E217 - David Whyte: The Conversational Nature of Reality

David Whyte trained as a marine zoologist, spent two years as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos, and went on to become one of the most beloved poets of our time. In this conversation we begin with words themselves: how they first arrive in our bodies as children, how they drift into abstraction, and how poetry can return them to direct presence. David describes the stages of attention he discovered while sitting in silence with the animals of the Galapagos, and how each deeper level of attention changes who we are and what can meet us. What We Dive Into: 1. Watching a Galapagos hawk, David moved from self-absorption to noticing, then to being seen, then to sensing the relationship itself as what was most alive. The same progression is available at the kitchen table with a partner or child, if we are willing to let it look back at us. 2. We often throw valuable things into grief, such as relationships, marriages, and plans, hoping we will not have to go down ourselves. David suggests that falling all the way to the bottom is how we find solid ground, and how the qualities we loved in someone lost begin to live in us. 3. Before David found his path, he had to refuse work that looked close to what he wanted. A stranger’s story by a fireside turned him back toward his original longing. Saying no to the near miss can feel like a loss, but it keeps room open for what is actually calling. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself. https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com ✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: Waking Up: Get your 14 day free trial! https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyself Anima Mundi: 20% off with code KNOWTHYSELF https://www.animamundiherbals.com/ ___________ 00:00 Intro 01:59 Words as Doorways into Reality 04:20 Living Inside Abstraction 09:27 Attention and the Capacity for Conversation 22:28 Zen and the Contemplative Path 36:59 Speaking from Silence 38:56 Overhearing What You Didn’t Know You Knew 50:38 Grieving John O’Donohue 58:52 The Soul Friend Without a Mask 1:01:08 Ambition and Crossing the Unknown Sea 1:10:26 Uncertainty on a True Vocation 1:24:39 The Power of a Stranger 1:26:42 The Courage to Say No 1:34:42 Letting Others Remain a Mystery 1:42:52 Inner and Outer Horizons 2:02:56 Living the Questions ___________ ✨MORE FROM DAVID ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidjwhyte/ ↳Substack: https://davidwhyte.substack.com ↳Poetry & Prose: https://davidwhyte.com/poetry-prose/ ↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@poetdavidwhyte ↳https://davidwhyte.com 📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF ↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l ↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/ ↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/ 👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum ↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast ↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The human voice is so powerful. Someone using language in a generous way can really bring the best out of us. But we often will close our ears to another person's voice. A lot of conversations are not conversations at all. It's just me waiting for a gap so that I can fire off this invisible pile of ammunition. You can't hear anything but your own voice and the rest of the world actually can't find you.

• 0:24André Duqum?

  Right now, we live in a culture that is in many ways attention deficit.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  It's really just about paying attention to things other than yourselves. So why not just fall silent? It's because you feel you're going to die, that's why. You feel as if your identity is falling apart. But it's actually almost the opposite. In silence, I realized that every part of the world was speaking back to me. The animals and landscapes and plants and trees and the ocean. You can have that also with your partner or your daughter in the kitchen in the morning. The conversation is going to look back at a part of you that you might not have looked at for a long time. Everything's alive. Everything is waiting for you. Just be on yourself. It's where you need to be. Just turn your face towards it.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Just fall even in the direction in which you're supposed to go.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  And the first step I always say is stop.

• 1:24André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself podcast. Our guest today, trained as a marine zoologist and spent over nearly two years as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos. He's a, one of the most globally decorated and cherished authors. He's a treasure of wisdom and his books, 12 poetry, five prose, really give great insight into the conversational nature of reality itself. David Whyte, thank you for being here.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  It's my pleasure.

• 1:56André Duqum?

  The pleasure is absolutely mine. I thought we could start with words themselves. As you describe them, they could be turned against us, used as weapons, or they can be leveraged as a greater means to gain access into reality itself. I would love for you to share in your own words about words themselves.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. We know when we're, when we're children and we're very small children and we're first learning whatever language we're growing in. When you hear a word, it's not about something, it is the thing itself. And when you hear, hear the word door. As a child, you immediately have a physical apprehension of the, of the door itself. And it carries everything that doors hold. Being closed, being open, hiding something, being a portal to something larger.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  It depends on the doors in your house too, as to whether they hold fear or they hold love and invitation, or more often something of both. So I do feel that our later use of language is often an abstraction of how we first came across it and how it first arrived in our bodies. So you could say that poetry is the art of re-establishing that direct, the direct presence of language in the body.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  And speaking of the word doorway, as a doorway to your next dispensation of understanding in your life, you know, the next emancipation of your character, of your ability to, to be generous with the gifts that you were given. And, and you're going to give a lot of those gifts through the way you speak and the way you make invitations and the way you hold the conversation of life.

• 4:10André Duqum?

  That, understanding that we are sort of passed down words and then we live inside this abstraction.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:17André Duqum?

  Nobody really defined for us.

• 4:21André Duqum?

  When you say that poetry is sort of a doorway to like rediscover these words,

• 4:28André Duqum?

  can you say a little bit more about how often we're living in an abstraction where we haven't defined? We throw around words like love, consciousness, home.

• 4:38André Duqum?

  And it's a medium we both traffic in. In this podcast, it's something that I'm increasingly gaining more, putting more attention to, right? An artist or a painter will study the medium in which they're using of paint. And I, in my past, have not given as much weight to exploring words themselves as, as doorways in your words. And so I'd like to set that framing a bit more.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yes, and the human voice is so powerful. And we often will, will close our ears and ourselves to another person's voice because, because we don't want that voice in our bodies, actually. Because the voice actually travels not only through the ears, but all the resonant bones in our, in our head. If you look at the phenomenology of hearing, it's not just the tympani in the, in the ears. We listen with our whole bodies, actually. And it's transmitted through the whole, whole body.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  So someone we love or someone we fear speaking can affect our stomach almost, almost immediately. Can affect our, our way of being. And on the other side of it, it can also, someone using or embodying language in a generous way can really bring the best out of us. Can, can make an invitation to us that we didn't realize we wanted or, or deserved. So the words and language are very, very powerful indeed, both to the, to the positive and to the negative.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  So learning how to become more conversational, which means you admit that someone else is actually alive. They're not just there as recipients of your insights and your, what you have to say. A lot of conversations that we call conversations are not conversations at all. It's just me waiting for a gap so that I can fire off this invisible pile of ammunition. That's at my side. And when the, when the ammunition is over, when I look down, it's all gone. The conversation is over. No, that's no conversation at all. You have to, you have to admit that's, that there is life and voice, and a voice other than your own. There's marvelous lines in Spanish by Antonio Machado.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  I don't remember the original Spanish, actually, but he says, he says, "An eye is an eye not because you see it. An eye is an eye because it sees you." An eye is not an eye because you see it as an eye. An eye is an eye because it sees you. Well, you could say the same thing for a voice. A voice is a voice because it speaks to you, not because you can, you can hear it and name it in a way that's too small for it.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  So the ability to have a relationship with what's just about to happen

• 7:55Speaker 00

  helps to make a conversation more real. You know, poets, when they first begin, or when you begin any exploration of language and it sounds like you're sincerely beginning to explore it, you tend to think that if only I can find this part of myself that's fully articulate, then I can just speak from that place and say everything I want to say. But it's actually almost the opposite. You're going to have to find the part of you that doesn't know what to say. And that's the part of you that's more invitational, more conversational. That's the part of you that will write good poetry. That's the part of you that will make real invitations to other people

• 8:40Speaker 00

  because you're really, from that place of not knowing, you're actually curious about the world. You're paying attention and you're more invitational. So much of what we call intimacy is the ability to make and receive invitations at a very, very physical level and to feel, to feel invited. We use words like belonging, but in many ways, belonging is a form of invitation that has been met, that has been made. And, and the best form of belonging is where it's, where the invitation has not only been made, but it's been met at the same time.

• 9:28André Duqum?

  The way that you're describing the conversational nature of reality and how attention deepens your ability to commune with and be intimate with whatever you're conversing with or relating to. Can you speak a little bit more about that distinction and the relationship between attention and having and even having the capacity for a conversation?

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, so your identity changes according to how much attention you're paying to things other than yourself. And the first stage of identity is no identity at all. That's where you're not paying attention, where you can't hear anything but your own voice, you can't see anything but your own reflection in the mirror. You don't have patience for anything around you. And there's very little conversation. And to the rest of the world, the rest of the world actually can't find you in a strange way. And I first investigated these different levels of attention and therefore different

• 10:38Speaker 00

  levels of incarnation that we can inhabit.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  I mean incarnation is just a very fancy theological way of saying being here in your body, being present, yeah. And which is half the battle, as they say. So the, I first started to investigate these different levels of participation that a human being can inhabit when I was a young naturalist in the Galapagos Islands. And going to Galapagos was a, was quite a surprise to me at the time. I was, I didn't know I was going to be there until six weeks before I got the job. And then suddenly I was there for two years in these far-flung islands, far away from

• 11:26Speaker 00

  the, from what we call the civilized world. And this is pre-internet, no email. It took three weeks for a letter to arrive, three weeks for a letter to get back to, to anyone in Europe. So you're six weeks away from any reply. We don't have that privilege today. When I think about it, it was a privilege to be so isolated, actually. But there were, there was another community there in the, in the Galapagos besides the, the human community that was there, which was the community of the natural world and all the animals and birds and the sea creatures that inhabited that astonishing constellation of qualities.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  And in those islands, the, the animals and birds and even the sea creatures have no fear of humankind, actually. So you can get very close to them and you can get into silent conversations with them. And it was there that I realized that every part of the world was speaking back to me. And until that moment, I barely listened to a small percentage of what was actually there. My vision, my hearing, my presence was so narrow and confined to the human social invitations

• 12:51Speaker 00

  that I'd been made, you know, in my growing, my, my Yorkshire community in the north of England, my Irish, Irish relatives, my Irish mother. And I had had a great education, so lots of invitations there. But Galapagos opened up the world and creation as it was before human beings evolved, never mind, took dominion. So you were constantly being taken out of yourself by the wondrous nature of the place. So you could, for instance, be leading a group of people. And my job was educator and policeman, guy guarding the islands as a naturalist guide,

• 13:32Speaker 00

  a guía naturalista, working for the national park and for, for your employer who brought these visitors, you know, to the, to the islands. You could be walking along feeling very sorry for yourself, as we often do as human beings, because of things that weren't as they should be, you know? You've not been kept into the manner to which you want to be accustomed. All of these natural complaints, human beings find time to make about reality. And then suddenly you would see a Galapagos hawk on a branch in front of you. And as you're walking along the path, it doesn't take off and fly away, it stays there.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  And you all stop and you maybe walk even a little closer and then you might be just eight or nine feet away. And that might be the perimeter that I, as a guy, would say, okay, we don't want to disturb this animal, but actually this is incredibly intimate there. So you'd be looking at the hawk and, and suddenly the hawk starts come to, to come alive in that silence, in its own essence, yeah. So then suddenly you've taken a step. The first step is not noticing at all. You're just caught up in your own, your own cycle, inner cycle. The second step is paying attention to something other than yourself. Oh my God, you know, this world is alive, yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Well, you can have that also with your partner or your daughter in the kitchen in the morning. You can see them as either someone for whom you have to complete tasks, you know, or someone you have to please, yeah. But quite often we don't see their essence speaking back to us, you know? The privilege of being in the presence in the kitchen with your daughter, with your partner, and being able to work from that place of origination. So in Galapagos, you were constantly being invited into the astonishing place of origination. So the second step is there's the hawk, yeah. It's absolutely astonishing in and of itself.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  And then you start to realize that the hawk is looking back at you. As Antonio Machado said, an eye is not an eye because you see it, an eye is an eye because it sees you, yeah. But the hawk, and when you're looking into those amber hawkish eyes, they're quite astonishing, actually. And it's often the last thing a creature will see before it, before its demise.

• 16:14André Duqum?

  Horrifyingly beautiful.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're very fierce, but they're looking back very fiercely at a place inside you that is deeper and broader and wider than the person who first started the conversation.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  And of course, we have this in the kitchen too, with a loved one or an intimate. One of the reasons we won't go deep is that you're, if you do, the conversation is going to look back at a part of you that you might not have looked at for a long time. So it's very disturbing to your surface identity. And, and so then you're into a different conversation. This part, this deeper part of you starts looking at the deeper part of the hawk. And then suddenly you're precipitated into the next level, which is, which is where

• 17:10Speaker 00

  you feel as if what is real is not you, nor is it the hawk. It's this relationship between you that's live. It's the conversation itself. And it's as if life is pirouetting backwards and forwards on a high wire between you and the hawk. It's a live exchange that's quite nourishing in and of itself. You don't need to go anywhere else. It's fulfilling in and of itself. And then the last stage, if you're given a few hours of watching the hawk, or I should, or cumulatively over the days and months, you know, being in silence with animals and,

• 17:54Speaker 00

  and landscapes and plants and trees and the ocean, then you both disappear. And there's just the essence itself of the relationship.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  There's not even the wire between you. I have a piece about this that's called The Bell and the Blackbird, the experience, the live experience I had, hearing the red-winged blackbird outside of my study doors, which were open at the time, and hearing a bell right behind me at the same time.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Someone struck a pair of tabatin bells just in exactly the right way and it went right through me and I heard the blackbird too. So 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. Wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know, you will have to give every last thing away.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  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."

• 20:53Speaker 00

  You know, when you hear that phrase, if you just hear that poem cold and you hear that phrase, "That radiance you have always carried with you." Most of the time you say, "What radiance? I don't have that, I wish I... I'd like that radiance, where is that radiance?" Well, the radiance lies in the disappearance, in the intimacy of the conversation itself, like a human love relationship. The ecstasy is in the mutual disappearance and the mutual recognition at the same time. So, a real conversation, a real meeting, and by the way, the word "conversation," it's a beautiful word, actually.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  It means inside-out, converse, you know, from the Latin. So, it's asking you to be inside-out and outside-in, both at the same time. What's beautiful about the word, too, is it can't be turned into jargon because conversation involves a whole spectrum of meeting. Everything from just a chat around the water cooler in the office, about what your local team might have done, right all the way through to a midnight life-changing conversation at your kitchen table. And then the conversation with the world around you. So, it's a beautiful word in that it cannot be manipulated,

• 22:21Speaker 00

  whereas dialogue is much more of a strategic word, in a way. So, in fact, it only involves two, whereas human beings intuit that they're always involved in multiple conversations at once, at many levels.

• 22:44André Duqum?

  You can burst out into poetry at any point you'd like.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Well, try and stop me, as they say.

• 22:52André Duqum?

  For the duration of this conversation and hopefully a friendship enduring after. I love it, so beautiful. Thank you for sharing, mutual friend, Sam Harris. I heard him share that your voice is equal parts gravel and silk.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Lovely.

• 23:08André Duqum?

  Which is a great compliment.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  That's very good.

• 23:10André Duqum?

  It rings true.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Thank you, Sam.

• 23:11André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 23:14André Duqum?

  So, there's many things that come up, both through the poem and what you shared before and after, about how, right now, we live in a culture that is, in many ways, attention-deficit. It's become a disorder. And we see the loneliness, the anxiety that's uprising, correlated to or caused by that. And I suppose, when you started off when saying, you know, the deeper you pay attention to life, your identity changes. I think many of us have had a reference point of that, to varying degrees, where we're so limited in our own solipsistic gaze of life and what we want of life and in our own head and thought process. And then we come into deeper intimacy with life, we pay deeper attention,

• 24:00André Duqum?

  and that scope of context of our identity dissolves a bit, it expands a bit. And as you shared that progression, you know, with the exchange of the hawk, can get to the point where the solidity of a self isn't as strong. It actually goes away in the sight of a beautiful exchange. Now, this has also been informed by your contemplative practices, your understanding of this through the years. Could you give a bit of context for how Zen and then contemplative paths have come into your life?

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, I have a very different perspective on Zen now than I might have a couple of decades ago when I was in the midst of the practice inside Zen monasteries or in week-long sessions. And I just see now how it makes up a part of everyone's everyday life. It's really just about paying attention to things other than yourself so that the idea about yourself disappears. And you can actually...

• 25:14Speaker 00

  The only thing that's real is where you meet the world. Everything else is an abstract. And so, the more of you that can meet the world, the more surface area you have, the more possibilities there are for things starting to happen. And I'm speaking about things practically happening, too, as well as metaphysically inside you, that things start to move on your behalf because you are the world that's moving on your own behalf. And you start to move, actually, on other people's behalf, too, at the same time. You're participating in the world, you become, actually, more useful.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  So, I was actually involved with Zen before I'd even heard of the word. I spent a lot of time as a child, out by myself in the woods and fields of West Yorkshire and beautiful countryside around where I grew up. I hadn't really appreciated how beautiful it was until I was back again, just a month or so ago, on a glorious afternoon. And I realized that many of my memories were not idealistic at all. They were actually real, about the place I had grown in. And it was full of history, it was full of far distances. And I would spend a lot of time just walking

• 26:39Speaker 00

  and being nourished by those distances and those horizons, the moors in the far-off west and by the animals in the fields and by the wild birds in the hedges. So, when I went to university, and that time at university coincided with that time that every human being goes through, where they start to forget the immediate visions of childhood.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  We forget how astonishingly enlightened, in a certain way, we were as children, in the way that we were in awe of the world and in awe of the way it invited us out of the windows of the house that we grew up in. If you ever opened the doors to children into a garden, the immediate thing they do is run into every corner, explore. And it's a representation of how they feel at their best. And when we get to 18, 19, or 20, we start to feel a kind of grief around losing that childish vision.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Oh, it's really childhood vision, it's not childish. And we have to start again in building it and re-establishing it in our adult lives, surrounded by the mature life of an adult human being. But to keep that... I forget, I think it was... Was it Huxley who said that "The ability for genius in adult life is to keep the primary vision of childhood alive into our adulthood." And I think it's a very good description. So, when I was at university, in order to try and,

• 28:46Speaker 00

  you could say, try and recall the nourishment I'd felt in a child, I started to meditate. And I started, but I was just doing it from books. At that time, there were no meditation groups in North Wales, where I was at university studying marine zoology. There were no Zen groups, but there were books. And there was Alan Watts, who you might get on the radio now and again. There weren't even tapes at that time, it was vinyl, you know. So, you were lucky. But there were Alan Watts books and there were other books

• 29:30Speaker 00

  by various Indian swamis and Zen teachers. And I started to read about them and I started to practice meditation. But when I think back, I was doing all kinds of weird and strange things and getting into all kinds of weird and strange places with my mind. But it was a very good era of transformation. And then eventually, I did find myself, when I was in North America, in the presence of good Zen teachers. And I started to take it more seriously and I started to do long Zen retreats and I started to sit every day at home. But eventually, I was in a session in Hawaii, actually, in the middle of the session.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  And I got to a physical place of awe and presence and that astonishing sense of being nourished by the world around me. There was... Because we were all pretending to be Japanese, there was no coffee in the session. We were all drinking green tea. But someone in a neighboring house at 8 o'clock every morning put on a flask of Kona coffee and a few molecules of that coffee would waft through the zendo. And I'd be sat there, breathing this in. And I tell you, it felt like the best cup of coffee in the world.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  On the first day, I said, "Oh, that's like my morning cup of coffee." But on the fourth or fifth day, it was my coffee, it was so wonderful. And the aroma and the presence of it, and the thirst being met by it. But in the middle of that session, I said, "Oh, my God, this is what I actually experienced in Galapagos." I was spending so many hours in silence there, day after day after day, month after month after month, that I actually was practicing Zen before I even knew it. So, the ability to...

• 31:38Speaker 00

  To, you know, it's a, you can get, they call it in Zen, they call it the stink of Zen, which is where, you know, you're very proud of your black robes and how you can sit and you're so upright and you've got, and you're in full lotus and the whole thing, you're so great, you know. But it's really very simple. It's just being present, yeah. There's a great moment where, where the central Chinese authorities sent out this young hotshot theologian to straighten up all of these wild Zen monasteries. Chan, they were called in China at that time, but it was a, it was the predecessor to Zen in, in, in Japan.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  And so he's going from monastery to monastery, trying to teach these guys proper Buddhist theology. And he, but he's meeting these, this wild presence in all of these teachers that's really, doesn't follow any rules, doesn't follow any central theology, but is just absolutely and utterly present. And he's slowly breaking down. He's slowly realizing that he has so many names for things and so many names of how things should be. He's like a fortress, you know, that's just being broken down. Rilke, the great German-speaking poet, has a line where he says, "All of you undisturbed cities, haven't you ever longed for the enemy?" All of you undisturbed cities.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Well, human being, you think of how we can so easily become undisturbed cities with 20-foot walls around ourselves, yeah. And Rilke wrote those lines in northern Italy when he was looking at these Italian cities and they're so beautiful, but then he suddenly realized, oh my God, they're all surrounded by huge walls, they're all at each other's throats for years. And he sees this as a representation of the way we can fall into this defensive mode. "All of you undisturbed cities, haven't you ever longed for the enemy? I'd like to see you besieged by him for ten endless and ground-shaking years until you are desperate and mad with suffering. Finally, in hunger, you would feel his weight.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  He lies outside the walls like a countryside, and he knows very well how to endure longer than the ones he comes to visit. Climb up on your walls and look out, his camp is there, his morale does not falter, he will not grow weaker, and he sends no one into the city to threaten or promise, and no one to negotiate." He is the one who breaks down the walls, and when he works, he works in silence. While this young theologian had started to enter the silence that these Zen teachers carried with them, this wild silence, and his edges, his walls were breaking down.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  And, and finally, he gets to this very, very well-known Zen master, Tzen, his name. And Tzen's heard about him going from monastery to monastery, so he's there at the gate to welcome him. And, and as he's approaching, he says, "You're welcome." He says, "Where are you going?" And the young theologian says, "Oh my God, I'm not sure. I don't know anymore." And Tzen, he says, "Where are you going?" And he says, "I'm going on pilgrimage." That's what he says, yeah. And, and Tzen says, "What is a pilgrimage?"

• 35:13Speaker 00

  And the man finally gives up. He says, "I don't know what a pilgrimage is." And Tzen says, "Marvelous." He says, "Not knowing is most intimate." This is a very great koan in the Zen tradition. If you understand this, you understand a lot about what you have to give up, what you have to undo. So when we're talking about language that's nourishing and words that are nourishing, they should come from a place of undoing, where you've given up trying to use language as ammunition.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  You've given up trying to use language to control. You look at the way in intimate relationships, so-called intimate relationships, the way we can use language to try and control the other person. Or where we're trying to throw our voice into the other person's body like a ventriloquist, you know, have them say what you want, and they're not cooperating, they're not saying what you want them to say, yeah. So no, we give up that. We enter the silence from which real speech can come. And then there's a possibility of something real happening.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  So I should create a little silence now so we can, you can say something?

• 36:44André Duqum?

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• 37:29André Duqum?

  It's risk-free, and if you love this podcast, there is a very slim chance you wouldn't love what they have going on there, too. The quality is just crème de la crème. That's wakingup.com/knowthyself, or link in description as always. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. There is something that I appreciate, though, in the way that you speak, as though it's informed by silence. So I think that the way that, the, the poetry that you share and the prose that you share, to me, I think there is, for at least what I feel is an attunement to that place of not knowing.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:08André Duqum?

  It's very clear when someone's rehearsing or reciting something that was passed down to them as opposed to an authentic discovery. It's as if it's as surprising to you as it would be someone else.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. There's a glorious moment in Irish mythology where Finn McCool and his warrior followers, the Fianna, were, were out and they were resting after their heroic endeavors, you know, in the wilds of Ireland. And they decided to have a, a competition as to who can describe the finest music in the world, yeah. And so someone says, "It's the, it's the sound of your wife's voice welcoming you home." And another says, "It's the sound of a, of a stag belling at the end of the valley," yeah. "It's the sound of rain falling after a long drought."

• 39:04Speaker 00

  "It's the sound of the breeze in the birch leaves," yeah, it goes on and on. And then they turn to Finn and they say, say, "What's your contribution?" And he, he says, "The finest music in the world is the music of what happens." The music of what happens, yeah. So.

• 39:28André Duqum?

  I think so much of what it means to be intimate with life is to be intimate with what happens and not just through the limited narration of top-down phenomena. And the way that you speak to this about attention, also, I think, mutual love of Sir Ian McGilchrist's kind of work on, on intentional systems as well is very, is very fascinating here. I've heard you describe poetry as trying to overhear yourself saying things you didn't know you knew.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:02André Duqum?

  And first, actually, would you care to elaborate on that at all? Because for you, you've created these spaces.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:11André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Yes, it's the act of actually overhearing yourself, say things you didn't know you knew. And for me, that comes from what feels like a physical edge or frontier inside myself. Almost, you could use the metaphor of mining where you're following a seam, and it's at that edge, the seam, where the rich, richness lies. But that metaphor breaks down also. It's, it's this physical sense inside myself of an edge from which the, the words arise, actually, as I'm, as I'm working.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  And, and so, for instance, many years ago, I wrote a little piece on grief. It's called "The Well of Grief." But I wrote it at a time when I was a very serious young poet. And, and I was seriously involved with the men's movement, too, headed at that time by Robert Bly in, in North America in the, in the early 90s. And Robert Bly was into grief in an enormous way, yeah. That was his, that was the be-all and end-all of his work for quite a few years. And it was rightfully so. And there was a lot to, that young men especially were not working with around their father's

• 41:36Speaker 00

  grief that had been passed down to them, and the inability to articulate that grief. But when I started the poem, "The Well, The Well of Grief," I, I had the idea I was going to write a long epic on grief. This was going to be my big poem. But I started in, and the lines are, "Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief. Turning down, turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe. Will never know the source from which we drink. The secret water, cold and clear.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Nor find, in the darkness glimmering, the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else."

• 42:26Speaker 00

  And the poem came to an end much sooner than I wanted it to. And what happened in the poem as I was dropping down, this is an illustration of of the kind of physical edge that I that I feel, is as I was dropping down through the waters, and it and often grief does feel like a deep well into which you're a depth into which you're sometimes drowning, sometimes falling, sometimes swimming, sometimes disappearing. I suddenly saw these gold coins on the bottom of the well. And my strategic mind that wanted to write the the long, serious young man's poem on

• 43:11Speaker 00

  grief, that would establish my reputation, said, don't look at those coins. I'm writing a long poem on grief, and if you look at those poems, the poem will come to an end. It was only afterwards that I realized that's what that voice said, but it all happens in a millisecond here. In the Zen tradition, that phenomenon is called a nen, N E N, where where you have just the beginning of a thought, not even the whole thing. But the so the nen was all about, don't look, yeah. And later you can elaborate what he was saying, but it was there, don't look. You're doing something.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  But I I knew I had to turn my face back because that was the frontier, that was the edge. You know, Coleridge and Keats talked about the imagination, the primary imagination, as the ability to form an image or a tonality inside yourself that would make sense of all of the images and tonalities that you were surrounded by. That's the primary imagination. It's not the ability to think up new things. They would have called that the secondary imagination or the fancy, as they called it, romantic times, around 1800 A.D. So my the imagination, and Keats said, I am certain of nothing but the holiness of

• 44:36Speaker 00

  the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. And the truth lay in those images there. So I turned my face back. And of course, what I realized was I had thrown those coins down myself. And if you go to any body of water around the world that human beings are around, you'll find coins in it. Even in a mall, if you see a fountain, you'll see people have thrown coins in it. It's this ancient, propitious activity.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  And the hope is, if you throw something valuable down into the well of grief, you yourself will not have to go down. And we throw we throw not just coins, we'll throw marriages down there, we'll throw relationships, friendships, you know, anything but face the grief. Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief, turning down, turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness

• 45:58Speaker 00

  glimmering the small, round coins thrown thrown by those who wished for something else. So that's that's the place from which poetry is written. You know, it's that unspoken imagery, tonality, invitation. You're going to find out when you get down there. You're in the ancient poem Beowulf, which is the oldest poem in the English language. It's so old, it's prototypical, it's Anglo-Saxon, actually, but they after Beowulf has defeated Grendel, the monster on the surface, something else comes out of the lake, two o'clock in

• 46:42Speaker 00

  the morning, fights off the guards at the great hall, makes its way and carries off young men and women back into the swamp, into the lake where it eats them. And Beowulf then has to go down into the lake to confront Grendel's mother down in the lake. So this is all of these, these poetic representations give you, they're not just stories made up, they're physical representations of a place where you have to go.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  You are Beowulf, you are the young man and woman who's been carried off into the swamp and eaten alive by unresolved grief. You will have to go down into the lake. But the poem also tells you how difficult it is. It's very compassionate. It says, a stag hunted through the woods by packs of hounds, a deer hunted through the woods by packs of hounds, a stag with great horns, though driven through the forest from faraway places, refuses to save its life in that water, prefers to die on that shore. It is not far from here, nor is it a pleasant spot.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  See, the English were into understatement even 1500 years ago. So the ability to understand that poetry is a fierce embodiment of the great journey of life that we're all on. So it's no wonder that that we keep poetry at bay, actually, and that it's taught so badly in schools. If you ever give a poem to a young person in a classroom, they will always recite it in an incredibly wooden voice.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  And actually, I think that's right because they are, in a sense, in a backward way, acknowledging how sacred the poem is. They understand intuitively that there's something that should not be brought out in the light of day in a way that narrows it, that diminishes it. And they've just been given this piece of sacred text to read just as an academic exercise. Unless the teacher's brilliant, unless he's got the same genius as the text has, the

• 49:29Speaker 00

  child is right not to participate. We intuitively understand how poetry is, and often we will, even, you know, the most strategic engineer, when they lose someone close to them in their life and they're asked to speak at a memorial service, they will instinctively look for poetry, even though they may not have read a line of poetry for years. We instinctively say, even looking at a football match, you know, a football game, we'll say it was poetry in motion, someone's genius move down there.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  It's about the ineffable, it's about what cannot be touched but must be touched through language, through embodiment, through running down the field with the ball under your arm, whatever, whatever form it takes.

• 50:26André Duqum?

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• 51:08André Duqum?

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• 51:26André Duqum?

  Since we're here, we had a couple of friends and colleagues of yours send in a couple of questions, one that I think is very fitting here because I think you speak of heartbreak as potentially the only unavoidable, unavoidable aspect of life. Like, we will repeatedly, through any long marriage, through any true vocation, meet that, meet that aspect of reality. I saw on the cover of Constellations, Liz Gilbert.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:57André Duqum?

  Shared, "Keep this book by your bedside forever." We just had her on the podcast. I messaged her and asked if she would send in a question, and she did. So she said, "I have a question for him about his grief over the loss of his friend John O'Donohue."

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:14André Duqum?

  "I feel as I heard an interview with David years ago, where he said that you grieve somebody, and it feels like falling into a void, and you fall, and you fall, and you fall, until you finally touch ground on the thing that you finally find within you, that you had always found within them. You have to sort of become yourself what they used to be for you, and that's the beginning of moving out of grieving. So my question would be, what was that thing, that essence, that John brought to David's life that he had to find within himself after John died?"

• 52:44Speaker 00

  I think, I think it had to do with a wild inhabitation of both his body and the language that came out of his body. He had a bird of paradise vocabulary, and he was fluent and funny in English, Irish, and philosophical German. And he was just a wild character. I'd walk into a room, and it would feel as if the lights brightened, you know? And he was constantly making loud sounds out of nowhere, would whoop, you know? When

• 53:24Speaker 00

  he passed away and died suddenly, I said, "Right, I'm gonna whoop more, John." I don't whoop anywhere near as well as he did, but he would go, "Whoop!" in the middle of... But yes, so, one of the things I always loved about John and admired, and when I was younger, felt a little jealous of, was his ability to just drop everything and, and speak to something really powerful in a moment. So, walking out in the landscape, for instance, you know, so 30 years ago, he could do that incredibly. I couldn't, I, I needed more

• 54:05Speaker 00

  of a ritual space, you know? I needed a stage, I needed a room, I needed a place, I needed the whole temenos created for me to do it. And, and so I started, when he went, I started to apprentice myself to, to just getting into it wherever I was, yeah. And now, it was wonderful, and I feel as if John's in, with me, you know, kind of companion in my own physical body. I can do it just as well as he did now. And that's part of the apprenticeship to the relationship, in a way. I have a, a walking tour I do in Japan on the Nekosendo

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Trail, and the Japanese have almost no public spaces in their villages or in their little Rio Kens, their little, their little medieval inns where you stay along the trail. So I have to give all the talks on temple steps, by a waterfall, on a bridge, under a tree, everyone with their umbrellas up, the rain falling, and I love it. I totally love it. Whereas, a good few decades ago, it would have been, it would have been a real challenge for me to do that. So, I do think that when someone passes away, who is close to you,

• 55:30Speaker 00

  you actually enter the relationship at another deeper level. There are certain constraints which physical incarnation actually placed upon you. There's also a strange intuition that they have a deeper form of wisdom on the other side of that veil. Whether it's true or not, we don't know, but you feel it, and that's just as true. And they have a bigger perspective, and that they're, they've gotten over many of their flaws by, by having

• 56:11Speaker 00

  gone, by being dead. They've gotten over many of their flaws that got in the way of the conversation. And so, the relationship is allowed to mature in a way in which it accelerates an immaturation that was with you while you were alive together, but also enters territory that it couldn't enter when you were both breathing the same air. So, so I felt that very much with John. I felt it. I still feel him at my side, actually. And it's still really a puzzle as to why he left, because he loved life so much. When

• 56:56Speaker 00

  he went, I said, "God," I said, "the Guinness better be good in, in heaven." Because, if you said to him, "Will you have a pint?" He said, "I will. I'd love a pint." He never was neutral about anything, you know? "Would you have a lamb, lamb chop?" "I'll take three," he'd say. So, I think he'd be the only person who'd be homesick in heaven for, for this life, yeah. So, it was a real puzzle when he, when he left. And I did feel as if he'd passed a baton to me, and I needed to carry some of that energy that he'd had himself. And I was in, I'd been an apprentice to that energy that he held in his life. We're talking

• 57:39Speaker 00

  about John O'Donohue here, he was great, he was a priest for 17 years, but he was a speaker, he was a student of German philosophy, most specifically the great, the great German Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart, who lived in the 13th century, same time as Dogen Zenji lived in Japan. So, he was, and he was just a really remarkable, and he was someone who was, lived as poor as a church mouse as a priest for so many years, and then suddenly had worldwide fame through his, through his, his book, Annam Kara, Looking at the Soul

• 58:22Speaker 00

  of the Celtic World. I gave that book to my agent at the time, in manuscript, and said, "You have to publish this. It's John's, John O'Donohue." He said, "I've never heard of John O'Donohue." "No, he's a, he's a great speaker. He's a friend of mine." He read it. He said, "I can't get it. I don't get it. It just doesn't do it for me." I said, "You're mad." He said, "I'm sorry. I'm not, I'm not gonna put it out." So, anyway.

• 58:49André Duqum?

  Whoops.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  But about two months later, John got a million dollar advance in those days when you did get advances. And my agent calls me up and says, "Anything you recommend for me in the future, I will take sight unseen. I'm an idiot," he said. So, John was precipitated suddenly into, into this kind of fame, yeah. And, and I got to walk alongside him as we, as we, as he explored that notoriety. I was well, I was more known than him at that time. So, we were able to help each other. And I feel that was still, I hope I'm helping

• 59:35Speaker 00

  him as, as much as he's helping me right now.

• 1:00:39André Duqum?

  And Anam Karra, her soul friend, he says that the that the soul friend or that Anam Karra is the one that sees you without a mask. What do you think he saw in you that no one else did?

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  Well, we did call ourselves brothers. It was almost as if we were separated at birth, as they say. And we were born just, just a month apart, actually. So he in the west of Ireland, me in the west of Yorkshire, both of Irish mothers. And our whole kind of unspoken instinctual theology was around belonging and around the power of words and, and around poetry. So I, I think he saw a different version of himself.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  And he also saw me as further along a path that he wanted to take as far as being in the world, being known for my work and making a living from it. But we also just got on in the pub in conversation and laughter. We used to have these weekends together where we would, we would stay at a lovely country house hotel in the Irish or English countryside. And we'd just go at it, talking with each other, pushing each other theologically and psychologically and emotionally. Quite often we'd sometimes fall out, but we made a rule we had to make up before we left the, the left weekend.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  And we'd walk too, and then we'd eat and drink and just have a great old time together. So there are very few people who you can have that kind of chemistry with. And, and very few people who, who breathe the same air as you during your lifetime. So you have to, but then again, a friendship like that teaches you that it's always a possibility. And therefore you need to be alert to possible depths of friendship that don't seem to be present on first meeting.

• 1:02:53André Duqum?

  I think many people would look at your life, your work, his life, his work, and be inspired for what seems like the outside in, a incredibly aligned, purpose-driven life where you are living in your genius, you know? And so I'd like to speak a bit about ambition and, you know, your work, Crossing the Unknown Sea. And perhaps we could start with ambition, the piece, the essay itself.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Yes. I was very surprised when Steven Spielberg read the book and said that ambition was his favorite essay because it really takes apart ambition. And there's someone who you'd think would be the acme of ambition. So, um, yeah, there's something that ambition does not do for us, yeah, the understanding of ambition. We don't understand all the ways we're being looked after by greater forces than our, than

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  ones we can muster ourselves. So this is, this is ambition. Ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is desire frozen, the current of a vocational life immobilized and over-concretized to set unforgiving goals. Ambition may be essential for the young and as yet unrealized life, but becomes the essential obstacle of any mature life.

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over description, over familiarity, or too much understanding. The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others. The very dis-ease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others. What is worthy of a life's dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  What is worthy of a life's dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence. Everything true to itself has its own secret language and an internal intentionality with an equally secret, surprising flow, even to the person who supposedly puts it all in motion. Ambition ultimately withers all secrets in its glare before those secrets have had time to come to life from within and then thwart the generosity and maturity that ripens the discourse of a lifetime's dedication to a work.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  We may direct the beam of ambition to illuminate a certain corner of the future world, but ultimately it can reveal to us only those dreams with which we have already become familiar. Ambition, left to itself, like the identity of the average billionaire, always becomes tedious. Its only object, the creation of larger and larger empires of control. But a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process, and then humbles, simplifies, and enlightens us about the hidden core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  But a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process, and then humbles, simplifies, and enlightens us about the hidden core nature of the work that enticed us into it in the first place. We find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end, we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had experienced the actual heartbreak of the journey. No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors, we are all compost for worlds

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  we cannot yet imagine. We're all compost for words, worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition takes us toward that horizon, but not over it. That line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek. A vocation always includes a specific, heartrending way we will fail at our attempt to live it fully.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  A vocation always includes a specific, heartrending way we will fail at our attempt to live fully. A true vocation always metamorphoses both ambition and failure into compassion and understanding for others. Ambition takes willpower and constant applications of energy to stay on the perceived bearing. But a, but a serious vocational calling demands a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field that surrounds us and from which we recharge ourselves as if breathing from the

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  atmosphere of possibility itself. A life's work is not a series of stepping stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there's no path, only a heading, a direction in conversation with the elements. Looking back, we see the wake we have left as only a brief, glimmering trace on the waters. Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it. But held onto too long, and especially in eldership, it always comes to lack surprise,

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity. The authentic watermark running through the background of a life's work is an arrival at generosity. And as a mark of that generosity, delight in the hopes of the young, delight in the hopes of the young, and the giving away to them, not only of rewards that may have been earned, but the reward in the secret itself, the core artistry that made the journey a journey. Perhaps the greatest legacy we can leave from our work is not to instill ambition in

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  others, though this may be the first way we describe its arrival in our life, but the passing on of a sense of sheer privilege of having found a road, a way to follow, and then having been allowed to walk it, often with others, with all its difficulties and minor triumphs, the underlying primary gift of having been both a witness to and a full participant in the conversation.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  Ambition.

• 1:11:15André Duqum?

  There's a lot there.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  There's a lot there, yeah.

• 1:11:18André Duqum?

  A lot there to chew on, yeah.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20André Duqum?

  It's one of my favorite as well.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  The last lines made me think of a little, tiny little haiku poem I wrote for beginning a pilgrimage, actually, which is called "For the Road to Santiago." Santiago being the goal of that very fashionable pilgrimage in northern Spain that everyone seems to be doing at the moment. And so it's "For the road to Santiago. Don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind. Just bring what you have. Just bring what you have. You're always going that way anyway. You were always going that way all along.

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  You're always going that way anyway. You're always going that way all along."

• 1:12:13André Duqum?

  This, I think to anyone who sincerely sits with it becomes nourishment. It really becomes sustenance for someone on a path where at times, especially the capacity we have for comparison of other people's journeys in the day and age we live in, feel like we're not living the life we were somehow set out to. And we feel lost, you know, at times. And this, this particular line of "A true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process, and then humbles, simplifies, and enlightens us about the hidden core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place."

• 1:12:57André Duqum?

  I certainly resonate so much with that.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:12:59André Duqum?

  And I'm curious for you to share a bit more about the unknown and the uncertainty that is actually a quality of your true path and the heartbreak that you will likely find down the road.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  Well, the amazing thing is, you've often, in order to find your path, you've to say no to a lot of paths that are not that path, even though you haven't yet found your path. And there's something very powerful about the way no opens up the unknown and, and the ability for recognition.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  Even when you haven't recognition, you haven't recognition yet of what the path is, you do often recognize what the path is not. And adolescents often feel this in a very, very powerful way. Teenagers, yeah, they long for something, but they're surrounded by things that are not it, yeah. And, and it's one of the reasons adolescents are so difficult to please, yeah. But it's a core necessity of taking the road forward, yeah. So for instance, when I was in my last year at university and I was coming to the completion of my degree in marine zoology, which originally I'd been inspired and instigated by the vision

• 1:14:23Speaker 00

  of Jacques Cousteau, the great French marine zoologist, who had sailed across our, our little television set and, and on the good ship Calypso, exploring the oceans of the world. You know, when I was 13 years old, I couldn't believe there was work in the world like this, you know. You could actually do something like this as a vocation. And I felt this incredible longing to be out there, but I didn't know how I would get

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  onto the bridge of the good ship Calypso or down, wearing the scuba, the gear that Jacques Cousteau actually invented, yeah, back in the 50s. And, but I followed the nearest path I could, which was getting a degree in marine zoology. I had to give up, say no to all my art subjects, which were much easier for me, and put myself into the salt mines of biology, chemistry, and physics, which I had to work twice as hard at, you know, as my scientifically inclined friends, yeah. And so, but eventually I was, I, I, I was, I got my degree in marine zoology.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  And right at that time, I made this very serious young man's vow not to apply for a job in marine zoology.

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  Now, why was I doing that? Because my friends weren't even getting answers to, from, from jobs that they'd applied for. They weren't even getting the interviews, yeah. And the jobs that were available were really quite tedious, you know, looking down a microscope at plankton, working for a government agency in the western Alps of Scotland, somewhere in a little lab, you know, not going out into the sea itself. So in order to protect myself, you know, I wouldn't have said this at the time, but I see it now, I made a vow, saying I'm not going to apply for any job. And I was going to go off to India, which is what everyone did at that time. And I was going to go on a spiritual pilgrimage to India.

• 1:16:34Speaker 00

  And so I was in the midst of it. I said no to it, put it all aside. And then I went to see my then girlfriend, who lived on the other side of the mountains. And I hardly saw her because I'd been studying nonstop for six months for my finals. And, and she lived in a remote farmhouse in a communal, communal setup. And so I decided I'd go over and see her. There was no telephone over there, so I just had to take my chances. And I hitchhiked around the mountains. And, and I got dropped off at the bottom of this looming atmospheric valley called Cumbenant. And Cumbenant was known for witchcraft, actually.

• 1:17:19Speaker 00

  And still to this day, there are covenants there and everything. And there's a tower there where Aleister Crowley used to call up the devil in the 1930s. You have to walk up this road in the dark with a storm coming behind me off the Irish Sea, off Cardigan Bay. And I'm walking past that tower, whistling, you know, as I go. And, and then up, up, up, up the valley, and I get to this remote farmhouse. And I'm stood outside and there's not a single light on in the place as it's getting dusk. The storm's starting to hit my back. I knock on the door and I can tell from the echo through the house, there's no one in there.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  And I'm, I say, well, I'm, I'm not going to stand out in the rain. And as you do when you're a student, you let yourself in, you know. So I let myself in. So I'm like Goldilocks and the three bears in there. And I say, well, I'll put the kettle on there. I'm sure someone will be back, make a cup of tea, you know. And then I said, well, I'll get a fire going, because they'll be, because the house was cold, they'll be happy to have a fire when they come in. But I'm there, I drink my tea, I sit by the fire. It's getting on and on, I'm there quite a few hours, no one's coming back, yeah. And I fall asleep in the chair by the fire. And then suddenly there's a knock at the door. I wake up and it's midnight, actually. The fire's almost out.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  And I said, if someone else is knocking at the door, it means that they don't live here either. One else is there. So I opened the door and there's, there's a fellow just a few years older than me, maybe in his late twenties or thirty, thirty or so. And he's a handsome looking fellow and he's got a leather bag over his shoulder, yeah. He's like some character out of a medieval story or something. And, and he's looking for someone else who lives in the house, who's also not there. I said, well, come in and we'll have a cup of tea and sit by the fire, you know, we'll get the fire going. So anyway, we both sat there and as you do with strangers, and this doesn't happen

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  as much today because we're so much into our phones and checking in with our friends miles away. But it used to be that when you were, got, opened a conversation, a long conversation with a stranger on a journey, you know, if you're on a train or a plane, you'd often tell them things that you'd never talked to your current friends about, you know. You divulged things you wouldn't say to people you knew. And we got into a really, really intimate conversation and he started to tell me about his work. And his work was going around from woodland to woodland and taking a kind of inventory of all the wildlife and what it could bear as far as food and, and how human beings could live off the woods and things.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  And I don't, I think he was working for a government agency of some kind, but it was really marvelous work. And it's something he'd wanted to do, you know, for, for years, he said. And so I asked him, and of course, this is a cri de coeur, this was a cry from my own heart. I said, "How did you start, you know, the journey towards this work?" And he looked at me really seriously, leant, leant forward and said, "Do you really want to know?" And I said, "Yeah, I really want to know." He said, "Well, I started by wanting to kill myself, by trying to commit suicide." I said, "My God." He said, "Yes."

• 1:20:54Speaker 00

  I was living in a really rundown building, a set of flats in London, 12-story high set of flats. We were on the top floor and I was living with, with, with a group of drug addicts and I was one of them. I was an addict also, yeah. And we barely had any furniture in the place. We barely had any food in the place. Everything went towards the addictions, you know. And so the addiction always comes first. Everyone was stealing from everyone and you couldn't trust anyone. And it was an awful gray rainy day. I decided I was going to throw myself out the window.

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  But it was an old fashioned sash window that you lifted up, you know. And I barely had the strength, because I was hardly eating at the time, to lift the sash window. And, and then I had to climb out, but there was a window box there with earth in it and a few weeds, just none of us, you know, would keep a flower box going. And I got stuck across the threshold of the window. And then the sash window came down on my back and I was stuck, yeah. And I had to laugh, you know, and I lost, in that moment, I lost the impetus to do it, yeah, because everything has to be.

• 1:22:19André Duqum?

  What a bummer.

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I, I hit the lowest of the low there because I couldn't even kill myself properly, he said, yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  And I also couldn't get out from under that window. And I...

• 1:22:36Speaker 00

  I was looking at this flower box. And the rain was dripping into one end of the of the ground of the flower box and forming this little stream that went from one end to the other. And there were little weeds along the side of the stream. And I didn't have anywhere to go or anything to do. And I just started molding the ground with my hands. And I was there probably forty five minutes. And at the end, I'd created a little landscape in the flower box. And when I looked at that ground, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to work with the land. And the hardest thing I ever did in my life was

• 1:23:19Speaker 00

  get myself out from under the window. And the next hardest thing was walk past my dealer on the corner, right outside the door. But I had one friend left in the world and I went and knocked on his door. And he took me in and I went into rehab. And then I went to night school, started to study. And then I went to college. And then I got a degree in horticulture. And I was doing landscaping jobs on the side. And then I got this work. So that's how I came here. So there I was, I said, oh, my God, you know, I'm hale and healthy.

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  I'm not, I'm not addicted to anything. I'm fully present in the world. And yet I said no to my vocation, to where I wanted to go. Um, so his ground became my ground. And I started to turn my face back towards what I'd originally set myself. And then all kinds of doors started open up and up. And as I said earlier, six weeks later, I was in the Galapagos Islands with this job. Um, and it came from that meeting. It came from this powerful no to everything that was not a yes. And that allowed somehow this falling and falling

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  in your, in your grief, just as you fall in your grief for another person. The grief for a loss of vision can be equally distressing and despairing. And then coming to ground in his ground in that little flower box. It's a ground onto which you can step and from which you can step into your new life. So this is, uh, often we, we won't drop down deep enough to reach that ground, you know? We get halfway there and then we start to make other plans. The strategic mind comes in too early to protect you.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  It's meant to be a good servant to the soul's desires. But how much apprenticeship do we get when we're growing to the soul's desires? It's often not there in our parenting. It's often not there in our schooling unless you have brilliant parents, unless you have a brilliant teacher. I was lucky, I did have brilliant teachers when I was at school. And I had a brilliant mother. So, um, the ability to drop down, to have confidence in the ground that awaits you inside. For the road to Santiago, don't make new declarations.

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  You could say, don't make premature declarations about what to bring or what to leave behind. Just bring what you have, just bring what you have. You're always going that way anyway. You were always going that way all along.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked three hundred fifty thousand Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  The wheel had roads. Electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com slash AI to learn more.

• 1:27:13André Duqum?

  A true storyteller was transported into that world. And there's many takeaways. One, don't underestimate the power of connecting with a stranger.

• 1:27:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:27:25André Duqum?

  Have you met, did you ever see him again?

• 1:27:27Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:27:28André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:27:30André Duqum?

  Wild. And, um.

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  You know, it's really powerful to understand that you can be that powerful stranger in another person's life.

• 1:27:39André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  Just at a bus stop. I was at a bus stop in Dublin, actually. And, and this young lad came up to me in awe. I just had my haircut, it was slicked back and I had sunglasses on. And he, he said, are you Bono? And the look in his face was one of adoration. And I had this absolute intuition, I should be Bono. I said, yes. And he said, I just wanted to really thank you for everything you've done for me, taking me through some really dark times. And I said, you're welcome. That's why we write these songs and play this music. And he shook my hand and he went off.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  And afterwards, I thought, Bono would not be stood at a bus stop waiting for the number twenty two. But he needed, he needed that stranger, yeah? And you could see it as a conceit on my part. But I just had this very powerful intuition that that's what this lad needed at that moment. And I would have disappointed him. And there's all kinds of ways we can be so disappointing to other people. Partly because we're afraid to live up to what the invitation is that they're making. We're afraid that we won't actually incarnate it.

• 1:29:09Speaker 00

  We won't. That will be disappointing.

• 1:29:16André Duqum?

  What a gift. There is a, something that was another highlight for sure for me was the power of no. And oftentimes, the hardest no is the one closest to a yes, where we seem to have some of our needs met or we're in an enmeshment where we're living this kind of malaise of our life. You know, where we like some things, but we're not fully alive.

• 1:29:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:29:39André Duqum?

  And we search for that, we yearn for that.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:29:43André Duqum?

  Now, what do you think is necessary to have the courage to say no? For those that want, don't want to be stuck under a windowsill moments before their own execution of self. But that, that, that want that to arrive at that place nonetheless. What does it really take if not just suffering?

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  I think it has to do with a, an arrival in your own beautiful aloneness in the world for to, for you to find your companionship. I mean, it's a very powerful dynamic about in, in romance and looking for a partner in marriage or commitment. You are, you are always presented with something that looks almost like what would be good for you. What be, what would be the right person? And all Jane Austen's novels are based on this discernment

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  between what looks like the perfect partner and what is not. And being able to understand what is going to be a blessing for you, what is going to be an invitation, a real invitation for you, what will be good for you as you go along. So, um, the ability to, um, give away what is not exactly right is very courageous. Because quite often we'll want to settle for second best, as we often say. And that's neither good for the person who you're settling for.

• 1:31:30Speaker 00

  They may not realize that you're settling for second best. They may be existentially disappointed and not want to be your second best. So it's not, it's not a very generous act on, on either side. Uh, so this is a piece I wrote about that aloneness, arriving in that aloneness, actually. It was written after I'd left my first marriage. And I moved into this new old house.

• 1:31:58Speaker 00

  Which I still inhabit, actually. And it was a small house at that time, so a hundred years old, which is old for the West Coast of the United States. And it's three times the size now. But you know, when I moved into it, it seemed to have endless horizons. When it's your home, it feels as if it's connected to the horizons of the world. And I was moving in there, I was living there alone. I was also a single parent there, so half the time I'd have my son there. But it was really my first adult home that I'd had that I'd not shared with other people.

• 1:32:42Speaker 00

  At university, I was sharing houses, as you do, you know, in order to make it work financially. When I was in Galapagos, I was sharing a boat, you know, in very close confinement, you know. And then I'd lived in a communal setup when I first came to the States. And then I was in a marriage, sharing with another person. And then suddenly I had my own house and it just felt incredibly nourishing. It was, this was a different form of coming to ground, yeah. So this is the piece, it's called "The House of Belonging." "I awoke this morning in the gold light. I awoke this morning in the gold light, turning this way and that,

• 1:33:27Speaker 00

  thinking, thinking it was one day like any other. But the veil had gone from my darkened heart and I thought, it must have been the quiet candlelight that filled my room. It must have been the first easy rhythm with which I breathed myself to sleep. It must have been

• 1:33:48Speaker 00

  the prayer, I said, speaking to the otherness of the night. I awoke this morning in the gold light, turning this way and that, thinking, thinking it was one day like any other. But the veil had gone from my darkened heart and I thought, it must have been the quiet candlelight that filled my room. It must have been the first easy rhythm with which I breathed myself to sleep. It must have been the prayer, I said, speaking to the otherness of the night. And I thought, this is the good day you could meet your love. This is the gray day someone close to you could die.

• 1:34:29Speaker 00

  This is the day you realize how easily the thread is broken between this world and the next. And I found myself sitting up in the quiet pathway of light, the tawny, close-grained cedar burning round me like fire and all the angels of this housely heaven ascending through the first roof of light the sun had made. This is the bright home in which I live. This is where I ask my friends to come. This is where I want to love all of the things it has taken me so long to learn to love. This is the temple of my adult aloneness.

• 1:35:10Speaker 00

  And I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life. There is no house, there is no house like the House of Belonging.

• 1:35:26Speaker 00

  This is the temple of my adult aloneness. And I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life. There is no house, no house like the House of Belonging. This is where I ask my friends to come. This is where I want to love all of the things it has taken me so long to learn to love.

• 1:35:48Speaker 00

  So I think, you know, one of the grounds we have to touch in order to be sure for another person is to have come to understand what we love in the world and to have confidence in it.

• 1:36:03Speaker 00

  Then the other person knows who they're with, actually.

• 1:36:09Speaker 00

  Simone Weil, the great French philosopher, she said, "What we love in other people is the hoped-for satisfaction of our desires. We do not love them for their desires. If we love them for their desires, we should love them as ourselves." What we love in other people is the hoped-for satisfaction of our desires.

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  But if we love them for their desires, we should love them as ourselves.

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  So the ability to understand, you know, how powerful it is to stand in the surety of your love for the world and for the things and for things you like to do and therefore to be able to have respect and love for what someone else, someone else does, yeah.

• 1:37:07Speaker 00

  You're not in the relationship to impress the other person.

• 1:37:13Speaker 00

  That soon runs out of road.

• 1:37:17André Duqum?

  I think likely many people can relate to the inevitable heartbreak that comes when you realize you're living life, in particular romantically, through relating your own idea of who somebody is as opposed to who they actually are. You know, we have this fantasy and it gets shattered. And that's heartbreaking. But it is your, it's your own illusion that was breaking. And, um,

• 1:37:46André Duqum?

  boy, I feel like there's a deep well here of so many different avenues to explore that we'll never get to the bottom of, which is fine, I'm here for the...

• 1:37:53Speaker 00

  I think just stepping off from what you just said, the astonishing thing is, is that you can't know the other person in the way you want to, in a way which you can name.

• 1:38:09Speaker 00

  You can't know who they're about to become or who in their heart of hearts they want to become because they themselves don't fully know. So how could you know? So the ability to grant that person space, to grant them breathing room, to allow them to be wrong, to get things wrong,

• 1:38:36Speaker 00

  in the same way you get things wrong. But to hold their best interests in heart. And when you get glimmers of what you see, oh, that's what they're looking for. You might just hint at it, you know, or mention it in a roundabout way. But not head on, in this is what you need to do, yeah. I mean, obviously, there are times where you lose patience and you will say that when you've seen something. And then you have to stand in the surety of having seen it and it will be tested against what they know about themselves too. But the ability to allow the other person to be a mystery.

• 1:39:21Speaker 00

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez was once asked in an interview about his long and happy marriage, which was unusual in artistic circles, you could say. And he said, "Well, I don't know really what the secret is, but, but you know, she's, I know her so well, I haven't a clue who she is."

• 1:39:45Speaker 00

  So that ability to be bemused and in the presence of an unfolding mystery. And it's the essence of parenting too.

• 1:39:59Speaker 00

  So you can't help but fall into wanting safety and protection for your children and therefore you fall into, into control. And the ability to hear your daughter's voice, not the one you want them to have, yeah, but the essence of your daughter's voice, the essence of your son's voice. This is the essence of parenting, really. To allow that life to have its own life.

• 1:40:40Speaker 00

  I always remember being in, in one of those wonderful moments with a teenage daughter as a father, where you say something deeply unhelpful to them and they say something deeply unhelpful back to you and then you follow it up with something even more unhelpful. And then you hear them going up the treads of the stairs with heavy footsteps so that they can hear you. And then you hear the door of their bedroom being slammed so that the whole House of Belonging reverberates.

• 1:41:16Speaker 00

  And I said to my, I started to follow, I was going up the stairs and I had my hand raised actually in speaking about to say that final unhelpful thing. And I caught myself and I said, David, I said, take your own advice. This is not a real conversation. How, what's the first step in that you tell people in deepening a conversation? And the first step I always say is stop the, stop the one you're having now. That's the first step in deepening the conversation. That's in my conversational leadership in VTS course. First step, stop the conversation you're having now. So I said, this is not a helpful conversation.

• 1:42:01Speaker 00

  Take your hand down, close your gob, go back down, you know? And I went down and I just went into silence in my body. And I just naturally started making tea. And in Britain and Ireland, you know, it's one thing you do in crisis is you put the kettle on and you make a proper cup. And to make a proper cup of tea, it takes you about 15 minutes. You have to warm the pot. Water has to be boiling when it hits the tea, then it has to mash for a while, you know? And I got out my mother's, her, my daughter's grandmother's, uh, Delft, the, the china.

• 1:42:42Speaker 00

  And I put together this tray and I got out my daughter's favorite chocolate biscuits. And then I took them into the living room. And then I went up with my heart in my mouth, I knocked on the door and in a different, more invitational voice, I said, come on, Charlotte, let's have a conversation. I apologize for whatever my part was in that not being helpful. And anyway, she came out as teenage girls do with their head down and her arms folded, you know? And walked down and sat in the chair with her head down and her arms folded. But she had one, one eye on the chocolate cookies, the chocolate biscuits. I thought I've got a chance.

• 1:43:25Speaker 00

  And I said, I said, don't say it. Whatever you want to say, don't say it. So we, we were there for the longest time. And then finally, I suddenly overheard myself saying, Charlotte, I said, tell me one thing you want me to stop doing as a father. And tell me one thing you want me to do more of. She looked at me and of course she immediately, she had a dozen things she wanted me to stop doing, but she had the one thing she told me. The interesting thing was she didn't know what she wanted me to do more of as a father.

• 1:44:10Speaker 00

  She was still growing into that, yeah? So it had her looking at who she was now as a daughter that would want a father of that age. She was catching up with herself, you know? And, you know, with an adolescent, the trajectory of maturation is so steep, you know? You're almost always talking to someone who's no longer there, which is why it's so difficult. So you should act as if they're no longer there, actually. They don't, they haven't even caught up with themselves.

• 1:44:48Speaker 00

  So it's a, it's an art form to actually arrive at the edge of maturation, both for you as a parent and for your child who's just arriving and finding out about themselves in this new body that they're inhabiting. There was sexual desires they never understood a human being could have, yeah? Invitations they want to make and want to be made to them that they haven't figured out. That's, it's an astonishing new form of incarnation.

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  The wheel had roads. Electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com slash AI to learn more.

• 1:46:12André Duqum?

  I loved reading a bit of your work around horizons, both inner and outer.

• 1:46:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:46:19André Duqum?

  As, and I think it's just best to come from your mouth, but speak to me about the correlation, the, the similarity between the two. What evokes, what is evoked in us when we see a horizon and the ones that are inner and what goes beyond it?

• 1:46:35Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, we all know instinctively how beautiful horizons are to us in a very physical way. You have a house here with gorgeous horizons, yeah? And we all know how much more we will pay for a house with a horizon, you know? With a view of the sea or the mountains, yes? Because human beings are actually drawn out of themselves, so. And a horizon is nourishing in and of itself. But you know, even if you're confined to a, to a bedsit in Brooklyn, where you're facing a brick wall, you will find a horizon in that brick wall eventually. You'll grow to love the corrugations of the brick wall, maybe the way the light finds

• 1:47:19Speaker 00

  it at an angle once or twice a day and burnishes it, yeah? And you start to have thoughts looking into that horizon as you're washing up or, or cooking. So we all know instinctively that horizons, especially when we're walking to them at a pace, you know, normal walking pace, uh, how invitational they are, you know? But it's interesting to think that there is an equally invitational inner horizon. But the invitation is felt in a very, very different way. It's an invitation to disappearance, actually.

• 1:48:04Speaker 00

  And so it's the line between what you know of yourself and what you don't know, what you're about to find, find out. And it's interesting that we more often find that horizon as a, as a boundary of resistance. One, we find it difficult to go below inside ourselves. It's why it's so difficult to, to quieten yourself down and drop down. I have two, uh, forest monks I just met. I just did a podcast with them. They, uh, they hung out in the Pike Place Market for, for a good number of years, just begging for their food.

• 1:48:47Speaker 00

  And if they didn't get food, they didn't, they didn't eat that day. But somehow they've managed to, as forest monks do, they've managed to raise $5 million to buy this piece of land and build a monastery. And so I was, I was marveling at this to myself. But I was thinking, isn't that astonishing, you know, that we will spend $5 million to find a place where you can just fall quiet?

• 1:49:17André Duqum?

  And then the forest monks could raise $5 million.

• 1:49:20Speaker 00

  No, they're really charismatic forest monks. And malnourished, but, but charismatic. And, um, I was thinking, isn't that extraordinary that we will put so much effort into creating a place which is only there so you can fall silent?

• 1:49:40André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41Speaker 00

  So why not just fall silent without the $5 million or without the monastery? Of course, we need the monastery in order to create a structure for that, for people. But it is very simple, actually. But why is it so difficult to do something so simple? It's because you feel you're going to die, that's why. When you fall silent, you feel as if your identity is falling apart. You feel as if your priorities are reordering and your intuitions are all correct, actually. And you feel as if you won't survive the experience in the manner to which you're accustomed. You will actually simply radically simplify.

• 1:50:26Speaker 00

  And you may not want to be the person we, you may not want to be with the person you're living with. You may not want to be the person who you are living with this person, yeah? You may not want this work that you're going to every day. So it's quite frightening to drop to a place of origination, to drop below that inner horizon. So a real conversation is putting that inner horizon of resistance in conversation with the far horizon that's calling you in your life. That's a real conversation.

• 1:51:02André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:03Speaker 00

  It also leads to a sense of humor. Because you're able to understand all the ways you don't want to make the journey, actually, and all the ways you don't want to change, thank you very much. And all the ways you'd rather just sit with a big bag of popcorn and watch something vacuous. And, and so you learn a kind of humility. And you learn also how to, uh, rub up against that inner boundary, how to lean against it. In the Northern European fairy stories, when the wicked stepmother sent one of her

• 1:51:45Speaker 00

  hunters out with the children into the forest to kill them, yeah? The forester always cannot do it. He can't bring himself to kill the children, the stepchildren. So he lets them go in the forest by themselves and say, well, I'll give them their own chance. Probably they won't survive anyway, so no one will know, you know? And he leaves them there. And the children or the child wander around in the dark wood, crying and lonely and, but quite often in many of the stories, they will then lean against a tree in their grief or they will lean against a stone.

• 1:52:28Speaker 00

  And the stone will take their body weight, the tree will take their body weight. And in that moment, the stone speaks to them and says, what is it, my child? How can I help you? The tree speaks to them.

• 1:52:44Speaker 00

  What do you need, my love? So it's this leaning against, you know, put your body weight against this boundary inside you, or just allow the world to permeate it and find it. For that, you need a sense of humor. You need to be brave about revealing yourself in that way. So this is a piece I wrote. I wrote it for John O'Donohue, actually, after he passed. And it's called Blessing for the Morning Light. John was a great blesser. Blessing is a big thing in the Irish tradition. John was a virtuoso blesser. And he could come up with a blessing in a moment for, he'd come up with a blessing

• 1:53:29Speaker 00

  for us talking together. And indeed, he wrote a book of blessings, actually, called To Bless the Space Between Us, or Benedictus in Ireland is the title. But this is Blessing for the Morning Light. I will often recite this to myself, just to put myself in proper conversation with the world in the morning. I have a little balcony outside the bedroom, so I'll walk out onto that balcony quite often. Blessing for the Morning Light, the blessing of the morning light to you, the blessing of the morning light to you, may it find you even in your invisible appearances.

• 1:54:08Speaker 00

  The blessing of the morning light to you, may it find you even in your invisible appearances. May you be seen to have risen from some other place you know and have known in the darkness, and that carries all you need. May you see what is hidden in you as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter. May what is hidden in you become your gift to give. May you hold that shadow to the light and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light. May you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance, this new morning,

• 1:54:47Speaker 00

  this being seen again, new and newly alive. The blessing of the morning light to you, may it find you even in your invisible appearances. So many times, we walk into a room and the person people are greeting is not actually the person who's walked into the room. You have a mask on, partly you want to protect yourself, partly you're being generous, you don't want to overwhelm people with things you haven't worked out yourself. But the great danger is that you become the mask. You stop having this frontier meet that frontier in the world, and the frontier's way out here in this abstract personality.

• 1:55:31Speaker 00

  The blessing of the morning light to you, may it find you even in your invisible appearances. May you be seen to have risen from some other place you know and have known in the darkness, and that carries all you need. May you see what is hidden in you as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter. May what is hidden in you become your gift to give. May what is hidden in you become your gift to give. May you hold that shadow to the light and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light. May you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance, this new morning, this being seen again, new and newly alive.

• 1:56:16Speaker 00

  So, may you join every previous disappearance. In that moment, I had this sudden realization of all of the difficult undoings I'd gone through in my life, you know, all the disappearances, and how, for most of them, I'd gone into them reluctantly. I'd been dragged into them. And then you get to the other side and you say, thank God, I went through that. I'm a much better person for it. So when I said, may you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance, the sudden understanding, well, wouldn't that be wonderful to get with the program, actually?

• 1:56:56Speaker 00

  To be, as Roche, the great German-speaking poet, said, to be ahead of all parting. It's an amazing invitation, to be ahead of all parting, to let go of what needs to be let go of, you know? To be right up with everything as the seasons changing, and to let it go as it's been asked to be let go. Not two months later, three months later, three years later, 30 years later, not on your deathbed now. May you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance, this new morning, this being seen again, new and newly alive.

• 1:57:40Speaker 00

  There's a moment in the Zen traditions, the great Zen master, Uman, or Yonman in Chinese, he came awake when being, when he was marooned in an inn on a pass. It was marooned in a snow blizzard, and he was there for days. And he was there with an already enlightened master. And the Zen master was just sleeping and enjoying himself and eating and not worrying about things. But Uman was in pre-enlightenment mode. He was deeply disturbed. He was having a terrible time.

• 1:58:25Speaker 00

  And then on the third day of him being so restless, the Zen master got really fed up of him. And he said, you fool, he said, don't you know that the treasure never comes in by the front gate? And in that moment, Uman, Yonman, was enlightened. And we could work with, we could work with that part around the treasure not coming in through the front gate, that's different. But the part that I love is he's at this pass, and the pass is below this mountain called Tortoise Mountain.

• 1:59:05Speaker 00

  And Yonman suddenly is enlightened and says, ah, he says, Tortoise Mountain has finally awoken. Tortoise Mountain has come awake. And what he's saying is, the whole of life is knocking on our door to invite us out. And we're so often not listening, not watching, not willing to leave the house that we're incarcerated in already. Everything's alive. Everything is waiting for us. Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you're alone.

• 1:59:48Speaker 00

  Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you're alone, as if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you at times have felt the grand array, the swelling presence and the chorus crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come.

• 2:00:32Speaker 00

  The doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you. At the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream ladder to divinity. Put down the weight of your aloneness, put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink. The cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything, everything is waiting for you. I'm thinking of a time where I was deeply incarcerated in myself, and it was just coming

• 2:01:17Speaker 00

  out of a marriage. And there's nothing more poignant when you are leaving a marriage than being invited to someone else's wedding. And I was invited to a classic three-day wedding in Ireland, Irish friends of mine, at a beautiful place that I recommended to them, actually, a place called Gregan's Castle out in County Clare, surrounded by the limestone mountains of the Buran. And we had a great old time there. And of course, even though I was leaving a marriage, the ceremony is so powerful. One thing, one thing I love about wedding ceremonies is they're so short, but they're

• 2:02:01Speaker 00

  so punchy and powerful. And here are two people, despite all the evidence, making a courageous promise to the world, and it's, I found it just as moving.

• 2:02:14Speaker 00

  But you know, three days of this intensity and it was, there was, there was, there was wonderful food and drink, there was dancing, there was music, there was singing. But eventually I said, I said to a woman I knew who worked at the hotel Bridey, who was actually a childhood friend of John's. I said, Bridey, tell me a place I don't know in this area. I know it so well, but tell, you grew up here. Tell me a place I don't know. I just need a new perspective, somewhere to blow the cobwebs away. And she said, do you know Cara and Cara and Adurish? I said, no. She said, it's round the back of Capuwalia Mountain there. You just take that little boring, that little lane, round the back of it.

• 2:02:58Speaker 00

  And you'll come to a crossroads. And when you get to the crossroads, you'll see a little farmhouse on your right. That's where I grew up. And then if you look up the hill to your left, you'll see this little boring, this little lane going up to the top of the hill. Go up there, it's gorgeous. You're looking down into the Carar Valley, you're looking out to, over the Atlantic, you know. And it'll do you a power good to go up there. I said, great, that sounds perfect. So I did, I drove up, found the little lane round the back of Capuwalia Mountain, came to the crossroads, saw the farmhouse, looked up. And I see these two limestone walls on either side of the road. And they're, they're meeting almost at the ridge

• 2:03:42Speaker 00

  in perfect Italian Renaissance perspective. Except they don't quite meet. There's a little door of light there. And I just felt as I stood at the bottom of that road, that I could walk up that road, through that doorway of light, and off into the thin air of my new life. And so this is the piece I wrote about it. It's called Just Beyond Yourself. And it's about those inner and outer horizons, really. Coming together suddenly out of nowhere. Just beyond yourself. Just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be.

• 2:04:25Speaker 00

  Half a step, just half a step into self-forgetting, and the rest restored by what you'll meet. 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. That's how you know you have to go. It's just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be.

• 2:05:10Speaker 00

  Just half a step into self-forgetting. Or constantly trying to be the spiritual warrior, you know, the hero. Half a step. Just turn your face towards it, just lean against it. Just fall even in the direction in which you're supposed to go. Half a step into self-forgetting, and the rest restored by what you'll meet. There's a road always beckoning. There's a road always beckoning. When you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon,

• 2:05:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:06:17Speaker 02

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• 2:07:02André Duqum?

  It's so good. Thank you for sharing. One last thing is that because on this podcast, I have the privilege of sitting with great minds such as yourself, great hearts such as yourself. And I find moments where there's like a really like a timeless pocket that we jump into.

• 2:07:21Speaker 00

  Which we had, yeah.

• 2:07:21André Duqum?

  Which we had. And which is the preferred state that I try to look for when we're thinking of who to have conversations with on the show. And there's a beautiful thing I read, you wrote about questions themselves, you know, and how often, I mean, in my words, we were always searching for this satisfactory, satiating answer to the questions that were so, so, so desperately going after at times, as opposed to appreciating the transformative quality of living in questions themselves.

• 2:07:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:07:59André Duqum?

  Is it enough for you to chew on if I, if I?

• 2:08:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:08:03André Duqum?

  About what questions themselves have the capacity to?

• 2:08:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you're also talking about arrival, supposed arrival in some place. The thing about arrival is, there are arrivals in life, and ones to celebrate too. But they almost, if it's a true arrival, it's almost always transforms into something totally surprising. And it's the beginning of a new invitation. So I think if I finish with this piece, which is about arriving at the supposed endpoint, it's called Santiago. So we have this 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain.

• 2:08:43André Duqum?

  Yeah, different than the one you shared earlier.

• 2:08:46Speaker 00

  Santiago, yeah. Yeah, this is, yeah, that was for the road to Santiago. This is arriving at Santiago, so it's perfect to finish. How did we arrange this so well? But yeah, it was the last poem I wrote in a cycle of poems called Pilgrim, which we're just about to revise and expand and reprint, actually. But I wrote this actually on, first of all, I began it at my friend's flat in Oxford, England. And then I wrote almost the whole thing on upstairs in the 747 flying. I was five hours sitting.

• 2:09:27Speaker 00

  And what I was working with was trying to blend all the tenses together, so that you got that timeless experience, you know, of everything happening all at once, which is how we actually experience things at a deep level. The soul doesn't experience time in the way the personality experiences it. So this is, and I knew I'd done it when, when that dissolution of time happened in the poem. And I knew I'd been sat for five hours too, because I stood up and fell over. My legs had fallen asleep.

• 2:10:09Speaker 00

  So this is, this is Santiago. The road seen, then not seen. The road seen, then not seen. The hillside hiding, then revealing the way you should take. The road dropping away from you, as if leaving you to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up, when you thought you would fall. The road seen, then not seen. The hillside hiding, then revealing the way you should take. The road dropping away from you, as if leaving you to walk on thin air,

• 2:10:51Speaker 00

  then catching you, holding you up, when you thought you would fall. And the way forward, always in the end, just the way that you came. The way forward, always in the end, just the way that you came, just the way that you followed, that carried you into your future, that brought you to this place, that brought you to this place. No matter that it sometimes had to take your promise from you. No matter that it always had to break your heart along the way. The sense of having walked from deep inside yourself out into the revelation, to have risked yourself for something that seemed to stand both far inside you and far beyond you,

• 2:11:36Speaker 00

  and that called you back in the end to the only road you could follow, walking as you did in your rags of love, and speaking in the voice that by night became a prayer for safe arrival. So that one day, one day you realized that what you wanted had actually already happened. One day you realized that what you wanted had actually already happened, and long ago, and in the dwelling place in which you lived before you began. And that every step along the way, every step along the way, you had carried the heart and the mind and the promise that first set you off and then drew you on.

• 2:12:21Speaker 00

  And that, and that, you are 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 than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach. You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach. As if all along you thought the endpoint 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

• 2:13:05Speaker 00

  and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back. And beneath that, 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 still stretching on. Like another life, and the road still stretching on.

• 2:13:46André Duqum?

  Thank you, David.

• 2:13:47Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.