The One You Feed - The Power of Listening and Interconnectedness with Jane Hirshfield

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

In this episode, Jane Hirshfield shares her extraordinary capacity for deep introspection and exploration of interconnectedness. You’ll hearJane read some of her beautiful poetry and discover how through her words, she is able to make profound connections between human experiences and the larger universe.In this episode, you’ll be able to: Experience the enlightening potential of appreciating small daily joys and how they can heighten your overall happiness Explore the art of embracing life’s curveballs while learning to capitalize on these difficult situations for personal growth Discover the captivating power of poetry as a medium for personal transformation and sharpened perception Foster a heightened sense of interconnectedness, enabling you to dissolve boundaries and enrich your understanding of self Acquire the skills to navigate through tough periods with grace, hope, kindness, and resilience To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No matter how long you feel like something, if you stay alive, you will eventually feel something else. You know, it is part of living a human life to experience these emotions, the ones we want, the ones we don't want. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance

of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jane Hirshfield, an American poet, essayist, and translator known as one of American poetry's central spokepersons for the biosphere and recognized as among the masters writing some of the most important poetry in the world today. Jane is a 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Her work has been translated into over 15 languages. Today, Eric and Jane discuss her new book, The Asking. Hi, Jane. Welcome to the show. It's wonderful to be talking with you. I am really excited to have you on. As I said to you

earlier, I have known of your work for many years now. And I believe a long time ago when I started thinking about who would be good guests on this show, your name was on a very, very early list. So it's really great that we're able to make this happen. And we're doing it around the release of a new book of yours called The Asking, which is new and selected poems. So it's sort of some new poems and a collection of a bunch of your older poems. And we'll be reading some of those as we go along. But let's start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent, and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it is very close to my heart and my life's work because it is so much a story about working with the intentions, working with vow, working with how we turn our awareness being basically the tiller of our lives, of our experience. And I wanted to bring you what I think will be a rather unusual response from one of your guests, which is a particular story about this very thing, which then turned into a poem.

So I'm going to read you the poem first and hope not to baffle readers, and then I will give you the event behind it. and then I will give you the event behind it. So the poem is called The Bird Net, and it's from the most recent book before The Asking, a book called Ledger. The Bird Net. I once decided to pretend to be angry.

Then I was. As a bird is caught in its birdness before it is caught in the bird net, the bird might be counted, tagged, released. The bird might be eaten. It took hours for the shaking to leave my body. Body of air, body of branch, what earth's yellows and nectars were made for. So what happened that evoked this poem was I was teaching at a writer's conference, and I won't say where so as not to malign the conference. The cooks were a little careless about something. So I've been a vegetarian for over 50 years now. And somehow I discovered, maybe they had actually just listed the ingredients,

but the vegetarian option for a meal for the conference, and we were all eating out of the cafeteria, of course, had beef stock in it. And I saw this and I thought, well, you know, that's not very acceptable. And then I decided, okay, I am just going to strategically pretend I'm very angry because that will make an impression on them and then they will not do this again. And so, as the poem says, I decided, you know, I'm not that angry. I'm used to it. I've seen it all the time. Friends have served me risotto and they've said, oh, it's wonderful. I made a homemade chicken stock. And I've sort of gone, oh. But I faked anger. And what I discovered as I was enacting my anger was that first I really felt angry, and then I literally was shaking for hours internally afterwards, because I am not in general a person who,

when I feel anger, this is something we can talk about later in the podcast, I think. How do we work with things like anger? How do we work with the uncomfortable emotions? But it's really rare for me to yell at anybody. And I was so upset by having done it that I just felt the effects of it and how hard it was to physiologically change my state of being after having fed the wrong wolf, basically. And it was a great lesson to me that, you know, maybe somebody who's a better actor than me can pretend to be angry, but I cannot. It is not something that I am able to do without feeling the after effects of it. And it also made me question a little bit, was this really such a strategically accurate choice? Do you have to be angry in order to impress on someone that maybe you don't put beef stock in the vegetarian

entree? So anyhow, that was just such a clear example to me of which wolf do you feed? What are the after effects of that? And that, of course, is what this is all about. how do our lives turn out depending on the choices that we make and the awareness that we can actually make a choice at all in these matters. That's what practice is. That's what the mind of malleability is about. Yeah. I mean, that's such a great story because it speaks to what I often think about, which is sort of the interplay between behavior, thought, and emotion. Because they all influence each other. We know how thought can influence emotion. I think about something that is unpleasant and I suddenly feel yucky inside my body. We can often think about how we'll just wake up in a mood, you know, an emotional state and our thoughts sort of take on that color. But our behavior is another very reliable way of moving things. And we talk on here

a lot about that behavior being a way to move ourselves in a positive direction. But you've given such a great example of that behavior, how it can move us in a negative direction and cause us to feel and take on what we are pretending at. And I think that's why any program of growth really has to address all three of those core elements because they're all critical. And if we look at most of our psychological traditions and spiritual traditions, they are most of them addressing all three of them in their own way. Yeah. And, you know, we have all heard the very simple saying, if you want to be a Buddha, act like a Buddha. Yeah. And Americans, especially, we often have doubts about this particular piece of advice sometimes because we have doubts about, you know, fake it until you make it. We have thoughts about sincerity and insincerity. And many of us,

I think, especially in the current culture, do feel the necessity for truth-saying, speaking the actuality of experience. And I think it's really important for those of us who are on the path of practice, on the path of trying to figure out what is skillful means, what works, what turns out well, what doesn't, at a time when there is so much to feel so many different emotions about. For me, this experience that's held in that poem was a real teaching of the penalty of running that experiment. And that for me, because it is not who I want to be. And the emotion of, you know, tiny outrage, the little foot stomping person saying, they did what? Weren't they even thinking? That's useful information. It's useful information for me, don't eat the dish. It's useful information for the cooks next time, you know, do something else. But how the information is carried within a life and

between people, that is the rich field of transformation. And I think for all of us now, one of the central questions is how can we change the way of this world we are part of? It is such an obvious moment of crisis and fracture and too much failure. And to find hope and to find interconnection and kindness and tenderness towards ourselves and one another, it just feels to me, to use a cliched expression, an existential question. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I had a conversation with both my son and my partner, Ginny, on a similar line recently. And it was really about what do you say to who, when, when you encounter people who believe something very differently than you do? And even something perhaps that you find abhorrent, perhaps, you know, and what do

you say when and to what purpose and to what end and to what does it accomplish? And I mean, I don't have any answers to any of those questions, by the way. I think the situations call for a lot of discernment. Is this a time to just sort of be quiet? Is this a time to say something because my internal state needs to say something? Is this a time to say something because I might actually be able to change a mind or a heart? And everybody's different in this, but it's really hard to figure out these days. And it makes me think of something you said. I think it may have been on the Ezra Klein show a couple years ago. And you said poems are not accusatory, right? You know, or to you, you said a good poem is not accusatory, right? In that, because that doesn't tend to lead to dialogue, conversation, change.

Yes. And so I do think is, how do we speak truth? How do we speak truth to power? How do we stand up for what we think is right, but not be so accusatory all the time? Because people don't change that way. Nobody hears anything other than, I think you're a bad person if you are accusatory. And they cannot take in anything else beyond that. We are such tender creatures, really. and appear to be bristling with porcupine quills. I think it is very rare for someone to be so pathological that they do not, in some way, in the hidden seed corner of the heart,

hope for love, hope for safety, hope for survival, all these very basic mammalian things. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think a great deal these days about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And in that pyramid of what has to be established first before the next thing can be established, at the very beginning, housing, food, a sense of safety, a sense of trust. as the foundation, if you can establish that between human beings and within lives, then you can begin to have a conversation about the next things which have to do with justice and ethics and art and joy and abundance and mystical ecstasy. It would take a real saint. Well, actually, this is part of the stories of the saints is those who can preserve their sense of mystical union under the direst of circumstances. That is the very definition of a saint. So I heard a conversation you had that went up on

the podcast very recently. By the time this airs, it won't be so recent. But you were talking about St. Francis and the wolf, and that the wolf is not tamed, the wolf is heard. That is the transformation. It is not force, it is not domestication, it is not domination, it is listening. And the quality of our listening to one another and the intentions of our listening to one another, I think is as important as the quality of our saying and of our actions. Yes. Yeah. I mean, if you look at nearly any theory of communication, right, they all start from you have to have safety or there is no dialogue, you know, and the vast majority of public conversations I see these days start immediately from a place of unsafety. Like start there. It's not even where you're like,

well, I've got to watch to see if we head into territory where somebody feels unsafe. It's like, that's the jumping off point. It just goes downhill from there. I agree. I was wondering if we could maybe talk about something that I think is central to your work. I can see it in your work and I've heard you say it. It's been a key theme of my life. I'll just read something you said. You said, a task for me has always been to make that sense of myself larger and larger, less fixed and less in the grip of the narrowest forms of self-service and more available to the larger interconnection, which we are equally and indelibly a part of. And I see that all through your work and my origin story, a little bit of

being a homeless heroin addict at 24. I remember very clearly when I read this section in the AA big book that said, selfishness, self-centeredness, that we think is the root of our problem, you know, and this bondage to self. And ever since I saw that, that has been my thing. It's like, how do I lessen that bondage of self? And so I was wondering if you could just sort of share a little bit about that in any way that you want to. So I remember very little of anything. I have a lifelong terrible memory. I can't quote most of my own poems by heart, let alone poems by other people. But there's one line that I wrote when I was 17, I think, that has always stayed with me and is directly about your early realization as well.

And I don't think the poem that it was part of was very good, but the line has stayed with me and it was, to define the meaning of we is to find a life of a kind. And for me, this has also been lifelong central because what I mean by we, what I want to mean by we, and what I say when I use that pronoun is all of us. I do not want a boundary of family, location, identity, nation. As I've come to say recently, I'm willing to have my we be boundaried by, you know, the top of the atmosphere of the planet. You know, Earth, that's okay. You know, all of us here on earth, but I don't even mean just the humans. I mean the animals, I mean the plants, I mean the mushrooms, I mean the virus, I mean the rocks, I mean the waters. That this is the we that we are part of. Lin Margulis called it the Gaia hypothesis,

Margulis called it the Gaia hypothesis, that just as we think of these human bodies as being an entity, and yet within our human bodies, there are so many different beings having their own lives, enjoying themselves. And to them, our human form is as the planet is to us. They might be aware of it, but it's pretty irrelevant. They're just busy being the microbiome. I have a poem that's kind of about this, if you would like to hear a poem. Yes, I would love to. I think that's great. So two of the recent books have these poems which begin, and I think it's rather, you know, it's kind of funny given what we're talking about. They begin with the title, My Something or Other, you know, my this, my that. And yet what they are all about is enlarging and changing and kind of exploding the idea of the meanness of our lives towards the largeness, the complexity, the interconnected, bigger systems of our lives. So anyhow, this is a poem

called My Proteins. And it began with a story in the Science Times saying that scientists had figured out how itch works, which was quite recent. I think it was 2013 that they figured out how itch works. So it starts with that, but then it moves on to what was then also a fairly new concept, although most people know it now, this concept of the microbiome, that there are hundreds of millions of independent lives within us who are actually creating our moods, our intelligence, our day-to-day experience, our health, our vibrancy, our resilience. So anyhow, my proteins. They have discovered, they say, the protein of itch, natriuretic polypeptide B, and that it travels its own distinct pathway inside my spine, as do pain, pleasure, and heat. A body, it seems, is a highway, a cloverleaf crossing, well-built, well-traversed, some of me going north, some going south. Ninety percent of my cells, they have discovered, are not my own person. They are other beings inside me, as 96 percent of my life is not my life. Yet I, they say, am they. My bacteria and yeast, my father and mother, grandparents,

lovers, my drivers talking on cell phones, my subways and bridges, my thieves, my police who chase myself night and day. My proteins, apparently also me, fold the shirts. I find in this crowded metropolis a quiet corner where I build of not-me Lego blocks, a bench, pigeons, a sandwich of rye bread, mustard, and cheese. It is me, and is not, the hunger that makes the sandwich good. It is not me, then is the sandwich, a mystery neither of us can fold, unfold, or consume. That's beautiful.

You know, when I was a little kid, I would lie awake at night wondering, okay, I took a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When did it stop being peanut butter and jelly and start being Jane? And of course, this goes up and down the scale. It goes both within our bodies and beyond our bodies. So who are we anyhow? You can't put a boundary around it. You can't put a jail cell around the spirit, and you can't put a border around our lives. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the

opening? Really No Really. Yeah, Really No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. That's the children's version of like the ship of Theseus, you know, right? That's great. It's great. But I mean, it is a truth, everything you just said. And yet it is also so hard sometimes to live that

experience, right? And one of the things I've noticed is that suffering is a contraction. suffering is a contraction. When I'm struggling, that we, or that sense of me is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and it's becoming more and more myopic, which then leads to more suffering. But it's very hard when whatever is going on inside me seems so important or so relevant or so critical to my well-being to broaden back out and say, oh, in the grand scheme of things, what ways have you found that are even partially effective in going from that? I'm in a myopic place where the only thing I seem to be able to think about is myself. And yet that's not the way I want to interact with the world because it's not the reality I have known in the past. It's not the way I know leads to my own well-being and the well-being of others. And yet, I seem like I'm locked in here.

When that's happening with me, I mean, after a little while, I get so tired of myself. I'm like, oh, crying out loud. Something else besides this me, me, me, please. I think this is why in the Buddhist description of things, the first noble truth is named as suffering. And some people think that suffering is something that you name it so that you can try to figure out how to escape from it. And that is part of the description, certainly. But also, I always think of all these noble truths as they are all always present. And so, you don't get to those of us who are not fully enlightened beings, you know, we will always suffer, we will always experience suffering. And the thing about it is it's so painful that the

very pain of it reminds you that you are trying to figure out what you can do about it. This is information. And the information of myopia, contraction, the unbearable muscle cramp of ego when it feels injured, which is something that happens to all of us, you know, continually in these human lives. You know, it is absolutely unbearable. And the very unbearability of it is what reminds you to think, okay, what worked in the past? What have I heard? What can I do? What have I learned? I'm going to give you two answers to the question. One answer is simply something learned through the long, difficult hours, weeks, months of a suffering life is if I feel like I can do nothing else, I can help someone else. I might be in my own doghouse. I am consigned to my own personal hell realm for as long as it's

going to take for me to work my way through that experience. But can I do anything that will help someone else? And that tiny crack is so useful. And one of the things I learned a long time ago in one of the longest and worst spells of abyss of my life was that when I finally emerged from it, of my life was that when I finally emerged from it, even that was helpful because it meant that for the rest of my life, when somebody describes themselves being in such a condition, I know what they mean. That was helpful. But then the second answer I'm going to give, which was quite formative for me was at some point, I began to understand that all the emotions are necessary and essential information. And so when you realize that this hell realm you find yourself in, I mean, for me, the two most excruciating of the painful emotions are one is anxiety and the other is embarrassment or shame. Both of those are

absolutely unbearable. Grief, I'm quite fond of. Grief is a genuine emotion. It is connected to what we love, what we care about. Grief is one of the faces of love. But anxiety and embarrassment, there's almost nothing you can do with them. But at some point, what I began to understand was they were telling me that I had made some mistake and I needed to figure out what the mistake might have been. And then either vow to not repeat it or figure out if there is some way to make restoration, whether it is to myself or to somebody else to whom I perhaps have caused injury. And so when you understand that thisusted, closed lock of the experience. I have a poem that talks a little bit about this. It's a shorter poem. Would you like to hear another poem? I would, but I first have to comment on the line of the muscle cramp of,

I don't know what you call it, constricted ego or whatever. Holy mackerel. That's a poet phrase right there. So descriptive and so much how it feels. It is agonizing. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. We poets, we're always trying to look for the vivid description if we can find one. It's part of the job is, you know, can you describe something as it really feels in your own words, in your own language? So, this is this tiny little poem in which what I haven't said in this description of the emotions as information is the other thing I realized, because if you pay attention to your life long enough, you do realize another of the great Buddhist teachings, which is that everything changes. Transience is inevitable. No matter how long you feel like something, if you stay alive, you will eventually feel something

else. And so, one of the other ways that I've begun to relate to the emotions is they are weather, and weather changes. And so this is a little poem, My Weather. Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious, restless, stunned, relieved. Does a tree also? A mountain? A cup holds sugar, flour, three large rabbit breaths of air. I hold these." So, you know, it is part of living a human life to experience these emotions, the ones we want, the ones we don't want. Yep. And that recognition is often a step in the healing of them is to sort of realize like,

of course, this happens to everybody. One of the things I often find myself in is, this shouldn't be happening to me. I'm doing something wrong. I've somehow missed something in my Zen training, or I didn't read that book clearly enough, or I should be better than this somehow. I should know better than this. I have all these tools. Why do I feel so bad? Which just tightens the muscle cramp, right? Right. Well, you know, one of my favorite lines in all of Buddha's teaching is the 13th century Zen master Dogen who said, a Zen master's life is one long mistake. It's like we all are making mistakes all the time. And to not idealize our vision of other people have got it all solved because no one has it all solved, and at least we've got company.

I think a lot of the good that poems do in the world, out there in everyone's lives, other people's poems for me, there in everyone's lives, other people's poems for me, my poems sometimes for other people, is they tell you that you are not the first to have felt whatever it is. That you will always find someone who has not only experienced this before, but survived long enough to bear witness to it, and to leave you words, and by the ability to read those words of, you know, Gerard Manley Hopkins' most desperate dark sonnet, you know he lived because he wrote the words down. You know he survived because the testimony is there. And that is a great reassurance when, you know, so much of the time, I think for so many of us now,

one of the things that everyone I know struggles with is despair. One of the things that everyone I know struggles with is despair, because the issues of a possibly catastrophically failing biological planet are so ubiquitous, and there's absolutely no assurance that we are going to make our way through this, and also the failures of culture and justice and social compact and economic equity. You know, I came of age at a time of great hope and optimism. The first Earth Day happened in my young adulthood. The first Earth Day happened in my young adulthood. And, you know, all the environmental things we needed to do were clear back then. You know, Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House.

Ronald Reagan came along and took them off. Rachel Carson told us everything we needed to know, not only in 1962, but even earlier, you know, books before Silent Spring. We knew what we needed to do. And I really thought, as you know, I looked at the first photograph of the whole Earth that was taken by one of the Apollo astronauts. by one of the Apollo astronauts. And the environmental movement was gaining traction. And for whatever its flaws were, the summer of love, which I witnessed as a person a little too young to take part in, but I saw so much expansion of the contractions that are equally humanly possible. And then over my lifetime, I have seen these enormous backlashes. And that surprised me. I wasn't prepared for so much backlash, and I wasn't prepared for the strength of it, and I wasn't prepared for the uncertainty of it. But how do we work with despair? I mean, this is a question I

see everybody asking. And it's not by refusing to feel it. It's not by a false optimism. It's by feeling it as a spur rather than an anchor dragging you to the bottom of the sea. To understand despair as a vow to work harder is the only way I can pass through its enormous iron gate and keep breathing. We all want to open our eyes the next day if we possibly can, if we possibly can. And the example of others helps, and the memory that there have been impossibly dark times before in human history, and we somehow got through them. The thought of biological resilience, all of these things are hands that hold mine in the dark. Again, by the time this airs, this will be way in the past, but I'm preparing to teach a workshop at Kripalu this upcoming week about connecting with nature and using it as a path into our spiritual life. And I was working today on

using nature as an example of resilience and probably know this story, but it's one of my favorites, which is that I don't remember what it was Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but basically the scientists said nothing will grow here for 7,500 years, right? But there are a couple of trees that survived all of that and continue to grow. And they are national treasures because they speak to some resilience in nature amidst horror. A beautiful example of like nature finds a way and we can take strength and hope in that. You might be wondering why I'm sitting here with a big smile on my face when you speak of this. I hope it's not because it's not true. No, it's because I have in my own garden a tree which is an offspring from the palonia that survived Hiroshima. Oh, wow. That's so cool.

Wendy Johnson, the great gardener and Buddhist teacher who ran the garden at Green Gulch Zen Center for decades, Wendy went to Hiroshima, gathered seeds from that tree, sprouted them, and gave them to various practice centers. And she had a few left over, and I have one of them in my own garden. Oh, that's so great. That's so great. Well, maybe I will see it one day. That's really special. Yeah. It is an extraordinary thing to be able to caretake. And you know, not many people come here. I lead a quiet and private life, but I have this beautiful garden.

And anybody who does come here and gets the tour of the apple trees and the fig tree and the Meyer lemon tree and what I call the optimistic grapefruit, they also meet the Hiroshima tree. Which is, I'm sorry to say, I didn't have a good place to plant it. And so for years I kept it in its pot. And I think I bonsai-ed it a bit. And so every year, it grows a little tiny bit more. And at some point, I think it will truly gain traction and just shoot up and become a big tree. But it's still a little on the small side. I still cultivate it carefully, make sure it gets some summer water. You know, the California climate is very different from Japan's climate. And so anyhow, it is still alive and I've had it for, you know, probably now 20

years. And this year, particularly, we got a lot of rains this winter. And so the Hiroshima tree is happier and putting forth more new growth than usual. I know that when you've talked about why did you go into Zen training in your 20s, you said it different ways. But one way you said it was, I was looking for an unmediated intimacy with things the way I am with everything, the closer I feel like I am to actual enlightenment. And I was wondering if you could read a poem for us that I felt spoke to this just a little bit, and it's called The Promise on page 214 of the latest book. promise. Mysteriously they entered those few minutes. Mysteriously they left, as if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart, who is always sleepless, suddenly slept. It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that, only a stepping back from the petty. I gazed at the range of blue mountains. I drank from the stream, tossed in a small stone from the bank. Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted. Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted. There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger. The dog's tail wagged a little in his dream. Thank you for asking for that poem. Yeah, I love that poem. I mean, I think it speaks to impermeability also, but also this trust in what life brings us.

Yeah. And there's nothing left to be saved from. Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted. Right. It's just a beautiful poem. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And that goes back to what we were speaking about earlier, of course, that only when people feel this flood of the perfection of things as they are,

whatever is included in that, can we have that sense of safety that allows you to behave well. I think one of the things which so troubles me about some of the current discourse in that culture out there and in here, because nothing happens in the world that doesn't happen within each of us, is one can either experience one's life as scarcity and longing for more and hunger, you know, the hungry ghosts of, you know, one of the realms of existence is the insatiable hungry ghost, which is that second wolf in the story, or perhaps the first wolf, I don't know which order you put them in. But the other experience of the world which is possible is the absolute abundance at every moment. There is not a moment when we are not completely surrounded by existence inside and outside. And when you can feel your life as abundance, you behave generously. It's like a spring flowing out of a mountain. You can drink as much of it as you need. You can let the rest

of it flow on. The spring will continue to flow. This is a kinesthetic experience of existence. of existence. And it is one that when I am able to find my way to that sense of the flowing spring, I am not afraid, and I can be generous, and I don't need to sequester anything. When we are continually told that this is a world of us, them, and somebody is going to take away what we have, they're going to come for it. That is the script of people who are trying to use our fears for their own advancement. And I see how effective that script has been. I'm haunted by certain historical things that have happened during my lifetime. The genocide in Rwanda, the fracturing of Yugoslavia into sectarian slaughtering. I saw these things. I read about them. I saw them develop. And people in Rwanda were coexisting and intermarrying and perfectly... It was a

functional culture until one person decided that they wanted power and got on the radio and began frightening people of one another. And out of that mutual fear, what a disaster, what a catastrophe arose because one person had a mouthpiece for raising the specter of the wolf. And it is so easy to fan the embers of fear and division. And how we can counter them, it is less easy to fan the sense of the fountain in us. fountain in us. Because evolution made us susceptible to fear. The amygdala is a very powerful part of the brain. And the Darwinian survival mechanisms are strong. And how you can counter them has to do with how we raise our children. It has to do with the stories we tell ourselves. It has to do with when you walk down the street, are we engaged in a dance of mutual courtesy that allows us not to run into each other? Are we meeting each other's eyes? Do we have the sense of the city as a place of community? That can be increased by any of us in any moment, just by how you conduct yourself when you walk down the street. If someone bumps into you, or if you bump into someone, what is said? And I'm really fast to say, I'm so sorry, are you all right? I noticed in this time

of the great COVID, do you wear a mask? Do you not wear a mask? So I'm still, at the time that we're recording this, which is pretty far into things, I'm still one of the last ones wearing a mask most of the time because I've never caught the virus and I'm afraid of long COVID and I have no problem with masks. You know, they're not uncomfortable. They work. And at least, you know, for me, it has worked rather well. And so I hear stories of, you know, other people who are still wearing masks and they talk about sometimes they go out and somebody looks at them in a way that does not make them comfortable and happy. And I think I go around inside my mask beaming at everyone.

I'm always sort of beaming at people. And nobody has ever, ever said anything mean to me or questioned my mask. I try to model Border Collie, the dog love of my life. And my border collie, oh, she wagged her tail at everybody. Rising mind was this border collie's nature. And so I learned a great deal from Maggie about, you know, what happens when you greet everybody with enthusiasm, openness, and joy. And so, she was one of my great spiritual teachers, my border It's Jenny. You've probably heard me with Eric on some episodes of The One You Feed. I have a question for you. Are you your own worst critic? I mean, when you pay attention to how you talk to yourself, is it just kind of mean? And do you often feel beat down and

just heavy inside? If so, I truly understand the struggle. I used to believe that relating to myself this way was what kept me performing at any acceptable level. And without it, I thought I'd drift off into the deep end and become a failure in pretty much every aspect of my life. But it turns out that's actually one of the inner critic's worst lies, that it helps you. I mean, maybe short term, you get a push and do well, but long term, it's corrosive and it actually keeps you from living to your potential. I've created a free three-part video series that teaches you how to get to the other side of the inner critic like I have, and you can grab it today. Just head to oneufeed.net slash inner critic. I'm sharing this with you as not only an inner critic survivor, but also a certified mindfulness teacher. And you can learn to relate to yourself

differently, living with an inner lightness and not a sense of being at battle with yourself. And life is so much better when you're a friend to yourself. I promise. So go to oneufeed.net slash inner critic for my free mini course. See you in the videos. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves

you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus does tom cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Add some sort of Collie Shepard mutt, and then Ralph was, I believe, mostly border Collie, but he didn't get the smart part of the border collie. Oh, I'm sorry. He got the sweet part. Oh, my goodness, was he sweet. The brains didn't quite come with it. Part of his charm. It's funny. I spent the first 35 years of my life deploring dogs, scared of them. I didn't like them. I actively really didn't like them. And then I ended up with

a dog. I'm going to go through the whole story, although it involves Chris, who's the editor of this show. He basically gave me a dog and has completely changed my life. I've had a number of them now, and they are one of the greatest joys to me. And I agree, great teachers. Great teachers. Even the, in quotes, bad dogs are good teachers because they so demonstrate, you know, well, if you walk around the world growling at everybody else, they're going to growl back, you know, or at least be frightened and pull away rather than move towards. Speaking of animals, you said somewhere you described the complete joyousness of remembering we are animals. Say more about that. That just jumped out at me. Well, I do feel that so much

of our woe and constriction are our human worries. And when they fall away from us, when we are just being in the world, which is what I see all the animals that I know, they're just busy being inside their lives. They're not adding the extra layer of self-doubt, self-questioning, which can be useful. We are human beings. We are fated to live human lives. But the moments of greatest happiness are the moments when we are fully embodied in the moment without adding an extra layer of self-talk or worrying about future or past. To me, it is the very picture of what, again, to go to our shared Zen vocabulary, when one master asks another, what is the face of enlightenment? And the answer is, when I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm sleepy, I sleep. That great simplicity and directness that animals bring to their lives. I've also had a long engagement with horses.

And the wonderful thing about horses is they are such emotional creatures. Whatever this moment brings, a horse is going to respond to. There's no gap between experience and response. And there's such a great integrity and honesty in that. And there's such a great joy in a horse putting its muzzle down to the ground and tearing at the grass, the deliciousness of the grass, the deliciousness of the sun. And then if a fly lands on their back, you see the skin shiver to flick it off, or the tail will come. The immediacy of the lives of animals. And we are animals, you know, it is to our peril if we forget that. There was another poem I was going to ask you perhaps to read, which you just wandered right into the middle of, which is Happiness is Harder. Oh, yes. What is the page for

that? 156, because you referenced that sort of Zen master idea. Oh, yes. Happiness is Harder. To read a book of poetry from back to front, there is the cure for certain kinds of sadness. A person has only to choose. What doesn't matter? Just that. This coffee, that dress. Here is the time I would like to arrive. Today, I will wash the windows.

Happiness is harder. Consider the master's description of awakened existence, how seemingly simple. Hungry I eat, sleepy I sleep. Is this choosing completely or not at all? In either case, everything seems to conspire against it. That poem has a lot to do with something that, again, I think of quite often when I'm thinking about poetry's role in our lives, which is the fundamentally curative sense that comes to us when we believe we have some agency in our lives. Again, the antidote to despair. In the poem, I call it a cure for certain kinds of sadness, but it is also a cure for despair. If there is anything you feel you can do, That is the beginning of restoration. And so there is almost never a time in a human life when there is nothing you can do. And so do something arbitrary and silly.

Read a book backwards. Decide that you're going to wear this rather than that. That is the beginning of agency, and it is the antidote to depression and terror and paralysis. Just do something. And I know for me, one of the times when I came out of the darkest stretch of my life, one of the ways I knew I was emerging from the darkness was I cut some flowers and put them on the kitchen table. I chose that. And so, you know, happiness is harder. Maybe you can't make it all the way to happiness. Like a little inchworm, we rise from the pitches of abyss and move towards happiness. And then the next thing you know, you go, oh, you know, the windows are so much brighter now that I wash them.

And that always makes me happy. I don't do it often enough, but it always makes me very happy when the windows are clear. Because clarity of vision is a great happiness. Seeing truly is a great happiness. Seeing truly is a great happiness. Accuracy is a happiness. And foolishness and whimsy are also happinesses. I came very late to the sense of whimsy in my life. I was quite a serious child. And now, I hang some lights on a tree outside. It makes me happy every time I see them, these glowing Japanese solar lanterns. Every time I a great thing to think about. I was really struck by that. So the last topic that I would like to talk about that shows up in a lot of your work is this idea of, you say, a lot of my poems are about finding a way to say yes to what I would

rather say no to. And wow, say a little bit more about strengthening that muscle. I'm glad you have raised that topic because it truly is one of the lifelong tasks for me. And it will never be solved because there will always be things that we wish didn't happen. because there will always be things that we wish didn't happen. We wish we could refuse, but we can't refuse them. So maybe I will tell you about a poem that changed my life, not written by me, written a thousand years ago by a Japanese woman poet, Izumi Shikibu. And I co-translated her poems for a book called The Ink Dark Moon with a Japanese-speaking woman, Mariko Aratani, who would give me the literals of the poems. I would write down the Japanese words in our alphabet. I would go home with every possible meaning for each of the words. And I knew as I received these poems from her, I knew that this particular poem, there was obviously something there. I had the grammar, I had all the words, I could translate it superficially, but I also knew I didn't understand yet what it meant. And that only when I understood what it meant would I be able to actually turn it into an English language poem. And so the poem was this, although the wind blows

terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house. Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house. Now, in poetry, a house is almost always, you know, both an actual house and a sort of figure for your own life. Houses are where our lives take place. The moon in Japanese poetry can mean anything from the fullness of a love affair to Buddhist awakening. And what that poem was saying was, if you wall up your house so tightly that no cold wind can ever come in, nothing you don't want can reach you. You will also be walling yourself off from everything you do want and hope for and wish. Only by our permeability to the difficult are we available to our permeability

to the largeness, the great, the beautiful, the transcendent, the non-self, the whole world, the sense of abundance, all of those things. And so reading that poem in my early 30s, as I co-translated that book, it was transformational in its teaching. And it became something which has been reenacted in different ways in my own work ever since. And so I'll give you one poem of my own that holds this same gesture because you have to re-find it again and again. These kinds of knowledge are not permanent. You can't build a lasting structure. You have to keep rediscovering them each time. So this is a poem remembering my time at the monastery, Tassahara, the three years I spent in that Zen monastery. We had no electricity, we had no heat in the cabins, We had no hot water in the cabins.

And somehow, even though I don't like being cold and I don't like cold water, I have preserved the practice of only washing my face in cold water in the morning ever since those three years. So the poem is called rather bafflingly, the title is Acedery Fragrance. Rather bafflingly, the title is Acidory Fragrance. Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water, not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. That is the work of a lifetime.

And to your point, we come back to it again and again. I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. I'm actually going to ask you to read another poem of yours in the post-show conversation that speaks to this also called The Weighing. Oh, yes. Yes. That's an absolutely central poem for me. I could have read that one, but I'm glad we saved it. We saved it.

So listeners, if you'd like access to the post-show conversations, get access to that and all our other benefits by going to oneyoufeed.net slash join. Jane, thank you so much for coming on. This has lived up to my very high expectations of talking to you. So thank you so much. It has been a great pleasure. Thank you. So thank you so much. It has been a great pleasure. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.