David Whyte (Part 1)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

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

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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.”

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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.

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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]

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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]

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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.

Transcript

[David White]

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]

Beautiful. Do you remember where you wrote that?

[David White]

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]

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

[David White]

You know, when you're a child and you hear the word door, you're not hearing an abstract. You have the physical sense of dawness in your body when you hear that door. One of the tasks of poetry is to keep the primary vision of childhood alive into adulthood, to keep the language that's physical, that's the doorness of the door, and not some abstracted thing that you walk through. So the word close is used every day by human beings. And as I wrote essay after essay in constellations using single words, I started to sharpen the acuity of my ear in listening to the way people use words. So I started to hear, in a very amusing way, all the ways people use the word close. I'm close to finishing. I'm close to starting. I'm close to giving up. I'm close to tears. I'm close to done. And so I just thought I'd investigate it. So I just started with that list of all the ways we use it. Just the way we. Same way we use the word time in such powerful and often pejorative ways. Time is slipping through our fingers. Time is our enemy. Time is against us. Time would be very, very surprised to hear this, because our life could not occur without the phenomena of time. No cellular growth could occur in the world.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about time and timelessness.

[David White]

Timelessness, in my mind, is where you're not caught in these linear boxes of the hours or the days, but time actually seems to be radiating out from the place where you're standing.

[Interviewer]

Say more about that.

[David White]

Well, I've said it best in a poem I wrote called the Bell and the Blackbird.

[Interviewer]

Do you have it?

[David White]

I do, yeah. So the bell and the blackbird. Is this Irish koan really this beautiful Irish question? It's the image in the koan in the story. The Irish wouldn't have called it a koan. I'm just borrowing that from the Zen tradition. But it is a koan. The Irish image is of a monk standing on the edge of the monastic precinct with a wall and the chapel inside the wall. And he hears the bell calling him to prayer. And he says to himself, that's the most beautiful sound in the world. But then simultaneously, he hears the call of the blackbird from over the wall, and he says, oh, and that's also the most beautiful sound in the world. And the implication in the image, because that's all you get from the story, you don't get any more. The implication is the question, which way did he go?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[David White]

Which way did he go. And I carried this koan for years, actually, in a very powerful way. And then I answered it in a way, or became the question, whatever way you want to, you want to describe it. One Easter morning, when I was at my desk with the French door fetter in front of my desk open, the smell of the spring air coming in, and from behind me, my wife rang two Tibetan bells together, and she hit them just right. So the sound went straight through me. And at the same time I heard the red winged blackbird outside. So this is. This is the experience I've been studying for years, which is just a occurred. And I put my hand up, I said, I can't talk to you now. And I started writing. And this is the piece I wrote. I was in a very, very powerful place when I heard it. I'd been concentrating, writing for an hour, and then suddenly the bell, out of nowhere, and the bird, and it broke open into this, the bell and the blackbird. The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage. Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all. Wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know you'll have to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting at all. That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk, both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation crying hallelujah.

[Interviewer]

Is the bell and the birdsong necessarily a call? And does there have to be a choice?

[David White]

Well, that's exactly what the experience was. There's a line by Rilke where he says, stretch your well disciplined strength between two opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns. Stretch your well disciplined strengths between two opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns. So my understanding is that human beings are constantly making decisions. Too early in the conversation they say, should I go A, should I go B? Well, my understanding is you're supposed to keep A and B alive until they stretch your identity, such a point that they break open and they form one single path. So I certainly had that. In the poles of practicality and poetry, you don't get much corroboration from the world when you're going full time as a poet, particularly when you're 30 years old or 32 years old, particularly if you have a family to support. And so not choosing between practicality and poetry. And then seeing how practical poetry is for people and how poetic practicality can be. So we suddenly realize you've been robbing Peter to pay Paul on both sides of the equation. And so holding things and refusing to choose until the choice has already been made. Actually, you suddenly discovered that, oh, you've become someone who's A plus B and everything else that goes with it.

[Interviewer]

Let's talk about seasons a bit.

[David White]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

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.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

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

[Interviewer]

Something like going through the motions.

[David White]

Exactly. Yes.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

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.

[Interviewer]

Would you say it's just developing self awareness?

[David White]

Well, except that phrase has become such a cliche that it just covers over the actual experience. You need language that's equal to what's going on, to your fear of leaving the season to which you've got used to.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, the comfort.

[David White]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you need language that's more invitational in some ways. You need language that's more frightening to you.

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[David White]

Today.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

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.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about when you're writing and something comes, yes, it sounds like what you want to say, but when you analyze it, you question whether it actually is or not.

[David White]

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.

[Interviewer]

Spectacular, beautiful piece of writing.

[David White]

That's the voice that you can't quite believe might carry a truth.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. But in the writing there's a knowingness.

[David White]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Beautiful.

[David White]

Yeah. And of course, for it to be good writing, it has to strike other people's knowingness. It's not just.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[David White]

If it's just your knowingness, then it's just a diary entry.

[Interviewer]

Do all the pieces start in the order that they're written? Or might you write a phrase and realize, oh, this is really the end of it?

[David White]

I Think that phenomena used to happen when I was younger writing. Now there's a much more coherent exploration.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

No.

[Interviewer]

It reveals itself as you go.

[David White]

Yes. I mean, I have a poem that literally works with that called Start close in. Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing. Close in the step you don't want to take. Start with the ground, you know, the pale ground beneath your feet. Your own way to begin the conversation. Start with your own question. Give up on other people's questions. Don't let them smother something simple to hear another's voice. Listen to your own voice. Wait until it becomes a private ear that can then really listen to another. Start right now. Take a small step you can call your own. Don't follow someone else's heroics. Be humble and focused. Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing. Close in the step you don't want to take. Start with the first thing. Close in the step you don't want to take. So it's that equilibrium of resistance and invitation that tells you you're in a real conversation. I think in our first conversation last year, I talked about that inner horizon, which, unlike the outer horizon, which is often seen as nourishing or inviting, we often feel there's a line of resistance inside us. Beneath that is where the revelation lies. So eventually we actually start to see it as a lodestone. We start actually being attracted to that line of resistance. When you discover it inside yourself, I mean, I'm sure you've had the same phenomena in your artistic approach to music and when you just can't get what you're wanting. But actually, the can't getness is a real clue as to what needs to happen. You're like a gundog. The hair stands up in your back. Your paw comes up. We're in the conversation.

[Interviewer]

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

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[Interviewer]

You mentioned vulnerability earlier. Do you want to talk about vulnerability a bit?

[David White]

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.

[Interviewer]

Beautiful. That piece seemed to really be about acceptance.

[David White]

Yes. Yeah. Where you feel things most deeply. You know, the French philosopher Camille said, live to the point of tears, which is not an invitation to modeling sentimentality, but to feel things as deeply as you can, as a kind of faculty of attention, actually. So that when the emotions break open, it breaks open into revelation and understanding, to allow yourself, you know, as you're raising a child, to feel the ache and woundedness of. Of not being equal to being a proper father or a proper mother. That actually brings you closer to being a good father and a good mother. And it also allows you to ask for help from others in helping you to be a better father or a better mother. So to understand where you're wounded, where you have been wounded, and to actually become enthusiastic about gaining more understanding of your wounds, where you're open to the world, whether you want to be where you've been open to the world, whether you want it to be opened in that way or not. And that's how this essay starts. I've just written this, actually, a few weeks ago.

[Interviewer]

Beautiful.

[David White]

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.

[Interviewer]

Wounds bind us to one another.

[David White]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

Yes. And there's a very practical side to it too. I work a lot in leadership inside organizations, and if you've no self awareness about your vulnerabilities as a leader, you will never ask for the kind of help that you really need. And you will never realize how much of the conversations that surround you by the people who report to you are actually protecting you from the knowledge of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses and incompetencies that you carry. If I'm in a leadership position, so many of the. Of the conversations that surround me are protecting me from. From yourself, from my own self awareness. Because people have an intimate understanding of how vulnerable we are about our vulnerabilities. Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

Yes, there's the phenomena of blessing, which is powerful in all our great religious traditions. Very powerful. In the Irish tradition, there are hundreds of forms of blessing. The greatest blessing you get every on a daily basis in Ireland is the blessing of welcome. People will welcome you in a very overt way into a house, into a bar, into an experience. You're very welcome here. You're here in Ireland. That's a blessing. That's a blessing of invitation of saying there's something here for you that you're going to be pleased by. So it's really. And my mother's understanding of blessing was always because she had ability to say things to people that were a form of blessing. And I asked her when I was 14 years old, I said, mother, what's a blessing? You do it so well. She said, well, the blessing's not just wishing something. Well, for someone, a real blessing is where you wish something for them that they did not realize they wanted for themselves. But you say it. So in other words, you've perceived that the present seasonality of their life.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[David White]

Which they've refused to enter. But you see what they have.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[David White]

It's like my English master when I was 14 old, telling me that I, I had a real talent as a poet and that I should take it seriously.

[Interviewer]

But you didn't see it yet.

[David White]

I was on the edge of it, but with trepidation, you know, who was I? I was 14 years old. I'm part of this tradition. It's like a. It goes back hundreds of years. It's got Shakespeare, it's got Milton, it's got Wordsworth, it's called Emily Dickinson. Who Am I? Yeah. And then you get the imprimatur, you get the mitzvah, you get the invitation to say you have the gift. Well, we can all do that with one another if we're sensitive enough.

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[David White]

Warning.

[Interviewer]

This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. How has writing changed you?

[David White]

I mean, it's changed me in so many radically physically wonderful ways. I'd be hard put to know where to start with that question. I remember when I lost my mother and I hadn't realized how entwined I was with my mother until I lost. And I'm the classic Irish mammy's boy, you know, firstborn son. And so it was like part of my own body being taken away.

[Interviewer]

You didn't know that before?

[David White]

Not as fully as I understood it after she died. Yeah. And it was just a shock to my system. And so I wrote intensively for six months. And many of those poems are in a book called Fire and the Earth. But after that, six months after I'd Written the whole cycle and saying, david, you've been really good to yourself there. I said, you've gone through seven years of grief in six months. Through the intentionality of writing, of saying all the ways that this ground is missing, this person is missing. And then not only that, but giving her away and granting her life back to herself. How much we hold the dead too tightly to us. And there's an ancient intuition of letting go of the dead so they can have their own afterlife without you. And I had this strange intuition when my mother had gone that she was in a place where she was no longer my mother. And it was really, really disturbing to me, as I say, the firstborn son of an Irish mother. But it was a place I had to go to. And it was this giving away that she actually, my mother lost her own mother when she was 13 and was at her mother's bedside at home when she died of heart failure back in the 1940s in Ireland. And so there was this real sense that my mother was going. Her heaven was a new childhood where she would be mothered again. Because when my grandmother, her mother died, my mother's childhood ended, really. She became a mother to the rest of the family. So I had this sense of having to give her away. Stop holding on to this radical person who just happened to be her mother. She had a life that was also completely separate and actually hindered by your coming to this world in many ways. Yeah. So just let her alone. To have her own life and her own death and her own way forward.

[Interviewer]

You still hear her voice?

[David White]

I've. Funnily enough, I've had a good 10 years where I haven't heard her voice. And then just over the last year, because of radical circumstances in my life, she's come back in again in a. In a way in which she's been giving me very specific advice, actually. It's like, oh, there you are again. And whether it's the inner voice, you know, a part of yourself, or whether it is an actual other voice, it doesn't really matter. This beautiful person became a part of your cellular structure and you became a part of theirs. So it's irrelevant whether the voice is actually other than you. Are you yourself?

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And not knowable.

[David White]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Do you still speak to her?

[David White]

I do. I'll often, if I'm in going through the fire of some difficulty, I will say, come on then, mom, give me your best. I just detain you for a minute. You know, you don't have to. I don't need you. Here, you've got other fish to fry. I know, but just give me your best for a moment and then I'll get this sense.

[Interviewer]

How do we change in the presence of water?

[David White]

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.

[Interviewer]

You were just connected to everything.

[David White]

Yeah. And it was through the revelation of water. So we naturally, unconsciously have a very, very powerful relationship to any form of water. Just turning on a tap and water appearing should be, the older you get, more and more miraculous. And in fact, one of the signal transformations of human health in any community is the ability to get clean water into those people. So water engineers are the unsung heroes of human society. Actually, it's the single biggest transformation you can make to human life.

[Interviewer]

What can and can't be held in words?

[David White]

Well, you're asking someone who's mostly Irish, and I'd say there isn't anything that can't be held in words. Yeah, yeah. So words can hold a lot of silence. So words can create silence. So, yes, you need silence by itself in order to understand certain things, that the beauty of words can create that powerful silence. And in fact, I often feel when I'm speaking on stage that it's the silences that are leading me on. So I'm following the silences because I'm following the listening in the silence. It's where people fall most silent that indicates the next step. But that silence is created by words. So we've all had the experience of saying something to someone in a very powerful way, and it just stops everything. So I'd say more things are possible than we know with words.

[Interviewer]

When you step out on stage, you stamp your foot.

[David White]

I ground myself. I often feel that people have an innate relationship with powerful silent attention, and they can recognize it in another person. So I can often walk on stage and just stand there, and immediately there's this powerful silence, and it's this powerful attentive listening just by the way you walk on, just by being silently engaged with everyone that's there in a very fierce way. And it's different than the silence you have when you go on stage saying, oh, my God, what am I going to say? Absolutely dying of nervousness. You know, people can recognize that. And then you'll hear fumbling and rustling in the audience and coughing, and you can walk on stage and go. The whole place just stops. So that's been an invitation to me to create that in my everyday conversational life. Not using it as a weapon over people to impress or to be this charismatic person, but just to tell people you're there in another way, that another conversation is absolutely available that normally lies beneath the surface of our everyday interaction, that you're there for it, they want to have it. So sometimes that's just touching a person on the shoulder or just listening and looking at the same time.

[Interviewer]

Do you remember the first time you were on stage?

[David White]

I remember the first time I was on stage as a poet.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about that.

[David White]

I'd been on stage doing lectures in marine biology and the Gaia theory quite a bit with slides. But the first time I was ever invited on stage at a large conference in Monterey Bay in California at the Cinema Conference center, which is all of these gorgeous wooden buildings built by one of America's great female architects actually, and their arts and crafts building. So I was invited to give a two hour keynote and I was invited as a poet and to use my poetry. So it was absolutely terrifying to me. It was only after the fact that I realized how terrifying it had been to me. Because who would I be if I failed at that? That was my ultimate goal and ambition in life. So here was this golden opportunity. You know, a creative opportunity is both an invitation and a dagger to your throat.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[David White]

And I felt the dagger more than I felt the invitation. So I went through this psychosomatic undoing. Actually, I fell ill. My talk was Thursday morning, but I turned up at the conference on Sunday evening. Now I turn up 20 minutes before the talk happens. But then I wanted to be ready. I wanted to hear the other conference speakers. But I was in a state of absolute exhaustion. And if I wasn't in my wooden chalet, I was laid on the floor literally at the back of the conference hall because I didn't have the strength to sit up listening to the other speakers to try and get inspiration. And this went on for three or four days. And on the evening before my talk, I wanted to prepare and I just couldn't. My brain was foggy, my body was empty. I said, well, I'll go to sleep. I'm bound to rally. In the morning I woke up, I was worse. It was just as if someone had pulled the plug. And then they came to get me from the chalet for my talk to 600 people in this hall. And I felt as if I was being led in front of a firing squad. And I went on stage and I remember I had a box of books because I felt like I was so flawed in my physical presence that my memory wouldn't be so. I had a box of portrait books and I put this cardboard box down on this desk. And everyone I know was saying, what's in the box? And interestingly enough, I never looked in the box once I started in. I was five minutes in, and the symptoms fell away completely in front of everyone. I was suddenly, completely clear, completely present, and my memory was flawless. And I spoke up to the first half. I got a standing ovation just for the first half. And in the middle of the second half, I heard the equivalence of the trumpets blaring, the angelic trumpets blaring, saying, this is what you're going to do for the rest of your life.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[David White]

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

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[David White]

Start close, Ed.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[David White]

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

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

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.

[Interviewer]

I said, God, you're right, your mother sounds very wise.

[David White]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Where do you think her wisdom came from?

[David White]

From grief. For many people, grief, especially in the childhood or adolescence that my mother experienced, that grief would lead to bitterness. But it's a testament to the bedrock of my mother's character that it turned to compassion. So at 13, she lost her mother. Her family was broken apart by the bad old Irish Catholic church who felt that a family should not stay in a household where there was only a father. My mother's brothers were put in with the Christian brothers and terribly abused. And my mother and her sister were threatened, you know, with the laundries which had been covered, you know, as places of just terrible enslavement really. And so she fled Ireland at 15 with her sister to England. That would be enough, you know, to traumatize any and to be adrift in a world where you're not fully accepted. And at that time there was a lot of prejudice towards the Irish in England. It's not there in the same way anymore. But somehow she had a blithe, celebrative spirit that was able to overcome all those difficulties. I mean, my mother was so young. We once drove out to the first woollen mill that she worked in when she was 15 when she came to Yorkshire. The dark satanic mills that Blake spoke of, it was one of those. And she was so young, she used to work an eight hour shift and then go and play in the park after she'd finished her shift. That's how young she was. So I don't know where she got. She had just a genius for compassion and walking an Irish mile in other people's shoes.

[Interviewer]

How was your inner experience from day to day? Would you say you're even keeled or is it a rollercoaster ride?

[David White]

Oh, it's I'm even keeled, yes. I think that comes from my father's Yorkshire actually. There's a wonderful stoical, grounded, unperturbable aspect to the Yorkshire character. Not getting over excited about things, you know, having a philosophical view and a good sense of humor at the same time. So I think that was a really good steady for me. Plus, you know, I started rock climbing with older men in my early teens and keeping a cool head in the midst of difficulty and danger in ostensibly dangerous situations. You know, 3, 4, 5, 600, 700ft above the ground while being engaged in practical competencies, rope work. And I think that also steered my character. And then I was a naturalist guide in the Gallipagos Islands aboard boats where things were going wrong. Every day you're sailing on this death dealing medium called the ocean. And we were sailing, we were in literal sailboats, we were sailing without gps, without navigation lights in the islands and by dead reckoning and by night so that people could visit places ashore. So my job was to be calm and collected in the midst of wild experiences.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about your substack.

[David White]

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

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[David White]

And this has happened before in Starbucks, in Chicago Airport. And then I say, could I have a Double Americana with foam on top? People say, are you David White? And so she said, are you David White? So that started the conversation. I said, what's your life? Then she said, oh, I'm an executive at subsdec. I said, well, it's a terrible name, but what is it? Yeah. So she explained it and really was quite convincing about how good it was for, for writers and that it was a kind of trust behind a non profit trust which is much more trustable than being run by billionaires. And so she said, listen, have your assistant get in touch with me and I'll put her in touch with my people and we'll do it all for you. I said, right, okay. And it's absolutely remarkable. First of all, I love the design, the white space, the font, the way I can put my photography in there too. So the whole feeling of it just has real integrity. And so I'm trying to migrate people over from my other platforms to substack. It's where I can put my new work. People can sign up and be free and get a lot of my work, but the new work is behind the paywall. So it just works very well to support my work and to give me an incentive to write new work, actually.

[Interviewer]

Great.

[David White]

It's very close to the reader's circle that I first set up for constellations one, which was just by email then. Very primitive. 100 people paid 100 bucks to get 24 essays, 12 of which I'd written. And so I was on a deadline after that, but I found the deadline really wonderful.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, motivation.

[David White]

Exactly. I'd find myself, my assistant Julie would call me and say, oh, tomorrow. And I'd find It would be 10 o' clock at night in Paris, so I'd have to go down in the lobby and write my heart out for three hours.

[Interviewer]

Had you ever worked on deadline before or no?

[David White]

Not in that way.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[David White]

But I found it incredibly, incredibly good.

[Interviewer]

For me, it's an incredibly useful tool. As long as it doesn't take over.

[David White]

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

[Interviewer]

How is speaking ideas different than writing ideas?

[David White]

Something occurs in the spaciousness of not having to say something to someone else. But it's almost like a conversation with some deep, deep line of resistance within yourself.

[Interviewer]

Like a soliloquy, really?

[David White]

In a way, yes. Yeah. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings of arrows of outrageous fortune, you know, that has this rhythmic descent into the body. But I do believe with practice you can get very close speaking, because I speak extemporaneously all the time. And many of my best ideas have come to me on stage in front of people, where I overhear myself saying things that I was either terrified of saying before or that I just discovered. I'm less terrified now, whatever I come up with. But I used to be terrified. When I was younger and I was starting to speak about death and grief and wounds, my younger self was deeply disturbed on stage by what would occur. The phenomena, the physical phenomena of standing there with perhaps my right knee shaking or my facial twitch and a tremor in my body. And the invitation was just to feel it more actually and to make yourself larger and to put your physical sense of yourself down in your hara. In your body, to hold it. Once I learned how to do that on stage, I started being less scared either about what I was overhearing myself saying or by the embarrassment I was becoming in front of an audience of a thousand people.

[Interviewer]

So do you record all of your speaking engagements?

[David White]

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

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

It would. And I should do more of that. But I don't. But whenever I do it, I say, oh my God, I've forgotten that. I knew that. I always place the priority of the new frontier above what I've done already. Sometimes you leave a few frontiers behind you. So I think I could probably do more of that.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

Yes, exactly. You get a kind of self forgetfulness, which is lovely. I get that now, even in my three Sunday series. Looking at the little green light at the top of my big screen there. I'm in my study, but I'm talking to thousands of people around the world. But there's an entrainment and an entrancement in which I feel quite natural and in which I get into that wonderful state of self forgetfulness where you're speaking directly just as you would over a glass of wine with a friend, where you're no longer counting every word. Or measuring every sentence.

[Interviewer]

When you look at the green lights, are you picturing someone or.

[David White]

No, I have a sense of this dark theater almost that expands out to the horizons of the world. So I do have an imaginative sense of people in various wonderful corners of the planet. Just because at the end of my three Sundays, people comment in the comment box.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[David White]

But I always ask them to say where they are. And you get these wonderful, wonderful. Oh, I'm in the Pyrenees. You're in a stone farmhouse. I'm in a house on stilts overlooking the water in Malaysia. And I'm on the Barrier Reef in Australia. I'm in Hoboken. It's just as exotic, actually, when you think about it. And so I do have that sense, that planetary wide physical sense of people listening.

[Interviewer]

When you hear the name of a place, do you imagine what it looks like or.

[David White]

Now I do, yeah. I see a physical picture, yes. So often if I've been there, then it will be an image I carry from the place. Or if it's one where I haven't been, then I've got some imaginative image I may have carried from childhood because I was a great armchair explorer as a child. So if someone says Timbuktu, I have an immediate image of adobe like huts and thatched roofs.

[Interviewer]

Based on reading, not based on being.

[David White]

Based on reading and imagination, which may or may not be accurate, but still it carries that imaginative cargo of invitation that we felt as children when we heard certain glamorous names. You know, San Francisco.

[Interviewer]

It's an interesting thing that.

[David White]

Rio de Janeiro.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

The name conjures something in us.

[David White]

Yes, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I tried to capture that in the poem Santiago, which I read in our last conversation. The way that a place shimmers in our imagination but is always calling us to a meta voyage beyond that place and a different understanding as you go along to shed the image. I'm just trying to recall the last lines of the poem, which are, you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach. You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach. As if all along you thought the end point might be a city with golden domes and cheering crowds and turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road. You Found just a simple reflection and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back. And beneath it, another invitation. All in one glimpse. Like a person or a place you had sought forever. Like a bold field of freedom that beckoned you beyond. Like another life. And the road, the road still stretching on.

[Interviewer]

Spectacular.

[David White]

That's what lies beneath the image.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[David White]

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

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[David White]

There's some unconscious intuition that says, I'm going to subvert the image that's now drawing me. I'm going to go to the actual place which is going to involve some kind of shriving, some kind of molting, some kind of stripping away loss. Loss. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

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

[David White]

I think it's a constant human experience. Yeah. I think not quite hereness is the hallmark of being human. I mean, it's interesting to feel quite affectionate towards AI at the moment in the way AI is actually not quite here at the moment. It's like a wayward college friend, you know, that's coherent most of the time and then suddenly falls into some kind of delusionary dream world of their own. But I think it's probably one of the most difficult and most intimate doors that a human being has to go through is the way you don't feel connected. Not quite here, not quite your best. And being able to dwell in your not quite hereness is actually coming close to the essence of the way you hold the conversation of life. Because when you think about it, it's the gap, it's the opening, it's the invitation to the depths. And what is missing that calls us deeper and deeper into the question. And in fact, Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic of the 13th century, when asked, what is the essence of God, Eckhart said, God is pure absence. God is pure absence. He must have thought the listener was up to the understanding, because this is like his own master giving a really powerful koan. To a. To an adept, God is pure absence. It's what you feel is most missing from you. So our everyday not missingness. You know, when you wake up after a restless night, if the moon has kept you awake or your troubles have kept you awake, it's the easiest thing in the world to skip over that restlessness and to say, well, the coffee will put me right, or a cold shower, but just to. When you first wake, to dwell in that not quite hereness. It's actually a step into your essence. Tetragrammatron.

[Interviewer]

Tetragrammatin is a podcast.

[David White]

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

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