The Power of Listening and Interconnectedness with Jane Hirshfield

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks

for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jane Hirschfield, an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as one of American poetry's central spokepersons for the biosphere and recognized as among the masters writing some of the most important poetry in the world Today. Jane is a twenty nineteen elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books include numerous award winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co translated volumes of

world writers from the deep past. Her work has been translated into over fifteen languages. Today, Eric and Jane discuss her new book, The Asking.

which is new and selected poems. So it's sort of some new poems and a collection of a bunch of your older poems, and we'll be reading some of those as we go along. But let's start, like we always do, with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. What is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second and they look up at their grandparents. They say, 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.

the bird might be eaten. It took hours for the shaking to leave my body, body of air, body of branch. What Earth's yellows and nectars were made for. So what happened that evoked this poem was I was teaching at a writer's conference, and I won't say where so as not to malign the conference. The cooks were a little

careless about something. So I've been a vegetarian for over fifty years now, and somehow I discovered maybe they had actually just listed the ingredients, but the vegetarian option for a meal for the conference, and we were all eating out of the cafeteria, of course, had beef stock in it. And I saw this and I thought, well, you know,

that's not very acceptable. And then I decided, Okay, I am just going to strategically pretend I'm very angry, because that will make an impression on them and then they will not do this again. And so I, you know, as the poem says, I decided, you know, I'm not that angry. I'm used to it. I've seen it all the time. Friends have served me with Soto and they've said, oh, it's wonderful. I made a homemade chicken stock, and I've

sort of gone, oh, But I faked anger. And what I discovered as I was enacting my anger was that first I really felt angry, and then I literally was shaking for hours internally afterwards, because I am not, in general a person who when I feel anger. This is something we can, you know, talk about later in the podcast. I think, you know, how do we work with things like anger? How do we work with the uncomfortable emotions? But it's really rare for me to yell at anybody.

And I was so upset by having done it that, you know, I just felt the effects of it and how hard it was to physiologically change my state of being after having fed the wrong wolf, basically, and it was a great lesson to me that, you know, maybe somebody who's a better actor than me can pretend to be angry, but I cannot. It is not something that I am able to do without feeling the after effects

of it. And it also, you know, made me question a little bit, was this really such a strategically accurate choice? Do you have to be angry in order to impress on someone that maybe you don't put beef stock in the vegetarian entree? So anyhow, that was just such a clear example to me of which wolf do you feed?

What are the after effects of that? And that, of course, is what this is all about, This conversation you are having with so many of us so usefully over the years now, is about how do our lives turn out depending on the choices that we make and the awareness that we can actually make a choice at all in these matters. That's what practice is. That's what the mind of malleability is about.

reliable way of moving things. And we talk on here a lot about that behavior being a way to move ourselves in a positive direction. But you've given such a great example of that behavior how it can move us in a negative direction and cause us to feel and take on what we are pretending at. And I think that's why any program of growth really has to address all three of those core elements, because they're all critical.

And if we look at most of our psychological traditions and spiritual traditions, they are most of them addressing all three of them in their own way.

necessity for truth saying speaking the actuality of experience. And I think it's really important for those of us who are on the path of practice, on the path of trying to figure out what is skillful, means, what works, what turns out well, what doesn't At a time when there is so much to feel, so many different emotions about.

For me, this experience that's hel in that poem was a real teaching of the penalty of running that experiment, and that for me because it is not who I want to be, And the emotion of you know, tiny outrage, the little footstomping person saying they did what weren't they even thinking? That's useful information. It's useful information for me. Don't eat the dish, it's useful information for the cooks

next time, you know, do something else. But how the information is carried within a life and between people, you know, that is the rich field of transformation. And I think for all of us now, one of the central questions is how can we change the way of this world we are part of. You know, it is such an obvious moment of crisis and fracture and you know, too much failure and to find hope and to find interconnection

and kindness and tenderness towards ourselves and one another. It just feels to me to use a cliched expression and existential question.

and to what does it accomplish? And I mean I don't have any answers to any of those questions, By the way, I think the situations call for a lot of discernment, you know. Is this a time to just sort of be quiet? Is this a time to say something because my internal state needs to say something. Is this a time to stay something because I might actually be able to change a mind or a heart. And everybody's different in this, but it's really hard to figure

out these days. And it makes me think of something you said. I think it may have been on the Ezra Klein Show a couple of years ago, and you said poems are not accusatory, right, you know, or to you you said, a good poem is not accusatory, right, in that, because that doesn't tend to lead to dialogue, conversation change. Yes, you know, and so I do think is, you know, how do we speak truth? How do we

speak truth to power? How do we stand up for what we think is right but not be so accusatory all the time because people don't change that way.

hope for survival, all these very basic mammalian things. I think a great deal these days about Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

And you know, in that pyramid of what has to be established first before the next thing can be established, you know, at the very big housing, food, a sense of safety, a sense of trust, and with that as the foundation, if you can establish that between human beings and within lives, then you can begin to have a conversation about the next things, which have to do with justice and ethics and art and joy and abundance and

mystical ecstasy. You know, it would take a real saint. Well, actually, this is you know, part of the stories of the saints is those who can preserve their sense of mystical union under the direst of circumstances. That is the very definition of a saint. So I heard a conversation you had that went up on the podcast very recently. By the time this errors, it won't be so recent. But you are talking about Saint Francis and the wolf, and that the wolf is not tamed, the wolf is heard.

That is the transformation. It is not force, It is not domestication, it is not domination. It is listening. And the quality of our listening to one another, and the intentions of our listening to one another, I think is as important as the quality of our saying and of our actions.

downhill from there. So I agree. I was wondering if we could maybe talk about something that I think is central to your work, and I can see it in your work, and I've heard you say it, and it's been a key theme of my life. I'll just read

something you said. You said, a task for me has always been to make that sense of myself larger and larger, less fixed and less in the grip of the narrowest forms of self service, and more available to the larger interconnection which we are equally and indelibly a part of. And I see that all through your work and my origin story a little bit of being a homeless heroin

addict at twenty four. I remember very clearly when I read this section in the AA Big Book that said selfishness, self centeredness that we think is the root of our problem, you know, and this bondage to self. And ever since I saw that that has been my thing. It's like, how do I in that bondage ofself? And so I was wondering if you could just sort of share a little bit about that in any way that you want to.

to find a life of a kind. And for me this has also been lifelong central because what I mean by we, what I want to mean by we, and what I when I use that pronoun, is all of us. I do not want a boundary of you know, family, location, identity, nation, as I've come to say recently, I'm willing to have my we be boundaried by you know, the top of the atmosphere of the planet, you know, Earth. That's okay, you know, I mean, well, all of us here on Earth. But I don't even mean just the humans. I mean

the animals. I mean the plants, I mean the mushrooms, I mean the virus, I mean the rocks, I mean the waters. That this is the we that we are part of.

the interconnected, bigger systems of our lives. So anyhow, this is a poem called My Proteins, and it began with a story in the Science Time saying that scientists had figured out how itch works, which was quite recent, you know, it was only I think it was twenty thirteen that

they figured out how itch works. So it starts with that, but then it moves on to what was then also a fairly new concept, although most people know it now, this concept of the microbiome that you know, there are hundreds of millions of independent lives within us who are actually creating our moods, our intelligence, our day to day experience,

our health, our vibrancy, our resilience. So anyhow, my proteins, they have discovered, they say the protein of itch nature etic polypeptide B, and that it travels its own distinct pathway inside my spine, as do pain, pleasure, and heat. A body it seems is a highway, a clover leaf crossing, well built, well traversed, some of me going north, some going south. Ninety percent of my cells, they have discovered,

are not my own person. They are other beings inside me as ninety six percent of my life is not my life yet, I they say, am they? My bacteria and yees? My father and mother, grandparents, lovers, my drivers talking on cell phones, my subways and bridges, my thieves, my police who chase myself night and day, my proteins apparently also me. Fold the shirts I find in this crowded metropolis, a quiet corner where I build of not me, lego blocks, a bench, pigeons, a sandwich of rye, bread, mustard,

and cheese. It is me, and is not the hunger that makes the sandwich good? It is not me? Then is the sandwich a mystery? Neither of us can fold, unfold, or consume.

to more suffering. But it's very hard when whatever is going on inside me seems so important or so relevant or so critical to my well being to broaden back out and say, oh, you know, in the grand scheme of things, what ways have you found it are even partially effective in sort of going from that, I'm in a sort of myopic place where the only thing I seem to be able to think about is myself. And yet that's not the way I want to interact with the world, because it's not the reality I have known

in the past. It's not the way I know leads to my own wellbeing and the well being of others. And yet I seem like I'm locked in here, you know, when that's happening with me, I mean, after a little while, I get so tired of myself. I'm like, oh, crying out loud, something else besides this, Me, me, me, me please.

We will always experience suffering. And the thing about it is it's so painful that the very pain of it reminds you that you are trying to figure out what you can do about it. This is information and the information of myopia contraction, you know, the unbearable muscle cramp of ego when it feels injured, which is something that happens to all of us, you know, continually in these

human lives. You know, it is absolutely unbearable, and the very unbearability of it is what reminds you to think, Okay, what worked in the past, What have I heard? What can I do? What have I learned? I'm going to give you two answers to the question. One answer is simply something you know learned through the long, difficult hours, weeks, months of suffering life. Is if I feel like I can do nothing else, I can help someone else. You know,

I might be in my own doghouse. I am consigned to my own personal hell realm for as long as it's going to take for me to work my way through that experience. But can I do anything that will help someone else? And that tiny crack is so useful. Of the things I learned a long time ago in one of the longest and worst spells of abyss of my life was that when I finally emerged from it, even that was helpful because it meant that for the rest of my life, when somebody describes themselves being in

such a condition, I know what they mean. That was helpful. But then the second answer I'm going to give, which was quite transformative for me, was, at some point I began to understand that all the emotions are necessary and essential information. And so when you realize that this hell realm you find yourself in, I mean, for me, the two most excruciating of the painful emotions are one is anxiety and the other is embarrassment or shame. You know,

both of those are absolutely unbearable. Grief, I'm quite fond of. Grief is a genuine emotion. It is connected to what we love, what we care about. Grief is one of the faces of love. But anxiety and embarrassment there's almost

nothing you can do with them. But at some point, what I began to understand was they were telling me that I had made some mistake, and I needed to figure out what the mistake might have been and then either vow to not repeat it or figure out if there is some way to make restoration, you know, whether it is to myself or to somebody else, to whom

I perhaps have caused injury. And so when you understand that this unbearable condition of being can be seen as something I can learn from, that begins to put a little W. D. Forty in that rusted closed lock of the experience. I have a poem that talks a little bit about this it's a shorter poem. Would you like to hear another poem?

feel something else. And so one of the other ways that I've begun to relate to the emotions is they are weather and weather changes, and so this is a little poem, My weather, wakeful sleepy, hungry, anxious, restless, stunned, relieved. Does a tree also a mountain? A cup holds sugar flower, three large rabbit breaths of air? I hold these so you know, it is part of living a human life to experience these emotions, the ones we want, the ones we.

Which just tightens the muscle cramp right right?

it all solved, and at least we've got company. I think a lot of the good that poems do in the world, you know, out there in everyone's lives, other people's poems, for me, my poems, sometimes for other people, is they tell you that you are not the first to have felt whatever it is, that you will always find someone who has not only experienced this before, but survived long enough to bear witness to it and to leave you words and buy the ability to read those

words of you know, Gerard Manley Hopkins's most desperate dark sonnet. You know he lived because he wrote the words down.

You know, he survived because the testimony is there, and that is a great reassurance when you know so much of the time, I think for so many of us now, one of the things that everyone I know struggles with is despair because the issues of a possibly catastrophically failing biological planet are so ubiquitous and there's absolutely no assurance that we are going to make our way through this, and also the failures of culture and justice and social

compact and economic equity. You know, I came of a which at a time of great hope and optimism. The First Earth Day happened in my young adulthood, and you know, all the environmental things we needed to do were clear back then. You know, Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House. Ronald Reagan came along and took them off. Rachel Carson told us everything we needed to know, not only in nineteen sixty two, but even earlier, you know, books before Silent Spring, we knew

what we needed to do. And I really thought, as you know, I looked at the first photograph of the whole Earth that was taken by one of the Apollo astronauts, and the environmental movement was gaining traction. And you know, for whatever its flaws were, you know, the Summer of Love, which I wit as a person a little too young to take part in, but you know, I saw so much expansion of the contractions that are equally humanly possible. And then over my lifetime I have seen these enormous backlashes,

and that surprised me. I wasn't prepared for so much backlash, and I wasn't prepared for the strength of it, and I wasn't prepared for the uncertainty of it. But you know, how do we work with despair? I mean, this is a question I see everybody asking. And it's not by refusing to feel it. It's not by a false optimism. It's by feeling it as a spur rather than an

anchor dragging you to the bottom of the sea. To understand despair as a vow to work harder is the only way I can pass through its enormous iron gait and keep breathing. Yeah, we all want to open our eyes the next day if we possibly can, if we possibly can, And the example of others' helps, and the memory that there have been impossibly dark times before in human history and we somehow got through them, the thought

of biological resilience. All of these things are hands that hold mine in the dark.

Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But basically the scientists said nothing will grow here for seventy five hundred years, right, But there are a couple of trees that survived all of that and continue to grow, and they are national treasures because they speak to some resilience in nature amidst horror, a beautiful example of like nature finds away and we can take strength and hope in that.

I'm sorry to say. I didn't have a good place to plant it, and so for years I kept it in its pot, and I think I bonceied it a bit, and so every year it grows a little tiny bit more and at some point point I think it will truly gain traction and just shoot up and become a big tree. But it's still a little on the small side. I still cultivate it carefully, make sure it gets some summer water. You know, the California climate is very different from Japan's climate, and so anyhow, it is still alive.

And I've had it for you know, probably now twenty years, and this year particularly, we got a lot of rains this winter, and so the Hiroshima tree is happier and putting forth more new growth than usual.

I felt spoke to this just a little bit. And it's called the Promise on page two hundred and fourteen of the latest book.

tossed in a small stone from the bank. Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted, even the greedy direction, even the grieving trusted there was nothing left to be saved from bliss nor danger. The dog's tail wagged a little in his dream. Thank you for asking for that poem.

I think one of the things which so troubles me about some of the current discourse in that culture out there and in here, you know, because nothing happens in the world that doesn't happen within each of us, is one can either experience one's life as scarcity and longing for more and hunger, you know, the hungry ghosts of you know, one of the realms of existence is the insatiable hungry ghost, which is that second wolf in the story, or perhaps the first wolf. I don't know which order

you put them in. But the other experience of the world, which is possible is the absolute abundance at every moment. You know, there is not a moment when we are not completely surrounded by existence inside and outside. And when you can feel your life as abundance, you behave generously. You know, It's like a spring flowing out of a mountain. You can drink as much of it as you need, you can let the rest of it flow on. The

spring will continue to flow. This is a kinesthetic experience of existence, and it is one that when I am able to find my way to that sense of the flowing spring, I am not afraid, and I can be generous, and I don't need to sequester anything. When we are continually told that this is a world of us them, and somebody is going to take away what we have. They're going to come for it. That is the script of people who are trying to use are fears for

their own advancement. And I see how the effective that script has been. You know, I'm haunted by certain historical things that you know, have happened during my lifetime. The genocide in Rwanda, the fracturing of Yugoslavia into sectarians, slaughtering. I saw these things, I read about them, I saw them develop. And you know, people in Rwanda were coexisting and intermarrying and perfectly. It was a functional culture until one person decided that they wanted power and got on

the radio and began frightening people of one another. And out of that mutual fear, what a disaster, what a catastrophe arose because one person had a mouthpiece for raising the specter of the wolf. And it is so easy to fan the embers of fear and division, and how we can counter them. It is less easy to fan the sense of the fountain in us, because you know, evolution made us susceptible to fear. The amygdala is a very powerful part of the brain, and the Darwinian survival

mechanisms are strong. And how you can counter them. It has to do with how we raise our children. It has to do with the stories we tell ourselves. It has to do with when you walk down the street, are we engaged in a dance of mutual to see that allows us not to run into each other. Are

we meeting each other's eyes? Do we have the sense of the city as a place of community that can be increased by any of us in any moment, just by how you conduct yourself when you walk down the street, if someone bumps into you, or if you bump into someone, what is said. And you know, I'm really fast to say I'm so sorry or you are right. I noticed, you know, in this time of the great COVID, you know, do you wear a mask? Do you not wear a mask?

So I'm still, you know, at the time that we're recording this, which is pretty far into things, I'm still one of the last ones wearing a mask most of the time because I've never caught the virus and I'm afraid of long COVID. And I have no problem with masks. You know, They're not uncomfortable. They work, and at least,

you know, for me, it has worked rather well. And so I hear stories of you know, other people who are still wearing masks, and they talk about sometimes they go out and somebody looks at them in a way that does not make them comfortable and happy. And I think I go around inside my mask beaming at everyone. I'm always sort of beaming at people, and nobody has ever ever said anything mean to me or questioned my mask. You know, I try to model a border Collie, the

dog love of my life, and my border Collige. Oh, she wagged her tail at everybody. She was rising mind was this border Collie's nature? And so I learned a great deal from Maggie about you know what happens when you greet everybody with enthusiasm, openness and joy, and so, you know, she was one of my great spiritual teachers. My border Collie was.

I truly understand the struggle. I used to believe that relating to myself this way was what kept me performing at any acceptable level, and without it, I thought I'd drift off into the deep end and become a failure in pretty much every aspect of my life. But it turns out that's actually one of the inner critics worst lies that it helps you. I mean maybe short term you get a push and do well, but long term it's corrosive and it actually keeps you from living to

your potential. I've created a free three part video series that teaches you how to get to the other side of the inner critic like I have, and you can grab it today. Just head to one youfeed dot net slash inner Critic. I'm sharing this with you as not only an inner critic survivor, but also a certified mindfulness teacher, and you can learn to relate to yourself differently, living with an inner lightness and not a sense of being at battle with yourself, and life is so much better

when you're a friend to yourself, I promise. So go to oneufeed dot net slash inner Critic for my free mini course see you in the videos.

and they are one of the greatest joys. Yes, me and I agree.

live human lives. But the moments of greatest happiness are the moments when we are fully embodied in the moment, without adding an extra layer of self talk or worrying about future or past. To me, it is the very picture of what again, you know, to go to our shared and vocabulary when one master asks another, you know what is the face of enlightenment? And the answer is, when I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm sleepy, I sleep. That great simplicity and directness that animals bring to their lives.

I've also had a long engagement with horses, and the wonderful thing about horses is they are such emotional creatures. Whatever this moment brings a horse is going to respond to. There's no gap between experience and response, and there's such a great integrity and honesty in that, and there's such a great joy and a horse putting its muzzle down to the ground and tearing at the grass, the deliciousness

of the grass the deliciousness of the sun. And then if a fly lands on their back, you see the skin shiver to flick it off, or the tail will come. The immediacy of the lives of animals. And we are animals, you know, it is to our peril if we forget that.

In either case, everything seems to conspire against it. That poem has a lot to do with something that, again I think of quite often when I'm thinking about poetry's role in our lives, which is the fundamentally curative sense that comes to us when we believe we have some agency in our lives. Again, the antidote to despair in the poem, I call it a cure for certain kinds of sadness, but it is also a cure for despair. If there is anything you feel you can do, that

is the beginning of restoration. And so there is almost never a time in a human life when there is nothing you can do. And so do something arbitrary and silly. Read a book backwards, you know, decide that you're going to wear this rather than that. That is the beginning of agency, and it is the antidote to depression and

terror and paralysis. Just do something. And I know, for me, one of the times when I came out of the darkest stretch of my life, one of the ways I knew I was emerging from the darkness was I cut some flowers and put them on the kitchen table. I chose that. And so you know, happiness is harder. Maybe you can't make it all the way to happiness. Like a little inchworm, we rise from the pitches of abyss

and move towards happiness. And then the next thing, you know, you go, oh, you know, the windows are so much brighter now that I wash them, and that always makes me happy. I don't do it often enough, but it always makes me very happy when the windows are clear, because clarity of vision is a great happiness, Seeing truly is a great happiness. Accuracy is a happiness, and foolishness and whimsy are also happiness. Is I came very late to the sense of whimsy in my life. I was

quite a serious child. And now you know, I hang some lights on a tree outside. It makes me happy every time I see them, these glowing Japanese solar lanterns. Every time I see them, I'm happy.

could refuse, but we can't refuse them. So maybe I will tell you about a poem that changed my life, not written by me, written a thousand years ago by a Japanese woman poet Zumishikipu, and I co translated her poems for a book called The Ink Dark Moon, with a Japanese speaking woman, Marico Ratani, who would give me the literals of the poems. I would write down the Japanese words in our alpha bet I would go home with you know every possible meaning for each of the words.

And I knew as I received these poems from her, I knew that this particular poem, there was obviously something there. I had the grammar, I had all the words. I could translate it superficially, but I also knew I didn't understand yet what it meant, and that only when I understood what it meant would I be able to actually turn it into an English language poem. And so the poem was this although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.

Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house. Now, in poetry, a house is almost always, you know, both an actual house and a sort of figure for your own life. Houses are where our lives take place the moon and Japanese poetry can mean anything from the fullness of a

love affair to Buddhist awakening. And what that poem was saying was, if you wall up your house so tightly that no cold wind can ever come in, nothing you don't want can reach you, you will also be walling yourself off from everything you do want and hope for and wish. Only by our permeability to the difficult are we available to our permeability to the largeness, the great, the beautiful, the transcendent, the non self, the whole world,

the sense of abundance, all of those things. And so reading that poem, you know, in my early thirties, as I co translated that book, it was transformational in its teaching, and it became something which has been re enacted in different ways in my own work ever since. And so I'll give you one poem of my own that holds this same gesture, because you have to rEFInd it again and again. These kinds of knowledge are not permanent. You can't build a lasting structure. You have to keep rediscovering

them each time. So this is a poem remembering my time at the monastery Tasahara. The three years I spent in that zen monastery. We had no electricity, we had no heat in the cabins, we had no hot water in the cabins. And somehow, even though I don't like being cold, and I don't like cold water, I have preserved the practice of only washing my face in cold

water in the morning ever since those three years. So the poem is called, rather bafflingly, the title is a sidery fragrance, even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water, not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted.