David Whyte on The Art of Poetry and Prose

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

the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is David White, a poet and author who also leads the Many Rivers organization and ENVITAS, the Institute for Conversational Leadership, which he founded in two thousand fourteen. David is the author of many poetry collection books and prose books, including the one primarily discussed here with Eric Still Possible. Hi David, Welcome to the show. Very good to be with you, all right.

I am really excited to have you on. Your poetry has been inspiring to me, actually, your poetry and your prose for a long time, so I'm really excited about this. We'll start with a poem from your new book. But before we do that, let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and it's in life. There are two wolves inside

of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents as well. Which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well.

I think the parable is just the beginning of an interesting conversation. Start off by identifying, you know, one bad walth one good wolf. But actually it's more hierarchy of function. The bad wolf is really the strategic mind when it's left to shape your identity and greed and fear, and it's the naming mind bereft of the faculty of belonging, which is really the other wolf. So I'd say the bad wolf is meant actually to be a good servant to the first wolf's desires, and then there isn't a

bad wolf and a good wolf. You get a better arrangement of things. That's my experience of it. So the ability to drop down to a foundational self that is paying attention in a way of direct perception rather than intermediate naming. And we often name things in order to keep them at a distance, to keep them in the abstract, to diminish them, to have power over them. But there are useful times to name things when you're in conversation with other people, and and so you learn discernment about

that naming. So a useful way to start, but in the end, I don't think the parable is accurate for the dynamic, but a very good place to start. Just in the way that people perceive different parts of themselves as good and bad, but if we have a different relationship with them, then we find that the bad part is just misaligned. Yeah, there's a lot of instances in your work where you know something is necessary skill for one part of our journey and then becomes an unnecessary

skill at another part of our journey. You know, it comes to mind hearing you talk about ambition, right, saying like, well, you know, for the youth, that's pretty important. It's good, but ultimately becomes an obstacle for someone who's fully mature. But I'm getting ahead of ourselves here. Why don't we start with a poem from the new book from Still Possible. Yeah, this book came out of the heart of the pandemic.

And of course, I don't know if you remember at the beginning of Lockdown, but everyone was going to be writing the great next American novel, or the great next Irish or British novel, or learning Italian are becoming a great Parisian baker, and some of the as did. But I had my traveling life stopped and I was suddenly at home, and being a home was like a radical

travel in itself, I mean over extended times. So I said, no, David, don't give yourself any goals or ambitions apart from my creating a community online, which took up most of my time. So I went into the pandemic just wanting to give myself a real rest actually from that kind of endeavor

and goal oriented seeking. But in the middle of it, I was watching a BBC documentary called Brotherhood, The Secret Life of Monks, which concentrated on the small community of Carthusian monks in the north of England and an elderly group of men who were actually starting a brewery in order to attract a younger group of men into the ministry.

Ostensibly this was this was what the documentary was about, but really it was really about the inner life of this remarkable body of monks who had been together for decades actually, And the documentary began focusing on the man who was obviously very ill in bed and who was having actually difficulty speaking, and it took a while to entrain into what he was saying and how we were

saying it. And then after a while you realized he wasn't only on his sick bed, he was actually on his deathbed, and he was talking about his life at the monastery and all the years he'd been there and coming in as a young monk, and the illusions he had. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, Eric, he says, you know,

I gave up praying years ago. And the immediate catch in your heart listening was all he lost his faith, you know, he just found a comfortable place to be where he'd be looked after, you know, and he just got with the program and lived his life. But there was a beat, you know, of silence for a little while, and he said, I gave up praying years ago because my whole life became a prayer. I was living and breathing the atmosphere of prayer. And it was such a

powerful statement. And then the very next scene was the man in his coffin actually after he died, surrounded by his fellow monks, reading the officers, you know, in the chapel around him. And I was so struck and so poignantly affected by both his testament on his deathbed and also the intimate invitation that he and his fellow monks had made to accompany him in his death. So I wrote this piece for him and it's called your prayer.

Your prayer only began with words, each one, each one just a hand on the door to silence, each one, just you putting your full weight against everything you thought you could never deserve, even in your gathered, chanted strength

in the chapel. What you said in the end was just a shoulder against the grain of wood, trying to keep the entrance open until that door, which had been no door at all, gave way to necessary grief, which is really just you understanding everything you had been missing all along, which is really just you feeling that raw vulnerability you needed to make a proper invitation, which is really just you feeling the full depth of your love at last, the heartbroken heart coming to heart felt rest,

the opening inside you filled to the gleaming brim and casting its generous being, the part of you you thought was foolish, the wisest voice of all, The part of you you thought was foolish, the wisest voice of all. Such a beautiful poem. There's an image that runs through multiple poems in your new book about this idea of a door. You sort of use it. It's sort of a shoulder against a door. Do that have a special

meaning to you. It just shows up. I noticed multiple times. Yes, it's you know, we can have the door as a barrier and a door that we're afraid to approach, and a door that we feel is locked. But a door is also by its own definition and opening. And so the idea of your weights against the door, whether it's a shoulder against the grain of wood, are you putting your full weights against everything you thought you never deserved.

It's this experience of real contact with what seems like a barrier that usually when you put your full weight against it, swings open. It's very powerful. And we've started with a kind of fairy tale parable and one of the powerful images in Northern European fairy tales, that's when the children are taken out at the behest of the false mother, usually by the hunter, and he's supposed to kill them there in the woods, but he can't do it,

actually can't bring himself to do us. So it just leaves them in the dark and says they and says they'll they'll have to fend for themselves. They probably won't make it, so that will do it, you know, and the child, the boy or the girl eventually starts crying, and in their grief they fall against a rock or a tree, and it's only when the rock or the tree takes their full weight that it says to them. It actually speaks back to them, It says, how can

I help you my child? More or less? And it's just as if it takes you the full weight of your grief and your exile for the world to speak back to you. So sometimes the doors already open actually and you were just afraid of leaning against and you find you actually all through to the other side. You know. Other times your way to your contact against it actually as a kind of conversation and it starts to change it into something else. And I'm thinking of the doors

outside in the world. Of course, in many ways, you know, perhaps a difficult conversation with another person, but it's quite often a kind of physical barrier in the body that we feel between our peripheral surface self that's always complaining and misnaming the world and feels pity for itself and the foundational part of you that feels as if everything in the world is actually quite miraculous and perfect here.

And the ability to get to that foundational core is not the ability to find some kind of elazy and perfection, you know, where we won't be touched as just being able to go to a place where we can have a proper conversation with things that are misaligned in the world and aren't making stense. It's the barrier between you and what's called in many of our traditions the essential self. You know, it's the part of you that can hold

a proper conversation with the world. And when that part of you holds the proper conversation, which is a kind of direct perception. I mean, in the Zen tradition or the Buddhist tradition, it's called Buddha nature, that place where what you think is you and what you think is not you disappears and becomes just the meeting itself, the

conversation itself. And we have this in extreme moments of our beautiful forgetting, whether it's in pleasures of intimacy with one of the person you know, or whether it's when you're ravished by an ocean view you know, or you're on the beach with the wind in your hair and your feet in the water and you just get out of yourself and into yourself at the same time. So

that's the doorway. It's what you think is a barrier or an opening, both through a play if you actually want to go, or a way you actually want to be. The classic Zen phase of the gateless gait, Yes, exactly, that door, which is no door at all, gave way to necessary grief. There is a kind of perception and austere perception of Zen whereby you know, when you're enlightened, you're not going to be touched by the heartbreak and difficulty of life, and you're not going to be awkward

and make mistakes. And but no, I mean, if you look at all the way enlightenment is actually described, it's really just saying enlightenment is when you're in a real conversation, when you're in a real meeting with something other than yourself. It doesn't mean to say you're protected, doesn't mean to say you're insulated. You know you're at this arrived place of perfection. No, you're just in a real conversation. And that's what makes all the difference. That's a beautiful answer.

And actually you answered a question I was going to ask before I even asked it, which was you know, looking at a couple views of spirituality, there's enlightenment, right, And another is a mature view of spirituality is the ten thousand joys and the ten thou sorrows, which I think your work speaks to so well. And I love the way you just sort of brought them together because I was going to ask you where the crossover point is for you, and I think you just answered, which

is real conversation. Yes, yeah, And that's why there's a very powerful kind of companionship between the apprenticeship to poetry and deep states of intentionality and zen or are any contemplative tradition. I mean, you could say that prose is really about something, poetry is the thing itself, or it should be good poetry as at least, and you could say theology is about something. But the practice of zen

is about direct seeing. The central practice, even in the Christian tradition, is about this direct perceptionist cloud of unknowing. There's a spiritual teacher by then of Adi Ashanti whose work is meant a lot to me. And he said once and I just thought this was so good. He said, you know, awakening is not freedom from feeling things, it's

freedom to feel things. And I thought that was a beautiful way of thinking about it, like we are in a space that's big enough, strong enough, solid enough that we can encounter life in all of its beauty and terror. Yes, that's lovely. That's an echo of what the French philosopher came you said. He said lived to the point of tears, which is not an invitation to modeling sentimentality. You know, it's to say to feel everything fully so it can

actually flower and transform into something else. You know. That's when we don't feel things fully is a Jucianti was intimating that things get stuck. And I do think depression is a form of stuck nous. It's just sorrow which is immobilized in a way. Not that we're not supposed to feel sorrow, but it's supposed to just have its season and then be allowed to move on. Depression, I think, is where you get that kind of gray immobility around it. Yeah.

And it's not to say that there isn't a clinical form of depression which needs medical help in order to help you shift. But I think it's the same dynamic. It's this drawing of the circle around us in a kind of fortified way. I mean, one of the dynamics of depression is it's self reinforcing nature. You start not looking out the window, you start not going out the door, you start not believing, not thinking there's anywhere to go,

or anything to do, or anyone to be with. I think direct perception always leads one to this experience of the invitational nature of reality. When you start paying deep, scintillating attention in silence, you realize everything is inviting you to its door. Strangely enough, you find that you're a part of everything too, and you, whether you want to

or not, are inviting everyone to your door. So you could say that real conversation is a mutual invitation, and you could say that enlightenment is a mutual acceptance of the invitation of being hospitable. It's a great, beautiful and disturbing question to ask yourself, as how invitational am I? Actually? If you're in a relationship, how invitational am I to my partner, to my wife, my husband, and my partner, whatever name I give them? How invitational am I to

my children? What invitation did they think I'm making? To them? How invitational am I to my friends? How invitational they am? I? Just? Actually? When I walk into a room, it's interesting to think that unconsciously human beings are constantly trying to figure out what the invitation is in almost every situation. Sometimes the invitation is to go away, and we have to be alert to that, which is why we're so wary much

of the time. But quite often that's a really powerful invitation that we're equally afraid of, which is to be more of yourself and to give your gift from that hidden self. So the doorways a door between what is spoken and what is not spoken, what has not been spoken yet, between the world in which we live and the hidden place in which we will give our gift

into that world. I want to move a little bit into one of your works that is meant the most to me, which is The Three Marriages, and you basically say, we all have, you know, three marriages to work to

another person and to ourselves. And my favorite line in that book is you're talking about how we meet ourselves, and you say, if we were really aware of the particular brick walls and unending difficulties that lay ahead of us, and finding just a little of that true self, we might lock ourselves up in a padded room with a towering pile of hello magazines, and never have a profound thought again. I always do think, Eric, that everyone has the right to say I don't want to have the conversation,

thank you very much. I don't want to respond to the invitation, because life is full of so much loss, difficulty, and heartbreak that almost all of us have been in despair or bereft at one time or another. And we can't quite believe that we have to have our heartbroken so many times, never mind just once, And we can't quite believe that there's no sincere path you can take

without having your heartbroken. And so everyone goes through the period in their life where they say, no, thank you, I'm just going to stay in this, in this insulation, I'm going to narrow down the bandwidth of my experience. Just as if you've got a piano but you only

play the middle keys of it. You know, you don't want to feel extreme joy, you don't want to feel extreme sorrow, and so you do get this effect the human beings have inhabiting this bland middle where actually you're you're afraid to break out along the edges, so only the bland middle of life can find you. You know, it takes one to recognize one in a way, to

expand the cordal structure of our existence. To have, you know, a part of the day which is music, whether you can play or not, but listening to it or witnessing it, you know, to have a part of the day which as you attempting to say something you haven't ever said before in your life, to ask a beautiful question, to do something physical that pushes your edges. Uh. You know, I run my own walking and portrait to us in different parts of the world, and we have good companionship,

good food. We have poetry in the morning and the conversations that come out of it, so you get a kind of imaginative intellectual stimulation. Then you have more good food at lunch, and then you go for a long, long walk out in beautiful places with the conversations you hold. In those places, you get wet, you get cold, you get hot, and then you arrive and you have a wonderful dinner and wine or guinness, depending what country you're in.

And then you rinse and repeat, you know, for six days in a row, and people's caudal structure starts to open up. You know, you're getting all the different parts of yourself addressed and you do feel these deep cords being played inside you. How would you shape a life like that for yourself? And that's always my question at the end of those I used to sit with the zen teacher and when we completed a seschine, you would

know sechines, you know, the intensive week long sitting. He'd always say, sechine starts tomorrow when you leave, you know, after seven days of fierce kind of physical and emotional agony. And I often say to that themselves. You know, if you've had a marvelous time in the West of Ireland, how do you create that? You know, get out in the elements every day, spend time with friends, have some music in your life, read a poem, and as you

probably know, you're obviously a lover of poetry. Quoting my own back to me, eric um, you only need one line of poetry day. Actually, you can travel a thousand miles in a single line of poetry. So is that how you encourage people to engage more deeply with poetry is to engage with less of it, but more deeply with each piece of it. Well, I would you know, if people were asking how do I bring poetry into my life. But I mean I work with it when i'm live by bringing a lot of it into their lives,

you know. But that's my art form. There's my jobs to get poetry to as many people as possible because it's such a life saver. Yeah, so that's why I memorize it. Um, That's why I build narratives around the stories. That's why I delight in all the details and also the biographical details of the poet, the man or woman who wrote them. And when you start to bring it all alive with storytelling, people find learned kind of qualities

that are being spoken to the poetry. I often say potrays the art of saying things you didn't know you knew you know. It's language against which you have no defenses. You write poetry so other people have no defenses against it when they're reading it. But for that to happen, you first of all have to write a line against which you have no defense. It kind of undos you unbuttons you opens you up, and you find yourself saying things you didn't know you knew, and quite often things

you didn't want to know. Thank you very much, because you were quite happy in your old, settled identity behind the place where you drawn the line where you close the door unlocked it from the inside. Is there a poem you would like to read or recite now that feels appropriate to where we are in the conversation. I mean, I've got my favorite, but I thought i'd open it to you. I'll start with the little one and then you could make a suggestion. But this is the first

poem in still possible. I didn't write it at the beginning, but it's an invitation to the journey that the book involves you in. And this is called for the Road to Santiago. And most people know now that Santiago is the of the pilgrim trail that goes across northern Spain for five miles Camino to Santiago de Compostella, which has become this beautiful ecumenical track. People of all persuasions and no persuasions at all are doing it. But it used

to be just a Catholic pilgrimage. So it's lovely the way it's opened out in the postmodern world. Like many things have. This is about setting off on the journey to Santiago and what you need to take with you. But it's of course, it's for any goal you set yourself that's precious to you in your life. For the Road to Santiago, for the Road to Santiago, don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind. Bring what you have. You're always going that way anyway,

you were always going that way all along. I love that, Bring what you have, Bring what you have. Yeah, I mean that was a disturbing line at the beginning when I wrote for the Road to Santiago, don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind. I mean, my whole art form is about making new declarations. And a lot of my poetry is in declarative sentences. Yeah, and a lot of my prose, my essays a declarative sentences are very unfashionable, you know, in the writing world.

So this was quite a both amusing and disturbing line. And I said, what you mean? I said to myself, what do I meet? What do you mean by that? You know? And when I say you, I'm talking about this deep stranger inside you, that it's you. But you always meet yourself the deepest stelf as as a stranger. First of all, who's speaking to you? Don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind. Bring what you have. You're always going that way anyway.

You're always going that way all along. First this invitation to have faith in the way you made and the way you hold the conversation of life. There's no one out can walk the camino in the way you can, and sometimes you literally have to crawl it on your hands and knees metaphorically. Sometimes in your life the only way to go through the door is on your hands and knees, or to fall flat through it. Where are you in your life? Don't try to be anything other

than you are. If you're just hanging on, then just hang on. That's your conversation at the moment. You're going to get there by just hanging on to begin with, not by being some kind of spiritual athlete. So have faith in the way you're just hanging on, actually, and learn to talk about it and ask for helping. You're

hanging on visible and invisible help. There's a lovely story in the ancient Polytechts, which are the earliest descriptions we have of Buddha's talks and his community that he gathered around him, you know, and there's a lovely story about one fellow who was a bit of a rogue. You know. He really loved what Buddha had to say, but after the talk was over, he be off, you know, having a drink and hanging out with the wrong kind of

crowd and getting into wonderful trouble. But he would turn up faithfully every day to the sanga, you know, and hear the talk. But at the end of one of Buddha's talks, and you've got the courage to stand up and say, yeah, you know, buddy, you're a great, You're a wonderful You never put a foot wrong, You're totally authentic, you're virtuous, you know. But I try to take a step and I fall down. He said, do you have any advice for me? And Buddha looked at him and said, yes,

just fall in the right direction. So it's really lovely. You know, it's an invitation. If you're going to come home drunk, you know, just make sure you fall into the kitchen, not out, fall through the door into the kitchen floor, don't fall out into the cold and the snow. It's very compassionate, it's beautiful. It's really an invitation. Wherever you are, your moment of transfiguration is just you taking a step towards a larger context and towards the context

that is good for you. I want to hit on this because I think this is right what we're sort of talking about here. You say that one of the great necessities of self knowledge is understanding your own reluctance to be here. All the ways you don't want to have the conversation, all the ways you don't want to be in the marriage, you don't want to be a parent, you don't want to be visible in a leadership position,

you don't want to be doing this work. So I think that's absolutely true, and I'm curious, though, where the line is in doing that acknowledging our reluctance in a deep and honest way and what passes for just sort of normal complaining. A lot of the time that we hear from people, which is they're they're talking about all the things they don't like, but it's not transforming. What's the difference there in your mind? Well, it's the naming

mind that's complaining. You know that things aren't conforming to a way you'd like them to be. In your abstract notion of perfection. So coming to terms with your own reluctance is just understanding how difficult it is to be alive, really, I mean just even to be alive, never mind be a parent or a partner, or a colleague, or a member of society or a community, with all the responsibilities

involved in all those different levels. So you pay attention to your reluctance in a kind of direct way, so it can speak to you both in a sense that it will give you a sense of humor. And there's nothing that will help you in parenting or in a marriage than having a sense of humor. If you have no sense of humor, you don't stand much of a chance in relationship. You will be humiliated in relationship. You will be humiliated in parenting. In fact, parenting is one

long apprenticeship to humilia. I would agree. I agree. And you will be humiliated by the person look back at you in the mirror. You will say the wrong thing at the wrong time in public. You know, So you've got to be able to understand, you know, why you're reluctant to appear and become visible. It's natural, and so you start to address it. You know, you start to be able to speak it out loud actually, and it

transforms it immediately. I mean, there's nothing more endearing than someone on stage who just confronts their nervousness directly, and there's nothing more inauthentic than someone who tries to cover it over with some kind of manufactured charisma. On stage, when you articulate how difficult it is to be here, you actually create both a direct contact with the difficulty itself, which starts to then transform, but you also make an

invitation to others to join you in that understanding. So if I'm reluctant to be on stage and yet might know that my work involves that kind of visibility, I've got to really pay attention to all the ways I don't want to be there. And then this wonderful dynamic starts to occur, which the Greeks addressed, and they had

a specific name for it. It's called an nto your DRUMA, which is the dynamic whereby something that becomes fullier and utterly itself immediately starts to change into something other than itself. In other words, it starts to get a seasonality, it stops being stuck. So almost always when you actually feel you're one particular form of reluctance. Fully, it immediately transforms

into something else. So you find, for instance, you know on stage that your reluctance has to do with the way you were perhaps shamed as a child whenever you were visible, either in your school or in your family, or in the playground wherever it was. Yeah, and you start to actually allow that to give you a sense of compassion for others that are shamed in those and suddenly your reluctance becomes this articulation of something that everyone

is feeling but never can say completely. So our reluctances are always doorways of connection and compassion and invitation to other people eventually, but people will just actually name their reluctance and then turn away from it. Yeah, I'll use it as a kind of foundation of cynicism, a way of indulging in the reluctance itself without actually moving it along.

It strikes me as similar to when you talk about despair being a natural and normal place to be as long as you've used the word seasonality, right, if you fully inhabit it, it will transform. And that's I think what you're sort of saying here. If you fully inhabit your reluctance. I know for me, when I start to feel reluctance towards something that is central in my life, yeah, it scares the ship out of me, right because you're like, well, what if I don't want to be this thing anymore?

Oh my goodness, and so yeah, yeah, it's turn away from it. Turn away from it instead of, as you're saying, really go deeply into it and go okay, this is what's happening. Yes, and what you're articulating there is this fear that you'll find out that you don't want it actually, and you've been shaping your whole life around it, and

so you're afraid to find out. And of course this is a very accurate description of what happens when you're in a relationship and you don't have certain conversations because you don't want to find out that you actually don't want to be in it. So this is a piece actually that's in still possible, and it's called you know, when it's time to go, And this is where you do find out that actually you're reluctant because you actually

have to leave. And that's another kind of flowering where going fully into all the ways you don't want to have. The conversation tells you. Actually, I wrote this during the pandemic. Good friend of mine was going through the throes of that separation and facing that he wanted to separate, and we had lovely conversations, but we were literally talking every day because he was really going through the emotional ringer. And there's a lovely male moment actually where he said,

I want you to be my coach. I mean, we've been friends for decades. And I said, really, I said, you want to be my coach. I said, okay, I'll ask you the classic coaching question. He said, what's that? I said, what kind of coach do you want me to be? He thought for a moment, and he said, I just want you to tell me what to do? Very masculine way, don't we all want? I said that doesn't work. I said, I'll tell you and you'll just said no. So anywhere I wrote this for him, but

it's for all of us in that situation. It's called you know when it's time to go. You know when it's time to go, that involuntary sense of hesitation discovered inside what only looks like your own body, hesitation like a movement in itself, your reluctance to hear the call as much an invitation as if a door had opened

in the broad heavens and called you through. You are unwillingness to hear the bird song another kind of listening, and the complete inability to speak such a clear and articulate understanding of what you want, even in the midst of thinking you'll never be ready, even when you feel you have never deserved that freedom to go, even under the comforting illusion that you never had a single speck of faith in what you want, You've already packed your

silent reluctance away, lifted your ear to the morning bird song, and before anyone can wake, you're out the door, down the road, around the on a and on your way. I have a really good friend who is in a similar situation to your friend. Uh when you wrote that poem, and she immediately was like, I have a favorite poem in that book, And I was like, I know which one it is. You really only need the title exactly exactly, but if it speaks to you, it speaks to you. Yeah,

it's a really beautiful idea. So I want to go back to this idea of the three marriages. For a second, one of the things that you do is you talk about a dynamic that is common to each of them. You say, in the pursuit of all three marriages, there is one essential human experience an individual brings to each of them. We hear more and more about it in

our modern world. And the word is anxiety. Yes, you say, are to do list to become the postmodern equivalent of the priests Rosary, the Lamas Sutra or an old prayer book, which I just think is is great. Say a little more about anxiety and working with it skillfully. Yes, Yeah, Anxiety is being far from home. Anxiety is feeling distance and exile without feeling it fully enough to actually be on your way back home through feeling it. So again, it's a kind of static nous. And I have this

piece called what to Remember When Waking. It looks at the way when you emerge from this imaginative and physics iological transfiguration called sleep, you've actually got an opening into the world that closes very quickly, actually, but it's an opening that's free from wary if you've slept properly. So there's a discipline of entering into sleep, you know, through the breath and the body, so that you're not falling asleep in anxiety. The way we fall asleep is often

the way we wake. But sometimes you can have just a transformative sleep out of nowhere. Everyone has one night a year when they wake up and they say, oh my god, if I slept like that every night, I'd be ten years younger. So this is the piece. It's about the discipline of waking. You know, to think that if you go straight to your to do list, that to do list was actually put together by the person

you were yesterday before you had this transformative sleep. So those are your set of waries from yesterday actually, So to wake into a kind of not to do list begin with, and then rewrite your to do less out of that later on completely transforms the day ahead. These

are the opening lines of the Pomb. What to remember when waking in that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake coming back to this life from the other, more secret, movable and frightening, lee honest world where everything began. There's a small opening into the day that closes the moment you begin your plans. There's a small opening into the day that closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep. To become human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance. You are not a troubled guest on this earth. You are not an accident amidst other accidents. So this starts to address

the anxiety and that line troubled guest. I take it it's stolen actually from a Gerta poem, the great German scientists and poet all around, a big hitter, both gang Gerta. He has this incredible poem called La Gazenzo the Holy Longing. The powerful line is so langni hastess stab unt d and beast and trouber gast out there dunklin Eden and so long as you have not experienced this to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth. M So there's trouber gusts, there's

troubled guests. It's a brilliant description of the human condition. Someone who doesn't know how to receive the hospitality of the world. And there's nothing worse than a troubled guests someone you invite to dinner or at the house. They don't know where to put themselves there, too nervous, they don't think they deserve it, or they don't know how to hold the conversation. We can often be like that in life, and so there's a necessary shyness in a

proper guest. You know, when you first come to the door. You don't walk into someone's house, you know, and kick your shoes off and open the refrigerated door and scy if they've got a beer, you know, and take it out straight away. You should be shy. You should be looking to how you actually begin the conversation in a way that's appropriate to displace of hospitality that you've been

invited into. The ability not to be a troubled guest on this earth, to go to an untroubled place inside yourself from which you can look at your troubles and your anxieties and your difficulties. There is a part of you that feels that the world is exactly right and exactly miraculous, just as it is, and we're quite often operating from the part of this that feels there's always something wrong with the world unless we go and put it right. Yeah, so our life is really a conversation

between the two. But if you don't have that foundation inside yourself, you will always be imprisoned by your anxieties and your worries. Yeah, you talk about this anxiety when we sort of create this relationship with ourself, and you see there's a way of holding ourselves that is larger than any particular worry. I love that. And you also talk about a way of being that's so alive to the phenomenon of existence that it stops distinguishing so much

between what is winning and what is losing. And that gets back to what we talked about earlier, the zen and the direct perception. I'm with things as they are without all my concepts about the way they should be. Yes, And I think this is really necessary to deepening any relationship or conversation in a relationship, because the way we've named someone else and the way we want them to

behave all the time. I mean, we get anxious about ourselves, but we get anxious about people who we live our love with, you know, and they're not conforming to the way we think they should actually behave So the relationship with silence, with their sun troubled place allows you to let the person have their own life more, not holding them hostage to a paragon of perfection that you set for themselves, not holding yourself hostage. There's a beautiful story

in the Zen tradition about a monk called Hogan. That's his Japanese name, actually as Chinese name was Jafen. But Hogan was a theological monk who lived in one of the great cities in China, and he prided himself on being the hippist theological kid in town, I suppose, and he decided that he and a coultry of monks would go out to all the rustic monasteries and take the

latest Buddhist theology to them. But in his journey he pretty soon realized that when he was confronted with many of these abbots, you know, who had been living the practice for decades, you know, he actually didn't know very much. And eventually he came across an abbot called Giso too monastery. He had a couple of confrontations with him in which he didn't come off very well conversational conversations, where again

he realized he didn't know much. And then, finally, very compassionately, Geso asked, Hogan, by the way, where are you going on this circuit? You know, what are you doing? And Hogan said, I'm going on pilgrimage. And then Jesus said, what is the pilgrimage? He said, looking at him directly, and Hogan looked at him, and this parent said, do you know, I don't know anymore what a pilgrimage is. And Jesus said, not knowing is most intimate. Not knowing

is most intimate. And really, when you think about it, you know, in the kitchen with your loved one, not

knowing is most intimate. You know, when you stop thinking you know who you're with, when you stop using those affectionate nicknames you have for them in order to imprison them in certain kinds of behaviors, or when you look at your wife, your husband, your partner, your child as if you've seen them for the first time and that you actually have to get to know them, and you let go of the illusion that you know who you're with. I mean, your child doesn't even know who they are,

So how could you know who they're growing into being. Actually, your husband, your wife, your partner doesn't know who they are, so how could you know who they're growing towards being? You know, there's a shyness at the beginning of a relationship where we don't quite know what to say, you know, or how to say it. We don't know what to wear, you know, all of those things that are those beautiful shyness is on a first date where you're really really

fascinated by someone. But there's another shyness when you've been with someone for a long, long time, for many years, and that shyness can be even more difficult than the first shyness you felt when you met them. And the ability to break below that level of shyness, I mean, when you think about it, it's a parable. It's a metaphor for your relationship with yourself. You've lived with this person in the mirror year after year after year. You've

given yourself names. You think you know who you are. Actually you can be very shy about getting below the surface of who you actually might be now. So the ability to actually drop below that line of shyness with a long term partner, this is a measure of our ability to stay intimate with the other person. We all know the difficulties in and keeping intimacy alive, sexual intimacy in a long term relationship, but also conversational intimacy, a

sense of intimacy with a shared horizon. These are all difficulties in a long term relationship. They all have to do with not knowing. Not knowing is great intimacy, of enquiring, asking beautiful questions of the other person and of yourself. That's beautiful and so true. It makes me think about

the cycles that you talk about. You say that common to all three marriages, right, which is this sort of recognition of what we want, and then there's a pursuit and then the hope to circumvent the difficult but necessary disappointments, um, which is where I think a lot of us get stuck. And then ultimately, in the face of that disappointment, the full recommitment to the vows we have made, which is that full recommitment to continuing to get to know either

that other person in our our own work or ourselves. Yes, yeah, I had I remember, I must go back and reread that book. Actually, you're reminding me of many many phenomenon dynamics in it that i'd forgotten I had addressed, you know, But I really loved actually following the lives of the people I chose out Robert Lewis Stevenson and Jane Austen, and following their lives through these different stages of the

romance with what they wanted in their lives. Often something you don't know you want that you're actually unconsciously pursuing. So I must go back. Thank you for the reminder to reread the three marriages. It's beautiful and I see it's echoes in all your work. Yeah, particularly the constant sort of engagement with the self. The perhaps hardest of the marriages in some way. Well, I don't know if

i'd I've been in some pretty bad marriages. So maybe I'll walk that statement back and just reminded of the image of that Robert Lewis Stevenson creates h kidnapped, where he's marooned on the island, the island of ver Aid, actually that he spent Robert Lewis Stevenson spent his childhood on because his father was an architect for building the lighthouse and the lighthouse houses that are still there. To

this day. I don't know if you remember the story and kidnap, but he's gone the island and things just get worse and worse, and he has a purse full of money and he's he's wandering around this island trying

to find a way off it. You know, he loses his money at all, falls out of his purse, so now he's broke on the island, you know, and he's trying to get the attention of the fishing people who are around and who just speak Gaelic, and they're waving to him and they're trying to communicate something, but he can't figure out what it is, but none of them

are coming to get him. And then eventually, finally when he wades into the water after a number of days there, he finds that actually, at low tide he can wade off the island to the mainland. And that's what the fishing people have been pointing and telling him he could do.

You know. It's a perfect parable actually of when Robert Lewis Stevenson was pursuing his love this woman who had in many ways fled away from him because she was half in a relationship with her husband who she wanted to leave, but it was at a time where you were under tremendous shame if you did, you know. And she moved to Oakland, and Robert Lewis Stevenson was in San Francisco, and there was no bridge at that time, so it was actually quite difficult to get across to

Oakland from San Francisco. He hardly had a penny in his pocket to pay for the ferry fair to go across. So as this writing, Kidnapped was the perfect parable of what he had gone through when he was in love with this young woman who eventually became his wife, actually in partner. And it was lovely to discover that image in Kidnapped. I'd never drawn the parallels to it before, but that was one of the most pleasurable parts of

the book. And of course we're always discovering ourselves, these invisible and visible parallels inside ourselves, between our behaviors out in the world that we think have often no real meaning to them, that you find are perfect out of representations of the dilemmas and doorways that we have to find our way through on the inside. So shall we do one last poem from the new book? Yes, So I've got a couple of suggestions, and you tell me

which you'd rather do or neither. But I love perfectly made and the edge you carry with you or two that came to mind from me. Yes, let's do the edge you carry with you. So I've been working with that quite a bit. I do love perfectly made too. I think we could spend the whole hour on perfectly made, and I think we are like keeping away from I think we could. It was that was sort of my plan. And so the edge you carry with you again, this is one of those titles where that's all you need.

Actually the first sentence, The edge you carry with you, all intuitively know what that is. It's from our inheritance, you know, those edges that we haven't fully resolved, you know, from the traumas of our childhood in or out of our family. I mean, we're traumatized just by birth itself, independent of who we come in with. So this is looking at what we carry within us and the way it can actually become our gift. The edge you carry with you? What is this beguiling reluctance to be happy?

What is this beguiling reluctance to be happy? This quickness in turning away the moment you might arrive, the felt sense that a moment unguarded joy might, after all, just kill you. You know so very well the edge of nus you have always carried with you. You know so very well your childhood legacy, that particular inherited sense of hurt, given to you so freely by the world you entered. And you know too well by now the body's hesitation at the invitation to undo everything others seemed to want

to make you learn. But your edge of darkness has always made its own definition secretly as an edge of understanding. And the door you closed might, by its very nature, be one just waiting to be lent against and opened, and happiness might just be a single step away on the other side of that next unhelpful and undeserving thought.

Your way home understood now not as an achievement, but as a giving up, a blessed undoing, and arrival in the body, the full rest in the give and take of the breath, This living, breathing body always waiting to greet you at the door, always, no matter the long years you've been away, still wanting you to come home. That is so so beautiful, a blessed undoing. I feel like so much of my spiritual practice, that's what it

has become exactly. Yeah, we're just afraid in that undoing that we won't find anything underneath because we've lost our necessary friendship with silence. I often think, you know, there's a lot of angry men in North America at the moment. It seems to be the fate of most American men to become angry in their middle and late life about one thing or another, or just walking down the road

or driving a car. And I do think it's because there's no discipline of silence, and when you haven't been introduced to the joys and treasures of silence earlier in your life, you actually start to see it as the enemy, because actually it is the enemy to your established identity. It's going to undo and break down the perimeter and edge that you set up for yourself. In all of our great traditions, that midlife you're supposed to actually turn

towards silence. It's very powerful. In the Hindu society. You became a forest dweller after you've raised your family. In medieval Europe, after you've had your time as a knight or a man at arms. You would become a hermit in the woods. I mean, this is a classical kind of image of perfection. Not everyone got to do that, or to even entertain it, but it was in the

literature and it was seen as the ultimate pattern. So I often think, you know, the anger that we see in our society is most especially because there's no rest, there's no rest into the silence that will open the door to you to a greater understanding, to a greater sense of ease in the world. So we hold ourselves to hostage. We hold, but rather than accused ourselves, we

accuse others. You know, we name people in ways you know, right wing are left wing, a liberal conservative, and we're creating a civil war because of that very simple reluctance to make a friendship with the unknown and with the intimacy of the unknown, and the beauties and nourishment of silence in a in an everyday life. Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up with an invitation to what I think we could all agree we need more of, which is silence. I know I do.

I try and prioritize it, and I could always you can always have more of it, David, I want to thank you for coming on. Your poetry induces a sort of inner silence in me, and for that I'm grateful. So thank you. Eric. Yeah, I'm so glad that we've been able to have this conversation lovely, and I look forward to the next one. Thank you very much. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

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