Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - David Whyte (Part 2)

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

David Whyte returns to continue his conversation in Part Two.  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: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.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 Tetragrammaton Tetragrammaton Tetragrammaton Tetragrammaton Poetry is seamless with actual reality. Good poetry that is, bad poetry doesn't know it at all as we know. So poetry is the disappearance of the wall, the disappearance of the veil.

As I say, I think it's a living entity, a good poem. So it's almost like a tree you've planted, you can walk around it in the future and see it from different angles. And then if it's alive, you've unconsciously written many different layers into it, some of which you're not fully conversant with yet in your life. So I'm always amazed when I go back to the first volume I wrote, Songs for Coming Home, which are very simple poems, because at that time, I knew that I was just supposed to get the sounds right on the page. That narrative is something that takes, I think, many years of application to bring into poetry, not into prose, but to bring narrative into poetry is exceedingly difficult. So to begin with,

I was just trying to get the sounds right on the page that were absolute representations of a physical inner experience. So I'm amazed when I go back and one of the greatest compliments you can be given in Ireland, I was once sitting with Ireland's greatest, Elan Piper's, Blackie O'Connell, and he's a friend of mine now. But I was very shy and he said, come on, play a jig, you know. So we played the Kilfanoa jig and a couple of others,

you know, and I put the fiddle down at the end and he turned to me and he gave me the ultimate compliment, which is, Jesus, there was nothing wrong with that. He said. That's the ultimate accolade in Ireland. There's nothing better you'll get. So when I go back and look at my early part, I say to myself, Jesus,

there's nothing wrong with that actually. It's coming in at a clear, simple level. I'll give you an example of one. It's called, horses a clear, simple level. I'll give you an example of one. It's called Horses Moving on the Snow. I was sitting in this farmhouse at a table, French doors open, there's wet snow on the grass outside and mist. And I'm just about to start writing when these white horses come running through the mist, you know, thudding in a muffled way through

the snow along the fence and disappear. Absolute remarkable moment. So I spent six hours writing to capture that moment. So this is the piece I wrote. This is one of the first serious poems in my adult life, I suppose, and it's called H moving on the snow, if I remember it. Through the damp grass around the house, there are horses moving on the snow. In the half light, they move quickly, following the fence until the mist takes them completely. And evening is the hollow sound of hooves in the South field. Beautiful. It was once coming back into the States from Canada, and we had Charlotte, my daughter, when she was young,

we'd no identification for her, no. So I'm really worried as we're approaching the border. I'm saying, well, what is it? What are we going to say? What are we going to do? How are we going to get through? So we pull up, I wind the window down, the fellow in the kiosk, instead of saying, where do you live? Where are you from? He says, what do you do? First thing,

I said, I'm a poet. And he looked at me, a poet, really? I said, yes. He said, give me a poem. I said, through the damp grass around the house, there are horses moving on the snow, and the half-light, they move quickly, following the fence until the mist takes them completely, and evening is the hollow sound of hooves in the south field. And he said, on you go. So the calm's been good to you. That's always been good to you.

That poem has been good to you. Yes, and it was a perfect representation of the way poetry takes you through barriers and difficulties that you think you can't negotiate. Do you think that poetry's power lies in the listener's participation in it? in the listener's participation in it? It's the seamless meeting of voice and listening.

And when they're both melded, the closer they come together, the more powerful the moment. So when I'm on stage, I've got a really physical sense of the listening in the room. It's like a physical, touchable entity. And I'm following that listening. And the way you follow the listening is you're following the place where the silence is deepest after a line, after a poem.

I work with silences on stage quite a lot. How did you learn to read poetry out loud? Well, certainly in the Irish tradition, so many people, all my uncles had poetry by the roll. You know, they, my mother had dozens and dozens of poems in Irish or English. Leprechaun a co-orchestrae, vichimu a rion leg, en plurin ron, gon co-ponte, e che do vi, gebron. I can still remember a lot of the Irish poems. So I'd hear them and she'd be saying them

out of nowhere. So it just seemed normal to me that you would learn. And I started learning poetry very early, seven or eight years old. And later on, it became a beautiful thing to be in my teens. You know, when you're a teen, you're often going off by yourself, night walks, and as a young man, anyway. And to be able to have a poem that you could just recite would immediately bring you into that experience, that powerful experience. Just to hear the thrush singing and get a line of Robert Browning, that's the wise thrush he sings each song twice over, lest you never could recapture that first fine careless rapture. It just takes you to another depth of listening again. That's the wise thrush he sings each

song twice over, lest you never could recapture that first fine careless rapture. So I was memorizing Shakespeare, I was memorizing Dylan Thomas, and I just felt transported each time. I realized, you know, it's not just an artificial state. I am in a deeper identity. I'm in a deeper version of myself when I'm saying it. So I just built up my repertoire through the years. And then when I went full time as a poet, I already probably had, I don't know, about 50 poems memorized. But now, I don't know how many I have, certainly over 300, maybe 400 pieces or poems. And they're like a lifeblood to me. That's why when you asked me,

could you bring some poetry? That's why I said it comes with me whether I want to or not. And I do think that my task in life is to get poetry to as many people as possible, because it's such an extraordinary lifesaver. It's so compassionate. It's so consoling. It allows you to be yourself and to apprentice to yourself and not to be anybody else but the person who you are in your grief, in your difficulty. Poetry tells you that the only cure for your grief is grief itself.

By demonstrating the essence of it in a piece, someone just feeling it absolutely and fully. Just letting winter be winter so that winter itself can think of spring rather than you having to think of spring. What do you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young? I believe less than I was young. I think that the most tedious thing you can know about a person is their beliefs. I'm really interested in the place that the beliefs come from.

I have an essay in here on beliefs, in which I think the word belief is an original fire that becomes fixed into something structured. A belief almost always means that I want someone else to believe it too. I find that beliefs tend to be barriers between people. So there's nothing more intriguing to me than someone who says they're a Christian, but they demonstrate it, they don't try and force it upon you, they don't, they're very unassuming in the way they are, but they're very serious about what they believe. But it never seems to take a concrete form that oppresses other people. That to me is a really healthy diagnostic of something

live and something real. So I feel like I learn nothing about a person except the way they're stuck from a person's fixed beliefs. So I feel the same way about myself. So I'm more interested in origin. So the affections, you know, you can believe that you must treat your neighbor as yourself. And so you can follow that as a rule, but it's imposed from the outside. You said it's good, and you know it's good, but to feel the actual intimacy and affection for humankind in general is a really...

It's different than a belief. Yeah, it's a fierce line of maturity in a human life that few people reach. Would you call it a knowingness? Yes, it's a knowingness, yeah. And the understanding that you share pain with others. So all the things that get in the way of that, including beliefs, are to be dropped.

They're conversations to be stopped in my mind. Yes. Yes. You know, their conversations to be stopped in my mind. Yes. Yes. You know, people get naturally very offended if their identities are in their beliefs from that. But I don't mean to be offensive to people. I'm actually wanting to invite out the place from which the beliefs were first needed and the fire underneath it. Or you know, the grief that needed

the necessary shelter of that belief. Understood. Yes, yeah. For instance, we have a nevermind religious beliefs which really gets us into senses of separation. Just unconscious beliefs we share, such as the general belief that you should never be angry. You know, anger is a bad thing. So I tried to get underneath that in this title for people,

and it's called Anger. It's from the first book. Anger is the deepest form of care for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family, and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion. The internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect, and those things for which we are willing to hazard and even imperil ourselves. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability.

formed by its accompanying vulnerability. When it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body's incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding, what we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life. The unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our minds with the clarity and breadth of our whole being. What we have named anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness. A powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity

or voice or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live. Anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability. Anger too often finds its voice strangely through our incoherence and through our inability to speak.

But anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics—a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land, or a colleague. Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things. We're often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry the understanding of that love, or who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness, they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love's vulnerability. In their helplessness, they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.

But anger truly felt at its centre is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here. It is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tendered, an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate, and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror opposite of its true internal essence. So anger only comes from the love that's beneath it.

Yes. That's what brings up the anger. So anger only comes from the love that's beneath it. That's what brings up the anger. The vulnerability, yes, and the inability to find any coherent vehicle for it, any coherent body that's alive in the outer world. Can everything be resolved through conversation? Well I suppose it depends how we define conversation in the fullest sense of the word. I mean, conversation actually comes from the Latin

meaning inside out actually, it's gorgeous. Converse, yeah? So if you turn everything inside out, yes. One of the things I learned from my mother when I reached my teens, my mother was remarkable in the sense that she had so much compassion and everyone recognized it in her. So if there was any trouble in the neighborhood, they would always be at my mother's kitchen table whether it was 12 noon or 12 at night. And I just grew up thinking this was normal,

that all mothers were like this. And my mother had the incredible listening ear and patience. And as I grew older, I began to realize, this patience is really amazing, actually. And then she would always send people off with a blessing, which is a very Irish thing. And she'd say something for them on their behalf. And then she would always send people off with a blessing, which is a very Irish thing. And she'd say something for them, you know, on their behalf.

And when I got old enough to realize that my mother wasn't an ordinary person, an ordinary mother, I said to her, mother, how do you do it? You know, because, you know, when there's a child in the room, you don't count, so they tell everything and you're just there in the corner playing or whatever. I say, many of these people have dug their own graves over years, you know. How do you keep the compassion and the patience and stay with the story?

And she said, well, you know, when you hear where someone's pain comes from, where the wound was struck, where the vulnerability is, you know, then you understand everything and you've patience for it all, you know where it all comes from. She said, I just act as if I already. Makes me break into tears now, but she said, I just act as if I already know the story from the beginning, before they've said a word. And that came from my mother's loss of her own mother when she was 13 or so, and that grief, she'd felt it so much, but she kept her compassion for the way everyone else felt, that same species of loss one way or another in their existence.

And then the other thing she said was when I asked her, and what's a blessing, mother, how do you do a blessing? Because you're so good at it. She said, you know, a blessing is not necessarily wishing something well for someone, wishing something good for someone. I said, the blessing isn't wishing something good for someone. I said, the blessing isn't wishing something good for them. What is it then, mother? And she said, a real blessing is where you wish something for someone that they did not even know they wanted themselves.

You say something they have not dared to wish for themselves. But in their heart of hearts, in their secret, in a hidden self, that's what they've wanted all along. It's a combination of being seen and hearing a possibility. Yes, and that's the conversation I'm talking about, the inside outness, to be able to apprehend the inside of what is being said to you. So much of today's life happens on the web.

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How did you decide to call the book Consolations? Because I really felt like I'd been consoled by the first essay I wrote on regret. And as I wrote my way through, I started calling them little constellations to myself without thinking of it as a title. And then after a while, there didn't seem to be a better way of describing them really. It was interesting. I was reminded there's an author in the 10th century called Bertius. The bestseller in the 10th and 11th centuries was Bertius' Consolatio, the Consolations of Philosophy. So it is the reiteration of a bestseller that was written a thousand years ago. It was interesting because Jamie Bing, the wonderful editor of Canon Gate, a publisher

and editor, was trying to come up with a new title for the second volume. And I said, well, good luck. I said, because I can't think of a better title. I've tried myself. And he's tried all kinds of things. And we've tried, I even engaged with him and we tried things together. And there's nothing better than Consolations 2 actually for the second volume. And with the same subtitles, there's something that's just right about it. These essays are written in the same spirit. So Consolations 2, solace, nourishment, and

underlying meaning of everyday words. And do you tend to remember your dreams? If I make a thing of it, I do, yes. But I don't normally make a program of writing them down, which I regret actually, but I'm just. Have you ever? I've had periods in my life where I've written dreams down. I had a period in my life where I was actually practicing lucid dreaming while I was in Galapagos.

And then I had a powerful experience that stopped me from doing it. And that was being out of my body, looking at myself sleeping. And then suddenly waking up and I was on deck actually at night, right next to the guardrail. So it was rather dangerous. I was sleepwalking out of it. So there is a power to all of these different practices. But I just I

got that from Journey to Ixland, you know, the trilogy written big in the 70s and 80s about the Mexican brujo. Carlos Castaneda. Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. I can't remember the name of the Mexican wizard now, who taught him. But he taught him a form of lucid dreaming, of looking at his hands.

So I practiced that, looking at my hands in my dreams, while I was in the Galapagos Islands. Don Juan, I believe. Don Juan, exactly. Yeah. And I eventually got where I could look at my hands in my dreams. And then the next stage was where I had that next experience

and then I stopped because I didn't want to go over the side of the boat at night. You mentioned somewhere looking at a clock and seeing time. That was around my father's death. Looking at a church clock, beautiful church tower, blue disk, you know, with gold hands on it, very large on the side of the tower so the local country people could see the clock. On a church, that was the church where the Bronte sister's father was a pastor for a

while actually. But it's also the church where Robin Hood is mythologically supposed to have married, made Marian. And it's just a short distance away from the cottage where in Yorkshire, the family cottage where my father passed away. And myself and my two sisters were looking after my father at the end, we're just the three of us, he was dying at home and we were all so

close. I mean I'm close with my sisters anyway but you can imagine when you're losing someone you love. We were just this iron-clad circle you know of affection and compassion and love together. And we were sat for hours with my father and because the oldest of my two younger sisters is sat by the deathbeds of hundreds of people, she's a palliative nurse, she recognized the signs that my father was passing that day. And so we were holding his hands, we were crying, we were laughing, we were reminiscing, we were loving him and one another.

And I suddenly realized that the circle of love was so tight that we were not letting him go, actually. And I said, we need to break the tension somehow. And then appropriately enough, my assistant, Jane, said, oh, we're out of tea. And I said, oh, I'll go, I'll run down to the shop and get some tea. I drove to the shop, which was just 10 minutes away. And when I was in the shop, I had a sudden panic that my father would pass while I was

away. So I threw things in the basket and ran through the till, jumped into the car, drove back up the hill. And then I was passing this church tower with the clock, with the gold hands. And I looked at that clock and it was just as if I saw the face of time itself. And I think it was five past four. And I had an absolute certainty looking at that clock that my father would pass at 25 past 4.

So I slowed down because I was just three minutes away from the cottage. And sure enough, I got back in, sat right down with my sisters and my father. I didn't say a word about the experience I'd had. My father passed at exactly 25 past four, which was exactly the moment when the sun, which had been flooding the room, dropped behind the hedge and the whole room went dark and somber. It was really an extraordinary moment. One moment we're in this light-filled room. My father takes his last breath.

We say, oh my God, he's gone. And we're all saying our blessings for him going, you know, and saying, you're going to meet my mother now and all the rest, you know, and the room went completely dark as we were. I have a piece actually written about that experience and just that sense of knowing that humans are given at particularly acute thresholds of their life for which there's no explanation. I would describe it as a mystical experience, would you? Yes, I would. And there's no, and I don't need to corroborate it

by any scientific parallels or anything. It just happened. We break through these barriers of time and space, crucial moments of our existence, moments of knowing. And in many ways, having said that, they are corroborated by science. And the electrons mirroring each other when they're apart from each other

with seemingly no connection between them both. Who knows what other parallels are being stirred as we speak together now. Have you had other mystical experiences? Oh my God, yeah, through my existence. We could be here all week, yeah. I don't talk about them very much

because I feel like it creates the wrong kind of invitation in the sense that it's the invitation to special experiences, to glamors, you know, and that you have to have these extraordinary experiences before you can experience the miraculous and everything. as before, you can experience the miraculous. And everything, when you really pay attention and you really have silence in your body and spaciousness, everything becomes remarkable and miraculous. Everything's speaking out of this astonishing parallel. So I only talk about the myth, the story is triggered,

just as we're talking now. And so it naturally led into that. Or I may have to ask you three times. Why do you think we're attracted to symmetry? It's a representation of the corroboration between outer and inner experience. When we're seeing clouds race across a gorgeous sky, we're having an equivalent experience inside us. And sometimes you have to see something in the outer world to realize that something

has changed inside you. I have a piece called The Journey. It says, above the mountains the geese turn into the light again, painting their black silhouettes on an open sky. Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you. Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you. Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart, sometimes

with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out, someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. You are not leaving. You are not leaving. You are not leaving. Even as the light fades quickly now, in my eyes you're always arriving. 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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That's a beautiful poem. Yeah. That's a beautiful poem. Yeah. Yes, that's when I felt the actual physical experience of that symmetry you're talking about arrive fully in my body having written that piece. Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out,

someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. Many of us have had the experience where you lose someone close to you, you go through the grief of it and the tears maybe and break down and then you look in the mirror for the first time and you see someone you've never seen before in your life. That kind of symmetry, the bones of the black sticks left when the fires got out, someone has written something new in the ashes of your life.

You're not leaving, you are arriving. But one mystical experience I had, which was a train of experiences in the Himalayas, appropriately enough, where mysticism just seems to be in the air, that does seem to be when you're in the Himalayas and the high Himalayas away from everything, there is some kind of veil, which is very thin, some kind of extraordinary atmosphere. So I was walking in a high valley at 10,000 feet, you know, in a remote part of the Himalayas.

This is in the 70s when many places hadn't been touched or visited by trekkers or westerners. And I'm walking through this high wooded valley and I've become separated from my two friends. One was a Sherpa and one was a Belgian ornithologist. And we got separated in the, it wasn't a blizzard, but it was this very heavy, quiet snow falling. And you couldn't see very far. I got distracted by something, probably by a bird or something that I was trying to identify. And I suddenly am lost in these woods,

except I can see the mountains on both sides. So I know which way to go more or less. So I'm walking in these woods, except I can see the mountains on both sides, so I know which way to go, more or less. So I'm walking through the woods and I come to this clearing and I look on the other side of the clearing, there is a man on a horse, comparisoned in silks with a brass hat on his head. He's a lama. And the horse has this silk covering covering also like something out of a medieval knight would have. And he was looking at me intently across the clearing with the snow

falling. And I stood there and I was in mountain gear, you know, goggles up on my head and he's there in this medieval outfit. And I just knew that when he saw me, he knew that the end of an epoch was coming for his life and the life of his people. He looked at the intentionality with which he was looking at me. And we stood looking at each other for the longest time, two worlds. And then he just, like Clint Eastwood, he pulled his reins to one side and off he went on the white horse and disappeared off into the direction I'd come. Didn't say a word, you know. But we must have looked at each other for a good two, three minutes,

not knowing what to say or perhaps not having to say anything. And anyway, I walked on and I eventually, it's like the hobbits, we ran into each other, almost stumbled over each other in the snow. And then the wind got up and it really turned into a blizzard. We don't know where to go for shelter, you know, we've lost the path. The Sherpa doesn't know this area of the mountains anyway. And we run into this old woman, just as you would in a medieval fairy story. And she's got a dung basket on her back, she's bent over, you know, and she starts pointing up the mountain to follow her. So

we follow her and we're going up this steep. We could barely keep up with her. We're young, fit men, you know, but this is 11,000 feet, 10,000, 11,000 feet. She's used to being out there. We follow her and we reach this little gompa, which is a temple, a walled little temple on this ridge. And she invites him, we climb this log ladder to get inside it. And she starts making tea. And they do it by putting this powdered brick, they grind this powdered brick of tea,

mix it with hot water, salt and rancid yak butter. First time you ever drink it, it's the worst thing you've ever put in your mouth. Three days later, you're desperate for it. It has everything you need. It has liquid, salt, fat, and caffeine, and it's like Alexia. So she was pumping this, and then I look over

and I see this little battered old photograph, and it's a photograph of the lama. This is his gompa and this is a woman who looks after him. And I felt almost as if the man had said, I'm not going to talk to you now, but I'm going to make sure you're looked after. So all these are just intuitions so far. And then this woman through the Sherpa, because we don't speak the language, tells him to get to the next village, don't go along the valley, go over the ridge and it'll save you hours to do it. And I always say if you ever hear the word shortcut in your life, run 100 miles the opposite

direction because it's almost always leads to disaster. And this almost did because the top of the ridge, I'm sure in the summer it was a shortcut, but the top of the ridge was full of wet snow and all three of us almost went off it to our deaths. And we were literally clinging on the side at times, you know, and slipping and sliding along. Then we came down the other side, and I suddenly realized that I'm getting sick as I'm coming down.

And I'm starting almost to hallucinate. We come into this village, the snow is still falling, and it's all of these low flat Tibetan buildings with flagpoles on top, with prayer flags on top, snapping in the wind and the snow. And over the top of each half door, there's a horse's head peeking out and no people. So it's like some Swifty and Gulliver's Travels tale, you know, with this Brob De Nagy realm which is inhabited only by horses.

And I'm in this semi-semihelucinogenic state with the fever I've got. So it looks as if the village is inhabited by horses. And I'm just trying to get a hold of myself. Suddenly there's a shout and a man runs into the middle of the street and he's holding a big key in his hand and he's looking at us and he's beckoning us and then probably a hundred people come out of all the doors to greet us in this village and we're surrounded by these people and I feel like by this time I'm just being held up by the force of the crowd because I'm ready to collapse actually.

But they insist that we follow them with this key. And this man is a lay monkey, he's dressed in orange robes. And there are two others with him. They lead us along this mountain path. And suddenly there's a drop of a thousand feet on directly from this path and this absolutely sheer cliff above us. The path ends right beneath these double wooden doors in the cliff side.

And we're standing there in front of these two doors, and there's one monk goes to one side of it, one monk goes to the other. Third monk has the key in the door in the middle. He turns the key and then they both on either side open the doors and there is the most beautiful golden Buddha with purple eyes staring out through the snow. And it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life.

And I just fainted in front of the, luckily I fell on the path, not backwards to my death. But I just fainted with the beauty of it and in my vulnerable stage. And I was out, you know, for 30 seconds or so, I looked up. And what was lovely was they just made no fuss of me whatsoever. The whole feeling was, yes, of course, that would be your reaction if you looked at our beautiful Buddha.

That's the reaction we wanted. And then they just closed the doors again. And I was carried on a litter back to recover in the village actually. So that moment, you know, seeing there was this preparation, the meeting with the lama at a distance, you know, the falling snow, the silence, the meeting of his assistants, you know, out of nowhere, the following her, her telling us to go over this ridge so that we could come down into this village in this

particular way. We might have had a completely different experience going along the valley bottom, you know, even walked past the village because it was high up in a little circ up there, a little hanging valley. And then the experience of being welcomed because so few Westerners, I don't, we might have even been the first Westerners in decades into that place, who knows? And then the confrontation with beauty. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think they were thinking

when they opened those doors? I think it was the pride, if you've come to our village, you must have come to see the Buddha. I see. Yes, that was the...there's no other reason you'd be here, except you must want to see the most precious thing we have. And we're going to show it to you. So it was very innocent, very real, innocent, very real, and very powerful. Which leads me to another extraordinary mystical experience in the Himalayas. About seven years later after that experience, I came back with

another man, a friend called Ian, and we had this idea of building on my experience in South America leading to us and his experience by running expeditions for people, forming an international ecological travel company. And so we put our first trip together and it was on the Annapurna Trail. This is very early on, so very few people were going on it at that time. And we flew up into Jomison, which is about 11 o'clock on the whole circuit, at about 10,000 feet. And then you're up there and you're starting, and you're going to go up another few thousand feet in another few days, and you're going to go over the Thong La Pass.

But first of all, because my friend Ian had lived in Nepal and was fluent Tibetan speaker and imbued in the culture, he said, in order for our organization to start off in the right way, we have to make a gift. We have to make a donation for us to be in in right relationship with our future. And I said, well, what do you think? He said, well, I've heard there's a school up there that's in trouble. They've run out of money. And we could just take a little diversion off the trail for a few hours, cross this river and come to the school. And we'll give them a few hundred dollars, which will be an absolutely enormous amount

for them. And it will set them on their feet. I said, sounds great to me. So anyway, we went off, we landed, we walk a few hours and then comes to the place. We turn off the trail and then we get to the river and the river is so high with the recent rains, there's nowhere to cross. And we're waiting to see if the river goes down. We wait a few hours there. And we're waiting to see if any of the school children

or the teachers come down from the other side, nothing. So we're a little disappointed. And what does this mean, by the way, as far as we can't give this gift? So we get back on the trail, and we go up towards Jakot and Muktinath. And we get to this stage on the trail where there is this road which has been carved out of the mountainside. It's obviously a natural shelf that has been slightly chiseled away and broadened, you

know, so it's about the width that a cart could take along it. But on the right-hand side is the sheer mountain. On the left-hand side is this absolutely enormous drop, yeah. But it's wide enough that you can walk along it. It's probably a quarter of a mile along, and it's just straight. You can see right to the edge. So we get along there, and we get to this place where we sit down for a while,

and we can see up the trail this crowd of people coming down this broad ledge, you know, towards us. And as they get nearer and nearer, Ian looks at them and he says, my God, it's the teachers and the school children, yeah? And so they're coming down and they meet us, and we have this greeting. And then Ian translates, he says,

the school had completely run out of money. They're having to close it. So they went to Muktinath on pilgrimage to ask for a miracle. To ask for a miracle, to ask for a miracle for the money, you know, for some gift or others. And they're on their way back and they meet us. And we give them the money there, thousands of rupees, tens of thousands of rupees on the ledge itself. And the kids do this dance, celebration,

and they're dancing near this precipice, like the catcher in the rye. You're worried about these kids dancing over the edge, but they're all so joyous, and their prayers and their miracle has worked. We've just been this unwitting participant in their miracle has worked, you know? We've just been this unwitting participant in their miracle stories, so. Incredible story.

Exactly, yeah. Do you pray? No, I just go into deep silence, which is I think where prayer leads, yeah. silence, which is I think where prayer leads. I have a piece I wrote out of a very powerful experience I had in lockdown where I decided that I was not going to give myself a special project during lockdown. Once I had my online Three Sundays series in place and I could actually provide for everyone who worked for me, I was happy. I said, I'm just going to give myself a real holiday and I'm not going to

write another book of poetry. I'm not going to set myself a theme. I'm just going to have a damn good holiday. And so I was really just enjoying that spaciousness and doing whatever I wanted. But I was sat at my desk looking at my big Apple screen, which has the little green light into which I look when I'm giving my broadcast. But I was watching a documentary that was on the BBC and it was called The Secret Life of Monks. They were looking at a Carthusian monastery in the north of England, the only Carthusian

monastery in England, and this group of extraordinary older monks who had been a community there for decades. And the documentary opens with all of these scenes of the seasonality of autumn around the grounds, you know, leaves falling and rain and the tawny hues of that season. And then suddenly you're inside and you're looking at this older man who's having difficulty speaking, but he's talking directly into the camera. And it takes you a while to entrain to what he's saying, but finally you understand he's actually not very well, but he's talking about his life as a monk.

And he's talking about how when he first came into the monastery, he had all kinds of strange ideas about what prayer was and what it meant to be a monk, and what it meant to have a relationship with God. And then out of nowhere, just to the camera, he says, oh, I gave up praying years ago, he said. And for a heartbeat, you think, oh, he lost his faith. He's got a great place to live, hang out with

the lads, you know, sing in the chapel three meals a day. He's in a great place. It's only for a heartbeat though, because he then says, I gave up praying years ago because my whole life became prayer. I was living and breathing from the atmosphere of prayer. And then the next image is of him dead in his coffin. He was actually on his deathbed when he said that, my whole life became prayer. And he's surrounded by the monks saying the dies irae and the offices of the dead on him. And then the next scene is of the coffin being buried and the clay being thrown onto the wood of the lid and then the filling in of the grave, you know, and then back to the grounds, you know, and the falling leaves. And it goes on from there exploring the community.

But as I watched that first sequence, the tears were just running down my face and I just started writing out of it. And that's when my writing began just naturally out of this moment. So this is called Your Prayer. And that's my answer to your question, do I pray? But it's written for this monk who inspired me. Your prayer. Your prayer only began with words, each one just a hand on the door to silence, each one just you putting your full weight against everything you thought you could never deserve. Even in your gathered, chanted strength in the chapel, what you said in the end was just a shoulder against the grain of wood, trying to keep the entrance open until that door,

which was no door at all, gave way to necessary grief, which is really just the full understanding of everything you had been missing all along, which is really just you feeling the raw vulnerability to make a proper invitation, which is really just you feeling the full depth of your love at last. The heartbroken heart coming to heartfelt rest.

The opening inside you filled to the gleaming brim and casting its generous beam. The part of you you thought was foolish. The wisest voice of all. of all. He had such a gleam in his eye, you know, he's on his deathbed but he's just giving through his eyes, they're so alive. So that was that the opening inside you filled to the gleaming brim and casting its generous beam almost like a lighthouse. L-M-N-T Element Electrolytes L-M-N-T

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I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. is how much effort and how many dramas in our life and how many pathways we take in trying not to have our heart broken.

Trying to find a path where you won't, in a sense, where you won't care. And that's the only way you can choose not to have your heart broken is to try not to care, which takes enormous amounts of energy. So normally, we're under the illusion, you know, when we're young, that when we really fall in love, we'll have found the person who won't break our heart. But our older self is sorry to inform our younger self that no, you've chosen them out for that

exact core competency. They will break your heart. You unconsciously chose them for that. Why? Because you care about them so deeply. And they'll disappoint you and you'll disappoint them and you'll disappoint each other. Because we're human.

Exactly, yeah. So plus, the axis of maturity along which you're moving involves heartbreak. The small heart you've got is going to be broken open into the larger heart. You'll need to understand what marriage entails beyond the honeymoon, beyond great sex, beyond the initial magic that comes with being together. So you can open to other forms of magic, other parallels. But when you think about it, any path you take that you care about will break your heart. Learning a musical instrument should break your heart. If you're a thin seer, you should come across moments where you're trying to emulate Martin Hayes if you're an

Irish musician and when you're trying to emulate John Renborn if you're a guitarist, you know, on and on it goes. But even just trying to become your best self. Yes. Yeah, you just times where you just can't make it sing because you can't make yourself sing. Yes. And then we tend to think of work as a place where I can have a professional armor.

I can go into finances, I can be a CEO, I can be a manager and I won't have, I don't need to get my heart broken there. That's the place where I can just do things and that it- it's not true. No, I think if you're sincere about any endeavor, part of that sincerity shows itself by you always coming to a place where you don't know how to get from here to there. And you actually wonder if you are the person who can get from here to there. And you actually wonder if you're the person who can get from here to there. And the work breaks your heart because you have to give up often being the lone ranger who's going to do it. You have to ask for help. You have to break and open your identity,

ask for visible and invisible help. So I think it was a merciful day for me when I realized there's no sincere path a human being can take where they won't have their heart broken. And that we actually, many lives, most lives even, are deformed by people attempting not to care. Yes, building walls and trying to protect themselves. Yes. And missing the whole point. Yeah, you see it in breakups and divorces.

You still care about this person. You just can't be vulnerable enough to let yourself care. So you have to turn them into the anime. You have to get involved in all kinds of strange behaviors, to go through dramas in the withdrawal, the destructive withdrawal. And the ability to stay caring while you're going through heartbreak is one of the great signs of maturity in a human life, to be still be present. And to have a robust vulnerability. It's not vulnerability as weakness, but vulnerability as presence and invitation. You know, this is another way of being in the world. I have

lines out of a poem called Santiago, which is supposedly reaching the endpoint around that path of heartbreak. So, in Santiago, of course, is the supposed endpoint of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the great postmodern pilgrimage. It used to be just a Catholic pilgrimage for a thousand years. Now everyone from around the world is doing it of every belief and no belief at all. So this is Santiago. The road seen, then not seen. The hillside hiding, then revealing the way you should take. The road dropping away from you, as if leaving you to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up

when you thought you would fall, the way forward, always in the end, just the way that you came, just the way that you followed, the way that carried you into your future, that brought you to this place. No matter that it sometimes had to take your promise from you, no matter that it always had to break your heart along the way. The sense of having walked from deep inside yourself out into the revelation to have risked yourself for something that seemed to stand both inside you and far beyond you, and that called you back in the end to the only road you could follow, walking as you did in your rags of love and speaking in the voice that by night became a prayer

for safe arrival. One day you realized that what you wanted had actually already happened long ago and in the dwelling place in which you lived before you began. Every step along the way, you had carried the heart and the mind and the promise that first set you off and then drew you on. And that, you, were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach. As if all along you thought the endpoint might be a city with golden domes and cheering crowds and turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road,

you found just a simple reflection and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back and beneath that another invitation, all in one glimpse, like a person or a place you had sought forever, like a bold field of freedom that beckoned you beyond, like another life and the road, the road still stretching on. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. That was the culmination of a whole cycle of poems that came out in the book called Pilgrim.

And I wrote that as a capstone, trying to bring everything together. And what I was trying to get in that piece was the blurring of tenses. The experience we all have when we're preparing for a journey, one moment you're walking around the house with a pair of socks in your hand

and with your bag open to pack, and the next you're home already having had this extraordinary experience and they all exist together actually. And that sense of sojourning, of traveling as something gifted and miraculous even in itself. And the fact that you can just actually sit at home and you're still traveling, if you're aware enough, and the world's moving around you, the seasonality of your inner growing and your outer growing are coming together in this extraordinary conversation. So that was written. I started it in Oxford, but I wrote for five hours on the upstairs of a

Boeing 747. And I sat there for five hours. I knew I sat there for five hours because when I stood up, I fell over. My legs had fallen asleep. I remember having the papers in my hand, standing on the stairs and having a glass of wine, actually looking it over. And then what happens, I'm stood there with the papers and the glass in my hand celebrating, having finished this piece, which is a capstone of the whole cycle. And up comes this fellow who's a fan of my work and also something of a friend. He's been on my Italy trip at least five times. And first we get over the thing of what are you doing here and all that, you know, and isn't this amazing?

And then he says, what have you got there? I said, it's the new piece. And he said, would you read it to me? I said, this could be the first world premiere on a 747, I said, of a poem. So I read him the piece there on this modern conveyance of pilgrimage, the 747. So it was extraordinary in its writing

because I felt that whole coming together in my body of all of those tenses as I wrote it. And the way forward, always in the end, just the way that you came, the way that you followed, the way that carried you into the future that brought you into the future that brought you to this place, no matter that it sometimes had to take your promise

from you, no matter that it always had to break your heart along the way. The sense of having walked from deep inside yourself out into the revelation, to have risked yourself for something that seemed to stand both inside you and far beyond you. And that called you back in the end to the only road you could follow,

walking as you did in your rags of love. When I wrote that line, I said, we'll all end up in that costume one day or another, you know? Those rags of love. Unbelievable. How does memorizing a poem compare to memorizing a song? It's interesting, because I have a young Irish poet who I'm mentoring, who's an absolute genius of a singer.

He can sing every genre, actually, but he sings Irish traditional. But he's got a voice that can go from way down there to the very top. He's really extraordinary and he's very facile with his voice and being able to sing. But he's also a good poet and I started apprenticing him to being on stage. And when it came to reciting poetry, he could barely get a word out without breaking down in tears. It was just as if there was no mask there.

There's something about the way the music carries the voice. The music is the body that's carrying the voice. Yes. And in poetry, your body is carrying the voice and there's no veil between you and the listener. So you've got to be able for it, as they say in Ireland, you've got to be equal to it. His chin would be wobbling, his lips would be curling,

his eyes would be tearing up, and there'd be long periods of silence, not where he was being silent, but just where he couldn't get out the next sentence. But it was really moving to see this absolute consummate performer who never missed a beat or a word in the song suddenly brought to a vulnerable halt.

So I don't know if that's an indication. So without the music, you're square one, essentially, every time. Yes, I've got to say something intimate that you must listen to. And therefore, if you must listen to it, I have to be fully present and I have to be fully invitational and fully vulnerable.

Because I'm saying this is worthwhile. It's the same dynamic we have when we have to convey a loss to someone, you're telling someone someone has died, you say it, and then you always repeat it because you know they couldn't take it in the first time so you say it in a slightly different way and then you say it again and you have silence between it. And most often you will actually fall into a iambic pentameter, just blank verse, because that's the way human beings speak when they're on their natural articulate edge. You know, it's the conveying of news in a way that's life-changing is natural

to human beings and is a natural part of the poetic form. It's not some abstracted art form. It's how human beings are when they're trying to speak on their emotional and heartbreaking edge you could say, when they're living to the point of tears as Camus said. Is poetry best experienced through reading or listening? At a zenith, I think it's spoken if it can be said fully. Some poets are very bad readers of their own work, actually. So in that case, I'd say no. But if someone can really read a piece, it's like hearing one of the Psalms,

Ye though I walk through the valley of, at the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. When you hear it's sad, you know, in the way it should be sad to hearing a Richard Burton recite it all, then there's a liveness that's really extraordinary. But you do learn how to put the voice to the page. It's one of the difficulties people have reading poetry

to begin with, they don't know what voice to read it in. But one of the difficulties people have reading poetry to begin with. They don't know what voice to read it in. But say you go to a Gary Snyder reading or you go and hear Seamus Heaney or you hear that voice and then you can put that voice to their poetry. But eventually if you read enough, you start to put your own voice to it. And so it can come alive on the page, I think, as much as when it's spoken. It just needs practice. Welcome to the house of macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood, Sustainably sourced directly from farmers. Macadamias. A rare source of omega-7.

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Not many that are out there who you have to have it memorized to do it justice really. It's rare with people who work extemporaneously with poetic speech whether it's actual poetry or just poetry in speech when John Donahue passed away I was a bit of a loss because if I couldn't go to an invitation people would say who do you recommend who's doing the same thing and I would always say John Donahue and when he passed away, I said, wait a minute, there are five billion people on the planet and I can't recommend anyone who does what I do. Works extemporaneously with speech,

whether it's poetic or the narrative between the portrait, that opens up a live experience in the room. There are other art forms that do it, but not in this particular way. Tell me more about John O'Donoghue. Well, he was born in the Cahir Valley in North Clare in the limestone mountains called the Burren. Very particular landscape, very particular genius loci. And he was born into an old farming family

there. And, you know, Ireland up until the 1970s, with very little changed in its shaping cultural speech than perhaps even 500 years ago, it was extraordinary. It's all happened since the 70s, really, all the changes. So he was at that threshold between the old Ireland and the new Ireland that he came along with. And he became a priest. And for the first born son to become the priest, that's a big thing. Your family is made when you're, at least in the old Ireland, it's not true nowadays. But in that island of 50 years ago, he was part of a kind of aristocracy in a way, of articulation and authority.

But he was a very wild theologian actually and the Catholic hierarchy used to kick his theological bottom as far as they could into the wilds of Connemara. But wherever he landed, the congregation would double or triple overnight. He was fluent in Irish, fluent in philosophical German. He lived in Heidelberg and studied the great German philosophers and fluent in English of course. So he had a bird of paradise vocabulary. So it was marvelous when we met, actually.

We had immediate chemistry. And we recognized each other coming from different ends of the spectrum and with very similar language or I should say very similar themes with slightly different language around belonging and longing and our understanding of poetry. So we did a few tours together. But we would meet up for weekends and have these philosophical discussions, sometimes falling out, yeah. And we'd always make up. What would you fall out over?

Just if we felt the other was getting above themselves in the way they were, with a kind of arrogance around their work Or they weren't open to other ways of seeing or being or not open to Helpful comments about how they could do their work better So those were the the things we fall out of we always made up. I have an essay on friendship now, which is all about the way that long friendships are based on mercy and forgiveness.

You will always offend your friend accidentally on purpose. You will always say what you've been trying not to say for a long time. And many times they will walk away in high dudge. And the only way this friendship survives is if you forgive one another. And so long friendships, and in fact long marriages, I think are based on continued and mutual forgiveness. You've seen the worst of your friend and you've forgiven them, they've seen the worst of you, and they've forgiven you and you're still in the conversation together. So that was John and I. But we also had an incredible sense of humor together. There are a few people where I literally would be aching with laughter.

But John and I, when we got together, would really go to town, you know, as far as laughter was concerned. So he was a genius of a leffer. And he had a laugh like a Gatling gun, and you'd hear it a mile away coming up the road. My son was the same, actually. He's got the same kind of laugh. So it was contagious. We learned a lot from each other and pushed each other and supported each other. I always said, you know, if I was coming to some Midwestern city at 12 o'clock at night, you know, getting to a hotel with no food, no conversation, you know, and then you have to get up and speak about the life of the soul under a plastic chandelier, you know, at 9 o'clock in the morning. We'd always know that there was someone else in the world who understood what we were going through and what we were carrying when we were doing that.

So we had a pact that we could call each other or text each other in those times and to know that someone else would know what we're going through. Tell me about the different personality of the places, Wales, Ireland. Yorkshire, yeah. They're all close together, but they are different. I'd really talk about the personality of Yorkshire because it's really not English in the way other people, especially Americans think of England,

which they tend to think of the Southern English culture and the Downton Abbey or the tend to think of the southern English culture and the Downton Abbey or the working class accent of the south. But the north is a totally different culture. And it's much more blunt, much more straightforward, not so diffident. And it's more communal. And people shout and talk to each other in the street in the north of England, where people would be embarrassed in England at someone calling across the street to them, although that's changed quite a bit.

So Yorkshire was settled by the Vikings. So the dialect I grew up with there is full of Old Norse and Danish words. And it was a full dialect actually that I learned. So I had three accents, really. One was the one I had with my father and his friends and with my mates, which was a full Yorkshire dialect, you know. And then at school, you had a kind of halfway between received BBC accent and Yorkshire. And then I had the Irish accent with my mother, in a way. Or I should say Irish vocabulary with my mother. But I could morph along them and I still do actually from Yorkshire to Ireland and along

that axis. Let me talk about Ireland next because they lived in parallel in the same house. On one side of the house you had my mother's linguistic approach to the world, which was a whole different cultural parallel. And it's always about the numinous and the invisible and what cannot be said, but which is said in three times as many words as someone in Yorkshire would use. So a very strange combination. And how far apart are these places? Yorkshire was psychologically a long way from Ireland.

You'd have to drive and take a ferry, multi-hour ferry. Most people wouldn't fly when I was a kid. They couldn't afford it. So it was, you'd get the train to Liverpool or Holyhead, and then it's many hours on the ferry and then another couple of hours to wherever you were in Ireland off four or five hours in those days on the roads. So would you say most people in Yorkshire had never gone to Ireland? In my youth that would be true.

There'd be more would have gone. But more would go to Spain than would go to Ireland actually, unless you're a fisherman or have an interest in traditional music. None of my friends or their families would have gone to Ireland or have been there. There was one other Irish boy whose parents were from Innescote, I remember, in Ireland, and he was the only person who had the same kind of background as I did. So Ireland lived in this parallel.

And then I went to, because Bangor was the best place for marine zoology, I ended up living in North Wales and discovering Welsh culture, which is very strong around the language. And Welsh language is a couple of thousand years old. I mean, a modern Welsh person can read a manuscript from 1500 years ago and make sense of it. It's the language that was spoken when Julius Caesar arrived with his legions in the whole of Britain. They were just pushed back into Wales. It's the old Brythonic language. It's a different branch of Celtic languages than the Galoidal Irish and Scottish, yeah.

Though some of the words are the same. And the interesting thing about Wales was a very different musical tradition. Because in Ireland, you have this efflorescence of music and song and dance and instruments, ancient and new ones that they brought in like the bouzouki from Greece, which is now a traditional Irish instrument. In Wales, they had this very fierce, venomous form of Christianity come in in the 18th century

in which they burned all their musical instruments on the village greens. And all of the music and traditional music went into the chapel, which is why you get this incredible harmony and choir-like singing at Welsh rugby matches. You have 60,000 people singing all in harmony and even in descant.

It's absolutely overwhelming. So it's just in the genes there. I remember the first night I was in Wales as a student, there were three guys came out of the pub all legless, leaning on each other, having had so much to drink. They could barely stand up, but they were walking, supporting each other, but singing in absolutely perfect three-part harmony as they went down the street. That was a representation of the power of that singing culture. And then the names that are there in the landscape, you know, Carneth dwelling, Carneth death, it's Carneth uchath, Aldeca nedi droskull. They're names that speak from the landscape.

If there are four corners through a field, three of them will have names in Wales. They're very old names and they describe things that happened there or animals or birds that lived in that place. To this day, the population is still Welsh speaking. So that was very good for me to be amongst a very different culture and people. It's very austere, the Welsh culture, and plutonic, it's kind of drawn in and hidden. It's not like the Irish culture. It's a culture to deeply respect. It's had to draw itself in in order to preserve itself from England because there's no body of water protecting it from English culture or English hegemony as there was in Ireland. And so the protective layer is all psychological in Wales.

So they keep themselves to themselves more. And it would take you a while to open up a real conversation with a Welsh speaking Welsh person and have it be natural and real. If you were a Sys, which means a Saxon really, in Welsh. But I did that with the farm on which I lived. I got to know the Welsh farmer there and his family. And looking after sheep, I learned I have a very large vocabulary of bad words in Welsh. And I know how to pronounce all the place names,

but I never learned how to hold a conversation. So yeah, it is remarkable. It's remarkable how many England's are within England, actually. Think of Yorkshire and Northumberland, you know, the Liverpool culture, all the accents that go with it, the accents change, still to this day. Scotland is on the same land mass as well, yes? Yeah, North, yeah, and the Scots are another. And how is that different? They're their own, very own people, very kind of,

they have a powerful traditional music inheritance. There was a very, very strong form of fundamental Christianity came in also in the 1500s with John Knox, and it destroyed a lot of the rich tapestry of Catholic life there. But what it did was pave the way for the Scottish Enlightenment and for writers and thinkers, John Hume and various, the Edinburgh Scottish Enlightenment. My grandparents on

my father's side came from Scotland, so white with a Y is the Scottish side of me. And my grandmother's people were herring fishers. They were nomadic. They had their own costume. And the men were all out on the boats and the boats would move with the season. So they would have one part of the season up in Peterhead in Scotland, one part of the season in Hull in Yorkshire and one part of the season in Yarmouth. And the men and women in these costumes would move through those three cities through the year. They would be gutting the fish ashore. And so in the First World War, when the Germans started sinking fishing boats, that all came to an end. And my grandmother and her family were caught in Hull, which was Yorkshire. And then my great-grandfather, on my father's side,

was invited down as a gamekeeper from Scotland when it was fashionable to have a Scottish gamekeeper, just like Queen Victoria had. So he was brought down on a gamekeeper on the local land of the big house, where I later used to creep in a couple of generations later, and I'd be thrown off by the gamekeepers of that generation. My grandfather, great-grandfather, used to do the same thing.

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Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn. Tell me something irrational you decided to do. Well I suppose it was irrational to think that I could live a life like Jacques Cousteau as glamorous and incredible as he did. And somehow with a lot of visible and invisible help, and I did get a lot of help, I found this incredible job in the Galapagos Islands and lived out much of what I'd seen in living out. And it was really astonishing. So studying marine zoology wasn't irrational,

but the dream I had in marine zoology was irrational enough to the independent observer. And then, of course, going full-time was a part. As I always say, people don't rush up to you slapping you on the back saying, great career move, David. Do you think in both cases it was the naive exuberance that allowed you to do it? Yes, yeah. It's like you didn't know you couldn't do it.

Exactly, yeah. It's like you didn't know you couldn't do it. Exactly, yes. But I did have certain experiences whereby I felt confirmed and seen. One of them was my teacher at Matfield Grammar. A grammar school in Britain is a secondary school actually, 11 to 18. And he was a genius teacher actually and he really took me aside and he said, you have a special gift and you need to follow it. And I felt anointed, you know, I felt mitzvahed by him as if I'd been given something that

I now, like a scroll, invisible scroll that I now carried. And I carried that even through my, when I stopped writing while I was doing marine zoology, when I was in Galapagos. I carried it by reading lots of poetry still. And then I picked it up again when I was 27. And then when I was 31 or 32, I gave my first talk at a place called a cinema on Monterey Bay to an audience 600 strong. And I went through all kinds of psychosomatic symptoms before I went on stage. I was deathly ill for four or five days before I could hardly move. And in fact, when they came to wake me and my chalet to go to speak, I was, I

felt like someone had pulled the plug and I was walking in front of a firing squad 600 strong. But within minutes of being on stage, all of the symptoms fell away. And my memory was flawless. And in the middle of that talk, I felt as if I heard the trumpets blare and say, this is what you're supposed to do for the rest of your life. Wow. So that was another irrational moment. And it was the moment where I went back

and resigned from my job directing an educational program at a center in the Northwest and went full time. Was nothing in the calendar and nothing in the checkbook. So I lived very, very, very simply for a good few years, actually. Do you still get butterflies when you get up in front of people? No. How long before that dissipated? Part of what that teaching was

was that I couldn't prepare to go on stage, but once I was on and I was in contact with the audience, there was no problem. So it was teaching me in a way that I had the gift that I could be walking through an airport, someone could tap me on the shoulder and say, could you come through this door and speak to 600 people for two hours? And I was taught that I could do that.

So the more I built my repertoire, the more I worked, the more real it became. So I don't get nervous, but I get very, very attentive. I go into a state of deep attention before I go on stage. And when I walk on stage, I have a sense of absolute physical contact with the atmosphere of the place. And I'll often just walk and stamp my foot on the ground, you know, and make contact, just hold the silence.

And you can feel everyone go, whoa, OK. People can tell, you know, when you're there and when you're serious. Yeah. When the French tell you that you're très serrilla, it's a compliment when you're serious. When the French tell you that you're très sérieux, it's a compliment when you're very serious. Oh, je suis très sérieux, you know, I'm very serious. It means you take your art form sincerely to heart,

and you don't want anything to get in the way. So in France, it's often used about about chefs around their food. So I feel when I'm going on stage, even if I start with a joke, you know. But often I'll just start straight in with the poetry, with a line, a few lines. And then out of that, the whole thing starts to evolve. I might have a title I'm working with. I'm going to branch into that theme in my own way. And if you do it in the right way, people forget about what the title was anyway. When you're in it, as long as you're making contact

and people are going, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, then you're doing the work. You're in the midst of the art form. And it'll be different from night to night, just because you're not up there scripted. Yes, the listening's different, and depending what theme you go into a poem with, and how you emerge out of that poem,

really influences the way you go into the next piece. You could do the same repertoire, I almost never do, but you could do it and the narrative that runs through them would be different. Just because of my new variations that take you off into different emphases and colorations. What I'm trying to do also is though, is begin with a theme, elaborate it,

and then return to it in a deeper way towards the end so that everyone feels as if you've stepped onto the ground that you first introduced them to and they feel as if they've been, well to change the metaphor, they feel as if they've been fully marinated in the experience and the theme. But my diagnostic of when things are going well is it feels like a disappearance. I disappear, the audience disappears, and there's this live edge between, that's where the talk is being given,

out of the listening and out of the silence. That's when you can hear a pin drop in the quiet after a poem, sustain the silence as long as you can. It's like water flowing downhill and filling all the hollows and you don't flow on until the hollow is filled. And then when it's full, you go on into the next word or the next narrative. Does it depend on the size of the audience or the size of the room or is it something else?

Something else really, there's an intimacy. I mean, people should feel as if you're speaking to them individually and that's often one of the things that people say when they're lined up afterwards in your signing books. It felt as if you're speaking just right to me in my life at this moment. That's one of the greatest compliments. So So to establish intimacy, to establish a live physical sense of everyone being here and everything being remarkable, and we've all just woken up to the fact, you know, together at the astonishing, miraculous and also absurd, humorous nature of reality all at the same time. How many years have you been practicing Zen?

Since my mid-twenties, seriously. How would you say it has remained the same over those years and how would you say it's changed your relationship to it? I'm less fussed about it. In my last essay in the next book is Zen, under Z, yeah, under Z. And the first line is Zen, it's a complete fraud. You know, because it's a word,

it's really a very seductive word. Zen speaks to us of beautiful spaces, spaciousness, polished wooden floors, bronze bells, superb design, quiet. But really, Zen is the invitation to heartbreak. And I say in the essay, Zen always begins and ends in tears. The first tears are for your body trying to sit in that position.

And then the second set of tears are for the breakdown that occurs in following the invitation that's made by the practice and by the koans, the know, the heart-breaking, heart-filling and heart-breaking questions. One of the things I say is Zen begins and ends in heartbreak. What happens after heartbreak is not, it's not possible to describe in words what happens after the heartbreak, so all you need to know going into Zen is heartbreak. To begin with, it's like the seductive lover who lures you in and then runs off with another person, in a way, because the word is so beautiful and so hip and remains beautiful and hip, no matter how many times we use it. Just the nature of the, and beauty of the word itself.

To begin with, Zen held all the glamors of, first of all, the rigor of it, sitting like a mountain. As they say, body like a mountain, breath like the wind, and mind like the open sky. That's sitting Zen. And then all the accoutrements, you know, the black robes and the black cushion and the white wall that you're facing and the walking and the kinhana, as it's called, and then the dokasan, the interviews with the zen master. Now I just more or less don't think of the word zen. I think I just go to the direct experience of walking around, which is available to me

in many ways, like my writing is now available to me, which the writing wasn't available. I'd have to sit down and work until it came. Now it's so close to me. It's just seconds before something recognizable is emerging, something good and surprising. And it's the same thing with what I used to call Zen practice. I only need to walk across that courtyard outside there, fall into quiet, and everything's coming alive.

As you've gotten less fussy with it, it has become more ubiquitous in your life. Would you say that? Yeah, everything is. Everything is practice, really. Where I used to have a Zen master, Eight Kim Roshi, at the end of a Sashin, you know, seven days set. You used to say, actually,

Sashin starts tomorrow when you leave. When you leave the Zen, don't go out into that world. Yes. You take. That's the real practice. Yes, yeah. How did you decide to put the essays alphabetically in the book? I just felt it was easy and clean.

And it solved any problem about what order they should go in. I mean, where do you put honesty and friendship? Do you prioritize one above the other or? So it just felt clean and also easily found. Yeah, so, oh, it's alone. It must be near the beginning. Zen is probably right at the end of the book. And if I remember a word like vulnerability, I can look straight down, see that it's towards

the end, the page number, or I can just flip through at the end. So I like the accessibility of the, and the simplicity of alphabetical order. Do you consider it all how the book reads as a book as opposed to a series of essays? I think it's, it would be a very fierce read to go through from beginning to end. Almost too much, I think it would be a very fierce read to go through from beginning to end. Almost too much, I think.

I think to dip in, chew something out, that's the way I read them now, actually. I'll go, oh, I need to read honesty again, you know? Because I've lost, just lost the essence of what I said, you know, and you go back. And if I've written it properly, you should feel as if it's enough for the day. Yes.

Yeah. It's the mixture is so rich. And some of them, you just need a couple of paragraphs, really. Yes. They're meant to be as they say, an island, the pure drop, a single malt essence of something.

Can you share a nighttime poem with me? I can, yeah. Now that the shades of night are falling fast. This is a piece called Sweet Darkness. And I wrote it out of experiencing the fact that when I sat at this writing desk at this landing at the top of the stairs with a window at my side, during the day I had a completely different relationship to my surroundings than I did when I was writing at night.

And I realized that I had a different horizon not only outside the window, but also on the page. You have night thoughts. And many of the old fears that accompany our ancient relationship with the night also, and vulnerabilities appear. So I wrote this poem as a hymn to the night and a hymn to that horizon which is hidden from us in a way in the night. So sweet darkness, when your eyes are tired, the world is tired also. When your vision is gone, no part of the world can find you. It's time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your home tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.

You must learn one thing. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free and give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. The great German-speaking poet Rilke has this astonishing poem called Do Dunkelheit, You Darkness, in which he's looking at a landscape, and there's a small fire in that landscape.

And he realizes that there's this immensity of darkness, but because he's a human being, his whole focus is on this one point of light. So he says, du dunkelheit hast der ich sterme, ich liebe dich mehr als die Flamme, welche die Welt begrenzt, indem sie glänzt in ergen imen Christ.

You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world because the fire makes a circle of light so that no one sees you anymore. But the darkness holds everything, animals and shapes, even myself. And it is possible a great energy is breaking into my body. I have faith in the night, he says. In German it's even more powerful because he has this rhyming. He says, und es kann sein, eine große Kraft ruht sich in meiner Nachbarschaft. Ich glaube an Mächter. That's right. The rhyme comes earlier. It's Menschen und Mächter.

So everything that's in the darkness, there are animals and shapes, people and powers, Menschen und Mächte, powers. This word power in German, Mächte, Mächtes power. And he rhymes it with Nächte, which is nights at the end, so it's really powerful. Menschen und Mächte und es kann sein, eine große Kraft, rote sich in meiner Nachbarschaft. It's really powerful. Mention on this Kanzhain, on the Grosskraft, in the original German he says, breaks into my neighborhood, which is very German. In a German neighborhood, everyone's keeping eyes on everyone else's behavior. So this is something strange coming into the neighborhood.

I translated it as breaking into my body. I have faith in the night. Roker's books were some of the first books that Hitler burned in the piles of he didn't want this relationship with the ordered daylight hours. He didn't want people having their own horizon in a way, which couldn't be seen by anyone else. So I think both in the sense of praising the night and in the constellations essays, I'm basically trying to convey an experience I've had that any quality that a human being feels has its place in the constellation of what it means to be fully human. So even things we don't see as being good things like being jealous, being angry, sulking,

being exiled, they're actually all inverse calibrations of the way we're attempting to belong to the world. And to feel them fully is to transform them and put us in a better relationship with this incredibly difficult and miraculous world that we live in. incredibly difficult and miraculous world that we live in. And if we don't look at that shadow aspect,

we miss the full picture. One doesn't exist without the other. Exactly. They make each other. Yes. Yeah, we're at that meeting place. First of all, you have to have confidence in the person who's going to meet the world, but then you have to let go of the very thing that you gain confidence in in order to meet, to undo yourself, to be undone. That's that fiery edge of disappearance.

It's like what we discussed before about belief. Always starting from the beginning. There's a Goethe poem that's very powerful about it. It says, Zag des Niemann, nur den Beil. Tell a wise person or else keep silent. For those who do not understand will mock it right away.

I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death. In the calm waters of the love nights where you have begotten, where you were begotten, a strange silence comes over you as you watch the silent candle burning. Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness and a desire for higher love making sweeps you onward. Distance cannot make you falter. Now arriving in magic, flying and finally insane for the light, you are the butterfly and you are gone. And so long as you have not experienced this to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

Wow. I'll finish with a night poem. This is a night poem from the fact that it occurred inside a dark interior which was a temple high in the Himalayas. When I'd been there previously, I'd fallen sick with amoebic dysentery and spent three days and nights in a yak manger having visions and fever and delusions and also remarkable breakthrough experiences. But while I was there, I'd heard about this temple, Temple of Braga, and that it had these astonishing carvings there of bodhisattvas, Buddhist saints. But I was too weak to make the trek up to the temple and see it. So I had to turn around and go back down the valley and leave my friends. But seven years later, I came back again, and this time in springtime with all these

wild hyacinths in the meadows. And I was with a group of nine people I was bringing, and we found this old lay monk who had the key to the monastery after an adventure. And he took us in, and we were in the vestibule. And we're all in the darkness in the vestibule, and it's absolutely pitch black. And we're all trying to find the single flashlight that we know someone has in one of the bags. Only one person's got a flashlight. And in the meantime, we're all talking to one another.

I know I don't have it, so I'm not looking. And I think I'm talking to a person, but suddenly my eyes got used to the dark. And I'm actually talking to this fierce Vajrapani guardian carving, which when I saw in the darkness, when my eyes became used to the dark, I just about jumped out of my skin. Wow. Because the Vajrapani means diamond water. It's a half human, half demon.

It's drinking blood from a skull cup. And it's got a spear pointed right at your heart. And I felt like that spear skewered me. But the interesting thing was, you know, the classic description of the Vajrapani is actually she and he is half woman, half man. He she is there for you to keep your fears outside. But I had a primary experience of being skewered in the very fear I felt when I leapt out of my skin. I saw it as the carver meant you to see it in total innocence, and it terrified me.

And I said, oh, he's saying to me, bring that very fear you felt when you saw me into the temple as if it skewered it on the edge and said this. And then just at that moment we found the flashlight, the lame monk who was leading us had his beads in his hand and he led us down the corridor and there was the Buddha with the mudra of Beckoning. And then we were led into this sacred space, you know. He lit all these yak butter lamps and the place filled with incense and yak butter smoke. And then we all looked up at once and around this high shelf were all of these astonishing

carvings in lotus position or half lotus, these faces looking down at us. And I felt this wave of emotion pass through all of us because these faces were so full of compassion and love. And we all felt it, we saw it all at once in that candlelight. And we stood there for the longest time in silence. And afterwards I said, what was that? And immediately I said to myself, we saw so much love in these wooden faces,

and our malleable visages are so often set against the world. You know, the human face is so often concreted and set against the world. And here were these wooden faces that were full of mobility, love, and compassion. So I wrote this piece to get to the bottom of it. Whenever I recite the piece, I'm back in the darkness of that temple, filled with the yak butter, candlelight, and the smoke rising like incense around us and

then seeing these faces looking down. So this is called the Faces at Braga. In monastery darkness by the light of one flashlight the old shrine room waits in silence while beside the door we see the terrible figure, fierce eyes demanding, will you step through? And the old monk leads us bent back, nudging blackness prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lamps and bow, eyes blinking in the pungent smoke. Look up without a word, see faces in meditation,

a hundred faces carved above, eye lines wrinkled in the hand-held light. Such love in solid wood, taken from the hillsides and carved in silence, they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. Engulfed by the past, they have been neglected, but through smoke and darkness they are like the flowers we have seen growing through the dust of eroded slopes. Their slowly opening faces turn toward the mountain, carved in devotion. Their eyes have softened through age, and their mouths curve through delight of the carver's hands. If

only our own faces would allow the invisible carver's hands to bring the deep grain of love to the surface. If only we knew as the carver knew how the flaws in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core. We would smile too and not need faces immobilized by fear or the weight of things undone. When we fight with our failings, we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself and wrestle with the guardian fierce figure on the side of good and as we fight, our eyes are hooded with grief and our lips are dry with pain. If only we could give ourselves to the blows of the carver's hands, the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers, feeding the sea where voices meet, praising

the features of the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away until we, growing younger toward death every day, would gather every flaw in celebration to merge with them perfectly, impossibly, wedded to our essence, full of silence from the carver's hands. Thank you.