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- [00:02]
David Whyte
Tetragrammaton. I'm memorizing the big poem which is called Still Possible. It's a good dozen pages long. It's still possible to feel your body as fully here and fully you, but not quite your own. To find you can live both entirely as yourself and in the lovely anonymous multitude of elements around you. So that's the phrase, that you can live both entirely as yourself and in the lovely anonymous multitude of elements around you. That you've always been a brother and sister to the clouds beyond the window or have lived your secret unspoken marriage with the pale blue sky for more years than you could ever remember. And that you have always been proud to be, through all your difficulties, a loyal companion and friend to the foaming tide, coming and going, appearing and disappearing with you and for you, day after day on the ceaseless shore. Yeah, so there you've got all of those companions that we've co evolved with. We've co evolved with the blue of the sky as an ally to our happiness actually. To mountain air, to the aromas of the earth underground and to the way the light changes in the sky. To the proximity of other human beings that we love. We're surrounded at all times by various visible and invisible spectra of belonging. How lovely. Anonymous multitude of elements around us. The poem actually starts with the most difficult possibility of all. Still possible. It's still possible to be kind to yourself, to drop constraints and fall often to your knees. It's not too late now to bow to what beckons the world still swimming around you as you kneel, transfigured by what sweeps on. It's still possible to leave every fearful former self in the wake of newly heard words minted from an astonished mouth. It's still possible to feel your body as fully here and fully you, but not quite your own. To find you can live both entirely as yourself and in the lovely anonymous multitude of elements around you.
- [02:45]
Interviewer
Did you write that to yourself?
- [02:47]
David Whyte
I did, yeah, I wrote it. This was my big lockdown poem, in a way.
- [02:52]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like that.
- [02:54]
David Whyte
Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah, it's giving. I often there is the poetry, what I call the poetry of self admonition. In other words, giving yourself a good telling off. Yeah, yeah. So I've got one called Self Portrait. Doesn't interest me if there's one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you can know despair or see it in others. If you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look Back with firm eyes saying, this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living, falling toward the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live day by day with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of Yeshua defeat. I have heard in that fierce embrace even the gods speak of God.
- [03:50]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [03:51]
David Whyte
Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, I had a while when I wrote it.
- [03:54]
Interviewer
That's a good one.
- [03:56]
David Whyte
So thank you for the corroboration. Yeah. So that's the self admonition that's looking in your mirror in a sense, saying, you're bigger than this. You know, it doesn't interest me if there's one God. How many gods? Stop wasting your time with those abstract theological questions. Yes, doesn't interest me if there's one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned, if you can know despair or see it in others. That was my mother's question that I inherited. It's mine now. You know. If you can know despair or see it in others. If you are prepared to live in this world, if you're prepared to live in this world with its harsh need to change you, if you can look back with fierce eyes saying, this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living, falling toward the center of your longing. If you are prepared to live day by day with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard in that embrace even the gods speak of God. And a really powerful line for me there was, I want to know if you can live with the consequence of love. Yeah, because we can all fall in love. But then staying with the love and through to its full maturation, that's what will kill you.
- [05:19]
Interviewer
And God. Speak of God is.
- [05:22]
David Whyte
Yeah, yeah. The whole thing breaks open. It's not strong. Yeah. It's everyone saying it at the end, the chorus. Yeah. This is another poem in the tradition of self admonition. Everything is waiting for you when you're losing faith and you're operating from the part of yourself that's not courageous enough to understand what's occurring when you're operating from the periphery. So the accusation, Jacuz, I accuse you, that's penetrating. It's not just an accusation. It's actually a way of penetrating to a deeper part of yourself in your self reflection. Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you're alone, as if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no Witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely even you at times have felt the grand array, the swelling presence and the chorus crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you or the window latch grants you courage. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come. The doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you. And the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream ladder to divinity. Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink. The cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you.
- [07:11]
Interviewer
When you say the words, they make you smile. It's very beautiful.
- [07:16]
David Whyte
Thank you. Yes.
- [07:19]
Interviewer
Great power in the words.
- [07:20]
David Whyte
Yeah. The phone is our enemy at times, but it's a lovely sweet mercy to say. And the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream ladder to divinity. You can turn any amplification of your voice into an entrance into heaven. Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you're alone, as if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely even you, even you at times have felt the grand array, the swelling presence and the chorus crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you or the window latch grants you courage. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come. The doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you. And the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream ladder to divinity. Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle, the is singing even as it pours you a drink. The cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are just unutterably themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you.
- [08:52]
Interviewer
So what's the feeling when you write that?
- [08:55]
David Whyte
I seem to remember an explosive sense of emotion, actually. And just a sweet feeling of having said it just right and therefore having helped others through it too. That others could join me in that beauty. You know the time when you're trying to find words for a friend and you don't have much hope, but suddenly you find them.
- [09:16]
Interviewer
Yes.
- [09:17]
David Whyte
And you say, oh my God, I Just said it. Right. You know, and they look up and they hear what you said. That's the experience I had there of just having found the sweet spot of both speaking and listening at the same time. And so I knew the poem had a future, would live on.
- [09:36]
Interviewer
Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think some words land in the body and other words that mean the same thing don't have that impact?
- [09:46]
David Whyte
It's often because the foundation of the word is in an abstract language. So a lot of the Latinate words in English are the abstracted words. So they were used in the church, they were used in law, they were used in institutions, but they weren't used by the common people. So the words that often touches in a very physical way are from the Anglo Saxon. They could be also from the Norman, French or the aristocracy when they were touched by their language. Or they could be from the Norse or Danish, as they were in the north of England where I grew up. So I think it's often to do with the root, daily use of the word. Shakespeare had this brilliant ability to layer word upon word, often using the Latinate at the end, the Latinate derivations after he'd set the physical sense of the word in your mind.
- [10:44]
Interviewer
Can you give me an example of that?
- [10:47]
David Whyte
When in disgrace with fortune in men's eyes I all alone be weep my outcast state and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries and think upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me light to one more rich in hope Featured like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope with what I most enjoy contented least yet in these thoughts myself almost despising Happily I think on thee and then my state, like to the lark at break of day Ascending from sullen earth Sings hymns at heaven's gate for thy sweet love remembered Such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings. I was hoping to come across an example in the middle of that, but that was actually mostly very physical language, apart from the word state. He loves to use the word state, Shakespeare, but he always sets an earthy context for the use of it, Whereas we would bring in the word state and it would hang abstractedly by itself. So I suppose that's a good example.
- [12:11]
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- [13:40]
Interviewer
What makes.
- [13:41]
David Whyte
A place holy this is fascinating actually, because I lead people to pilgrim places in my walking tours, my poetry and walking tours, whether they're in Italy or the Himalayas or Japan or the north of England, most especially in the west of Ireland. Holy wells and tombs and places where many of the great mythic dramas of the Irish imagination took place. So I've actually thought about this quite a lot. There's one place, for instance, called Coleman's Bed. And in Ireland, a bed means a place where someone slept. So it means a dwelling place, really. The Irish word is lobber. So you'll often have the word lobber and then the name of the person who lived there. So Lobber Fordrick, the bed of Patrick or Lobber Coleman, the bed of Colman. These were Irish saints. Yeah, but sometimes it will be a bed where Irish mythic figures were supposed to have slept the night. There's one place which is a place where a very famous abbot called Coleman would go away from his monastery out into the wild limestone mountains now called the Burren. And he found this place under this cliff, a cliff called Eagle Rock. And he found a cave there. And there was running water, a holy well, cress, hazel trees. So he's got protection from the wind and the weather. And he would go out there, away from his monastery to reinforce his contemplative practice. Because actually, when you're in the monastery, there's no place more political than a monastery, actually. So you need a monastery to get away from the monastery. And I've worked in a lot of them, so I know the dynamics. So he'd go up to this place and the Irish saints were very much like the Hindu gurus. Hindu gurus would not have an official sanction from a Vatican saying they were a saint, but they would be called saints by the local people. And people would take them fruit and revere them and come for darshan or whatever, for a blessing. It was much the same with many of the Irish Saints, particularly the ones who lived alone. And so Coleman was part of this really wild interpretation of Christianity. I think one of the best interpretations of Christianity that's existed in the fact that the revelations of Jesus could be seen in the wind rustling the leaves of a tree, or a stag belling at the end of a valley, or the clouds racing over the mountains, just as much as they could be read in in a Bible. In the stories, they had this Druidic experience of the wild world. There was even Celtic St. Francis in the form of St. Kevin, and he had this remarkable relationship with the animal world. He'd drop his prayer book in the water and a heron would bring it back and he'd drop it again, or an otter would bring it back. And there was one famous time he was praying in the chapel. And the Celtic monks prayed not in the Roman way, with their hands together, but in the old Druidic way, with their hands out like this. They also had an interesting tanzia. Instead of a bald patch in the middle of their heads, their hair was shaven halfway back and then long at the back. So they would have looked incredibly cool. Actually, it was more of a druidic tantra. And St. Kevin's supposed to have been in his chapel with his hands out, and his hand was near the window, and he was praying for so long that a passing blackbird looked down and saw the perch and said, that would be a great old place to rest. So it came down. And so Kevin kept praying so that he wouldn't disturb the bird. But before he knew it, the bird had gone off and come back a couple of times with little snags of wool and twigs and leaves, and was building a nest. So in the story, Kevin has to keep praying until the nest is built. But then doesn't the bird lay an egg in the nest? And so Kevin has to keep praying until the egg is hatched. But then isn't there a little chick in the nest? And he has to keep praying on until finally the chick is fledged and flies off into the wild blue yonder with his mother. And then he's finally able to put his hands together. There's a famous poem by Seamus Heaney about Kevin putting his hands together and what it must have felt like, wow. But it's really, you know, it's an apocryphal story, but it's really a very precise story about the phenomenology of meditation. So it's very powerful image. So Coleman would have been of that lineage. And so Coleman's Bed is a beautiful place to go to. And I went up there with a friend to begin with who showed me the place. And then I'd go up by myself. And then I started taking my groups up there. And about 12 years into visiting this place, visiting every year, I started to say, what is it about this? Why do we come back to these holy places? Your question? Yeah. What is a holy place? And what draws you back like a magnet? And sometimes the holy place is just a short walk from your house to a place where you turn back. But that place is. Is holy in your mind because it's a place that nourishes you so fully. So I wrote this piece, it's called Coleman's Bed. And one of my readers actually counted 26 invitations in the poem. And it's really about the way a holy place invites you deeper and deeper into self understanding. But then I got a really straight, practical answer right at the end about why we would visit a place where a supposedly holy person lived. Yeah. In this case, Coleman. So this is the piece. It's called Coleman's Bed. Make a nesting now a place to which the birds can come. Think of Kevin's prayerful palm holding the blackbird's egg and be the one looking out from this place who warms interior forms into light. Feel the way the cliff at your back gives shelter to your outward view. Then bring in from those horizons all discordant elements that make a home. Be taught now among the trees and rocks how the discarded is woven into shelter. Feel the way things hidden and unspoken slowly proclaim their voice in the world. Find that far inward symmetry to all outward appearances Begin to welcome back all you sent away. Be a new annunciation. Make yourself into a door through which to be hospitable even to the stranger in you. See with every turning day how each season wants to make a child of you again Wants you to become a seeker. After birdsong and rainfall Watch how it weathers you into a testing in the tried and true Tells you with each falling leaf to leave and slip away even from the branch that held you to be courageous to be like that last word you'd want to say before you leave the world above all be alone with it all. A hiving off a corner of silence amidst the noise Refuse to talk even to yourself and stay in this place until the current of the story is strong enough to float you out. Goat then where others in this place have come before. Under the hazel by the ruined chapel below the cave where Coleman slept Become the stream that Makes the river flow and then the sea beyond. Live in this place as you were meant to, and then, surprised by your abilities, become the ancestor of it all, the quiet, robust and blessed saint that your future happiness will always remember. So the whole dynamic of a holy place where someone holy lived is that something good happened there that was a blessing on future generations. And the Celtic church actually reinvigorated post barbaric, post Roman Europe. Actually, all the foundations of the Benedictine monasteries across Europe were originally Irish foundations, actually. So they were a blessing to their time and they were remembered in individual characters as a blessing. So we go back because something good happened there, but the invitation is to, in many ways, is to be that saint for your future self. All of us can remember moments in our life where we got up from our chair, we picked the phone up and we called someone and it changed our life. Or we went out the door, we went to a concert, we went to a restaurant, we met people. If we hadn't have gone out the door, if we hadn't have stirred ourselves in whatever form that stirring took place, we would be immeasurably impoverished. So you can go back and thank that saintly moment, that person. You were in a kind of pilgrimage. You go back and say, thank God, David. Thank God, Rick. You went out the door, you went to the concert, you met that person. But the corollary of that is, what could I do now that my future self would come back and thank me for?
- [23:33]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [23:34]
David Whyte
Yes. Yeah.
- [23:35]
Interviewer
So beautiful.
- [23:36]
David Whyte
Become the ancestor of it all.
- [23:38]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [23:38]
David Whyte
The quiet, robust and blessed saint that your future happiness will always remember.
- [23:49]
Interviewer
You told me a story about coming into a situation some time ago and meeting a person and saying, this is how you meet someone you'll know for the rest of your life. Tell me about that.
- [24:03]
David Whyte
That was at the time of my son's birth. And there were. There were three couples who had three boys together. We were one of the couples. And the women, of course, got to know each other through all the Lamar's classes and yoga and God knows what. And we men just met each other at the time of the birth, in fact, after the births. First there was David Bourne. Then there was my son Brendan. And then there was Nico Bon to Brian and Irini. And we all made a pilgrimage to see the last baby. So we were all there in the room, except I was the last person to come into that room where the mother was with Nico. And when I came through the door, I saw this man, young man my own age, sat looking through the bars of the Bed at the bottom. It was an old fashioned metal hospital bed. And I saw his face and I said to myself, this is how you meet people you will know for the rest of your life. This is how you meet a person. And it was so prophetic. We became such close and intertwined friends. I'm going to his house in Oxford and we became close friends, artistic friends. He was a book designer and calligrapher and one of the best book designers in Britain actually. But also I inveigled him into going into the mountains and starting rock climbing. We became mountaineering and alpine and rock climbing buddies for years, with our lives literally in each other's hands. So here we are, 40 years later, literally still in that powerful relationship. It's that intuition of friendship. You know, if you have a young son or daughter and they're sometimes desperate to play with another friend, you take them out to a playground and they see another boy or another girl and you can feel their body all a quiver just for that companionship, that playmate. We all have it within us still. And I actually think, I think the making of new friends is a real hallmark that you're still alive. I think, for instance, in North America, one of the tragedies of male society is that American males cruise on the friendships they make up until college and then everything after that is predicated on whether you're working together or not. And if you're working together, you might have a friendship that endures, but as soon as you work in another place. And part of the corollary of that is that American men often run their emotional lives through their women, so they don't have a direct emotional exchange with another man around their deepest difficulties or fears. That's a generality. Of course there are great, there are American men who are able to make, of course, yes. But the ability in each epoch of your life to make a new friend, this is a sign that you're still there, you're still a player, you've still got an edge, you can still recognize the new territory embodied in another person. I mean, I feel that with you and our meeting. Yes, it's a delight. Oh, here's another friend.
- [27:26]
Interviewer
It's a good feeling.
- [27:27]
David Whyte
Actually, there's a lovely story. My friends had their grandson over, we'll call him Tommy, and they'd invited a friend over to him to play and the friend was coming in an hour. And you know what an hour feels like to a seven year old boy, you know, and so he sat by the window staring out of the window. At the driveway for 20 minutes or so. So his grandmother said, tommy, come over here. I'll get you a big pile of books. And then time will go past until your friends come. And he just hung his head and he said, no, no, Grandma. I think I'll just sit anxiously by the window. That was so sweet. I learned a lot from that accident. Sometimes when you're just anxious, you just need to be anxious. You just need to wait anxiously by the window in your life. Sometimes it was just a moment of absolute freedom for me.
- [28:22]
Interviewer
How can we develop our speaking voice?
- [28:27]
David Whyte
Definitely by listening to ourselves. Hearing your voice out of your body, or more often, just above your shoulders in your head. So you hear my voice now? I practice my voice. It's going through my soles into the ground. It's down in my belly, my chest, my legs. If I take my voice up just above the shoulders, I'm immediately less interesting to listen to. You don't want to hear me as much, actually. As soon as I take my voice down into the body, it takes on the tidal rhythm of the breath. And it takes the amplitude and resonance of the breath, too. And it's not just putting on a deep voice. It's coming, coming from some other place. And people unconsciously can tell how much of you is there. Even if they've never studied the voice in their life. Even if they don't register what voices are like. They instinctively know how much of you is there from your voice. You got this explanatory voice all the time up here, trying to defend itself, trying to justify things all the time. And as an Irish friend of mine says, never explain. Your friends don't need it, and your enemies won't believe you.
- [29:44]
Interviewer
That's great.
- [29:45]
David Whyte
This part is constantly trying to explain so you can record yourself. But it is a whole apprenticeship in and of itself. It's like learning an instrument. You wouldn't pick up the guitar and be able to play a John Renbourne riff right away. You just have to go at it slowly, practice and develop it. And I had an instinctual draw towards understanding the place of the voice in the body. I remember when I was 13, wanting to spend more time around my father because I felt intimidated by him. And because I felt my voice would go up here when I was with him, Just like it would with the school bully in the yard, you know, at school and with my friends. My voice was easier down. So I was really interested. And for some reason, who knows why? Because of my future. I don't know. And so my father was very surprised when I, I started saying, where are you going, dad? Oh, I'm going to see your Uncle Tom. Can I come with you and yeah, of course you can sit in the front seat and practice speaking to my father while keeping my voice down in my body, in my stomach, and then watching the way it would squeak upwards. So I've been naturally drawn to that. But I know what it takes because it's been decades. If I listen to my Voice in my 30s, I go, oh my God, I had so far to go, you know, But I thought I was the bee's knees at the time. Yeah, yeah. So the ease you can bring into your voice, the tidal movement, the arrival with the other person's listening, this is part of the dance of the voice, is to bring the other person along with what you're saying so that they're almost saying it as you are saying it.
- [31:47]
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- [33:15]
David Whyte
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- [33:23]
Interviewer
Tell me about cadence and rhythm.
- [33:27]
David Whyte
Yeah, I mean the cadence and rhythm of poetry is the cadence and rhythm we find ourselves in whenever we have to carry deep meaning to another person. When you are bringing very traumatic news to another person around a death or something they just don't want to hear, you will fall into a natural poetic rhythm in your voice. You will also say it three times in three different ways and you will touch their shoulder or their hand, as you say, contact. Physical contact with the voice, with the body, and you may even fall into iambic pentameter, which is how human beings speak in English, I should say, when you're in a flow of Carrying a narrative which must be heard in its depths.
- [34:20]
Interviewer
Have you ever been to a fortune teller?
- [34:24]
David Whyte
Only in the street, yes. Oh, but I have, in a sense. I had a session with the state shaman of Tibet, actually, in his exile in Nepal in a Tibetan refugee camp. I got taken there and it was really quite extraordinary, really. So he set up this altar of mirrors and everything and brought down this deity. And I was up there and I went into some kind of an altar of mirrors. Yeah, it was this altar, little altar of mirrors. The understanding I got from the translator was that this powerful deity was brought down into this altar. And then he took on the voice of the deity and I absolutely collapsed on the floor. It was really an extraordinary physical experience. Wow. He said that he saw me in a past life as a monk, actually didn't say whether it was a Tibetan monk or whatever it was, but I was a monastic and had been a monastic, and I was delirious, actually. It was really extraordinary. I hardly heard anything he said. I only heard from others what he said about it. And that was the one thing he said. So that was. I suppose that was close to being a fortune teller, except at another level. But I have had experiences with what I would call real, authentic. You could only say psychic powers, really about.
- [35:58]
Interviewer
Yeah, tell me.
- [35:59]
David Whyte
And that was with. That's a really. A man of great integrity, David Spengler. And he's very quiet, very unassuming, which is always a good recommendation for someone. But he and his older woman friend Myrtle, were really quite extraordinary. And so Myrtle, when I was in my late twenties with almost nothing to show for my poetic future, told me in no uncertain terms that I would be on stage in front of thousands of people, and that I would be extraordinarily famous and that it would be through poetry. And I haven't thought about this for years, actually. You've just reminded me of it. And it was really a very powerful experience of being, as I said earlier, being mitzvahed, of being touched, of being given the anointment in a way. And I could feel it in my body. I could feel this tingling sense of anticipation. I couldn't sleep that night. My body was just aglow with this prediction out of nowhere, really, that was one of recognition in my own body that this is what actually lay ahead of me. So that was absolutely extraordinary. There's no corroborating. I have no corroborating understanding from my training in science of how that would occur.
- [37:31]
Interviewer
It's an amazing story.
- [37:33]
David Whyte
Yes.
- [37:33]
Interviewer
And the fact that that description of Being famous for poetry and speaking to thousands of people live. It's a very short list.
- [37:44]
David Whyte
Exactly. I mean if you're going to.
- [37:47]
Interviewer
It's a short list. It's not like you'll be on television. There are thousands and thousands of people on television. Hundreds of thousands of people. This is specific and it's a very short list.
- [38:00]
David Whyte
Yes. And I did not have to cross her palm with silver.
- [38:03]
Interviewer
That's remarkable.
- [38:04]
David Whyte
No, there was no, not even a thought of exchange for was just her seeing into me. So yeah, these things are deeply unsettling and deeply wonderful at the same time.
- [38:21]
Interviewer
Tell me about ritual.
- [38:23]
David Whyte
We have rituals that deepen our lives and we have rituals that keep life at bay. We all know what those might be. The doom scrolling on the Internet is one of the ways we numb ourselves. But there is a way of being on the Internet and actually discovering things that enliven you. So for instance, with regard to the Internet, my first ritual is to look at the worldwide moving BBC weather map and I click the option for all of the isobars so you see all these wonderful high and low pressures all around the planet. That's my first context. Before I look at any news or anything, I will just see what's happening in the contextual non human world. And it's so beautiful, the map is so beautiful. And then you can click the arrow and it will move through the next week with all of these swirling high and low pressures. That's just a little ritual I have of making this portal, this screen for a moment sacred. Therefore every other moment could be sacred. I'm looking at our astonishing planet with the weather systems on it. The map has no boundaries on it, no frontiers, no human demarcations. So it's like a clean sweep of.
- [39:47]
Interviewer
Your mind from looking at them regularly. Can you now feel the pressure zones changing? Can you feel what low pressure feels like?
- [39:58]
David Whyte
I suppose I can, yeah. You know, in Britain almost everyone grew up with these isobars on their maps. I was so surprised when I came to the States for instance, and the weather maps had no isobars on them. And in fact, when I was at university I learned how to make them actually from the data coming in from all the different weather stations. It was very satisfying, these lines suddenly appearing on your weather map. And so I actually go straight to the isobars rather than looking at what Apple weather says. Yes, because you can see the edge of a low front coming in, you can see where the rain is. So here's a piece I wrote on routine actually, which is often the way we create our rituals. So routine is the way we worship fully at the altar of the timeless. Routine is the way we step down from what is absolutely extraordinary into the miracle of an ordinary day and an ordinary hour. Routine is disguised ritual. Routine is not the routine word it has come so routinely to sound. Routine is how we disguise our rituals of attentiveness. And like all rituals, routines are a way of enriching our relationship to a puzzling and sometimes overwhelming world. Or keep that same fierce world at bay. I drink my coffee at the same time, by the same window every morning to appreciate the tiny miraculous nature of its taste or contemplate the extraordinary nature of my changing daily realities. Or I drink it feeling besieged. I drink it hurriedly, not quite ever fully present, but also not wanting the ritual to end. My precious time alone about to end too soon. My own set time, but a time set against the world's besieging time. Routine as defense against reality becomes my own self constructed temporary prison cell, repeatedly visited until made permanent. A place where I go to close the door and lock it from the inside. My precious quiet, my only way of keeping the world at bay. Routine as protection and defense always feels merciful and protective to begin with, while slowly over time, narrowing our character and our sense of possibility, all the while closing down our freer relationship with time itself. And then I go on to talk about the routines that are actually the opposite, that actually create an entrance into the timeless.
- [42:46]
Interviewer
That's wild. I never considered routine from that perspective before. Very beautiful.
- [42:51]
David Whyte
Yeah. And yet as an artist, you must have very invitational routines. Routines that open you or you couldn't have done what you've done. Routines that are life giving routines as living engagement only look like routines from the outside. A settled creative routine may only look like the unchanging, boring everyday existence we love to condemn. But everything in a fully engaged creative ritual of routine is being invisibly cradled into life inside that still figure. Shaving maple at the workbench or the silhouette chopping onions against the kitchen window. Or the seated practitioner sitting stock still against the wall, unmoving on their black meditation mat. A proper creative nourishing routine takes real imagination and real adaptability to sustain. Routine is anything but routine. Routine is the central ever changing discipline of an evolving, maturing, creative and ever surprising life. Yeah. Writing that actually changed my own approach to routine.
- [44:10]
Interviewer
How different is it? Writing with a word in mind, like routine?
- [44:16]
David Whyte
Yes.
- [44:16]
Interviewer
Versus writing poem, let's say.
- [44:22]
David Whyte
Well, I'd say the prose of an essay is about something Whereas a poem is the thing itself.
- [44:30]
Interviewer
But most prose are not limited to describing a word. No, it's a very narrow.
- [44:37]
David Whyte
Yes.
- [44:38]
Interviewer
Ask.
- [44:38]
David Whyte
Yes.
- [44:40]
Interviewer
You're putting yourself in a box when you start.
- [44:44]
David Whyte
Yes. Except usually I don't start with the word in isolation. I start with someone overhearing something. It might be in a conversation at a bar, or it might be in an exchange with another person. That opens up an insight I hadn't had before about the word. And then I'll start in. Now that I have written so many essays, I have a faith that I can start with any word and mine or redeem it in some way. Bring it into an understanding that has much more amplitude and depth. So I suppose I've learned. I think if I'd have started with words as a box, then I would have felt imprisoned by it.
- [45:41]
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- [47:10]
Interviewer
Is there an essay that you've written not based on a word?
- [47:15]
David Whyte
No, I've written prose books, but not.
- [47:19]
Interviewer
Not essays.
- [47:20]
David Whyte
No, I haven't. No. It started as a. Started with the word regret.
- [47:25]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [47:26]
David Whyte
Being requested to write on a single word and out of nowhere I got the word regret in the. In the restaurant in Paris and was so surprised by what came out that I was. I was suddenly incredibly happy to think of other words that I might redeem for myself. Because I did myself so much good around the word regret, I suddenly stopped having regrets about regrets.
- [47:58]
Interviewer
Yeah. You took the charge out of it.
- [48:00]
David Whyte
Yeah.
- [48:01]
Interviewer
Is there some aspect of that work that's like detective work?
- [48:06]
David Whyte
It does feel like detective work. Yeah, it does, yeah. Etymological detective work. It's the Etymology of the heart as well as the word itself. Yes, it's very satisfying. The one that I'm most proud of in many ways. I mean, there are the really powerful, impactful essays that knock you over like time and death, but the one I did on background, which is such a boring word, and I really taught myself about the power of background out of that essay. And you must work with that all the time with music. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the phenomena of passing into deeper forms of attention in Zen sitting is that the background becomes just as important as the foreground. In fact, you realize you never really saw the foreground until you saw the background from which it was emerging. Yes. So I say that background is not the you go first word that it seems to be. Actually, do you want to read a.
- [49:13]
Interviewer
Little bit of background?
- [49:13]
David Whyte
Let's try it. Stark's tongue in cheek here. Background is not the shy, retiring you go first word it seems to want to be. Background is underestimated and calls on us to widen our vision and open to a greater breadth of attention. Foreground dominates our lives, is overestimated in importance, and hides the greater context from which it has emerged. The neglect of background is the source of much of our present loneliness and most definitely our present unhappiness. Background is always what we start to pay attention to when we start to pay real attention. In Zen practice, one of the signs of deepening states of presence and intimacy with our surrounding reality is the way background stops being background, the way we stop choosing between near and far, past and present, near objects and those that seem to lie over the horizon of our understanding. Background shapes our seeing of a thing as much as the thing itself. The sun around a silhouetted maple actually outlines what we see as the shape of a tree. A tree, in our real, grounded physical apprehension of the world, is made of light and its absence as much as it is made of wood. Foreground has come to be a kind of obsession in our lives, making us unwitting slaves to too many of the things that are placed right in front of our noses. Numbers, results, graphs, the blurred screen full of endless messages. We obsess with what individual people seem to be saying to us, rather than the vast sweep of human mythological dynamics that lie behind their speech. Facebook, under all its multi headed disguises of Instagram, WhatsApp and threads, is aptly named trying as it is, to be the first thing we see every day in front of our noses, literally in our faces. Foreground is where we recognize too late in the news, most of our problems, but also most of the possibilities that have just slipped through our hands, all of which can only emerge from the greater context behind the news, the living, breathing, ever evolving background. Foreground without background is where we always come to recognize things too late. The ability to pay attention to background from the very beginning grants us a disguised clairvoyance in making it look as if we are able to look into the future. We understand what is about to happen by looking now at the background from where all our problems and possibilities first emerge. Paying attention to background as much as foreground is not only an introduction to our greater surroundings. Paying attention to background tells us we are already in a conversation with greater worlds and have been and have been for longer than we know. Bringing background into our life tells us how much we have been defending and fighting against acknowledging everything that has been there all along and has often been traveling faithfully from far away to knock on our door. Background and backdrop is the ultimate context of community. The birdsong, the wind in the trees, the eyes of the passing stranger trying to catch our eye for a morning hello, and even at the end of our walk, the warm hubbub of a coffee shop filled with waking voices. Background is our substrate of belonging. A shared communal background is our first remedy for loneliness. We've grown and evolved over the millennia with the green of grass and leaves to find every shade of that color soothing and inviting, and with the wind ruffling the blades to find refreshment with the blue of the sky to find it scintillating and with the spaciousness it creates in our minds literally uplifting. We are lonely today, not because we are losing contact with other individuals, but because we have lost our friendship with the sky and the moon and the stars that create the canopy beneath which all of our human relationships and friendships flourish and prosper in mutual awe. Direct contact with another foreground face and constant contact with with all the foreground explanations we conspire to make together is only a temporary cure for loneliness, often leading to disappointment in the specifics of a too predictable story and a too familiar life. But to share the breezy morning sky by the broad Atlantic with a passing stranger or live music when crammed into a pub full of unknown but foot tapping fellow listeners is another form of closeness, one sustained by a friendship with the wider world. Rather than making foreground relationships and foreground naming bear all the weight, background is, strangely, a doorway to close up intimacy, one that does not need the burden of asking of the relationship, what now? We share a sky, the sound of the rain the appreciation of music with almost all our fellow human beings. The shared greater context of our surrounding life is what grants the real possibility of deep friendship to our foreground friends, even prisoners who rarely see the sky, but who share a proper sympathetic understanding of their enclosed background and their curtailed background lives are given through their prison walls the possible intimacies of friendship. Background is half of what we see and hear. Background is half of what we do not see and hear. Background is our visible and invisible helpmate waiting for us to raise our heads to look and see. Background is the constellation of swirling forces out of which our life emerges and background holds our future, the horizon in our life that always draws us on. A life that can find true definition only through what always lies beyond it.
- [56:11]
Interviewer
Tetragrammatri.
- [56:20]
David Whyte
Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.
- [56:35]
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What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammaton? Counterculture Tetragrammatin Sacred geometry Tetragrammatin the avant garde Tetragrammatin Generative art Tetragrammatin the Tarot Tetragrammatin out of print music Tetragrammatin Biodynamics Tetragrammatin Graphic design Tetragrammatin Mythology and magic Tetragrammatin Obscure film Tetragrammatin beach culture Tetragrammatin Esoteric lectures Tetragrammatin off the grid Living Tetragrammatin Alt Spirituality Tetragrammatin the canon of fine objects Tetragrammatin Muscle cars Tetragrammatin Ancient wisdom for a new age upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and and see where you are drawn.