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David Whyte (Part 1) - Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin | Wave AI Podcast Notes

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David Whyte (Part 1)

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Wed Oct 01 2025

Summary

Podcast Summary: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Guest: David Whyte (Part 1)
Date: October 1, 2025

Overview

In this deeply reflective episode, Rick Rubin converses with renowned poet and writer David Whyte, exploring the liminal spaces of human existence—closeness, seasonality, time, change, vulnerability, wound, transformation, and the nature of language and presence. Whyte's poetic sensibility permeates every topic, and he regularly draws from his own poems and essays to illuminate the conversation. The episode moves fluidly between literary analysis, philosophy, personal story, and the lived experience of being “almost there.”

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Nature of Closeness and Arrival

[00:02 – 05:18]

Whyte begins by reading his essay on closeness, describing humanity as “creatures who are on the way,” always “close” but never fully arrived.
- “Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there.” —David Whyte, [00:02]
Closeness is measured by “the inverse distances of our proximity,” and intimacy arises through vulnerability—a “courageous form of unilateral disarmament.”
Whyte discusses how the physicality of words in childhood (“doorness”) is preserved through poetic language.

2. Word Exploration: 'Close' and 'Time'

[03:31 – 05:18]

Whyte details how repeated usage sharpened his ear for the emotional resonance of words like “close” and “time,” noting their ubiquity and emotional range.

3. Time, Timelessness, and The Bell and the Blackbird

[05:18 – 10:22]

Timelessness is where time “seems to be radiating out from the place where you're standing.”
Whyte recounts his inspiration for “The Bell and the Blackbird”—an Irish “koan” about a monk torn between the call to prayer (bell) and the call of nature (blackbird).
- “Either way takes courage... Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all.” —David Whyte, [07:00]
Maintaining tension between two choices is where identity grows. The poles of “practicality and poetry” can merge rather than compete.

4. Seasons and Personal Seasonality

[10:22 – 20:03]

Whyte draws connections between the human experience and natural seasonality, referencing biological processes like melatonin and the mythic power of the moon.
The moon’s name embodies “the circular sense of subtle celestial change.”
Most people live “seven to ten years behind” their true maturity; traumatic events often force a reckoning with the present season.
Whyte reads from his piece “Sometimes,” urging us to heed the “tiny but frightening requests” of a new season.

5. Authenticity vs. Emulation

[15:28 – 20:03]

Whyte describes the dangerous comfort of repeating old stories for audiences—becoming stuck in emulating a previous, successful self.
- “When you start telling them as ways of keeping the audience at bay... you’re in trouble.” —David Whyte, [16:20]
Changing seasons early helps avoid stagnation.

6. Language, Change, and Mythic Forces

[22:06 – 28:06]

The moon is both a physical and mythic force, representing the “ever-shifting, half-hidden gravitational power” that shapes both tides and internal change.
Change isn’t linear self-improvement but is influenced by larger, unseen forces beyond our will.
- “The sun illuminates our way. The Moon carries those powers hidden in our present that will fatefully influence our future.” —David Whyte, [24:34]

7. Intuitive Truths, Death, and Afterlife

[28:10 – 32:00]

Whyte discusses uncertainty in writing—sometimes writing what “sounds as if it should be true.”
He shares a piece on death (“Beyond Santiago”), highlighting an inner certainty that emerges in deep states of poetic attention, contrasting with everyday rational neutrality on the subject.
- “You will find in that long anticipated enemy the ultimate form of forgiveness and friendship.” —David Whyte, [31:10]

8. Writing Process: Start Close In

[32:06 – 34:16]

Whyte does not always know where his writing will end; the story reveals itself.
He recites his well-known poem “Start Close In,” emphasizing beginning “with the first thing, close in, the step you don’t want to take."
- “Don’t follow someone else’s heroics. Be humble and focused. Start close in.” —David Whyte, [33:10]

9. Vulnerability and Wounding as Portals for Growth

[36:01 – 49:13]

Whyte reclaims vulnerability as robustness—“not a weakness... but the underlying, ever-present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state.”
- “The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability.” —David Whyte, [39:55]
He reads from his essay on wounds, describing them as “doorways” that connect us to others, to generational history, and to transformation.
Wounds can be self-inflicted, and "falling in love has always been seen as an ultimate wounding."
Once healed, wounds lead to “emancipation into new territories of understanding.”

10. Blessing and the Power of Others’ Perception

[50:20 – 52:33]

Blessings are not just well-wishing but insight: “A real blessing is where you wish something for them that they did not realize they wanted for themselves.” —Whyte's mother, [51:45]
The gift of recognition and poetic calling is often first seen by others before we accept it ourselves.

11. Writing as Transformation & Grieving

[54:09 – 57:37]

Whyte describes writing through his grief after his mother’s death, comparing it to “seven years of grief in six months.”
He learned the importance of “giving her away,” not holding too tightly to the dead, and allowing them their own journey.
Sometimes, in hard times, he calls on her memory or voice for counsel.

12. Revelation Through Water

[58:14 – 62:04]

A transformative experience during illness in the Himalayas revealed his oneness with the cycle of water, showing the absurdity of the self as a fixed project.
- “This whole David White project is absolutely absurd. And that's why I was laughing. And it was this release.” —David Whyte, [60:35]

13. The Power of Words and Silence

[62:04 – 65:08]

Words can “hold a lot of silence”—poetry and language can create deep, attentive, shared silence.
The stillness generated by presence is as important as speech itself.
- “Words can create silence.” —David Whyte, [62:08]

14. Taking the Stage and Inviting Silence

[65:08 – 70:03]

Whyte recalls his first poetry reading and the terror of wholly presenting himself, ultimately finding that his entire life had prepared him for it.
- “A creative opportunity is both an invitation and a dagger to your throat.” —David Whyte, [66:19]

15. Invitation, Saying Yes, and the Threefold Ask

[70:03 – 73:03]

Whyte discusses Joseph Campbell’s notion of the “refusal of the call” and his mother’s wisdom:
- “When you're asked three times, you have to go.” —Whyte's mother, [72:58]
The third ask is often the true invitation to step into our path.

16. Family, Grief, and Character

[73:04 – 76:38]

Whyte’s mother’s resilience and compassion came from her own childhood trauma—turning grief into empathy.
His own even-temperedness is a blend of his mother’s compassion and his father’s “stoic, Yorkshire” nature, reinforced by literal and figurative high-stakes experiences.

17. Substack and the Creative Process

[76:38 – 79:02]

Whyte discusses building community via Substack, appreciating the direct connection and the motivational value of deadlines: “There are deadlines that bring you alive and deadlines that kill you.” —David Whyte, [79:02]

18. Speaking vs. Writing and States of Presence

[79:10 – 82:49]

Many of Whyte’s best insights emerge while speaking extemporaneously—he values the “self-forgetfulness” and newness that arises in this state.
Speaking to an audience (even virtually) is described as a “dark theater that expands out to the horizons of the world.”

19. The Power of Imagination and Place

[83:20 – 85:40]

Place names conjure powerful images, sometimes rooted in personal experience, sometimes wholly imagined.
Whyte reflects on the interplay between imagined destinations and reality, reading lines from his poem “Santiago”:
- “You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach.” —David Whyte, [85:20]

20. The Universal Experience of ‘Not Quite Here’ and the Essence of Absence

[86:10 – 88:58]

Whyte affirms that “not quite hereness” is fundamentally human.
- “I think not quite hereness is the hallmark of being human.” —David Whyte, [86:15]
He draws from Meister Eckhart: “God is pure absence.” Embracing not-quite-here is a step into human essence, an invitation to depth.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there.” —David Whyte, [00:02]
“To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament.” —David Whyte, [02:40]
“Either way takes courage… Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all.” —David Whyte, [07:00]
“The sound in the word moon is like the moon itself, coming and going, while giving a reassuring sense of being eternally present.” —David Whyte, [11:40]
“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability.” —David Whyte, [39:55]
“Blessing is…wishing for them what they did not realize they wanted for themselves.” —Whyte's mother, [51:45]
“A creative opportunity is both an invitation and a dagger to your throat.” —David Whyte, [66:19]
“When you’re asked three times, you have to go.” —Whyte's mother, [72:58]
“You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach.” —David Whyte, [85:20]
“I think not quite hereness is the hallmark of being human.” —David Whyte, [86:15]
“God is pure absence.” —Meister Eckhart, cited by David Whyte, [87:34]

Timestamps for Key Segments

Opening Reflection on Closeness: [00:02–05:18]
The Koan of The Bell and the Blackbird: [05:18–10:22]
Seasonality and the Human Life: [10:22–20:03]
Reading “Sometimes”, Artistic Stuckness: [15:28–20:03]
Change, The Moon, and Mythic Perspective: [22:06–28:06]
Writing & Inner Knowingness, “Beyond Santiago”: [28:10–32:00]
“Start Close In” Poem and Creative Resistance: [32:15–34:16]
Discussion on Vulnerability & Robustness: [36:06–41:49]
Essay on Wounds and Their Purpose: [41:50–49:13]
Seasonal Change, Blessing, and Recognition: [50:20–52:33]
Grief, Writing, and Letting Go of the Dead: [54:09–57:37]
Revelation through Water: [58:14–62:04]
Language and Silence: [62:04–65:08]
Stage Presence and the Creative Threshold: [65:08–70:03]
The Threefold Ask and Accepting the Call: [70:03–73:03]
Parental Influence and Character: [73:04–76:38]
Substack and Artistic Discipline: [76:38–79:02]
Speaking vs. Writing; Public Presence: [79:10–82:49]
Imaginative Places and Actual Arrival (“Santiago”): [83:20–85:40]
The Universality of “Not Quite Here”: [86:10–88:58]

Conclusion:

David Whyte’s conversation with Rick Rubin traverses poetry, philosophy, and the intricate fabric of lived experience. Laced with memorable readings and keen observations, Whyte brings listeners into the subtle realms between language, presence, vulnerability, and transformation. Whether discussing the gravitational pull of the moon, the necessity of wounds, or the courage to start close in, this episode is a testament to “being almost there”—to dwelling in the profound and perpetual journey that is being human.

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Transcript

David White (0:02)

Tetragrammaton. So this is close. Close is what we almost always are. Close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something or close to success. And even with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up. Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there. We are creatures who are on the way. Our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity. I see you closing your eyes and nodding your head to concentrate. I had the same feeling when I wrote the said. There's some part of me that understands what I just wrote. I just need to take a second with that. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity. As I said. Oh, we're not too far away. Or I'm not too far away from writing. Oh, I almost feel like writing. I'm not writing yet. But the inverse distances of our proximity and intimacy. Calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation. To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy. A form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling surface identities. To consciously become close is a courageous form of. Of unilateral disarmament. A chancing of our arm and our love. This phrase isn't used in the States, but in Britain and Ireland. When you chance your arm, it means you risk yourself. Yeah. To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament. A chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections. And an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring. Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival. But by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. We are, in effect, always close. Always close to the ultimate secret. That we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach. The step between not understanding that and understanding that is as close as we get to happiness.

Interviewer (3:27)

Beautiful. Do you remember where you wrote that?

David White (3:31)

I think I wrote it in my study. Because the image I get, immediate physical image. Is the grain in the wood of my desk. Yes.

Interviewer (3:39)

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

David White (10:33)

Well, there is a beautiful seasonality to existence, and it's caught within our very cellular structure. I mean, you just look at melatonin, for instance, and the way it drops us into the seasonality of sleep. Well, melatonin was produced by sea creatures that rose and fell in the columns of the ocean before there was life. And so these creatures moved up towards the sun, and the more and more sun they felt, the more melatonin they produced until they fell into sleep and dropped down again in the column in the night. So that seasonality is actually within our very cell structure to this day, which is really just one wonderful example of the way the seasonality of life lies within us and within our language, too. I wrote an essay on perhaps one of the most beautiful words in the English language, which is moon. And the moon occupies our unconscious and our conscious minds in really extraordinary ways. It's a seasonality in and of itself. So the moon might carry the most evocative combination of vowel and consonant sounds in the English language, calling us to imagine its round reflecting white orb even as we say its ancient name, exerting its gravitational pull on our voice and our thoughts, as if emanating and emerging through the extraordinarily long sound that lives at the center of that initial soft m and the half spoken N that begin and end its passage through our mouths. Moon is an extraordinary word equal to the astonishing celestial body it calls to mind. It is a word that carries the circular sense of subtle celestial change, representing that overwhelming sense of presence and part presence, presence and non presence that the moon itself inhabits in our lives. The sound in the word moon is like the moon itself, coming and going, while giving a reassuring sense of being eternally present. So that first paragraph looks at one of the essentials of seasonality, which is appearance and disappearance and all the gradations in between. And the remarkable thing about a season is that it's already started before you know it. By the time you see the first golden leaf on a tree that Process has been initiated long before. So almost always we're catching up with ourselves. And being caught up with the season that you're actually in is one of the great tasks of. Of a satisfactory human life. I often think most human beings are seven to ten years behind the actual core maturity that they have attained. And their peripheral life is just so busy and so distracting that they refuse to settle down into the actual seasonal edge that they've attained inside themselves. Quite often we'll only attain that maturity when we have a trauma or a wound, or we go bankrupt, or things fall apart, or you come home and there's a note on the kitchen table and your spouse has left you. And then you hit the present season with so much velocity that you break apart on impact and you catch up with yourself. So this is a time honored way of human transformation. But there are better ways, ways that are more merciful on the human soul. And that's by keeping up with yourself. The first indication that you see. I wrote a piece called Sometimes. Sometimes, if you move carefully through the forest breathing like the ones in the old stories, who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without making a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests. Conceived out of nowhere, but in this place, beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you are doing right now and to stop what you are becoming while you do it. Questions that can make or unmake a life. Questions that have patiently waited for you. Questions that have no right, no right to go away. So those tiny but frightening requests, those come out of the new seasonality. Meanwhile, we're saying, wait a minute, I just got everything in place. I've just finished my book. I'm just, you know, give me a moment's peace and. No, the season's moving on. Yeah.

David White (16:20)

Yeah. No. You're trying to be someone you're trying to be your previous self that was successful in getting you to this place. Yeah. And so I was telling stories. And there's nothing wrong with telling stories again and again. That's how our great storytelling traditions evolve. But when you start telling them as ways of keeping the audience at bay, start telling the same stories as a kind of weapon, start telling the stories as a defense, start telling the stories as a concrete way of holding things in place, you're in trouble. And so I sat down at my desk at home, and at that time I was out in this back shed, and it was a very dark place with just a single small window. And it was perfect for writing this piece. And I said, david, find a story that you've never told before in a sense, right? Why you haven't told a story. And I suddenly had the immediate image of being on the kitchen floor with one knee up and one down. At seven or eight years old, looking over this book of Native American stories. And one of my aunties had given me this book. I can still remember the odor of the ink and the pages. And it was beautifully illustrated. And if you'd have let that book fall open by itself, it would have fallen open to my favorite story. And it was the story of a young boy being taught how to cross a piece of broken ground in the forest without making a sound. And the elder was standing there in the illustration with great dignity and gravitas, with her shawl around his shoulders. And the boy was on his knees. And as I was looking over the book, one knee up, one down, taking his moccasins off, and behind him was his tunnel of twigs and leaves that he was about to cross without making a sound. And I remembered how much this story affected me and how I used to go out and practice my non existent Native American skills in the local woods and fields and creeping up on my friends. And I probably sounded like a wild mastodon, but to me, I was that boy. And I suddenly realized that I was myself crossing into new territory. So I sat in that very moment and I wrote that piece. Sometimes, if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories, who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound? You come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests. Well, that was exactly what I was feeling on stage, was I was getting the tap on the shoulder. Hey, hey. Things have changed. Things have changed. And you're not in the new season. You're still in the old season. All of us have had the experience where we've had our winter coat on for so long. If you live in the northern hemisphere and suddenly you realize it's a baking late spring day, an early summer day, and you're still wearing that jacket and you go, oh my God, I can take the layer off now, you know, and that's the way I felt. That poem was a portal into the new season of my life. And in a way, the new theme was. Was the new theme. The new theme was the seasonality of existence. And from then on, I've rarely been caught in that frozen state of emulation. I've recognized it early enough that I can change it. You know, catching the season early enough when it's changing is one of the great necessary disciplines of a human life.

David White (22:11)

Yes. So just to go further into the moon essay which carries the change itself. The moon sails forever and has sailed forever through the dark sky that lives inside us as much as the night sky above our house. We've grown and evolved on this planet. From the simplest cells to the extraordinarily complex creatures we are in an intimate parallel with our waxing and waning satellite. In other words, we're always in an unconscious conversation with change in a very physical way. Living on this Earth has always meant living in an abiding, awestruck companionship with something both overwhelmingly close and too far away to control. We've always lived half reverently, half resentfully, at the whim of that imaginative, physiological, psychological power we call the Moon. Living on this planet, we, every one of us, live at the movable edge of a powerful conversational triad. The Earth's grounded gravitational pull that gives us a solid place to stand. The Sun's strength of light allowing us to live to see and be seen, and even voluntarily move towards what we see. And then the Moon's other ever shifting half, hidden gravitational power making itself known through the tides or the tides in our bodies, always pulling us away from any fixed point to which we try to hold, always pushing and pulling us through powerful fields of attraction that seem to mimic and embody our own desires, whether we wish to be pulled or not, whether we wish to have those powerful, upsetting tidal desires or no. So when we're looking at change, we often think in a very linear way. Oh, change, I'm going to change into some improved version of myself. No. There are powers, parallel and companionable, seen and unseen, powers that you are changing with, half of which you understand at any one time, half of which you don't. So the word change covers an enormous multitude of sins. You could say in the human imagination, the Earth might be where the sun illuminates everything we need to see and name. But the Moon has always embodied the task of carrying the unnamable and lives according to its own hidden urgencies, which in our daylight hours are forgotten or only half revealed. The sun illuminates our way. The Moon carries those powers hidden in our present that will fatefully influence our future. In the human imagination, the Moon has always represented an alternative life, another body of deeper parallel laws than the ones we follow. In the full light of our rules based days, the Moon tells us we are subject to paths far beyond our ability to summarize or understand. In the human mythic inheritance, the Moon is the body's susceptibility to other bodies, our helpless attraction to what calls us beyond our present life. No matter how perfectly arranged that life may be, the Moon embodies our deeply felt response to the greater physical tidal poles of existence. So it's interesting that I'm reading this exactly at the full moon here. Yeah, the Moon works on and within the body in a way unregistered by the thinking mind. The Moon and the Moon's pull on the body cannot be audited or fully accounted for. The Moon works both by stealth and overwhelming silent power. We ensure the Moon's unconscious power exceeds the narrow consciousness we bring to our daylight ambitions. Mythically, the Moon has always been intuited as carrying instinctual understanding, while the sun only illuminates what the Moon already knows before things come to light. I don't know if that's true or not, but it sounds as if it should be true. Yeah. While the sun only illuminates what the Moon already knows before things come to light, the Moon's tidal polarness has always been felt as subversive to the desires we seem to hold at our lit, well managed surfaces. Human plans are linear, made for the light of day, and that light comes directly from the sun in a straight line. But the Moon's power is tidal, a constellating force pushing and pulling everything outside and inside, right down to the tiniest mitochondria in our very cells, working away within our inward parts. Though the Moon seems to hang above us in the night sky, the Moon is always intuited to work from the inside out. Whether we live deep in the barely lit countryside with views of each and every phase of the appearing and disappearing moon, or in the reflected light of garishly lit cities where we glimpse it only at its fullest as a startlingly white orb suddenly suspended between buildings, the Moon runs through us just like the mighty tides. It draws back and forth across the planet, changing and moving both our inward sense of presence and the way we shape our every inward onward way through each and every one of our outward sunlit lives. So the essay goes on, but I think that that speaks to seasonality, both in what we can see and what's moving us from the unseen.

David White (28:24)

Well, there's some things that we won't admit to ourselves. There are things we know already that we just don't have the confidence to speak fully. So in many ways, when I said that was a tongue in cheek acknowledgment of that dynamic. I've got a very. What was, to me, a very powerful piece. It takes a very different perspective on death than the way I would talk about it, if you and I were talking about it just over dinner or something, and we hadn't somehow been given the deeper context, but we were just talking about death from our strategic point of view. This is what I wrote after I'd written a poem when putting it in this book. If you were to ask me in the busy lighted hours of the day whether I believed in an afterlife, I would have to say that I am firmly neutral on the matter, with an accompanying practical sense passed down from my father's Yorkshire that we'll all find out soon enough. But every now and again, in the deepest states of attention and letting go necessary to the writing of good poetry, there emerges a physical sense of a deeper and surer foundation in the body. And beneath even that, a voice from an inner tidal core identity which displays absolutely no neutrality at all. And so this is a piece I wrote out of that beautiful. It's called Beyond Santiago. Death is so simple. One moment you are alive and then you're not. And that fear you carry with you might be equally as simple too, that you'll never have the time to accomplish what you wish. But stop a moment now before the way beyond. And let me tell you this, you'll go out of this life, however untimely, having completed every single thing you wished. You will arrive in that night like a newborn child welcomed by loving arms. You will find in that long anticipated enemy the ultimate form of forgiveness and friendship. Every fearful goodbye suddenly become a gentle getting to know. A getting to know of a forgiveness that was strangely always anticipated. And a welcome and a full understanding of all you ever did. Everything you gave and everything you were given. And then everything you could never give. And above all, everything you could never bring yourself to receive. Those unattainable distances that always broke your heart and the gifted understanding of why it was so hard for you to love. And then, and most importantly, and right to the heart, everything you were and everything you gave that was never, ever on your list.

David White (36:06)

Yeah. I mean, I've worked with it quite a bit, both in the sense of speaking about it, but also trying to get a physical understanding of it myself. And of course vulnerability is a very powerful fashionable word at the moment. But quite often when it's spoken about, we're not getting the physicality of the experience, which is all about vulnu wound. That's the root of vulnerability. It's where you're open to the world whether you want to be or not. So your vulnerability is going to be the axis along which you make your invitation to others. It's going to be the axis of your artistic development, but also your maturity as a human being. So I like to talk about robust vulnerability because we so often associate vulnerability with weakness. But actually where you literally need help is where you're going to develop, where you're going to make the connection. And young men have to find this out very painfully in relationship that after the short initial period of impressing. I'm talking about a heterosexual relationship now impressing a woman. What closes off the relationship is your lack of vulnerability. Your unwillingness to open to where you don't know and where you're not in control and to share that with the other person. That's what's going to deepen the relationship. We're so, as young men, we're so terrified of that not being in control. The young masculine body is all about perimeter. You know, that's why young men are, especially today, are so much into bodily definition, around muscles and everything. This is where I end and this is where the world starts. It's absolute perimeter. That perimeter will not be broken. That perimeter is my safety. So this is a little piece I wrote on vulnerability. So I'm standing up for vulnerability in a way here. So it's very. The essay is very definitive in a way. Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition or something we can arrange to do without. Vulnerability is not a choice. Vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature. The attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not, and most especially to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability, we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential tidal and conversational foundations of our identity. To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human, and most especially of being youthfully human. But it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers. Powers eventually are most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath. The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability. The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

David White (41:50)

It's just on my sub stack. But this is Wounds. Wounds are where we are suddenly open to the world or opened traumatically by the world, whether we desire to be opened or not. A wound opens up or breaks down the precious edge between What I think is me and what seems to be other than me. Wounds are compelling because they cause immediate pain, physical or emotional. The gash in the arm, the sting of a razor cut while shaving, or the well aimed insult to our sense of self when verbally attacked. Wounds also cause immediate reaction. The staunching of new blood with our palm, our hand moving automatically to touch and cover the painful area. The folding of the body around where we have been breached or hurt. Or tellingly, our defensive voice holding the insult to our dignity at bay. All maturation, emotional and physical, comes from our inner sense of self being overwhelmed by what seems to come from beyond the closed system of our psychological or physiological understanding. Sometimes that beyond comes from over the horizon of our outer understanding, through traumatic physical breakdowns in the everyday world. And sometimes they emerge from deep within us, from below the horizon of our inner comprehension. It's sobering and yet comforting to think that there is no satisfactory human life without being wounded. The opening of our bodies and our emotions in that first breathtaking adolescent experience of sexuality. The breeze off the mountain catching our imaginations and our senses off guard. The scent of a new spring entering our minds and evoking a physical memory of every previous spring. To be closed off, to be unentered by, to be unopened by and unwounded by the world, is to live in a numb physical twilight where we feel the world is literally passing us by, leaving us untouched and even unseen. Wounds are self inflicted. As much as received from others. We actually carry a boundless desire to be opened and therefore wounded in the right way. We actually spend a great deal of time unconsciously sabotaging many of our surface comforts and our surface structures. We actually often disorder the ways we have ordered our world from within. Blowing open our lives to reveal surprising, hidden, yet long nurtured desires. And out of those desires, the surprising anticipations and joys of a new life. Wounds are often misnamed and miscategorized. What we often call a wound is what happens when we are trying to be open in a way that is good for us, but ends up opening us in a way that hurts us. The wounds of sexuality, when we are taken advantage of. The wound of love, when that love is unrequited. The wound of grief, when our love is unaccountably taken away by distance, by illness, by the ultimate wound of death itself. Falling in love has always been seen as an ultimate wounding. The image of being pierced by love's dart is thousands of years old. And in every culture, cupid's arrow arrives seemingly from nowhere, causing inner aches and pains to places we did not even know we possessed. Love is never something we agree to. Love is never something we agree to. And true love is the ultimate intrusion into our previously impervious lives. The wound delivered by love brings that astonishing combination of adoration, creative helplessness and revolutionary insight. Before I was wounded by love, I was under the illusion that that I had the basic elements of my life under control. Before I fell wounded in love, I thought I knew and could predict my future. To fall in love is to enter the wilder, elemental physical experiences of our human inheritance and to suffer as others have suffered. In their joy, in their heart stopping, temporary disappointments, and even in their religious ecstasy. We feel wounded even by the wounds we have involuntary caused others. We have all consciously or unconsciously been the cause of wounds to others by not requiting their love, by not confirming their hopes, by not being able to be there for them in the very specific ways they needed or desired, or by saying truths we should have kept to ourselves. The way I've wounded others is my doorway to compassion for all the ways. I have been wounded so many times myself. Sometimes just by accident. We can be miserly about the way. We will not allow ourselves to admit we have been hurt. But wounds generously bind us one to another, across time and even across broad oceans our ancestors might have crossed before bringing us into this world. Wounds are open portals between generations. The grief of my grandfather from the trenches of the First World War passed down through the silences and sadnesses of my own father. My mother's fleeing enslavement in the laundries of Ireland. Her possible bitterness turned to real compassion for others she met, forced as she was, against her will to make a new life out of nothing. Wounded is how we are and wounds are what we all, every one of us, carry. Visible or not. Both in those of us who struggle with the day to day, and perhaps even more especially with those of us who walk around being supremely competent. But every wound that is allowed to heal leads to our emancipation into new territories of understanding and maturation, often against our original will. Once a wound is closed, all healing happens from the inside out and is felt from the inside out long after there is no outside visible sign or scar to represent what has occurred. An old wound carried well is the signature of both our courage, our self compassion and an ability to recognize and then help the griefs of others. Wounds are literal portals and doorways. Some are light grazes we can run through psychologically or physiologically in seemingly no time at all. Some are deep and ragged gashes that we can only crawl through on our hands and knees, sometimes for a span of decades. But all wounds, consciously held, lead somewhere, either into our next maturation or into a deeper compassion for others. And then for every one of us in the end, into those wounds of the mortal kind that will take us eventually into the greatest unknown territory of all.

David White (58:14)

Well, you could say that water is the ultimate conversational element on the planet. It holds everything together. I had this experience of contracting amoebic dysentery or something like it, collapsing. I was up at 10,000ft in the Himalayas, in what was then a remote part, no longer as remote as a road has been broken through to this area, but I was weeks away from any roadhead at that time. And I staggered into this little hamlet, literally on the edge of my strength, crawled in even. And I was taken in by this family, put by the fire. But this family were three kids and the parents. It was a one room house. There was really no room for me, especially as this huge Westerner, you know, with big boots. So they. They took me out and put me in this manger outside. It was a yak manger full of straw and dried yak dunk. And I was in there for three days and three nights. And I hallucinated for three days and three nights. And on the third day, I had this experience of breaking open. And I broke open into the revelation of water, actually. And the revelation was that up above me in the firmament, this astonishing firmament, and the stars were just clear at night, you know, and the clouds were racing over, and I was between the peaks of Dhaulagiri and Annapurna. And there was this moisture in the air that would fall. The snow on the mountains would move down as a glacier, melt at the bottom, form a stream, drop down into the Marciande river below me that would go into the Ganges, the Ganges would go into the ocean, the oceans would evaporate and the whole. So I was part of this enormous circle and my moment of enlightenment and I let out a gunshot of laughter, actually. I was sat up with my hands out, raving and laughing and shouting. And the whole family just ran out of the hut, actually. And they stood in a line like that scene in the Sound of Music where the kids go from small to big. The parents were there and they looked at me. And then suddenly they all put their hands together and namaste me to get that. Because they recognized I was having some experience. They recognized in the Tibetan experience that was revered. And my experience was, oh, there's the Marciandi River Valley. We call it Marciande. Here's David White. We call it David White, but actually you've given the name to something that's already gone. You're naming something that's already left you. So the whole feeling was this whole David White project is absolutely absurd. And that's why I was laughing. And it was this release.

David White (70:18)

Yes. Well, the first time is if it's your path, it's going to be frightening. Your path is always the path of heartbreak. Why is it the path of heartbreak? Because your path is always the path where you care most deeply. So your path forward is the path of heartbreak, so you're going to be afraid of it. So the first invitation is always the refusal of the call, as Joseph Campbell called it. No, thank you. I'm happy where I am with my protected, non heartbreaking life. And then the second one is hearing something from beyond but not quite believing it. And the third time your life is at stake, you say, no. The third time you've missed a tide. I had this lovely moment where after I'd gone full time as a poet, after that, a wonderful event where I'd gone through this shriving of physical breakdown. And I was speaking at a psychological conference in Washington D.C. and at the end of the talk there was a line of people and at the very end was this gentleman who, who I got to know very well in the end. But he, he said, we have to invite you into corporate America. And I was a very serious young artist at that time, so. And I grew up, you know, raving socialist, part of, of Yorkshire from long lines of rebels on, on my Yorkshire Scots side and Irish. So anything that was part of the corporate world was the enemy to art and you'd sell yourself out and all this. So I said, no, I'm not interested, but I'm interested why you would invite me. And he said a beautiful thing. He said, you know, the language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory that we've entered. And I just heard the language in your poetry that's large enough. So I thought that was really powerful, but it still didn't bump me out of my inherited enclosure of what it meant to be a young artist. And then I got back to Whidby and he called me up. He said, I really want to reiterate the invitation. And I said, no, I feel fierce about it. He said, right, I'm coming out to Whidby Island. So I was talking to my mother, my Irish mother. I said, I've had this experience. I said, no. I've said no again and now he's coming out. And she said, oh, you've already said yes. I said, really? She said, yeah, when you're asked three times, you have to go, wow. Yeah, it was a beautiful moment.