David Whyte, Poet — The Conversational Nature of Reality

1. 0:00 – 0:51

   Start.

   1. DWDavid Whyte0:00

      And then I started thinking, as I was on my walk, of all the other parameters that I'd placed upon myself. That I needed to be in my study in order to write, that I needed two weeks in my study in order to write, that I needed another two weeks, one at each end, you know, to decompress from my traveling and speaking and recompress [chuckles] to go out. And I realized, my God, you know, the number of strictures I put around-

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:27

      [laughs]

   3. DWDavid Whyte0:28

      ... what I need in order to write. I need silence. I need quiet, you know? And I said to Matt, "David, what if you could write everywhere, anywhere?"

   4. TFTim Ferriss0:36

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:51 – 5:05

   Connecting with Henry Shukman.

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:51

      David, such a pleasure to finally meet, and I wanted to give a deep bow to the person who made the introduction. This is Henry Shukman. And I wanted to perhaps start with how you first met Henry. How did you guys connect?

   2. DWDavid Whyte1:06

      Ah, well, that's an interesting foundation from which to step o- into our adventure together here, our conversation adventure. Henry Shukman, of course, is a fully fledged Zen master. He's had inka. He's in the Kawu Yamada Roshi tradition, which is the same tradition I sat in, although I sat with a lot of masters, different masters. Henry and I met at the William Wordsworth Foundation in the English Lake District. He was poet in residence, and I came to give a reading. And we were, in many ways, two young poetic blades, and we got on like a house on fire together. I remember driving all over the place and taking walks with him and, and then by sheer happenstance, we found that Oxford was a second home to us. Well, he'd actually grown up in Oxford and Oxfordshire. And so from then on, we would meet every Thursday night in the Bookbinder's Arms pub, and we would talk literature and Zen, actually, because strangely enough, Henry was just getting into Zen in a really fierce way. And I, at that time, was the old hand in Zen, so I was giving... I suppose I was giving pointers or talking about koans. But unbeknownst to me, Henry would soon be driving a Lamborghini, passing [laughs] a Zen Lamborghini [laughs] passing me at great speed in the future. But the great thing about Henry was he was the toast of the literary world in London. He was being published in the TLS, you know, Times Literary Supplement.

   3. TFTim Ferriss2:55

      Mm-hmm.

   4. DWDavid Whyte2:56

      He was in demand as one of the up-and-coming poets, and he also had a pipeline of novels. So when fate took us apart and I came back to live in the States full time and, and he seemed to disappear, and I tried to find out a number of times where he was, and because I couldn't find anything on him on the internet... Obviously, I didn't look hard enough, but I couldn't find anything, so I thought he must have passed away. He must have died.

   5. TFTim Ferriss3:32

      Mm.

   6. DWDavid Whyte3:32

      Because he was so good at what he did. He was so famous as a young poet. It's, it could be the only explanation. And in many ways, he had died metaphorically. He'd gone so fully into Zen, which is, you know, a form, a, a deep path of heartbreak, as my latest essay on Zen says. And he emerged twenty years later, as I say, as a fully fledged Zen master, and he appeared on the Sam Harris app. He appeared on the Sam Harris app, and we were both on it together. And so I, I asked Sam to make the introduction so we could contact, and we were so happy to find each other again. So it's really interesting at this new juncture, having spent so long apart, he's now coming full bore back into poetry, and I'm having another round of dedication in my Zen sitting. So the world turns, so we're Zen and poetic bros.

   7. TFTim Ferriss4:37

      [laughs]

   8. DWDavid Whyte4:39

      And we have the same sense of humor, which is great, and we just did a big day in Santa Fe, the theme of one of my essays, which is the word unordinary.

   9. TFTim Ferriss4:49

      Hmm.

   10. DWDavid Whyte4:50

       And of course, Zen's always talking about ordinary mind, which is actually extraordinary mind. And so it's lovely to have him back in my life and to work together and, uh, just to have the friendship, actually, is really marvelous,

3. 5:05 – 10:57

   Low times in the High Himalayas and a yak manger awakening.

   1. DWDavid Whyte5:05

      so.

   2. TFTim Ferriss5:06

      I'm gonna come back and touch on a bunch of things that you mentioned. And part of the reason I wanted to invoke the great name of Henry is because he offered some suggestions. Well, I asked him if he could offer some fun avenues for exploration, and he said, "Totally fine to blame them on me." So I wanted to at least let the audience know who Henry [chuckles] was before I start blaming someone.

   3. DWDavid Whyte5:29

      Lovely.

   4. TFTim Ferriss5:29

      [laughs] I'm going to kick off the next stage in the adventure with the following: You had an awakening while half dead with amoebic dysentery in a yak manger in the High Himalayas.

   5. DWDavid Whyte5:42

      [laughs]

   6. TFTim Ferriss5:43

      What were you doing there, and what happened?

   7. DWDavid Whyte5:46

      Well, I was in the yak manger because that's the only place the, the Tibetan family could find for me, actually. It was more or less a one-room hut they were in with five children, and I staggered in there You know, at their death's door, really

   8. TFTim Ferriss6:05

      And how old were you at the time, if you just place us in your life?

   9. DWDavid Whyte6:08

      I was in my mid-20s or late mid-20s, yes. So, so that was the only place they could put me, and I was in a delirium in the yak manger for three days and three nights, which is a, a mythic period. [laughs]

   10. TFTim Ferriss6:25

       [laughs] How did you end up there in the first place?

   11. DWDavid Whyte6:28

       Well, I was trekking. I was-

   12. TFTim Ferriss6:30

       Hmm

   13. DWDavid Whyte6:30

       ... on the Annapurna trail when it first opened up-

   14. TFTim Ferriss6:34

       Hmm

   15. DWDavid Whyte6:34

       ... in the mid-'70s, so we were one of the first people along it, and very different experience than if you walked it today. We had experiences that Marco Polo would've had, you know, going into-- through Asia in the centuries. We were often the first Westerner certain people had seen, certainly when we went off the main trail and up the side branches and found villages up above in the mountains. And it was one of the... In one of those tiny villages that I, I, I collapsed actually a mile or so before I got there and literally crawled on my hands and knees into the hamlet, and this family took me in. I have a piece in my cycle of poems about pilgrimage, about the love of the stranger and how powerful it is. And I've had my life saved by strangers, not only in the Himalayas, but in South America and, and other places. There's something very powerful about the stranger's love. And, and so I was very appreciative of the hospitality this family gave me, even though all they had for me was this, this ma... Luckily, it was quite a deep, capacious manger and full of straw and dried yak dung, which is actually quite comfortable in its dried form. [laughs]

   16. TFTim Ferriss7:58

       [laughs]

   17. DWDavid Whyte7:58

       Although it does tend to stick in your hair, particularly as my hair was quite long at that time. And as part of that hospitality, this family had a rice beer which they brewed themselves, and all families in those mountains brew their own rice beer. But some of the rice beer a family, a family will make is terrible-

   18. TFTim Ferriss8:17

       [laughs]

   19. DWDavid Whyte8:19

       ... and they get a bad reputation for their rice beer. But this family's rice beer was like strawberries and cream, and it was the only thing I could sip for the three days and three nights. It sat in a mug at the end of this, of this manger. And I went through all the different levels of hell that you see painted in all those Tibetan iconographical... I had a really powerful experience of many of the images that I had seen. Probably, I, I'd taken them in, you know, being in the Kathmandu Valley and then going into gompas and temples, and I was sitting in them too in meditation. And so I think I'd taken them in in a dreamlike form, and then I had this three-day experience of going through many of the experiences that a lot of this very powerful, fierce iconography represented. And then it all blew open on the third day, and I sat up, laughing uproariously and swaying from side to side with my hands out, and the whole family ran out, and they all looked at me with their mouths open. And then they all stood in a row, and it was like the scene from The Sound of Music, where all the children are, are in a row, you know, with the smallest and the tallest. [laughs]

   20. TFTim Ferriss9:40

       [laughs] Yeah.

   21. DWDavid Whyte9:40

       And they all bowed at the same time-

   22. TFTim Ferriss9:43

       Hmm

   23. DWDavid Whyte9:43

       ... towards me. It was just as if they just recognized something because it's in the air up there. You know, the llamas they would meet and the spirituality you could cut with a knife in those mountains. And so they just... It was just as if, "Oh, we recognize this," yeah. They all bowed-

   24. TFTim Ferriss10:03

       Hmm

   25. DWDavid Whyte10:03

       ... and they just left me alone, no fuss. And that moment of breakthrough was realizing that the whole David Whyte project was completely absurd.

   26. TFTim Ferriss10:16

       The project of David Whyte as self, do you mean?

   27. DWDavid Whyte10:19

       Yes, and the name that I'd given myself and that was given to me was just like the name of the river in the valley below, the Marsyangdi River. You were looking at something that had actually already passed.

   28. TFTim Ferriss10:32

       Hmm.

   29. DWDavid Whyte10:32

       That what was real about your identity is actually what's just about to precipitate out of the seasonal edge of your existence.

   30. TFTim Ferriss10:40

       Hmm.
4. 10:57 – 13:16

   The place from where David writes good poetry.

   1. TFTim Ferriss10:58

      Could you say a bit more about that, that place from which you write good poetry? If it's a possibility to, to elaborate on that at all. Is it a felt sense? Do you know when you're in that place?

   2. DWDavid Whyte11:12

      Oh, yes. Yeah. It's a very physical experience. And to begin with, when you're first walking into it, when you're either a young poet or a, a young adherent of some kind of contemplative tradition, it's quite inchoate. It's quite vague. But eventually, you get this almost pinpoint sense in your... It's there in the classical place, in the hara, you know, down in the-

   3. TFTim Ferriss11:42

      In the belly.

   4. DWDavid Whyte11:44

      Yes. Yeah, and, and also in the heart. It's the place that's willing to engage with the fiercest conversations of existence in a way.

   5. TFTim Ferriss11:53

      Hmm.

   6. DWDavid Whyte11:54

      It's the part of you that already knows it's going to have to give everything, every last thing away. It's the part of you that lives at the center of the pattern, and this is what Coleridge and Keats called the primary imagination And the ability to think up new things was only the fancy or the secondary imagination, so... But the central physical tonality from which you're able to meet the fierce conversations of existence, that to Coleridge and Keats was the primary imagination, but it's also Buddha nature. It takes on different names-

   7. TFTim Ferriss12:32

      Hmm

   8. DWDavid Whyte12:32

      ... in different experiences, yeah. It's a place from which you're useful to other people, either in articulation, and strangely enough, you're useful because your articulation is beginning from a place below the horizon whereby meaning is mediated by language.

   9. TFTim Ferriss12:55

      Mm-hmm.

   10. DWDavid Whyte12:55

       It's below language, but it takes a linguistic form. That's why if it's good poetry, it's fresh.

   11. TFTim Ferriss13:03

       Hmm.

   12. DWDavid Whyte13:03

       If it's good literature, if it's good speech, if it's invitational speech, if it's surprising speech, if it's loving speech, if it's affectionate invitational speech, it almost always comes from that place.

5. 13:16 – 18:10

   Invitational speech.

   1. TFTim Ferriss13:16

      Could you say more about invitational speech? Because in the course of doing research for this conversation, I came across invitational questions, and th-this is not phrasing that I'm familiar with. So, uh, could you define or give examples of what you mean?

   2. DWDavid Whyte13:35

      Well, I often say that all my work is based on the conversational nature of reality. You could also call it the invitational nature of reality.

   3. TFTim Ferriss13:45

      Mm-hmm.

   4. DWDavid Whyte13:45

      It's a mutual invitation, the fact that we're constantly being invited out of ourselves into larger and larger territories of self-understanding and understanding about the world, larger and larger territories of generosity, and the ultimate generosity of giving ourselves completely away at the end of our lives, of getting out of the way. I often think that one of the great frontiers of human maturation is where you realize that actually it might not be a tragedy that you're going to die. The rest of creation could actually be quite relieved to see you go. [laughing]

   5. TFTim Ferriss14:28

      [laughing] Your final gift to the world.

   6. DWDavid Whyte14:30

      Exactly. So when you realize that you're... you start getting out of the way sooner. You might as well. You're going to have to anyway.

   7. TFTim Ferriss14:37

      Yeah, might as well start practicing.

   8. DWDavid Whyte14:39

      Yes, and when you think about it, every conversation as its foundation has an invitation in it. When the invitation stops, the conversation really stops. You may still be exchanging blather, but actually the conversation stopped.

   9. TFTim Ferriss14:55

      Hmm.

   10. DWDavid Whyte14:56

       And the other thing is invitation is based on vulnerability. You only invite someone in when you feel you really need help understanding something, or actual physical help, or loving help, all the different forms of help. So, so you've got this trajectory, this spectrum of qualities, which are all, all make up the phenomenology of conversation itself, which is this beautiful Latin word which means inside out, [chuckles] converse. [chuckles]

   11. TFTim Ferriss15:33

       Hmm.

   12. DWDavid Whyte15:35

       And to go back to your original question, I work a lot with inner and outer horizons, yeah. And we all know the way outer horizons are so nourishing for us, and there's a lot of medical research now showing that you're much happier when you're looking at a far horizon. You're in New York City now. If you look out, you know, to all the buildings, it's quite nourishing to see that extraordinary landscape, that profile against the sky, and the same with mountains, the same with the city. If you grow up in the Midwest, you grow to love the horizon of the plains, and we all know how wonderful it is to walk through a landscape and watch the horizon come towards us. And the beautiful thing about a horizon is that it's, it's got something over it. That's the definition, and that, uh, that what's over it is the unknown that's inviting you. When I was a child, I grew up in a very hilly part of Yorkshire, of an Irish mother and a Yorkshire father, and when I got to about seven years old, I would set myself a new horizon every year that I would try to reach, and I had a constant relationship with horizons that I loved, yeah.

   13. TFTim Ferriss16:45

       This is a physical horizon.

   14. DWDavid Whyte16:47

       Physical horizons, yeah.

   15. TFTim Ferriss16:49

       Mm-hmm.

   16. DWDavid Whyte16:49

       But we also have a very physical horizon that's also a non-physical horizon at the same time inside us, and that horizon is often not perceived in quite as nourishing a way. We often see that inner horizon as a line of resistance, actually, and difficulty, and it's the horizon between what you know about yourself and, as I said earlier, what's just about to precipitate out of the seasonality of your being, what's just about to emerge from the leading edge of your maturation that's coming from some unknown place inside you. All of us have the experience of suddenly realizing, "Oh my God, I'm a different person."

   17. TFTim Ferriss17:36

       Mm-hmm.

   18. DWDavid Whyte17:37

       "I don't have those desires anymore. I don't want those things that steered my life and motivated me for so long." And it can be quite a shock to a person, and the invitation to go below the horizon from which that revelation has come is often refused.

   19. TFTim Ferriss17:57

       Hmm.

   20. DWDavid Whyte17:57

       We will stay in the old ambitions because we don't know who we are without those aims and those goals, and we feel as if our life is falling apart, and the intuition is correct, actually.

   21. TFTim Ferriss18:09

       [chuckles]

6. 18:10 – 24:39

   Catching up with the curve of one’s transformation.

   1. TFTim Ferriss18:11

      If I could interject for one second, just for framing this, I'm curious if this is effectively overlapping with what you're saying, and it might be helpful for people to hear in these words. So I read in a interview that you've done, and please feel free to fact check this, of course, but I'll quote here, "Most people I believe are living four or five years behind the curve of their own transformation." Is that effectively a different facet or-

   2. DWDavid Whyte18:40

      Exactly

   3. TFTim Ferriss18:41

      ... I suppose a compatible facet of what you're describing? And would you mind expanding on that?

   4. DWDavid Whyte18:47

      Yes. I think one of the great disciplines of a human life is to catch up with yourself.

   5. TFTim Ferriss18:53

      [chuckles]

   6. DWDavid Whyte18:54

      This part of you that lies below the horizon of your understanding is the part of you that's already matured into the next dispensation of your existence. It doesn't need the same things that you think you need at the surface of your life now. And so you know intuitively that if you drop below that horizon, your surface life will fall apart. And so many of your friendships or relationships, you don't know, they may or they may not, but you're afraid. You're afraid that you're putting things in jeopardy, and this is why we turn our face away from that edge of maturation. And quite often, we've also had the experience of outer circumstances suddenly pulling the rug out from under us. All the things you've been investing in suddenly fall apart. And sometimes you realize, "Oh my God, I actually worked to... I couldn't have done a better job of self-sabotage than I did-

   7. TFTim Ferriss19:55

      [laughs]

   8. DWDavid Whyte19:55

      ... over the last years." And it's sometimes it's what you might call the soul's attempt, you know, to break things apart unconsciously on the surface that you refuse to do from your own willpower. And-

   9. TFTim Ferriss20:09

      Mm.

   10. DWDavid Whyte20:10

       So sometimes y- you know, your life breaks down, and you hit present reality with such velocity that you break apart on impact. And this is a time-honored way of transformation, but it's very hard on us [chuckles] to go through it that way. There's another way of doing it, which is to stay up with the edge of your own seasonal maturation, and that occurs below this invisible line inside you.

   11. TFTim Ferriss20:42

       How do you take that second approach? Is meditation a primary tool for that? How do you develop the attunement, the sensitivity to sense that?

   12. DWDavid Whyte20:56

       It's dwelling fully in the body-

   13. TFTim Ferriss20:58

       Mm-hmm

   14. DWDavid Whyte20:58

       ... physical body, and so there are lots of different disciplines around that. We sometimes get forced into it through terrible illness, as I did in the yak manger in the Himalayas, yeah, where your outer life falls apart along with your physical body. And, you know, when my children were growing up, I used to notice that every time they had a real illness, whenever they emerged from the illness, they'd matured in some way.

   15. TFTim Ferriss21:26

       Hmm.

   16. DWDavid Whyte21:26

       It was almost as if it marked boundaries and frontiers of maturation. Or you can do it, you know, with this physical dwelling that's in all of our great contemplative traditions, where you stop putting your identity in your thoughts. You go to this deeper autonomic body that's able to breathe by itself without any will. And from that place, you then inhabit the mind. You then inhabit thought, and you don't give up your intellect. Your intellect just becomes a good servant to what we might call the soul's desires, the faculty of belonging inside you. So to go back to the image of inner and outer horizons, you know, the ability to put the inner horizon inside you in conversation with the far horizon of your imagination out in the physical world makes a really powerful conversation. But the really fierce conversation is when you put what's below that horizon inside you, which is the unknown just about to be known in your life about who you are and what you want, in conversation with what lies over the horizon of what you're seeing, you know, your ambitions or your desires in the outer world or the actual physical line to which you're going. And when you put those two unknowns together, that's, I think, what we've called mystical experience-

   17. TFTim Ferriss23:04

       Hmm

   18. DWDavid Whyte23:04

       ... or enlightenment in a way. It's a powerful meeting of two unknowns, and your identity is the frontier between them, where you speak them, you know? And in Dharma combat in Zen-

   19. TFTim Ferriss23:19

       [chuckles]

   20. DWDavid Whyte23:20

       ... that's often what's being... The Zen master is throwing out something from the unknown, and the student is supposed to actually access the unknown to meet it, you know? And almost always they fail. [laughs] They choose something from their thinking mind. Then the real student comes along and, and that's how you get these marvelous koans and exercises which are representations of the two unknowns sparking this incredible creative life, you know.

   21. TFTim Ferriss23:54

       And if we don't come back to it, I will refer people to my first, maybe even my second conversation with Henry Shukman on this podcast, where we spend probably an hour on koans. [laughs] So-

   22. DWDavid Whyte24:09

       Oh, right. Yes

   23. TFTim Ferriss24:10

       ... if people wanna dive into that. Also, the somatic awareness and sort of, I don't wanna say disentangling, but sort of disambiguating that from the identification with thoughts Is very well handled in the way in Henry's app also, which I would encourage people to check out.

   24. DWDavid Whyte24:32

       Yes.

   25. TFTim Ferriss24:33

       It's very much a skill development program with a logical progression, so I'd encourage people to check that out.

7. 24:39 – 33:57

   A revolutionary moment reflecting on parameters and regret.

   1. TFTim Ferriss24:39

      I would like to come back to conversations and invitational questions, and if you have a better example that comes to mind, feel free to run with it. But I wanted to give people a, a real-world example of what this looks like in practice, and the particular story that I'm looking at in front of me relates to you having a good old conversation with yourself at a restaurant when you did not have time to go and grab a book from your hotel. I don't know if that is enough of a prompt. I can certainly-

   2. DWDavid Whyte25:12

      Oh, yes. It was a revolutionary moment in my life, actually. I just... And led to the Constellations essays and led to the writing of the first one with the title Regret. And I was in, I was in Paris. I'd done a lot of work with a company in Paris. And on my days off, I would do this circuit through Paris that I called my Sunward Walk, where I just started off in the morning towards the east with the sun coming up, and I would follow the sun down whatever street I would... it was shining down. But almost always along the street, you would come across something really fascinating, like an eighteenth-century fan museum or [laughs] or the Museum of Paris or this sculptor's house or that artist's house or a wonderful bakery or charcuterie, and you'd be distracted. And then you came out 20 minutes or an hour later, and the sun had moved. So then you follow the sun down that street, even if it's just a one shining behind the clouds. And you go the whole day that way, and it takes you in a clockwise direction across the river and through the southern suburbs of Paris. And I've done this Sunward Walk probably half a dozen times and never repeated the same journey. But I was halfway through this walk when my phone rang, and it was The Observer magazine in Britain, The Sunday Observer, which has millions of readers or had, and they wanted me to write something for their philosophical column, and I got quite excited with such a large readership. But then I got the parameters for it. It had to be a single-word title, and it could only be 300 words. And I was [laughs] I was so disgusted with the parameters. [laughs] So I said, "Okay, I'll do it," and I snapped the phone off, you know. And then I, I said, "David, get over yourself," you know. They've got their parameters. You've got yours, you know, so... And, and then I said, "What if you could write it in 300 words?" You know? There's many a moment in a human life where someone has actually changed other people's lives in less than 300 words. So I said, "Right." And then I started thinking as I was on my walk of all the other parameters that I'd placed upon myself, that I needed to be in my study in order to write, that I needed two weeks in my study in order to write, that I needed another two weeks, one at each end, you know, to decompress from my traveling and speaking and recompress to go out. [laughs] And I realized, my God, you know, the number of strictures I put around-

   3. TFTim Ferriss28:07

      [laughs]

   4. DWDavid Whyte28:08

      ... what I need in order to write. I need silence. I need quiet, you know. And I said to myself, "David, what if you could write everywhere, anywhere?" So I got to the end of the walk, and I'd booked into this restaurant, and I didn't have time to go back to my hotel. I didn't have a book, and I had no scintillating company. So I said, "Well, what if you had a, an entertaining conversation with yourself, David?" And I asked the waiter, "Do you have a piece of paper?" And he did, and it was a beautiful piece of watermarked paper with gold leaf at the edge actually-

   5. TFTim Ferriss28:42

      Oh, very nice paper

   6. DWDavid Whyte28:43

      ... as only the French would pull out, you know. [laughs]

   7. TFTim Ferriss28:47

      Not the back of a receipt like you get in New York. [laughs]

   8. DWDavid Whyte28:50

      Yeah, exactly. [laughs] And I wrote Regret at the top of the page.

   9. TFTim Ferriss28:55

      Hmm.

   10. DWDavid Whyte28:55

       And I said, "That's interesting, and why regret?" And this was the title for the philosophical piece I was going to write. And, and so I wrote it, and this is the piece actually. It was the first essay I wrote. It's just very short. The piece that appeared in Constellations is just a little longer than 300 words, but not much longer. Regret is a short, evocative, and achingly beautiful word, an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief enunciation. It is also a rarity, and almost never heard except where the speaker insists that they have none, that they are brave and forward-looking and could not possibly imagine their life in any other way than the way it is. To admit regret is to understand we are fallible, that there are powers in the world beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. And yet, strangely, to admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins. The rarity of honest regret may be due to our contemporary emphasis on the youthful perspective. It may be that a true, useful regret is not a possibility or a province of youth That it takes a hard-won maturity to experience the depths of regret in ways that do not overwhelm and debilitate us, but put us into a proper, more generous relationship with the future. Except for brief senses of having missed a tide, having hurt another, having taken what is not ours, youth is not yet ready for the rich current of abiding regret that runs through and emboldens a mature human life. Sincere regret may, in fact, be a faculty of paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, or experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life. Fully experienced, regret turns our eyes attentive and alert to a future possibly lived better than our past.

   11. TFTim Ferriss31:32

       Mm.

   12. DWDavid Whyte31:34

       So unconsciously, I was, I was really regretting all the ways I'd, I'd hemmed myself in with all the parameters I felt I needed in order to write. And strangely, just naming those different forms of reluctance released me completely. Suddenly, I was able to write anywhere, on trains, boats-

   13. TFTim Ferriss31:56

       Hmm

   14. DWDavid Whyte31:56

       ... the Tube in London, cliffsides in Ireland, wherever. And, and in fact, that's... I got so excited by the revolutionary aspect that that essay had on my own life, that I thought there must be lots of other words we use in narrow and pejorative ways that-

   15. TFTim Ferriss32:18

       Hmm

   16. DWDavid Whyte32:18

       ... we often use language against ourselves as a weapon against change. I got an essay on time there, where we're constantly saying time is our enemy. You know? Time is not on our side. Time is slipping through our fingers, you know? [chuckles]

   17. TFTim Ferriss32:34

       Mm-hmm.

   18. DWDavid Whyte32:34

       Time, if it could speak, which it does speak, actually, but time would be very surprised to find out that it's our enemy. You know? Nothing could happen without the incredible, astonishing life-giving properties of time itself. So I set off on the adventure, which included writing these essays with these single-word titles on vulnerability, honesty, friendship, the body, death, shame, in all kinds of circumstances all around the world in my traveling. So that's the story-

   19. TFTim Ferriss33:15

       Hmm

   20. DWDavid Whyte33:15

       ... that you called on. It was a revolutionary moment in my life. It's really an interesting invitational question, actually, to choose a regret to feel fully, because often we feel we're disempowering ourselves with the regret, and we're told not to have regrets but to just plow on. But the way forward actually may be through a fully felt sense of remorse, a way you could have been and weren't, a generosity you could have displayed and didn't. And by fully experiencing it, you could be precipitated into a deeper form of generosity in the future.

8. 33:57 – 39:19

   “Everything Is Waiting for You.”

   1. TFTim Ferriss33:58

      Thank you for that. And I do want to encourage everyone to read certainly as much as they can of your work, but Time, which I have printed out with tons of highlights [chuckles] in my suitcase somewhere, which is right next to me, caught me at the right time, which is another reason why we're having this conversation. I've thought of having this conversation in this forum, on this podcast for many years, and for whatever reason, just felt like the right time.

   2. DWDavid Whyte34:26

      And what is that time for you now?

   3. TFTim Ferriss34:29

      This is gonna sound like a cop-out, but it was more of a felt sense and recognition when your name came up again. I think particularly after putting one of your poems in my newsletter, 5-Bullet Friday, Everything Is Waiting for You.

   4. DWDavid Whyte34:47

      Yes.

   5. TFTim Ferriss34:48

      It put words to a sentiment that I had had difficulty verbalizing, in part because I don't think I'd ever tried to verbalize it, [chuckles] if that makes sense. It never occurred to me to frame it in the way that you did, and I, I don't wanna do violence to your words by picking from the end of this. I don't know if you have this handy, but I could also-

   6. DWDavid Whyte35:17

      Time. I have it. Yeah.

   7. TFTim Ferriss35:18

      Oh, Time. Great. Everything Is Waiting for You, this is what prompted, I think-

   8. DWDavid Whyte35:23

      Oh, Everything Is Waiting for You. Yeah.

   9. TFTim Ferriss35:25

      Yeah. Would it be too much insult to the work if I, if I highlighted just a few lines that struck me?

   10. DWDavid Whyte35:34

       Not at all. I have it in my memory too, if you need.

   11. TFTim Ferriss35:36

       Oh, you do? Oh, please.

   12. DWDavid Whyte35:37

       I do. Yeah, yeah.

   13. TFTim Ferriss35:39

       If you'd do us the honor, that would be beautiful.

   14. DWDavid Whyte35:42

       Everything Is Waiting for You. It's a very ancient human sense that things are actually just about to come and find you, and they're going to find someone deep inside you that you don't fully know yourself, echoed in the Zen tradition again and again. Everything Is Waiting for You. "Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were 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.

   15. TFTim Ferriss37:23

       Mm. Fantastic. Thank you. I wanna highlight the line that stuck out most to me in bold in my mind, which was, "Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation."

   16. DWDavid Whyte37:39

       Yes.

   17. TFTim Ferriss37:40

       That's the line that stuck with me because much like these outdated constraints, outdated narratives, outdated stories that are four or five years old as we look at the current sort of horizon internally, let's just say, the feeling of unnecessary burden that we impose-

   18. DWDavid Whyte38:08

       Yeah

   19. TFTim Ferriss38:08

       ... on ourselves is something that I feel very deeply. And the aloneness as a, for instance, is... And this is something Henry has helped me to really hone in on. Paying attention to the, the sensations, the bodily feel of loneliness, maybe the inner narration, maybe visuals, maybe any number of things, but not taking that on with a inherent heaviness with the label of loneliness and the identification as someone who is lonely is something that has been very enabling for me in the last few years as someone who's felt alone or lonely for a very high percentage of my life, I would say. So thank you for that poem. It really, it really struck me, and-

   20. DWDavid Whyte39:03

       Yes

   21. TFTim Ferriss39:03

       ... found it very helpful, and I wanted to have you on this podcast for many reasons, one of which is that I think for, and I don't want to imply that all of us Yanks are knuckle-dragging cretins who can barely make out a paragraph,

9. 39:19 – 45:59

   The secret code to life and the agreed insanity of so-called adults.

   1. TFTim Ferriss39:19

      but poetry, I think, gets relegated to the realm of optional, frivolous, decorative, but I certainly feel like there's much more to it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to arrive at that conclusion. [chuckles]

   2. DWDavid Whyte39:36

      Yeah.

   3. TFTim Ferriss39:37

      But I, I wanted to rewind the clock for you, it seems, and I'm reading here. I just wanna read this, and you can tell me if this is fact-checked properly. [chuckles] But all right. "I've been writing poetry since the age of seven or so, probably under the influence of my Irish mother. I was taken by poetry. I saw it as a secret code to life, and I didn't understand how other people didn't see that. I often thought witnessing what passed for adult conversation," great wording, "that all these so-called adults were actually inhabiting a kind of agreed insanity." All right, I'll stop there. So I would love to hear you comment on secret code to life, what that means to you, and then the agreed insanity of so-called adults.

   4. DWDavid Whyte40:24

      Yes. Well, we can certainly witness the agreed insanity of our political discourse at the moment.

   5. TFTim Ferriss40:31

      [laughs]

   6. DWDavid Whyte40:31

      So we know how immature our supposedly adult world can be. And I just felt it as a child. I think most children have had it, and it just gets covered over. You realize that the priorities of the adult wo- these people are suffering from a form of amnesia. They've forgotten the primary radiant experience of what it's like to be a child. And so poetry always carried that living element, that current for me, whether it was Irish poems in Irish from my mother or her stories, and the mutability of her stories too.

   7. TFTim Ferriss41:12

      What do you mean by that, the mutability?

   8. DWDavid Whyte41:13

      The stories were never the same. They always had some kind of wonderful extemporaneous-

   9. TFTim Ferriss41:20

      Mm-hmm

   10. DWDavid Whyte41:20

       ... change in them. And as another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, said, "No amount of exaggeration will do justice to what actually happened." [both laughing] And it's actually true. You know, the main thing is to get the spirit of what occurred across. And then my father's Yorkshire storytelling tradition was very different. But those two linguistic inheritances came together in a very powerful way. And indeed, it was a Yorkshire, even though I was reading a lot of Irish poems, and I was reading a lot of Walter de la Mare, and we had great poetry in our schools, actually, and good teachers, you know. So I was lucky that way. But when I was about 13 or so, I was down in the little library in the, the town where I grew up, and I saw that the top shelf was poetry. You know, it was as if it was kept away from-

   11. TFTim Ferriss42:17

       [laughs]

   12. DWDavid Whyte42:18

       ... kids.

   13. TFTim Ferriss42:18

       Like the stack of Playboys. [laughs]

   14. DWDavid Whyte42:20

       Yeah. And I had to reach up. It was just before I went through my growing spurt, and so I had to reach up, and I got hold of one of the poetry books, and they... Right in the tipsy topsy 'tweenness of my two fingers and pulled it off. I remember it dropped down and I caught it, and then I opened it, and it was a joint volume by Ted Hughes, fellow Yorkshire poet not far from where I grew up, and Tom Gunn, who moved to San Francisco Bay Area, actually. And first of all, I was surprised that they were thirty years old, both of them, and they were described as young poets [laughs] .

   15. TFTim Ferriss43:00

       [laughs]

   16. DWDavid Whyte43:00

       I thought, "That's not young. Thirty seemed like they were a person." But I read into the book, and I was just astonished. I said, "Oh, here are adults who have kept the primary vision of childhood alive into their maturity." I wouldn't have used that language as a-

   17. TFTim Ferriss43:20

       Mm

   18. DWDavid Whyte43:20

       ... as a child, but that's what I thought. And so I thought, oh, poetry is the secret code to staying alive, to staying present, and to staying visionary. You know, to, to William Blake, innocence was not a commodity that was going to be replaced by experience. Innocence was your ability to be found by the world in ever greater and greater ways, yeah.

   19. TFTim Ferriss43:48

       What do you mean by that, found by the world in greater and greater ways? Is that being unfettered by a metastasized collection of labels and concepts that prevents you from seeing and feeling clearly? Is it something else?

   20. DWDavid Whyte44:03

       That's a very articulate description of one aspect of it, Tim, yeah.

   21. TFTim Ferriss44:07

       [laughs]

   22. DWDavid Whyte44:07

       But it's that phenomena we have whereby there's actually a form of innocence to every epoch in our life if we're mature enough, strangely, ironically, to use that word, to step. You know, there's a kind of innocence you have in your teens. It's an innocence that we normally associate with innocence, yeah. But actually, there's an innocence you can have in your sixties or your seventies or your eighties, your fifties, your forties, yeah. It's your ability to look on the world as if you've seen it for the first time.

   23. TFTim Ferriss44:43

       Mm-hmm.

   24. DWDavid Whyte44:44

       But in the maturity of that body that's now at the frontier of your forty-second year or your fifty-third year or your sixty-fifth year or your seventy-seventh year, there's a new life. And in many ways, the innocence of the adolescent would not be able to grasp the life that the innocence of the seventy-seven-year-old would, would be able to grasp. So the ability to pay attention and, and everything is waiting for you is, is a poem that's telling you to pay attention as if you've seen everything just for the first time.

   25. TFTim Ferriss45:21

       Mm-hmm.

   26. DWDavid Whyte45:23

       And that everything is speaking back to you in its own voice. You're just not hearing it, and everything is coming to meet you in an unspoken way. And if you can open up the same unspoken part of you to meet the unspoken in the world and the spoken inside you and the spoken in the world, all kinds of astonishing experiences that are gratifying and powerful and timeless all in themselves without you having to achieve anything beyond it come into your, into your possibility and your grasp.

10. 45:59 – 46:16

    Being found by the world in greater and greater ways.

    1. TFTim Ferriss45:59

       It seems to me that if people are looking for ways to pull the gauze from their eyes, so to speak, or see the world anew in some respect or themselves for that matter, that questions are a very

11. 46:16 – 48:56

    Asking beautiful questions.

    1. TFTim Ferriss46:16

       useful tool. I have a long list of questions that are attributed to you. They may or may not be in fact [laughs] questions from you, but I wanted to read off just a few of them, and then I have a follow-up question. Question number one: What helped you get here that you need to give away? Who are you when you're the best to yourself and the world around you? What is the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt?

    2. DWDavid Whyte46:44

       Yes.

    3. TFTim Ferriss46:45

       It is too precious to ask the question which you are afraid the answer will come back as no. And I'll keep going, but I may come back to that one. How can you be friends with your longings, with what you want? What would you be if you failed being yourself?

    4. DWDavid Whyte47:01

       [laughs] Yes.

    5. TFTim Ferriss47:03

       What promise did I make sincerely that I now need to let go of?

    6. DWDavid Whyte47:07

       Yes.

    7. TFTim Ferriss47:08

       What would it be like to have absolute faith in your intuitions? These are excellent questions. Excellent, excellent questions. I could see myself journaling for pages on any one of these. And I suppose the meta question that I'd love to do, hear you speak to is, how have you generated these questions? And then could you explain to me what is the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt?

    8. DWDavid Whyte47:39

       Well, many of those questions have come just spontaneously when I've been on stage, and I mean either on stage in front of a thousand people or just in a small group working with people and working with the implications of poetry. And I have hundreds of poems memorized, so I can extemporize and go depending on where I feel the invitation is in the room. So I will often paraphrase a piece and unearth what I call the beautiful question, the beautiful and disturbing question-

    9. TFTim Ferriss48:12

       Mm-hmm

    10. DWDavid Whyte48:12

        ... beneath the line. And I often think a beautiful question is defined by the fact that it helps to shape your life as much by asking it as by having it answered. Asking the question is a form of deep attention, and it's a form of attention that can be deepened, actually. You can get an immediate reward, but actually you can carry a question for years. That you suddenly realize is now being answered in a completely surprising way. And the particular question you chose out, which is, what's the doubt you've carried inside you?

12. 48:56 – 59:53

    “Tan-y-Garth.”

    1. TFTim Ferriss48:56

       The doubt, yes. Yeah, the beautiful question you've cradled three years of doubt.

    2. DWDavid Whyte49:00

       That's a line from Tan-y-Garth, and Tan-y-Garth is the name of a Welsh farm on which I lived for a good few years. It became my base. I helped the farm, Welsh farming family there with the 900 sheep, digging them out of snowdrifts, and lambing, and shearing, and sending them off to market. And I would travel out into the world, and then I'd come back again. And so I was part of the whole seasonal round for a good couple of years at Tan-y-Garth. But I got to know a fellow pilgrim who'd come to light on the farm with his family, and his name was Michael. And he lived in the old... I lived in a caravan in the farmyard, or in a field next to the farmyard, and he lived with his family in this old stone cottage. And we got to know each other. I was just in my twenties, just back from the Galapagos Islands, where I'd been a naturalist guide, and just about to set off into the Himalayas. And he was at the end of his artistic life. Or I should say, no, he was in the full maturity of his artistic life. He'd been a traveling Shakespeare player. He'd played Lear, actually. He had this long Celtic face, actually, with all these horizontal lines on it.

    3. TFTim Ferriss50:24

       [laughs]

    4. DWDavid Whyte50:24

       And we got to know each other, working with the sheep and building walls and walking in those, you know, for two years or so. But we would retreat into his cottage, which was called... The main farm was called Tan-y-Garth, which I think in Welsh just means halfway up the mountain [laughs] . And he and his family lived in Tan-y-Garth Bach, which means little halfway up the mountain. It was just the original farmhouse that grew out of the mountainside. It was just a stone cottage with the back wall of the mountain. And there was a fire in there going all through the summer, as much as it was going through the winter. It was the same temperature in that cottage in, on a midsummer's day [laughs] as it was in the middle of winter.

    5. TFTim Ferriss51:02

       [laughs]

    6. DWDavid Whyte51:03

       And he and I would sit by the fire. His wife, Diane, was a very religious woman. She used to disappear upstairs, 8:30 or so, and, and Michael would reach behind the couch for a bottle of brandy, where it would hide.

    7. TFTim Ferriss51:17

       [laughs]

    8. DWDavid Whyte51:18

       And then we would start these incredible conversations, and I discovered very soon he was a lover of Blake, William Blake. And then I discovered that Michael himself was an engraver like William Blake, yeah.

    9. TFTim Ferriss51:30

       Hmm.

    10. DWDavid Whyte51:31

        And it was much later on I discovered Michael was also a poet, but engraving was his main artistry. And his prized possession was this very thick book of illustrated Blake engravings.

    11. TFTim Ferriss51:45

        Oh, nice.

    12. DWDavid Whyte51:46

        Yeah. It must have cost a fortune, actually, for him because they were very poor. Very poor but rich family, actually. And, and his great doubt would find its, its maximum efflorescence [laughs] . His great doubt would find its greatest question when he would look at this book and he would say to me... And this happened once we got into it over the weeks. He'd ask this question every night almost by the fireside, the Welsh wind and rain beating against the window. He'd say, "Do you think Blake actually talked with the angels or was it just a metaphor that we stand in conversation with worlds greater than our ken?" And he would ask this question.

    13. TFTim Ferriss52:38

        Hmm.

    14. DWDavid Whyte52:38

        And he really meant it when he asked it. He wanted to know. And he had a very fierce way of asking questions, actually. If you ever made a declarative statement, you know, he would ask you a fierce question about it, and you'd find yourself backing out of it [laughs] and reversing your opinion because the well of doubt was so powerful in his face. So doubt was really his way of paying attention. So through the years, we got to know each other, and I'd go away and come back, and go away and come back. And the other thing he'd say every night, almost every night, was, "You know, I love this place so much. I found my place to die." And he meant Tan-y-Garth. And if you looked out of that window, you'd see fields and, and if there were four corners to a field, three of them would have names. Yeah. And there was a little stream called the Cassag, which wended its way through the farmland out of the mountains, and every little elbow of that stream had a name. And there was one place which was called The Place of the Three Dead Englishmen in Welsh [laughs] .

    15. TFTim Ferriss53:53

        [laughs]

    16. DWDavid Whyte53:54

        This being Wales, that was, it was not a place of tragedy.

    17. TFTim Ferriss53:57

        [laughs] Victory lap. Yeah.

    18. DWDavid Whyte54:00

        Yeah, something good had happened there in the 1400s, so The Place of the Three Dead Englishmen. But it was actually a little pool where we used to swim, The Place of the Three Dead Englishmen. I used to imagine the blood in the brook.

    19. TFTim Ferriss54:10

        [laughs]

    20. DWDavid Whyte54:12

        The whole place was a mythic language, and then the Carneddau mountains beyond that, you know? Well, anyway, I came to the States, and it was many years later that I went back, and I surprised them, actually. I walked up one day. I was on my way to Ireland, and I realized, "Oh, I have time to stop in Wales on my way to the ferry, and there's no phone in Tan-y-Garth Bach, so I'll just walk up." And I saw Diane, you know, when I was about half a mile away. When you've lived in the countryside, actually, you can recognize people's silhouettes from a long way away And so I hadn't seen her for two years, but she knew it was me. She started waving, yeah.

    21. TFTim Ferriss54:49

        Hmm.

    22. DWDavid Whyte54:49

        And I came up to the cottage, and there was the smell of scones coming out of the, out of the doorway. I thought, "Perfect bachelor timing. This is great."

    23. TFTim Ferriss54:58

        [laughs]

    24. DWDavid Whyte54:58

        So we sat down. It was so good to see each other. And, and then I said, "Where's Michael?" And she said, "Oh, he's in the hospital, and I'm afraid it's serious. He has leukemia. And so he's in for tests as, and, and treatment." I said, "Oh my God." And so I was there a couple of hours, and, and I had to leave to go to Ireland, and I didn't come back that way. And then I heard that he'd passed away, so I'd missed him, you know? But Diane wrote me this incredible letter in which she said he'd had... In the last months before he died, he'd had this, this kind of remission, and he'd come out and come back to the farm. And in the letter, she said, "In those last few weeks, he was experiencing everything he'd read in Blake."

    25. TFTim Ferriss55:50

        [laughs]

    26. DWDavid Whyte55:51

        "He was conversing with his angels." And so I wrote this poem, Tan-y-Garth, and I realized I couldn't talk about Michael without talking about what he loved. And what he loved was Tan-y-Garth, and then all the Welsh names. I wrote this as an elegy because I was, I was poor as a church mouse at that time. I couldn't afford to just jump on a plane and go to his memorial service, so I sat down to have my own memorial service, and I wrote this piece. So it's called Tan-y-Garth: Elegy for Michael. "This grass-grown hill is a patchwork lined with walls I've grown to love. Four hundred years at least, the hill farms clung tenacious to the weathered slope, over the Ogwen and the green depths of Môn. The eye has weathered also into the gray rocks and the fields bright with spring, the windblown light from the mountain filling the valley, the low-backed sheep following the fence hemmed by dogs and John's crooked staff," John, the farmer, yeah. "The still valley filled with his shouts and the mewling of sheep pressed through the gate. Beneath Eryri, the bowl of Llangynnyr is stirred with mist. The dogs lie low in the tufted grass and watch with pure intent the ragged back of the last sheep entering the stone-bound pens. The rough ground of Wales lives in the mind for years, springing moor grass under feet treading concrete, hundreds of miles from home. And the ground has names, songs full of grief, sounds that belong to a single stream. Cesair is the place of the mare. Cwm Llangynnyr is the valley of speech, utterance of wind. Brynllys, the blue moorland filled by the sky. The farm, passed down, yet never possessed, lives father to son, mother to child, feeding the people with sheep, the sheep with grass, and memory with years lived looking at mountains. One single glance of a hillside darkened by cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes, and this world needs all the breath we have. Carnedd Llewelyn, Garnedd Dafydd, Garnedd Uchaf, all the Carneddau. Eryri of the shining light. Tryfan, the endless ridge curving to nothing. One man I know loved this place so much he said he'd found his place to die. Years I knew him, walking the high moor lines or watching the coals of a winter fire in the cottage grate. And die he did. But not before one month's final joy in wild creation gave him that full sight he glimpsed in Blake. He, too, wrestled with his angel. In and out of hospital, the white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountain's bracing sense of space. Now he was ready. His heart, so long at the edge of the nest, shook its wings and flew into the hills he loved, became the hills he loved, walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt. His ashes are scattered over by Aber, the water continually saying his name, as I still go home to Tan-y-Garth, speaking the names of those I love."

    27. TFTim Ferriss59:28

        Hmm. Wow. Beautiful, beautiful poem. First of all, I don't want to skip over the substance of that, and I appreciated the, the repetition of... And I'm not going to get the wording exactly correct, but the, the faith nursed in doubt.

    28. DWDavid Whyte59:46

        Yeah. Walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt.

13. 59:53 – 1:06:45

    Memorizing poetry.

    1. TFTim Ferriss59:53

       Yeah. Is there a developed skill to memorizing poetry, or is that just an innate [sighs] sort of bard genetics? [laughs]

    2. DWDavid Whyte1:00:06

       Well, certainly. You know, you go to Ireland, and people have it by the barrow load.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:00:10

       [laughs]

    4. DWDavid Whyte1:00:10

       You've only to poke someone in Ireland, and [laughs] out it spills, you know? And my uncles were the same, so, as well as my mother.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:00:20

       Hmm.

    6. DWDavid Whyte1:00:20

       But, um, you know, uh, it's just you learn one line at a time, but you learn it because you love it, and you want to have it.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:00:29

       Mm-hmm.

    8. DWDavid Whyte1:00:29

       And I found when I was young, walking, I used to spend a lot of time alone walking out in the countryside, that if I could just call up a line, then it wasn't something that was occurring in the abstract. I was actually having a powerful primary experience that the poet had when they wrote it. And, and especially-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:00:49

       Mm-hmm

    10. DWDavid Whyte1:00:49

        ... if you got it, as we say, by heart, yeah. So you really just learn one line at a time, and then you have to learn the seams between the lines, which is often quite a trick.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:01:01

        [laughs]

    12. DWDavid Whyte1:01:02

        But my memory is much better now than when-- I never had a photographic memory, so I had to work to learn them. But now I can memorize much more easily than when I was younger, actually. So I have a better memory now than I had 40 or 50 years ago.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:01:20

        Through practice.

    14. DWDavid Whyte1:01:21

        Through practice, yeah.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:01:22

        Is that cultivated ability? What are the helpful constituent ingredients of that? In other words, are you focusing on the, the musical cadence, in a sense, to help you memorize? Do you imagine visuals? Are you actually seeing in your mind's eye the words themselves? What are-- If you had to tease out some of the components of this improved ability, how would you try to do that?

    16. DWDavid Whyte1:01:53

        There is a visual element, but it's kind of transitory. It moves through them very quickly. If you think of the Tan-y-Garth poem, it's full of so much imagery, but I'm-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:02:02

        So much

    18. DWDavid Whyte1:02:03

        ... physically there on the farm when I'm reciting that.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:02:05

        Mm-hmm.

    20. DWDavid Whyte1:02:05

        I've got the Welsh breeze coming out of Cwmllwyfa, which means the Valley of Speech, Cwmlla-llwyfa in, in Welsh. And Yr Elen means the shining one. It's this ridge of light. So yes, I see them.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:02:17

        Hmm.

    22. DWDavid Whyte1:02:18

        But, you know, it's the meaning. It's all the constellating qualities together, the rhythm, the beauty of the phrase. So for instance, you had the, the phrase you were trying to catch again and again. So that would be a good one for you to learn because it obviously means something to you. So just to take that line out of the poem and not feel you have to learn the rest of the poem.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:02:38

        Mm-hmm.

    24. DWDavid Whyte1:02:39

        "It walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt."

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:02:44

        Mm-hmm.

    26. DWDavid Whyte1:02:45

        So that's obviously important to you. So to learn that line and then to be able to embody the experience when you recite the line, it reinforces it. And it works as a beautiful question, actually, as you deepen your understanding of what it means to pay attention to the world through all the ways that you doubt it, all the ways you're reluctant to be here, all the ways you don't want to have the conversation, thank you very much-

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:03:11

        [laughs]

    28. DWDavid Whyte1:03:12

        ... all the ways you just don't believe.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:03:14

        Mm-hmm.

    30. DWDavid Whyte1:03:16

        Those are you. Those are the way you're made. So to be able to have that phrase to take you. So it's interesting, you know, when I first started off, my repertoire of poetry that I'd written myself did not cover up many of the thresholds of experience that I was working with on stage or with people. So I would memorize other people's poems. I'd memorize Antonio Machado in Spanish or Rilke from, from the German or Yeats or Seamus Heaney. So I still have all those poems in my memory.
14. 1:06:45 – 1:20:54

    “Zen.”

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:06:46

       I wanted to come back to something you said in the very beginning of our conversation, and I may be misquoting. I jotted it down quickly, but Zen is a deep path of heartbreak. And I would like to keep that in mind, but hear you describe how Zen entered your life and why Zen?

    2. DWDavid Whyte1:07:10

       When I was at university, I started to practice all kinds of strange forms of meditation that were my own ideas of what meditation [chuckles] probably was. [chuckles] So in my little room up in the Welsh village above Bangor, where I studied marine zoology, I remember practicing all kinds of, of strange exercises.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:07:34

       So hold on one second. I don't wanna stop you before you get started, but we're gonna come back to the marine zoology at some point, I suspect. But connect the dots here, or what was the catalyzing book, moment, conversation, TV program, whatever it was, that sent you off to explore [chuckles] the-- these different forms of real or created meditative practices?

    4. DWDavid Whyte1:08:03

       Well, as I say in my essay on Zen, Zen is a big old fraud of a word.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:08:08

       [chuckles]

    6. DWDavid Whyte1:08:09

       Because it's so cool. The word, you know, is so glamorous in every generation. It's... The word itself remains hip-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:08:18

       [chuckles]

    8. DWDavid Whyte1:08:18

       ... no matter [chuckles] what we do. So the Zen of this, the Zen of that. It's just a gorgeous word.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:08:24

       [chuckles]

    10. DWDavid Whyte1:08:25

        You get caught by the glamors of Zen, you know, the black robes, the bronze bells, the reflective wooden floors, the quiet temples, you know, the, the Yoda-like teachers, you know.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:08:38

        [chuckles]

    12. DWDavid Whyte1:08:38

        That probably was the original invitation that I felt.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:08:42

        Mm-hmm.

    14. DWDavid Whyte1:08:43

        "Oh, what a remarkable path to take," you know? But it is, you know, it draws you in and then abandons you. The word draws you in and then abandons you to, as I say, the real work, which is the path of heartbreak, of undoing.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:09:03

        Would you mind reciting that piece? Are you open to that?

    16. DWDavid Whyte1:09:06

        Yeah, it's the last... Being a Zed or a Z-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:09:09

        Mm-hmm

    18. DWDavid Whyte1:09:10

        ... as you say so quaintly in your country.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:09:12

        [chuckles] Zed sounds better, I'll be honest.

    20. DWDavid Whyte1:09:14

        [chuckles]

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:09:16

        But if I say it, I sound like a pompous ass, so have to hold off. [chuckles]

    22. DWDavid Whyte1:09:21

        Zen. It's the last essay in the book. So Zen is a great, big, magnificent, all-embracing seduction of a word, and that's what I felt when I first came across it. Zen is the beguiling and charming philanderer of the first order.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:09:38

        [chuckles]

    24. DWDavid Whyte1:09:39

        That good-looking stranger who lets us fall in love and then runs off with someone else so that we can fall out of love with the word and be let alone in our grief to fall in love with reality. Zen is a centuries-old, glamorous, disguised cover-up, inviting us in in each succeeding generation so exquisitely, so quietly, so subtly, so seductively into its grip that we do not, to begin with, have any understanding of what we have become so innocently ensnared by. We do not have a clue as to the way we are being taken in so swiftly and so unerringly into the currents that lead to the edge of our own necessary physical and emotional breakdown. Amidst our hopes for polished wood, serene surroundings, the sound of bells, and the whispered shuffle of bare feet, we always find, to our consternation, that Zen always begins and ends in tears.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:10:49

        [chuckles]

    26. DWDavid Whyte1:10:51

        The first tears in Zen practice are for our bodies and our restless minds, for our backs, our knees, and for our legs trying to sit upright on those strangely necessary black cushions. The next tears are for our hearts, our emotions, and our previously imprisoned minds. The last tears are for a joy and laughter that still, to our amazement, keeps a friendship and an understanding with our previous griefs. Zen is the journey we take through heartbreak. At the last heartbreak, Zen retires from the field. Zen generously disappears and lets us alone, refusing to let us use the word so freely again, refusing to let us be fooled by what we originally needed to be so enticed by.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:11:46

        Hmm.

    28. DWDavid Whyte1:11:47

        Drawn towards Zen practice, we almost always fall in love with the word itself. Zen beguiles us with that barely breathing vowel sound that lives so eternally and so glamorously at its center, between the dashing capital Z [chuckles] and that oh-so-subtle brushstroke of an N. The word itself seems to be clean and rested, insightful and eternally hip, something inspiring, something that conjures light and space and a welcome order amidst a difficult world of besiegement, care- chaos, and successive, never-ending experiences of grief. We fall for the word as we fall for the deep silences that swim dreamily through the first pains of our practice. Zen welcomes us through its invitation to a sense of spacious ease, to freedom from worry, and thankfully, in our mind's eye, to a deeper form of rested presence, a presence we first saw in the clean, perfectly proportioned spaces inherited so seductively from Japan. But then, as Zen breaks down the divisions in our mind and body- We find our sense of self breaks down too, firstly from the inside out, and then at the end, from the outside in. We learn to bow in the Zendo, not knowing what we are rehearsing, unconsciously preparing as we are to duck through the achingly low doors of the basement our heartbreak will provide. We pass through those low doors as we pass into the difficulties of marriage or intimate relationship. Like the raw vulnerabilities we find in the commitments of marriage or in a long intimate partnership, Zen begins with the honeymoon of getting to know, graduates through difficult and unwanted surprises, and then culminates in a slow breakdown day by day through the trials and invitations of intimacy and heartache itself. As in a marriage, in Zen we learn that the line between this body, another's body, and the body of the world is not where we thought it was. As in a love relationship, we learn that what we thought we knew is not equal to what we are discovering. As in an intimate relationship, we learn that who we thought we were is not who we are now in the midst of all the disappearing boundaries. Almost always in relationship, what we think we have to give is not actually what is needed. What we thought was love might not have been love at all, and what we thought we had to give up is not, after all, what is being asked for. Tellingly, as in relationship, the hardest thing to do in Zen practice is simply finding a way to breathe freely while staying connected to the world or the world of another. Breathing is foundational to both coming to know and letting go of what we think we know. Like the things we think we know about relationship, all the things we thought we knew about Zen will have to be given up at the end, and even then, Zen and the intimacies of relationship both ask us to give up the very last thing, the very thing for which we thought we had already given everything up. Like the essence of intimate relationship, the very essence of Zen might be giving up and giving in, not to our partner, but to what the essence and heartache of the partnership calls us to. Zen is surprising under its subterfuge. Zen's biggest surprise is that it seems to have more confidence in the incoherent life we first brought to it than the one we are trying to replace it with. We find ourselves seen at a core as one who generated difficulties, not because our essence is difficulty, but because difficulties were what we thought we needed in order to get through, in order to be worthy of something better. Difficulty was our needed friend. Difficult is how we thought things should be. Difficult is what we thought we were. In the attempt to give our old life away and have it replaced by the newly spacious clarity we first glimpse in Zen, we find it constantly returned to us in a voice that says we will never need anything more than what we already had. We're told in no uncertain terms that we were more miraculous in our simple wish to find a way than any abstracted spacious place we could reach through sitting in silence, and yet sitting in silence is how we will find the way. Zen frustrates us, wants us to find the way just by being the very essence of things that find their way. Zen in the old cliché, because it is so true, wants us to be the way itself. It might be that Zen as a word would like us to understand this one simple thing so it can go home and have a good rest. Zen begins by being the hand seemingly raised to keep us at bay, and then slowly and imperceptibly it seemed to be the hand that rests on our shoulder, telling us we might be fine just as we are. When we actually glimpse what we are, we and that hand seem to disappear altogether, simply because there's no need for a hand when the reluctant body that needed it has disappeared. Zen indeed is an old fraudster, but one with a heart of gold. Just as we are taken in, it relents and to our relief gives us all our money back. Zen, we realize in the end, is much humbler in its aims than we thought it was. Zen, we realize, is more realistic than we thought it was. Zen in the end is always surprisingly practical and helpful and just wants us to do the simplest, most obvious thing. Zen doesn't waste its energy by choosing too early in the game and waits for things to make their own choice unimpeded by interference. Zen refuses to choose between light and dark, restlessness and order, between not knowing or having answers. Zen has a well-cultivated sense of humor and carries its own hidden cargo of amusement at all our self-deceptions and false choices. Zen is a true comedian at times, its most hilarious proposition being that you might not, after all, have to believe in your own thoughts. [laughs] Zen is a true comedian. We walk towards Zen as if towards a door of light. But Zen practice moves us just as much and unerringly towards a door into the dark, into what until now we could not see or discern, so that we might better understand what we might have hidden there, but also so that we might better understand the underlying miracle of light itself. Zen leads us on like the very best kind of guide, as if we might be equal to what we eventually find. Zen is the ultimate kind of guide in that it disappears in the moment of our understanding to leave us with what we have found, and more importantly, and to our astonishment, what comes to find us. If Zen asks us to begin with to follow the thread of heartbreak, then to begin with, heartbreak is the only thread we need to follow. Heartbreak has many difficult doors, almost all of them leading where we hoped and prayed we did not need to go. Reading between the lines, the old Zen teachers seemed to think that one heartbreak was as good as another. So many doors. All heartbreak is giving up, but the mercy that lies in the path of heartbreak is that in the end, we will have to give up even our precious, well-guarded memories of heartbreak itself. In real heartbreak, something else always comes to find us. On the other side of heartbreak, there's an experience of timeless radiance that cannot be described from this side of heartbreak. So for now, sitting Zen and carrying the silence from sitting into our lives, heartbreak is all we need to know.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:20:51

        Hmm.

    30. DWDavid Whyte1:20:52

        There's more, but-
15. 1:20:54 – 1:23:34

    Courage.

    1. DWDavid Whyte1:20:54

       ... heartbreak is all we need to know [laughs] .

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:20:57

       Heartbreak is all we need to know.

    3. DWDavid Whyte1:20:59

       Well, you know, all of us spend so much time trying to find a path where we won't have our heart broken.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:21:05

       Mm-hmm.

    5. DWDavid Whyte1:21:06

       And really, the only way you can find a path where your heart won't break is by not caring. Finding a path where you don't care about things or other people. That's the ultimate protection against heartbreak. But then you live a life in the abstract. You live a life that never makes any real sense. You live a life of loneliness. Um, so finding out what you care about-

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:21:40

       Mm-hmm

    7. DWDavid Whyte1:21:40

       ... even though we try and find a path where we won't have our heart broken, you're going to have your heart broken anyway, so we might as well get with the program [laughs] and have our heart broken over something that we actually care about.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:21:52

       [laughs]

    9. DWDavid Whyte1:21:54

       So, so what do you care about? What do you really care about?

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:21:58

        What are your thoughts on the word courage and how this ties into what you're discussing? What is the etymology of the word courage?

    11. DWDavid Whyte1:22:07

        Well, it's very similar. I'm sure you know the first part of the word is from the French cœur, uh, heart. It's what your heart felt about, and you are really only courageous about what your heart felt about. We use the word heart in the abstract, but it's really an invitation into the body, into the physical body, what your heart felt about. And to allow yourself to be heartfelt... I mean, often we'll create a barrier between ourselves and our children because we care about, exactly because we care about them so deeply.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:22:47

        Mm-hmm.

    13. DWDavid Whyte1:22:48

        We can't believe how devastated we would be if we lost them, you know? We would be if we lost them. So it's very hard to feel that heartfelt love at its depth because it always... Heartfelt love, uh, in its ultimate always has to give something away, has to give the other person away. So the courage to love, you know, is the courage to feel the heartbreak in loving.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:23:19

        Hmm.

    15. DWDavid Whyte1:23:20

        And the way you won't escape. There's no escape [laughs] from heartbreak.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:23:27

        Yeah. Unless you wanna be one of the walking dead with a muted experience of life.

    17. DWDavid Whyte1:23:32

        Yeah, exactly.

16. 1:23:34 – 1:31:06

    How living in a trailer on the side of a Welsh mountain helped David develop as a writer.

    1. DWDavid Whyte1:23:34

       Yeah.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:23:34

       You seem to have been, for lack of a better word, a seeker from a relatively young age. I would be curious to know how or why that started, if you can even answer that question. And then to come back to the all paths lead to Shukman line of questioning, [laughs] you can answer either or both of these. How did living in a caravan on the side of Mount Snowdon, if I'm saying that correctly, help you develop as a young writer? I can't leave the living in a caravan on the side of a [laughs] a mountain alone. The seeking-

    3. DWDavid Whyte1:24:15

       Yeah

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:24:16

       ... you know, where does that come from?

    5. DWDavid Whyte1:24:18

       It was actually the side of the Carneddau Mountains, just a range over from Snowdon, but you were very close. Snowdon-

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:24:24

       I was close

    7. DWDavid Whyte1:24:25

       ... central mountain in the... Yeah, it's Snowdonia. You're right, so.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:24:28

       [laughs]

    9. DWDavid Whyte1:24:29

       But having lived there and the, and the Welsh names being so specific to place-

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:24:34

        Yeah

    11. DWDavid Whyte1:24:34

        ... I can't let you get away with it, so [laughs] .

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:24:35

        No, please don't. Please don't. Slap on the wrist. Just a quick side note. I remember my, my one and only time in Wales [laughs] went to something called the Dew Lectures, which was great, near Cardiff, I believe it was, or-

    13. DWDavid Whyte1:24:46

        Mm

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:24:46

        ... outside of Cardiff.

    15. DWDavid Whyte1:24:47

        Yes.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:24:48

        And I rented a car. This was before Google Maps, and I remember the... Some very kind woman at the hotel giving me directions to get to some farmers market or something I wanted to explore, and I wrote down everything phonetically, and as soon as I got to the first sign, I knew I was completely fucked [laughs] . It was just I could not, could not read-

    17. DWDavid Whyte1:25:07

        No

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:25:07

        ... anything.

    19. DWDavid Whyte1:25:08

        Yes. It's- It's a revelation when you find out how they're actually pronounced, you know? There's a lovely sign which is-- says, "Llwybr Coedus," which English tourists would be following trying to get to this mythical village, but it actually just meant public footpath. [laughs]

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:25:28

        [laughs]

    21. DWDavid Whyte1:25:29

        So-

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:25:29

        Sounds very dignified.

    23. DWDavid Whyte1:25:31

        Yeah. No, it's a magnificent language. It goes back two thousand years. It's the language that was spoken in the whole island, really, when the Romans arrived two thousand years ago.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:25:41

        No kidding.

    25. DWDavid Whyte1:25:41

        And a modern Welsh person can, or a postmodern Welsh person can read a manuscript or make sense of one that's fifteen hundred years old. Yeah.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:25:51

        That's incredible.

    27. DWDavid Whyte1:25:52

        Yeah. It's so rich, and it has a very powerful poetic tradition-

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:25:57

        Hmm

    29. DWDavid Whyte1:25:58

        ... which is still alive to this day where-- within the language. So it was lovely to be bathed in that language. I learned how to pronounce it and a host of words. I never learned how to have conversational Welsh.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:26:11

        Mm-hmm.
17. 1:31:06 – 1:38:55

    Irish koans, French doors, and Tibetan bells.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:31:07

       When did you start your Zen practice? And for people who have no familiarity- What does it look like? How does it differ from Vipassana meditation or other-

    2. DWDavid Whyte1:31:18

       Yes

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:31:18

       ... types of meditation that people may have heard of?

    4. DWDavid Whyte1:31:21

       Well, it started in my mid-20s after I moved to the States, and there are two main streams of Zen. You know, one is shikantaza sitting, which is simply following your breath and empty mind. The other form is the one that includes emptying your mind but also has koan work, where you empty your mind around a beautiful question. So what is the sound of one hand clapping?

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:31:52

       Mm-hmm.

    6. DWDavid Whyte1:31:53

       Very powerful question. What's it like to be one hand moving through space and time that doesn't meet anything other than itself? It's a tragedy. [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:32:05

       [laughs] Marco. Marco.

    8. DWDavid Whyte1:32:07

       [laughs]

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:32:07

       No Polo. Now, are these questions... I'd love to hear your perspective on this. Are they powerful because they productively break the logical or rational mind? Is it a tool for escaping the tyranny of epistemological arrogance, thinking that you can sort of solve for everything with left brain analytical thinking? I mean, what, what makes a question like that powerful?

    10. DWDavid Whyte1:32:41

        Well, I'll give you an example. Uh, but this koan is actually out of the Irish tradition. But once you've studied koans, you realize they're in every tradition.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:32:51

        Hmm.

    12. DWDavid Whyte1:32:51

        You just didn't realize. [laughs]

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:32:52

        Okay.

    14. DWDavid Whyte1:32:53

        You know, we have the Blue Cliff Record with hundreds of numbered koans all commented on by various Zen masters through the centuries, but actually they're everywhere, yeah. And your intimate others in your life will provide them to you, too, yeah, especially your children.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:33:11

        [laughs]

    16. DWDavid Whyte1:33:12

        But this, you know, in the Irish tradition, there's a story which is a very brief description of a monk standing at the edge of the monastic precinct, and this would be the edge of a monasticism which had an incredible respect and sense of revelation in the natural world. Irish, the Irish church, you know, pre-Catholic, was non-hierarchical, at least a very different kind of hierarchy, equal place for women in that monasticism. And the word, the revelation could be understood as much through the sun on the leaves moving in the wind as in the Bible. There's a monk on the edge of the monastic precinct, and he suddenly hears the bell calling him to prayer. And in the story, he says that's the most beautiful sound in the world, the call to depth, to silence, to prayer. But immediately, at the same time as the bell is ringing, he hears the blackbird singing over the wall. And he says, "And that's also the finest sound in the world," which is the world just as it is, just as it comes to find you. Well, I've known that story for decades, you know? And in the abstract, I knew what it was pointing towards, which is you're not supposed to choose actually between depth and, and the world outside. Yeah. We're supposed to stretch, stretch our identity b- between both those horizons and beyond both those horizons. But I had actually had the, the physical experience of revelation in the koan sat in this very place where I am now. And it was Easter morning, just in front of me here, behind the screen, French doors, and I had the French doors open so that the beautiful spring day could be both smelt and heard through the door. And I'm sat, I've got an empty page right here on my desk, and through that door behind me comes my wife, and she's got two Tibetan bells in her hand, and she bangs them together. And all of us have been in a shop with Tibetan bells, and you hit them, and you get an awful sound. You don't get it right, and takes you about five or six times before you get the pure note. Well, she hit it the first time, and the note went straight through me. And at exactly the same time, I heard the red-winged blackbird outside-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:35:57

        [laughs]

    18. DWDavid Whyte1:35:58

        ... which here in the northwest, the Pacific Northwest, is the sound of spring. And the world just both collapsed and came together at the same time. And I put my hand out, I said, "I can't talk to you right now." And I wrote this piece all in one go, which was the expression of my... And this is it. It's called "The Bell and the Blackbird." "The sound of a bell still reverberating. The sound of a bell still reverberating or a blackbird, 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 takes courage. Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all. Wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know you'll have to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself without any meeting at all. That radiance you have always carried with you As you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation crying hallelujah.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:37:34

        [laughs]

    20. DWDavid Whyte1:37:37

        That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation crying hallelujah. So that koan had lived inside me for years as an abstract and then a semi-abstract and, and then suddenly the moon is in the reflection in the bucket, the bucket breaks open, and the moon disappears. In the Zen story, it says the monk is enlightened. [laughs]

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:38:19

        [laughs]

    22. DWDavid Whyte1:38:19

        But we are, we don't get to choose. We're both alone, completely and utterly alone, and if we knew how alone we were, we'd run 100,000 miles in the opposite direction. [laughs] But we're also completely and utterly connected.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:38:35

        Hmm.

    24. DWDavid Whyte1:38:36

        And if we knew how completely and utterly connected we were, we'd also run 1,000 miles in the opposite direction. And somehow, the human task is to hold that aloneness and togetherness together-

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:38:51

        Hmm

    26. DWDavid Whyte1:38:51

        ... in an invitational conversation.

18. 1:38:55 – 1:42:45

    Poetry as consolation.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:38:55

       We chatted a bit earlier about the impact, the meaning, the revelation of poetry for you when you were seven, eight, nine years old, observing the agreed-upon insanity of so-called adults-

    2. DWDavid Whyte1:39:11

       Yes

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:39:11

       ... and what that allowed you as direct access when you pulled that book off the top shelf with your two fingers and caught it, to that childlike innocence, again, not as a uninformed, adorable naiveté but as much more. As an adult, what does poetry do for you, and what do you hope your poetry will do for others?

    4. DWDavid Whyte1:39:40

       Well, it's, it's a consolation, and that's one of the reasons I gave that name to the essays, actually. It's consoling both in the sense of putting an arm around you and saying, "There's nothing wrong with what you're experiencing, and there's nothing wrong of the depth of heartbreak with which you're experiencing it." But, uh, the consolation is also an invitation that you have inside you the ability to find your way and also to have good company along the way and to help and invite others as you go. So the poetry was, when I first started, was just a brilliant art form in and of itself. It was just a pleasure to learn it, to recite it, to learn to be able to write it myself, and then to work with it with other people. It was just so explosive in my life and so nourishing and so inviting and maturing all at the same time. I remember when I lost my mother, and I was so grief-stricken by that loss 'cause we were so close. But I wrote my grief, you know, into a whole collection, which was Everything Is Waiting For You, actually. And when I finished the cycle of poems, I said, "My God, poetry's been such a good friend to me." I've gone through seven years of grieving in seven months through... because poetry has allowed me to take each step along the way in such a powerful, invitational way. So when I first started, also, you know, I was a young poet. I wanted to be a famous poet, so poetry was a way that I could be successful in the world, and my ideas of what it meant to be a successful poet were being recognized, you know, being published by the mainstream publishers, being celebrated, you know? But now my definitions of what's successful in poetry are to do with helping others, that the poem actually speaks to another heart and mind and will be taken and carried by that heart and mind and given to others. I suppose, in other words, other people will be memorizing my poetry by heart-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:42:07

       Mm-hmm

    6. DWDavid Whyte1:42:08

       ... or a line of it at least or searching for it in a drawer when they need it. You know? It's a very instinctual thing. Even a person who has never looked at a poem for 20 years, when they lose someone close to them in their life and they have no articulation for it, at the memorial service, they will have pulled out a poem to be able to speak to what they cannot say themselves.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:42:32

       Hmm.

    8. DWDavid Whyte1:42:33

       So that's my job, is to be able to help people who cannot speak for themselves suddenly earn that right themselves, yeah-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:42:42

       Hmm

    10. DWDavid Whyte1:42:42

        ... by recognizing it.

19. 1:42:45 – 1:43:50

    The best place to hold a poem.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:42:45

       Yeah. At some point, and I never do this, but I would love to have a number of signed or inscribed books of yours because I really feel like the physical... I would like to have the physical copies of, of your work. I have digital. I have certain things like Time printed out, and there's just something that is, I don't wanna say transmitted, but the tactile ability to sort of paw through and peruse the work is fundamentally different for me.

    2. DWDavid Whyte1:43:21

       That's lovely. Thank you. Thank God poetry's very hard to handle on a Kindle, so it's very hard to find the poem you want, so.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:43:28

       [laughs]

    4. DWDavid Whyte1:43:28

       But we've also produced these pocket books with a semi-waterproof cover.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:43:34

       Oh, perfect.

    6. DWDavid Whyte1:43:35

       Yeah. And they just fit in a jacket, so you can take them out and peruse. Yeah. But the best place to hold a poem is in your- Your mind and heart, actually. But to begin with, you have to start with the page.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:43:46

       Yeah, [laughs] you gotta start with the lifting weights before you go win the gold at the

20. 1:43:50 – 2:01:28

    “Time.”

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:43:50

       Olympics. The piece Time, what prompted the writing of that particular piece?

    2. DWDavid Whyte1:43:58

       Well, the whole writing of Consolations II, following the first Consolations, was, was so intense. It was written in a kind of delirium between January and July of this year, '24.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:44:13

       [laughs] Oh my God. That's really fast.

    4. DWDavid Whyte1:44:15

       Yeah. 60 essays in seven months, 52 of which appear in the book.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:44:20

       Yeah.

    6. DWDavid Whyte1:44:21

       Each one a very intense drop into the abyss, in a way. And it reached its culmination in, I think it was May or the end of April. I was in... First of all, I was in Rome working with the Vatican there, with my wife actually, and then I had 10 days to myself before my Tuscan walking tour began, which I lead every year. And so I booked into this castle in the Perugian countryside, as you do.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:44:54

       [laughs] As one does prior to their Tuscan walking tour. Yeah.

    8. DWDavid Whyte1:45:00

       In order to write, and I'd seen this place for a long time, but it was so phenomenally expensive, I said, "I can't afford to stay there." But then I said, "If you get an essay a day, your guilt will be assuaged, David."

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:45:13

       [laughs]

    10. DWDavid Whyte1:45:13

        And so I booked in for three nights, and the place was so stunning and so silent and so wonderful, and the people who ran it were so hospitable, and the food was so great, and the surrounding countryside and horizons that we've been speaking about were so enticing. I just felt the bottom drop out from me.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:45:38

        Hmm.

    12. DWDavid Whyte1:45:40

        And I entered this magnified experience of timelessness. So in the first three days, I got three essays. I said, "Right-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:45:49

        Wow!

    14. DWDavid Whyte1:45:49

        ... I'm staying seven nights." Yeah.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:45:51

        Yeah. Let's extend this.

    16. DWDavid Whyte1:45:53

        Exactly. So I went down... Thank God I could stay in the same room because I was writing so well in there. And on the fourth day, I wrote Time. I started it in the morning.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:46:06

        That was in one day you wrote that?

    18. DWDavid Whyte1:46:08

        I wrote it in, I don't know, probably seven or eight or nine hours.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:46:13

        Wow!

    20. DWDavid Whyte1:46:13

        I started in the morning. I took a few breaks walking, finished at 11 o'clock at night or midnight with this piano player, me and the piano player in the Humphrey Bogart bar [both laughing] in the hotel. But in the middle of that day, I felt as if time was looking me in the face. I felt as if I was... Well, I mean, the classic phrase is the out-of-body experience, but I felt as if all the walls were looking back at me and everything was corroborating my experience of time that I was speaking. So it was an out-of-body experience looking back at myself. I mean, a really physical experience of being out of my body, time looking me in the face, a kind of breakdown as I looked back at time and held its gaze. This is the only way I can describe it.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:47:09

        Hmm.

    22. DWDavid Whyte1:47:10

        And a sudden release from all the ways I'd been holding time hostage. One of the operative lines in the essay is, um, "Time is not slipping through our fingers. It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time." Time is not slipping through our fingers. It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:47:32

        Mm-hmm.

    24. DWDavid Whyte1:47:33

        Because we have such a narrow approach to time itself. We're barely present a lot of the time, barely present to ourselves or to others. So yes, it was a really remarkable experience, but it was a representation of the kind of delirium that I wrote the rest of the book. It was the magnified version [both laughing] .

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:47:59

        Well, I don't wanna be a greedy little piglet and ask for Time. That may be asking too much. You've already generously shared a lot of your work.

    26. DWDavid Whyte1:48:06

        You can edit out as much as you want. I, I would just read, maybe read some excerpts from it.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:48:11

        Oh, yeah. I'm not in any rush whatsoever. I'm having so much fun.

    28. DWDavid Whyte1:48:14

        It's appropriate for you not to be in a rush if I'm going to read an essay [both laughing] .

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:48:19

        Yeah. Speed reading poetry is overrated.

    30. DWDavid Whyte1:48:23

        Could you give me time quickly? [laughs]
21. 2:01:28 – 2:03:29

    Writing and reading good poetry.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:01:28

       anywhere. David, this has been such a wide-ranging and fun conversation. We've covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you would like to chat about, or anything you'd like to point my listeners to, ask of them, questions you'd like to pose? Anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind to a close?

    2. DWDavid Whyte2:01:55

       That's quite an invitation, Tim. I think we could Spend the next week here actually, so [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:02:02

       Well, the broadband's pretty good. [laughs]

    4. DWDavid Whyte2:02:05

       Except you're in a hotel room in New York, so-

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:02:07

       [laughs]

    6. DWDavid Whyte2:02:07

       ... I'm in pleasanter surroundings. I see the shades of night have fallen fast outside your window there.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:02:13

       They have indeed. [laughs] It's like a time lapse of the sun going up and down. [laughs]

    8. DWDavid Whyte2:02:19

       I think for now we've had a marvelous conversation. But I'd say, you know, the whole invitation from poetry is that it's possible to speak what you think is impossible to say.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:02:35

       Mm.

    10. DWDavid Whyte2:02:36

        And once you've said it, you are freed into a larger territory. Yeah. And you'll eventually make a prison of that territory too, but that's going to be the end of that season. Yeah.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:02:50

        [laughs]

    12. DWDavid Whyte2:02:51

        And you'll learn how to, to get out of the prison earlier.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:02:55

        Mm.

    14. DWDavid Whyte2:02:56

        You'll be able to recognize when you're impersonating yourself instead of being yourself. Yeah.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:03:00

        [laughs]

    16. DWDavid Whyte2:03:02

        And you don't have to write it yourself. You can just read good poetry or learn how to, to start to speak even in just a hesitant, broken, stuttering way what you feel needs to be said to a loved one or to a colleague or to a friend or to yourself in the mirror.

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:03:24

        Mm.

    18. DWDavid Whyte2:03:25

        That's the invitation I'd like to leave people with.

22. 2:03:29 – 2:07:41

    Parting thoughts.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:03:29

       And certainly I recommend people get their hands on anything that you've written, including your latest, Consolations II, which further explores what you call the conversational nature of reality, which is a wording I absolutely love. And people can find you at davidwhyte.com, all things David Whyte, W-H-Y-T-E.com. And I would kick myself if I didn't ask for people who are inspired by this conversation, who want to dip their toes into the waters of poetry, aside from your own poetry, are there any starting points you might recommend for intrepid readers of poetry? Because for instance, I'll admit something embarrassing. For me, for a long time, and maybe this was from going to schools where I was presented with this stuff, but I would end up reading poetry that seemed impenetrable. It seemed [laughs]

    2. DWDavid Whyte2:04:23

       Yes.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:04:24

       Just undecipherable, much like I might look at some contemporary art and there's a plaque explaining what it means, and it's, you know-

    4. DWDavid Whyte2:04:32

       Yeah

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:04:32

       ... an otter duct tape to a piece of Velcro, and I'm like, "I don't get it. I just don't get it."

    6. DWDavid Whyte2:04:37

       No.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:04:37

       And then I came across certain poets, Mary Oliver, certainly Hafez-

    8. DWDavid Whyte2:04:45

       Yes

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:04:45

       ... and many others, who made sense to me finally, and I was like, "Oh, this can exist."

    10. DWDavid Whyte2:04:51

        Yes.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:04:52

        And that opened the door for me to engage. So I'm wondering if there are other poets or collections that you might put on a shortlist for people who are shy but interested in engaging.

    12. DWDavid Whyte2:05:07

        The doorway in is always so personal.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:05:09

        Mm-hmm.

    14. DWDavid Whyte2:05:10

        And so I'd advise going along the bookshelf, pulling them down, and putting them back up until you find a voice that speaks to you.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:05:19

        Mm.

    16. DWDavid Whyte2:05:19

        It might be... And, and to have faith, and that voice will lead you to a lot of other voices.

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:05:26

        Mm-hmm.

    18. DWDavid Whyte2:05:27

        You know, to begin with, just to be able to have an easy relationship with the word, and that's why people love Mary Oliver so much. She's so... She is so invitational actually. She's so engaging. She's so simple. She's so clear.

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:05:41

        Mm-hmm.

    20. DWDavid Whyte2:05:42

        You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:05:55

        That is the line. Wild geese, right?

    22. DWDavid Whyte2:05:58

        Yeah. That-

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:05:58

        Yeah

    24. DWDavid Whyte2:05:59

        ... the invitation you want-

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:06:00

        So good

    26. DWDavid Whyte2:06:00

        ... is one, the voice that speaks to you. Yeah. And Robert Bly's translations of Antonio Machado, Seamus Heaney's poetry, and, and there are so many, Emily Dickinson. There are so many clear voices, and there is some impenetrable poetry that's worth giving your time to, but only if you feel it's worth giving, only once you've got the love for poetry. But there is a lot of bad impenetrable poetry too, so your intuition may be entirely correct. Yes. [laughs]

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:06:33

        [laughs] It's one thing to be impenetrable with a purpose and on purpose.

    28. DWDavid Whyte2:06:38

        Yeah.

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:06:39

        When it starts to veer-

    30. DWDavid Whyte2:06:41

        Yeah

Episode duration: 2:07:52