David Whyte - ON LOVE

Falling in love is a courageous, destabilizing, and deeply human act. In this Valentine’s Day special, Irish poet and philosopher David Whyte returns with poems of romance. He reflects on love’s power to transform a life through intimate stories of vulnerability, longing, and the willingness to step into the unknown to live and love fully. ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  En el amor romántico hay este deseo de un ideal. Cuando digo ideal, no estoy hablando de algo que se quiere disipar. Hablamos de contemplación, realmente contemplación es una palabra que dice que vas a hacer un modelo del cielo aquí, en tu propio cuerpo y en tu propia vida. Eso es un caer en amor religioso. Así que mantener el ideal, pero permitir que el ideal tenga su propia vida, para que pueda cambiar con usted. Es casi siempre más grande de lo que se podía imaginar cuando comenzó.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Y en muchos sentidos es la misma dinámica que tenemos que seguir cuando estamos enamorados de una persona. Incluso enamorarse de un ideal al principio, y justamente así. Necesitas ser quitado de tu no idealista, inimaginable ser. Pero si tienes alguna madurez o tu madurez es concedida en el camino hacia adelante, te están dando a entender que este ideal con el que te has enamorado tiene su propia vida, en realidad, esta persona. Y así, hay una frase maravillosa de Simone Weil, la filósofa francesa.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Dice: "Lo que amamos en otras personas es la esperanza de satisfacción de nuestros deseos. No los amamos por sus deseos. Si los amamos por sus deseos, deberíamos amarlos como a nosotros mismos." Y así, lo que tienes que enamorarte es de los deseos que hay en el mundo, que están en la persona con la que te has enamorado. Y estás siendo invitado a seguir ese camino ardiente. Son palabras hermosas de Pablo Neruda sobre su enamoramiento con la poesía. Y con el mundo, esa poesía tiene el poder de articular. Así que dice: "Y algo encendió en mi alma..."

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Fever or unremembered wings and I went my own way deciphering that burning fire. And I wrote the first bare line, pure foolishness, pure wisdom of one who knows nothing. Yes. And suddenly, I saw the heavens unfastened and open. You hear it in Spanish and you can feel it in the body. Y algo golpeaba en mi alma fiebre, o alas perdidas, me fui haciendo solo, desquefrendo aquella quemadura. Escribí la primera línea vaga, vaga sin cuerpo, pura tratería, pura sabiduría, del que no sabía nada.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Y vi pronto al cielo, desgranado y abierto. It's just incredibly grounded at the same time that he's taking you out of your present body. So, the powers of romantic love are to do with subversion of your present identity. And, I mean, we actually know from research that your brain functionality actually changes when you're in love. Thank God, you know. And you can't see straight, you're not meant to see straight, you'd never leave your present life, your present house, your present circumstances.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  There's a logic has to be put in abeyance, logic will be brought back in, in, as a good servant, to the relationship. But to begin with, we raise our house down to the foundations and hopefully the other person does the same. And we build from, from that meeting. This is a piece called "Second Sight." Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you've never seen before painted through an evening sky. Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you've never seen before painted through an evening sky.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitation and not a telling word of wisdom. Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitation and not a telling word of wisdom. Sometimes you need only that first shyness that comes from being shown things far beyond your understanding. So that you can fly and become free by being still and by being still here.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  And then there are times you need to be brought to ground by touch and touch alone, to know those arms around you and to make your home in the world just by being wanted, to see those eyes looking back at you as eyes should see you at last, seeing you as you always wanted to be seen, seeing you as you yourself had always wanted to see the world.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you've never seen before painted through an evening sky. Sometimes you need your god to be a simple invitation and not a telling word of wisdom. Sometimes you need only that first shyness that comes from being shown things far beyond your understanding so that you can fly and become free by being still and by being still here. And then there are times you need to be brought to ground by touch and touch alone, to know those arms around you and to make your home in the world just by being wanted,

• 6:06Speaker 00

  to see those eyes looking back at you as eyes should see you at last, seeing you as you always wanted to be seen, seeing you as you yourself had always wanted to see the world. And I think that's what we see in the lover's eyes is it's our self being seen as we had always imagined we could possibly see too at the same time. And this is also about, you know, in romantic love, there's this powerful physical relationship to the gravitational field of longing. What's physically pulling you?

• 6:49Speaker 00

  It has a sexual power to it, but it's beyond sexual at the same time. It takes the forms of ideal notions of living together, of sharing a life together, of going beyond yourself. But first of all, you have to shape this kind of invitational identity.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  And the interesting thing is you're you're also inviting someone else to invite you.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  So it's this mutual invitation and this mutual vulnerability. You look at vulnerability, it comes from the Latin vulnue, meaning wound. So when you're vulnerable, you're open to the world. And you're open in a way where you have no choice. That's just the way you're made, actually. So in meeting another person in love, you're the way you're made is meeting the way the other person is made. In a proper love relationship, you can say, I love you, and the other person can say, I love you, yeah. But really, it's we love us. That's what's being said. We love us.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  That would be more accurate, yeah. Yeah, the union. Exactly. And the future that that union can bring about. Would you say that falling in love is an affirmation?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  It seems like a word that's not powerful enough for what occurs, actually. This subversive falling apart and dismantling that occurs. Your previous notions of where you were going to live, how you were going to live, and how you were going to organize your life are gone. So it's affirming something, but it's affirming a future you. A new thing. Exactly. And it's a different thing. Exactly. It's a letting go of the past. Yes, yeah. I had this very powerful experience when I left my second marriage. And I went, I'd recommended to friends of mine who were getting married a place in Ireland as a venue. They said, where should I go? I said, Gregan's Castle is the best place.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  And they had a half a dozen places on their list to visit to discover where they were going to get married in Ireland. And they went to Gregan's Castle first, and they didn't go to any other place. They said, that's it, this is it. So then I had to go to the wedding, yeah. But there's nothing more poignant than attending a wedding when you are leaving your own marriage. And yet, there's something incredibly powerful about that brief ceremony, even if you're leaving.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  There's something that's very courageous about two people committing to a future together. That's so unknown and has so much trepidation and difficulty in its undertaking. And I was very moved, like almost everyone is. But it was a three-day wedding and it was quite overwhelming, you know, the singing, the dancing, the drinking, the celebration. Meanwhile, I've got this underground movement where I'm actually floating out of a relationship. So I had to take a break away and I said to this lovely woman who worked at the hotel, Bridie, she's a childhood friend of a very close friend of mine. I said, "Tell me a place

• 10:10Speaker 00

  in this area, which I know so well that I actually don't know, you know, one corner of the Barren, the limestone mountains of North Clare." And she said, "Do you know Caeran Adarich?" I said, "No." She said, "Well, it's up the back of Capua Walia Mountain there. It's where I grew up." She take the road around the back of Capua Walia, the little boring, the little lane. You'll come to this crossroads and you'll see a little farmhouse there on the right. That's where I grew up. And there's a lane goes up the hill, a boring, as they say in Ireland, a little lane. And if you go up there, there's the views over the Atlantic and the Aran Islands. It's a great place to blow the cobwebs away. I said, "Great, thank you." So I drove up there and I parked the car at Little Crossroads. I saw her farmhouse where she'd grown up

• 10:55Speaker 00

  and where my good friend used to come across and play, actually. And I started up this hill and there were these two limestone walls on either side of the road that met in almost perfect Italian Renaissance perspective at the top, except they didn't meet quite at the top. There was a little doorway of light. And I walked up that hill towards that doorway of light. And when I walked through that, over the hill, I felt as if I could just walk straight off into the thin air of my new life.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  And it was, in many ways, it was my falling in love with my life again. Yes. It was my new marriage and commitment to what lay over my own horizon. I wrote this piece, it's called "Just Beyond Yourself." "Just beyond yourself, it's where you need to be, just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be, half a step into self-forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet. Just beyond yourself, it's where you need to be, half a step into self-forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet. There's a road, always beckoning.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  When you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time, that's how you know it's where you have to go. That's how you know it's the road you have to follow. That's how you know, that's how you know you have to go. It's just beyond yourself, it's where you need to be."

• 12:41Speaker 00

  When you think about it, that's the description of how it feels falling in love with another person too. Half a step into self-forgetting. Yes. And the rest restored by what you'll meet.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  There's a road, always beckoning. When you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time, that's how you know it's where you have to go. That's how you know it's the road you have to follow. That's how you know you have to go. It's just beyond yourself, it's where you need to be.

• 13:23Rick Rubin?

  And that's a poem clearly to yourself.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  It is, yeah, yeah, but it's amazing how parallel it is to falling in love with another person. And of course, there's no one who's more of a dark handsome stranger than your own unknown self that's about to appear in your life. And your new self is always, is always an attractive stranger.

• 13:46Rick Rubin?

  And that can happen after any event, any tragedy, it doesn't have to be after a change in a relationship.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. I think one of the signal experiences of romance and falling in love is the almost parallel experience of being unrequited or possibly being unrequited. It's those agonies we go through. Today, it's when your text isn't returned, you know, within forty-five minutes or four or five minutes. And has everything gone, has everything disappeared, you know, is this person really there? Have I imagined it? Did they imagine something about me that I disappointed them in? So it's this appearance and disappearance, appearance and disappearance.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  I mean, sometimes it is a signal that this is not going to work, actually, if it just keeps occurring without any kind of real consummation. But almost always, it's a rehearsal for what you'll go through in the years to come if you commit together. The appearances and disappearances and changes in love. I mean, I've been through a few marriages now and relationship and my feeling is it's all love, actually, it's just all love. You still love the person you were married to previously. It's just that the seasonality of the love has changed, it's a different kind of. We don't seem to live in a world that allows you to, except in rare circumstances,

• 15:20Speaker 00

  to carry on that deep love relationship in a changed way. The rest of the world somehow wants you to fight it out, you know, and doesn't want you to be comfortable in, in having a...

• 15:34Speaker 00

  An abiding friendship with the other person. But it's all love, really. And the love has just changed. It's either changed radically for one person, or it's radically changed for both people.

• 15:45Rick Rubin?

  I think if it's changed for one, it has to change for the other.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 15:48Rick Rubin?

  It's the nature of...

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:50Rick Rubin?

  It only works in both directions.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Yes. I always think every experience that a human being has, whether it's jealousy or fear, difficulty, and envy, they're all doorways to some form of maturity, actually. I set myself the challenge of writing a blessing for unrequited love, calling on my own experience on being unrequited at times.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  So this is a blessing for unrequited love.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  A blessing on the eyes that do not see me as I wish. A blessing to the ears that can never hear the far inward footfall of my own shy heart. Blessings to the life in you that will live without me, to the open door that now and forever takes you away from me. Blessings to the path that you follow alone, and blessings to the path that awaits you joining with another. A blessing for the way you will not know me in the years to come, and with it, a blind, outstretched blessing of my hands on anything or anyone that cannot ever come to know me fully as I am.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  And therefore, a blessing even then for the way I will never fully know myself. Above all, the deepest, kindest wishes of my own hidden and untrammelled heart for what you had to hide from me in you, from what you... The deepest, kindest wishes of my own hidden and untrammelled heart for what you had to hide from me in you. Let me be generous enough and large enough and brave enough to say goodbye to you without any understanding, to let you go into your own understanding, to live fully in your understanding and to gift your understanding.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  May you always be in the sweet, central, hidden shadow of my memory without needing to know who you were when you first came, who you were when you stayed and who you will become in your freedom now that you have passed through my life and gone. What motivated you to write that? Unrequited love. In the moment. It was so powerful. Yeah. When I felt agonies of any kind of always being interested in the phenomenology of it in a parallel, I've always been saying, what is this? And why does a human being feel these things? And what are you being drawn into? What larger dispensation of maturity

• 18:35Speaker 00

  is calling you through this portal and through this doorway? A blessing for the way you will not know me in the years to come. A blessing even then for the way I will never fully know myself. Above all, the deepest, kindest wishes of my own hidden and untrammelled heart for what you had to hide from me. Let me be generous enough and large enough and brave enough to say goodbye to you without any understanding. You never really understand why your love is unrequited. To let you go into your own understanding, to live fully in your understanding and to gift your understanding to others. May you always be in the sweet, central, hidden shadow of my memory

• 19:20Speaker 00

  without needing to know who you were when you first came, who you were when you stayed and who you will become in your freedom now that you have passed through my life and gone.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  And, you know, I spoke about unrequited love as being a necessary experience in the courtship phase, even with someone who you are going to be committed to, or marry, or live with. Because you will go through those rhythms of knowing, and getting to know, and suddenly not knowing, and being far, far from, you know, in the years to come with a person. We've all had the experience, the beautiful experience of that night, you know, being with your loved one in bed, and waking and coming close to them, and moving away and coming close to them, and getting too hot and needing to cool off on the other side,

• 20:17Speaker 00

  metaphorically and, and, and physically. And leaving the other person alone, and moving away and coming back. So this is, this is written about that experience of feeling love throughout a night, a dreamlike night, where waking and sleeping are one beautiful interchange and exchange. So this is Loving the Night. Definitely a Valentine's poem. Loving the Night. Sometimes when you lie close to me, your body is so still in my arms. I find myself half in love with your barely breathing form, and half in love with the unspeaking, silent source from which you come.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  I find myself touching your lips with mine to feel their warmth, and bowing my head to hear your breath, instilling myself to listen far inside you for the gentle rise and fall of the tide that tells me you're still free to come and go in life. So that I take your hand in mine to sense your pulse, and touch your hair, and stroke your cheek, and move my lips to yours to feel the warmth emerging from your inward self, and to see we are still here and still pledged to breathe this world together. All night like this, I find myself asleep and awake. Turn toward the moon, then turn towards you.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Your warmth inviting me to bring you close and leave you alone. All night, I find myself unable to choose between the love I feel for you through closeness and the grief of having to let you go through distance. So that it seems I can only breathe fully in the dark by taking you in and giving you away in your quiet rhythm of appearance and disappearance. Letting you return only in your breathing and not breathing. Or your half-side phrases spoken to the dark. Or your half-side phrases spoken to the dark. Whispered from the dream in which you live. So that I lie between sleeping and waking. Seeing you are here and dreaming you are gone.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Wanting to hold you and wanting to let you go. Living far inside you as you breathe close to me. Living far beyond you as I wait through the hours of the night for you to wake and find me again. The light in your eyes, half dreaming on the pillow, looking back at me, seeing me at last. Not knowing how far I have traveled, through what distance I have come to find you. Where I have been or what I have seen. How far or how near. Not knowing how I have gained and lost you a hundred times between darkness and dawn.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  It's incredible.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  So that I lie between sleeping and waking. Seeing you are here and dreaming you are gone. Wanting to hold you and wanting to let you go. Living far inside you as you breathe close to me. And living far beyond you as I wait through the hours of the night for you to wake and find me again. The light in your eyes, half dreaming on the pillow, looking back at me, seeing me at last. Not knowing how far I have traveled, through what distance I have come to find you. Where I have been or what I have seen. How far or how near. Not knowing how I have gained and lost you a hundred times between darkness and dawn.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  It's interesting that we will often say that two people slept together, rather than two people made love. There's something about the commitment and vulnerability of being in that unconscious, half-conscious state through the hours of a night. There's some kind of commitment that occurs where your will is not being engaged. And often, if the relationship is unable to sustain that kind of relationship, that's when you wake up the next morning with regret at the person who's laid next to you.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Because in that half-dreamlike state, you realize that you're in the wrong place with the wrong person. The visitation and un-visitation is not consummated. That's a visitation that you shouldn't have made. So this next one is about the powerful, dreamlike experience that occurs in a truly consummated relationship, not just in sexual consummation, but in the half-dreaming state that occurs afterwards. I often think, when I'm trying to come close to the essence of my partner,

• 25:19Speaker 00

  that it's a lovely thing to see them as a kind of oceanic coming and going, rather than a fixed platform that you're going to stand on or a fixed place you're going to name, and to see them as a kind of tidal force.

• 25:36Rick Rubin?

  It also speaks to your first love, the sea.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly, the ocean, the sea, and you have a lot of water in my life.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  So this is a poem called "The Sea in You", as in the ocean, yeah, the ocean in you, the sea in you. It's the title poem of the book in which it appears, actually. "The Sea in You". "When I wake under the moon, I do not know who I have become unless I move closer to you. When I wake under the moon, I do not know who I have become unless I move closer to you, obeying the give and take of the earth as it breathes the slender length of your body, so that in breathing with the tide that breathes in you and moving with you as you come and go and following you, half in light and half in dark, I feel the first firm edge of my floating palm touch and then trace

• 26:32Speaker 00

  the pale light of your shoulder to the faint, moonlit shadow of your smooth cheek. And drawing my finger through the pearl water of your skin, I sense the breath on your lips touch and then trace the finest, furthest, most unknown edge of my sense of self. I sense the breath on your lips touch and then trace the finest, furthest, most unknown edge of my sense of self, so that I come to you under the moon as if I had swum under the deepest arch of the ocean, to find you living where no one could possibly live and to feel you breathing where no one could possibly breathe.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  And I touch your skin as I would touch a pale whispering spirit of the tides that my arms try to hold with the wrong kind of strength and my lips try to speak with the wrong kind of love. And I follow you through the ocean night, listening for your breath in my helpless calling to love you as I should. And I lie next to you in your sleep as I would next to the sea, overwhelmed by the rest that arrives in me and by the weight that is taken from me and what by morning is left on the shore of my waking joy."

• 28:01Speaker 00

  When I wake, under the moon, I do not know who I have become, unless I move closer to you, obeying the give and take of the earth as it breathes the slender length of your body, so that in breathing with the tide that breathes in you and moving with you as you come and go and following you, half in light and half in dark, I feel the first firm edge of my floating palm touch and then trace the pale light of your shoulder to the faint, moonlit shadow of your smooth cheek. I'm drawing my finger through the pearl water of your skin. I sense the breath on your lips

• 28:45Speaker 00

  touch and then warm the finest, furthest, most unknown edge of my sense of self,

• 28:53Speaker 00

  so that I come to you under the moon as if I had swum under the deepest arch of the ocean, to find you living where no one could possibly live and to feel you breathing where no one could possibly breathe. And I touch your skin as I would touch a pale, whispering spirit of the tides that my arms try to hold with the wrong kind of strength and my lips try to speak with the wrong kind of love. And I follow you through the ocean night, listening for your breath in my helpless calling to love you as I should. And I lie next to you in your sleep as I would next to the sea, overwhelmed by the rest that arrives in me

• 29:38Speaker 00

  and by the weight that is taken from me and what, by morning, is left on the shore of my waking joy.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  So I do often feel that in falling in love we're constantly arranging for our own disappearance. If we follow the vulnerabilities of love and that we have to apprentice ourselves to our own helplessness. And I think particularly the masculine psyche has to apprentice itself to its own helplessness and disappearance.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  To invite your partner to help you find yourself in that helplessness.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  It's a mutually creative and loving act. But perhaps I'll finish with a piece that encapsulates the falling in love with a person, a falling in love with a work, and a falling in love with your own life again. And I often think that life is this constant cycle of getting close, getting intimate, you know, disappearing, and then almost dying and having to bring yourself back to life again. Establishing yourself and disestablishing yourself. Going out with the tide, coming in with the tide, being fully in the world, being fully as far from the world as you could ever get.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  And it's all part of the path of love, of being found by the world in ways that you did not think it was possible to be found. So this is a piece called "The True Love", and it's a piece I wrote that came out of work, but it was also about committing in a love relationship. I worked with 144 Catholic sisters. On a three-day retreat, I was the only man there. And the theme they wanted me to work with was stepping out of the boat. When Peter has to step out of the boat in the middle of the storm on the lake in the New Testament

• 31:48Speaker 00

  and sees the Spirit of Jesus walking across the water towards him. So I was invited down to work with this theme for three days, and three nights, you might say, in biblical terms, with these sisters. And I came out of that and I wrote this piece. And there's a lovely memory in the piece of when I used to study, go on marine zoological studies in the western Isles of Scotland. And we had a marine station out in the Hebrides. And in the Hebrides, there's this old Celtic form of Christianity there, still alive, you know, it's very much connected to the ancient Irish form of Christianity.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  And in that tradition, they have prayers for every part of the day, just as they used to have in Ireland. So you'd wake up, you'd say a prayer for the light coming in the window. You'd say a prayer for when you pulled the curtains, yeah. You'd say a prayer for unsmearing the fire and blowing the embers alight again, yeah. You'd say a prayer for going out the door the first time in the day. And there was an old fella who used to come down to the stone quay below our station. I say station, it was just an old granite house, but it was our marine biology station. And he used to approach his fishing boat, you know, which was only probably forty feet long or so,

• 33:16Speaker 00

  by himself when he was just doing maintenance on it. But he'd never touch an item of his gear until he'd taken his hat off, pressed it to his chest, and said his prayers. And you'd see him standing there, praying in front of the boat, and he'd turn towards the sea and pray to the sea too. And I used to be there with my coffee on my tea, looking at him, and I'd say, you know, I have no equivalent of that in my own life, you know. But what would it be if I had it? What would my own equivalent of that prayer be? So... This poem has been used at hundreds and hundreds of marriages, actually. Most particularly for gay marriages where people have had to hide their love when they were younger.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Now the laws have changed in many of our developed western countries, but still in many parts of the world, you know, you have to hide that kind of love. And so it's become a... The stepping out of the boat is becoming an image, you know, and a powerful arbiter of the feelings of both sides. So it's been very satisfying to see this poem go out into the world. And be used in such a marvelous way. I'm constantly meeting people who thank me for being at their wedding.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  The true love.

• 34:34Rick Rubin?

  Also interesting that had you written it for that purpose, it could have never been as good.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  You're probably right, yeah.

• 34:42Rick Rubin?

  It doesn't work that way.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:44Rick Rubin?

  You wrote what you needed to write.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah.

• 34:47Rick Rubin?

  And it found its use in the world outside of you.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:51Rick Rubin?

  Very beautiful.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it was something, many of those biblical images deeply inside me because, you know, in English schools at that time, you had religious education. And at that time, it was all Christian. So we learned all the biblical stories. And then I went to Sunday school and I just happened to go to a Sunday school where the teachers were absolutely brilliant storytellers. So my sisters and I would love to go to Sunday school on Sunday morning because the teachers were so wonderful, yeah. And I loved all the biblical stories. They're still alive in me. I once had to give a, I inherited a talk on Jesus, actually, from, from my Irish priest friend,

• 35:35Speaker 00

  John O'Donoghue, passed away, God bless him, yeah. But after he passed away, he had this talk he was supposed to have given. And they said, would you come and give this talk on Jesus? And I said, I'm not qualified. Oh, yes, you are, they said. And so I, I went back and I remembered my child's experience with Jesus and how powerful it was. And partly because of these stories and the images that are burned in my, in my child's mind, you know, from those stories are so compelling. So in my work, biblical images are constantly erupting out of nowhere. Moses, you know, Herod searched for days, looking for the children.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  The mind's hunger for fame will hunt down all innocents, you know, things like this. And so this is one of those images that just powerfully emerged from this deep core inside me.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  The true love.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  There's a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours. There's a faith in loving fiercely the work that is rightfully yours. There's a faith in loving fiercely the life that is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years. There's a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years. And especially if you never believed you could deserve this love and beckoning hand held out to you this way. I'm thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Years ago, in the Hebrides, I remember an old man who walked every day on the gray stones to the shore of Baying Seals, who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water. And I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them and how we're all waiting for that abrupt waking and that calling and that moment we have to say yes, accept. It will not come so grandly, so biblically, but more subtly and intimately

• 38:00Speaker 00

  in the face of the one you know you have to love. So that when we finally step out of the boat towards them, we find everything holds us and everything sustains our courage. And if you wanted to drown, you could. If you wanted to drown, you could, but you don't. You don't because finally, after all this struggle and all these years, you simply don't want to anymore. You've had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love and you will walk across any territory, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  And if you wanted to drown, you could drown, but you don't. You don't, because finally, after all this struggle and all these years, you simply don't want to anymore. You don't want to anymore. You've simply had enough of drowning. And you want to live, and you want to love, and you will walk across any territory, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

• 39:55Speaker 03

  What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin? Counter-culture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamics? Tetragrammatin. Graphic design? Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammatin. Obscure film? Tetragrammatin. Beach culture? Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures? Tetragrammatin. Off-the-grid living? Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality? Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects? Tetragrammatin. Muscle cars? Tetragrammatin. Ancient wisdom for a new age.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.