The Tim Ferriss Show - #781: David Whyte, Poet — Spacious Ease, Irish Koans, Writing in Delirium, and Revelations from a Yak Manger

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

David Whyte (davidwhyte.com) is the author of twelve books of poetry and five books of prose, including his latest, Consolations II, which further explores what David calls “the conversational nature of reality.”Sponsors:GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving: https://givewell.org (If you’ve never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to one hundred dollars before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to https://givewell.org and pick PODCAST and enter The Tim Ferriss Show at checkout.)Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save between $400 and $600 on the Pod 4 Ultra)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Timestamps:[00:00] Who is David Whyte?[06:25] Connecting with Henry Shukman.[10:32] Low times in the High Himalayas and a yak manger awakening.[15:17] The place from where David writes good poetry.[17:22] Invitational speech.[21:55] Catching up with the curve of one's transformation.[27:58] A revolutionary moment reflecting on parameters and regret.[37:41] "Everything Is Waiting for You."[40:54] The secret code to life and the agreed insanity of so-called adults.[46:47] Being found by the world in greater and greater ways.[48:52] Asking beautiful questions.[58:13] "Tan-y-Garth."[01:02:09] Memorizing poetry.[01:08:28] "Zen."[01:22:55] Courage.[01:24:15] How living in a trailer on the side of a Welsh mountain helped David develop as a writer.[01:31:14] Irish koans, French doors, and Tibetan bells.[01:38:30] Poetry as consolation.[01:42:03] The best place to hold a poem.[01:43:07] "Time."[02:00:01] Writing and reading good poetry.[02:04:52] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is tim ferris welcome to another episode of the tim ferris show where does my job to interview world class performers to deconstruct how they do what they do to tease out the habits routines favorite books inspirations and so on you can apply and test in your own lives. I guess today i have wanted to have on for years and in my mind what what he teaches, what he writes, his means of thinking, his frameworks, the way he tilts the lens, the prism of perception ever so slightly, all of these things are incredibly practical. That's my perspective. His name is David White.

You can find him at davidwhite.com. White is spelled W-H-Y-T-E. David White is the author of 12 books of poetry and five books of prose, including his latest Consolations 2, which I highly recommend. You should just get everything that he's written, frankly. But Consolations 2 further explores what David calls the conversational nature of reality. of reality. David holds a degree in marine zoology and has traveled extensively including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon, and Himalayas. We will talk about some of his adventures and how they informed who he is today. He is the recipient of two honorary degrees from Newman University in Pennsylvania and Royal Roads University in Victoria, British

Columbia. David grew up with a strong imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father's Yorkshire and now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. He also has hosted a live online series, Three Sundays, every other month since 2020. And as I'm recording this, I have pages upon pages of notes that I took while David and I were having this conversation. It energized me for so many hours after we finished chatting. I hope it also has that galvanizing inspiring impact on you. You can find David online, Instagram,

Instagram.com slash David J. White. Note the middle initial, David J. White. Note the middle initial, David J. White. And the website again is Davidwhite.com. And we're going to dive right into it. Before that, just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible. With millions of nonprofits in the United States and around the world, how do you find the few that could actually make a big impact with your donation?

Today's sponsor, GiveWell, makes it easy. They've been a sponsor of this podcast for a very long time. I am a huge fan. Why am I a huge fan? Well, GiveWell researches charitable opportunities in global health and poverty alleviation and directs funding to those that have the highest impact. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high-impact giving. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site for free.

They have 39 staff researchers, including researchers with backgrounds in economics, biology, and much more. They spend more than 50,000 hours each year looking for the giving opportunities that will maximize each dollar of your donation impact. You can make tax-deductible donations to the recommended funds or charities and GiveWell does not take a cut. More than 100,000 donors including me, yours truly, have used GiveWell to donate more than 2 billion dollars and that includes Tim Ferris Show listeners who've donated close to 1 million dollars, 960k or so now. to date. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save more than 200,000 lives and improve

the lives of millions more. If you have never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. So you can make your money go further with the help of give well to claim your match go to give well.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferriss show at checkout just to let them know where you heard about this so to claim your match go to give well.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferriss show at checkout again that's give well.org to have your donation matched or to simply learn more check it out highly recommend givewell.org to have your donation matched or to simply learn more. Check it out.

Highly recommend. Givewell.org. This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. I have been using 8 Sleep pod cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. 8 Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod and

I'm excited to test it out, Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically, more on that in a second. First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool, even in a heat wave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that. Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for

the best unwinding experience. And for those snore heavy nights, the pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring. Plus with the Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking, as just one example, is at 99% accuracy. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day.

And if you have a partner, great, you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own ideal temperatures. It's easy. So go to eightsleep.com slash Tim and save between $400 and $600 on the Pod 4 Ultra. 8sleep currently ships within the U.S., Canada, the U.K., select countries in the EU and Australia. This special offer is valid until December 14th. David, such a pleasure to finally meet. And I wanted to give a deep bow to the person who made the introduction.

This is Henry Schuchman. And I wanted to perhaps start with how you first met Henry. How did you guys connect? Ah, that's an interesting foundation from which to step up into our adventure together here, our conversation adventure. Henry Schickman, of course, is a fully fledged Zen master. He's had Inca. He's in the Kaun Yamada Roshi tradition, which is the same tradition I sat in, although

I sat with a lot of masters, different masters. Henry and I met at the William Wordsworth Foundation in the English Lake District. He was poet in residence and I came to give a reading. And we were in many ways two young poetic blades and we got on like a house on fire together. I remember driving all over the place and taking walks with him. And then by sheer happenstance, we found that Oxford was a second home to us. Well, he'd actually grown up in Oxford and Oxford. So from then on, we would meet every Thursday night in the bookbinder's arms pub, and we would talk literature and Zen actually, because strangely enough,

Henry was just getting into Zen in a really fierce way. And I, at that time was the old hand in Zen. So I suppose I was giving pointers or talking about coins, but unbeknownst to me, Henry would soon be driving a Lamborghini passing a Zen Lamborghini, passing me at great speed in the future. But the great thing about Henry was, he was the toast of the literary world in London. He was being published in the TLS, you know, Times Literary Supplement. He was in demand as one of the up and coming poets. And he also had a pipeline of novels. And so when fate took us apart, and

I came back to live in the States full time, and he seemed to disappear. And I tried to find out the number of times where he was. And because I couldn't find anything on him on the internet, obviously, I didn't look hard enough, but I couldn't find anything. So I thought he must have passed away. He must have died because he was so good at what he did. He was so famous as a young poet. It could be the only explanation. And in many ways, he had died metaphorically, he'd gone so fully into Zen, which is, you know, a deep path of heartbreak, as my latest essay on Zen says, he emerged 20 years later, as, as I say, as a fully fledged Zen master, he appeared on the Sam Harris app, and we were both on it together. And so I asked Sam to make the

introduction so we could contact and we were so happy to find each other again. So it's really interesting at this new juncture, having spent so long apart, he's now coming full bore back into poetry and I'm having another round of dedication in my Zen sitting. So the world turns, so we're Zen and poetic bros. And we have the same sense of humor, which is great. And we just did a big day in Santa Fe on the theme of one of my essays, which is the word unordinary. And of course, Zen is always talking about ordinary mind, which is actually extraordinary mind. And so, it's lovely to have him back in my life and to work together just to have the friendship actually is really marvelous.

I'm going to come back and touch on a bunch of things that you mentioned. And part of the reason I wanted to invoke the great name of Henry is because he offered some suggestions. Well, I asked him if he could offer some fun avenues for exploration and he said, totally fine to blame them on me. So I wanted to at least let the audience know who Henry was before I started blaming someone. Lovely. And I'm going to kick off the next stage in the adventure with the following. You had an awakening while half dead with amoebic dysentery and a yak manger in the high Himalayas.

What were you doing there and what happened? Well, I was in a yak manger in the high Himalayas. What were you doing there and what happened? Well, I was in the yak manger because that's the only place the Tibetan family could find for me actually. It was more or less a one room hut that they were in with five children. And I staggered in there at death's door really. And how old were you at the time if you just place us in your life? I was in my mid-20s, or late mid-20s, yes. So that was the only place they could put me. And I was in Delirium in the Yak Manger for three days and three nights, which was a mythic period.

How did you end up there in the first place? Well, I was trekking. I was on the Annapurna trail when it first opened up in the mid 70s. So we were one of the first people along it. And very different experience than if you walked it today, we had experiences that Marco Polo would have had, you know, going in through Asia in the centuries, we were often the first Western a certain people had seen certainly when we went off the main trail and up

the side branches of the and found villages up above in the mountains. And it was one of the in one of those tiny villages that I I collapsed actually a mile or so before I got there and literally crawled in my hands and knees into the hamlet. And this family took me in. I have a piece in my cycle of poems about pilgrimage, about the love of the stranger and how powerful it is. And I've had my life saved by strangers, not only in the Himalayas, but in South America and other places.

There's something very powerful about the stranger's love. And so I was very appreciative of the hospitality this family gave me, even though all they had for me was this. Luckily, it was quite a deep, capacious manger and full of straw and dried yak dung, which is actually quite comfortable in its dried form. It does tend to stick in your hair, particularly as my hair was quite long at that time. And as part of that hospitality, this family had a rice beer, which they brewed themselves and all families in those mountains brew their own rice beer, but some of the rice beer, a family will make is terrible. And they get a bad reputation for their rice beer. But

this family's rice beer was like strawberries and cream. And it was the only thing I could sip for the three days and three nights. It sat in a mug at the end of this manger. And I went through all the different levels of hell that you see painted in all those Tibetan iconography. I had a really powerful experience of many of the images that I had seen. Probably I'd taken them in, you know, being in the Kathmandu Valley and then going into Gompas and temples and I was sitting in them too, in meditation. So I think I'd taken them in in a dreamlike form and then I had this three-day experience of going through many of the experiences that a lot of this very powerful fierce iconography represented. And then it all blew open on the third day and I sat up laughing uproariously and

swaying from side to side with my hands out and the whole family ran out and they all looked at me with their mouths open. And then they all stood in a row. And it was like the scene from the sound of music where all the children are are in a row, you know, with the smallest and the toughtest. And they all bowed at the same time. towards me. It was just as if they just recognized something. Because it's in the air up there, you know, the llamas they would meet the spirituality you could cut with a knife in those mountains.

It was just as if, oh, we recognize this. They all bowed and they just left me alone, no fuss. And that moment of breakthrough was realizing that the whole David White project was completely absurd. The project of David White as self, you mean? Yes. And the name that I'd given myself and that was given to me was just like the name of the river in the valley below the marsy and the river. You were looking at something that was actually already passed that what was real about your identity is actually what's just about to precipitate out of the seasonal edge of your existence that as yet does not have a name. seasonal edge of your existence. That as yet does not have a name. And that is actually the place from which you write good poetry. Also it's that from the unknown below the horizon of your understanding

lying deep inside yourself. Could you say a bit more about that? That place from which you write good poetry, if it's a possibility to elaborate on that at all. Is it a felt sense? Do you know when you're in that place? Oh, yes, yeah, it's a very physical experience. And to begin with, when you're first walking into it, when you're either a young poet or a adherent of some kind of contemplative tradition. It's quite inchoate, it's quite vague. But eventually you get this almost pinpoint sense. It's

there in the classical place in the horror, you know, down in the right below. Yes, yeah. And also in the heart. It's the place that's willing to engage with the fiercest conversations of existence in a way. As the part of you that already knows is going to have to give every last thing away. It's the part of you that lives at the center of the pattern. And this is what Coleridge and Keats called the primary imagination. And the ability to think up new things was only the fancy or the secondary imagination.

So the central physical tonality from which you're able to meet the fierce conversations of existence, that's what Tokurajin keeps as the primary imagination. But it's also Buddha nature. It takes on different names in different experiences. It's a place from which you're useful to other people, either in articulation. And strangely enough, you're useful because your articulation is beginning from a place below the horizon whereby meaning is mediated by language. It's below language, but it takes a linguistic form. That's why if it's good poetry, it's

fresh, it's good literature, if it's good speech, if it's invitational speech, if it's surprising speech, if it's loving speech, if it's affectionate, invitational speech, it almost always comes from that place. Could you say more about invitational speech because in the course of doing research for this conversation, I came across invitational questions. This is not phrasing that I'm familiar with.

Could you define or give examples of what you mean? Well, I often say that all my work is based on the conversational nature of reality. But you could also call it the invitational nature of reality. It's a mutual invitation, the fact that we're constantly being invited out of ourselves into larger and larger territories of self-understanding and understanding about the world, larger and larger territories

of generosity and the ultimate generosity of giving ourselves completely away at the end of our lives, of getting out of the way. I often think that one of the great frontiers of human maturation is where you realize that actually, it might not be a tragedy that you're going to die, the rest of creation could actually be quite relieved to see you go. Your final gift to the world. Exactly. So when you realize that you start getting out of the way sooner, you might as well, you're going to have to anyway.

Yeah, might as well start practicing. And when you think about it, every conversation as its foundation has an invitation in it, when the invitation stops, the conversation really stops. You may still be exchanging blather, but actually conversation stopped. And the other thing is invitation is based on vulnerability. You only invite someone in when you feel you really need help understanding something or actual physical help or loving help all the different forms of help. So you've got this trajectory, the spectrum of qualities which all make up the phenomenology of conversation itself, which is this beautiful Latin word which means inside out, converse. And so to go back to your original question, I work a lot with inner and outer horizons. And we all know the

way out to horizons are so nourishing for us. And there's a lot of medical research now showing that you're much happier when you're looking at a far horizon. You're in New York City.. If you look out, you know, to all the buildings, it's quite nourishing to see that extraordinary landscape, that profile against the sky. And the same with mountains, the same with the city. If you grow up in the Midwest, you grow to love the horizon of the plains. And we all know how wonderful it is to walk through a landscape and watch the horizon come towards us. And the beautiful thing about a horizon is that it it's got something over it. That's the definition and that that

what's over it is the unknown that's inviting you. When I was a child, I grew up in a very hilly part of Yorkshire of an Irish mother and a Yorkshire father. And when I got to about seven years old, I would set myself a new horizon every year that I would try to reach. And I had a constant relationship with horizons that I love. This is a physical horizon. Physical horizons, yeah. But we also have a very physical horizon that's also a non-physical horizon at the same time, insiders.

And that horizon is often not perceived in quite as nourishing a way. We often see that inner horizon as a line of resistance actually, and difficulty. And it's the horizon between what you know about yourself. And as I said earlier, what's just about to precipitate out of the seasonality of your being what's just about to emerge from the leading edge of your maturation that's coming from some unknown place inside you, all of us have the experience of suddenly realizing, Oh my god, I'm a different person. have the experience of suddenly realizing, Oh my God, I'm a different person. I don't have those desires anymore. I don't want those things that steered my life and motivated me for so long. And it can be quite a shock to a person. And the invitation to go below

the horizon from which that revelation has come is often refused. We will stay in the old ambitions because we don't know who we are without those aims and those goals. And we feel as if our life is falling apart and the intuition is correct, actually. If I could interject for one second, just for framing this, I'm curious if this is effectively overlapping with what you're saying. And it might be helpful for people to hear in these words. So I read in an interview that you've done, and please feel free to fact check this, of course, but I'll quote here.

Most people, I believe, are living four or five years behind the curve of their own transformation. Is that effectively different facet or I suppose a compatible facet of what you're describing. Would you mind expanding on that? Yes, I think one of the great disciplines of a human life is to catch up with yourself. This part of you that lies below the horizon of your understanding is the part of you that's already matured into the next dispensation of your existence. It doesn't need the same things

that you think you need at the surface of your life now. And so you know intuitively that if you drop below that horizon, your surface life will fall apart. And so might many of your friendships or relationships, you don't know, they may or they may not, but you're afraid. You're afraid that you're putting things in jeopardy. And this is why we turn our face away from that edge of maturation. And quite often, we've also had the experience of out of circumstances, suddenly pulling the rug out from under us. All the things you've been investing in suddenly fall apart. And sometimes you realize, Oh, my God, I actually, I couldn't have done

a better job of self sabotage than I did over the last years. And it's sometimes it's the it's what you might call the soul's attempt, you know, to break things apart unconsciously on the surface that you refuse to do from your own willpower. And so sometimes, you know, your life breaks down and you hit present reality with such velocity that you break apart on impact. And this is a time-honored way of transformation. But it's very us to go through it that way. There's another way of doing it, which is to stay up with the edge of your own seasonal maturation and that occurs below this invisible line inside you. How do you take that second approach is meditation a primary tool for that? How do you develop the attunement, the sensitivity to sense that?

It's dwelling fully in the body, physical body. And so there are lots of different disciplines around that. We sometimes get forced into it through terrible illnesses I did in the Yak manger in the Himalayas, your outer life falls apart along with your physical body. And you know, when my children were growing up, I used to notice that every time they had a real illness, whenever they emerged from the illness, they'd matured in some way. It was almost as if it marked matured in some way. It was almost as if it marked boundaries and frontiers of maturation. Or you can do it, you know, with this physical dwelling that's in all of our great contemplative traditions, where you stop putting your identity in your thoughts, you go to this deeper,

You go to this deeper, autonomic body that's able to breathe by itself without any will. And from that place, you then inhabit the mind, you then inhabit thought, and you don't give up your intellect. Your intellect just becomes a good servant to what we might call the soul's desires, the faculty of belonging inside you. So to go back to the image of our inner and outer horizons, the ability to put the inner horizon inside you in conversation with the far horizon of your imagination out in the physical world, makes a really powerful conversation. But the really fierce conversation is when you put what's below that horizon inside you, which is the unknown

just about to be known in your life, about who you are and what you want, in conversation with what lies over the horizon of what you're seeing, you know, your ambitions or your desires in the outer world or the actual physical line to which you're going. And when you put those two unknowns together, that's, I think what we've called mystical experience or, or enlightenment in a way. It's a powerful meeting of two unknowns. And your identity is the frontier between them. Where you speak them, is the frontier between them, where you speak them, you know, and in Dharma combat in Zen, the Zen master is throwing out

something from the unknown, and the student is supposed to actually access the unknown to meet it. And almost always they fail. They choose something from their thinking mind, then the real student comes along. And, and that's how you get these marvelous coins and exercises, which are representations of the two unknowns sparking this incredible creative life. And, uh, if we don't come back to it, I will refer people to my first, maybe even my second conversation with Henry Schuchman on this podcast where we spend probably an hour on comments.

All right, yes. If people want to dive into that. Also, the somatic awareness and I don't want to say disentangling, but sort of disambiguating that from the identification with thoughts is very well handled in the way in Henry's app also, which I would encourage people to check out. It's very much a skill development program with a logical progression. So I encourage people to check that out. I would like to come back to conversations and invitational questions. And if you have a better example that comes to mind, feel free to run with it. But I wanted to give people a real world example

of what this looks like in practice. And the particular story that I'm looking at in front of me relates to you having a good old conversation with yourself at a restaurant when you did not have time to go and grab a book from your hotel. I don't know if that is enough of a prompt. Oh yes, yeah, yeah. It was a revolutionary moment in my life actually.

I just, and led to the consolations essays, and led to the writing of the first one with the title Regret. I was in Paris. I'd done a lot of work with a company in Paris. And on my days off, I would do this circuit through Paris that I called my Sunward Walk, where I just started off in the morning towards the east with the sun coming up. And I would follow the sun down whatever street it was shining down. But almost always along the street street you would come across something really fascinating like an eighteen century. I'm museum of the museum of paris are the sculptors house of that artist house are wonderful bakery are. Shark to read and you'd be distracted.

When you came out twenty minutes or an hour later and the sun had moved. So then you follow the sun down that street, even if it's just a one shining behind the clouds. And you go the whole day that way. And it takes you in a clockwise direction across the river and through the southern suburbs of Paris. And I've done this sunward walk probably half a dozen times and never repeated the same journey. And I've done this Sunward Walk, probably half a dozen times and never repeated the same journey. But I was halfway through this walk when my phone rang, and it was the Observer magazine in Britain, the Sunday Observer, which has millions of readers or had. And they wanted me to write something for their philosophical column. And I got quite excited with such a large readership.

But then I got the parameters for it. It had to be a single word title and it could only be 300 words. And I was so disgusted with the parameter. So I said, okay, I'll do it. And I snapped the phone off, you know, and then I, I said, David, get over yourself, you know, they've got their parameters, you've got yours, you know, so and then I said, What if you could write it in 300 words, you know, there's many a moment in a human life where someone has actually changed other people's lives in less than 300 words. So I said, right. And then I started thinking, as I was on my walk, of

all the other parameters that I'd placed upon myself, that I started thinking as I was on my walk of all the other parameters that I'd placed upon myself, that I needed to be in my study in order to write, that I needed two weeks in my study in order to write that I needed another two weeks, one at each end, you know, to decompress from my traveling and speaking and recompressed to go out. And I realized, my God, you know, the number of strictures I put around what I need in order to write, I need silence and eat quiet. And I said to my David, what if you could write everywhere, anywhere. So I got to the end of the walk, and I

booked into this restaurant and I didn't have time to go back to my hotel. I didn't have a book. booked into this restaurant and I didn't have time to go back to my hotel. I didn't have a book and I had no simulating company. So I said, what if you had an entertaining conversation with yourself, David and I asked the waiter, do you have a piece of paper? And he did. And it was a beautiful piece of watermarked paper with gold leaf at the edge of the paper as only the French would pull out. Not the back of a receipt like you get in New York.

Yeah, exactly. And I wrote regret at the top of the page. And I said, that's interesting. Why regret? And this was the title for the philosophical piece I was going to write. And so I, I wrote it. This is the piece actually, it was the first essay I wrote is just very short, the piece that appeared in constellations is just a little longer than 300 words, but not much longer. Regret is a short, evocative, and achingly beautiful word.

Analogy to lost possibilities, even in its brief enunciation, it is also a rarity and almost never heard except where the speaker insists that they have none, that they are brave and forward-looking and could not possibly imagine their life in any other way than the way it is. To admit regret is to understand we are fallible, that there are powers in the world beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past, but of the very story we tell about our present. And yet strangely, to admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins. The rarity of honest regret may be due to our contemporary emphasis on the youthful perspective. It may be that a true useful regret is not a possibility or a province of youth. That it takes a hard-won maturity

to experience the depths of regret in ways that do not overwhelm and debilitate us, but put us into a proper, more generous relationship with the future. Except for brief senses of having missed a tide, having hurt another, having taken what is not ours, youth is not yet ready for the rich current of abiding regret that runs through and emboldens a mature human life. Sincere regret may, in fact, be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, or experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. To regret fully is to appreciate

how high the stakes are in even the average human life. Fully experienced, regret turns our eyes attentive and alert to a future possibly lived better than our past. So unconsciously, I was really regretting all the ways I'd hemmed myself in with all the parameters I felt I needed in order to write. And strangely, just naming those different forms of reluctance released me completely. Suddenly, I was able to write anywhere on trains, boats, the tube in London, cliff sides in Ireland, wherever. And in fact, I got so

excited by the revolutionary aspect that that essay had on my own life, that I thought there must be lots of other words we use in narrow and pejorative ways that we often use language against ourselves as a weapon against change. I got an essay on time there, we were constantly saying, time is our enemy, you know, time is not on our side. Time is slipping through our fingers. Time, if it could speak, which it does speak, actually, but time would be very surprised to find out that it's our enemy. Nothing could happen without the incredible astonishing life giving properties of time itself. So I set off on the adventure

which included writing these essays with the single word titles on vulnerability, honesty, friendship, the body death, shame, in all kinds of circumstances all around the world in my traveling. So that's the story that you called on. It was a revolutionary moment in my life. It's really an interesting, invitational question actually to choose a regret to feel fully. Because often we feel we're disempowering

ourselves with the regret and we're told not to have regrets, but to just plow on. The way forward actually may be through a fully felt sense of remorse over a way you could have been and weren't. A generosity you could have displayed and didn't. And by only experiencing it, you could be precipitated into a deeper form of generosity in the future. Thank you for that. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health.

I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain,

gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one.

Drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. I do want to encourage everyone to read certainly as much as they can of your work, but time, which I have printed out with tons of highlights in my suitcase somewhere, which is right next to me, caught me at the right time, which is another reason why we're having this conversation. I've thought of having this conversation in this forum, on this podcast for many years and for whatever reason just felt

like the right time. What is that time for you now? This is going to sound like a cop out, but it was more of a felt sense and recognition when your name came up again. I think particularly after putting one of your poems in my newsletter, Fibble of Friday, Everything is Waiting for You, your poems in my newsletter, Fible of Friday, Everything is Waiting for You. Yes. It put words to a sentiment that I had difficulty verbalizing, in part because I don't think I'd ever tried to verbalize it, if that makes sense. It never occurred to me to frame it in the way that you did. And I don't want to do violence to your words by picking from the end of this. I don't know if you have this handy, but I could also. Time. I have it. Oh, time. Great. The everything is waiting for you. This is what prompted

I think. Oh, everything is waiting for you. Yeah. Yeah. Would it be too much insult to the work if I highlighted just a few lines? Not at all. I have it in my memory too if you need. Oh, you do? Oh, please. I do. Yeah.

If you do us the honor, that would be beautiful. Everything is waiting for you. You know, it's a very ancient human sense that things are actually just about to come and find you. And they're going to find someone deep inside you that you don't fully know yourself and echoed in the Zen tradition again and again. So everything is waiting for you. Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you're alone, as if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely even you at times have felt the grand array, the swelling presence, and the chorus crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you or the window latch grants you courage. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come. The doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you. And the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing, even as it pours you a drink. The cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you.

Fantastic. Thank you. So I want to highlight the line that stuck out most to me in bold in my mind, which was put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. That's the line that stuck with me because much like these outdated constraints, outdated narratives, outdated stories that are four or five years old as we look at the current sort of horizon internally, let's just say. The feeling of unnecessary burden that we impose on ourselves is something that I feel very deeply and the aloneness as a for instance is and this is something Henry has helped me to really hone in on as a for instance, and this is something Henry has helped me to really hone in on, paying attention to the sensations, the bodily feel of loneliness, maybe the inner narration, maybe visuals, maybe any number of things, but not taking that on with an inherent heaviness with the label of loneliness and the identification as someone

who is lonely is something that has been very enabling for me in the last few years as someone who's felt alone or lonely for a very high percentage of my life, I would say. So thank you for that poem. It really struck me and found it very helpful. And I wanted to have you on this podcast for many reasons, one of which is that I think for, and I don't want to imply that all of us Yanks or knuckle dragging cretins who, frivolous, decorative, but I certainly feel like there's much more to it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to arrive at that conclusion. Yeah. But I wanted to rewind the clock for you, it seems, and I'm reading here. I just want

to read this and you can tell me if this is fact check properly. All right. I had been writing poetry since the age of seven or so, probably under the influence of my Irish mother. I was taken by poetry. I saw it as a secret code to life and I didn't understand how other people didn't see that. I often thought witnessing what passed for adult conversation, great wording, that all these so-called adults were actually inhabiting a kind of agreed insanity. All right, I'll stop there. I would love to hear

you comment on secret code to life, what that means to you, and then the agreed insanity of so-called adults. Well, we can certainly witness the agreed insanity of our political discourse at the moment. So we know how immature our supposedly adult world can be. I just felt it as a child. I think most children have had it and it just gets covered over. You realize that the priorities of the adult what these people are suffering from a form of amnesia. They've forgotten the primary radiant experience of what it's like to be a child. And so poetry always carried that living element, that current for me, whether it was Irish poems in Irish from my mother or her stories, and the mutability of her stories,

too. What do you mean by that? The mutability? The stories were never the same. They always had some kind of wonderful, extemporaneous change in them. As another Irishman, Oscar Wilde said, no amount of exaggeration will do justice to what actually happened.

And it's actually true. The main thing is to get the spirit of what occurred across. And then my father's Yorkshire storytelling tradition was very different. But those two linguistic inheritances came together in a very powerful way. And indeed, it was a Yorkshire, even though I was reading a lot of Irish poems, and I was reading a lot of Irish poems and I was reading a lot of Walter Della Mare and we had great poetry in our schools actually and good teachers. You know, so I was lucky that way. But when I was about 13 or so, I was down in the little library in the town where I grew up and I saw that top shelf was poetry, you know, as if

it was kept away from like the stack of playboys. And I had to reach out. It was just before I went through my growing spurt. And so I had to reach up and I got hold of one of the poetry books in the right in the tipsy topsy tweenness of my two fingers and pulled it off. I remember it dropped down and I caught it. And then I opened it and it was a joint volume by Ted Hughes, fellow Yorkshire poet not far from where I grew up. And Tom gun, who moved to San Francisco barrier actually, first of all, I was surprised that there were 30 years old both of them and they were

described as young poets. That's not young. It seemed like they were passing in a back. I read into the book, and I was just astonished. I said, Oh, here are adults who have kept the primary vision of childhood alive into their maturity. I wouldn't have used that language as a child. but that's what I thought. And so I thought, oh, poetry is the secret code to staying alive, to staying present and to staying visionary. To William Blake, innocence was not a commodity that was going to be replaced by experience.

Innocence was your ability to be found by the world in ever greater and greater ways. What do you mean by that found by the world in greater greater ways? Is that being unfettered by a metastasized collection of labels and concepts that prevents you from seeing and feeling clearly? Is it something else? That's a very articulate description of one aspect of it, Tim. Yeah. But it's that phenomena we have whereby there's actually a form of innocence to every epoch in our life, if we're mature enough, strangely, ironically, to use that word, to

step, you know, there's a kind of innocence you have in your teens, which it's an innocence that we normally associate with innocence. Yeah. But actually, there's an innocence you can have in your 60s or your 70s or your 80s, your 50s, your 40s. It's your ability to look on the world as if you've seen it for the first time. But in the maturity of that body, that's now at the frontier of your 40s, second year or your 53rd year or your 65th year, or

your 77th year, it's, there's a new life. And in many ways, you know, the innocence of the adolescent would not be able to grasp the life that the innocence of the 77 year old would be able to grasp. So the ability to pay attention and everything is waiting for you is a poem that's telling you to pay attention as if you've seen everything just for the first time. And that everything is speaking back to you in its own voice, you're just not hearing it. And everything is coming to meet you in an unspoken way. And if you can open up the same unspoken part of you to meet the unspoken in

the world and the spoken inside you and the spoken in the world, all kinds of astonishing experiences that are gratifying and powerful and timeless, all in themselves without you having to achieve anything beyond it come into your possibility and your grasp. It seems to me that if people are looking for ways to pull the gauze from their eyes, so to speak, or see the world anew in some respect or themselves for that matter that questions are a very useful tool. I have a long list of questions that are attributed to you.

They may or may not be in fact questions for me, but I wanted to read off just a few of them and then I follow up question. Question number one, what helped you get here that you need to give away? Who are you when you're the best to yourself in the world around you? What is the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt? Yes. It is too precious to ask. The question which you are afraid the answer will come back as no. And I'll keep going, but I may come back to that one. How can you be friends with your longings, with what you want? What would you be if you failed being yourself?

What promise did I make sincerely that I now need to let go of? What would it be like to have absolute faith in your intuitions? These are excellent questions. Excellent, excellent questions. I could see myself journaling for pages on any one of these. And I suppose the meta question that I'd love to hear you speak to is, how have you generated these questions? And then could you explain the, what is the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt? Could you explain what is the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt? Yes.

Well, many of those questions have come just spontaneously when I've been on stage. And I mean, either on stage in front of a thousand people or just in a small group working with people and working with the implications of poetry. And I have hundreds of poems memorized, so I can extemporize and go depending on where I feel the invitation is in the room. So I will often paraphrase a piece and unearth what I call the beautiful question, the beautiful and disturbing question beneath the light. And I often think a beautiful question is defined by the fact

that it, it helps to shape your life as much by asking it as by having it answered. Asking the question is a form of deep attention and it's a form of attention that can be deepened actually. You can get an immediate reward, but actually you can carry a question for years that you suddenly realize is now being answered in a completely surprising way. And the particular question you chose out, which is what's the doubt

you've carried inside you? Yeah, the beautiful question you've cradled three years of doubt. Yeah, that's a line from Tanegath. And Tanegath is the name of a Welsh farm on which I lived for a good few years it became my base i helped. What's forming family that with the nine hundred sheep digging the mountains no dress and lemon and sharing and sending them off to market. I would travel out into the world and then i come back again and so as part of the whole seasonal round for a good couple of years at Tanigath, but I got to know fellow pilgrim who'd come to

light on the farm with his family, his name was Michael. I lived in a caravan in a farmyard, or in a field next to the farmyard. And he lived with his family in this old stone cottage. And we got to know each other. I was just in my 20s, just back from the Galapagos Islands where I'd been a naturalist guide and just about to set off into the Himalayas. And he was at the end of his artistic life,

or I should say, no, he was in the full maturity of his artistic life. He'd been a traveling Shakespeare player, he'd played Lear, actually, he had this long Celtic face, actually, with all these horizontal lines on it. And we got to know each other working with the sheep and building walls and walking in those, you know, for two years or so. But we would retreat into his cottage, which was called the main farm was called Tanegath, which I think in Welsh just means halfway up the mountain. And he and his family lived in Tanegath back, which means little halfway up the mountain. It was just the original farmhouse that grew out

of the mountainside. It was just a stone cottage with the back wall of the mountain. And there was a fire in there going all through the summer as much as it was going through the winter. It was the same temperature in that cottage in on a midsummer's day as it was. And he and I would sit by the fire. His wife, Diane was a very religious woman. She used to disappear upstairs, 830 or so and Michael would reach behind the couch for a bottle of brandy where it would hide. And then we would start these incredible conversations. And I discovered very soon he was a lover of Blake, William Blake. And then I discovered that Michael himself was an engraver like William Blake. And there was much

later on, I discovered Michael was also a poet. But engraving was his main artistry. And his prized possession was this very thick book of illustrated Blake engravings. Oh, nice. Yeah. It must have cost a fortune actually for him because they were very poor. very poor, but rich family actually, and his great doubt would find its maximum efflorescence. His great dial would find its greatest question in when he would look at this book, and he would say to me and this happened. Once we got into it over the weeks, he'd ask this question every night, almost by

the fireside, the Welsh wind and rain beating against the window. He'd say, do you think Blake actually talked with the angels? Or was it just a metaphor that we stand in conversation with worlds greater than our Ken? And he would ask this question. And he really meant it when he asked it he wanted to know. And he had a very fierce way of asking questions. Actually, if you ever made a declarative statement, he would ask you a fierce question about it, and you'd find

yourself backing out of it and reversing your opinion, because yourself backing out of it and reversing your opinion because the well of doubt was so powerful in his face. So doubt was really his way of paying attention. So through the years we got to know each other and I go away and come back and go away and come back. And the other thing he'd say every night, almost every night was, you know, I love love this place so much i found my place to die. Any man tannigas. And if you look out of that window you'd see fields and if there were four corners to a field three of them would have names. little stream called the Kaseg, which wended its way through the farm land out of the mountains. And every little elbow of that stream had a name. And there was one place which was called the place of the three dead Englishmen in Welsh. And this being Wales, that was not

a place of tragedy. Victory lap. Yeah, something good had happened there in the 1400s. So the place of the three dead Englishmen, but it was actually a little pool where we used to swim. The place of the three dead Englishmen, I used to imagine the blood. But the whole place is a mythic language. And then the carnivory mountains beyond that, you know, well, anyway, I came to the states and it was many years later that I went back. And I surprised them.

Actually, I walked up one day, I was on my way to Ireland and I realized, Oh, I have time to stop in Wales on my way to the ferry and there's no phone in Tanegath back, so I'll just walk up. And I saw Diane in, you know, when I was about half a mile away, when you've lived in the countryside, actually, you can recognize can recognize people still wet from a long way away. I'm sorry i haven't seen her for two years but she knew it was me she started waving and i came up to the cottage. And there was a smell of scones coming out of the doorway i thought perfect bachelor timing this is great so we sat down it was so good to see each other. And then I said, Where's Michael? And she said, Oh, he's in the hospital. And I'm afraid it's serious. He has

leukemia. And so he's in for tests and treatment. I said, Oh, my God. So I was there a couple of hours and and I had to leave to go to our and I didn't come back that way. And then I heard that he passed away. So I'd missed him, you know, but Diane wrote me this incredible letter in which she said he'd had in the last month before he died, he'd had this kind of remission and he'd come out and come back to the farm and in the letter, she said, in those last few weeks he was experiencing

everything he'd read in Blake. So he was conversing with his angels. And so I wrote this poem at Tanegath and I realized I couldn't talk about Michael without talking about what he loved and what he loved was Tanegath and then all the Welsh names. I wrote this as an elegy because I was poor as a church mouse at that time. I couldn't afford to just jump on a plane and go to his memorial service. So I sat down to have my own memorial service and I wrote this piece. So it's called Tanegath Elegy for Michael. This grass-grown hills are patchwork lined with walls I've grown to love.

Four hundred years at least the hill farms clung tenacious to the weathered slope, over the Ogwen and the green depths of Mon. The eye has weathered also into the grey rocks and the fields bright with spring, the wind-blown light from the mountain filling the valley, the low back sheep following the fence hemmed by dogs and John's crooked staff, John the farmer. The still valley filled with his shouts and the mewling of sheep press through the gate. Beneath Eirellen the bowl of flour is stirred with mist. The dogs lie low in the tufted grass and watch with pure intent the ragged back of the last sheep entering the stone-bound pens.

The rough ground of Wales lives in the mind for years, springing more grass under feet, treading concrete, hundreds of miles from home. And the ground has names, songs full of grief, sounds that belong to a single stream, Kessig is the place of the mayor, Komplava is the valley of speech, utterance of wind, the blue moorland filled by the sky, the farm passed down, yet never possessed, lives father to son, mother to child, feeding the people with sheep, the sheep with grass, and memory with years, live looking at mountains.

One single glance of a hillside darkened by a cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes, and this world needs all the breath we have. Karnath-luanen, karnath-dathath, karnath-ukhaf, all the karnedi, erralen of the shining light, druskel, the endless ridge, curving to nothing. One man I know loved this place so much, said he'd found his place to die. Years I knew him, walking the high moorlines or watching the calls of a winter fire in the cottage grate and I he did. But not before one month's final joy in wild creation gave him that full sight he glimpsed in Blake. He too wrestled with his angel in

and out of hospital the white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountains bracing sense of space. Now he was ready. His heart, so long at the edge of the nest, shook its wings and flew into the hills he loved. Became the hills he loved, walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he'd nursed. For years in doubt, his ashes are scattered over by Abba, the water continually saying his name, as I still go home to Tanagath, speaking the names of those I love.

Wow. All right. Beautiful, beautiful poem. First of all, I don't want to skip over the substance of that. And I appreciated the repetition of, and I'm not going to get the wording exactly correct, but the faith nursed in doubt. Yeah. Walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith. He'd nurse for years in doubt. Yeah. Is there a developed skill to memorizing poetry, or is that just an innate sort of barred genetics? Well, certainly, you go to Ireland

and people have it by the barrow load. You want to poke someone in Ireland and out at spills, you know, my equals were the same. So as well as my mother, but you know, it's just you learn one line at a time, but you learn it because you love it. And you want to have it. And I found when I was young walking, I used to spend a lot of time alone walking out in the countryside that if I could just

call up a line, then it wasn't something that was occurring in the abstract, I was actually having a powerful, primary experience that the poet had when they wrote it. And especially if you got it as we say by heart. Yeah. So you really just learn one line at a time. And then you have to learn the seams between the lines, which is often quite a trick. But my memory is much better now than when I never had a photographic memory. So I had to work to learn them. But now, I can memorize much

more easily than when I was younger, actually. So I have a better memory now than I had 40 or 50 years ago through practice. Through practice. Is that cultivated ability? What are the helpful constituent ingredients of that? In other words, are you focusing on the musical cadence in a sense to help you memorize? Do you imagine visuals? Are you actually seeing in your mind's eye the words themselves? If you had to tease out some of the components of this improved ability, how would you try to do that? There is a visual element, but it's kind of transitory. It moves through them very quickly. If you think of the Tanegath form, it of so much imagery, but I'm physically there on the farm when I'm

reciting that I've got the Welsh breeze coming out of cum clauver. It means the valley of speech cum clauver in in Welsh and irellyn means the shining one is this ridge of light. So yes, I see them. But you know, it's the meaning it's all the constellating qualities together the rhythm the beauty of the. So for instance you had the phrase you were trying to catch again and again so that would be a good one for you to learn because it. Obviously means something to you so just to take that line out of the palm and not feel you have to learn the rest of the palm. Walked with an easy grace cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt. So that's obviously important to

you. So to learn that line, and then to be able to embody the experience when you recite the line, it reinforces it. And it works as a beautiful question, actually, as you deepen your understanding of what it means to pay attention to the world through all the ways that you doubt it, all the ways you're reluctant to be here, all the ways you don't want to have the conversation, thank you very much, all the ways you just don't believe. Those are you, those are the way you're made.

So to be able to have that phrase to take you. So it's interesting, you know, when I first started off, my repertoire of poetry that I'd written myself did not cover many of the thresholds of experience that I was working with on stage or with people. So I would memorize other people's poems. I'd memorize Antonio Machado in Spanish or Relki from the German or Yates or Seamus Heaney. I still have all those poems in my memory, but now I've written my way into almost every threshold that I want to speak about. So now I, I mostly use my own call on my own poetry, but it's lovely to call on

Heaney or Yates too, at the same time. It's just a rich storehouse inside yourself. That word primary has come up quite a bit in this conversation and I believe it refers back to the primary and secondary imagination. There's another way of thinking about the primary, the fundamental generative force that produced the language.

Yes. And if I were to memorize that line of yours, which you just recited, how would I try to best access that primary or make an attempt to do that? But it should be there in the rhythm. And, you know, when you ask heartfelt questions, your voice naturally falls into iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is how human beings in English speak when they're on their edge of revelation in a way. That's why Shakespeare used it so much. Blank verse, we call it, iambic pentameter, five beats, you know. But if you think of the times where you've had to communicate something very poignant, very vulnerable to someone else, maybe you're leaving a relationship,

maybe you're giving the news of someone's death, which is going to affect the person in a very powerful way. You will always fall into a rhythm, and it's a poetic rhythm, actually. You will always repeat yourself three times, usually, and in three different ways. It has to be said, it has to be heard, and it can never be heard the first time. In the Greek theater, when the gods spoke, the audience could not take it in the first time, so the chorus would repeat it. That was the job of the chorus,

was to repeat the revelation of the gods because human beings could not understand what was being said the first time. So that's why we're so careful in our speech. So, poetry is not some abstracted art. It's how human beings speak when they're trying to create language against which there are no defenses. This has to be heard, and it has to be heard in the spirit in which it is being conveyed. And the language has to be invitational to that particular person.

I wanted to come back to something you said in the very beginning of our conversation, and I may be misquoting, I jotted it down quickly, but Zen is a deep path of heartbreak. And I would like to keep that in mind, but here you describe how Zen entered your life and why Zen. When I was at university, I started to practice all kinds of strange forms of meditation that were my own ideas of what meditation probably was. So in my little room up in the Welsh village above Bangor where I studied marine zoology, I remember practicing all kinds of strange

exercises. So hold on one second, I don't want to stop you before you get started. But we're going to come back to the marine zoology at some point, I suspect. But connect the dots here or what was the catalyzing book moment conversation, TV program, whatever it was that sent you off to explore these different forms of real or created meditative practices. Well, as I say in my essay on Zen, Zen is a big old fraud of a word, because it's so cool. The word, you know, is so glamorous in every generation is the word itself remains

hip no matter what we do. So the Zen of this, the Zen of that, it's just a gorgeous word. So you get caught by the glamors of Zen, you know, the black robes, the bronze bells, the reflective wooden floors, the quiet temples, you know, the Yoda like teachers, you know, and so that probably was the original invitation that I felt, oh, what a remarkable path to take. take you know draws you in and then abandons you the word draws men and then abandons you to as I say the real work which is the path of heartbreak of undoing Would you mind reciting that piece? Are you open to that? Yes, the last being a Z or a Z as you say so quaintly in your country. Z sounds better. I'll be honest. But if I say that, I sound like a pompous ass, so have

to hold off. So Zen, it's the last essay in the book. So Zen is a great, big, magnificent, all embracing seduction of a word. And that's what I felt when I first came across it. Zen is the beguiling and charming philanderer of the first order, that good looking stranger who lets us fall in love and then runs off with someone else so that we can fall out of love with the word and be let alone in our grief to fall in love with reality. Zen is a centuries old, glamorous, disguised cover-up,

inviting us in, in each succeeding generation, so exquisitely, so quietly, so subtly, so seductively into its grip, that we do not, to begin with, have any understanding of what we have become so innocently ensnared by. We do not have a clue as to the way we are being taken in so swiftly and so unerringly into the currents that lead to the edge of our own necessary physical and emotional breakdown. Amidst our hopes for polished wood, serene surroundings, the sound of bells and the whispered shuffle of bare feet, we always find to our consternation

that Zen always begins and ends in tears. The first tears in Zen practice are for our bodies and our restless minds, for our backs, our knees and for our legs, trying to sit upright on those strangely necessary black cushions. The next tears are for our hearts, our emotions and our previously imprisoned minds. The last tears are for a joy and laughter that still, to our amazement, keeps a friendship and an understanding with our previous griefs. Zen is the journey we take through heartbreak. The last heartbreak, Zen retires from the field. Zen generously disappears and lets us alone, refusing to let us use the word so freely again, refusing

to let us be fooled by what we originally needed to be so enticed by. Drawn towards Zen practice, we almost always fall in love with the word itself. Zen beguiles us with that barely breathing vowel sound that lives so eternally and so glamorously at its center between the dashing capital Z and that oh-so-subtle brushstroke of an N. The word itself seems to be clean and rested, insightful, and eternally hip. Something inspiring. Something that conjures light and space and a welcome order amidst a difficult world of besiegement, chaos, and successive never-ending experiences of grief. We fall for the word as we fall for the deep silences that swim dreamily through the first

panes of our practice. Zen welcomes us through its invitation to a sense of spacious ease, to freedom from worry and thankfully in our mind's eye to a deeper form of rested presence. A presence we first saw in the clean, perfectly proportioned spaces inherited so seductively from Japan. But then, as Zen breaks down the divisions in our mind and body, we find our sense of self breaks down too. Firstly from the inside out, and then at the end, from the outside in. We learn to bow in the Zen-Do, not knowing what we are rehearsing, unconsciously preparing

as we are to duck through the achingly low doors of the basement our heartbreak will provide. We pass through those low doors as we pass into the difficulties of marriage or intimate relationship. Like the raw vulnerabilities we find in the commitments of marriage or in a long intimate partnership, Zen begins with the honeymoon of getting to know, graduates through difficult and unwanted surprises, and then culminates in a slow breakdown, day by day, through the trials and invitations of intimacy and heartache itself. As in a marriage, in Zen we learn that the line between this body, another's body, and

the body of the world is not where we thought it was. As in a love relationship, we learn that what we thought we knew is not equal to what we are discovering. As in an intimate relationship, we learn that who we thought we were is not who we are now in the midst of all the disappearing boundaries. Almost always in relationship, what we think we have to give is not actually what is needed. What we thought was love might not have been love at all. And what we thought we had to give up is not after all what is being asked for. Tellingly, as in relationship, the hardest thing to do in Zen practice is simply finding a way to breathe freely while staying connected to the world or the world of another.

Breathing is foundational to both coming to know and letting go of what we think we know. Like the things we think we know about relationship, all the things we thought we knew about Zen will have to be given up at the end. And even then, Zen and the intimacies of relationship, both ask us to give up the very last thing, the very thing for which we thought we had already given everything up. Like the essence of intimate relationship, the very essence of Zen might be giving up and giving in, not to our partner, but to what the essence and heartache of the partnership calls us to.

Zen is surprising under its sub-diffusion. Zen's biggest surprise is that it seems to have more confidence in the incoherent life we first brought to it than the one we are trying to replace it with. We find ourselves seen at a core as one who generated difficulties, not because our essence is difficulty, but because difficulties were what we thought we needed in order to get through, in order to be worthy of something better.

Difficulty was our needed friend. Difficult is how we thought things should be. Difficult is what we thought we were. In the attempt to give our old life away and have it replaced by the newly spacious clarity we first glimpse in Zen, we find it constantly returned to us in a voice that says,

we will never need anything more than what we already had. We're told in no uncertain terms that we were more miraculous in our simple wish to find a way than any abstracted spacious place we could reach through sitting in silence. And yet, sitting in silence is how we will find the way. Zen frustrates us, wants us to find the way, just by being the very essence of things that find their way. Zen in the old cliche, because it is so true, wants us to be the way itself. It might be that Zen as a word

would like us to understand this one simple thing, so it can go home and have a good rest. Zen begins by being the hand seemingly raised to keep us at bay, and then slowly and imperceptibly, it seemed to be the hand that rests on our shoulder, telling us, we might be fine just as we are. When we actually glimpse what we are, we and that hand seem to disappear altogether,

simply because there's no need for a hand when the reluctant body that needed it has disappeared. Zen indeed is an old fraudster, but one with a heart of gold. Just as we are taken in, it relents, and to our relief, gives us all our money back. Zen, we realize in the end, is much humbler in its aims than we thought it was. Zen, we realize, is more realistic than we thought it was. Zen in the end is always surprisingly practical and helpful, and just wants us to do the simplest,

most obvious thing. Zen doesn't waste its energy by choosing too early in the game and waits for things to make their own choice unimpeded by interference. Zen refuses to choose between light and dark, restlessness and order, between not knowing or having answers, Zen has a well-cultivated sense of humor and carries its own hidden cargo of amusement at all our self deceptions and false choices. Zen is a true comedian at times, its most hilarious proposition being that you might not after all have to believe in your own thoughts. Zen is a true comedian. We walk towards Zen as if towards the door of light, but Zen practice moves us just as much and unerringly towards a door into the

dark into what until now we could not see or discern, so that we might better understand what we might have hidden there, but also so that we might better understand the underlying miracle of light itself. Zen leads us on like the very best kind of guide, as if we might be equal to what we eventually find. Zen is the ultimate kind of guide in that it disappears in the moment of our understanding to leave us with what we have found.

And more importantly, and to our astonishment, what comes to find us. If Zen asks us to begin with, to follow the thread of heartbreak, then to begin with, heartbreak is the only thread we need to follow the thread of heartbreak. Then to begin with, heartbreak is the only thread we need to follow. Heartbreak has many difficult doors, almost all of them leading where we hoped and prayed we did not need to go. Reading between the lines, the old Zen teachers seemed to think that one heartbreak was as good as another.

So many doors. All heartbreak is giving up, but the mercy that lies in the path of heartbreak is that in the end, we will have to give up even our precious, well guarded memories of heartbreak itself. In real heartbreak, something else always comes to find us. On the other side of heartbreak, there's an experience of timeless radiance that cannot be described from this side of heartbreak. So for now, sitting Zen and carrying the silence from sitting into our lives, heartbreak

is all we need to know. Heartbreak is all we need to know. Heartbreak is all we need to know. Heartbreak is all we need to know. All of us spend so much time trying to find a path where we won't have our heart broken. And really, the only way you can find a path where your heart won't break is by not caring. Finding a path where you don't care about things or other people. That's the ultimate protection against heartbreak. Then you live a life in the abstract you live a life that never makes any real sense you live a life of loneliness.

So finding out what you care about. Even though we try and find a path where we won't have our heartbreak and you're going to have your heart broken anyway. So we might as well get with the program and have our heart broken over something that we actually care about. So what do you care about? What do you really care about? What are your thoughts on the word courage and how this ties into where you're discussing? What is the etymology of the word courage? Well, it's very similar. And I'm sure you know, the first part of the word is from the French heart. So it's really, it's what your heart felt about. And you are really only courageous about what your heart felt about. You know, we use the word heart in the abstract, but it's really an invitation into the body into the physical body, what your heart felt about. And to allow yourself to be

heartfelt. I mean, often will create a barrier between ourselves and our children because we care about them so deeply. We can't believe how devastated we would be if we lost them. So it's very hard to feel that heartfelt love that it's depth, because it always heartfelt love in its ultimate always has to give something away, has to give the other person away. So the courage to love, you know, is the courage to feel the

heartbreak in loving and the way you won't escape. There's no escape from heartbreak. Unless you want to be one of the walking dead with a muted experience of life. You seem to have been, for lack of a better word, a seeker from a relatively young age, I would be curious to know how or why that started, if you can even answer that question. And then to come back to the all paths lead to Schuchman line of questioning, you can answer either or both of these. How did living in a caravan on the side of Mount Snowden, if I'm saying that correctly, help you develop as a young writer?

I can't leave the living in a caravan on the side of a mountain alone. The seeking, where does that come from? It was actually the side of the Carnada Mountains, just a range over from Snowdon, but you were very close. Central Mountain in the, it's Snowdonia, you're right. But having lived there and the Welsh names

being so specific to place, I can't let you get away with it. Please don't, please don't slap on the wrist. Just a quick side note, I remember my one and only time in Wales, went to something called the Dew Lectures, which was great, near Cardiff, I believe it was, or outside of Cardiff.

And I rented a car. This was before Google Maps. And I remember some very kind woman at the hotel giving me directions to get to some farmer's market or something I wanted to explore. And I wrote down everything phonetically. And as soon as I got to the first sign, I knew I was completely fucked.

It was just I could not read anything. So that's it. No, they're, yes, it's a revelation when you find out how they're actually pronounced. Jim, there's a lovely sign which says clubber co-e-thus, which English tourists would be following trying to get to this mythical village, but it actually just meant public footpath. Sounds very dignified. But yeah, no, it's a magnificent language. It goes back 2000 years.

It's the language that was spoken in the whole Island really, when the Romans arrived 2000 years ago and the modern Welsh person can or a postmodern Welsh person can read a manuscript or make sense of one that's 1500 years old. Incredible. Yeah, it's so rich and it has a very powerful poetic tradition, which is still alive to this day within the language. So it was lovely to be bathed in that language. I learned how to pronounce it and a host of words. I never learned how to have conversational Welsh. Although I have a great store, living on a Welsh sheep farm, I have a great store of bad words.

Which I bet. Which were hurled at the dogs or the sheep or even at me if I wasn't cooperating. So what happened on this mount that was not Mount Snowdon? I can't recall the other range. I apologize. Well, you know, when I finished my stint in the Galapagos Islands, I was there almost two years. I had reached both an impasse and some incredible invitation that I couldn't quite discern at the same time. After I left the islands, you know, where I'd lived aboard these sailing boats for almost the whole time. I traveled through South America and then I came back to North Wales where I'd studied marine

zoology, the subject that took me out there in the first place. And I'd lived down in the village below Tanegath Farm in a village called Gerland. And then I found this caravan in the farm and found I could have it for free if I helped the farmer and then I get a little bit extra to I lived on very little day in this instance, caravan is like what we would call an RV in the US something like that. trailer trailer. There we go. All right. No, it's on wheels. It was a cute caravan. But that is a very caravan is a very romantic the the

the the the the the the the the

the the the the in the woods when I first came to this island where I live now, a lot of Vietnam veterans still living in the woods. They were in retreat from PTSD, from violence, from a world which didn't understand what they'd gone through. And in many ways, I was traumatized too by Galapagos, but I wasn't traumatized by violence, although I witnessed a lot of it in the animal world although I witnessed a lot of it in the animal world and the marine world, I was traumatized by beauty actually. The place was so astonishingly overwhelmingly itself. And I was just a my new part of creation. When you're in Galapagos, you feel as if you're on the planet before human beings evolved. Nevermind took dominion, as it says in the Bible,agos, you feel as if you're on the planet before human beings evolved, never mind took dominion, as it says in the Bible, you know, you're just a visitor.

And all your ambitions, your ideas of what are subsumed under this astonishing immensity which you're witnessing every day. I mean, we're all often overwhelmed when we see the gorgeous images in an Attenborough documentary. But I was witness to those both I was diving to as well as leading people ashore. I was a naturalist guide, taking people ashore. I was witnessing those amazing images above and below water on a daily basis. And I was paying attention in silence. It was only years later in Zen retreats I realized I was just recapitulating the experiences I'd had in Galapagos but with no outer guidance.

What do you mean by that? Recapitulating the experience? Well there was no Zen master to say, oh yeah, what you've just experienced and the falling apart that goes with it is a necessary part to the journey. It was a kind of self-compassionate act to go on retreat afterwards and that was the caravan on the side of the Carnede Mountains in North Wales. And my friendship with Michael was perfect. It was a very internal conversation between two people in a way. In that cottage next to the fire,

often through the winters, you know, or when we were walking out with the dogs to go and fetch the sheep in. It was a necessary catching up with myself as we we spoke early of that necessary ability to understand what kind of threshold of maturity are you on? And how easily we turn away from that threshold because it's so scary that you're losing your previous desires. You're losing your previous ways that you wanted the world to be. And

that you wanted the world to be. And you're stepping into an unknown, which is your new self and the way your world will be perceived and joined by that self. When did you start your Zen practice? And for people who have no familiarity, What does it look like? How does it differ from the past meditation or other types of meditation that people may have heard of? Well, it started in my mid 20s. After I moved to the States, mid to late 20s. And there are two main streams of Zen, you know, one is Shikantaza sitting, which is simply following your breath and empty mind. The other form is the one that includes emptying your mind, but also has koan work, where you empty your mind around a beautiful question. So what is the sound

of one hand clapping? Very powerful question. What's it like to be one hand moving through space and time that doesn't meet anything other than itself? It's a tragedy. Marco, Marco was no polo. Now are these questions, I'd love to hear your perspective on this. Are they powerful because they productively break the logical or rational mind? Is it a tool for escaping the tyranny of epistemological arrogance, thinking that you can sort of solve for everything with left-brain analytical thinking? I mean, what makes a question like that powerful? thinking that you can sort of solve for everything with left brain analytical thinking?

I mean, what makes a question like that powerful? Well, I'll give you an example. But this Koan is actually out of the Irish tradition. But once you've studied Koans, you realize they're in every tradition. And you just didn't realize. We have the Blue Cliff record with hundreds of numbered Koans, all commented on by various then masters through the centuries, but actually they're everywhere. And your intimate others in your life will provide them to you too, especially your children. In the Irish tradition, there's a story, which is a very brief description of a monk standing at the edge of the monastic precinct.

And this would be the edge of a monasticism which had an incredible respect and sense of revelation in the natural world. The Irish church in a pre-Catholic was non-hierarchical, at least a very different kind of hierarchy, equal place for women in that monasticism. And the revelation could be understood as much through the sun on the leaves moving in the wind as in the Bible. So there's a monk on the edge of the monastic precinct and he suddenly hears the bell calling him to prayer. And in the story, he says, that's the most beautiful sound in the world. The call to depth to silence to prayer, but immediately at the same time as the bell is ringing, he hears the blackbird

singing over the wall. And he says, and that's also the finest sound in the world, which is the world, just as it is, just as it comes to find you. I've known that story for decades, you know, and in the abstract, I knew what it was pointing towards, which is you're not supposed to choose actually between depth and the world outside. We're supposed to stretch our identity between both those horizons and beyond both those horizons. But I actually had the physical experience of revelation in the car and sat in this very place where I am now. And it was Easter morning, just in front of me here behind the screen are French doors. And I had the

French doors open so that the beautiful spring day could be both smelt and heard through the door. And I'm sad, I've got an empty page right here on my desk. And through that door behind me comes my wife. And she's got two Tibetan bells in her hand, and she bangs them together.. All of us have been in the shop with the bed and bells and you hit them and you get an awful sound you don't get it right and take about five or six times before you get the pure no was she hit the first time. I'm the no one straight through me. I'm at exactly the same time i had the red winged blackbird outside. And at exactly the same time, I had the red winged blackbird outside. Which here in the Northwest, the Pacific Northwest is the sound of spring.

And the world just both collapsed and came together at the same time. And I put my hand out, I said, I can't talk to you right now. And I wrote this piece all in one go, which was the expression of my. And this is it. It's called the bell and the blackbird. The sound of a bell still reverberating the sound of the bell, still reverberating or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field. The sound of a bell, still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way, takes courage, either way

takes courage, either way, once you did become nothing, but that self, that is no self at all. Once you to walk to the place where you find, you already know you'll have to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting at all. That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation crying Hallelujah. That that radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation, crying, Hallelujah.

So that coin had lived inside me for years as an abstract and then a semi abstract and then suddenly the moon is in the reflection in the bucket. The bucket breaks open and the moon disappears. In the Zen story says the monk is enlightened. But we are we don't get to choose. We're both alone, completely and utterly alone. And if we knew how alone we were, we'd run 100,000 miles in the opposite direction. But we're also completely and utterly connected. And if we knew how completely and utterly connected we were, we'd also run 1000 miles in the opposite direction. And somehow, the human task is to hold that aloneness and togetherness together in an invitational conversation. We chatted a bit earlier about the impact, the meaning, the revelation of poetry for you when you were seven, eight, nine years old, observing the agreed upon insanity of so-called adults. Yes. What that allowed you as direct access when you pulled that book off the top shelf with

your two fingers and caught it to that childlike innocence, again, not as an uninformed adorable naivete but as much more. As an adult, what does poetry do for you? And what do you hope your poetry will do for others? It's a consolation. And that's one of the reasons I gave that name to the essays, actually. It's consoling both in the sense of putting an arm around you. And saying there's nothing wrong with what you're experiencing. And there's nothing wrong of the

depth of heartbreak with which you're experiencing it. The consolation is also an invitation that you have inside you the the ability to find your way. And also to have good company along the way. And to help and invite others as you go. So the poetry when i first started was just a brilliant art form in and of itself it was just a pleasure to learn it to recite it to learn to be able to write it myself. to learn to be able to write it myself and then to work with it with other people. It was just so explosive in my life and so nourishing and so inviting and maturing all at the same time. I remember when I lost my mother and I was so grief-stricken by that loss because we were so close. But I wrote my grief into a whole collection, which was,

everything is waiting for you actually. And when I finished the cycle of poems, I said, my God, poetry has been such a good friend to me. I've gone through seven years of grieving in seven months through, because poetry has allowed me to take each step along the way in such a powerful, invitational way. So when I first started also, you know, I was a young poet, I wanted to be a famous poet. So poetry is a way that I could be

successful in the world. And my ideas of what it meant to be a successful poet were being recognized, you know, being published by the mainstream publishers being celebrated, you know, being published by the mainstream publishers, being celebrated, you know. But now my definitions of what's successful in poetry are to do with helping others, that the poem actually speaks to another heart and mind and will be taken and carried by that heart and mind and given to others. Yeah. I suppose in other words, other people will be memorizing my poetry by heart, or a line of it at least, or searching for it in a drawer when they need it.

It's a very instinctual thing. Even a person who has never looked at a poem for 20 years when they lose someone close to them in their life and they have no articulation for it, at the memorial service they will have pulled out a poem to be able to speak to what they cannot say themselves. So that's my job is to be able to help people who cannot speak for themselves suddenly and that right themselves, you know, by recognizing it.

Yeah. At some point, and I never do this, but I would love to have a number of signed or inscribed books of yours because I really feel like I would like to have the physical copies of your work. I have digital, I have certain things like time printed out and there's just something that is transmitted but the tactile ability to sort of paw through and peruse the work is fundamentally different for me. That's lovely. Thank you. And thank God, poetry is very hard to handle on a Kindle. So it's very hard to find the poem you want. But we've also produced these pocketbooks with a semi the But to begin with, you have to start with the page. Yeah, yes. Kind of start with the lifting weights before you go win the gold at the Olympics.

The peacetime, what prompted the writing of that particular piece? Well, the whole writing of Consolations 2, following the first Consolations, was so intense. It was written in a kind of delirium between January and July of this year, 24. That's really fast. Yeah. So it was 60 essays in seven months, 52 of which appear in the book, each one a very intense drop into the abyss in a way.

And it reached its culmination in, I think it was May or the end of April. First of all, I was in Rome working with the Vatican there with my wife actually. And then I had 10 days to myself before my Tuscan walking tour began, which I lead every year. And so I booked into this castle in the Perugian countryside, as you do. And as one does prior to their Tuscan walking tour. In order to write. And I'd seen this place for a long time, but it was so phenomenally expensive. I said, I can't afford to stay there.

But then I said, if you get an essay a day, your guilt will be a swash David. And so I booked him for three nights and the place was so stunning and so silent and so wonderful and the people who ran it was so hospitable and the food was so great. And the surrounding countryside and horizons that we've been speaking about was so enticing. I just felt the bottom drop out from me. And I entered this magnified experience of timelessness. So in the first three days, I got three essays, I said, right, I'm staying seven nights. Yeah, let's extend this. Exactly. So I went down and got I could stay in the same room because I was writing so well in there. And on the fourth day, I wrote time. I started it in the morning.

That was in one day. You wrote that. I wrote it in, I don't know, probably seven or eight or nine hours. I started in the morning. I took a few breaks walking and finished at 11 o'clock at night or midnight with this piano player, me and the piano player in the Humphrey Bogart bar. In the middle of that day, I felt as if time was looking me in

the face. And I felt as if I was well i mean the classic phrases the out of body experience but i felt as if. All the walls looking back at me and everything was corroborating my experience of time that i was speaking so is an out of body experience looking back at myself. I mean i'm really physical experience of being. physical experience of being out of my body, time looking me in the face, kind of break down as time as I looked back at time and held its gaze. This is the only way I can describe it. And a sudden release from all the ways I'd been holding time hostage. One of the operative lines in the essay as time is not slipping through our fingers. It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time. Time is not slipping through our fingers.

It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time because we have such a narrow approach to time itself. We're barely present a lot of the time, barely present to ourselves or to others. So yes, it was a really remarkable experience, but it was a representation of the kind of delirium that I wrote the rest of the book. It was the magnified version. I don't want to be a greedy little piglet and ask for time that may be asking too much. You've already generously shared a lot of your work. Well, you can edit out as much as you want. I will just read maybe read some excerpts from it.

Oh, yeah, I'm not in any rush whatsoever. I'm having so much fun. It's appropriate for you not to be in a rush if I'm going to read. Yeah rush speed reading poetry is overrated. Could you give me time quickly? the way harnessing the power of naming, perhaps in some ways like the Welsh. I mean, there's a power in naming. And when you give words to feelings or fleeting insights or experiences that people have that are profoundly impacting, but perhaps get lost in the shuffle of life when you're able to freeze frame it captured on a page with memorable language that's a real service I think to providing people with the coordinates of that experience such that they might more readily access it again if that makes some sense sense. Very kind. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So without further ado, please. Would love to hear.

Yeah. So here's the piece written between early morning and late at night. So this is a word we use in very pejorative ways. Time is our enemy. Time is not on our side. And time is slipping through our fingers, all of those things. Yeah. So I thought I'd start in a very radical way. All of these essays have a line in them where the reader is supposed to cry out, can that be true? So I'd start with one right at the beginning. Yes. And time is on our side.

Time is not our enemy. Time is our greatest friend. Time is not our enemy. Time is our greatest friend. If we can come to know time in its own intimate unfolding way, and not through the abstract measure we have made of it, time starts to grant to greater, more spacious, more elemental, and even eternal freedom to every mortal, seemingly time bound human life. Time is not slipping through our fingers. Time is here forever.

It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time. Memory and the traces of memory grant me a sense of time passing and also enable me to learn how I remember through time and how I learn and how I put those memories in that learning into conversation with the future shapes my identity for good or for ill. Time lies at the center of my identity. Time only time only seems to be something in which I participate involuntarily. But time needs me voluntarily to deepen my understanding of its multivalent nature and help to mediate its life fully in my world. Time needs me.

Needs me to live through all its many appearances to give it life and amplitude. Time exists in a field of possibility which I influence and partly determine. I may constantly cry that I need more time, but actually time needs more of me. More of our spacious, uninterrupted, timeless time to live out and understand both its extraordinary depths and its incalculable far off horizons. Time teaches us that nothing at the surface is as it seems, but also that all the surface seemings of the world depend upon the all embracing

multi-level presence of time. Time may take a linear form in my mind, but only because my senses are narrow, my mind given to defensive postures to surfaces and unimaginative forms that restrict my understanding of the multidimensional, radiant nature of existence. Time not only invites me below all surfaces, but in all directions at once, including frighteningly, when time seemingly turns back towards me and looks me in the face. Time may seem always to be flowing away from me, but in deeper states of attention, I and time are reciprocal partners. We create a multifaceted conversational reality together, not only through memory, but through

direct experience. Seeing the multitudinous face of time itself, and courageously holding its gaze, is one of the great thresholds of religious transformation. When my sense of time breaks out of the linear, so does my identity. In the deeper, timeless states of love or newly being in love, time radiates out from the very place where I am standing,

unbinding me from the well-fitted, previously time-bound manacles of my routine life. The sudden freedom felt when time is opened by the power of love always makes me click my heels. The entrance into time is always the threshold where we are asked to loosen our grasp on our previous fearful understandings. Love is time unanchored and let to be fully itself, where the hours are rich and spacious with anticipation and the sudden sense that there is no immediate horizon

to our possibilities. Without love and the all round attention love pays to the world, time is where I feel most powerless. Without love, time is where I feel most powerless, because time passes and I will die. So I hold on, of course, to a version of time mediated through control, exhausting my very power to live through the very force of my grip. Living fully and giving freedom to those who live with me often means letting go of the way I hold onto time. And all the ways I hold onto the people I love too strictly, too narrowly, and too unimaginatively

to my particular version of time. Whatever the version of time we have arranged for ourselves, time always feels like a powerful gravity, a pull to our senses, always drawing us toward a clock, toward an appointment, toward a sense that something should be happening now, whether it is actually possible or not. Time is intimately connected with gravity. Astonishingly, physicists tell our disbelieving ears that everything gravitates toward places where time moves more slowly. And time seems to move more slowly the greater the mass to which it is near.

The greater the gravity, the greater the slowing down of time. So that to our amazement, someone living on a mountain top ages more quickly than their neighbors down in the valley. What physicists call mass, we could call presence. And as in a human life, presence is invitational. Presence invites other presences towards it. Presence slows time down and opens up possibilities of experiencing the timeless and the eternal.

The depth, amplitude and invitational nature of my presence slows time for everyone around me. Timelessness is the foundation of all real charism and charisma. By creating a centered, timeless presence, I invite everyone unconsciously to make the choice to join me there, or should they be afraid of what might happen in that slow, spacious territory of possibility, run a hundred miles in the opposite direction. What is disturbing about time in my mortal human world is that my personal surface experience of it is irrevocable. The glass broken into a hundred shards cannot heal itself.

The child I lost will never return to me. The regrets I have are things I can only heal in my imagination, or with others in my future who might benefit from the sincerity of my regret. This arrow of time exists only at the surface of things. When I die, the individual atoms and molecules of my body actually experience not time passing, but simply a change of state. A transition from an ordered world to one and another level, newly disordered, but also full of new potential. The meeting of time and the timeless is the place of my inevitable disappearance and transformation. Time tells me with some glee that we are all

compost for many future lives and many future worlds. Time never comes to an end. Even though my time will come to an end, time does not pass. Even though I will pass, time will carry on to eternity. Therefore, a proper relationship with the foundational nature of time is my own everyday doorway into the eternal. When I stop counting time as a way of controlling it, I stop my addiction to naming the hours and what should occur in those hours. That single pathway across the field suddenly branches to a hundred more. No one has explored. That 30 minutes with my son or daughter fully spent lives for years as a precious binding memory. When we stop measuring change as if we knew

what measuring change actually meant, the human ability to measure time also stops, which is why on a silent retreat or in a monastery, we make all the outer hours repeatable, so that day after day, nothing on the outside seems to change. We stop time on the outside so that we can concentrate on all the ways things change and grow on the inside. We dwell in the deepening, broadening, and maturing sense of presence we call the timeless.

As our war against time quietens, we start to take joy in the increased acuity of the years, the entrancing aromas of rain on fresh leaves that we previously never gave ourselves the time to breathe. Time is left to itself to be itself and to grow what it needs to grow in every season of a human life. In a deeply rested state, as we loosen our grip on what we think is time, our sense of bodily tension falls away along with the falling away of a falsely measured self. And out of that, we begin to experience that joyful radiance we call timelessness, growing through every cell of our previously time-bound bodies. Just like now, as I write these last lines

in the quiet late night hours in a hotel bar in Italy, listening to miracle hands moving softly over the keys of a perfectly tuned piano. Memory meeting the moment in each note, and then memory and moment both disappearing and reappearing in the onward music, each note exquisitely timed, but part of an onward unstoppable flow. This moment in time, inherited from all previous times, rippling into the future, or all time.

Thank you. Thank you for giving me the time to read time. It takes me right back both to the physical experience and the hotel bar, I might say at the end of the night with this brilliant pianist actually, he was marvelous. What a gift of a location for your writing, what a blessing of the surrounding for your writing and what a gift of a reading. So thank you for that. Just so long as the listener doesn't feel they need a Perugian castle in order to write. So you want to write poetry.

Step one. You've also written poetry in the tube, so it can happen anywhere. David, this has been such a wide ranging and fun conversation. We've covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you would like to chat about or anything you'd like to point my listeners to? Ask of them questions you'd like to point my listeners to ask of them questions you'd like to pose anything at all they'd like to add before we wind to a close

that's quite an invitation tim i think we could spend the next week here actually well the broadband's pretty good yes i'm during the hotel room in New York, so I'm in the surroundings. I see the shades of night have fallen fast outside your side your window. That's the sun going up and down. I think for now we've had the marvelous conversation, but I'd say, you know, the whole limitation from poetry is that it's possible to speak what you think is impossible to say. to speak what you think is impossible to say. And once you've said it, you are freed into a larger territory. You'll eventually make a prison of that territory too, but that's going to be the end of that season.

And you'll learn how to get out of the prison earlier. You'll be able to recognize when you're impersonating yourself instead of being yourself. And you don't have to write it yourself. You can just read good poetry or learn how to start to speak even in just a hesitant, broken, stuttering way. What you feel needs to be said to a loved one or to a colleague or to a friend or to yourself in the mirror.

That's the invitation I'd like to leave people with. And certainly I recommend people get their hands on anything that you've written, including your latest constellations to which further explores what you call the conversational nature of reality, which is a wording I absolutely love. And people can find you at davidwhite.com, all things David White, w-h-y-t-e dot com. And I would kick myself if I didn't ask for people who are inspired by this conversation, who want to dip their toes into the waters of poetry, aside from your own poetry, are there any starting points you might recommend for intrepid readers of

poetry? Because for instance, I'll admit something embarrassing. For me for a long time, and maybe this was from going to schools where I was presented with this stuff, but I would end up reading poetry that seemed impenetrable. It seemed undecipherable, much like I might look at some contemporary art and there's a plaque explaining what it means and it's an otter duct tape to a piece of Velcro. And I'm like, I don't get it. I just don't get it. And then I came across certain poets, Mary Oliver, certainly Hafez and many others who made sense to me finally. And I was like, oh, this can exist. And that opened the door for me to engage. So I'm wondering if there are other poets or collections

that you might put on a short list for people who are shy but interested in engaging. Yes. Well, I think, you know, justify it's the door we in is always so personal. I'd advise going along the bookshelf, pulling them down and putting them back up until you find a voice that speaks to you. And to have faith. And that voice will lead you to a lot of other voices. You know, to begin with, just to be able to have an easy

relationship with the word. And that's why people love Mary Oliver so much. She's so she is so invitational. Actually, she's so engaging. She's so simple. She's so clear. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on 100 miles through your desert. You do not have to walk for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. That's the wild wild geese right? Believe that? Yeah.

That the invitation you want is one voice that speaks to you. Yeah. Robert Bly's translations of Antonio Machado, Seamus Hine's poetry and there are so many Emily Dickinson. There are so many clear voices. There is some impenetrable poetry that's worth giving your time to, but only if you feel it's worth giving your one only once you've got the love for poetry. But there is a lot of bad impenetrable poetry too, so your intuition may be entirely correct. It's one thing to be impenetrable with a purpose and on purpose when it starts to veer

off that track is when it gets a little complicated. Well, David, this has been such a joy, such a gift. I really appreciate it. Lovely. Absolutely. And I just like to say that you're a really marvelous and invitational conversationalist. And it comes from a, from that robust vulnerability of wanting to know really, and you really feel that as a sincere reaching out across the ethos. So that's much appreciated. Thank you very much. Well, thank you.

There really means a lot coming from you and really feeling means a lot coming from you and really feeling infigurated and excited to explore in the, in the outer realms and the inner realms. So I think I'm going to get straight into a meditation session after this and then go get, go get a bite to eat. But really appreciate the time. Lovely. Yeah. Don't neglect those fantastic bars and restaurants in Manhattan. Everybody listening, we will link to everything we discussed in the show notes, as per usual at tim.blogslashpodcast. Just search David White and he'll pop right up.

And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, both to others and to yourself. And thanks for tuning in. others and to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts, guests, and these strange esoteric things

end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blogslashfriday. Type that into your browser, tim.blogslashfriday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep.

I have been using 8 Sleep pod cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. 8Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod, and I'm excited to test it out, Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically.

More on that in a second. First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool, even in a heat wave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that.

Pod4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. And for those snore-heavy nights, the Pod4 can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring. Plus, with the Pod4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them, because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod4 Ultra itself.

They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking, as just one example, is at 99% accuracy. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner, great, you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own ideal temperatures. It's easy.

So go to 8sleep.com slash Tim and save between $400 and $600 on the Pod 4 Ultra. 8sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. This special offer is valid until December 14th. With millions of nonprofits in the United States and around the world, how do you find the few that could actually make a big impact with your donation? Today's sponsor GiveWell makes it easy and they've been a sponsor of this podcast for a very long time. I am a huge fan.

Why am I a huge fan? Well, GiveWell researches charitable opportunities in global health and poverty alleviation and directs funding to those that have the highest impact. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high impact giving. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site for free. They have 39 staff researchers, including researchers with backgrounds in economics, biology, and much more. They spend more than 50,000 hours each year looking for the giving opportunities

that will maximize each dollar of your donation impact. You can make tax-deductible donations to the recommended funds or charities, and GiveWell does not take a cut. More than 100,000 donors, including me, yours truly, have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion, and that includes Tim Ferriss Show listeners who have donated close to $1 million dollars, $960k or so now. To date, rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save more than 200,000 lives

and improve the lives of millions more. If you have never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. So you can make your money go further with the help of GiveWell. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferriss show at

checkout just to let me know where you heard about this claim your match, but givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferriss show at checkout. Again, that's givewell.org to have your donation matched or to simply learn more. Check it out. Highly recommend givewell.org.