All of these ways of interacting with the world that are just interactions, they're not an intimate kind of physical alchemical exchange. And then I started to notice that the deeper my attention to things other than myself, the fiercer and deeper my own identity became and the deeper place I could call on my own voice. So you might be caught up in your complaining to yourself, for instance, about something the crew were doing to haze you as a new guide on the boat and you're walking along, but Galepegas would never let you alone. It would never let you stay in this smaller person. So you'd be walking along the path by the

beach and there'd be a Galapagos hawk on a branch, you know, looking straight at you. And in Galapagos you can walk right up to it, you know, so you're just maybe five feet away, you're looking straight into the eyes of this hawk and this hawk is looking back at you. And if you really see the hawk looking back at you, it's looking back at someone very different than the one who began looking at what you thought was hawk. You start to change in that being seen. And then that drops away and what is left is this just the living conversation

between you both. You're neither looking at a hawk nor are you a person being looked at a hawk. You are that conversation, that alchemy, that dance between what you think is you and what you think is not you. You both disappear. And then this kind of ecstasy appears, this radiance out of that surface undoing and this sense of the timeless and this sense of being rewarded by things just as they are, not as

a prelude to something else happening, but a reward in and of themselves. So I used to be able to look just at the silhouette of a bird flying against the sky, and they talk in the Zen tradition of the pearl without price. It's that experience, this experience of being given a treasure in the glimpse of the bird. That's where that all started

and that was reinforced later by my Zen practice. When did you first pick that up? I would, I'd been experimenting in all kinds of weird ways with meditation before I went off to Galapagos, trying different things by myself because I had no teachers or anything. So I was reading about Zen,

I read a bit about transcendental meditation, so I would just attempt it in my own room. And then after Galapagos, I took up Zen, as well as Aikido, the Japanese martial art form, which is really no martial art at all really. And then I worked with various Zen teachers, but it was only in those retreats that I started to realize, oh, I'm just recapitulating what I experienced in those islands, looking at birds and animals and landscapes for hours in silence.

And so you realize that in our evolutionary past, we would have spent a lot of time in silence. We would have spent a lot of time hunting where you had to wait for and pay attention and not make noise and not talk to you just there in absolute presence. Because if you miss the moment, you could miss feeding yourself and your tribe, you know. That was life and death. Yes, yeah, so, and of course,

you would have had a very powerful experience with the animal you were hunting, too. It would have been a heartfelt experience, not you just taking a trophy home, but part of yourself dying, too. And I had that experience myself in Galapagos. You know, we would fish off the boats and bring in mahi-mahi and large tunas.

And I remember this beautiful mahi-mahi, which you'd have to club, you know, to kill it. Otherwise it would bounce around in the boat and destroy everything. They're very powerful. There's a reason they're one of the fastest fishers on the planet. And I remember standing over it feeling, this is a beautiful creature and I'm about to kill it. And just what I had to give over there was a sense of, I could

be taken by these waters too, or by what lies in them. And there are a lot of dangerous creatures in the water there, or circumstances. And I can't complain. I'm part of this whole cycle, so if I'm clubbed on the head too, as part of this. So it was a real physical giving over, and a real step in my maturity. And it made sacred the eating of the fish.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Yes. Yes, so that might be good for me to read Death. Yeah, let's do it. How did you choose to do one on Death? When did it come in the series? I can't remember now actually. I think it was there as a challenge.

It's the ultimate in a way, you know. So as an essayist, are you going to write on death? Dare you write on death? Are you up to it? So I think that was part of it, but I'm not sure actually. I can't remember. I have had a lot of experience of death in my life and I've been around quite a few dead bodies, you know, one place or another. And I've had a number of near-death experiences, drowning in Galapagos, almost dying of amoebic dysentery in the Himalayas, all of which were accompanied by very powerfully, profound emotional and psychological changes. So death has been a companion. But also, I'm trying to write this

from the point of view of everyone. So that's why the first line is death happens only to other people. Death will never find me. death happens only to other people. Death will never find me. Death happens only to other people while I am alive. And strangely, death when it comes happens only to another person, even when I am in the midst of dying myself.

All around us on the planet every day and in ways we cannot bring ourselves to think about. Hundreds of thousands of people pass away saying goodbye to their lives and to their loved ones. We walk in witness with death the longer we live and we walk alone but often secretly speaking with those with whom we have walked and talked during their lives. But even as we mourn or celebrate those we know, those we knew and loved, we unaccountably live on.

Our hearts beating faithfully, looking on death as we do unconsciously on other people, as a strange form of miracle that can never be fully understood. Death is something that only happens to other people and that somehow and unaccountably takes them from our daylight hours. Death happens only to other people

even when it happens to myself. I always become another surprising person the closer I get to the doorway of my own disappearance. If I am conscious and able to bear witness to my going, then in that disappearance someone else starts to appear, someone who I do not fully recognize, who has lived for years beneath my busy daylight hours. The mercy in dying, if I am able to pay attention, is it stripping away of my previous priorities and my previous sense of self.

The person who is dying is not the person I thought I was all along. The person who is dying is a new and unfamiliar being I am now getting to know as I go. If I lose my wits before dying, then death really does happen to someone else. If I keep my wits, then death becomes the beginning of a new friendship with someone from whom I spent a lot of time hiding over the years. Someone I barely let breathe in the midst of my misplaced priorities and unneeded busyness. A new friendship with someone we realize we have neglected all along. Felt fully in this new friendship, death becomes irrelevant or becomes just the magnifying necessary background to this astonishing delayed getting to know.

How we live shapes how we die with reluctance or with courage, and almost always with a good measure of both. But dying well involves undoing the way we lived but did not fully live. Death happening to someone I am becoming allows me to understand who I was and wasn't in my life. I am brought to understand that what stopped me from living courageously is the same fear that will stop me from dying courageously. The approach to death is almost always felt as opportunity refused or accepted by the

ones dying and by the ones witnessing at their bedside. Opportunity for confession, for forgiveness, for a blessed forgetting that releases everyone concerned. Death strangely and poignantly becomes the opportunity to relive and to reimagine. Almost all people approaching death, once they are through the early torments of letting go, glimpse a radical simplicity

they never felt they deserved or possessed, a simplicity that allows them, if they are brave enough, to make a new friendship with themselves, with their loved ones, and with the world. In our home, approaching the end, in those last days surrounded by family or very often in a hospital bed, attached to tubes and blinking graphs with often only the understanding hand of a tired nurse to hold us. We experience visions and dreamlike meetings with those we loved and knew, often going back to childhood, or just as amazingly forward to a sense of being both welcomed and thoroughly

forgiven. Palliative nurses tell us again and again working at the bedside of the dying that these two dynamics of meeting and of forgiveness are constants to be witnessed again and again. The near-death experiences of those who temporarily die, no matter the trauma, speak of similar mercies. Witness as in witnessing themselves and looking down on their own body, combined with serenity and even a sense of choice as to whether to stay or go. The person who dies is never the person who held on so grimly and so tightly and for so long.

The person who dies is never the person who until now had never been given the chance to appear. The one who dies in the end is the one who realizes that all their life they unconsciously sought and quite often refused an absent affection. And sometimes in contradiction how much love actually surrounded them all along or how through everything they were held and helped by those familiar faces who bore witness to their growing, their struggles, and their hard-sought happiness. No, the person about to die is always the one becoming another unfamiliar and newly astonished person, the one who can't believe what an extraordinary, ordinary miracle it has all been,

the one who realizes what a privilege it was even to say no to love, the one who is astonished that they were willing to miss so much or at times give so little and who forgives themselves for missing so much and forgiving so little. The person who dies is not the unforgiving person who came into the cancer, into the illness, or the hospital bed. The person who dies is the one who begins to forgive themselves in the light of all the forgiveness they suddenly intuit they are about to receive.

Death happens to someone else, to someone who appears at the end, to the one who has finally given up on many of the nonsense priorities that run their days. Death happens to this hardly recognizable, newly simple, vulnerable being, now watching the evening light or hearing the gentle rain against the window. Death happens to the person seeing the face of all humanity in the single pair of disbelieving eyes sitting by the bed. Death happens to this extraordinary body about to leave the body that breathed itself so courageously and through all difficulty to come to this particular end. We can all be assured that death only happens to someone else, someone I have yet to meet, someone I am about to meet.

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Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn. Not me reading or writing this essay hoping, despite the title, that death will stay far away. Not me who wonders if I will be equal to all the saying goodbye. Not me who hopes above hope that by technological wizardry I can live forever. It's an old fear and a true one, that death always comes to find us. It's just that mercifully and thankfully and even faithfully and consistently in the

end it does not really find us. With just a little help and a little letting go, death only comes to find the person we have always secretly wanted to be. Death only comes to find the person we have always secretly wanted to be. Beautiful. What an ending. Surprise ending. That essay will be the death of me.

Is everything you write ultimately about yourself? No. No, it's through the lens of yourself. It's through the beautiful story you've made, but it has to then join everyone's story. But is that not the story of everyone. Yes, if you tell it in a big enough way, but not if you just tell it in the me, me, me, moi, moi, moi, yeah. But enough about you, let me talk about me.

Not in that way. Do you remember where you were when you wrote that one? I think I finished at Castel Reschio at the Italian writing retreat. But every essay I try to have a line where I, or the reader will say, my God, can that be true? Yeah. Yeah. So the surprise, death only happens to other people.

Yeah. And so you're startled, because you know that part of you has felt that actually, but you've never articulated that. No. God, that could be true actually. That's how I've experienced it. I remember as a child, you know,

I remember losing a friend as a, was quite young to a car accident. And I remember thinking, actually in his life, he could still be alive. We just think that he's gone, but actually, because I had very near misses where I was almost knocked by a car, and I said, maybe to other people,

I was actually killed there, but I still live on. So it's deep in our intuitions in a way. I don't know if you ever had that experience. I have. And I do think, actually, when we're young, intuitions in a way. I don't know if you have had that experience. I have. And I do think actually when we're young we're not supposed to understand death. A child's not really supposed to understand dying. And childhood would be the less for it. I think we're supposed to feel as if we're immortal for the first half of our life.

And there's enough grief and difficulty in the average existence. Without death. Exactly. And then when you're ready for it, when you have to understand it, you slowly have to turn your face towards it. Do you remember in childhood your first experience of death? I remember my grandmother dying and my not wanting to look in the coffin to see her.

Something I've regretted to this day, but I wasn't ready for it at that time. How old were you then? I was 13, I think, yeah. And then I'd had the experience before that of losing that friend to the accident. And then I had another one of a good friend of mine dying in the same long distance race that I ran in, Jonathan Walker, his name was, I still remember. I have a funny way of carrying him is that when I'm asked my name in a coffee shop to

put on the coffee at Starbucks or wherever, I will often say Jonathan, and it's my way of remembering him. Yes. But that was a big shock to my system. And then increasing amounts as I grew older, I lost two or three friends in the rock climbing and mountaineering fraternity. When someone passes doing an activity that you do, how does that impact you with that activity? Well, I certainly kept on running, but it was,

it was a big shock to my system because this boy, Jonathan Walker, was shaped like a polo. He was like a Greek god. He had this mane of blonde hair, the longish blonde hair down to his shoulders, thick blonde hair. He was absolutely handsome and built like a Greek god. And he died at the finish line, literally falling over the finish line from probably a heart trouble that hadn't been diagnosed. You know, you wouldn't look at a 13-year-old child or 14, 15, maybe. And I had a really powerful experience afterwards of we were gathered around because he'd been carried into the changing rooms so they could administer first aid and try to resuscitate him. So we were all gathered, I was with a little circle of

friends and I remember the assistant headmaster, Mr. Jessett, came out to talk to us and he said something to us and we all nodded and I turned away and I walked about 20 yards and then I just collapsed. He told us that he'd died but I couldn't take it in, you know, but I'd heard it somewhere inside me, but my surface personality just couldn't face it. So I turned and then I literally collapsed on the ground. So the power of the word, you know, the power of something being transmitted to a very deep part of you. The part of you, as Camus said, that lives to the point of tears. But it was good when I look back, it was good for me. I was, you know, to be able to experience

that level of grief so quickly without keeping it at bay was very healing. Reverie. Reverie carries the same beautiful half awake, half asleep sense in its sound as it does in its dreamlike meaning. Reverie is a rare and neglected state in our times, asking us to pay attention to simultaneous inner and outer horizons, with rested bodily depths and with a broad listening amplitude.

Reverie is an antidote to much of the over-focus, over-delineation and branding of our identities, most especially in an age where we are drawn like moths to a flame, burned and distracted by the internet, from one state of narrow focus to another. The combined state of rest and broad, diffused attention that reverie implies, and the luxuriant sense the word communicates invites us to inhabit our bodies, our intellects, and our imaginations simultaneously, where neither the mind, the body, nor the imagination are given precedence. Yet all of them are felt and inhabited in deeper ways that are not possible when we attempt to focus on them in separation.

To be in a state of reverie is to inhabit multiple layers of our consciousness all at once, to be fully aware of every bodily internal feeling while hazily hearing and seeing every ambient sound and sight, to be present in this time now while inhabiting the timeless, employing the mind to reinterpret the future and even reimagine the past. The word reverie recalls to each of us the luxuriant sense of rest we might feel in front of an open fire, perhaps even nodding off of the body rested and resting deeper while all the time acutely aware of the sound of rain brushing against a window, the logs crackling and the sound of children playing mutely in

the distance. A hammock by the ocean inhabited without a phone and rocked by the arriving sea breeze holds the same invitation. Reverie is our ability to take it all in, all at once, without making a job of work or a task out of taking it all in. Reverie is our multivalent, multi-talented ability to connect to all levels, all at once, and all without effort. Reverie is always despised by those who do not like the broad freedom it grants us from other people's wishes and other people's control. Those who wish to control others' lives and to make them conforming members of a classroom, an office or an army, do not like the way reverie puts us beyond the bounds,

not only of the controlling minds of others, but also beyond the part of our own mind that is easily manipulated by others. Reverie and daydream puts us beyond manipulation. Reverie has always been the foundational, imaginative cornerstone of every child's life and every child's sense of safety, free from the rules and regulations of oppressive adults. Reverie is the refuge and sanity of all prisoners, and all who are confined justly or unjustly by walls put into place by others. Little wonder our work environments, our educational systems, and the present unimaginative views

of the mental health industry deplore reverie, asking us to sacrifice our ability to advance on a broad front for constant unimaginative short-term focus, a focus that can then easily be manipulated by others. The medical community and drug industry wielding their diagnosis of ADHD might be the most guilty in medicalizing, stigmatizing, and monetizing reverie, ignoring all the ways that reverie is a viable, alternative way of being present in and to the world. Our stigmatization of reverie has large costs on the sizable portion of the population that does not conform to a smaller but more powerful percentage of people whose priority on constant focus

and constant linear achievement makes a kind of shadow dictatorship for us all. Reverie must be reclaimed. Despite the fact that approximately 15% of the population doesn't share the majority's short-term emphasis on constant focus, And despite the fact that this must have conveyed some kind of evolutionary advantage on the broader human population, there is apparently, according to the drug industry, the doctors who serve them and the coercive majority, something wrong with every single one of the 1,200 million people who do not wish to participate in their coercive, overly focused world. Reverie is subversive to control, a subtle form of rebellion against other people's

priorities. In China, young adults are lying flat, refusing to join the exhortations to focus and eat bitterness. In Japan, many young people are refusing to leave their rooms. Both are signs of helplessness, but both are pushbacks against coercive societies, asking them to be one way when they want to be another. Reverie is often our refuge and our sanity, and when we come out of our rooms and combine it with an outer, active life, might be the very best kind of sanity.

Reverie might be a refuge from other people's priorities, but it is also a rewarding state in and of itself. In reverie, parts of us meet, join together, converse, and even heal. That which our isolated intellect is powerless to enjoin, ideas, understandings and direct physical apprehensions of others form in the cross-fertilization and conversational crosscurrents that flowing, dreamlike states of reverie provide. Martin Luther King's power lay not in the fact that he had a plan. His power was much more conversational, more invitational, and all the more convincing in that invitation because he told us out of a reverie that he had a dream.

Reverie. Magnificent. I've never thought of reverie in that light, and it's very beautiful. How would you compare reverie and awe? I think awe is a direct overwhelm of one's own senses by what lies outside of you, where reverie is more of a dreamlike conversation you're having with reality where you can be mulling on the past, yeah, to the point at which it almost comes alive around you, yeah, and then you can bring that to bear on what you want for yourself in the future. And you might be thinking of an old love or an old relationship or a time you were happy

or a time that you were deeply sorrowful and sad. And you bring that into conversation with the present and with the future all at once. And you also bring it into conversation with the ambient surroundings with what only looks like the background. Background is always becoming foreground. And I find in deeper states of attention, particularly the fiercer, deeper states of intentionality that one of the phenomena that occurs is that background becomes just as important as foreground. The first time I ever went to Hawaii, I was going on a Zen session, so I was getting straight off the plane going to this zendo in the suburbs of Honolulu and

sitting facing a wall for seven days, nine hours a day and half hour periods. And I remember on the way there, I was sat next to a young man my age and he was so enthusiastic about going back to Hawaii and he was going to be renting jeeps, he was going to be surfing, he was going to be hula hooping, he was going to be, he was going to buy himself a set of Hawaiian shirts. He was doing everything. And then finally, after he'd been talking for quite a while, he realized I hadn't said anything.

And he said, and what are you going to do for your week here? And I said, I'm going to be looking at a wall for seven days. But you know, in that seven days, I had an experience of Hawaii that was of the absolute essence. The first sounds of the insects in the morning, because you start sitting before dawn, the first appearance of the pale tropical light, the sound of a gecko skittering up a wall, the sound of breadfruit falling onto a galvanized tin roof outside, the sound of rain sibilating onto tropical leaves, the movement of your shadow across the wall as the sun went.

And at eight o'clock every morning, someone in a neighboring house, an ordinary house, not in the Zendo, would put on a flask of Kona coffee. And a few molecules of that coffee would weft through the Zendo. And because we were all pretending to be Japanese, it was just green tea. So that was my morning coffee. And at the beginning of the week, you'd, oh, this will have to do instead my morning coffee. And at the beginning of the week, oh, this will have to do instead of my coffee. By the end of the week, it was my morning coffee.

And I was enjoying it just as much, anticipating it and having my senses sharpened and heightened by that deep, silent experience. So I've gone back to Hawaii many times since, and I've always had to recall that experience in order to bring myself to Hawaii. And it came from being in one place and letting what looked like the background

become foreground. So that's, in many ways, that's reverie. It's a deep state of attention that holds all other forms of attention at the same time. The word reverie has a religious connotation as well, yes? Well, it actually comes from the French, rêve, which is a dream, a reverie, a small dream, yeah.

But I've forgotten the Latin now, whether it comes from the Latin. Often the Latin has a deeper meaning to it. So I think you're thinking of reverence, which to revere. Are they not related? They might be, but I don't know enough about that particular etymology,

whether the two actually are bonded. They should, they should belong to each other. It seems so. Yes, reverie and reverence and revere, to revere someone. I suppose when you revere someone, you are in a semi-dreamlike state, actually. There was a line about linear progress, linear...

Yes, the shadow dictatorship of those who prioritize linear progression. Linear progression. Yes, yeah. One thing coming after another. If you've done this, you need to be onto the next thing. You can't rest, and you shouldn't be diverted. But the most interesting things happen

during those diversions. That's where life is. Exactly, yes. Everyone's heard how, for a lot of people, the way their spirit was broken in the classroom by the un-understanding adult world and the inability of the teacher to speak to the whole spectrum of human experience. And then when you get a teacher who can do that,

it's really remarkable that everyone remembers that teacher who was able to see your spirit and find a way for it. I was incredibly lucky. I had three great teachers. You're lucky if you get one. Yes. But I had them in junior school, but in my secondary education,

I had a Latin and classics teacher who was complete genius. I had a physics teacher, was also remarkable. And I had an English master, as we called them in our school, who really took me under his wing and told me that I had a gift. And that meant a lot to me at that time, you know, stayed with me. So very lucky.

And it really is luck of the draw. We have no control over these things. I suppose we don't, I suppose we feel we don't. Um, there are some theories that, uh, we make unconscious invitations to the world and somehow create things. But I consider myself incredibly lucky. I got the last gasp of an old classical education in a way just before it died out.

Yeah. So I had Latin and Greek and Greek mythologies and all the old, I had the Bible stories and was taught in a really fierce way where a lot was expected of you. And I had the best in the modern world in that we had a co-educational school, so it wasn't just a boy school as many of those traditional schools were. Can you tell me about the bardic tradition is that ritual tradition of poetry and storytelling in which you're

taken out of yourself by someone who is a real practitioner in the art. The bardic system always implies a lineage and a tradition. You've had this handed to you. You've learned these stories from other people. You've learned the lineages from other people. You've learned thousands of lines of poetry. You've learned how to extemporize. In the old Irish tradition, you were 21 years before you became a fully fledged druid, man or woman. If you specialized, then the last seven years were spent in your specialization. So for Ollams, as they were called, who were the poetic bards, they spent the last seven years concentrating

on nothing but the bardic arts. So you learned all the stories, all the lineages, who was belonging to everyone, where everything came from. But you were also taught extemporization. So we only have a few anecdotal stories passed down, you know, but one of them involved being immersed up to your neck in freezing cold water in a mountain lake with your mouthful of pebbles and then being asked to extemporize 300 lines of blank verse on a given subject, say the moon or a butterfly or the first bud of spring. So you learned how to find that part of you that could speak under the most difficult circumstances.

And then the other one was you would spend months immersed in a darkened house with other poets. You were not allowed to see the light and you were three months in there where you can imagine you would go through all kinds of psychological spaces, I imagine, and almost psychotropic experiences. And I'm sure they also use psychotropic drugs too, because there are many traditional mountaintops in Britain and Wales and Ireland where it's said if you spend the night alone on the top of the mountain, you will either wake up a poet or insane, one or the other. So all of these are testaments to the fierce emphasis on,

you know, the bard, the poet actually held the history of the people and all those stories that were attached with them, the ability to extemporize in the present, and therefore to open up the future. So they held past, present, and future together. And they were very powerful people. It carried on into the Celtic Church, which was an alternative for about 500 years from

the Catholic Church. So the Irish Church was almost like a communal Irish druidic inheritance. You know, they felt that you could have the revelation of Christianity from seeing a deer silhouetted against the sky as much as you could. The story coming out of Palestine. And everything was taught in threes. When the Trinity came as a story,

it was seen as the crown on the head of their teaching rather than something that was a competing story. Everything was memorized. Nothing was written down until Latin came and then the church started writing them down. They started writing down the old themes and stories. So for instance, there's a tiny poem by William Butler Yeats called The Song of the Wandering Angus.

Angus being one of the ancient Celtic gods of truth and beauty and he was always wandering all over the place and making women fall in love with him and turning buds into blossom as he passed. So Yeats writes this just after he's met Maud Gonne, who became the love of his life. Yates walked into this sophisticated soiree, ready to impress everyone. He was a very impressive young man, but he sees this woman standing beneath this glass window

with a curved top, and there's an enormous spray of apple blossom in the vase on the window sill. And she's standing beneath this talking to someone, but the apple blossom is falling onto her hair. So there's this shower of natural apple blossom falling and covering her hair. And he looks at her and she's the most beautiful woman in his eyes he's ever seen. And he's straight over there, of course, and he finds that she's also the most intelligent

woman he's ever met in his life. So he falls totally and utterly in love for the rest of his life. And she was interested, but within a short while she just wanted to be really good friends. And so William Butler Yeats proposed to her at least half a dozen times during his life. And she said no each time being an intelligent woman. She wanted a different kind of man. But Yeats, the marvelous thing about Yeats is he never stopped loving her. And he had to just make himself larger and larger, and he wrote her into his oeuvre.

And in fact, he wrote her into the Transformation of Ireland, because part of Yeats and the Circle's necessary work at the time was preparing the Irish mind for revolution, so that it could be free, not just as a reaction against the British, but to have their own mythologies and their own stories and their own foundation. So he wrote these plays in which this feminine hero, Kathleen Nehulian, was the major character. And Kathleen Nehulianhan could be a young maid or an old woman in the same play, but it was the same person, it was Ireland.

And he wrote these parts specifically for Maud Gonn and she played Kathleen Nehulinghan on the stage. So he just kept loving her, but having to give her away and having to write her into his work. But this is the piece he wrote not long after he'd met her. It does hold past, present and future together because it's a young man's love poem, but it's also an older man looking back at the same time. So he says in the poem,

the Song of the Wandering Angus, he says, I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire was in my head, and cut and peeled a hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread. And when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream and caught a little silver trout. When I had laid it on the floor, I went to blow the fire aflame, but something rustled on the floor I went to blow the fire aflame but something rustled on the floor and someone called me by my name. It had become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening

air. Now I am old with wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands. I will find out where she went and kiss her lips and take her hands and walk through long and dappled grass and pluck till time and times are done. The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun." Wow. I remember hearing a story you told of being asked three times, which means the answer was yes. Yes, that came directly from my mother, but it's also, it came through my mother because

it's very powerful in the Irish psyche, even right to the point of going in someone's house in the west of Ireland, and if they say, will you have a cup of tea? And you say yes right away, they think you're really forward. You're supposed to say, no, no, you're great, I'm grand, I'm just on my way. I'll go on and have a cup of tea. Yeah, no, no, I'm great, I'm great.

And they say, will you have a cup of tea? And third time, you know they're serious, so you say yes. And it's the same with a musical instrument. I play fiddle, you know, and I have to be in practice to be able to play at the standard that's played in County Claire, say. So if I'm in practice, I might have it along with me, but I'd still be shy because the standard

is so incredibly high, even in the local pump. So I'd be asked to play. And if someone said, will you give us a tune? And you say, I will, right away. They'll say, Jesus, he's a forward. He thinks a lot of himself. So you say, no, no, I'm out of it. I'm not up to it right now.

Go on, go on, no, no. And then maybe 10 minutes later they say, will you join us? I said, go on then, I will. Yeah. So it's a test of sincerity in a way. So I've had times in my life where I've been asked sincerely three times and I've gone because of it. I've got over myself. Someone's seen something in me that I haven't seen or that I'm afraid of. The first invitation I had into the corporate world was someone who was standing at the edge of this line after I'd given a keynote talk in Washington, DC.

It was a psychological conference and he waited till the end, you know. So I knew he wanted to talk to me and in best American fashion, this is 30 years ago now, best American fashion, he said, we have to hire you. And best Anglo-Irish fashion, I said, for what? And he said to come into corporate America. And I said, for what?

And he said a beautiful thing, actually. He said the language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory we're about to enter. And I just heard the language that's large enough. That was into a more conversational work environment, which we did go into actually. Tell me about that experience. Well, you know, I was a very serious young man as a poet. So in the milieu I grew up with, you didn't sully your art form in any large institutional world, whether it was governmental or business-oriented.

So I said, no, I'm not going to do that. And behind that was I'm a serious poet. I'm not going to create some kind of propaganda for your organizations, because I didn't understand what I was being asked of. Plus I had a very cliched understanding of the work world from my inheritance. I grew up in a raving socialist part of West York, the Luddites used to meet in the field next to the place where I grew up actually to train

before they marched across the fields and broke up the new weaving machinery that was taking their jobs, or which they thought was taking their jobs. And then on my other side, I'm from long lines of Irish and Scottish rebels. So the corporate world represented something that was like a shibboleth to me. It was a big bad, overreaching, all too powerful, inhuman world, a very naive view of it, really. So he asked me and I said no. And he said, well, give me your phone number and let me call you. So he called me once I was back home on Whidbey Island

and I said no again, even though he was, I said, you're very kind and I know you're sincere. And he said, right, I'm coming out to Whitby Island to see you. I said, are you? And he said, I am. And are you home next weekend? I said, I am. And I said, you're welcome.

And so I called my mother up actually and told her about this whole series of conversations. And she said, ah, you've said yes already. And I said, how do you mean I said yes already? If you're asked sincerely three times, you have to go. So I said, you're right, Mother. So as soon as he arrived, I said, my mother's told me I have to do this. Anyway, we had a great old conversation. He was a man called Peter Block, very imaginative man, very funny in a wonderfully Jewish way,

very insightful. And I worked with him and another man called Joel Henning. And to my gratification, I should say to my surprise to begin with, but then to my gratification, I found that I didn't have to compromise my work at all. Well, if it was about compromise, why would they pick you? They chose you for you. Yes. Yes, I just had no idea what I'd be involved with, but I was involved with people who were trying to deepen the conversation and trying to work together in better ways.

What was more of you in that? And what was your experience there? I understand that that was their intention, but what did you find when you were there? I found that they were pushing me. First of all, they were really enthusiastic about the poetry being brought to bear on their everyday difficulties, which is what I did. How did they see that?

How did they see poetry helping corporate life? Just that image I used earlier about the invisible self, you know, walking into a room and people just seeing the outside. Well, that's true of leadership, you know, and so if you only see the outside, you'll only get the outside from other people too. So the ability to bring that authentic core without overwhelming people with your difficulties or your particular way of being is an immediate invitation for other people to speak from that core too, to have a proper conversation.

So that's just one little example. But over the years, I developed these seven elements, these seven steps for deepening any conversation. So the first element or step is to stop the conversation you're having now. Not to re-engineer it, not to ameliorate it, not to rethink it, just stop it entirely. And so identifying the conversation you need to stop having, and all of us have one. And if you don't know what it is, just ask your wife, ask your husband, ask your partner, ask your colleague. They'll tell you right away the conversation

you need to stop having. Ask your customer if you're an organization. Give me an example of a conversation that would need to stop. I remember when my organization first got beyond four people or so, and suddenly you could feel it as an organization rather than me just having a few people working for me. And yet, in the office, my desk, even when I was away, dominated everything. I was empty.

There was no picture of me there, but it might as well have been hair white sitting. Overlooking. The throne. Yeah, overlooking. So my assistant, Julie, was very subtle. She said, I've heard about these two consultants. They're really good at helping. And by this time, I'd been working

in the organizational world for years, and I said to myself, wait a minute, does this consultancy thing really work? Am I going to waste money on other people coming into my organization? And I said, fine. And they came in and they interviewed everyone beforehand. And then they got to me after they'd interviewed everyone else. And we were three questions into it.

And I knew where the problem was in the organization. Moi, you know, was me. And I needed to stop being that person who was there whether I was there or not, at least to begin the process. I mean, there's still a dynamic of it now all these years later that I always have to work with. So we stopped that invisible conversation that was occurring. Julie took that desk and then I took a desk, you know, a tiny little thing at the side because I was hardly there and

most of the time I was up in my own study writing, you know, was much more appropriate. So that was one. IBM, for instance, way back in the 80s, it had this program which was DOS, which they sold to Microsoft. They didn't realize that they weren't a hardware company, they were actually a software company. But they couldn't start that conversation about being someone who produced computers and produce, but all the future lay with Microsoft who took that and ran with it.

So there was a conversation that needed to be stopped. Apple understood what its true essence was in a way. So you stop the conversation in the first step that in order to drink from a deeper well, in order to drop down to another level. And it's really amazing when I'm working in organizations, you can send people off from a team that you're working with, they've worked together for years, send them off into on their own, say, what's the conversation you all need to stop happening? They come back and they've all got the same thing. They just never said it to each other. They're

all going back. Why have we ever, for some reason, it's just so much there that it feels as if it's a necessary part of the culture. So the second element is then having a friendship with the unknown with silence. Because the first proclivity is to replace the conversation immediately with another one before you've had time to actually be open to something new. And then that brings you to a bump in the unknown with that something new, which is always experienced to begin with as a kind of trauma actually. This can't be what I'm being invited into.

And it's exemplified by Dante's Waking in a Dark Wood, the first lines of the Commedia. And then the next step after that is the step that Dante took through the woods, which everyone takes, which is following the path of vulnerability and confronting your difficulties and your reluctances. And he meets them in the form of the lion, the leopard and the wolf, but they're all, they're representations of our own flaws. And then after that, you have to ask for help out of your vulnerability. And that's when he met Virgil, who says, will you follow me if you're serious about becoming a poet? And he says, I will.

And then he goes through the gate that says, give up all hope, you and I, which is perfect for the path of the poet. So these are just examples of the way you can bring poetry to bear. I can talk all day about stopping, just stopping. The number of poems that are about just bringing things to a halt or things being brought to a halt against your will. And then the relationship with silence and that difficulty with our friendship with the unknown.

And then the next stage, you know, which is that running into something. As D.A.X. Lawrence said, who is that knocking at my door? Who is that knocking at my door? It is someone come to do me harm. And then he says, no, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them. Who is that knocking on my door? So I have seven of these elemental steps. So stopping in order to drink from a deeper well, making a friend of the unknown, second step. Third

element is coming to ground with a bump in the dark wood. Fourth is following the path of vulnerability. Yeah. And it's also the path of artistry actually. And the fifth is asking for help. Yes. And there are two kinds of help, visible and invisible help. Visible help is transactional help. That's difficult for us to ask for. You won't even ask a person to take the other end of a table. You'll try to do it. You'll ruin your back trying to carry it yourself.

But then there's invisible help, which we've normally associated with ancient religion and angelic realms and other parallels. But you can think about invisible help in a very practical way. Invisible help is the help that you do not as yet know you need. If you're not paying scintillating attention, you walk straight past it.

All of us can remember times in our lives where we were offered help and we said, don't need it, I'm fine. And seven years of drama lecture, you used to look back and you say, oh my God, if I'd only put it- It was right there. Yeah, if I could have said,

so the question is, what invisible help am I walking past right now? Where am I not looking? Am I really paying attention? And even the identity that's asking for help starts to bring it into. When I was first investigating this element of asking for help, I spent a whole year where every day I would ask someone specifically for help of one kind or another.

So that's the transactional help. I'd call someone, I'd email someone. If it didn't occur to me, I'd think something up. And two things were remarkable about that. First of all, the buoyancy that came into my life. And the second was how much people wanted to help. There's nothing like being needed. And being needed for something that you're admired for

that the other person doesn't have. You're really good at this. Would you come and help me with it?" And so I realized, oh my God, you know, we're so shy of asking for help, but the world is crying out to be asked for help. And then the next one is an extension of that is making the invitation. So when you think about it, leadership is not just conversational leadership, it's invitational leadership. What invitation are you making to your people? What invitation do they think

you're making to them? And then shaping a more invitational identity, which is really interesting. Just to have that phrase is really a beautiful coin, beautiful question that will carry you a long way. Walking out this door, how could I be more invitational? Yeah. Yeah. And then you get all kinds of subsidiary questions such as what invitation does my wife think

I'm making to her on a daily basis? Have I stopped making invitations? What invitation do I think my partner, my husband, my loved one, my daughter, my son, my colleague, what invitation do I think they're making to me? What invitation do I want them to make to me? Will I actually ask for it? They may not be able to give it, but they might actually be able to do it. So that's a huge one, is the invitational element.

And all of these elements I've established in my mind through coming across them accidentally in a way and hearing myself on stage, either in front of organizations or in front of a general public, suddenly say something, I go, oh my God, yeah, that's the next step that you look for once you've established this. And then the last step I call harvest,

and that's the ability to bring in the harvest of everything you've been working towards. Both in the sense of it might be harvesting a profit, but harvest in the sense of when you've produced a piece, making sure it gets out into the world and that you're there with it when it's out. So that's another kind of harvest. Then there's the celebration which is associated with harvest. So many places you've just achieved something really marvelous together and split second

later the next day you're on to something else. There's no celebration, there's no saying let's go out to dinner, let's look at what we've done, let's slap each other on the back, let's just go out on the river on a boat for a day and just say we did that and we're quite remarkable and let's just give it a rest for a moment before we turn our face enthusiastically to the next sowing. And then the real corollary of harvest though

is are you harvesting in the hours of the day in which you're working? Or are you working in a dynamic of conditionality? I'll get to my happiness when I've done this project. I'll do what I really want when the kids are through school, when the house is paid off, when I'm in a better relationship, when I've got this amount of money in the bank, when I'm retired, and the ultimate conditionality is

I'll get to it when I'm dead, when all the responsibilities have gone. So are you harvesting? in the hours of the day in which you're Dedicating yourself because it's not a passive process to work. You're shaping an identity It's like practicing you think of most people in what we call ordinary jobs There are no real ordinary jobs, but you're working eight, nine, if you're in leadership, 10, 11 hours a day.

Imagine if you practiced a musical instrument for eight, nine, 10 or 11 hours a day. Wouldn't matter if you had any musical proclivity at all, you would become incredibly good at the clarinet, at the piano, at the saxophone. So you're becoming incredibly good at whoever you're practicing at being in the hours of the day. So Harvis asks you to say, by the way I am in my everyday, who am I practicing at becoming?

Do I actually want to become that person? Do I actually want to become that person? And that brings you back to stopping. Yeah, but as I was going to say, in some ways the seven steps are not necessarily in order because the seventh step might live with you through the whole process. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. And in fact, that's why I use the word elements more. It's better than the linear,

but sometimes it's useful to have the linear progression because they do actually work as a linear. And they're certainly good for those in the corporate world who are in a linear state of mind. And then later you can say, but actually they- You can think of them as elements. Yeah, they live in parallel. Some of them going on at once.

Sometimes one part of your life you're having to stop, another part of your life you're taking the path of vulnerability in a relationship. So we're multivalent, we're moving along. Thank you. you