David Whyte (Part 1)

David Whyte is a celebrated Irish poet, philosopher, and speaker whose career spans nearly forty years. Known for ten volumes of poetry and multiple best-selling prose collections, Whyte’s latest collection, Consolations II, which contains 52 new essays, continues his trademark exploration of ordinary words and the profound choices that frame our lives. His writing continues to illuminate the connections between inner solitude and communal life, drawing critical acclaim for the depth of his insight into everyday experience. In 2025, he embarked on a major UK book tour, held worldwide retreats and workshops, and launched the “David Whyte Companion”– an online archive of his work and teachings. Whyte’s "Three Sundays Series," monthly immersive online sessions, remain a centerpiece for his global audience, tackling themes from love, to human identity, to personal courage. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ 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.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton

• 0:25Speaker 01

  So this is, uh, this is close. Close is what we almost always are. Close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something, or close to success, and even with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up. Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there. We are creatures who are on the way. Our journey, a series of impending, anticipated arrivals.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity. I see you closing your eyes and nodding your head to concentrate. I had the same feeling when I wrote the line. I said, "There's some part of me that understands what I just wrote. You know, I just need to take a second with it." We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity. As I said, you know, "Oh, we're not too far away," or "I'm not too far away from writing." "Oh, I almost feel like writing." I'm not writing yet, but... The inverse distances of our proximity. An intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel

• 1:50Speaker 01

  in giving up our sense of separation. To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy. A form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identities.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love. This phrase isn't used in the States, but in Britain and Ireland, when you chance your arm, it means you risk yourself. To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections, and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival, but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. We are, in effect, always close, always close to the ultimate secret, that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach. The step between not understanding that and understanding that is as close as we get to happiness.

• 3:27Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful. Do you remember where you wrote that?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  I think I wrote it in my study, because the image I get, immediate physical image, is the grain in the wood of my desk.

• 3:39Rick Rubin?

  Did it start with the idea of closeness? Did the word come before the concept came?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  You know, when you're a child and you hear the word "door", you're not hearing an abstract. You have the physical sense of door-ness in your body when you hear that "door". One of the tasks of poetry is to keep the primary vision of childhood alive into adulthood, to keep the language that's physical, that's the door-ness of the door, and not some abstracted thing that you walk through. So, the word "close" is used every day by human beings. And as I wrote essay after essay in Constellations using single words, I started to sharpen the acuity of my ear. In listening to the way people use words.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  So I started to hear in a very amusing way all the ways people use the word close. I'm close to finishing, I'm close to starting, I'm close to giving up, I'm close to tears, I'm close to done. And so I just thought I'd investigate it. So I just started with that list of all the ways we use it. Just the way we, same way we use the word time in such powerful and often pejorative ways. Time is slipping through our fingers. Time is our enemy. Time is against us. Time would be very, very surprised to hear this. Because our life could not occur without the phenomena of time.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  No cellular growth could occur in the world. Tell me about time and timelessness. Timelessness is, in my mind, is where you're not caught in these linear boxes of the hours or the days. But time actually seems to be radiating out from the place where you're standing. Say more about that. Well, I've said it best in a poem I wrote called "The Bell and the Blackbird." Do you have it? I do, yeah. So "The Bell and the Blackbird" is this Irish koan, really. This beautiful Irish question. It's the image in the, in the koan, in the story. The Irish wouldn't have called it a koan, I'm just borrowing that from the Zen tradition, but it is a koan.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  The Irish image is of a monk standing on the edge of the monastic precinct with a wall and the chapel inside the wall. And he hears the bell calling him to prayer. And he says to himself, "That's the most beautiful sound in the world." But then simultaneously, he hears the call of the blackbird from over the wall. And he says, "Oh, and that's also the most beautiful sound in the world." And the implication in the, in the image, because that's all you get from the story. You don't get any more. The implication is, is the question, "Which way did he go?" "Which way did he go?" And I carried this koan for years, actually, in a very powerful way.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  And then I answered it in a way, or became the question, whatever way you want to, you want to describe it. One Easter morning, when...

• 6:49Speaker 01

  I was at my desk with the French doors that are in front of my desk open, the smell of the spring air coming in. And from behind me, my wife rang two Tibetan bells together, and she hit them just right. So the sound went straight through me. And at the same time, I heard the red-winged blackbird outside. So this is, this is the experience I've been studying for years, which has just occurred.

• 7:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  And I put my hand up, I said, "I can't talk to you now."

• 7:21Speaker 01

  And I, I started writing. And this is the piece I wrote. I was in a, a very, very powerful place when I heard it. I'd been concentrating, writing for an hour. And then suddenly the bell, out of nowhere, and a bird, and it broke open into this. The bell and the blackbird. The sound of a bell, still reverberating. Or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage. Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know you'll have to give every last thing away. The approach, that is also the meeting itself. Without any meeting at all. That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation crying, "Hallelujah."

• 8:34Rick Rubin?

  Is the bell and the bird's song necessarily a call? And does there have to be a choice?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly what the experience was.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  There's a line by Rilke where he says, "Stretch your well-disciplined strengths between two opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns." "Stretch your well-disciplined strengths between two opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns." So, my understanding is that human beings are constantly making decisions too early in the conversation. They say, "Should I go A, should I go B?" Well, my understanding is you're supposed to keep A and B alive until they stretch your identity to such a point that they break open and they form one single path.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  So I certainly had that in the poles of practicality and poetry. You don't get much corroboration from the world when you're going full-time as a poet, particularly when you're 30 years old or 32 years old, particularly if you have a family to support. And so not choosing between practicality and poetry.

• 9:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  And then seeing how practical poetry is for people, yeah. And how poetic practicality can be.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  So, we suddenly realize you've been robbing Peter to pay Paul on both sides of the equation. And so, holding things and refusing to choose until the choice has already been made, actually. You suddenly discover that, oh, you've become someone who's A plus B and everything else that goes with it.

• 10:22Rick Rubin?

  Let's talk about seasons a bit.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:24Rick Rubin?

  Do the seasons mirror us? Do we mirror the seasons? What's our relationship to the seasons?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Well, there is a beautiful seasonality to existence, and it's caught within our very cellular structure. I mean, you just look at melatonin, for instance, and the way it drops us into the seasonality of sleep. Well, melatonin was produced by sea creatures that rose and fell in the columns of the ocean before there was life on land. And so, these creatures moved up towards the sun. And the more and more sun they felt, the more melatonin they produced, until they fell into sleep and dropped down again in the column in the night. So, that seasonality is actually within our very cell structure to this day, which is really just one wonderful example

• 11:18Speaker 01

  of the way the seasonality of life lies within us. And within our language, too. I wrote an essay on perhaps one of the most beautiful words in the English language, which is "moon". And the moon occupies our unconscious and our conscious minds in really extraordinary ways. It's a seasonality in and of itself. So, the moon might carry the most evocative combination of vowel and consonant sounds in the English language, calling us to imagine its round, reflecting, white orb, even as we say its ancient name, exerting its gravitational pull on our voice and our thoughts, as if emanating and emerging

• 12:03Speaker 01

  through the extraordinarily long sound that lives at the center of that initial soft "m" and the half-spoken "n" that begin and end its passage through our mouths. "Moon" is an extraordinary word, equal to the astonishing celestial body it calls to mind. It is a word that carries the circular sense of subtle celestial change, representing that overwhelming sense of presence and part-presence, presence and non-presence that the moon itself inhabits in our lives. The sound in the word "moon" is like the moon itself, coming and going, while giving a reassuring sense of being eternally present.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So that first paragraph looks at one of the essentials of seasonality, which is appearance and disappearance, and all the gradations in between. And the remarkable thing about a season is that it's already started before you know it. By the time you see the first golden leaf on a tree, that process has been initiated long before. So almost always, we're catching up with ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. And being caught up with the season that you're actually in is one of the great tasks of a satisfactory human life. I often think most human beings are seven to 10 years behind the actual core maturity that they have attained.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  And their peripheral life is just so busy and so distracting that they refuse to settle down into the actual seasonal edge that they've attained inside themselves. Quite often, we'll only attain that maturity when we have a trauma or a wound, or we go bankrupt, or things fall apart, or you come home and there's a note on the kitchen table and your spouse has left you. And then you hit the present season with so much velocity that you break apart on impact. And you catch up with yourself. So this is a time-honored way of human transformation, but there are better ways that are more merciful on the human soul.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And that's by keeping up with yourself. Yeah. The first indication that you see. I wrote a piece called "Sometimes." Sometimes, if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without making a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests. Conceived out of nowhere, but in this place, beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you are doing right now and to stop what you are becoming while you do it. Questions that can make or unmake a life.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Questions that have patiently waited for you. Questions that have no right, no right to go away.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  So those tiny but frightening requests, those come out of the new seasonality. Meanwhile, we're saying, wait a minute. I just got everything in place. I've just finished my book. I'm just, you know, give me a moment's peace. And no, the season's moving on.

• 15:28Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember what was going on in your life when you wrote that?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  I do, actually, because I'd got to a place of stuckness. I was on stage and I was realizing I was, I was in that terrible phenomena that all artists experience of simulation, taking on this mask of, that consisted of all your competences, but was not a real conversation with the future. So there was a dynamic of emulation going on. But it was so, it was so subtle because you were actually emulating a previous self. Very hard for you to tell, so it's very hard for your audience to tell to begin with.

• 16:11Rick Rubin?

  Did you say it was like going through the motions?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes.

• 16:15Rick Rubin?

  You weren't completely present in it at that time.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, you're, you're trying to be someone. You're trying to be your previous self.

• 16:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  That was successful in getting you to this place, yeah. And so I was telling stories and there's nothing wrong with telling stories again and again. That's how our great storytelling traditions evolved. But when you start telling them as ways of, of keeping the audience at bay, start telling the same stories as a kind of weapon, start telling the stories as a defense, yeah. Start telling the stories as a concrete way of holding things in place. You're in trouble, yeah. And so I, I sat down at my desk at home. And at that time, I was out in this back shed and it was a very dark place with just a single small window. And it was perfect for writing this piece.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  And I said, David, find a story that you've never told before.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  In a sense, right, why you haven't told a story. And I suddenly had the immediate image of being on the kitchen floor with one knee up and one down at seven or eight years old, looking over this book of Native American stories. And one of my aunties had given me this book. It was, I can still remember the order of the ink and the pages, and it was beautifully illustrated. And if you'd have let that book fall open by itself, it would have fallen open to my favorite story. And it was the story of a young boy being taught how to cross a piece of broken ground in the forest without making a sound. And the elder was standing there in the illustration with great dignity and gravitas,

• 17:58Speaker 01

  with a shawl around his shoulders. And the boy was on his knees, as I was, looking over the book, one knee up, one down, taking his moccansons off, and behind him was this tunnel of twigs and leaves that he was about to cross without making a sound. And I remembered how much this story affected me and how I used to go out and practise my non-existent Native American skills in the local woods and fields and creeping up on my friends. And I probably sounded like a wild mastodon, you know, but to me, I was that boy. And I suddenly realised that I was myself crossing into new territory. So I sat in that very moment and I wrote that piece.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests. Well, that was exactly what I was feeling on stage, was I was getting the tap on the shoulder. Hey, hey, things have changed. Things have changed and you're not changed, you're not in the new season, you're still in the old season. All of us have had the experience, you know, where we've we've had our winter coat on for so long. If you live in the northern hemisphere. And suddenly you realize it's a baking late spring day, an early summer day.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And you are still wearing that jacket. And you you go, oh, my God, I can take. I can take the layer off now, you know. And that's the way I felt. That poem was a portal into the new season of my life. And in a way, the new theme was was the new theme. The new theme was the seasonality of existence. And from then on, I've rarely been caught in that frozen state of emulation. I've recognized it early enough that I can change it. You know, catching the season early enough when it's changing is one of the great necessary disciplines of a human life. Would you say it's just developing self-awareness?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Well, except that phrase has become such a cliche that it just covers over the actual experience. You need language that's equal to what's going on. To your fear of leaving the season to which you've got used to. Yeah, the comfort. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so you need language that's more invitational. In some ways, you need language that's more frightening to you.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Let's talk about change a bit because that seems to be what it's about. Yes.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  So just to go further into the moon essay, which carries

• 20:50Speaker 01

  a change itself.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  "The moon sails forever and has sailed forever through the dark sky that lives inside us as much as the night sky above our house. We've grown and evolved on this planet from the simplest cells to the extraordinarily complex creatures we are in an intimate parallel with our waxing and waning satellite. In other words, we're always in an unconscious conversation with change in a very physical way. Living on this earth has always meant living in an abiding awe-struck companionship with something both overwhelmingly close and too far away to control." We've always lived half reverently, half resentfully,

• 21:37Speaker 01

  at the whim of that imaginative, physiological, psychological power we call the moon.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Living on this planet, we, every one of us, live at the movable edge of a powerful conversational triad. The Earth's grounded gravitational pull, that gives us a solid place to stand. The Sun's strength of light, allowing us to live, to see and be seen, and even voluntarily move towards what we see. And then the Moon's other, ever-shifting, half-hidden gravitational power, making itself known through the tides or the tides in our bodies. Always pulling us away from any fixed point to which we try to hold. Always pushing and pulling us through powerful fields of attraction that seem to mimic and embody our own desires, whether we wish to be pulled or not,

• 22:30Speaker 01

  whether we wish to have those powerful upsetting tidal desires or no. So, when we're looking at change, we often think in a very linear way, "Oh, change, I'm going to change into some improved version of myself." No, there are powers, parallel and companionable, seen and unseen powers, that you are changing with.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Half of which you understand at any one time, half of which you don't.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  So, the word "change" covers an enormous multitude of sins, you could say. In the human imagination, the Earth might be where the Sun illuminates everything we need to see and name. But the Moon has always embodied the task of carrying the unnamable, and lives according to its own hidden urgencies, which in our daylight hours are forgotten or only half-revealed. The Sun illuminates our way. The Moon carries those powers hidden in our present that will faithfully influence our future.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  In the human imagination, the moon has always represented an alternative life, another body of deeper parallel laws than the ones we follow in the full light of our rules-based days. The moon tells us we are subject to powers far beyond our ability to summarize our understand. In the human mythic inheritance, the moon is the body's susceptibility to other bodies, our helpless attraction to what causes us beyond our present life. No matter how perfectly arranged that life, maybe the moon embodies our deeply felt response to the greater physical tidal pulls of existence. So it's interesting that we're...

• 24:20Speaker 01

  I'm reading this exactly at the full moon here. The moon works on and within the body in a way unregistered by the thinking mind. The moon and the moon's pull on the body cannot be audited or fully accounted for. The moon works both by stealth and overwhelming silent power. We intuit the moon's unconscious power exceeds the narrow consciousness we bring to our daylight ambitions. Mythically, the moon has always been intuited as carrying instinctual understanding, while the sun only illuminates what the moon already knows before things come to light. I don't know if that's true or not, but it sounds... Sounds great. Should be true, yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  While the sun only illuminates what the moon already knows before things come to light. The moon's tidal pull on us has always been felt as subversive to the desires we seem to hold at our lit, well-managed surfaces. Human plans are linear, made for the light of day, and that light comes directly from the sun in a straight line. But the moon's power is tidal, a constellating force pushing and pulling everything outside and inside, right down to the tiniest mitochondria in our very cells, working away within our inward parts. Though the moon seems to hang above us in the night sky, the moon is always intuited to work from the inside out.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Whether we live deep in the barely lit countryside with views of each and every phase of the appearing and disappearing moon, or in the reflected light of garishly lit cities, where we glimpse it only at its fullest as a startlingly white orb suddenly suspended between buildings, the moon runs through us just like the mighty tides it draws back and forth across the planet, changing and moving both our inward sense of presence and the way we shape our every inward onward way through each and every one of our outward sunlit lives. So, there it goes on, but I think that that speaks to seasonality both in what we can see

• 26:34Speaker 01

  and what's moving us from the unseen.

• 26:37Rick Rubin?

  You stopped after a line and said, "I'm not sure if that's true."

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:41Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about when you're writing and something comes.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:46Rick Rubin?

  It sounds like what you want to say, but when you analyze it, you question whether it actually is or not.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Well, there's some things that that we won't admit to ourselves. There are things we know already that we just don't have the confidence to speak fully. So, in many ways, when I said that, it was a tonguing cheek acknowledgement of that dynamic. I've got a very, what was to me a very powerful piece. It takes a very different perspective on death than the way I would talk about it if you and I were talking about it just over dinner or something, and we hadn't somehow been given the deeper context, but we were just talking about death from our strategic point of view. This is what I wrote after I'd written a poem when putting it in this book.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  "If you were to ask me in the busy lighted hours of the day whether I believed in an afterlife, I would have to say that I am firmly neutral on the matter, with an accompanying practical sense passed down from my father's Yorkshire that we'll all find out soon enough. But every now and again, in the deepest states of attention and letting go necessary to the writing of good poetry." There emerges a physical sense of a deeper and surer foundation in the body. And beneath even that, a voice from an inner tidal core identity, which displays absolutely no neutrality at all. And so this is a piece I wrote out of that. Beautiful. It's called "Beyond Santiago." Death is so simple.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  One moment you are alive, and then you are not. And that fear you carry with you might be equally as simple too, that you'll never have the time to accomplish what you wish. But stop a moment now before the way beyond, and let me tell you this. You'll go out of this life, however untimely, having completed every single thing you wished. You will arrive in that night like a newborn child welcomed by loving arms. You will find in that long-anticipated enemy the ultimate form of forgiveness and friendship. Every fearful goodbye suddenly become a gentle getting to know. A getting to know of a forgiveness that was strangely always anticipated,

• 29:11Speaker 01

  and a welcome, and a full understanding of all you ever did. Everything you gave, and everything you were given. And then everything you could never give, and above all, everything you could never bring yourself to receive. Those unattainable distances that always broke your heart, and the gifted understanding of why it was so hard for you to love. And then, and most importantly, and right to the heart, everything you were, and everything you gave, that was never, ever on your list. Spectacular. Beautiful piece of writing.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  That's the voice that you can't quite believe might carry a truth. Yeah. But in the writing, there's a knowingness. Exactly, yeah. Beautiful. Yeah, and of course, for it to be good writing, it has to strike other people's knowingness. It's not just, if it's just your knowingness, then it's just a diary entry. Do all the pieces start in the order that they're written? Or might you write a phrase and realize, oh, this is really the end of it?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  I think that phenomena used to happen when I was younger writing.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Now it's, there's a much more coherent exploration.

• 30:37Rick Rubin?

  When you write the first line, do you already know the whole story or no?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 30:43Rick Rubin?

  It reveals itself as you go.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, I have a poem that literally works with that called Start Close In. Start close in, don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing, close in the step you don't want to take. Start with the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet, your own way to begin the conversation. Start with your own question. Give up on other people's questions. Don't let them smother something simple. To hear another's voice, listen to your own voice. Wait until it becomes a private ear that can then really listen to another. Start right now. Take a small step you can call your own. Don't follow someone else's heroics. Be humble and focused.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing. Close in the step you don't want to take. Start with the first thing. Close in the step you don't want to take. So it's that equilibrium of resistance and invitation that tells you you're in a real conversation. I think in our first conversation last year, I talked about that inner horizon, which unlike the outer horizon, which is often seen as nourishing or inviting, we often feel there's a line of resistance inside us. Beneath that is, is where the revelation lies. So eventually, we actually start to see it as a loadstone.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  We start actually being attracted to that line of resistance. When you discover it inside yourself. I mean, I'm sure you've had the same phenomena in your artistic approach to music. And when you just can't get what you're wanting. But actually, the can't get-ness is a real clue as to what needs to happen.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  You're like a gun dog, you know, the hair stands up in your back, your paw comes up.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  We're in the, we're in the conversation.

• 32:47Rick Rubin?

  Start close in is a beautiful phrase. Mmm, I love it.

• 32:55Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned vulnerability earlier. Want to talk about vulnerability a bit?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I've worked with it quite a bit, both in the sense of speaking about it, but also trying to get a physical understanding of it myself. And of course, vulnerability is a very powerful, fashionable word at the moment. But quite often when it's spoken about, we're not getting the physicality of the experience, which is all about vulnu, wound. That's the root of vulnerability. It's where you're open to the world, whether you want to be or not. So your vulnerability is going to be the axis along which you make your invitation to others. It's going to be the axis of your artistic development,

• 33:43Speaker 01

  but also your maturity as a human being. So I like to talk about robust vulnerability, because we so often associate vulnerability with weakness.

• 33:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  But actually, where you literally need help is where you're going to develop, where you're going to make the connection. And young men have to find this out very painfully in relationship, that after the short initial period of impressing, I mean, I'm talking about a heterosexual relationship now, impressing a woman, what closes off the relationship is your lack of vulnerability. Your unwillingness to open to where you don't know and where you're not in control, and to share that with the other person. That's what's going to deepen the relationship. We're so, as young men,

• 34:39Speaker 01

  we're so terrified of that, not being in control. The young masculine body is all about perimeter, you know. That's why young men are, especially today, are so much into bodily definition around muscles and everything. This is where I end, and this is where the world starts. It's absolute perimeter. That perimeter will not be broken. That perimeter is my safety. So this is a little piece I wrote on vulnerability.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  So I'm standing up for vulnerability in a way here. So it's very, the essay is very definitive in a way. Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition or something we can arrange to do without. Vulnerability is not a choice. Vulnerability is the underlying, ever-present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature. The attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not, and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability, we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential,

• 35:55Speaker 01

  tidal and conversational foundations of our identity. To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances is a lovely, illusionary privilege, and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human, and most especially, of being youthfully human. But it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers. Powers eventually are most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath. The only choice we have as we mature

• 36:37Speaker 01

  is how we inhabit our vulnerability. The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door. Beautiful. That piece seemed to really be about acceptance. Yes.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, where you feel things most deeply. You know, the French philosopher Camus said, "Live to the point of tears", which is not an invitation to modeling sentimentality, but to feel things as deeply as you can. It's a kind of faculty of attention, actually. So that when the emotions break open, it breaks open into revelation and understanding.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  To allow yourself, you know, as you're raising a child, to feel the ache and woundedness of not being equal to being a proper father or a proper mother. That actually brings you closer to being a good father and a good mother. And it also allows you to ask for help from others in helping you to be a better father or a better mother. So to understand where you're wounded, where you have been wounded, and to actually become enthusiastic about gaining more understanding of your wounds, where you're open to the world,

• 38:34Speaker 01

  whether you want to be, where you've been open to the world, whether you wanted to be open in that way or not. Yeah. And that's how this essay starts. I've just written this, actually, a few weeks ago. Beautiful. It's just on my Substack, but this is Wounds. "Wounds are where we are suddenly open to the world or opened traumatically by the world, whether we desire to be opened or not. A wound opens up or breaks down the precious edge between what I think is me and what seems to be other than me. Wounds are compelling because they cause immediate pain, physical or emotional, the gash in the arm, the sting of a razor cut while shaving,

• 39:18Speaker 01

  or the well-aimed insult to our sense of self when verbally attacked. Wounds also cause immediate reaction, the staunching of new blood with our palm, our hand moving automatically to touch and cover the painful area, the folding of the body around where we have been breached or hurt, or tellingly, our defensive voice holding the insult to our dignity at bay."

• 39:44Speaker 01

  All maturation, emotional and physical, comes from our inner sense of self being overwhelmed by what seems to come from beyond the closed system of our psychological or physiological understanding. Sometimes that beyond comes from over the horizon of our outer understanding through traumatic physical breakdowns in the everyday world. And sometimes they emerge from deep within us, from below the horizon of our inner comprehension. It's sobering and yet comforting to think that there is no satisfactory human life without being wounded. The opening of our bodies and our emotions in that first breathtaking adolescent experience of sexuality.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  The breeze off the mountain catching our imaginations and our senses off guard. The scent of a new spring entering our minds and evoking a physical memory of every previous spring. To be closed off, to be un-entered by, to be un-opened by and unwounded by the world is to live in a numb, physical twilight where we feel the world is literally passing us by, leaving us untouched and even unseen. Wounds are self-inflicted as much as received from others. We actually carry a boundless desire to be opened and therefore wounded in the right way.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  We actually spend a great deal of time unconsciously sabotaging many of our surface comforts and our surface structures. We actually often disorder the ways we have ordered our world from within, blowing open our lives to reveal surprising, hidden, yet long-nurtured desires. And out of those desires, the surprising anticipations and joys of a new life.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Wounds are often misnamed and miscategorized. What we often call a wound is what happens when we are trying to be open in a way that is good for us, but ends up opening us in a way that hurts us. The wounds of sexuality, when we are taken advantage of. The wound of love, when that love is unrequited. The wound of grief, when our love is unaccountably taken away by distance, by illness, by the ultimate wound of death itself. Falling in love has always been seen as an ultimate wounding. The image of being pierced by love's dart is thousands of years old, and in every culture.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Cupid's arrow arrives seemingly from nowhere, causing inner aches and pains to places we did not even know we possessed. Love is never something we agree to. Love is never something we agree to, and true love is the ultimate intrusion into our previously impervious lives. The wound delivered by love brings that astonishing combination of adoration, creative helplessness, and revolutionary insight. Before I was wounded by love, I was under the illusion that I had the basic elements of my life under control. Before I fell wounded in love, I thought I knew and could predict my future.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  To fall in love is to enter the wilder, elemental, physical experiences of our human inheritance, and to suffer as others have suffered in their joy, in their heart-stopping, temporary disappointments, and even in their religious ecstasy. We feel wounded even by the wounds we have involuntary caused others. We have all consciously or unconsciously been the cause of wounds to others by not requiting their love, by not confirming their hopes, by not being able to be there for them in the very specific ways they needed or desired, or by saying truths we should have kept to ourselves. The way I've wounded others is my doorway to compassion for all the ways I have been

• 43:46Speaker 01

  wounded so many times myself, sometimes just by accident. We can be miserly about the way we will not allow ourselves to admit we have been hurt. But wounds generously bind us one to another, across time, and even across broad oceans our ancestors might have crossed before bringing us into this world. Wounds are open portals between generations. The grief of my grandfather from the trenches of the First World War, passed down through the silences and sadnesses of my own father. My mother's fleeing enslavement in the laundries of Ireland, her possible bitterness turned to real compassion for others she met,

• 44:30Speaker 01

  forced, as she was, against her will, to make a new life out of nothing. Wounded is how we are, and wounds are what we all, every one of us, carry, visible or not, both in those of us who struggle with the day-to-day, and perhaps even more especially with those of us who walk around being supremely competent. But every wound that is allowed to heal leads to our emancipation into new territories of understanding and maturation, often against our original will. Once a wound is closed, all healing happens from the inside out,

• 45:09Speaker 01

  and is felt from the inside out long after there is no outside visible sign or scar to represent what has occurred. An old wound, carried well, is the signature of both our courage, our self-compassion, and an ability to recognize and then help the griefs of others. Wounds are literal portals and doorways. Some are like grazes we can run through psychologically or physiologically in seemingly no time at all. Some are deep and ragged gashes that we can only crawl through on our hands and knees, sometimes for a span of decades. But all wounds consciously held lead somewhere, either into our next maturation or into a deeper compassion for others.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And then, for every one of us in the end, into those wounds of the mortal kind that will take us eventually into the greatest unknown territory of all.

• 46:07Rick Rubin?

  Wounds bind us to one another.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:10Rick Rubin?

  Very interesting idea. We think of a wound as a very personal thing.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Yes. And there's a very practical side to it, too. I work a lot in leadership inside organizations. And if you've no self-awareness about your vulnerabilities as a leader,

• 46:33Speaker 01

  you will never ask for the kind of help that you really need. And you will never realize how much of the conversations that surround you by the people who report to you are actually protecting you from the knowledge of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses and incompetences that you carry. If I'm in a leadership position, so many of the conversations that surround me are protecting me

• 47:04Rick Rubin?

  from... From yourself.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  From my own self-awareness. Because people have an intimate understanding of how vulnerable we are about our vulnerabilities.

• 47:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. There's also a relationship between wounds and what you said about seasons. By the time you see the yellow leaves on the tree, it's already has been started. And with wounds, the outer surface may heal. What we see and the timing of what's going on are not necessarily in alignment.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yes. There's the phenomena of blessing, which is powerful in all our great religious traditions, very powerful in the Irish tradition. There are hundreds of forms of blessing. The greatest blessing you get every... on a daily basis in Ireland is the blessing of welcome. People will welcome you in a very overt way into a house, into a bar, into an experience. You're very welcome here, you're here in Ireland. That's a blessing, that's a blessing of invitation, of saying, "There's something here for you that you're going to be pleased by." So it's really... And my mother's understanding of blessing was always... because she had ability to say things to people that were a form of blessing. And I asked her when I was 14 years old,

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I said, "Mother, what's a blessing you do it so well?" She said, "Well, a blessing's not just wishing something well for someone."

• 48:26Speaker 01

  A real blessing is where you wish something for them that they did not realize they wanted for themselves, but you say it. So in other words, you've perceived the present seasonality of their life. Yes. Which they've refused to enter, but you see what they have. Yes. It's like my English master when I was fourteen and all telling me that I had a real talent as a poet and that I should take it seriously. But you didn't see it yet. I was on the edge of it, but with trepidation, you know, who was I? I was fourteen years old and part of this tradition. It's like a, it goes back hundreds of years. It's got Shakespeare, it's got Milton, it's got Wordsworth, it's got Emily Dickinson. Who am I?

• 49:08Speaker 01

  And then you get the imprimatur, you get the mitzvah, yeah? You get the invitation to say you have the gift, yeah? Well, we can all do that with one another if we're sensitive enough. How has writing changed you? I mean, it's changed me in so many radically, physically wonderful ways. I'd be hard put to know where to start with that question. I remember when I lost my mother and I hadn't realized how entwined I was with my mother until I lost, I'm the classic Irish mammy's boy, you know?

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Firstborn son, and so it was like part of my own body being taken away. You didn't know that before? Not as fully as I understood it after she died. Yeah. And it was just a shock to my system. And so I wrote intensively for six months. And many of those poems are in a book called Fire and the Earth. But after that six months, after I'd written the whole cycle and saying, David, you've been really good to yourself there. I said, you've gone through seven years of grief in six months through the intentionality of writing, of saying all the ways that this ground is missing, this person is missing.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  And then not only that, but giving her away and granting her her life back to herself, how much we hold the dead too tightly to us. And there's an ancient intuition of letting go of the dead so they can have their own afterlife without you.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  And I had this strange intuition when my mother had gone. That she was in a place where she was no longer my mother. And it was really disturbing to me, as I say, the firstborn son of an Irish mother. But it was a place I had to go to. And it was this giving away that she actually. My mother lost her own mother when she was thirteen and was at her mother's bedside at home when she died. Of heart failure. Back in the nineteen forties in Ireland. And so there was this real sense that my mother was going, her heaven was a new childhood.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Where she would be mothered again. Because when my grandmother, her mother died, my mother's childhood ended really. She became a mother to the rest of the family. So I had this sense of having to give her away. Stop holding on to this radical person who just happened to be your mother. She had a life that was also completely separate and actually hindered by your coming to this world. In many ways, yeah. So just let her alone to have her own life and her own death and her own way forward.

• 52:12Rick Rubin?

  Do you still hear her voice?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  I've, funnily enough, I've had a good ten years where I haven't heard her voice. And then just over the last year, because of radical circumstances in my life, she's come back in again in a. In a way in which she's been giving me very specific advice, actually. It's like, oh, there you are again. And whether it's the inner voice, you know, a part of yourself, or whether it is an actual other voice, it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. This beautiful person became a part of your cellular structure. And you became a part of theirs. So it's irrelevant whether the voice is actually other than than you or you yourself.

• 52:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and not knowable.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 52:59Rick Rubin?

  Do you still speak to her?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  I do, I'll often, if I'm going through the fire of some difficulty, I will say, "Come on then, Mum, give me your best."

• 53:15Speaker 01

  "I just detain you for a minute, you don't have to, I don't need you here, you've got other fish to fry, I know, but just give me your best for a moment." And then I'll get this sense.

• 53:28Rick Rubin?

  How do we change in the presence of water?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Well, you could say that water is the ultimate conversational element on the planet. It holds everything together.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  I had this experience of contracting amoebic dysentery or something like it, collapsing, I was up at 10,000 feet in the Himalayas, what was then a remote part, no longer as remote as a road has been broken through to this area. But I was weeks away from any roadhead at that time. And I staggered into this little hamlet, literally, on the edge of my strength, crawled in even, and I was taken in by this family, put by the fire. But this family were three kids and the parents. It was a one-room house, there was really no room for me,

• 54:26Speaker 01

  especially as this huge west and I, you know, with big boots. So they took me out and put me in this manger outside. It was a yak manger, full of straw and dried yak dung. And I was in there for three days and three nights. And I hallucinated for three days and three nights. And on the third day, I had this experience of breaking open. And I broke open into the revelation of water, actually.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  And the revelation was that up above me, in the firmament, this astonishing firmament, and the stars were just clear at night, you know, and the clouds were racing over, and I was between the peaks of Dalagiri and Annapurna, and there was this moisture in the air that would fall, the snow on the mountains would move down as a glacier, melt at the bottom, form a stream, drop down into the Marciandi River below me. That would go into the Ganges, the Ganges would go into the ocean, the oceans would evaporate in the whole circle. So I was part of this enormous circle. And I had my moment of enlightenment, and I let out a gunshot of laughter, actually.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  I was sat up with my hands out, raving and laughing and shouting, and the whole family just ran out of heart, actually. And they stood in a line like that scene in The Sound of Music where the kids go from small to big, you know, the parents were there. And they looked at me, and then suddenly they all put their hands together and namaste me together, because they recognized I was having some experience, they recognized in the Tibetan experience that was revered, you know. And my experience was, oh, there's the Marciandi River Valley. We call it Marciandi, yeah. Here's David Whyte. We call it David White. But actually, you've given the name to something that's already gone. You're

• 56:24Speaker 01

  naming something that's already left you, yeah. So the whole feeling was this whole David Whyte project is absolutely absurd, and that's why I was laughing, and it was this release from this name.

• 56:37Rick Rubin?

  You were just connected to everything.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it was through the revelation of water. So we naturally, unconsciously, have a very, very powerful relationship to any form of water.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Just turning on a tap and water appearing should be, the older you get, more and more miraculous. And in fact, one of the signal transformations of human health in any community is the ability to get clean water into those people. So water engineers are the unsung heroes of human society, actually. It's the single biggest transformation you can make to human life. What can and can't be held in words? Well, you're asking someone who's mostly Irish and

• 57:34Speaker 01

  I'd say there isn't anything that can't be held in words, yeah. Yeah, so words can hold a lot of silence. So words can create silence. So yes, you need silence by itself in order to understand certain things. But the beauty of words can create that powerful silence. And in fact, I often feel when I'm speaking on stage that that is the silences that are leading me on. So I'm following the silences because I'm following the listening in the silence.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  It's where people fall most silent that indicates the next step. But that silence is created by words. So we've all had the experience of saying something to someone in a very powerful way, and it just stops everything. So I'd say more things are possible than we know with words. Yeah. When you step out on stage, you stamp your foot.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  I ground myself. I often feel that people have an innate relationship with powerful silent attention and they can recognize it in another person. So I can often walk on stage and just stand there and immediately there is this powerful silence. And it's this powerful attentive listening, just by the way you walk on, just by being silently engaged with everyone that's there in a very fierce way. And it's different than the silence you have when you go on stage saying, "Oh my God, what am I going to say? Absolutely, I'm dying of nervousness," you know.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  People can recognize that. And then you'll hear fumbling and rustling in the audience and coughing and you can walk on stage and go.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  And the whole place just stops.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  So that's been an invitation to me to create that in my everyday conversational life.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Not using it as a weapon over people to impress or to be this charismatic person, but

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  just to tell people you're there in another way.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  That another conversation is absolutely available that normally lies beneath the surface of our everyday interaction. That you're there for it, if they want to have it. So sometimes that's just touching a person on the shoulder.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Or just listening and looking at at the same time. Do you remember the first time you were on stage? I remember the first time I was on stage as a poet.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Tell me about that. I'd been on stage, you know, doing lectures in marine biology and the Gaia theory quite a bit with slides. But the first time I was ever invited on stage at a large conference in Monterey Bay in California. At the Asilama Conference Center, which is all of these gorgeous wooden buildings built by, by one of America's great female architects, actually. And their arts and crafts buildings. So I was, I was invited to give a two-hour keynote.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  And I was invited as a poet and to use my poetry. So it was absolutely terrifying to me.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  I was only after the fact that I realized how terrifying it had been to me. Because who would I be if I failed at that? That was my ultimate goal and ambition in life. So here was this golden opportunity. You know, a creative opportunity is both an invitation and a dagger to your throat. Yeah. And I felt the dagger more than I felt the invitation. So I went through this psychosomatic undoing, actually. I fell ill. My talk was Thursday morning, but I turned up at the conference on Sunday evening. Now I turn up twenty minutes before the talk happens. But then I wanted to be ready. I wanted to hear the other conference speakers. But I was in a state of absolute exhaustion.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  And if I wasn't in my wooden chalet, I was laid on the floor, literally at the back of the conference hall, because I didn't have the strength to sit up, listening to the other speakers to try and get inspiration. And this went on for three or four days.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  And on the evening before my talk, I wanted to prepare and I just couldn't. My brain was foggy, my, my body was empty. I said, well, I'll go to sleep. I'm bound to rally in the morning. I woke up, I was worse. It was just as if someone had pulled the plug. Yeah. And then they came to get me from the chalet for my talk to six hundred people in this hall. And I felt as if I was being led in front of a firing squad. Yeah. And I went on stage. And I remember I had a box of books because I felt like I was so flawed in my physical presence that my memory wouldn't be. So I had a box of poetry books and I put this cardboard box down on this desk. And everyone I knew, I know was saying, what's in the box? You know?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  And interestingly enough, I never looked in the box.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Once I started in, I was five minutes in and the symptoms fell away completely in front of everyone. I was suddenly completely clear, completely present, and my memory was flawless.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And I spoke up to the first half. I got a standing ovation just for the first half. And in the middle of the second half, I heard the equivalent of the trumpets blaring, the angelic trumpets blaring, saying, "This is what you're going to do for the rest of your life."

• 1:03:52Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yes. And it was almost as if I arranged this falling apart for myself so I'd understand how native it was to the way I was. I'd been preparing all my life. I didn't need to prepare for what was native to me. And from that moment on, I've always felt I could be just walking through an airport, past the doorway, someone came out of it and said, "We've got 600 people in here. Can you talk to them for two hours?" And I'd just go through the door and, of course I can, yeah. So it was just as if I was bodily preparing myself to say, "You're ready for the mission. You're ready for the road. You'll always have to prepare in some ways or other,

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  but just have faith in the bedrock foundational nature of the way you hold the conversation of life."

• 1:04:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Start close in.

• 1:04:46Rick Rubin?

  It's amazing that it happened all at once, like a light switch being turned on.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:50Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Yes, although, you know, I'd been memorizing poetry since I was seven years old. I'd been writing poetry since I was seven years old. I wrote it seriously from when I was 13 years old. I'd been reading poetry. I'd been listening to speakers and recording speakers. Part of my job was recording speakers that came to this nonprofit where I was. So it was this, this harvest of all the different forms of apprenticeship suddenly come to this single point of fruition.

• 1:05:22Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about being asked three times. We spoke about this before. I'm not asking for the story, but the concept of how when you're asked three times, it's different than when you're asked once or twice.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, the first time is, if it's your path, it's going to be frightening. Your path is always the path of heartbreak. Why is it the path of heartbreak? Because your path is always the path where you care most deeply.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  So your, your path forward is the path of heartbreak. So you're going to be afraid of it. So the first invitation is always the refusal of the call, as Joseph Campbell called it. No, thank you. I'm happy where I am with my protected, non-heartbreaking life. And then the second one is hearing something from beyond, but not quite believing it.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  And the third time your life is at stake. You say, no, the third time you've missed a tide.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  I had this lovely moment where, after I'd gone full-time as a poet, after that, a wonderful event, where I'd gone through the shriving of physical breakdown. And I was speaking at a psychological conference in Washington DC. And at the end of the talk, there was a line of people. And at the very end was this gentleman who, who I got to know very well in the end, but he, he said, we have to invite you into corporate America. And I was a very serious young artist at that time, so. And I grew up, you know, a raving socialist part of, of Yorkshire, from long lines of rebels on, on my Yorkshire Scots side and Irish. So anything that was part of the corporate world was the enemy to art.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  And you'd sell yourself out and all this. So I said, no, I'm not interested, but I'm interested why you would invite me. And he said a beautiful thing. He said, you know, the language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory that we've entered. And I just heard the language in your poetry. That's large enough. So I thought that was really powerful, but it still wouldn't, didn't bump me out of my inherited enclosure of what it meant to be a, a young artist. And then I got back to Widbey and he called me up.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  He said, I really want to reiterate the invitation. And I said, no, I feel fierce about it. He said, right, I'm coming out to Wibbly Island. So I was talking to my mother, my Irish mother. I said, I've had this experience, you know. I said, no, I've said no again. And now he's coming out. And she said, oh, you've already said yes. I said, really? She said, yeah, when you're asked three times, you have to go.

• 1:08:15Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a beautiful moment. I said, God, you're right.

• 1:08:19Rick Rubin?

  Your mother sounds very wise.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:23Rick Rubin?

  Where do you think her wisdom came from?

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  From grief.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  For many people, grief, especially in the childhood or adolescence that my mother experienced that grief, would lead to bitterness. That's, it's a testament to the bedrock of my mother's character that it turned to compassion.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  So at thirteen, she lost her mother. This, her family was broken apart by the bad old Irish Catholic Church, who felt that a family should not stay in a household where there was only a father. My mother's brothers were put in with the Christian Brothers and terribly abused. And my mother and her sister were threatened, you know, with the laundries, which are being uncovered, you know, as places of just terrible enslavement, really. And so she fled Ireland at fifteen with her sister to England. That would be enough, you know, to traumatize any and to be adrift in a world where you're not fully accepted.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  And at that time, there was a lot of prejudice towards the Irish in England. It's not there in the same way anymore. But somehow she had a blithe celebrative spirit that was able to overcome all those difficulties. I mean, my mother was so young. We once drove out to the first woolen mill that she worked in when she was fifteen, when she came to Yorkshire. The dark satanic mills that Blake spoke of. It was one of those. And she was so young, she used to work an eight-hour shift and then go and play in the park after she'd, after she'd finished her shift. That's how young she was.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  So I don't know where she got, she had just a genius for compassion and walking an Irish mile in other people's shoes.

• 1:10:17Rick Rubin?

  How is your inner experience from day to day? Would you say you're even keeled? Or is it a roller coaster ride?

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, I'm even keeled, yes. I think that comes from my father's Yorkshire, actually. There's a wonderful stoical, grounded, unperturbable aspect to the Yorkshire character. Not getting over excited about things, you know, having a philosophical view and a good sense of humor at the same time. So I think that was a really good stead for me. Plus, you know, I started rock climbing with older men in my early teens and keeping a cool head in the midst of difficulty and danger in ostensibly dangerous situations,

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  you know, three, four, five, six hundred, seven hundred feet above the ground while being engaged in practical competencies, rope work. And I think that also steered my character. And then I was a guide, a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands aboard boats where things were going wrong every day. You're sailing on this death dealing medium called the ocean. And we were sailing, we were in literal sailboats. We were sailing without GPS, without navigation lights in the islands and by dead reckoning and by night so that people could visit places ashore. So my job was to be calm and collected

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  in the midst of wild experiences.

• 1:11:57Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your Substack.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  I was in a coffee bar in Costa Rica, in Nocero, and I ordered something in Spanish. And the woman next to me said, are you David Whyte? Because so many people relate to me through my voice.

• 1:12:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  And this has happened before in Starbucks in Chicago airport and then I say, I say, could I have a double Americano with foam on top? They'd say, are you David Whyte? And, and so she said, are you David Whyte? So that started the conversation. And I said, what's your life name? She said, oh, I'm an executive at Substack. I said, well, it's a terrible name, but what is it? Yeah. So she explained it and really was quite convincing about how good it was for for writers. And that it was a kind of trust behind a nonprofit trust, which is much more trustable.

• 1:12:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Than being run by billionaires. And so she said, listen, have your assistant get in touch with me and I'll I'll put her in touch with my people and we'll do it all for you. I said, right. Okay. And it's absolutely remarkable. First of all, I love the design, the white space, the font, the way I can put my photography in there too. So the whole feeling of it is just as real integrity. And so I'm trying to migrate people over from my other platforms to Substack. It's where where I can put my new work. You know, people can sign up and be free and get a lot of my work, but the new work is behind the paywall. So it just works very well to support my work and to give me an incentive to write new work, actually.

• 1:13:33Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  It's very close to the readers circle that I first set up for Constellations One, which was just by email then, very primitive. Hundred people paid a hundred bucks to get twenty four essays, twelve of which I'd written. And so I was on a deadline after that, but I I found the deadline really wonderful.

• 1:13:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, motivation.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'd find myself, my assistant Julie would call me and say, oh, tomorrow. And I'd find it would be ten o'clock at night in Paris. So I'd have to go down in the lobby and write my heart out for three hours.

• 1:14:08Rick Rubin?

  Had you ever worked on deadline before or no?

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Not in that way.

• 1:14:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  But I found it incredibly, incredibly good for me.

• 1:14:14Rick Rubin?

  It can be an incredibly useful tool, as long as it doesn't take over.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yes. Yeah, there are deadlines that bring you alive and deadlines that kill you.

• 1:14:26Rick Rubin?

  Yes. How is speaking ideas different than writing ideas?

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Something occurs in the spaciousness of not having to say something to someone else.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  But it's almost like a conversation with some deep,

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  deep line of resistance within yourself.

• 1:14:53Rick Rubin?

  Like a soliloquy, really.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  In a way, yes, you know, to be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings of arrows of outrageous fortune. You know, that's, that has this rhythmic descent into the body. But I do believe with practice, you can get very close speaking. Because I speak extemporaneously all the time. And many of my best ideas have come to me onstage in front of people where I overhear myself saying things that I was either terrified of saying before or that I'd just discovered. I'm less terrified now, whatever I come up with, but I used to be terrified.

• 1:15:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  When I was younger and I was starting to speak about death and grief and wounds. My younger self was deeply disturbed onstage by what would occur. The phenomena, the physical phenomena of standing there with perhaps my right knee shaking or my facial twitch, you know, and the tremor in my body. And the invitation was just to feel it more, actually, and to make yourself larger and to put your physical sense of yourself down in your hara, in your body, to hold it. Once I learned how to do that onstage, I started being less scared either about what I was overhearing

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  myself saying or by the embarrassment I was becoming in front of an audience of a thousand people. So.

• 1:16:27Rick Rubin?

  Do you record all of your speaking engagements?

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Not all of them. It depends. Yeah, I probably should have allowed more things to be recorded.

• 1:16:36Rick Rubin?

  I'm saying even if you're speaking extemporaneously, new things come up and it would be great to be able to refer back to them.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  It would, and I should do more of that, but I don't. But whenever I do it, I say, oh, my God, I'd forgotten that I knew that.

• 1:16:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  I always place the priority of the new frontier above what I've done already.

• 1:16:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Sometimes you leave a few frontiers behind you. So I think I could probably do more of that.

• 1:17:01Rick Rubin?

  Sometimes there's a state that you go into in front of an audience where you're not conscious of every word.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Yes. Exactly, you get a kind of self-forgetfulness, which is lovely. I get that now even in my Three Sunday series, looking at the little green light at the top of my, my big screen there. I'm in my study, but I'm talking to thousands of people around the world. But there's an entrainment, an entracement, in which I, I feel quite natural and, and in which I get into that wonderful state of self-forgetfulness. Yeah. Where you're speaking directly, just as you would over a glass of wine with a friend. Yes. Where you're no longer counting every word or, or measuring every sentence. When you look at the green lights, are you picturing someone or no?

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  I have a sense of this dark theatre almost, that expands out to, to the horizons of the world. So I do have an imaginative sense of people in various wonderful corners of the planet. Just because at the end of my Three Sundays, people comment in the comment box. I see. But I always ask them to say where they are and you get these wonderful, wonderful, "Oh, I'm in the Pyrenees, you're in a, in a stone farmhouse," you know. Uh, "I'm in a, a house on stilts overlooking the water in Malaysia." And, uh, "I'm on the Barrier Reef," you know, in Australia. "I'm in Hoboken," you know, it's just as exotic, actually, when you think about it.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  And, uh, so I, uh, I, I do have that, that sense, that planetary-wide physical sense of people listening. When you hear the name of a place, do you imagine what it looks like or no? I do, yeah, I see a physical picture, yes. So often if I've been there, then it will be a, it will be an image I carry from the place. Or if it's one where I haven't been, then I've got some imaginative image I may have carried from childhood because I was a great armchair explorer as a child. So if someone says Timbuktu, I have an immediate image of, of adobe-like huts and thatched roofs and... Based on reading, not based on being... Based on, on reading and imagination, which may or may not be accurate.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  But still, it carries that imaginative cargo of invitation.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  That we felt as children when we heard certain glamorous names, you know, San Francisco or

• 1:19:25Rick Rubin?

  It's an interesting thing.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Rio de Janeiro.

• 1:19:27Rick Rubin?

  The difference between our beautiful imagined places versus the reality of those places. And sometimes they're very different.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Rick Rubin?

  Sometimes they're much more beautiful than we imagine. Sometimes they're not so interesting.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:40Rick Rubin?

  The name conjures something in us.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I tried to capture that in the poem Santiago, which I read in our last conversation. The way that a place shimmers in our imagination, but is always calling us to a meta voyage beyond that place. And a different understanding as you go along to shed the image. I'm just trying to recall the last lines of the poem and which are, "You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach. You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way."

• 1:20:22Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  "Than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach, as if all along you thought the end point might be a city with golden domes and cheering crowds and turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road. You found just a simple reflection and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back, and beneath it, another invitation. All in one glimpse. Like a person or a place you had sought forever, like a bold field of freedom that beckoned you beyond, like another life. And the road, the road's still stretching on."

• 1:20:59Rick Rubin?

  Spectacular.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  That's what lies beneath the image.

• 1:21:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  Why would you set off to a place you already know?

• 1:21:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  There's some unconscious intuition that says, "I'm going to subvert the image that's now drawing me. I'm going to go to the actual

• 1:21:15Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  place for which is going to involve some kind of shriving, some kind of molting, some kind of stripping away.

• 1:21:27Rick Rubin?

  A loss.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Loss, yeah.

• 1:21:29Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful. Have you ever felt like you're not quite here?

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  I think it's a constant human experience.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think not-quite-heerness is the hallmark of being human.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  I mean, it's interesting to feel quite affectionate towards AI at the moment. In the way, AI is actually not quite here at the moment. It's like a wayward college friend, you know? That's coherent most of the time and then suddenly falls into some kind of delusionary dream world of their own. But I think, I think it's, it's probably one of the most difficult and most intimate doors that a human being has to go through. Is the way you don't feel connected. Not-quite here, not-quite your best. And being able to dwell in your not-quite-heerness

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  is actually coming close to the essence of the way you hold the conversation of life. Because when you think about it, it's the gap. It's the opening. It's the invitation to the depths and what is missing that calls us deeper and deeper into the question. And in fact, Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic of the 13th century, when asked, "What is the essence of God?", Eckhart said, "God is pure absence." God is pure absence. He must have thought the listener was up to, up to the understanding.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Because this is like a Zen master giving a, giving a really powerful koan to an adept. "God is pure absence." It's what you feel is most missing from you. So our everyday not-missingness, you know, when you wake up after a restless night, if the moon has kept you awake, or your troubles have kept you awake. It's the easiest thing in the world to skip over that restlessness and to say, "Well, the coffee will put me right," or, or a cold shower, or... But just to, when you first wake, to dwell in that not-quite-heerness. It's actually a step into your essence.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

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