David Whyte (Part 2)

0:01Tetragrammaton.

0:23I'm memorizing the big poem, which is called Still Possible. It's a good dozen pages long. it's still possible to feel your body as fully here and fully you but not quite your own to find you can live both entirely as yourself and in the lovely anonymous multitude of elements around you so that's the phrase there that you can live both entirely as yourself and in the lovely anonymous multitude of elements around you that you've always been a brother and sister to the clouds beyond the window, or have lived your secret unspoken marriage with the pale blue sky for more years than you could ever remember, and that you have always been proud to be, through all your difficulties, a loyal companion and friend to the foaming tide, coming and going, appearing and disappearing with you and for you, day after day, on the ceaseless shore.

1:20Yeah, so there you've got all of those companions that we've co-evolved with. We've co-evolved with the blue of the sky as an ally to our happiness, actually, to mountain air, to the aromas of the earth and the ground, and to the way the light changes in the sky, to the proximity of other human beings that we love. we're surrounded at all times by various visible and invisible spectra of belonging a lovely anonymous multitude of elements around us the poem actually starts with the most difficult possibility of all still possible it's still possible to be kind to yourself to drop constraints and fall often to your knees it's not too late now to bow to what beckons, the world still swimming around you as you kneel transfigured by what sweeps on.

2:19It's still possible to leave every fearful former self in the wake of newly heard words minted from an astonished mouth. It's still possible to feel your body as fully here and fully you, but not quite your own, to find you can live both entirely as yourself and in the lovely anonymous multitude of elements around you did you write that to yourself i did yeah i wrote it this was my big lockdown poem in a way yeah yeah it sounds like that yeah exactly oh yeah it's giving i often there is the poetry what i call the poetry of self-admonition in other words in other words giving yourself a good telling off yeah yeah So I've got one called Self-Portrait.

3:08It doesn't interest me if there's one god or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you can know despair or see it in others. If you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying, this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living, falling toward the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live day by day with the consequence of love and the bitter, unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.

3:49Wow. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah, I had a wow when I wrote it. That's a good one. So thank you for the corroboration. Yeah, so that's the self-admonition. And that's looking in your mirror and, in a sense, saying you're bigger than this. It doesn't interest me if there's one God or many gods. Stop wasting your time with those abstract theological questions. It doesn't interest me if there's one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you can know despair or see it in others. That was my mother's question that I inherited. It's mine now, you know. If you can know despair or see it in others.

4:25if you are prepared to live in this world, if you're prepared to live in this world with its harsh need to change you, if you can look back with fierce eyes saying, this is where I stand, I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living, falling toward the center of your longing, if you are prepared to live day by day with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard in that embrace even the God speak of God. And a really powerful line for me there was that I want to know if you can live with the consequence of love. Yeah. Because we can all fall in love.

5:11Yeah. But then staying with the love and through to its full maturation, that's what will kill you. Yeah. God speak of God is. Yeah. Yeah. The whole thing breaks open. It's not you. Yeah. It's everyone saying it at the end. The chorus, yeah. This is another poem in the tradition of self-admonition. Everything is waiting for you. When you're losing faith and you're operating from the part of yourself that's not courageous enough to understand what's occurring when you're operating from the periphery. So the accusation, jacuzzi, I accuse you. That's penetrating. It's not just an accusation, it's actually a way of penetrating to a deeper part of yourself in your self-reflection.

6:03Your 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.

6:46Put 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. When you say the words, they make you smile. Mm-hmm. It's very beautiful. Thank you. Yes. Great power in the Word. Yeah, the phone is our enemy at times, but it's a lovely sweet mercy to say, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream letter to divinity. Yeah. You can turn any amplification of your voice into an entrance into heaven.

7:36Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were 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, 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.

8:22And the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream ladder to divinity. Put down the weight of your alertness 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 just unutterably themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you. So what's the feeling when you write that? I seem to remember an explosive sense of emotion, actually. and just a sweet feeling of having said it just right and therefore having helped others through it too, that others could join me in that beauty.

9:09You know the time when you're trying to find words for a friend and you don't have much hope, but suddenly you find them. Yes. And you say, oh, my God, I just said it right. And they look up and they hear what you said. That's the experience I had there of just having found the sweet spot. of both speaking and listening at the same time. And so I knew the poem had a future, would live on. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think some words land in the body and other words that mean the same thing don't have that impact? It's often because the foundation of the word is in an abstract language. So a lot of the Latinate words in English are the abstracted words.

9:56So they were used in the church. they were used in law, they were used in institutions, but they weren't used by the common people. So the words that often touches in a very physical way are from the Anglo-Saxon, they could be also from the Norman French or the aristocracy when they were touched by their language, or they could be from the Norse or Danish as they were in the north of England where I grew up. So I think it's often to do with the root daily use of the word. Shakespeare had this brilliant ability to layer word upon word, often using the Latinate at the end, the Latinate derivations, after he'd set the physical sense of the word in your mind.

10:44Can you give me an example of that? When in disgrace, with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, and think upon myself and curse my fate, wishing me light to one more rich in hope, featured like him with friends possessed, desiring this man's art and that man's scope, with what I most enjoy contented least. Yet in these thoughts myself, almost despising, happily I think on thee. And then my state, like to the lark at break of day ascending from sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate. For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings.

11:37I was hoping to come across an example in the middle of that, but that was actually mostly very physical language. Apart from the word state, he loves to use the word state, Shakespeare. But he always sets an early context for the use of it. Whereas we would bring in the word state and it would hang abstractedly by itself. So I suppose that's a good example.

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13:39What makes a place holy? This is fascinating, actually, because I lead people to pilgrim places. In my walking tours, my poetry and walking tours, whether they're in Italy or the Himalayas or Japan or the north of England, most especially in the west of Ireland, holy wells and tombs and places where many of the great mythic dramas of the Irish imagination took place. So I've actually thought about this quite a lot. There's one place, for instance, called Coleman's Bed. And in Ireland, a bed means a place where someone slept. So it means a dwelling place, really. The Irish word is lobber. So you'll often have the word lobber and then the name of the person who lived there.

14:31So Lobber Fordrick, the bed of Patrick, or Lobber Coleman, the bed of Coleman. These were Irish saints, yeah. But sometimes it will be a bed where Irish mythic figures were supposed to have slept the night. There's one place, which is a place where a very famous abbot called Coleman would go away from his monastery out into the wild limestone mountains, now called the Burren. And he found this place under this cliff, a cliff called Eagle Rock. And he found a cave there. And there was running water, a holy well, cress, hazel trees. So he's got protection from the wind and the weather. And he would go out there away from his monastery to reinforce his contemplative practice.

15:25Because actually when you're in a monastery, There's no place more political than a monastery, actually. So you need a monastery to get away from the monastery. And I've worked in a lot of them, so I know the dynamics. So he'd go up to this place, and the Irish saints were very much like the Hindu gurus. Hindu gurus would not have an official sanction from a Vatican saying they were a saint, but they would be called saints by the local people, and people would take them fruit and revere them and come for darshan or whatever, for a blessing. It was much the same with many of the Irish saints, particularly the ones who lived alone.

16:05And so Coleman was part of this really wild interpretation of Christianity. I think one of the best interpretations of Christianity that's existed in the fact that the revelations of Jesus could be seen in the wind rustling the leaves of a tree or a stag belling at the end of a valley or the clouds racing over the mountains just as much as they could be read in a Bible, in the stories. They had this druidic experience of the wild world. There was even a Celtic Saint Francis in the form of Saint Kevin, and he had this remarkable relationship with the animal world. He'd drop his prayer book in the water, and a heron would bring it back, and he'd drop it again, or an otter would bring it back.

16:55And there was one famous time he was praying in the chapel, and the cultic monks prayed not in the Roman way with their hands together, but in the old Druidic way with their hands out like this. They also had an interesting tonsia. Instead of a bald patch in the middle of their heads, their hair was shaven halfway back and then long at the back, so they would have looked incredibly cool, actually. It was more of a druidic tonsure. And St. Kevin's supposed to have been in his chapel with his hands out, and his hand was near the window. And he was praying for so long that a passing blackbird looked down and saw the perch and said, that would be a great old place to rest.

17:36So it came down. And so Kevin kept praying so that he wouldn't disturb the bird. But before he knew it, the bird had gone off and come back a couple of times with little snags of wool and twigs and leaves and was building a nest. So in the story, Kevin has to keep praying until the nest is built. But then doesn't the bird lay an egg in the nest? And so Kevin has to keep praying until the egg is hatched. But then isn't there a little chick in the nest and he has to keep praying on until finally the chick is fledged and flies off into the wild blue yonder with his mother. And then he's finally able to put his hands together.

18:17There's a famous poem by Seamus Heaney about Kevin putting his hands together and what it must have felt like. Wow. But it's really, you know, it's an apocryphal story, but it's really a very precise story about the phenomenology of meditation. So it's a very powerful image. So Coleman would have been of that lineage. And so Coleman's Bed is a beautiful place to go to. And I went up there with a friend to begin with who showed me the place. And then I'd go up by myself, and then I started taking my groups up there. And about 12 years into visiting this place, visiting every year, I started to say, what is it about this?

18:56Why do we come back to these holy places? Your question, yeah. What is a holy place and what draws you back, like a magnet? And sometimes the holy place is just a short walk from your house to a place where you turn back. But that place is holy in your mind because it's a place that nourishes you so fully. So I wrote this piece, it's called Coleman's Bed, and one of my readers actually counted 26 invitations in the poem. And it's really about the way a holy place invites you deeper and deeper into self-understanding. But then I got a really straight practical answer right at the end about why we would visit a place where a supposedly holy person lived, in this case, Coleman.

19:46So this is the piece, it's called Coleman's Bed. Make a nesting now, a place to which the birds can come. Think of Kevin's prayerful palm holding the blackbird's egg, and be the one, looking out from this place, who warms interior forms into light. Feel the way the cliff at your back gives shelter to your outward view, then bring in from those horizons all discordant elements that make a home. Be taught now among the trees and rocks how the discarded is woven into shelter. Feel the way things hidden and unspoken. Slowly proclaim their voice in the world. Find that far inward symmetry to all outward appearances.

20:30Begin to welcome back all you sent away. Be a new enunciation. Make yourself into a door through which to be hospitable. even to the stranger in you. See with every turning day how each season wants to make a child of you again, wants you to become a seeker after birdsong and rainfall. Watch how it weathers you into a testing in the tried and true, tells you with each falling leaf to leave and slip away, even from the branch that held you. To be courageous, to be like that last word you'd want to say before you leave the world. Above all, be alone with it all, a hiving off, a corner of silence amidst the noise.

21:20Refuse to talk, even to yourself, and stay in this place until the current of the story is strong enough to float you out. Ghost then where others in this place have come before, under the hazel by the ruined chapel, below the cave where Coleman slept. Become the stream that makes the river flow, and then the sea beyond. Live in this place as you were meant to, and then, surprised by your abilities, become the ancestor of it all, the quiet, robust, and blessed saint that your future happiness will always remember. So the whole dynamic of a holy place where someone holy lived is that something good happened there.

22:07That was a blessing on future generations. And the Celtic church actually reinvigorated post-barbaric, post-Roman Europe, actually. All the foundations of the Benedictine monasteries across Europe were originally Irish foundations, actually. So they were a blessing to their time, and they were remembered in individual characters as a blessing. So we go back because something good happened there. But the invitation is to, in many ways, is to be that saint for your future self. All of us can remember moments in our life where we got up from our chair, we picked the phone up and we called someone and it changed our life.

22:53Or we went out the door, we went to a concert, we went to a restaurant, we met people. If we hadn't have gone out the door, if we hadn't have stirred ourselves in whatever form that stirring took place, we would be immeasurably impoverished. So you can go back and thank that saintly moment, that person you were. In a kind of pilgrimage, you can go back and say, thank God, David, thank God, Rick, you went out the door, you went to the concert, you met that person. But the corollary of that is, what could I do now that my future self would come back and thank me for. Wow. Yes. Yeah. So beautiful.

23:36Become the ancestor of it all. Yeah. The quiet, robust, and blessed saint that your future happiness will always remember. Hmm. You told me a story about coming into a situation some time ago and meeting a person and saying, this is how you meet someone you'll know for the rest of your life. Mm-hmm. Tell me about that. That was at the time of my son's birth. And there were three couples who had three boys together. We were one of the couples. And the women, of course, got to know each other through all the Lamaze classes and yoga and God knows what. And we men just met each other at the time of the birth.

24:22In fact, after the births. First there was David born, then there was my son Brendan, and then there was Nico born to Brian and Irini. and we all made a pilgrimage to see the last baby. So we were all there in the room, except I was the last person to come into that room where the mother was with Nico. And when I came through the door, I saw this man, young man my own age, sat looking through the bars of the bed at the bottom. It was an old-fashioned metal hospital bed. And I saw his face, and I said to myself, this is how you meet people you will know for the rest of your life. This is how you meet a person.

25:02And it was so prophetic. We became such close and intertwined friends. I'm going to his house in Oxford. And we became close friends, artistic friends. He was a book designer and calligrapher, and one of the best book designers in Britain, actually. But also, I inveigled him into going into the mountains and starting rock climbing. I mean, we became mountaineering and alpine and rock climbing buddies for years with our lives literally in each other's hands. So here we are 40 years later, literally, still in that powerful relationship. It's that intuition of friendship. You know, if you have a young son or daughter and they're sometimes desperate to play with another friend, and you take them out to a playground and they see another boy or another girl and you can feel their body all a quiver just for that companionship, that playmate.

26:03We all have it within us still. And I actually think the making of new friends is a real hallmark that you're still alive. I think, for instance, in North America, one of the tragedies of male society is that American males cruise on the friendships they make up until college. And then everything after that is predicated on whether you're working together or not. And if you're working together, you might have a friendship that endures, but as soon as you work in another place. And part of the corollary of that is that American men often run their emotional lives through their women. So they don't have a direct emotional exchange with another man around their deepest difficulties or fears.

26:52That's a generality, of course. There are great American men who are able to make. Of course. Yes, but the ability in each epoch of your life to make a new friend, this is a sign that you're still there. You're still a player. You've still got an edge. You can still recognize the new territory embodied in another person. I mean, I feel that with you and our meeting. Yes. It's a delight. Oh, here's another friend. It's a good feeling. Actually, there's a lovely story. My friends had their grandson over. We'll call him Tommy. And they'd invited a friend over to him to play. And the friend was coming in an hour.

27:39And you know what an hour feels like to a seven-year-old boy, you know? and so he sat by the window staring after the window at the driveway for 20 minutes or so so his grandmother said tommy come over here i'll get you a big pile of books and then time will go past you know until your friends come and he just hung his head and he said no no grandma i think i'll just sit anxiously by the window that was so sweet i learned a lot from that actually you know Sometimes when you're just anxious, you just need to be anxious. You just need to wait anxiously by the window in your life sometimes. It was just a moment of absolute freedom for me.

28:21How can we develop our speaking voice? Definitely by listening to ourselves. Hearing your voice out of your body or more often just above your shoulders in your head. So you hear my voice now. I practice my voice. It's going through my soles into the ground. It's down in my belly, my chest, my legs. If I take my voice up just above the shoulders, I'm immediately less interesting to listen to. You don't want to hear me as much, actually. As soon as I take my voice down into the body, it takes on the tidal rhythm of the breath. And it takes the amplitude and resonance of the breath, too. And it's not just putting on a deep voice.

29:07It's coming from some other place. And people unconsciously can tell how much of you is there, even if they've never studied the voice in their life, even if they don't register what voices are like. They instinctively know how much of you is there from your voice. You've got this explanatory voice all the time up here, trying to defend itself, trying to justify things all the time. And as an Irish friend of mine says, never explain. your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe you that's great but this part is constantly trying to explain so you can record yourself but it is a whole apprenticeship in and of itself it's like learning an instrument you wouldn't pick up the guitar and be able to you know play a john remborn riff right away you just have to go at it slowly Practice and develop it.

30:07And I had an instinctual draw towards understanding the place of the voice in the body. I remember when I was 13 wanting to spend more time around my father because I felt intimidated by him. And because I felt my voice would go up here when I was with him, just like it would with the school bully in the yard, you know, at school. and with my friends my voice was easier down so i was really interested for some reason who knows why because of my future i don't know and so my father was very surprised when i i started saying where are you going dad oh i'm going to see your uncle tom can i come with you and yeah of course you can sit in the front seat and practice speaking to my father while keeping my voice down in my body, in my stomach, and then watching the way it would squeak upwards.