Speaker 1: 0:15

Hi, this is Umid Ashtari and Natasha McElhane. Our guest this week is David White. David is a philosopher, poet, who is the author of eight volumes of poetry, four books of prose as well as a collection of audio recordings. He travels and lectures throughout the world, bringing his own and others' poetry to large audiences. He also works with corporations to teach them about conversational techniques. He's just a dude.

Speaker 2: 0:42

He certainly is. He holds a degree in marine zoology and has worked as a naturalist guide in the galapagos islands. David also holds honorary degrees from newman university in pennsylvania and royal roads university in victoria, british columbia, and is an associate fellow of the saeed business school at the university of oxford. In our conversation we will focus on his most recent books consolationsolations 1 and 2, which are about the nourishment and underlying meaning of everyday words.

Speaker 1: 1:11

We will talk about words as the magnifying glass of the human condition.

Speaker 2: 1:16

His reading of Alone.

Speaker 1: 1:18

Not avoiding the difficult questions, his reading of Injury, the interplay between the poet and the listener.

Speaker 2: 1:25

His reading of horizon.

Speaker 1: 1:27

The hawk of the Galapagos.

Speaker 2: 1:30

And conversations we should stop having.

Speaker 1: 1:32

The difference between oven and love.

Speaker 2: 1:35

And that death only happens to other people. Let's listen.

Speaker 1: 1:42

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari.

Speaker 2: 1:44

And Natasha McElhone, and with us today is David.

Speaker 3: 1:48

White.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari and Natasha McElhone, and with us today is David White.

Speaker 3: 1:50

Hi, david, so exciting. Good to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:52

We thought we'd start today off by asking you which constellation you're most in need of today yourself.

Speaker 3: 1:59

Ah right, I think just the consolation of spaciousness, which I don't have a title for in the book. I think the threshold I'm on in my life now is about undoing and ease and broad horizons and letting myself radically alone in a way, and letting the world radically alone. So I have the title alone in the first book of constellations, looking at the redemptive aspects of that word, and so I suppose, uh, I suppose the the essay would be alone.

Speaker 3: 2:42

Alone, not as I suppose the essay would be alone, Alone, not as in lonely although that also has its redemptive aspects too but in feeling yourself a discrete being that's being met by all the other discrete beings of the world. So there's a clear space for that meeting.

Speaker 2: 3:01

Do you want to read Alone, to us Alone?

Speaker 3: 3:06

Yeah, it's the first, first uh titling what has now become constellations. One alone is a word that stands by itself, carrying the austere, solitary beauty of its own meaning even as it is spoken to another. It is a word that can be felt at the same time as an invitation to depth and as an imminent threat, as in all alone, with its returned echo of abandonment. Alone is a word that rings with a strange finality, especially when contained in that haunting aggregate, left all alone, as if the state, once experienced, begins to define and engender its own inescapable world. The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.

Speaker 3: 4:03

Being alone is a difficult discipline. A beautiful and difficult sense of being solitary is always the ground from which we step into a contemplative intimacy with the unknown. But the first portal of aloneness is often experienced as a gateway to alienation, to grief and abandonment, to grief and abandonment. To find ourselves alone or to be left alone is an ever-present, fearful and abiding human potentiality. Is an ever-present, fearful and abiding human potentiality of which we are often and abiding human potentiality of which we are often unconsciously and deeply afraid. To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement. When I wrote those lines, that's where the essay broke open. That's where I felt I'd said something new and I was ready to be consoled by what lay beyond that line.

Speaker 3: 5:18

To be alone for any length of time is to shed and now to skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement. The permeability of being alone asks us to reimagine ourselves, to become impatient with ourselves, to tire of the same old story, and then slowly, hour by hour, to start to tell the story in a different way, as other parallel ears, ones we were previously unaware of, begin to listen to us more carefully in the silence. This is very powerful in the Zen tradition the understanding that you will not find yourself, but the world will come and find you, and it will find someone at a much deeper foundation and with a much deeper generosity than the person who first started being silent For a solitary life to flourish, even if it is only for a few precious hours. Aloneness asks us to make a friend of silence and, just as importantly, to inhabit that silence in our own particular way, to find our own, very own way into our own particular and even virtuoso way of being alone.

Speaker 3: 6:41

To inhabit silence in our aloneness is to stop telling the story altogether. To begin with, aloneness always leads to rawness and vulnerability, to a fearful simplicity, to not recognizing and to not knowing, to the wish to find any company other than that not knowing. Unknown self looking back at us in the silent mirror. Unknown self looking back at us in the silent mirror. One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves. One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance, to begin with, to be left to ourselves. Aloneness begins in puzzlement at our own reflection, transits through awkwardness and even ugliness at what we see, and culminates one appointed hour or day in a beautiful, unlooked-for surprise at the new complexion beginning to form, the slow knitting together of an inner life now exposed to air and light, now exposed to air and light.

Speaker 3: 7:44

To be alone is not necessarily to be absent from the company of others. The radical step is to let ourselves alone, to seize the berating voice that is constantly trying to interpret and force the story from too small and too complicated a perspective. Even in company, a sense of imminent aloneness is a quality that can be cultivated. Aloneness does not need a desert or a broad ocean or a quiet mountain. Human beings have the ability to feel the rawest, most intimate forms of aloneness while living closely with others or beset by the busyness of the world. They can feel alone around a meeting table in the happiest, most committed marriage, or aboard a crowded ship with a full complement of crew.

Speaker 3: 8:36

The difficulty of being alone may be felt most keenly in the most intimate circumstances, in the darkness of the marriage bed, one centimeter and a thousand miles apart, or in the silence around a tiny, crowded kitchen table. But to feel alone in the presence of others is also to understand the singularity of human existence, while experiencing the deep physical current that binds us to others, whether we want that binding or no. Aloneness can measure togetherness, even through a sense of distance. Aloneness can measure togetherness even through a sense of distance. I've often thought you know intimate love relationship. You're often unconsciously measuring your closeness by how distant you are actually.

Speaker 2: 9:25

Oh, we're not too far apart.

Speaker 3: 9:26

Today we say or we're getting closer, and so we often measure things through an inverse calibration and quite often the ability to be happy with your aloneness gives you another place from which to actually feel the intimacy through closing that distance. Actually, at the beginning of the 21st century, to feel alone or want to be alone is deeply unfashionable. To admit to feeling alone is to reject and betray others, as if they are not good company and do not have entertaining, interesting lives of their own. To distract us and to actually seek to be alone is a radical act. To want to be alone is to refuse a certain kind of conversational hospitality and to turn to another door and another kind of welcome, not necessarily defined by human vocabulary.

Speaker 3: 10:33

It may be that time away from a work, an idea of ourselves or a committed partner is the very essence of appreciation for the other. It may be that time away from a work, an idea of ourselves or a committed partner is the very essence of appreciation for the other, for the work and for the life of another, to be able to let them alone as we let ourselves alone, to live something that feels like a choice again, to find ourselves alone as a looked-for achievement, not a state to which we have been condemned. To find ourselves alone as a looked-for achievement, not a state to which we have been condemned.

Speaker 1: 11:24

You see, I feel like you know me very well when you read those things out, and I think the essence of what you're doing is that you have stared into the abyss, you've jumped over all the guardrails, you've pierced the veil of ignorance and you've just sat there and looked at it. What was the original reason why you went on this journey and started living and thinking so deeply about this human condition?

Speaker 3: 11:51

oh my, that's the big question. I think it started, uh, with my mother, really, and, uh, the drama of my mother's life that had brought her from Ireland to England, and the understanding that she actually came from another world than the world of Yorkshire where I grew up. I mean, from a linguistic point of view, yorkshire has a dialect I grew up with a full dialect, actually and full of Norse and Danish words, and it's very down to earth, it's very blunt, it's very compassionate. In that bluntness actually, someone said you know, yorkshire, people say nothing until they say everything.

Speaker 3: 12:41

They don't hold back. So my mother's world was was, uh, completely different linguistic territory and, uh, it lived in lots of parallels at once. And my mother's life, you know, whereas, whereas my father had one clock that he that he lived, by which which told the actual time, my mother had four or five clocks around the house by which told the actual time. My mother had four or five clocks around the house, all of which told different times depending on what she wanted to do. And I grew up with these different parallel ways of looking at time and being in time and shaping your identity around things.

Speaker 3: 13:23

And my mother had all kinds of stories, and the stories would change every time she spoke. So I'd say I thought that, you know, I'd be five years old. I'd say I thought the donkey was in the field, mother, and she'd say no, the donkey was always in the road, you know, but the night before it had been in the field. But the whole story would change and there was this real sense that, as Oscar Wilde said, no amount of exaggeration would do justice to what actually happened. You're trying to get the actual spirit of the story across.

Speaker 3: 13:57

So I lived in these two worlds one, this movable, constellating, changeable existence from my mother's island and my father's absolute groundedness in what seemed like the everyday. But the Yorkshire groundedness has its own kind of surreal quality too, where it changes into its opposite. So I think I was really fascinated from an observational point of view, but also about how you could live in different ways and I always felt, you know, when I was looking across the Yorkshire landscape as a child, I used to have a stone wall. I'd go out to sit on, look out towards the moors, Saddleworth Moor and out to the west. I always felt as if I was looking at Ireland too at the same time as I was looking at the Yorkshire landscape, and my mother's inheritance was a kind of invisible parallel.

Speaker 2: 14:49

There's a beautiful parallel here. My dad lived in Saddleworth, lancashire, so I spent my holidays in the moors. Amazing, yeah, and my mum's Irish from Donegal, west coast of Ireland.

Speaker 3: 15:02

So Isn't that extraordinary.

Speaker 2: 15:03

Very similar, and perhaps that's why I respond so much to your writing. But I've heard you talk very often about this duality and then also where it crosses and where it meets. But that was just lovely hearing the word Saddleworth. I literally haven't heard that since I was a child.

Speaker 3: 15:21

So you know it probably enables you and the finer points of acting also, you know all these different identities that human beings can nestle into, yeah, and come to ground in and then penetrate to the other side of.

Speaker 2: 15:39

A lot of writers process through writing. Obviously, their toolkit is words, but they come to fruition or they're able to transmit them through the writing of them, through the practice of writing. For me, I find it difficult to, as you can tell, speak. I don't know what I'm going to say until I speak. So quite often, whilst I'm speaking, it becomes clear to me what it is I want to say. But it'll take a while.

Speaker 2: 16:05

And then I might edit and repeat what I say for clarity With you. It's so distilled. We were saying before we started that constellations too is so rich it's like a box of chocolates that you can only have one at a time. Well, actually I'm bad with a box of chocolates, I eat them all at once. So I also ate your book all at once. I was exhausted by the end of it. I mean, I felt torn into shreds and so emotional and so raw and like you'd sort of put your hand down my throat and just scooped out my innards and thrown them on the floor.

Speaker 3: 16:39

Well, you had the same experience. I had in writing it, which was very different than Constellations 1, actually, which was a much more spacious experience.

Speaker 2: 16:47

It's much more temple.

Speaker 3: 16:48

Yes, I wrote 60 essays in seven months, starting in January, so I was in a kind of delirium, 52 of which are in the book, and when I finished, for the first time in my writing career, I was mentally exhausted after writing a book, and so I had the same experience you had, actually, of just having to go out and garden and not look at it, in a way, except when I had to come back to do the final edits when they came back. That's a parallel experience to the writing, actually.

Speaker 2: 17:23

It's funny, you say about gardening, because I said to Rameed yesterday I said, and we were trying to sort of not define what you did, but just and not even classify, but just kind of.

Speaker 1: 17:36

Triangulate in some way.

Speaker 2: 17:37

Yeah, and also see what the difference between our responses was and the similarities, so that we could offer you a good sounding board. But one of the things I said is I said but he's a gardener of words our responses was and the similarities so that we could offer you a good sounding board.

Speaker 2: 17:45

But one of the things I said is I said but he's a gardener of words, he digs and with his trowel into each word and he sort of excavates it. It's like a child with an insect pulling off its legs and opening it up and seeing what's inside and and just being quite reckless with the whole thing. You know all convention is just split open.

Speaker 3: 18:06

My attempt is to keep the insect alive.

Speaker 2: 18:11

I think you killed a few and to let it fly out the window.

Speaker 3: 18:17

I always rescue insects and carry them outside.

Speaker 1: 18:20

Well, you rescue language 52 made it out of 60. 52 out of 60 made it. It sounds like from what you were saying. Yeah, you wrote 60 and 52 only because I would have.

Speaker 3: 18:31

Uh, they're waiting for constellations three now I see, I see yes, only because 52 was what I had set myself as a, an accidental number that occurred. For the first book. I wrote a. I had a reader's circle of 24 essays which people joined, and they got one every two weeks.

Speaker 3: 18:47

Yeah, it was just by email right and then I had a second reader's circle, another 24 for another year, and then I said, oh, we have a book and uh. And then I wrote a few more and the book came out and the first reviewers all said, oh, a pack of cards, 52 won for every week of the year. And I said, well, that was a coincidence. So. So I set myself uh 52, which seemed impossible. You know, in march or april, when I was on on essay number 19, and then I had many going in parallel. But it was a very physical experience.

Speaker 3: 19:23

I spent a week at an old castle in the Italian countryside. That's where the absolute, distilled essence of the book occurred. I wrote an essay every day for seven days. I was there alone, you know, and someone else was doing the cooking. So I had time in beautiful countryside. But I had almost physical, out-of-the-body experience, looking back at myself when I wrote the essay on time and also the essay on the body. You know the definition of the word conversation from the Latin is converse means inside-out, so it's literally the inside being on the outside and the outside coming in to find you on the inside, which is quite disturbing to our any settled identity we might have at the edges, where you've you've given yourself too rigid a name, or you've given the world too rigid a name, or you've given the world too rigid a name, or you've given your partner too solid a name.

Speaker 2: 20:28

Going into that. So I started talking about words and how it takes me personally a long time to find the words that I'm trying to say or to express the thought that I'm having. You're very articulate with words and you can be incredibly nomic and precise and economical with how you say something and also, as we said, the rich box of chocolates distillation. You're turning yourself inside out to find the truth of what it is you're trying to say. Do you do a stream of consciousness as you write? Do you like speaking as much as you like writing, or do you need?

Speaker 3: 21:02

to write in order to know what it is you want to say I do love speaking and I've been lucky.

Speaker 3: 21:08

You know, many poets are more introverted. It often comes with the territory, so they don't get out into the world. Or if they do read, they might not be good readers of their work. Actually, other people might read their work a lot better than they do. I've just been lucky in that I've been given this voice, you know, and in many ways I'm a kind of extroverted, introvert, so I spend a lot of time alone. But I also love to be in front of a crowd speaking and creating the magic there at the edge between what you think is you and what you think is not you. So that's a different art form, but they've been mutually reinforcing.

Speaker 3: 21:44

I've often overheard myself saying things on stage that are absolute revelations in the moment and it's brought out by the fierceness of the listening. If you engender real listening through silence and you follow the silence that you're creating in the room, it's a mutual dance. Actually, I often say a talk is listened into being. It's energy exchange. Working extemporaneously, I have, you know, hundreds of poems memorized so I can go in lots of different directions where the silence is inviting me, where people are inviting me in a way unconsciously. So that's being a mutual reinforcement.

Speaker 3: 22:25

And and you know, there's often this misconception when you start off in writing or in poetry especially in poetry that you're going to find this part of yourself that knows what to say, and once you've found it, you're going to speak from that place and the writing will flow. But it's actually almost exactly the opposite. You have to find the part of you that doesn't know what to say in the face of the revelation, in the face of what you're seeing anew in the world, and that's the place from which you'll write. Good poetry is is from a place unmediated by language. So in my speech I'm trying to come constantly from the place that's unmediated by language. It's underneath everything, it's inside you, it's inside me, and to bring those two together and don't ask me how it occurs it's uh, it's a very physical experience of a kind of inner horizon meeting an outer horizon, and uh, and then the real magic happens when what lies below the inner horizon, inside you, starts to converse with what lies beyond the horizon, outside you.

Speaker 2: 23:44

Do you want to read Horizon?

Speaker 1: 23:46

Yeah, sure, let's do Horizon.

Speaker 3: 23:49

I don't think I've. Well, I've read it for the recording, but I don't think I've read it in public actually.

Speaker 1: 23:55

All right Nice.

Speaker 3: 23:57

A premiere Is this one that spoke to you.

Speaker 1: 24:00

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 24:03

Yeah, this is one of the big themes in my uh revelation of the last few years really is, uh, the way that we often feel. We. You know, physiologically, the latest medical research shows us that when we're looking at a far horizon we're in a much happier state than when we're looking close up at a screen, and that makes every day sense. Yes, you rarely get depressed by looking at a far horizon of the ocean or the mountain. Quite the opposite, in fact. We pay a lot of money for a view and walking through a landscape where the horizon is naturally coming towards you at the same pace to which you are moving towards it is part, you know, the ancient uh dynamic of pilgrimage, of going to a place that's going to nourish you in in in a way that the place you set off from hasn't been nourishing you, and uh and so uh. But we don't often talk about the inner horizon inside ourselves, which is often felt as a line of resistance, actually, rather than one of nourishment. We often are afraid of going below it, because we intuit that if we do go into that place unmediated by language, all the ways we've named ourselves in the world will fall apart, because we realize they're just too rigid. I had a near death experience in the Himalayas where I was in a yak manger for three days, hallucinating, and on the third day I had this astonishing revelation about the whole David White project being completely absurd and that this river-like entity inside me had been named, you know, but it was really absurd to name it. And I was. There was a river below in the valley, coming out of the fastness of the of the Himalayan mountains, and and I looked at the river and and thought, oh, that's right, we've given it a name, you know, the Marciandi River Valley, the Marciandi River, but actually you're looking at something that's already gone. So the ability to pay attention without naming what you're paying attention to in a way that narrows them, this is, I think, really important in an intimate love relationship.

Speaker 3: 26:30

We get names, for we think we know the person we're with and they don't even know themselves. So how could you name them? Actually, they can't name what's just about to be born, they can't name the seasonality of the particular threshold they're on. That's what their life is actually about, you know. So the ability to radically let your intimate partner alone in a way to have their own experience, and we use nicknames at the beginning of an affectionate love relationship as a token of affection, but quite often it then becomes a box. The nickname holds the person in place. So we've given ourselves nicknames too. We've given the world names that are just too small.

Speaker 3: 27:23

Horizons are everywhere. Horizons are everywhere, both inside and outside of what only feels like our sense of self. The edge between what I think is me and what I think is you is as much a horizon as any line of mountains or that far dark line on the distant ocean. Horizon is the line between what we think we know and what we do not know, between what we think we see and what we do not see. Horizons mark the threshold between the world that I inhabit and the one that seems to wait for me, between the world I can almost understand and what lies beyond the imagination of my present life.

Speaker 3: 28:15

Horizons are creative, disturbing, invitational edges, just by the fact that they exist. Horizons between the known and the unknown are everywhere in our human lives, even when we refuse to lift our heads and our eyes to see them. Wherever we live, the sun rises over a certain horizon and sets behind the opposite one at the end of the day, but often invisibly, because we have four thick walls surrounding us, set firmly against our understanding. Horizons are appearing and disappearing all around us, whether we know it or not. Even in my own mind, when I refuse to face something real and necessary in my life, I stop looking at the edge between what I know and what I do not know. I close myself off from understanding by refusing to look at a necessary inner horizon.

Speaker 3: 29:16

Horizons are invitational edges between what is familiar and what must be imagined. The main horizon in my life is the line over which, imaginatively, my future lies. You know, when I was a child I used to go to that stone wall I mentioned earlier. It was a wonderful stone wall because sometime in the last few centuries a farmer had replaced the top upright stones with a saddle-like stone which was comfortable to sit on because it had the best view of the surrounding countryside and the moors Saddleworth Moor in the distance. And in fact when I used to go out there alone I'd always have to have a peek first, because it was the favorite place for courting couples to go. So you had to make sure you weren't disturbing the proceedings.

Speaker 3: 30:04

I love courting couples to go, so you had to make sure you had to make sure you weren't disturbing the proceedings yes, I know and uh, courting couples say in yorkshire.

Speaker 3: 30:16

I used to daydream there about my future, and so the far horizon was always the horizon of my future too, and it's astonishing the intuitions I had about my my adult life, actually from when I was eight or nine years old. Going out there, I would see myself standing on a stage in front of hundreds of people and I would be speaking, and in the dayd people would be really fascinated at what I was saying and as a child I used to say I wonder what I would be saying that they would be so fascinated about.

Speaker 3: 30:54

You know what would I be saying? And the other astonishing image I used to get was of a futuristic room with a family gathered around it and they were looking into this pool and words of my poetry because I was writing poetry even at that time would come up in the pool and they could do something. I don't know what. They could touch something and the lines would change. Well, that is an incredible intuition of the internet, actually, and the computer which was yet to come. Along the screen. There's this high-tech rock pool and it would return again and again.

Speaker 3: 31:37

So it is incredible that we somehow have this internal recognition, this symmetry, parallel, this parallel inside of us. And it's there, you know, when you first meet the person who becomes central to your life, whether it's a love relationship, a marriage, a father or the mother of your children, a colleague, you know, an artistic collaborator. When you first meet them, you look back on it. It's always very fateful how that occurred and the fact that you actually gave enough time for something to occur, something did inside. You actually recognize that you needed to stop and say hello and deepen the relationship. So, carrying on with horizons, or is there enough of horizons? Would you like to hear more?

Speaker 1: 32:33

More yeah.

Speaker 3: 32:37

Horizons are invitational edges between what is familiar and what must be imagined. The main horizon in my life is the line over which, imaginatively, my future lies. The line between the world I can perceive and the world that waits for me is also a parallel to my individual creative powers and to my sense of personal courage. My individual creativity is calibrated by how much I put the world I live in into conversation with the world beyond the horizon I must live into. Physical outer horizons are good for our individual human physiology. As recent medical studies tell us, it appears to be the case that merely by taking time to gaze at a far horizon, with our head and our eyes uplifted, and looking into the far distance, we are put into a much happier physiological state of being than when we are looking down closer to home, most likely into a screen. Hence our need and thankfulness for a room with a view, for a walk by the ocean, for a sunset drive, or the calm that comes over us seeing the sun rise again over far mountains. The loss of distant horizons in our life is a recent phenomenon, our myopia magnified and our happiness curtailed by the multitudinous close-up screens in our phones, on our laptops, that bring our heads down, that make our necks bent, that leave our eyes hooded, the beneficent, physical horizons of the world lost to our gaze. Horizons are never passive in their presence. Horizons are never passive in their presence. Consciously and unconsciously, horizons always exert a gravitational and invitational pull from far off the salt line of the far ocean stretching away to infinity from our summer beach, a beckoning line far beyond our ideas of what a seaside holiday means. The distant line of mountains, always calling from afar, even if we have never driven to visit them More distractingly and more personally. The far edge of invitation deep within someone else's loving, seductive eyes, frightening and emboldening us beyond ourselves into another life and a commitment far beyond what our logical mind could ever contemplate. Horizons tell me I am. All possibilities I can see or hear or even sense. Horizons call on me constantly, whether I ever reach them or not, no matter how far away, horizons call on me to live in a different way, wherever I find myself, most particularly in this place now, from which I am viewing the next edge between what I know and do not know.

Speaker 3: 35:42

We tend to think of horizons as only being visible in the outer physical world, but it is fascinating to find that we carry a horizon inside us that is just as real as any of the ones that reside in any of the far-off distances beyond our bodies. Spending time in silence, we find that the invisible interior edge that lies inside each one of us is just as real. Interior edge that lies inside each one of us is just as real, just as invitational and just as beautifully disturbing as any line between the known and the unknown that exists in the outer world of mountains, oceans or loving, seductive, captivating eyes. The line deep inside my sense of self, between what I know and can articulate about myself and what lies at the foundational level inside me, is always felt in a very physical way as an equally powerful invitation to exploration as any bold horizon out beyond me in the physical world. This interior line is the edge of my self-knowledge and the place from which my future life and any authentic articulation of that life arises.

Speaker 3: 36:50

The interior line between what I would wish to say and how I would wish to say it, between what I am and what I want to be, between what I cannot say and what I want to articulate or live wholeheartedly, is the threshold and horizon of my present maturity.

Speaker 3: 37:09

Strangely, this edge of growing inner maturity is often felt as a line of resistance or immobility. What lies beneath quite often stays beneath the edge of my inquiry. The only way through this inner horizon is through silence and silently breathing into the resistance, into the seeming immobility of that edge. But true to the invitational spirit of horizons, what is immobile in me will eventually be what moves most in the end. What is immobile in me will eventually be what moves most in the end. Looking down into my chest for heartfelt words or intelligent, thoughtful perspectives or words that encourage or embolden, I always experience a line of resistance, an edge of immobilityility, a demarcation between what I want to say and what can be said and what will surprise me and my saying it. As I read those lines, I realize that that's part of the dynamic that's in every one of these constellations is that is you need to grant the person their own reluctance to explore anger, to explore aloneness.

Speaker 3: 38:26

So we often move towards that experience, along an inverse calibration of reluctance or fear, and to be able to speak them as you go into it. This is invitational to people. Oh, someone, not only someone else understands, but someone's actually showing me the next step, in a way.

Speaker 1: 38:46

They stared into the abyss.

Speaker 3: 38:47

This is what I was referring to with that yes, yeah, I suppose I would use a different metaphor probably than the abyss sure maybe less the abyss to begin with, more nourishing in the end.

Speaker 3: 39:03

The abyss of heartbreak, yeah, um, looking down into my chest for heartfelt words or intelligent, thoughtful perspectives, or words that encourage or embolden, I always experience a line of resistance, an edge of immobility, a demarcation between what I want to say, what can be said, and what will surprise me in my saying it. This is my horizon between knowing and not knowing, from which all good articulation, indeed all good poetry, comes. Becoming familiar with that horizon and the increasing depth at which I must find it as I slowly mature in my life, in my art or in my relationships with others, is one of the great invitational necessities of a growing life. This inner horizon might be called the edge and present limit of my self-knowledge. Putting this inner horizon of self-knowledge, and even the resistance to the depths which it hides, in conversation with the outer horizons of my present life grants me the gift of creative expression. It gives me the ability to describe an everyday sunset with surprising originality when those inner and outer horizons meet in my words or my paintbrush, or even in my simple joy in being a happy witness, uniting the inner limits of my understanding with the outer limits of what I can see also puts me in a fruitful, creative conversation with my future. The bringing together of these inner and outer horizons is the basis of every authentically creative life.

Speaker 3: 40:47

There is another step. There is another step bringing what lives below the horizon of my inner understanding into conversation with what lies beyond the limits of what I can understand in the outer world is the foundation for what we have always called mystical experience. In that meeting, all horizons start to move and disappear. Any static sense of self needing an equally static world fades away, and I experience the act of seeing and hearing as both a way I am shaping the world and a way I am being shaped by it at one and the same time. When the unknown inside me is put into conversation with the unknown that lies beyond the horizon, outside me, I experience a physical sense of radiance that I find I have always carried with me, emerging from below the horizon of my understanding. When inner and outer horizons meet and, more importantly, when what they have hidden until now meet, I walk in new pastures, I come fully alive. I walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship, by every corner of creation, crying Hallelujah, hallelujah.

Speaker 3: 42:05

Those last lines are stolen, actually, from a poem of mine which is really a kind of embodiment of the meeting of those horizons. It's called the Bell and the Blackbird the sound of a bell still reverberating or a blackbird calling from a corner of the field. The sound of a bell still reverberating or 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, 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 Alleluia, alleluia.

Speaker 1: 43:13

Alleluia, you've seen horizon, body, invisible. What you do is that you point our attention and create awareness for what we are missing within ourselves and surrounding us. It is funny because you've written two decks of cards and you've not used the word that I think is underlying that and that is paying attention. Because paying attention to your body, paying attention to the horizons within you, paying attention to the invisible world around us, and I wonder why you haven't approached the word attention yet.

Speaker 3: 44:02

Perhaps because it's so obvious, maybe no, I mean I use the word attention all the time as a way of understanding how our identities are shaped, one of the things I realized as a young naturalist in the Galapagos Islands where.

Speaker 3: 44:20

I lived for a good period and where I spent hours every day watching landscapes and animals in silence and animals in silence, I realized that my identity depended not upon my personal beliefs but upon the depth of attention that I was paying to things other than myself. So the deeper attention, the deeper current, you know, that flowed between what I thought was myself and the world, the more attention I was paying, the more your identity radically changed and went through all kinds of disappearances. And this happened in a very practical way. Every day You'd be walking along and there would be a Galapagos hawk on a branch staring at you and because creatures have no fear of humankind, a galapagos hawk on a branch staring at you, and because creatures have no fear of humankind, in in galapagos, the hawk would just stay staring at you. The closer you got, you could literally walk up to three feet away and the and you'd be looking into those hawk like eyes, a privilege you don't normally get unless you're, unless you have one on your wrist that you've trained, yeah, but uh, um, suddenly to see the hawkness of the world, the absolute essence of hawkness. It'd be a few months there before you'd actually be able to get to that state where you weren't just reeling off the Latin name, pretending that you knew what you were looking at. But you realize those.

Speaker 3: 45:55

Antonio Mach machado, the great spanish poet, said something really simple and remarkable. He said an eye is not an eye because you see it, an eye is an eye because it sees you. Yeah and uh. So the hawkness of the world is looking back at you. But you know, it's finding someone, it's finding the essence of you. That's when things fall apart on the surface in a good, creative way To begin with, when you don't recognize it, it feels traumatic and disturbing.

Speaker 3: 46:31

And as you get used to it. It's a form of humiliation. In a way, you return to the ground of your being. Any complicated ideas you had about yourself, named in complicated ways, fall away and that simplicity that we recognize, you know, in all our great religious texts and contemplative traditions, starts to be recognized as a physical experience in your own life and your own way forward.

Speaker 3: 47:02

So I'd attempted various forms of meditation in my own room as a student when I first discovered the glamorous aspects of Zen and all this, and I was doing all kinds of strange things that I thought was meditation, but they did put me into equally strange states actually. So I realized oh, you can, you can go to, to exotic frontiers of the mind, but Galapagos was really the place where I I started to have a fiercely interior life and to be able to articulate from that place. And it was only years later, when I was sitting in Zen retreats, that I realized oh, I'm just recapitulating my everyday experience in Galapagos Silence, attention, the world coming to find you and you being transformed by that world.

Speaker 2: 47:50

This is a long time ago when I first discovered your work and I listened to an interview with you and you spoke about how you not issued but you'd put your pen down for a while and gone to biology and studying the sciences yes, um, and you'd applied yourself and it was difficult and crunchy but you decided that's what you were going to do and you went to the Galapagos and worked there. Two things two seeds were planted, one that I had to go to the Galapagos with my youngest son, so each of my sons.

Speaker 2: 48:24

I give them a trip of a lifetime when they turn 13 and they get to choose wherever they want to go in the world and fortunately, galapagos was one of his choices and it was just after lockdown so it was empty so just as fate would have it, because I'd listened to your story about the galapagos many years before yes I managed to experience it in the closest way possible in our modern times because obviously we couldn't predict and it's full hawkiness.

Speaker 1: 48:52

Yeah, and it's full hawkiness.

Speaker 2: 48:54

So there's that. And secondly, I listened to you and I read your poetry a lot, along with Mary Oliver and various other people, when I was most alone, and I didn't want to share that free time with other people, necessarily, but I did share it with people like you who didn't know that they were sharing their time with me. I always think that's the wonderful thing about a writer or a poet.

Speaker 2: 49:20

Yeah, and I remember one of the things all of the writers and the poets and the people that I loved to listen to when I was young a lot of them were male or they were women without children.

Speaker 2: 49:34

Someone else was dealing with the washing or the raising of the kids or the cooking, all of those things that joyfully take up your day as a parent, as a mother, and I remember thinking but how can they not address the rest of us? And I listened more recently to you talking about an estrangement that I don't think, if I'm reading what you said correctly is, is any longer in place. An estrangement with your son, but a delight in discovering grandparenthood and being able to give a lot of time and devotion to that. You were talking about regret and how regrets are, even when you embrace and acknowledge them, freeing, because then you can do something about it. Or, given the time that we're in now and that the volume has been turned up on other voices, whether it be the female voice, whether it be the marginalized voice, whether it be the person from an ethnic minority background whose writing is suddenly being acknowledged and winning prizes and tell me about that in in your lifetime, in your professional lifetime yes, uh, firstly, I was never estranged from my son.

Speaker 3: 50:51

Actually, it was more an observation of other fathers and sons.

Speaker 3: 50:55

And so, apart from those, those wonderful temporary estrangements that occur in adolescence, where they need to separate, you know but uh, no, I've always been a very close father and, uh, I've always been a cook, I've always kept house, so I've uh, again, it's that Yorkshire and Irish side of me. So I've always been very much in the world and I've always earned a living as a poet so that I can provide. So I really want to write for people who want to be fully in the world and delight in the world too at the same time. I mean delight in the ironing or the washing. I love to iron actually. So one of my little rituals actually in the hotel room before I'm going on stage is to iron a shirt, and I often will just get the essence of what I want to get across while I'm ironing.

Speaker 2: 51:51

I was doing for this, for years Ironing out the creases of the words.

Speaker 3: 51:54

I know, but actually it comes from the fact that some of the idyllic states of my childhood was when I was in the kitchen and my mother was ironing and she had a beautiful Irish voice she would sing and.

Speaker 3: 52:07

I'd be placed in this big basket full of linen and I'd have a book and I'd be listening to my mother and the smell of linen and comfortable, and I'd have a book and I'd be listening to my mother and the smell of linen ironing. So, as I tell every, as I've told every woman in my life, it's very simple if you want me to be happy, just put me in a big basket of linen iron and sing. Yeah, so no, but I love to iron. And I realized one day I just had a dream, actually, of digging up. I just moved into a new house and I was, I was rearranging the floor, but I was doing it with an iron, and so I I was interpreting dreams at that time I woke up and I said what's the iron? And then I remember my mother oh, the iron's love, you know. And so I think that's why I iron the shirt before I go on stage.

Speaker 3: 52:55

It's a, it's an act of uh, it's an act of love which I want to get across, uh, in my, uh invitation love and care, and that's what I want to get across in my, in my. We're so bullied and coerced by the world, bullied and coerced even into supposedly good states. Often you hear people telling you things that are good for you, but they're told to you in a way in which you don't feel very good about yourself. That's someone you have to be in order to get there.

Speaker 2: 53:38

God, I think I do that to my youngest son yeah, the ability to be here in the world.

Speaker 3: 53:46

This is a piece about waking up in that new house. Actually it's called the house of belonging, it's the title poem from that collection and it's about waking into the world, but in a new way. You know, I was in that house. I'd, I'd, uh, I just left my first marriage and this house was be to be for myself and for my son, who I had half the time, and uh, so it was my new house of belonging. I went through the usual undoing you go through when you go through divorce and separation and not knowing where the anchorage is. But this one morning I woke up and it had all swept away, and so this is the house of belonging.

Speaker 3: 54:27

I awoke this morning in the gold light. I awoke this morning in the gold light, turning this way and that thinking. Thinking. It was one day like any other, but the veil had gone from my darkened heart and I thought it must have been the quiet candlelight that filled my room. It must have been the first easy rhythm with which I breathed myself to sleep. It must have been the prayer I said speaking to the otherness of the night, and I thought this is the good day you could meet your love. This is the grey day someone close to you could pass. This is the day you realize how easily the thread is broken between this world and the next.

Speaker 3: 55:13

And I found myself sitting up in the quiet pathway of light the tawny, close-grained cedar burning like fire and all the angels of this housely heaven ascending through the first roof of light the sun had made. This is the bright home in which I live. This is where I ask my friends to come. It's the bright home in which I live. This is where I ask my friends to come. This is where I want to love all of the things it has taken me so long to learn to love. This is where I want to love all of the things it has taken me so long to learn to love. This is the temple of my adult aloneness and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life.

Speaker 3: 55:56

There is no house. There is no house like the house of belonging. So that's waking into this physical world. You know the world. There's washing up in that house. There's washing to be done, there's ironing to be done, there's the garden to be tended to and the house to be renovated, which I was in the midst of, and uh, to have the spaciousness, uh, to be able to give yourself to work without seeing it as a burden, without making everything into a burden. We're virtuoso at turning everything into a weight. You get a sudden love for it. You're in your 40s and you suddenly say I always wanted to play the piano. And you give yourself that beautiful permission and freedom to start to learn the piano and within a few weeks you're racing down the motorway, you know, at 70 miles per hour, trying to get to your piano lesson on time, and you've just made it into another thing that you're doing so all along, to be able to be present in a way that things are allowed to be good to you.

Speaker 3: 57:18

I have to do the washing, oh the washing. I get to wash. It's incredible. You think of the people. Well, I just get to swing my legs out over the side of the bed and stand up. My friend John O'Donoghue used to say there are people in this life who would give every last penny they had to be able to do that and they can't. They don't have movement in their legs. We get to stand up. We get to put our hands in hot, soapy water, which doesn't mean to say you're condemned to having your hands in hot soapy water. So, which doesn't mean to say you're condemned, you know, to having your hands in hot soapy water all the time. But the ability to see things speaking back to you also allows you to see opportunities for other lives beyond also what you're doing. So we live in all these parallels all at once, yeah, which is why I have that tongue in cheek.

Speaker 3: 58:14

Satire of uh, the word now now, I don't know if you read yes, that one you have the uh, because I do think people get bullied about being in the power, of the power of now, and so the whole first uh paragraph of that is to try and console people away from it's tongue-in-cheek, and I hope that eckhart has a sense of humor about it, but afterwards I said.

Speaker 3: 58:40

I said if he can't find it funny, uh, then he's not really living in the now. But I'll just read that first piece, yeah, yeah, because what I'm saying is that we, that we live in many parallels at once and often our tragedy is choosing between them. You look at the way someone has dementia and they start to lose their memory. Their loss of memory actually prevents them from fully living in the present. Their loss of memory actually prevents them from fully living in the present. You need memory to be. Memory magnifies the now. So this is my little foray into now.

Speaker 3: 59:33

Now is presently overrated. Now is presently overrated. Now is not what it was and is also never what we think it is. There is no power of now. Now does not have any power by itself. Now belongs as much to its past inheritance, to what brought it about, as it does to it just-about-to-happen future. Now is not where we are supposed to live, isolated from the poignant and maturing illusions of memory or the joyous lineaments of anticipation. Now does not exist without its astonishing past, nor its dreamy, not-to-believe future. Now is a word that, in the last 20 years, has definitely got above itself. Most tellingly and as a final condemnation, now is a word that has lost its sense of humor. Saying we should live totally in the now is just as amusing as saying we should live totally in the 12 and a half minutes ago you said that you say it a few times actually in the 12 and a half minutes ago you said that you say it a few times actually uh, in in your writing and in your speaking, which I think you cite as an irish expression.

Speaker 2: 1:00:40

Which is the problem with the past is it's not the past yes, yeah, exactly yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:00:46

Things live on in us until they've matured fully and then they're able to uh through what the Greeks called enantiodromia once something becomes fully itself, it then is able to change into its opposite and disappear. And so we carry things that we're still maturing with from the past. We carry that child who had to create a defensive perimeter because they were threatened at a certain time in their life by a parent, by the world, by their classmates, by just the oppression of the adult world. But the threat goes away. You've still got the walls around you. They're still living inside you. It's that child still inside you who's peeping out and there's lovely lines by roomie. He says the little bird in the heart's cage is putting out his head on this side and that. So we've all got that little bird putting out his head. Is it safe to come out? Not really, but come out anyway. Yeah, yes.

Speaker 1: 1:02:01

The way you talk about now made me think about how we also abuse the word love or abuse, the word awesome or abuse all these other words by overusing them and cheapening them. Yes, what do you think about the drivers of this regression? The drivers of Of this regression, drivers of this regression, of this regression, yeah, this regression yeah well, it's because we want to cover over, uh, the actual experience.

Speaker 3: 1:02:22

So the repetition of the word is is like a cover over over what we don't want to look at. And uh, it's interesting, you know, in the states, uh, one of the words that's used in adolescence, a lot is like it's like, like like like and it carries on into adulthood, you know, but it actually prevents you because literally things are. Person in many ways is refusing to actually come to terms with their ability to articulate fully what's present in their world and also their fear of what they've found.

Speaker 1: 1:03:10

And the actual relation between the two things that they're trying to compare.

Speaker 3: 1:03:14

Exactly. Yes, it's an unconscious tick, verbal tick, yeah, but it's very instructive. But we all have our equivalence of like, absolutely we. You know, yes, yes, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:03:26

Kind of.

Speaker 3: 1:03:27

Yeah, so heartfelt language, you know, that penetrates, uh, that as I say. Um, I've said it again and again my definition of poetry is language against which, there, there are no defenses, and that's as you're writing it too, so that's when you burst into tears is because the vessel of your body is not able to carry what you've just discovered. So the boundaries break open. That's when we experience tears they overflow literally.

Speaker 2: 1:04:02

You know you use the word vessel. I was saying to Amid when we were talking on the phone last night I feel like this book, both of them, but this one more so. Constellations 2, yeah, book both of them, but this one more so. Constellations, yeah, each of these words are like little boats or vessels that take us to the edge of the abyss, a big lake, and there are ports.

Speaker 2: 1:04:22

Each one is a port, and because we can't do it all at once, we can't look at it all at once, but we can if we just focus yeah our attention on one of these and I feel like they're arteries, almost these words, a sort of map of what it is to be human, and they're little arteries that lead to each of these experiences or these emotional threads, and they take us, yeah, to the abyss. I agree with you Because I don't see the abyss as us. Yeah, to the abyss. I agree with you Because I don't see the abyss as being. Well, if we really look at that word, what does it mean?

Speaker 3: 1:05:00

Yes.

Speaker 2: 1:05:01

If you really look into it, you're less afraid.

Speaker 3: 1:05:05

Yes.

Speaker 2: 1:05:06

Whereas if you avoid looking into it, you become more and more afraid. Yes, right, yeah it you become more and more afraid. Yes, right, so I. For me, this is the. The value of this is that it carries us to a place where we won't go on our own, but we will go with you in this vessel yes it feels quite safe.

Speaker 3: 1:05:24

To that I'm amazed that you read the whole book all at once and uh, I, having experience writing it all at once, I, I, I'm uh very moved and uh and appalled at what you must've gone through to read it all. It's meant, you know, it's meant for a person to choose out a word that's speaking to them at the time, but I'm uh, I'm really impressed that you were able to do that, but it uh, it's uh. I imagine it's quite overwhelming to read the whole in a good way.

Speaker 1: 1:05:56

Pardon, in a good way.

Speaker 3: 1:05:57

I think yes yes, um, it's meant to be consoling in the sense that you shouldn't feel as if you have to take it on all at once, just whatever your next step is. Uh, I'm uh incredibly impressed and moved that I found a close readers so early on, so thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:06:19

I was interested in the fact that you actually worked with corporations like the AT&Ts and the NASA's and the Boeing's of this world.

Speaker 3: 1:06:28

I still do, and you still do, and you still do. Actually.

Speaker 1: 1:06:31

And that is completely different from the world that we were inhabiting there. For a second, I feel that world. How do you bring these two together? What is it that you actually do with these organizations?

Speaker 3: 1:06:43

Well, I work in very much the same way as I do when I'm speaking to a literary audience, you know, at some hip place in downtown San Francisco. Literary audience, you know, at some hip place in downtown San Francisco. I, you know, I work with memorized poetry as the narrative and I'm really looking at the whole phenomenology of conversation, in other words, how you deepen it how you deepen a conversation and and so I just color it with the knowledge.

Speaker 3: 1:07:11

You know what they're having to deal with every day and because I've worked for 35 years now in the corporate world. I've worked in companies for long term and short term. I've worked in hundreds of companies around the world in all kinds of cultures, so I've seen almost everything. So when I first went into the corporate world I was a complete ingenue and I thought I'd have to compromise my work. I didn't have to compromise my work. I also hardly knew what any of the acronyms meant.

Speaker 3: 1:07:41

I remember leaning over to the first consultant who invited me in and saying what does CEO stand for, by the way? But the astonishing thing is now I walk into a room and almost always I have more experience than anyone in the place, including the ceo, because I've actually seen so many different colorations and dramas and different kinds of organizations with different kinds of hierarchies and different kinds of conversations and different kinds of blocks and tragedies and conversations they're not having. So the interesting thing is, you know, I used to work very hard to make it practically useful to people. But the interesting thing is, these days people really don't want it to be practically useful. They want you to talk about the depth of your insight and your experience and they can apply it. They don't need you to do these childlike illustrations of how you can make this useful in your life. They're adults, they've been working with it for a long time. So what they need is the insight and the revelation. So I just do broad colorations.

Speaker 3: 1:09:03

So one of the first steps in deepening the conversation is to stop the conversation you're having now. Every organization has a conversation. It needs to stop having. Every little work group has a conversation. It needs to stop having. Every little work group has a conversation. It needs to stop having. The three of us here have a conversation individually. We each need to stop having, and the dispensation of your next life doesn't open up until you stop having that particular conversation. You stop naming things or naming yourself in a certain way. So that's the first step.

Speaker 3: 1:09:39

The second one is cultivating a relationship with the unknown. So almost always you find that you have absolutely no relationship with the unknown. You're constantly trying to have easy answers to everything. Why? Because that's what's been reinforced in our lives. Our educational systems never gave us an accolade for saying to the teacher you know, sir, miss, I've absolutely no idea what you're talking about, but I'd love to know when were you ever rewarded for that? No, the fellow at the front of the class with his hand up or her hand up, who had the easy answer, the answer they were rewarded. So it's really interesting to examine what the state of your friendship is with the unknown, the things you don't know about. So you start watching your mind and just how you. You're constantly having to have an answer for things, even when you've no right to have an answer. Yeah, so, uh. So that's just the first two steps and I've got seven steps for deepening yeah so the conversation which you know, that pleases the linear mind.

Speaker 3: 1:10:43

They're actually all happening all at once, but it's nice to lay them out. Third step is then coming to ground with a bump in the unknown. That's the Dantean moment in Dante of awaking in the dark wood, and then from there following the path of vulnerability, where vulnerability is actually not a weakness but a robust way of making invitations to other people to help you actually visibly and invisibly. So on it goes. So that's the way I work with and if I need to bring in practical examples, I've got hundreds from my adventures in the corporate world.

Speaker 3: 1:11:24

I have an irish niece actually, uh, marlene mccormick, and she, uh, she went into to study drama at the university of sligo and, uh, and we sat down before she went off to study drama at the University of Sligo, and and we sat down before she went off and she said, well, she said she knew I worked in the corporate world. She didn't know how it worked at all, but she said, well, I don't suppose the major corporations, the world will be knocking on my door with a degree in drama. And I said, marlene, I said a degree in drama is what would most qualify you to work in corporations when two or more are gathered together. There will be drama, so working with those dramas.

Speaker 1: 1:12:05

You know when you were talking something occurred to me, and that was that you are referring often to certain stories or identities that we cling on to as prisons. I feel like that sometimes myself, but then you also have very strong identities yourself your Yorkshire self, your Irish self, your poet self. Which layers are we supposed?

Speaker 3: 1:12:36

to peel off ones. Are we supposed to hold onto? Well, my experience is, and it and it's very they're very deeply in in the teachings out of the zen tradition is you're not supposed to choose oh yeah, you're not supposed to choose that makes sense, yeah there's lovely lines by uh, by rilke, the great german speaking poet I say german speaking because he actually was born in prague and grew up in the german speaking population of prague.

Speaker 3: 1:13:04

But uh, he said uh, stretch your well-disciplined strengths between two opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns. Stretch your well-disciplined strengths between two opposing poles. So it's really the conversation between things where all the real action is.

Speaker 1: 1:13:29

But having those conversations is required.

Speaker 3: 1:13:31

Yes, so there's a lovely title to that film, which is what? What is it?

Speaker 1: 1:13:38

everything everywhere all at once. Yeah, so that's it.

Speaker 3: 1:13:41

Yeah, that's um yeah, but out of that, everywhere, everything else, what is it everywhere?

Speaker 2: 1:13:50

all at once. Everything everywhere all at once. Everything everywhere, all at once.

Speaker 3: 1:13:55

It's like looking at a complex landscape. You look at the Amazon jungle. It's made up of hundreds of thousands of interlocking systems and creatures, but it's got a very powerful genius loci, it's got a very powerful spirit. That's singular. So we can be the same. We have this complexity, this constellation of qualities inside us and you allow them all to be and suddenly you've got your own rainforest or mountain ecology or ocean inside you, whatever it is.

Speaker 2: 1:14:31

But that's sort of what you've done here, that, rather than define the word, you show how it's connected to a feeling or an experience of being human. And given that we're the only creatures that use language or that use words, the definition, in a way, of a word the Oxford Dictionary definition of a word without context is immaterial to us. The connection you make, the way you show the contradiction of the word. Well, you just read out now yes. And you redefined now.

Speaker 2: 1:15:05

Yes, oh, I go on to redefine it, and you do that with most of the words, I think redefine it.

Speaker 1: 1:15:15

Yeah, but and you do that with with most of the words, I think um, if I may use an analogy, you basically have the human condition on x-axis and then you put words on the y-axis and somehow you tell us where on that map we find ourselves and describe that place on the map. It is in mapping the human condition thoroughly, on overlaying these words together, that your words hit so differently than the dictionary definition, if I may say so.

Speaker 2: 1:15:36

When you said that he chooses multi-dimensional words rather than one dimensional.

Speaker 1: 1:15:43

Yes, uh, so I have a bit of a tech background and I'd love to.

Speaker 3: 1:15:47

I can tell from your analogy yes, the, the X and the Y, of course. Of course it's going to get worse, david, don't worry, I'm going to make it worse.

Speaker 1: 1:15:57

So I'd love to hear we can maybe stay on this, but I'd love to hear your thoughts also on these AIs that are now creating words. They're compressing the knowledge of humans into what we call an embedding, which is a way they abstract everything that we do into something higher dimensional. And even in this higher dimensional space, you can see that, for instance, the word love has a much higher entropy in the way it occurs than, say, the word oven. Right, yeah, so there is an inherent, inherent, and we know this intuitively, as human beings and the abuse of that word.

Speaker 2: 1:16:36

Well, the word oven is very often abused the word oven is very often abused.

Speaker 1: 1:16:42

Um, it's this higher dimensionality that you can even measure when you look at it from, a, say, statistical point of view. So, and you pick, you don't pick oven, obviously, as a word, clearly, because that that on the x, y axis, that that I was just talking about, there's not much in terms of that word in the human condition other than maybe household, or you could make it that, I don't know, do you agree with this hierarchy that I'm generating here?

Speaker 3: 1:17:07

I don't know, I've got a, I've got an. I'd have to think about that actually, because everything you know when you're a child and you hear the word oven, you are not hearing a word about something. You're, you, you're getting the absolute physicality of that astonishing place where things go in, heat up, come out smelling delicious or ruined, if you're, if your parents are a bad cook yeah, bad cooks, but um, no, uh, oven is really a screwdriver, so in oscillations.

Speaker 3: 1:17:42

I've got the word background, which is really unglamorous word, but it's one of my favorite essays because one of the one of the uh experiences in revelation in the Zen tradition, you know in sitting, is where the background starts to become just as important as the foreground, as what you've made the foreground and background starts to have an equal voice with the foreground. So I found that I mean background is a very ostensibly boring word, but actually inside our understanding lies an unconscious understanding of that word that we don't allow ourselves to feel fully or understand.

Speaker 1: 1:18:30

It's the body-mind thing that you also bring in body when you talk about body. Yes, this is a body mind dichotomy yeah, I think you're the foreground background is similar in this way.

Speaker 2: 1:18:38

Yes, but background? That's so strange that you would say it was a boring word. It's everything. People talk about their backgrounds all the time in acting check off.

Speaker 3: 1:18:48

It's all about your previous circumstances what just happened before you came on stage.

Speaker 2: 1:18:52

As an actor, background and research and what happened before, but it's rather a flat word.

Speaker 3: 1:19:01

If I was meeting someone and I say what's your background, then it feels like a very utilitarian word.

Speaker 1: 1:19:08

I need you to explain yourself, maybe Instead of saying oh, you had an Irish father.

Speaker 3: 1:19:18

That's more of an intuitive invitation to something.

Speaker 2: 1:19:23

I know we're probably running out of time. I really want him to read Injury. What do you think about that?

Speaker 3: 1:19:29

Yes, it's a good one to choose because it was very personal and very physical. For the first time in my life this last year, during the writing of this book, I had a knee injury which stopped me from walking as robustly as I normally do playing tennis and on my walking tours that I run it actually, for the first time in my life prevented me from going out and leading some of the actual walks. So it was a big, big threshold in my experience of the body. But I wrote this during that. This is one of the essays I wrote at Castello Rescue in the Italian countryside. It was where I was looking after my knee, but I suddenly had this sense of how merciful the body is and how badly we treat it and how we treat injuries and the bodies. Whatever part of the body is injured is a nuisance that needs to get its act together.

Speaker 3: 1:20:34

Body is injured as a nuisance that needs to get its act together and I just had this real sense of how the my knee had uh, had unselfishly carried me for so many years and now I was complaining that I had to carry it for a while yeah I said this is not a proper relationship and it was a lovely turnaround because I started living from the inside of my knee out. What does my knee need, actually? And it doesn't need me saying get better, for God's sake. Get better. If you had a loved one in bed and you were going in the bedroom every day and saying, will you get better, for god's sake? That's not helpful to the person.

Speaker 3: 1:21:18

So, um, but it led to practical things of of just literally nursing the knee and allowing it to tell me when I should stop doing whatever I was doing.

Speaker 3: 1:21:30

Yeah, injury but we have all kinds of injuries, of course, and we have psychological injuries which are also speaking to us and asking us to live from the inside out of the wound or the trauma that we had. And in fact the first line goes straight there. Actually, injury is the invitation to live from the inside out. Injury is how we are shocked into discovery. Injury is in some form the fate of every human being and is always accompanied by a strange sense of its deeply fateful nature, as if this particular form of incapacitation had been waiting for us all along, as if this injury now belongs to me personally as a birthright, as much as the knee it affects or the leg it has broken. Despite the medical profession's general statistics around our accident or illness, injury always feels deeply, deeply personal and somehow redounds upon our identity and our life. Injury always makes us think in metaphors and even mythic terms. Every injured person, given time and space, always trials multiple possibilities around what they did wrong or what they must learn from this seemingly fateful blow. Injury, we suspect, is the beckoning hand to an understanding we can only respond to after we have decided to turn down every other way of learning. The first shock of injury is in how much pain the body or the mind seems to make us feel at the moment of injury. We know that, emotionally and physically, the pain can be literally unbelievable and untranslatable to another. The body we are surprised to find wants to let us know in no uncertain terms, all the agonizing ways, that some holy perimeter has been breached, that some wholeness is now less than whole, or that some system is in disorder. No matter our wish to call it back to instant health and order, the underlying sense is that the pain and disorder will endure until some wholeness is restored. Injury invites us to explore the opposite of perfection. Injury invites us to explore the opposite of perfection. Injury tells us we are about to begin our travels through the unending land of the not quite right.

Speaker 3: 1:24:09

The second shock is in coming to terms with the ever-present nature of our vulnerability, a vulnerability that the injury is suddenly and unaccountably uncovered. Until we were injured, we realize we always floated three feet above the ground of actual reality, and often three feet above the realities of our own bodies. Injury refuses to let us take anything about our bodies or the world we have to negotiate for granted. Until we were injured, we never understood the miraculous nature of the heart with its never-ending faithful beat, until the day it refused to keep in rhythm. We never knew the incredible abilities of the knee to keep us lithe and upright until we sustained that slight tear in our medial meniscus. We had absolutely no idea that our bone marrow was and is the birthplace of our very lifeblood until the word leukemia spilled from the doctor's lips like a low, far-off verbal thunder stroke, breaking over our unsuspecting lives.

Speaker 3: 1:25:22

The third shock is that we have a completely different identity, injured, than we did when we were well. I am now a person who limps and is seen to limp, or who has lost an eye or a limb. I am a person whose hand trembles. I am a person who needs things I didn't need before a crutch, a medicine, a watchful eye. Most tellingly and most humiliatingly, I am a person who obviously needs help before anyone even thinks about how I can help them.

Speaker 3: 1:26:01

The fourth shock is how long the body takes and how much it needs to heal. Patience is the sudden necessary companion to injury and, equally suddenly, injury asks me to have a different relationship with time and the possibilities of time and what might potentially happen in a span of time. Time may heal all, but I do not understand how much time that healing may take or how my understanding of healing may change as time goes by. Injury humbles me in my understanding of time. How much time is now a question I know I can never, ever fully answer. The fifth shock of injury is understanding how much we have to turn our identities inside out in order to truly bring about the healing we desire. Injured I have the opportunity to realize that I have always treated the signals of the body as a nuisance and that healing involves me understanding how much my mindset is a real nuisance in the body's attempt to heal Injury is an invitation into the very touch point of the mind, the body or the soul that was injured.

Speaker 3: 1:27:27

The sixth shock is the way injury invites me to contemplate my past and the way I have neglected my body in the past. Until I get to the center of my emotional wound, I do not realize how much my childhood trauma asked for in the way of constant emotional protection. Until I stationed myself in the very center of the pain in my trembling knee myself in the very center of the pain in my trembling knee, I did not really understand how many decades my knee has supported me without question and how little support I have offered it in return. Until I am injured, I do not realize how much I have been asking my body for non-stop performance, rarely giving it the rest or care it needs. The road to healing is the road that reshapes my previous relationship with the body. To take care of my knee, I need to put my consciousness at the very center of that astonishing complex of bone, muscle, cartilage and fascia and have it speak back to the rest of me, telling me what it needs and doesn't want. From moment to moment, I walk at my knee's direction instead of trying to make my knee correspond to some golden, abstract idea of how I think it should perform. Our first reaction to injury is to tell the injury to get better and as soon as possible, but we each know of us exactly how we react to being given imperatives about booking up, getting over it and getting well. To begin to heal is always to begin to let the injury itself tell us what it needs to lead us where it wants to go.

Speaker 3: 1:29:15

Until we were injured, we did not understand how fine the line was between health and incapacitation, between being robustly independent and being vulnerable to other people's necessary help and, astonishingly, at times being absolutely helpless without that help. Until we were injured, we were under the delusion that we were secure from humiliation and that, in the spirit of that word, we didn't need a well-developed sense of humor. Until we were injured, we didn't really accept that we were just as amusingly and not so amusingly vulnerable as everyone else. Injury, fully felt and fully accepted, grants us compassion. Injured.

Speaker 3: 1:30:01

We now know how easily mere mortals are overwhelmed by circumstance, how the greatest of reputations can dissolve with infirmity and how everyone else in our world deserves a measure of understanding just for the act of having been born into the illusory robustness of their all-too-vulnerable, fragile, accident-prone bodies. Injury is our unconscious enrollment in a fully earned form of hard-won presence, a doorway to compassion for others and a threshold of maturation. We cross the threshold of maturation that injury provides only with our slight limp or with our bad back. We enter only by holding our side where we feel the pain. We learn compassion only by helping the part of us that cannot help itself, and out of that we learn to help others who cannot help themselves. Through injury we reach an earned state of understanding that we realize can often only be reached by those who crawl across that difficult, hard one line of maturity, determinately across that difficult, hard one line of maturity, determinedly, metaphorically or actually, on their trembling hands and knees.

Speaker 2: 1:31:19

That's amazing.

Speaker 3: 1:31:20

Makes you even want to have one, doesn't it?

Speaker 2: 1:31:25

Well, that's inevitable. Just one.

Speaker 1: 1:31:28

Speaking about inevitable, we were thinking about asking you how you feel about the inevitable. You know, injuries at some point are lethal. How do you feel about your own mortality? How do you encounter that?

Speaker 3: 1:31:45

Well, we'd have to read the essay on death for that. And, as I say, death always happens to someone else, to someone who you become. The person now who's afraid of death is actually not the person you become. If you are conscious, of course. If you lose your wits, then death really does happen to someone else. But if you keep your wits and you go into it sincerely and you go through the heartbreak of saying goodbye and you go through the heartbreak of saying goodbye, then, as I say at the end of the essay, death only happens to the person we've always secretly wanted to be. It happens to the person who's transformed by the letting go.

Speaker 3: 1:32:28

And I mean, I'm in a place in my life already where I'm ready, I'm up for it, you know, and I had a near-death experience that wasn't manufactured by any outward circumstances in Copenhagen a couple of years ago, and ever since then I feel like I've walked back into my body and everything else is just a bonus.

Speaker 3: 1:32:59

I get to actually participate, I get to sit talking to you here, I get to put my hands on the table, I get to have a sip of coffee it's all marvelous and I can let go of things and let things be as they are, and it's also led to me working on my legacy, building a website that's going to have everything I have on it, whether it's a video or a recording or a poem or an essay, and also maps where the poems were written or written about. So, like I said, my work's been very physically connected to landscape and genius loci and the spirit of places. Death is always a very fierce invitation. Yeah, that gets less fierce and more intriguing and inviting the closer you actually get to it in your own maturity, through your own hard-won maturity. I mean, I don't think you're supposed to know about death when you're young.

Speaker 1: 1:34:08

Denial. I love denial and consolation.

Speaker 3: 1:34:14

Exactly, You're not ready for it and you shouldn't be ready for it. You should have all the delusions of being immortal when you're young, Otherwise you wouldn't risk yourself in so many ways that you do.

Speaker 1: 1:34:24

So you have become the person that you're meant to be.

Speaker 3: 1:34:28

Partly. Yeah, who knows? Yeah, there's always threshold of uh fear and difficulty that you haven't anticipated. So I'm in a delusory state that, uh, that I'm equal to it, you know. But uh, we'll see when the when, the time comes yeah right, david, it was an absolute pleasure really.

Speaker 1: 1:34:50

You speak to my soul with your writing and and I thank you for that.

Speaker 3: 1:34:54

You're very kind. That's exactly why these essays and the books and the poetry I write is written Originally in the personal writing. It's to touch the part of myself I haven't touched yet and in a way that's nour is and not just observational. So, uh, thank you very much for those words, thanks for your time and thank you and tasha too, thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 1:35:21

Bye.