David Whyte (Part 2)

David Whyte returns to continue his conversation in Part Two. David Whyte is a prolific Irish poet, philosopher, and speaker whose work that spans nearly four decades has resonated with audiences around the world. Beginning his career in 1986, Whyte has published three books of prose and ten volumes of poetry, including Still Possible and Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Through his Three Sundays Series, he creates immersive experiences for his audience that invite reflection on the complexities of human existence in 75-minute online sessions. His latest collection, Consolations II, continues his exploration of language and the choices that shape our daily lives. This month, Whyte is commencing the Consolations II England & Scotland Book Tour, which will move through Edinburgh, London, Oxford and Brighton. In January, he will speak daily at the Wisdom & Wellbeing Week 1 Intensive in Nosara, Costa Rica, alongside Henry Shukman, Leslie Salmon Jones, and Jeff W. Jones, building a foundation for each day’s conversation by sharing meaningful poetry and thought-provoking commentary. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

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

• 0:22Speaker 00

  The poetry is seamless with actual reality. Good poetry, that is. Bad poetry doesn't do it at all, as we know. But so, poetry is the disappearance of the wall, the disappearance of the veil. As I say, I think it's a living entity, a good poem. So it's almost like a tree you've planted. You can walk around it in the future and see it from different angles. And then, if it's alive, you've unconsciously written many different layers into it, some of which you're not fully conversant with yet in your life. So I'm always amazed when I go back to the first volume I wrote, Songs for Coming Home, which are very simple poems, because at that time I knew that I was just supposed

• 1:07Speaker 00

  to get the sounds right on the page. That narrative is something that takes, I think, many years of application to bring into poetry. Not into prose, but to bring narrative into poetry is exceedingly difficult. So to begin with, I was just trying to get the sounds right on the page that were absolute representations of a physical inner experience. So I'm amazed when I go back and...

• 1:39Speaker 00

  One of the greatest compliments you can be given in Ireland. I was once sitting with Ireland's greatest, Eilin Piper, Blackie O'Connell. And he's a friend of mine now. But I was very shy and he said, "Come on, play a jig", you know. So we played the Kilfanaora jig and a couple of others, you know. And I put the fiddle down at the end and he turned to me and he gave me the ultimate compliment, which is, "Jesus, there was nothing wrong with that", he said.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  That's the ultimate accolade in Ireland, there's nothing better you'll get. So when I go back and look at my early poetry, I say to myself, Jesus, there's nothing wrong with that actually. It's coming in at a clear, simple level. I'll give you an example of one, it's called "Horses Moving on the Snow". I was sitting in this farmhouse, the table, French doors open, there's wet snow on the grass outside and mist. And I'm just about to start writing when these white horses come running through the mist, you know, thudding in a muffled way through the snow, along the fence and disappear. Absolute remarkable moment. So I spent six hours writing to capture that moment.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  So this is the piece I wrote. This is one of the first serious poems in my adult life, I suppose, and it's called "Horses Moving on the Snow", if I remember it.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  "Through the damp grass around the house, there are horses moving on the snow. In the half-light, they move quickly, following the fence until the mist takes them completely. And evening is the hollow sound of hooves in the south field."

• 3:24Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  I was once coming back into the States from Canada and we had Charlotte, my daughter, when she was young, we'd no identification for her, no. So I'm really worried as we're approaching the border. I'm saying, well, what are we going to say, what are we going to do, how are we going to get through, you know? So we pull up, I wind the window down, the fellow in the kiosk, instead of saying, "Where do you live, where are you from?", he says, "What do you do first thing?", I said, "I'm a poet." And he looked at me, "A poet, really?", I said, "Yes", he said, "Give me a poem." I said, "Through the damp grass around the house, there are horses moving on the snow.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  In the half-light, they move quickly, following the fence until the mist takes them completely. And evening is the hollow sound of hooves in the south field." And he said, "On you go."

• 4:24Rick Rubin?

  So the poem's been good to you.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  It was.

• 4:26Rick Rubin?

  That poem has been good to you.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yes, and it was a perfect representation of the way poetry takes you through barriers and difficulties that you think you can't negotiate.

• 4:37Rick Rubin?

  Do you think that poetry's power lies in the listener's participation in it?

• 4:45Speaker 00

  It's the seamless meeting of voice and listening.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  And when they're both melded, the closer they come together, the more powerful the moment. So when I'm on stage, I'm really, I've got a really physical sense of the listening in the room. It's like a physical, touchable

• 5:08Speaker 00

  entity. And I'm following that listening. And the way you follow the listening is you're following the place where the silence is deepest. After a line, after a poem. I work with silences on stage quite a lot.

• 5:22Rick Rubin?

  How did you learn to read poetry out loud?

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Well, certainly in the Irish tradition, so many people, all my uncles had poetry by the roll, you know, they... My mother had dozens and dozens of poems in Irish or English. Leprechaun, a cuarca estrés, vishimoo, erion leigh, gon plurin ron, gon cuponte, eche de vi gubron. I can still remember a lot of the Irish poems. So I'd hear them, and she'd be saying them out of nowhere. So it just seemed normal to me that you would learn. And I started learning poetry very early, you know, seven or eight years old. And later on, it became a beautiful thing to be in my teens. You know, when you're a teen, you're often going off by yourself, night walks, and as a young man, anyway.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  And to be able to have a poem that you could just recite would immediately bring you into that experience, that powerful experience.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Just to hear the thrush singing and then get a line of Robert Browning. "That's the wise thrush, he sings each song twice over, lest you never could recapture that first fine careless rapture." This just takes you to another depth of listening again. "That's the wise thrush, he sings each song twice over, lest you never could recapture that first fine careless rapture."

• 6:48Speaker 00

  So I was memorizing Shakespeare, I was memorizing Dylan Thomas, and I just felt transported each time. I realized, you know, it's not just an artificial state. I am in a deeper identity. I'm in a deeper version of myself when I'm saying it. So I just built up my repertoire through the years. And then when I went full time as a poet, I already probably had, I don't know, about fifty poems memorized. But now, I don't know how many. I have certainly over three hundred, maybe four hundred pieces or poems. And they're like a lifeblood to me. That's why when you asked me, "Could you bring some poetry?" That's why I said it comes with me whether I want to or not.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  And I do think that my task in life is to get poetry to as many people as possible.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Because it's such an extraordinary lifesaver. It's so compassionate. It's so consoling. It allows you to be yourself and to apprentice to yourself and not to be anybody else but the person who you are in your grief, in your difficulty. Poetry tells you that the only cure for your grief is grief itself

• 8:09Speaker 00

  by demonstrating the essence of it in a piece, someone just feeling it absolutely and fully. Just letting winter be winter so that winter itself can think of spring rather than you having to think of spring.

• 8:27Rick Rubin?

  What do you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young?

• 8:32Speaker 00

  I believe less than now is young. I think that the most tedious thing you can know about a person is their beliefs. I'm really interested in the place that the beliefs come from. I have an essay in here on beliefs.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  In which I think, you know, the word belief is original fire that becomes fixed into something structured that I A belief almost, almost always means that I want someone else to believe it too. I find that beliefs tend to be barriers between people.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  So there's nothing more intriguing to me than someone who says they're A Christian, but they demonstrate it. They don't try and force it upon you. They don't. They're very unassuming in the way they are, but they're very serious about what they believe. But it never seems to take a concrete form that oppresses other people. That to me is a really healthy diagnostic Of something live and something real.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  So I feel like I learn nothing about a person except the way they're stuck From a person's fixed beliefs. So I feel the same way about myself. So I'm more interested in origin.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  So the affections, you know, you can believe that you must treat your Neighbor as yourself, yeah. And so you can follow that as a rule, yeah, but it's imposed from the outside. You said it's good, you know, and you know it's good, but But to feel the actual intimacy and affection for humankind in general is a really

• 10:18Rick Rubin?

  It's different than a belief.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a fierce Line of maturity in a human life that few people reach.

• 10:26Rick Rubin?

  Would you call it a knowingness?

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Yes, so knowingness, yeah. And the understanding that you share pain with others. So all the things that get in the way of that Uh, including beliefs are to be dropped, you know, their conversations to be stopped.

• 10:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  In my mind.

• 10:43Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. You know, people get naturally very offended if their identities are in their beliefs from that. But I don't mean to be offensive to people. I'm actually wanting to invite out The place from which the beliefs were first needed. And the fire underneath it.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Or, you know, the grief that that needed the necessary shelter of that belief.

• 11:09Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. For instance, we have a never mind religious beliefs where which really get us into senses of separation. Just unconscious beliefs we share such as the general belief that you should never be be angry, you know, anger is a bad thing. So I I tried to get underneath that in this title for people. And it's called anger, it's from the first book.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Anger is the deepest form of care for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family, and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all possibly about to be hurt.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion. The internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect, and those things for which we are willing to hazard and even imperil ourselves. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  When it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body's incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life. The unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our minds with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  What we have named anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness. A powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice or way of life to hold it.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears, or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live. Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability. Anger too often finds its voice strangely through our incoherence and through our inability to speak. But anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love,

• 14:04Speaker 00

  in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land, or a colleague.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things. We're often abused, or have been abused, by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry the understanding of that love, or who have no outer emblems of their inner care, or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness, they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love's vulnerability. In their helplessness, they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  But anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here. It is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tendered, an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate, and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror opposite of its true internal essence.

• 15:40Rick Rubin?

  So anger only comes from the love that's beneath it?

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:45Rick Rubin?

  That's what brings up the anger?

• 15:47Speaker 00

  The vunrat, yes, and the inability to find any coherent vehicle for it. Any coherent body that's alive in the outer world.

• 15:59Rick Rubin?

  Can everything be resolved through conversation?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Well, I suppose it depends how we define conversation in the fullest sense of the word. I mean, conversation actually comes from the Latin, meaning inside-out, actually. It's gorgeous. Converse, yeah. So if you turn everything inside-out, yes.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  One of the things I learned from my mother when I reached my teens, my mother was remarkable in the sense that she had so much compassion and everyone recognized it in her. So if there was any trouble in the neighborhood, they would always be at my mother's kitchen table, whether it was 12 noon or 12 at night. And I just grew up thinking this was normal, that all mothers were like this. And my mother had the incredible listening ear and patience. And as I grew older, I began to realize, you know, this patience is really amazing, actually. And then she would always send people off with a blessing, which is a very Irish thing.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  And she'd say something for them, you know, on their behalf.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  And when I got old enough to realize that my mother wasn't an ordinary person, an ordinary mother, I said to her, "Mother, how do you do it?" You know, because, you know, when there's a child in the room, you don't count. So they tell everything and you're just there in the corner playing or whatever. I say, "Many of these people have dug their own graves over years, you know. How do you keep the compassion and the patience and stay with the story?" And she said, "Well, you know, when you hear where someone's pain comes from, where the wound was struck, where the vulnerability is, you know, then you understand everything and you have patience for it all. You know where it all comes from." She said, "I just act as if I already..."

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Makes me break into tears now, but she said, I just act as if I already know the story. From the beginning. Before they've said a word. So. And that came from my mother's loss of her own mother when she was thirteen or so and and that grief, you know, she'd felt it so much. But she kept her compassion for the way everyone else felt. That same. Species of loss, one way or another, in in their existence. And then the other thing she said was. When I asked her, and and what's a blessing, mother, how do you do a blessing? Because you're so good at it. She said, you know, a blessing is not necessarily wishing something.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Well, for someone wishing something good for someone. I said, the blessing isn't wishing something good for it. What is it then, mother? And she said. A real blessing. Is where you wish something for someone that they did not even know they wanted themselves.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  You. Say something they have not dared to wish for themselves.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  But in their heart of hearts, in their secret. In a hidden self. That's what they've wanted all along.

• 19:15Rick Rubin?

  It's a combination of being seen and hearing a possibility.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Yes, and that's the conversation I'm talking about, the inside outness.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  To be able to apprehend.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  The inside of what is being said to you.

• 19:39Rick Rubin?

  How did you decide to call the book Consolations?

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Because. I really felt like I'd been consoled by the first essay I wrote on regret.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  And as I wrote my way through, I started calling them little consolations to myself without thinking of it as a title. And then, after a while, there didn't seem to be a better, a better way of describing them, really. It was interesting, because Jamie Bing, the wonderful editor of Canongate, a publisher and editor, was trying to come up with a new title for the second volume. And I said, "Well, good luck," I said, "because I can't think of a better title. I've tried myself." And he's tried all kinds of things, and we've tried, I even engaged with him, and we tried things together. And there's nothing better than Consolations 2, actually, for the second volume, and with

• 20:36Speaker 00

  the same subtitles, there's something that's just right about it. These essays are written in the same spirit. So, "Consolations to solace, nourishment, and underlying meaning of everyday words."

• 20:50Rick Rubin?

  Do you tend to remember your dreams?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  If I make a thing of it, I do, yes. But I don't normally make a program of writing them down, which I regret, actually, but I'm just...

• 21:02Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever?

• 21:03Speaker 00

  I've had periods in my life where I've written dreams down. I had a period in my life where I was actually practicing lucid dreaming while I was in Galapagos. And then I had a powerful experience that stopped me from doing it. And that was being out of my body, looking at myself, sleeping. And then suddenly waking up, and I was on deck, actually, at night, right next to the guardrail. So it was rather dangerous. I was sleepwalking out of it. So there is a power to all of these different practices. But I just, I got that from Journey to Ixtland, you know, the trilogy, written big in the seventies and eighties about the Mexican bruho.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Carlos Castaneda.

• 21:50Rick Rubin?

  Oh, yes.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. I can't remember the name of the of the Mexican wizard now who taught him, but he taught him a form of lucid dreaming, of looking at his hands. So I practiced that, looking at my hands in my dreams while I was in the Galapagos Islands.

• 22:05Rick Rubin?

  Don Juan, I believe.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Don Juan, exactly. Yeah. And I eventually got where I could look at my hands in my dreams. And then the next stage was where I had that next experience. And then I stopped because

• 22:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  I didn't want to go over the side of the boat at night.

• 22:23Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned somewhere, looking at a clock and seeing time.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Hmm. That was around my father's death. Yes, uh, looking at a church clock. Beautiful church tower, blue disc, you know, with gold hands on it, very large on the side of the tower so the local country people could see the clock. On a church, that was the church where the Bronte sisters' father was a pastor for a while, actually. But it's also the church where Robin Hood is mythologically supposed to have married, made Marian. And it's just a short distance away from the cottage where, in Yorkshire, the family cottage where my father passed away. And myself and my two sisters were looking after my father at the end.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  We're just the three of us. He was dying at home. And we were all so close. I mean, I'm close with my sisters anyway. But you can imagine when you're losing someone you love. We were just this ironclad circle, you know, of affection and compassion and love together. And we were sat for hours in my father. And because my, the oldest of my two younger sisters is sat by the deathbeds of hundreds of people. She's a palliative nurse. She recognized the signs that my father was passing that day. And so we were holding his hands. We were crying, we were laughing, we were reminiscing, we were loving him and one another.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  And I suddenly realized that the circle of love was so tight that we were, we were not letting him go, actually. And I said, we need to break the tension somehow and then. Appropriately enough, my my sister Jane said, oh, we're out of tea. And I said, oh, I'll go, I'll run down to the shop and get some tea. I drove to the shop, which was just ten minutes away. And when I was in the shop, I had a sudden panic that my father would pass while I was away. So I threw things in the basket and ran through the till, jumped into the car, drove back up the hill. Then I was passing this church tower with the clock with the gold hands.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  And I looked at that clock and it was just as if I saw the face of time itself. And I think it was five past four. And I had an absolute certainty, looking at that clock, that my father would pass at twenty five past four. So I slowed down because I was just three minutes away from from the cottage. And sure enough, I got back in, sat right down with my sisters and my father. I didn't say a word about the experience I'd had. My father passed at exactly twenty five past four, which was exactly the moment when the sun, which had been flooding the room, dropped behind the hedge and the whole room went dark and somber. It was really an extraordinary moment.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  One moment, we're in this light-filled room. My father takes his last breath. We say, oh, my God, he's gone. And we're all saying our blessings for him going, you know, and saying, you're going to meet my mother now and all the rest. And the room went completely dark as we were. I have a piece, actually, written about that experience and and just that sense of knowing that humans are given at particularly acute thresholds of their life, for which there's no explanation.

• 25:58Rick Rubin?

  I would describe it as a mystical experience, would you?

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Yes, I would, and there's no, and I don't need to corroborate it by any scientific parallels or anything. It just it just happened. We break through these barriers of time and and space at crucial moments of our existence, moments of of knowing.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  And in many ways, having said that, they are corroborated by science.

• 26:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  And the electrons, you know, mirroring each other when they're apart from each other, with no, seemingly no connection between them both. Who knows what other parallels are being stirred as we speak together now?

• 26:40Rick Rubin?

  Have you had other mystical experiences?

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, yeah, through my existence. We could be here all week, yeah. I don't talk about them very much because I feel like it creates the wrong kind of invitation, in the sense that it's the invitation to special experiences, to glamours, you know, and that you have to have these extraordinary experiences before you can experience the miraculous. And everything, when you really pay attention and you really have silence in your body and spaciousness, everything becomes remarkable and miraculous.

• 27:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Everything's speaking out of this astonishing parallel. So I only talk about them if the story is triggered, you know, just as we're talking now, and so it naturally led into that.

• 27:32Rick Rubin?

  Or I may have to ask you three times.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Well, that...

• 27:36Rick Rubin?

  Why do you think we're attracted to symmetry?

• 27:40Speaker 00

  It's a representation of the corroboration between outer and inner experience. When we're seeing clouds race across a gorgeous sky, we're having an equivalent experience inside us. And sometimes you have to see something in the outer world to realise that something has changed inside you. I have a piece called "The Journey", it says, "Above the mountains, the geese turn into the light again, painting their black silhouettes on an open sky. Sometimes, everything has to be inscribed across the heavens, so you can find the one line already written inside you. Sometimes, everything has to be inscribed across the heavens, so you can find the one line already written inside you.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart. Sometimes, with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out, someone has written something new in the ashes of your life." You are not leaving. You are not leaving. Even as the light fades quickly now, in my eyes, you are always arriving.

• 29:03Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever had any mystical experiences?

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Yes, writing that poem.

• 29:10Rick Rubin?

  That's a beautiful poem.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Yes, that's when I felt the actual physical experience of that cemetery you're talking about arrive fully in my body having written that piece. Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out, someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. Many of us have had the experience where you lose someone close to you, you go through the grief of that and the tears maybe and break down. And then you look in the mirror for the first time and you see someone you've never seen before in your life. That kind of cemetery, the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out, someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. You are not leaving. You are arriving.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  But one mystical experience I had, which was a train of experiences in the Himalayas, appropriately enough, where mysticism just seems to be in the air. That seems... There does seem to be, when you're in the Himalayas, in the high Himalayas away from everything, there is some kind of veil, which is very thin, some kind of extraordinary atmosphere. So I was walking in a high valley at 10,000 feet, you know, in a remote part of the Himalayas. This is in the 70s, when many places hadn't been touched or visited by trekkers or westerners. And I'm walking through this high wooded valley and I've become separated from my two friends.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  One was a Sherpa and one was a Belgian ornithologist. And we got separated in the... It wasn't a blizzard, but it was this very heavy, quiet snow falling. And you couldn't see very far.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  I got distracted by something, probably by a bird or something that I was trying to identify. And I suddenly am lost in these woods, except I can see the mountains on both sides, so I know which way to go more or less, yeah. So I'm walking through the woods and I come to this clearing. And I look on the other side of the clearing, there is a man on a horse. Caparisoned in silks with a brass hat on his head, he's a lama. And the horse has this silk covering also, like something out of a medieval, a medieval knight would, would have. And he was looking at me intently across the, across the clearing with the snow falling.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  And I stood there and I was in mountain gear, you know. Goggles up on my head and, and he's there in this medieval outfit. And I, I just knew that when he saw me, he knew that the end of an epoch had, was coming for his, his life and the life of his people. He looked, the intentionality with which he was looking at me.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  And we stood looking at each other for the longest time, two worlds.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  And then he just, like Clint Eastwood, he pulled his reins to one side. And off he went on the white horse and disappeared off into the, the direction I'd come. Didn't say a word, you know, but we must have looked at each other for a good two, three minutes, you know.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Not knowing what to say, or perhaps not having to say anything.

• 32:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  And anyway, I walked on. And I eventually, it's like, like the hobbits, we ran into each other, you know, almost stumbled over each other in the, in the snow. And then the wind got up and it really turned into a blizzard. We don't know where to go for shelter, you know, we've lost the path, the shepherd doesn't know this area of the mountains anyway. And we run into this old woman, just as you would in a medieval fairy story. And she's got a dung basket on her back, she's bent over, you know. And she starts pointing up the mountain, you know, to follow her. So we follow her and we're going up this steep. We could barely keep up with her. We're young, fit men, you know. But this is eleven thousand feet, ten, eleven thousand feet. She's used to being up there.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  We follow her and we reach this little gompa, which is a temple. A walled little temple on this ridge. And she invites us in. We climb this log ladder to get inside her. And she starts making tea. And they do it by putting this powdered brick, they grind this powdered brick of tea. Mix it with hot water, salt and rancid yak butter. First time you ever drink, it's the worst thing you've ever put in your mouth. Three days later, you're desperate for it. It has everything you need. It has liquid, salt, fat and caffeine, you know, and it's like Alexia, you know, so.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  So she was pumping this and then I look over and I see this little battered old photograph. And it's a photograph of the Lama. This is his gompa and this is a woman who looks after him. And I felt, I felt almost as if we. The man had said, I'm not going to talk to you now, but I'm going to make sure you're looked after. So. All these are just intuitions so far, you know. And then this woman through the sherpa, because we don't speak the language, tells him. To get to next village, don't go along the valley, go over the ridge and it'll save you hours to do it. And I always say, if you ever hear the word shortcut in your life,

• 34:50Speaker 00

  run a hundred miles the opposite direction because it's almost always leads to disaster. And this almost did because the top of the ridge, I'm sure in the summer it was a shortcut. But the top of the ridge was full of wet snow and all three of us almost went off it to our deaths. And we were literally clinging on the side at times, you know, slipping and sliding along. Then we came down the other side. And I suddenly realized that I'm getting sick, you know, as I'm coming down. And I'm starting almost to hallucinate. We come into this village, the snow is still falling.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  And it's all of these low, flat Tibetan buildings with flag poles on top, with prayer flags on top. Snapping, you know, in the wind and the snow.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Over the top of each half door, there's a horse's head peeking out. And no people. So it's like some Swifty and Gulliver's Travels tale, you know, with this Robb De Nagian realm, which is inhabited only by horses. And I'm in this semi, semi-hallucinogenic state with the fever I've got. So it looks as if the village is inhabited by horses. And I'm trying to get a hold of myself. Suddenly, there's a shout, and a man runs into the middle of the street. And he's holding a big key in his hand, and he's looking at us, and he's beckoning us. And then probably a hundred people come out of all the doors to greet us in this village.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  And we're surrounded by these people, and I feel like by this time I'm just being held up by the force of the crowd, because I'm ready to collapse, actually. But they insist that we follow them with this key. And this man is a lay monk, he's dressed in orange robes, and there are two others with him. They lead us along this mountain path. And suddenly, there's a drop of a thousand feet directly from this path and this absolutely sheer cliff above us. The path ends right beneath these double wooden doors in the cliffside.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  And we're standing there in front of these two doors, and there's one monk goes to one side of it, one monk goes to the other. Third monk has the key in the door in the middle. He turns the key, and then they both on the other side open the doors. And there is the most beautiful golden Buddha with purple eyes staring out through the snow. And it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life. And I just fainted in front of the... Luckily, I fell on the path, not backwards to my death. But I just fainted with the beauty of it, and in my vulnerable state.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  And I was out, you know, for thirty seconds or so, I looked up. And what was lovely was they just made no fuss of me whatsoever. The whole feeling was, yes, of course, that would be your reaction if you looked at our beautiful Buddha. That's the reaction we wanted.

• 38:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  And, uh, and then they just closed the doors again. And I was carried on a litter back to recover in the village, actually. So that moment, you know, seeing, uh, there was this preparation, the meeting with the Lama, the distance, you know, the falling snow, the silence, the meeting of his assistants, you know, out of nowhere, the following her, her telling us to go over this ridge so that we could come down into this village in this particular way. We might have had a completely different experience going along the valley bottom, you know, even walked past the village, cause it was high up in a, a little cirque up there, a little hanging valley.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  And then the experience of being welcomed because so few Westerners, I don't, we might have even been the first Westerners in decades into that place, who knows?

• 39:00Speaker 00

  And then the confrontation with beauty.

• 39:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:05Rick Rubin?

  What do you think they were thinking when they opened those doors?

• 39:10Speaker 00

  I think it was the pride, if you've come to our village, you, you must have come to, to see the Buddha.

• 39:16Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Yes, that was the, there's no other reason you'd be, except you must want to see the most precious thing we have.

• 39:25Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  And we're going to show it to you. So it was very innocent, very real and very powerful.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  Which leads me to another extraordinary mystical experience in the Himalayas. About seven years later, after that experience, I came back with another man, a friend called Ian, and we had this idea of building on my experience in South America, leading tours and his experience by running expeditions for people, forming an international ecological travel company. And so we put our first trip together. And it was on the Annapurna Trail. This is very early on, so very few, few people were going on it at that time. And we flew up into Jomson. Which is about eleven o'clock on the whole circuit. At about ten thousand feet and then you're you're up there and you're starting.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  And you're going to go up another few thousand feet, another few days, and you're going to go over the Throng La Pass. Yeah. But first of all, because my friend Ian had lived in Nepal and was fluent Tibetan speaker and imbued in the culture. He said, in order for our organization to start off in the right way, we have to make a gift. We have to make a donation for us to be in in right relationship with our future. And I said, well, what do you think? He said, well, I've heard there's a school up there that's in trouble. They've run out of money. And we could just take a little diversion off the trail for a few hours, cross this river and come to the school.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  And we'll give them a few hundred dollars, which will be an absolutely enormous amount for them. And it will set them on their feet. I said, sounds great to me. So so anyway, we went off, we landed, we walked a few hours and then comes to the place we turn off the trail. And then we get to the river. And the river is so high with the recent rains, there's nowhere to cross. Yeah. And we're waiting to see if if the river goes down. We wait a few hours there. And we're waiting to see if any of the schoolchildren or the teachers come down from the other side, nothing. Yeah. So we're a little bit disappointed.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  And what does this mean, by the way, as far as that we can't give this gift? So we get back on the trail and we go up towards Jaikot and Muktinath. And we get to this stage on the trail where there is this.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Road which has been carved out of the mountainside. It's obviously a natural shelf that has been slightly chiselled away and broadened, you know. So it's about the width that a cart could take along it. But on the right hand side is the sheer mountain, on the left hand side is this absolutely enormous drop. But it's wide enough that you can walk along it. It's probably a quarter mile along and it's just straight, you can see right to the edge. So we get along there and we get to this place where we're, we sit down for a while and we can see up the trail this crowd of people coming down this broad ledge, you know, towards us.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  And as they get nearer and nearer, Ian looks at them, he says, my God, it's the teachers and the schoolchildren, huh? And so they're, they're coming down and they meet us and we have this greeting and then Ian translates, he says, "The school had completely run out of money, they're having to close it, so they went to Muktinath on pilgrimage

• 43:13Speaker 00

  to ask for a miracle, to ask for a miracle."

• 43:16Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  For the money, you know, for some gift or others. And they're on the way back and they meet us.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  And we give them the money there, thousands of rupees, tens of thousands of rupees on the ledge itself. And the kids are all, do this dance, you know, celebration and they're dancing near this precipice like the cat in the rye, you know, worried about these kids dancing over the edge, but they're all so joyous and their, their prayers and their miracle has worked, you know, we've just been this unwitting participant in their miracle stories, so.

• 44:00Rick Rubin?

  Incredible story.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 44:05Rick Rubin?

  Do you pray?

• 44:07Speaker 00

  No, I just go into deep silence, which is, I think, where prayer leads, yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  I have a piece I wrote out of a very powerful experience I had in lockdown, where I decided that I was not going to give myself a special project during lockdown. Once I had my online Three Sundays series in place and I could actually provide for everyone who worked for me, I was happy. I said, "I'm just going to give myself a real holiday and I'm not going to write another book of poetry. I'm not going to set myself a theme. I'm just going to have a damn good holiday." And so I was really just enjoying that spaciousness and doing whatever I wanted.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  But I was sat at my desk looking at my big Apple screen, which has a little green light into which I look when I'm giving my broadcasts. But I was watching a documentary that was on the BBC and it was called "The Secret Life of Monks", and they were looking at a Carthusian monastery in the north of England, the only Carthusian monastery in England, and this group of extraordinary older monks who had been a community there for decades. And the documentary opens with all of these scenes of the seasonality of autumn around the grounds, you know, leaves falling and rain

• 45:43Speaker 00

  and the tawny hues of that season. And then suddenly you're inside and you're looking at this older man who's having difficulty speaking, but he's talking directly into the camera. And it takes you a while to entrain to what he's saying, but finally you understand he's actually not very well, but he's talking about his life as a monk. And he's talking about how, when he first came into the monastery, he had all kinds of strange ideas about what prayer was and what it meant to be a monk and what it meant to have a relationship with God. And then out of nowhere, just toward to the camera, he says, "Oh, I gave up praying years ago," he said.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  And for a heartbeat, you think, "Oh, he lost his faith." He's got a great place to live, hang out with the lads, you know, sing in the chapel, three meals a day. He's in a great old, great place. It's only for a heartbeat though, because... He then says, "I gave up praying years ago because my whole life became prayer. I was living and breathing from the atmosphere of prayer." And then the next image is of him dead in his coffin. He was actually on his deathbed when he said that. "Oh, my whole life became prayer." And he's surrounded by the monks saying the deus

• 47:13Speaker 00

  erei and the obesis of the dead on him. And then the next scene is of the coffin being buried and the the clay being thrown onto the wood of the lid. And then the filling in of the grave, you know, and then back to the grounds, you know, and the falling leaves and and it goes on from there, exploring the community. But as I watched that first sequence, the tears were just running down my face and and I just started writing out of it. And that's when my writing began just naturally out of this moment. So this is called "Your Prayer", and that's my answer to your question, "Do I pray?"

• 47:54Speaker 00

  But it's written for this monk who inspired me. "Your Prayer." "Your Prayer only began with words. Each one just a hand on the door to silence. Each one just you putting your full weight against everything you thought you could never deserve. Even in your gathered, chanted strength in the chapel, what you said in the end was just a shoulder against the grain of wood, trying to keep the entrance open, until that door, which was no door at all, gave way to necessary grief." Which is really just the full understanding of everything you had been missing all along,

• 48:39Speaker 00

  which is really just you feeling the raw vulnerability to make a proper invitation, which is really just you feeling the full depth of your love at last. The heartbroken heart coming to heartfelt rest. The opening inside you filled to the gleaming brim and casting its generous beam. The part of you you thought was foolish, the wisest voice of all.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  He had such a gleam in his eye, you know, he's on his deathbed, but he's just giving through his eyes. They're so alive, so that was that. The opening inside you filled to the gleaming brim and casting its generous beam, almost like a lighthouse.

• 49:38Rick Rubin?

  Speak to me a little bit about heartbreak. We typically think of heartbreak as it relates to a romantic situation.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:45Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the depth of heartbreak.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Well, I think one of the amazing dynamics around heartbreak is how much effort and how many dramas in our life and how many pathways we take in trying not to have our heart broken.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Trying to find a path where you won't, in a sense, where you won't care. And that's the only way you can choose not to have your heart broken is to try not to care,

• 50:15Speaker 00

  which takes enormous amounts of energy.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  So normally, we're under the illusion, you know, when we're young, that when we really fall in love, we'll have found the person who won't break our heart.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  But our older self is sorry to inform our younger self that, no, you've chosen them out for that exact core competency. They will break your heart. You unconsciously chose them for that.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Why? Because you care about them so deeply. And they'll disappoint you and you'll disappoint them and you'll disappoint each other.

• 50:51Rick Rubin?

  Because we're human.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah. So, plus, the axis of maturity along which you're moving involves heartbreak. The small heart you've got is going to be broken open into the larger heart. You'll need to understand what marriage entails. Beyond the honeymoon, beyond great sex, beyond the initial magic that comes with being together. So you can open to other forms of magic, other parallels. But when you think about it, any path you take that you care about will break your heart. Learning a musical instrument should break your heart if you're sincere.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  You should come across moments where you're trying to emulate Martin Hayes. If you're an Irish musician. And when you're trying to emulate John Renborn, if you're a guitarist, you know, on and on it goes, yeah. But even just trying to become your best self.

• 51:51Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, you just, times where you just can't make it sing. Because you can't make yourself sing.

• 51:58Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  And then we tend to think of work as a place where I can have a professional armor. You know, I can go into finances, I can, I can be a CEO, I can be a manager and I won't have, I don't need to get my heart broken there. That's the place where I can just do things and that it.

• 52:17Rick Rubin?

  It's not true.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  No, I think if you're sincere

• 52:23Speaker 00

  about any endeavor, part of that sincerity shows itself by you always coming to a place where you don't know how to get from here to there. And you actually wonder if you're the person who can get from here to there. And the work breaks your heart because you have to give up often being the lone ranger who's going to do it. You have to ask for help. You have to break and open your identity. Ask for visible and invisible help. So I think it was a merciful day for me when I, when I realized there's no sincere path a human being can take where they won't have their heart broken.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  And that we actually, many lives, most lives even, are deformed by people attempting not to care.

• 53:17Rick Rubin?

  Just building walls and trying to protect themselves.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:20Rick Rubin?

  And missing the whole point.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, you see it in breakups and divorces. You still care about this person, you just can't be vulnerable enough to let yourself care. So you have to turn them into the enemy, you have to get involved in all kinds of strange behaviors that go through dramas in the withdrawal, the destructive withdrawal. And the ability to stay caring while you're going through heartbreak is one of the great signs of maturity in a human life, to be still be present, yeah. And to have a robust vulnerability. It's not vulnerability as weakness, but vulnerability as presence and invitation.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  You know, this is another way of being in the world. I have lines out of a poem called Santiago, which is supposedly reaching the end point. Around that path of heartbreak, so. And Santiago, of course, is the supposed end point of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the great postmodern pilgrimage, used to be just a Catholic pilgrimage for a thousand years, now everyone from around the world is doing it of every belief and no belief at all.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  So this is Santiago. The road seen, then not seen.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  The way forward, always in the end, just the way that you came, just the way that you followed, the way that carried you into your future, 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 inside you and far beyond you, 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.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  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. 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, and that 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 end point might be a city with golden domes and cheering crowds and turning the corner of what you thought was the end of the road, you found just a simple reflection and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back, and beneath

• 56:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 56:48Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable, unbelievable.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  That was the culmination of a whole cycle of poems that came out in the book called Pilgrim, and I wrote that as a capstone, trying to bring everything together. And what I was trying to get in that piece was the blurring of tenses. The experience we all have when we're preparing for a journey. One moment you're walking around the house with a pair of socks in your hand and with your bag open to pack and the next you're you're home already. Having had this extraordinary experience and they all exist together, actually. And that sense of sojourning, of travelling as something gifted and miraculous even in itself.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  And the fact that you can just actually sit at home and you're still travelling. If you're aware enough, yeah. And the world's moving around you, the seasonality of your inner growing and your outer growing are coming together in this extraordinary conversation. So that was written, I started it in Oxford, but I wrote for five hours on a the upstairs of a Boeing seven four seven. And I sat there for five hours. I knew I sat there for five hours because when I stood up, I fell over. My legs had fallen asleep. I remember having the papers in my hand, standing on the stairs and having a glass of wine, actually. Looking it over.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  And then what happens? I'm stood there with the papers and the glass in my hand, celebrating. Having finished this piece, which is the capstone of the whole cycle. And up comes this fellow who's a fan of my work. And also something of a friend. He's been on my Italy trip at least five times. First, we get over the thing of what are you doing here and all that, you know? And isn't this amazing? And then he says, what have you got there? I said, it's a new piece. And he said, would you read it to me? I said, this could be the first world premiere on a seven four seven, I said, of a of a poem. So I read in the piece there on this modern conveyance of pilgrimage, the seven four seven.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  So it was extraordinary in its writing. Because I felt that whole coming together in my body of all of those tenses as I as I wrote it. And the way forward, always in the end, just the way that you came. The way that you followed, the way that carried you into the future, 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 inside you and far beyond you, and that called you back in the end

• 59:43Speaker 00

  to the only road you could follow, walking as you did in your rags of love. When I wrote that line, I said, "We'll all end up in that costume one day or another," you know? Yeah, those rags of love.

• 59:58Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable. How does memorizing a poem compare to memorizing a song?

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  It's interesting because I have a young Irish poet who I'm mentoring, who's an absolute genius of a singer. He can sing every genre, actually, but he sings Irish traditional. But he's got a voice that can go from way down there to the very top. He's really extraordinary. And he's very facile with his voice in being able to sing. But he's also a good poet. And I started apprenticing him to being on stage. And when it came to reciting poetry, he could barely get a word out without breaking down in tears. It was just as if there was no mask there.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  There's something about the way the music carries the voice. The music is the body that's carrying the voice.

• 1:00:54Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  And in poetry, your body is carrying the voice. And there's no veil between you and the listener. So you've got to be able for it, as they say in Ireland. You've got to be equal to it. His chin would be wobbling, his lips would be curling, his eyes would be tearing up, you know? And there'd be long periods of silence, not where he was being silent, but just where he couldn't get out the next sentence. But it was really moving to see this absolute consummate performer who never missed a beat or a word in a song, suddenly brought to a vulnerable halt. So I don't know if that's an indication.

• 1:01:41Rick Rubin?

  So without the music,

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Rick Rubin?

  you're square one, essentially, every time?

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  Yes, I've got to say something intimate that you must listen to. And therefore, if you must listen to it, I have to be fully present and I have to be fully invitational and fully vulnerable. Because I'm saying, this is worthwhile. It's the same dynamic we have when we have to convey a loss to someone. You're telling someone someone has died. You say it, and then you always repeat it. Because you know they couldn't take it in the first time. So you say it in a slightly different way, and then you say it again. And you have silence between it.

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  And most often, you will actually fall into a iambic pentameter, just blank verse. Because that's the way human beings speak when they're on their natural articulate edge. You know, it's the conveying of news in a way that's life-changing is natural to human beings and is a natural part of the poetic form. It's not some abstracted art form. It's how human beings are when they're trying to speak on their emotional and heartbreaking edge, you could say. When they're living to the point of tears, as Camus said.

• 1:03:12Rick Rubin?

  Is poetry best experienced through reading or listening?

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  At a zenith, I think it's spoken, if it can be said fully. Some poets are very bad readers of their own work, actually. And so in that case, I'd say no. But if someone can really read a piece, it's like hearing one of the Psalms. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." When you hear it sad, you know, in the way it should be sad, hearing a Richard Burton recite it all, then there's a liveness that's really extraordinary. But you do learn how to put the voice to the page.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  It's one of the difficulties, people have reading poetry to begin with. They don't know what voice to read it in. But say you go to a Gary Snyder reading, or you go and hear Shea Messini, or you hear that voice and then you can put that that voice to their poetry. But eventually, if you read enough, you start to put your own voice to it. And so it can come alive on the page, I think, as much as when it's spoken. It just needs practice.

• 1:04:24Rick Rubin?

  Are there any poetry performers who perform other people's poetry and really do it justice?

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Not many that are out there who you have to have it memorized to do it justice, really. It's rare with people who work extemporaneously with poetic speech, whether it's actual poetry or just poetry in speech. When John O'Donohue passed away, I was a bit of a lost because if I couldn't go to an invitation, people would say, who do you recommend who's doing the same thing? And I would always say John O'Donohue. And then when he passed away, I said, wait a minute. There are five billion people on the planet and I can't recommend anyone who does what I do.

• 1:05:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  Works extemporaneously with speech, whether it's poetic or the narrative between the poetry that opens up a live experience in the room. There are other art forms that do it, but not in this particular way.

• 1:05:21Rick Rubin?

  Tell me more about John O'Donohue.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  Well, he was born in the Caochur Valley in North Clare in the limestone mountains called the Barren. Very particular landscape, very particular genius loci. And he was born into an old farming family there. And, you know, Ireland up until the 1970s with very little changed in its shaping cultural speech than perhaps even 500 years ago. It was extraordinary. It's all happened since the 70s, really, all the changes. So he was at that threshold between the old Ireland and the new Ireland that he came along with. And he became a priest.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  And for the first born son to become the priest, that's a big thing. Your family is made, right? At least in the old Ireland. It's not true nowadays. But in that island of fifty years ago, you know, he was part of a kind of aristocracy in a way, of articulation and authority. But he was a very wild theologian, actually. And the Catholic hierarchy used to kick his theological bottom as far as they could into the wilds of Connemara. But wherever he landed, the congregation would double or triple overnight. He was fluent in Irish, fluent in philosophical German. He lived in Heidelberg and studied the great German philosophers.

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  And fluent in English, of course. So he had a bird of paradise vocabulary. So it was marvelous when we met, actually. We had immediate chemistry. And we recognized each other coming from different ends of the spectrum and with very similar language. Or I should say, very similar themes with slightly different language around belonging and longing and our understanding of poetry. So we did a few tours together. And but we would meet up for weekends and have these philosophical discussions, sometimes falling outs. And we'd always make up and.

• 1:07:31Rick Rubin?

  What would you fall out over?

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  Just if we felt the other was getting above themselves in the way they were with a kind of arrogance around their work. Or they weren't open to other ways of seeing or being, or not open to helpful comments about how they could do their work better. So those were the things we'd fall out of. We always made up. I have an essay on friendship there, which is all about the way that long friendships are based on mercy and forgiveness. You will always offend your friend accidentally on purpose. You will always say what you've been trying not to say for a long time. And many times they will walk away in high dudgeon.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  And the only way this friendship survives is if you forgive one another. And so long friendships, and in fact, long marriages, I think, are based on continued and mutual forgiveness.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  You've seen the worst of your friend and you've forgiven them. They've seen the worst of you and they've forgiven you. And you're still in the conversation together. So that was John and I. But we also had an incredible sense of humor together. There are a few people where I literally would be aching with laughter. But John and I, when we got together, would really go to town. You know, as far as laughter was concerned. So he was a genius of a leffer. And he had a laugh like a Gatling gun. And you'd hear it a mile away, coming up the road. My son was the same, actually. He's got the same kind of laugh. So it was contagious.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  We learned a lot from each other and pushed each other and supported each other. I always said, you know, if I was coming to some Midwestern city at 12 o'clock at night, you know, getting to a hotel with no food, no conversation, you know, and then you have to get up and speak about the life of the soul under a plastic chandelier, you know, at nine o'clock in the morning. We'd always know that there was someone else in the world who understood what we were going through and what we were carrying when we were, when we were doing that. So we had a pact, you know, that we could call each other or text each other in those times and to know that someone else would know what we're going through.

• 1:09:54Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the different personality of the places Wales, Ireland.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Yorkshire, yeah.

• 1:10:03Rick Rubin?

  They're all close together, but they are different.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  I'd really talk about the personality of Yorkshire because it's really not English in the way other people, especially Americans, think of England, which they tend to think of the southern English culture and the Downton Abbey or the working class exiled to the south. But the north is a totally different culture. And it's much more blunt, much more straightforward, not so diffident. And it's more communal. And people shout and talk to each other in the street in the north of England, where people would be embarrassed in England at someone calling across the street to them. Although that's that's changed quite a bit. So Yorkshire was settled by the Vikings. So the dialect I grew up with there is full of Old Norse and Danish words.

• 1:10:51Speaker 00

  And it was a full dialect, actually, that I learned. So I I had three, three accents, really. One was the one I had with my father and his friends and with my mates, which was a full Yorkshire dialect, you know. And then at school, you had a kind of halfway between received BBC accent and Yorkshire. And then I had the Irish accent with my mother in a way. Oh, I should say Irish vocabulary with my mother. So but I could morph along them, and I still do, actually, from Yorkshire to Ireland. And along that axis. Let me talk about Ireland next because they lived in parallel, you know, in the same house.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  On one side of the house, you had my mother's linguistic approach to the world, which was a whole different cultural parallel. And it's always about the numinous and the invisible and what cannot be said, but which is said in three times as many words as someone in Yorkshire would use.

• 1:11:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  Uh, so a very strange combination.

• 1:11:55Rick Rubin?

  And how far apart are these places?

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  Uh, Yorkshire was psychologically a long way from Ireland. You'd have to drive and take a ferry, multi-hour ferry. Most people wouldn't fly when I was a kid, they couldn't afford it. So it was, uh, you'd get the train, you know, to Liverpool or Holyhead. And then it's many hours on the ferry and then another couple of hours to wherever you were in Ireland. Of four or five hours in those days on the roads.

• 1:12:24Rick Rubin?

  So would you say most people in Yorkshire had never gone to Ireland?

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  In my youth, that would be true. There'd be more would have gone. But more would go to Spain than would go to Ireland, actually. Unless you're a fisherman or have an interest in traditional music. None of my friends or their families would have gone to Ireland or have been there. There was one other Irish boy whose parents were from in Ascoty, I remember, in Ireland. And he was the only person who had the same kind of background as I did. So Ireland lived in this parallel. And then I went to, because Bangor was the best place for marine zoology.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  I ended up living in North Wales and discovering Welsh culture, which is very strong around the language. And the Welsh language is a couple of thousand years old. I mean, a modern Welsh person can read a manuscript from fifteen hundred years ago and make sense of it. It's the language that was spoken when Julius Caesar arrived with his legions in the whole of Britain. And they were just pushed back into, into Wales. It's the old Bretonic language. It's a different branch of Celtic languages than the Galloidal Irish and Scottish. Though some of the words are the same. And the interesting thing about Wales was a very different musical tradition.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  Because in Ireland, you know, you have this efflorescence of music and song and dance and instruments, ancient and new ones that they brought in, like the bazooki from Greece, which is now a traditional Irish instrument. In Wales, they had this very fierce, venomous form of Christianity come in in the eighteenth century, in which they burned all their musical instruments on the village greens. And all of the music and traditional music went into the chapel, which is why you get this incredible harmony and choir-like singing at Welsh rugby matches.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  You have sixty thousand people singing all in harmony and even in descends. It's absolutely overwhelming, so it's just in the genes there. I remember the first night I was in Wales as a student, there were three guys came out of the pub, all legless, leaning on each other, having had so much to drink. They could barely stand up, but they were walking, supporting each other, but singing in absolutely perfect three-part harmony as they, as they went down the street. And that was, that was a representation of that, the power of that singing culture. And then the names of the, that are there in the landscape, you know,

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  Carneth Dweilin, Carneth Gafis, Carneth Ukaf, Alder Carneddy, Drosgul. There are names that speak from the landscape. If there are four Conestra field, three of them will have names in, in Wales. They're very old names and they describe things that happened there, or animals or birds that lived in that place. It's, to this day, the, you know, there's, the population is still Welsh-speaking. So that was very good for me to be amongst a very different culture and people. It's very austere, the Welsh culture, and plutonic. It's kind of drawn in and hidden. It's not like the Irish culture. It's a culture to deeply respect.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  You know, it's had to draw itself in in order to preserve itself from England. Because there's no body of water protecting it from English culture or English hegemony, as there was in Ireland. And so the, the protective layer is all psychological in Wales. So they keep themselves to themselves more. And it would take you a while to open up a real conversation with a, with a Welsh-speaking Welsh person and, and have it be natural and real. If you were a seis, which means a Saxon really, in Welsh. But I did that with the farm on which I lived. I got to know the Welsh farmer there and his family.

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  And looking after sheep, I learned, I have a very large vocabulary of bad words in Welsh.

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  And I know how to pronounce all the place names, but I, I never learned how to hold a conversation.

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:17:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is remarkable, it's remarkable how many Englands are within England, actually.

• 1:17:11Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Think of Yorkshire and Orthumberland, you know, the Liverpool culture. All the accents that go with it, the accents change, you know, still to this day.

• 1:17:21Rick Rubin?

  And Scotland is on the same landmass as well, yes?

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, north, yeah, the Scots are another.

• 1:17:26Rick Rubin?

  And how is that different?

• 1:17:28Speaker 00

  They're their own, very own people, very, kind of.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  They have a powerful traditional music inheritance. There was a very, very strong form of fundamental Christianity came in also in the 1500s with John Knox. And it destroyed a lot of the rich tapestry of Catholic life there. But what it did was pave the way for the Scottish Enlightenment and for writers and thinkers, yeah. John Hume and various, the Edinburgh Scottish Enlightenment. My grandparents on my father's side came from Scotland, so white with a Y is the Scottish side of me. And my grandmother's people were herring fishers.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  They were nomadic, they had their own costume. And the men were all out on the boats and the boats would move with the seasons. So they would have one part of the season up in Peterhead in Scotland. One part of the season in Hull in Yorkshire and one part of the season in Yarmouth. And the men and women in these costumes would move from, through those three cities through the year. They would be gutting the fish ashore. And so in the First World War, when the Germans started sinking fishing boats, that all came to an end. And my grandmother and her family were caught in Hull, which was Yorkshire, yeah.

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  And then my great grandfather, on my father's side, was invited down as a gamekeeper from Scotland, when it was fashionable to have a Scottish gamekeeper, just like Queen Victoria had. So he was brought down in a gamekeeper on the local land of the big house, where I later used to creep in, a couple of generations later, and I'd be thrown off by the gamekeepers of that generation, my grandfather. Great-grandfather used to do the same thing.

• 1:19:29Rick Rubin?

  Tell me something irrational you decided to do.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  Well, I suppose it was irrational to think that I could live a life like Jacques Cousteau, as glamorous and incredible as he did. And somehow, with a lot of visible and invisible help, and I did get a lot of help, I found this incredible job in the Galapagos Islands and lived out much of what I'd seen him living out, and it was really astonishing. So studying marine zoology wasn't irrational, but the dream I had in marine zoology was irrational, you know, to the independent observer. And then, of course, going full-time as a poet. As I always say, people don't rush up to you slapping you on the back, saying, "Great career move, David."

• 1:20:21Rick Rubin?

  Do you think in both cases, it was the naive exuberance that allowed you to do it?

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:20:29Rick Rubin?

  It's like you didn't know you couldn't do it.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Exactly, yes.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  But I did have certain experiences whereby I felt confirmed and seen.

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  One of them was my teacher at Matfield Grammar, a grammar school in Britain, is a secondary school, actually, eleven to eighteen. And he was a genius teacher, actually, and he really took me aside and he said, "You have a special gift and you need to follow it." And I felt anointed, you know, I felt mitzvahed by him, as if I'd been given something that I now, like a scroll or invisible scroll, that I now carried, yeah. And I carried that even through my, when I stopped writing while I was doing marine zoology when I was in Galapagos. I carried it by reading lots of poetry still. And then I picked it up again when I was twenty-seven.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  And then when I was thirty-one or two, I gave my first talk at a place called Asilomar on Monterey Bay to an audience six-hundred strong. And I went through all kinds of psychosomatic symptoms before I went on stage. I was deathly ill for four or five days before, I could hardly move. And in fact, when they came to wake me in my chalet to go to speak, I was, I felt like someone had pulled the plug and I was walking in front of a firing squad six-hundred strong. But within minutes of being on stage, all of the symptoms fell away. And my memory was flawless.

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  And in the middle of that talk, I felt as if I heard the trumpets blare and say, "This is what you're supposed to do for the rest of your life."

• 1:22:18Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  So that was another irrational moment. And it was the moment where I went back and resigned from my job directing an educational program at a center in the northwest and went full-time, with nothing in the calendar and nothing in the checkbook. So I lived very, very, very simply for a good few years, actually.

• 1:22:46Rick Rubin?

  Do you still get butterflies when you get up in front of people?

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:22:50Rick Rubin?

  How long before that dissipated?

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  Part of what that teaching was, was that I couldn't prepare to go on stage. But once I was on, and I was in contact with the audience, there was no problem. So it was teaching me in a way that I had the gift, that I could be walking through an airport, someone could tap me on the shoulder and say, "Could you come through this door and speak to 600 people for two hours?" And I was taught that I could do that. So the more I built my repertoire, the more I worked, the more real it became. So I don't get nervous, but I get very, very attentive. I go into a state of deep attention

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  before I go on stage. And when I walk on stage, I have a sense of absolute physical contact with the atmosphere of the place. And I'll often just walk and stamp my foot on the ground, you know, make contact, just hold the silence. And you can feel everyone go,

• 1:24:00Speaker 00

  "Whoa, okay."

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  People can tell, you know, when you're there and when you're serious.

• 1:24:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  When the French tell you that you're très sérieux, it's a compliment when you're very serious, yeah. Je suis très sérieux, you know, I'm very serious. It means you take your art form sincerely, yeah, to heart. And you don't want anything to get in the way. So in France, it's often used about chefs, around their food. So I feel très sérieux, you know, when I'm going on stage, even if I start with a joke, you know. But often I'll just start straight in with the poetry, with a line, a few lines, yeah. And then out of that, the whole thing starts to evolve.

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  I might have a title I'm working with, but I'm going to branch into that theme in my own way. And if you do it in the right way, people forget about what the title was anyway. When you're in it, as long as you're making contact and people are going, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Then you're, you're doing the work, you're, you're in the midst of the art form.

• 1:25:11Rick Rubin?

  And it'll be different from night to night, just because you're not up there scripted.

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  Yes, the listening's different and depending what theme you go into a poem with and how you emerge out of that poem really influences the way you go into the next piece. You could do the same repertoire, I almost never do, but you could do it. And the narrative that runs through them would be, would be different.

• 1:25:37Speaker 00

  Just because of minute variations that take you off into,

• 1:25:42Speaker 00

  into different emphases and colorations. What I'm trying to do also is though is begin with a theme, elaborate it and then return to it in a deeper way towards the end. So that everyone feels as if you've stepped onto the ground that you first introduced them to and you've, and they feel as if they've been, well, to change the metaphor, they feel as if they've been fully marinated in the, in the experience and the theme. But my diagnostic of when things are going well is a kind, it feels like a disappearance. I disappear, the audience disappears and there's this live edge between.

• 1:26:23Speaker 00

  That's where the talk is being given, out of the listening and out of the silence.

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  That's when you can hear a pin drop in the quiet after a poem. Sustain the silence as long as you can. It's like water flowing down, downhill and filling all the hollows. And you don't flow on until the hollow is filled. And then when it's full, you go and into the next word or the next narrative.

• 1:26:56Rick Rubin?

  Does it depend on the size of the audience or the size of the room? Or is it something else?

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  Something else, really. There's an intimacy. I mean, people should feel as if you're speaking to them individually. And that's often one of the things that people say when they're lined up afterwards in your signing books. It felt as if you're speaking just right to me and my life at this moment. That's one of the greatest compliments. So to establish intimacy, to establish a live, physical sense of everyone being here and everything being remarkable. And we've all just woken up to the fact, you know, together,

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  at the astonishing, miraculous, and also absurd, humorous nature of reality all at the same time.

• 1:27:57Rick Rubin?

  How many years have you been practicing Zen?

• 1:28:00Speaker 00

  Since my mid twenties, seriously.

• 1:28:05Rick Rubin?

  How would you say it has remained the same over those years? And how would you say it's changed your relationship to it?

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  I'm less fussed about it. My last essay in the next book is Zen, under Z, yeah, under Z. And the first line is, "Zen is a complete fraud." You know, because it's a word. It's really, it's really a very seductive word. Zen speaks to us of beautiful spaces, spaciousness, polished wooden floors, bronze bells, you know, superb design, quiet. But really, Zen is the invitation to heartbreak. And I say in the essay, "Zen always begins and ends in tears." The first tears are for your body, trying to sit in that position.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  And then the second set of tears are for the breakdown that occurs in, you know, following the invitation that's made by the practice and by the koans, the heartbreaking, heart-filling and heart-breaking questions. One of the things I say is, Zen begins and ends in heartbreak. What happens after heartbreak is not...

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  It's not possible to describe in words what happens after the heartbreak. So all you need to know going into Zen is heartbreak.

• 1:29:33Speaker 00

  To begin with.

• 1:29:36Speaker 00

  It's like the seductive lover who lures you in and then runs off with another person in a way. Because

• 1:29:46Speaker 00

  the word is so beautiful and so hip and remains beautiful and hip, no matter how many times we use it. It's just the nature of the and beauty of the word itself.

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  You know, to begin with Zen held all the glamours of, first of all, the rigor of it, you know, sitting like a mountain. As they say, you know, the body like a mountain, breath like the wind and mind like the open sky, that's sitting Zen. And then all the accoutrements, you know, the the black robes and the black cushion and the white wall that you're facing and the walking and the kinhana, as it's called, and then the dokushan, the interviews with the Zen master. Now, I just more or less don't think of the words Zen. I think I just go to the direct experience

• 1:30:41Speaker 00

  of walking around, which is available to me in many ways, like my writing is now available to me, which the writing wasn't available. I'd have to sit down and work until it came. Now it's so close to me. It's just seconds before something recognizable is emerging, you know, something good and surprising. And it's the same thing with with what I used to call Zen practice. I only need to walk across that courtyard outside there,

• 1:31:11Speaker 00

  fall into quiet and everything's coming alive, you know.

• 1:31:16Rick Rubin?

  As you've gotten less fussy with it, it has become more ubiquitous in your life. Would you say that?

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, everything is. Everything is the is practice, really. Where I used to have a Zen masters, eight kimroshi, at the end of a sashin, you know, seven day sit. You used to say, actually, sashin starts tomorrow when you leave. When you leave the Zen, don't go out into that world.

• 1:31:43Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:31:44Speaker 00

  You take.

• 1:31:46Rick Rubin?

  That's the real practice.

• 1:31:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:31:50Rick Rubin?

  ¿Cómo decidiste poner los ensayos en el libro?

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  Sólo sentí que era fácil y limpio. Y solucionaba cualquier problema sobre cuál orden debería ir. Es decir, ¿dónde ponías la honestidad en la amistad? ¿Priorizabas uno sobre el otro? Así que solo sentí que era limpio y también fácilmente encontrado. Sí, así que... Oh, está solo. Debe estar cerca del principio. Zen probablemente esté justo al final del libro. Y si recuerdo una palabra, como vulnerabilidad, puedo mirar hacia abajo, ver que está hacia el final, el número de página. O puedo simplemente ir a través al final. Así que me gusta la accesibilidad y la simplicidad del orden alfabético.

• 1:32:40Rick Rubin?

  ¿Consideraste todo cómo el libro se lee como un libro en comparación con una serie de ensayos?

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  Creo que sería una lectura muy severa para pasar de principio a fin, casi demasiado, creo.

• 1:32:55Rick Rubin?

  Sí.

• 1:32:55Speaker 00

  Creo que para entrar, escuchar algo, esa es la forma en que lo leo ahora. Voy, oh, necesito leer la honestidad de nuevo.

• 1:33:02Rick Rubin?

  Sí.

• 1:33:03Speaker 00

  Porque he perdido, solo perdido la esencia de lo que dije. Y vuelves. Si lo he escrito correctamente, deberías sentirse como si fuera suficiente para el día.

• 1:33:12Rick Rubin?

  Sí.

• 1:33:13Speaker 00

  Sí. La mezcla es tan rica.

• 1:33:18Speaker 00

  Y algunos de ellos, realmente, solo necesitas un par de párrafos.

• 1:33:21Rick Rubin?

  Sí.

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  Se supone que deben ser como un ensayo y la gota pura.

• 1:33:26Speaker 00

  Una sola esencia de algo.

• 1:33:31Rick Rubin?

  ¿Puedes compartir un poema de noche conmigo?

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  Puedo, sí.

• 1:33:39Speaker 00

  "Ahora que las sombras de la noche están cayendo." Este es un poema llamado "Cerca de la oscuridad." Y lo escribí a partir de experimentar el hecho de que cuando me senté en esta escritura, en este paseo por encima de las escaleras con una ventana a mi lado, durante el día, tuve una relación completamente diferente con mis alrededores que tuve cuando escribía en la noche. And I realized that I had a different horizon, not only outside the window, but also on the page. You have night thoughts, and many of the old fears

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

  that accompany our ancient relationship with the night also, and vulnerabilities appear. So I wrote this poem as a hymn to the night, and a hymn to that horizon which is hidden from us in a way in the night. So, sweet darkness, when your eyes are tired, the world is tired also. When your vision is gone, no part of the world can find you. It's time to go into the dark, where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There, you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your home tonight.

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing: The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

• 1:35:36Speaker 00

  The great German-speaking poet Rilke has this astonishing poem called "Du Dunkelheit, you darkness", in which he's looking at a landscape, and there's a small fire in that landscape. And he realizes that there's this immensity of darkness, but because he's a human being, his whole focus is on this one point of light. So he says: "Du Dunkelheit hast, der ich sterbe, ich liebe dich mehr als die Flamme, welche die Welt begrinst, in dem sie glänzt, in Ehrgen, Eimen, Kreis. You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world."

• 1:36:22Speaker 00

  Because the fire makes a circle of light, so that no one sees you anymore. But the darkness holds everything, animals and shapes, even myself. And it is possible, a great energy is breaking into my body. "I have faith in the night," he says.

• 1:36:47Speaker 00

  In German it's even more powerful because he has this rhyming. He says: "Und es kann sein, eine große Kraft rührt sich in meiner Nachbarschaft.

• 1:37:00Speaker 00

  Ich glaube an Mekta."

• 1:37:03Speaker 00

  That's right, the rhyme comes earlier. It's "Menschen und Mekta." So, everything that's in the darkness, there are animals and shapes, people and powers. "Menschen und Mekta," powers. This word "power" in German, "Mekta," Mekta's power. And he rhymes it with "nectar," which is nights at the end, it's soul. It's really powerful. "Menschen und Mekta, es kann sein, eine große Kraft rührt sich in meiner Nachbarschaft." In the original German, he says, "breaks into my neighborhood," which is very German. You know, in a German neighborhood, everyone's keeping eyes on everyone else's behavior. So this is something strange coming into the neighborhood.

• 1:37:48Speaker 00

  I translated it as "breaking into my body." "I have faith in the night." Röker's books were some of the first books that Hitler burned, you know, in the piles of... He didn't want this relationship with the ordered daylight hours. He didn't want people having their own own horizon, in a way, which couldn't be seen by anyone else.

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  So I think, you know, both in the sense of praising the night and in the constellations essays, I'm basically trying to convey an experience I've had that any quality that a human being feels has its place in the constellation of what it means to be fully human. So even things we don't see as being good, things like being jealous, being angry, sulking, being exiled, they're actually all inverse calibrations of the way we're attempting to belong to the world.

• 1:38:59Speaker 00

  And to feel them fully is to transform them and put us in a better relationship with this incredibly difficult and miraculous world that we live in.

• 1:39:13Rick Rubin?

  And if we don't look at that shadow aspect, we miss the full picture.

• 1:39:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:39:22Rick Rubin?

  One doesn't exist without the other.

• 1:39:24Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:39:25Rick Rubin?

  They make each other.

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, we're at that meeting place. First of all, you have to have confidence in the person who's going to meet the world, but then you have to let go of the very thing that you gain confidence in in order to meet, to undo yourself, to be undone. That's that fiery edge of disappearance.

• 1:39:54Rick Rubin?

  It's like what we discussed before about belief.

• 1:39:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:57Rick Rubin?

  Always starting from the beginning.

• 1:40:01Speaker 00

  There's a Gert upon us, very powerful about it. He says, "Tell a wise person, or else keep silent."

• 1:40:10Speaker 00

  For those who do not understand will mock it right away. I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death. In the calm waters of the loved nights, where you have begotten, where you were begotten, a strange silence comes over you as you watch the silent candle burning. Now, you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness, and a desire for higher lovemaking sweeps you onward. Distance cannot make you falter. Now, arriving in magic, flying, and finally insane for the light, you are the butterfly and you are gone.

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  And so long as you have not experienced this, to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

• 1:41:07Speaker 00

  I'll finish with a night poem.

• 1:41:10Speaker 00

  This is a night poem from the fact that it occurred inside a dark interior, which was a temple high in the Himalayas. When I'd been there previously, I'd fallen sick with amoebic dysentery and spent three days and nights in a yak manger, having visions and fever and delusions, and also remarkable breakthrough experiences. But while I was there, I'd heard about this temple, Temple of Braga, and that it had these astonishing carvings there of bodhisattvas, Buddhist saints. But I was too weak to make the trek up to the temple and see it.

• 1:41:55Speaker 00

  So I had to turn around and go back down the valley and leave my friends. But seven years later, I came back again, and this time in springtime with all these wild hyacinths in the meadows and...

• 1:42:09Speaker 00

  And I was with a group of nine people I was bringing and we found this old lay monk who had the key to the monastery after an adventure. And he took us in and we were in the vestibule. And we're all in the darkness in the vestibule and it's absolutely pitch black. And we're all trying to find the single flashlight that we know someone has in one of the bags. Only one person's got a flashlight. And in the meantime, we're all talking to one another. I know I don't have it, so I'm not looking. And I think I'm talking to a person, but suddenly my eyes got used to the dark and I'm actually talking to this fierce Vajrapani guardian carving. Which when I saw in the darkness, when my eyes became used to the dark, I just about

• 1:42:54Speaker 00

  jumped out of my skin. Wow. Because the Vajrapani means diamond water. It's a half-human, half-demon. It's drinking blood from a skull cup. And it's got a spear pointed right at your heart. And I felt like that spear skewered me. But the interesting thing was, you know, the, the classic description of the Vajrapani is, is actually she and he is half-woman, half-man. He, she is there for you to, to keep your fears outside. But I had a primary experience of being skewered in the very fear I felt when I leapt out of my skin. I saw it as the carver meant you to see it in total innocence. And it terrified me.

• 1:43:37Speaker 00

  And I said, oh. He's saying to me, bring that very fear you felt when you saw me into the temple. As if it skewered it on the edge and said, this. And then just at that moment, we found the flashlight. The lay monk who was leading us had his beans in his hand and he led us down the corridor and there was the Buddha with the moodra beckoning. And then we were led into this sacred space, you know. He lit all these yak butter lamps and the place filled with, with incense and yak butter smoke, you know.

• 1:44:16Speaker 00

  And then we all looked up at once and around this high shelf were all of these astonishing carvings in lotus position or half lotus, these faces looking down at us. And I felt this wave of emotion pass through all of us because these faces were so... Full of compassion and love.

• 1:44:42Speaker 00

  And we all felt it, or we saw it all at once in that candlelight. And we stood there for the longest time in silence. And afterwards, I said, what was that? And immediately, I said to myself,

• 1:44:58Speaker 00

  we saw so much love in these wooden faces. And our malleable visages are so often set against the world. You know, the human face is so often concreted and set against the world. And here were these wooden faces that were full of mobility, love, and compassion.

• 1:45:17Speaker 00

  So I wrote this piece to get to the bottom of it. Whenever I recite the piece, I'm back in the darkness of that temple, you know, filled with the yak butter candlelight and the smoke rising like incense around us and then seeing these faces looking down. So this is called "The Faces at Braga".

• 1:45:41Speaker 00

  "In monastery darkness, by the light of one flashlight, the old shrine room waits in silence. While beside the door, we see the terrible figure, fierce eyes demanding, 'Will you step through?'" And the old monk leads us bent back, nudging blackness, prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lamps and bow. Eyes blinking in the pungent smoke, look up without a word, see faces in meditation, a hundred faces carved above, eye lines wrinkled in the handheld light. Such love in solid wood, taken from the hillsides and carved in silence, they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. Engulfed by the past, they have been neglected.

• 1:46:26Speaker 00

  But through smoke and darkness, they are like the flowers we have seen growing through the dust of eroded slopes. Their slowly opening faces turn toward the mountain, carved in devotion. Their eyes have softened through age and their mouths curve through delight of the carver's hands.

• 1:46:45Speaker 00

  "Si solo nuestros propios rostros permitieran las manos invisibles de los carveros llevar el gran de amor a la superficie. Si solo supiéramos, como el carver sabe, cómo los pisos en el bosque llevan su búsqueda a su núcleo, también nos sorprenderíamos y no necesitaríamos rostros inmovilizados por el miedo o el peso de las cosas sin hacer. Cuando peleamos con nuestros fracasos, ignoramos la entrada al propio santuario y peleamos con la figura de un guardián fuerte de lado del bien. Y mientras peleamos, nuestros ojos están cubiertos de tristeza y nuestros labios sehan secos de dolor. Si solo podríamos nosotras servirnos de los golpes de las manos de los carveros, las líneas en nuestros rostros serían las huellas de ríos, alimentando el mar donde se encuentran las voces,

• 1:47:30Speaker 00

  homenajear las características de la montaña y el nublado y el cielo. Nuestros rostros se desvanecerían hasta que nosotros, creciendo cada día más joven hacia la muerte, reuniríamos todos los pisos en celebración para fusionarnos perfectamente, imposiblemente, cuelgados a nuestra esencia, llenos de silencio de las manos de los carveros."