#781: David Whyte, Poet — Spacious Ease, Irish Koans, Writing in Delirium, and Revelations from a Yak Manger

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/e8c8000e29aeea6c

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview world class performers, to deconstruct how they do what they do, to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, inspirations, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. My guest today, I have wanted to have on for years.
And
In my mind what he teaches is
What he writes
His means of thinking
His frameworks, the way he
Tilt the lens, the prism.

All these things are
Incredibly practical.
That's my perspective. His name is David White. You can find him at DavidWhite.com. White is spelled W H Y T E. David White is the author of twelve books of poetry.
and five books of prose, including his latest Constellations Two, which I highly recommend. You should just get everything that he's written, frankly. But Constellations Two further explores what David calls the conversational nature of reality. David holds a degree in marine zoology
and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands.
and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon, and Himalayas. We will talk about some of his adventures and how they informed who he is today.
He is the recipient of two honorary degrees from Newman University in Pennsylvania and Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. David grew up with a strong imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father's Yorkshire.
And now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. He also has hosted a live online series three Sundays.
Every other month since
twenty twenty. And as I'm recording this, I have pages upon pages of notes that I took while David and I were having this conversation. It energized me for
So many hours after we finish chatting.
I hope it also has
That galvanizing inspiring impact.
On you.
You can find David online Instagram, Instagram.com slash David J White. Note the middle initial, David J White, and the website again is David White.
dot com and we're gonna dive right into it. Before that, just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible.
With millions of nonprofits in the United States and around the world, how do you find the few that could actually make a big impact with your donation?
Today's sponsor, Give Well, Makes It Easy, and they've been a sponsor of this podcast for a very long time. I am a huge fan.
Why am I a huge fan? Well, GiveWell researches charitable opportunities in global health and poverty alleviation and directs funding to those that have the highest impact. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high impact giving. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site.
For
free. They have thirty-nine staff researchers, including researchers with backgrounds in economics, biology, and much more. They spend more than fifty thousand hours each year looking for the giving opportunities that will maximize
Each dollar.
of your donation impact.
You can make tax deductible donations.
to the recommended funds or charities and GiveWell does not take a cut. More than one hundred thousand donors, including me, yours truly, have used GiveWell to donate more than two billion dollars
And that includes Tim Ferriss show listeners who've donated close to one million dollars, nine hundred and sixty K or so now, to date.
Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save more than 200,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more. If you have never used Give Well to donate,
You can have your donation matched up to one hundred dollars before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. So you can make
your money.
Go.
Further.
with the help of GiveWell. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferris show at checkout, just to let them know where you heard about this. So to claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferris Show at checkout.
Again, that's givewell dot org to have your donation match.
Or to simply learn more. Check it out. Highly recommend.
Give well.org.
This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using ASleep podcover for years now. Why?
Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet.
you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed.
Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod, and I'm excited to test it out.
Pod for Ultra.
It cools, it heats.
And now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second. First, Pod Four Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as twenty degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature.
Keeping you and your partner cool.
Even in a heat wave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive.
I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down.
This solves all of that.
Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. And for those snore heavy nights.
The pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring.
Plus with the Pod4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod4 Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV.
Their heart rate tracking as just one example is at ninety nine percent accuracy.
Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner
Great. You can split the zones.
And you can sleep at your own
ideal temperatures.
It's easy.
So go to eight sleep.com slash Tim.
And save between four hundred dollars and six hundred dollars on the Pod Four Ultra. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US.
Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.
This special offer is valid until december fourteenth.
Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then I'll see you personally quite.
No, it just seemed like that.

I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal enter skeleton.
Me show
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 Shuchman.
And I wanted to perhaps start with how you first met Henry. How did you guys connect?
Ah, that's an interesting foundation from which to step up.
Into our adventure together here, our conversation adventure.
Henry Shukman, of course, is a fully fledged
Zen Master, he's had Inca, he's in the Kowoon.
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 then by sheer happenstance, we found that Oxford was uh second home to us. Well, he'd actually grown up in Oxford and Oxygen.
So from then on we would meet every Thursday night in the bookbinders arms pub.
And we would talk literature.
And then actually because
Strangely, Henry was just getting into Zen in a really fierce way.
Um
I at that time was the old hand in Zen.
So I suppose I was giving point as I'll talk about
Coins, but unbeknownst to me, Henry.
Would soon be driving a Lamborghini passing.
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.
He was in demand as one of the up and coming poets.
And he also had a pipeline of novels.
And so when fate took us apart.
And I came back to live in the States full time 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.
Because he was so good at what he did. He was so famous.
As a young poet.
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 deep path of heartbreak is my
Latest essay on Zen.
Says.
He emerged
Twenty years later as a
As I say, as a fully fledged Zen master.
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.
Um
I'm having another
round of dedication in my Zen sitting. So
The world turns, so we're Zen and Poetic Brose.
And we have the same sense of humor, which is great.
And we just did a big day in Santa Fe on
the theme of one of my essays, which is the word unordinary.
And of course Dan'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.
Just to have the friendship actually is really marvelous. So
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. He said totally fine to blame them on me, so I wanted to at least
Let the audience know who Henry was before I started blaming someone. Lovely. And uh
I'm going to
Kick off the next
Stage in the adventure.
With the following, you had an awakening while half dead with a meebic dysentery and a yak manger in the high Himalayas. What were you doing there and what happened?
Well, I was in the yak manger because that's the only place the Tibetan family could
Fine for me actually.
It was more or less a one room hut.
They were in with
Five children.
And I staggered in there at death door, really. And how old were you at the time, if you just place us in your life?
I was in my mid twenties.
Or uh late.
Mid twenties, yes.
So that was the only place they could put me and I was in uh delirium in the Yank manger for
Three days and three nights.
Which is a a mythic period.
How did you end up there in the first place?
While I was tracking I was
on the Annapurna Trail when it first opened up.
in the mid seventies. So we were one of the first people along it.
And very different experience than if you walked it today. We we had experiences that Marco Polo would have had, you know, going into Asia in the centuries. We were often the first
Western as certain people had seen certainly when we went off the main trail and up the
Side branches of the and found villages up above in the mountains.
And it was one of the in one of those tiny villages that 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 that something
Very powerful about the stranger's love.
And so I was very appreciative of the hospitality this family gave me.
Even though all they had for me was this.
Luckily it was quite a deep, capacious manger and full of straw.
and dried yak dung.
Which is actually quite comfortable in its dry form. Oh no. It does.
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 will make is terrible.
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 sit for the three days and three nights. It sat in a mug.
at the end of this main track.
And I went through all the different
levels of hell that you see
Painted in all those.
Tibetan iconographer.
I had a really powerful experience of many of the images that I had seen. Probably a
I'd taken them in, you know, being into Kathmandu Valley and then going into Gompas and Temples and I was sitting in them too.
in meditation. 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.
And they all bowed at the same time.
Towards me.
It was just as if they just recognized something.
Because it's in the air up there, you know, w the llamas they would meet.
the spirituality you could cut with a knife in those mountains.
It was just as if oh
We recognize those, yeah.
They all bowed and they just left me alone, no fuss.
And that moment of breakthrough was realizing that the whole
David White project was completely absurd.
The project of David White as self, you mean? Yes, and the name that I given myself and that was given to me was just like the name of the river in the valley below the Marciandi River.
you were looking at something that was had actually already passed.
that what was real about your identity is actually what's just about to precipitate out of the seasonal edge of your existence.
Mm.
That as yet does not have a name.
And that is actually the place from which you write good poetry.
Also it's that
from the unknown below the horizon of your understanding.
Lying deep inside yourself.
Mm-hmm.
Could you say a bit more?
About that.
That place from which
You write good poetry.
If it's a possibility to elaborate on that at all.
Is it a f
Felt sense.
Do you know when you're in that place?
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
adherent of some kind of contemplative tradition.
It's quite incoate. It's quite vague.
But eventually you get this almost pinpoint.
Sense.
It's there and
The classical place in the Hara, you know, down in the
And uh
Yes, yeah.
And also in the heart.
It's the place that's willing to engage with the fiercest conversations of existence, in a way.
It's the part of you that already knows is going to have to give 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
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 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.
It's below.
language, but it takes a linguistic form.
That's why if it's good poetry, it's fresh.
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.
Could you
Say more about
invitational speech because in the course of doing research for this conversation I came across

Invitational questions.
And this is not phrasing that I'm
Familiar with
Could you
Define or give examples of what you mean?
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.
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.

Uh huh.
Your final gift to the world.
Exactly. So when you realise that you start getting out of the way sooner, you might as well you're going to have to anyway.
Yeah, might as well start practicing. 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
Conversation stop.
And the other thing is
Imitation is based on vulnerability.
You only invite someone in
when you feel you really need help.
understanding something or actual physical help.
Yeah.
Loving help, all the different forms of help.
So you've got this trajectory, this spectrum of qualities which all make up the phenomenology of conversation itself.
Which
It's this beautiful Latin word which means
Inside out.
Converse.

And so
To go back to your original question.
I work a lot with inner and outer horizons.
And we all know the way out to horizons is 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.
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
It's got something over it. That's the definition. And that 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.
This is a physical horizon.
Physical horizons, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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
And uh
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.
Different facet.
Exactly.
compatible facet of what you're describing. Would you mind
Expanding on that?
Yes, I think
One of the great
disciplines of a human life is to catch up with yourself.
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 might 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 realise Oh my God, I actually
I couldn't have done a better job of self sabotage than I did over the last
Yeah, and it's sometimes it's the
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 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 to go through it that way.
There's another way of doing it, which is
She stay up.
with the edge of your own
seasonal maturation and that occurs below this.
Invisible line inside you.
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.
It's dwelling fully in the body.
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 manager in the
MLS, yeah. 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.
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 Avenna and now to 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 they're really
First conversation is when you
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 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. So
Or enlightenment in a way.
It's a powerful meeting of two unknowns.
And your identity is the frontier between them.
Why you speak them, you know, and then
Dharma combat in Zen.
Zen master is throwing out something from the unknown and the student is supposed to actually
Access
The unknown to meet it.
And almost always they fail.
They choose something.
From their thinking mind.
But then
The real student comes along and
And that's how you get these marvelous
Koans and exercises which are
Representations of
The two unknown sparking this incredible creative life.
And uh
If we don't come back to it I I will refer people to my first
Maybe um.
Even my second conversation with Henry Shuckman on this podcast where we spend
Probably an hour on co ons.
No.
If people want to dive into that also the somatic awareness
And
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. It's very much a skill development program with a logical progression. So I'd encourage people to check that out. 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 want to give people a real world example of what this looks like in practice.
And the

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.
Don't know if that is enough of a prompt.
I can certainly.
It was a revolutionary moment in my life, actually. I just
And led to the
Constellations essays.
And uh led to the writing of the first one.
With the title Regret.
I was in Paris.
I've 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 it was shining down.
But almost always along the street you would come across something really fascinating, like an eighteenth century
Plan Museum.
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 twenty 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 wall when my phone rang.
And it was the observer magazine.
In Britain.
The Sunday, which has millions of readers or had.
Um
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 three hundred words.
And I was
I was so disgusted with the parameter.
Yeah.
So I said I'll okay, I'll do it and I snap 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 then I said, What if you could write it in three hundred words? You know, there's many a moment in a human life where
Someone has actually changed other people's lives in less than three hundred 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 travelling and speaking and
recompressed to go out. And
I realized, my God, you know, the number of strictures I put around
What I need in order to write. I need silence. I need quiet. No.
And I said to my 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 have no scintillating company. So I said, 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.
Not the back of a receipt like you get in New York.
Yeah, exactly. You want

And I wrote regret at the top of the page.
And I said, That's interesting.
Why regret?
And this was the title for the philosophical piece I was going to write.
And so I
I wrote it.
This is the piece actually.
It was the first
essay I wrote is just very short.
The piece that appeared in
Constellations is just a little longer than three hundred words, but
Not much longer.
Regret.
It's a short.
Evocative.
and achingly beautiful word.
An allergy to lost possibilities, even in its prefinanciation.
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.
And 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 at the very time.
Story.
We tell about our present.
And yet strangely.
To admit sincere.
and abiding regret.
Is one of our greatest but unspoken
Contemporary.
Sends
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.
But it takes a hard one maturity to experience the depths of regret in ways that do not overwhelm.
And debilitators.
But put us into a proper
more generous relationship with the future.
Except for brief senses.
Of having missed a tide.
Having hurt another.
Haven what is not ours, but
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 for 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.
And uh
Fast.
So unconsciously I was really
regretting all the ways 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.
release me completely. Suddenly I was able to write anywhere on trains, boats
The tube in London.
Cliff Sides in Ireland, wherever.
And in fact.
I got so excited by
the revolutionary aspect that
the essay had on my own life.
But I thought there must be lots of other words we use in narrow and pejorative ways that
We often
use language against ourselves as a weapon against change.
I got an essay on time there. We were constantly saying
Time is our enemy, you know, time is not on our side.
Time is slipping through our fingers, you know.
Time, if it could speak, which it does speak actually, but time would be very surprised to find out that it's our enemy.
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 travelling.
So
That's the story.
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 plough on.
The way forward actually may be through a fully felt
Sense of remorse.
All the
Away.
You could have been and weren't.
a generosity you could have displayed and didn't.
And by
Fully experiencing.
you could be precipitated into a deeper form of generosity.
In the future.
Thank you for that.
I
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me.
on the road. So what is AG1? AG one is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG one gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system.
So take ownership of your health and try AG One today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG One travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out.
go to drinkage one dot com slash Tim. That's drinkage one, the number one. Drink AG One dot com slash Tim. Last time, drink AG One dot com slash Tim.
Check it out.

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 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.
What is that time for you now?
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, Fible Friday, everything is waiting for you.
Yeah.
It put words.
to a sentiment that I had had
Difficulty
verbalizing in part because I don't think I'd ever tried.
Two
Verbalize it.
If that makes sense. It never occurred to me to frame it in the way that you did. And I don't I don't want to 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
Time. I have it. Yeah.
Oh time, great. The everything is waiting for you. This is what prompted, I think. Oh, everything is waiting for you. Yeah. Yeah.
Would it be uh too much?
insult to the work if I highlighted just a few lines.
Not at all. I have it in my memory too, if you need Oh you do? Oh please. I do, yeah.
Yeah. If you do us the honor, that would be
Beautiful.
Everything is waiting for you.
You know, 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.
And echoed in the Zen tradition.
Again and again.
So
Everything is waiting for you.
A great mistake.
It's to act the drama as if you were alone.
As if life were a progressive
Uncunning.
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.
Swelling presence.
And the chorus.
Crowding out.
You're solo.
Boys.
You must note.
The way.
The soap dish enables you.
Or the window latch.
Grants you
Courage.
Alertness.
is the hidden discipline.
A 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.
If you're a dream ladder.
to divinity.
Put down.
The weight of your aloneness.
and ease into the conversation.
The cattle is singing.
Even as it pours you a drink.
The cooking pots have left.
Their arrogant aloofness and seeing the good in you.
At last.
Oh.
The birds.
And creatures.
of the world.
Uh
Unutterably.
themselves.
Everything.
Everything.
Everything.
is waiting for you.
Fantastic. Thank you.
So 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.
Yeah.
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 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
Yeah.
Paying attention to 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 of 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 struck me.
And 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 creetons who can barely make out a paragraph. 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. Yeah. But I w I wanted to
Rewind the clock.
For
You it seems, and I'm reading here.
I just want to read this and you can tell me if this is fact checked properly, 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.
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
Adult.
Well, we can certainly
witness the agreed insanity of our political discourse at the moment. So
We know how immature.
our supposedly adult world can be.
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 what 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.
What do you mean by that? The mutability? The stories were never the same. They always had some kind of
Wonderful, extemporaneous.
Change in them.
As another Irishman Oscar Wilde said, no amount of exaggeration will do justice to what actually happened. 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 a Yorkshire, even though I was reading a lot of Irish poems and
I was reading a lot of
Walter Delamaire and we had great poetry in our schools actually and good teachers. Yeah. So I was lucky that way.
But
When I was about thirteen or so, I was down in the little library in the
Town where I grew up.
And I saw that top shelf was poetry, and it was as if it was kept away from
Like the stack of playboys. Yeah. And I had to reach up. It was just before I went through my growing spot.
And so I had to reach up and I

Right in the
Tipsi Topsy.
between the s 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 join volume by Ted Hughes.
fellow Yorkshire part, not far from where I grew up.
And
Tom Gunn.
who moved to San Francisco Bay Area, actually.
First of all, I was surprised that they were thirty years old, both of them, and they were described as young poets.
That's not Yakuverty seem back.
They were past it, you know.
Yeah.
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, is there?
Child
But that's
What I thought.
And so I thought, Oh
Poetry is the secret code to staying
Alive, to staying
Present and not sustain.
Visionary.
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.
What do you mean by that found by the world in greater greater ways? Is that being unfettered by
And
A metastasized collection of labels and concepts that
Prevents you from seeing
And feeling clearly? Is it something else?
That's a very articulate description of one aspect of it, Tim. Yeah.
But it's that phenomenon 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.
Yeah, there's a kind of
innocence you have in your teens.
Which
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.
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, yeah.
It's
There's a new life. And in many ways, you know, the innocence of the
Adolescent.
would not be able to
grasp the life that the innocence of the 77 year old would be able to grasp. So the ability to pay attention and and everything is waiting for you is
It's a poem that's telling you to pay attention as if you've seen everything just for the first time.
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 in the
Inside you and the spoken.
In the world.
All kinds of astonishing
Experiences that are gratify and powerful.
And timeless.
All in themselves without you having to achieve anything beyond it.
Comment your
possibility in your grasp.
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.
A new and some
respect or themselves for that matter, that questions.
Are very
Useful tool. I have
A long list of questions that are attributed to you. They may or may not be in fact.
Questions for me, but I wanted to read off just a few of them.
And then I have 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 in the world around you?
What is a beautiful qu the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt?
Yes.
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?
Yes.
What promise did I make sincerely that I now need to let go of?
Yes.
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 had tough to do.
hear you speak to is how have you generated these questions?
Yeah.
And then
Could you explain the what is the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt?
Yes.
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. You know, I have hundreds of poems memorized so I can extemporise and go depending on where
I feel the invitation is in the room.
So
I will often paraphrase a piece and unearth the what I call the beautiful question, the beautiful and disturbing question.
Beneath the line.
And I often think a beautiful question is defined by the fact that it
It helps to shape your life as much by asking it.
As by having it answered.
Asking the question.
is a form of deeper tension.
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.
Yeah, the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt.
Yeah.
That's a line from Tanagarth.
And Tanagarth is the name of a Welsh farm.
on which I lived for a good few years. It became my base. I helped
The Welsh farming family there, the with the nine hundred sheep.
digging them out of snow drifts 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 it's part of the whole seasonal round for a good
Couple of years at Tanagar.
But I got to know uh fellow
pilgrim who'd come to light on the farm with his family. His name was
Michael.
I lived in a caravan in a farmyard.
Or in a field next to the farm yard.
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 travelling Shakespeare player. He'd played Lear, actually. He had this
long Celtic face actually with all these horizontal lines on it.
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 Tanagarth.
Which I think in Welsh just means halfway up.
the mountain. And he and his family lived in Tanigath 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 mid summer's day as it was in the middle.
And he and I would sit by the fire.
His wife.
Diane was a very religio. She used to disappear upstairs.
eight thirty or so and
Michael would reach behind the couch for a bottle of brandy.
Where it would hide.
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.
And it was much later on I discovered Michael was also a poet.
But engraving was his main
Artistry.
And his prize possession was this
Very thick book.
of illustrated Blake engravings.
Oof.
Nice.
It must have cost a fortune actually for for him because they were very poor.
Right.
Poor but rich family actually and
His great doubt.
would find its
maximum
Efflorescence.
His great dialogue.
would find its greatest question in
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.
They're
Wells.
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 can.
And he would ask this question.
And he really meant it when he asked it. He wanted to know. Yeah.
And
He had a very fierce way of asking questions, actually. If you ever made a declarative statement.
He would ask you a fierce question about it and you'd find yourself backing out of it 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 Tanagar.
And if you looked out of that window.
You'd see
Fields and
If there were four corners to a field, three of them would have names.
And there was a little stream called the Casseg, which wended its way through the farm.
Land
out of the mountains.
And every little elbow of that stream.
Had a name.
And there's one

called The Place of the Three Dead Englishmen in Welsh.
Yeah.
And this being Wales. That was it was not a place of tragedy. Victory Lap. Yeah, something good had happened there in the 1400s with a 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
Ha.
But the whole place was a mythic language and then the Carnethi 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 uh there's no phone in Tannegath back, so
I'll just walk up.
And I saw Diane in 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.
And I came up to the cottage.
And there was the smell of scones coming out of the doorway. I thought perfect bachelor timing. This is great.
So we sat down, it was so good to see each other 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 and treatment. I said, Oh my God.
So I was there a couple of hours and and I had to leave to go to our 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 had
In the last month before he died he'd had 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 he'd read in Blake.
So he was
Conversing with his angels, yeah.
And so I wrote this poem uh Tanagath and I realised
I couldn't talk about Michael.
Without talking about what he loved.
And what he loved was Tanagarth.
And then all the Welsh names.
I wrote this as an allergy because 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 uh Tanagarth allergy for Michael.
This grass grown hills, 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 Ogwin.
And the green.
depths of Mona.
The eye is weathered also.
into the grey rocks and the fields bright with spring.
The wind blown light from the mountain filling the valley.
The low
back 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 muling of sheep.
Press through the gate.
Beneath Erlen.
The bowl of flower is stirred with mist.
The dogs lie low in the tufted grass and watch with pure intent.
The ragged back.
Of the less sheep.
Entering.
Stone.
Found.
And
The rough ground of Wales.
Lives in the mind for years.
Springing More grass, under feet, treading concrete.
Hundreds of miles from home.
And the ground has names.
Songs full of grief.
Sounds belong to a single stream.
Kasseg
It's the place of the mayor.
Komm klar.
Is the value of speech.
Patterns of wind.
The blue moorland filled by the sky.
The Farm.
Pass down.
Yet never possessed.
Lives.
Father to son.
Mother to child.
Feeding.
The people with sheep.
The sheep with grass.
And memory.
With years.
Live looking.
At mountains.
One single glance of a hillside darkened by a cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes.
And this world needs all the breath we have.
Carnival and
Carlos O'Have.
All the carnival.
A Rallen of the Shining Light.
Truscal.
The endless ridge.
Carving.
To nothing.
One man I know loved this place so much.
Sad found his place to die.
Yes, I knew him.
walking the high moor lines or watching the calls of a winter fire.
In the cottage great.
And die he did.
But not before one month's final joy.
and wild creation.
gave him that foresight he glimpsed in Blake.
He too.
wrestled with his angel.
And
And out of hospital the white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountains 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.
Yeah.
With an easy grace.
Cradled.
By the faith.
It nursed.
For years in doubt his ashes.
Scattered.
Over by Haba.
The water.
Continually.
Saying his name.
As I
Still go home.
to turn it off.
Speaking.
The names.
Those.
Alright.
Love.
Wow.
All right.
Beautiful, beautiful poem. First of all, I don't want to skip over the
Substance of that.
And I appreciated the
Repetition of and I'm not going to
Get the wording.
Exactly correct. But the
The Faith Nursed in Doubt.
Yeah.
Walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith.
He nursed for years in doubt.
Yeah.
Is there a developed skill to
Memorizing poetry? Or is that just an innate sort of bar genetics?
Uh well certainly
You know, you go to Ireland and people have it by the barrow load. You've only to
Someone in Ireland and
Out it spills, you know, and my apples were the same, so
As well as my mother.
But
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.
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 especially 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. Yeah.
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
Forty or fifty years ago.
True practice. True practice. Is that cultivated?
Ability.
What are the helpful constituent ingredients of that? In other words, are you focusing on 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?
If you had to tease out some of the
components of this improved ability.
How would you try to do that?
There is a visual element, but it's kind of transitory. It moves through them very quickly. If you think of
The Tanagarth poem is full of so much imagery, but
I'm physically there on the farm when I'm reciting that. I've got the Welsh breeze coming out of Cumlava.
It means the valley of speech.
Come on.
in Welsh and Ireland means the shining one. It's this ridge of light. So yes, I see them.
But you know, it's the meaning, it's all the constellating qualities together, the rhythm, the beauty of the
Right, so for instance you had 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.
walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt.
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.
All the ways you just don't believe.
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 m memorise Antonio Machado in Spanish or
Relky from the German or
Yates.
Or uh Sheamus Heane.
I still have all those poems in my memory.
But now I've written my way into almost every threshold that I want to speak about.
So now I
I mostly use my own
call on my own poetry. But it's lovely to call on
He are Yates too at the same time. It's just a rich storehouse inside yourself.
That
Word primary has come up quite a bit in this conversation and
I believe it refers back to the primary and secondary imagination is another way of thinking about the primary
The
Fundamental generative.
Force.
That produced
The language?
Yes.
And if I were to memorize that line.
Of yours.
She just
Recited.
How would I try to best access
That primary.
Or make an attempt to do that.
But it should be there in the rhythm.
Mm-hmm. And
You know, when you ask
Heartfelt questions you're
voice naturally falls into
I am big pantameter.
I am big pantomist how
human beings in English speak.
When they're on their edge.
Um
Revelation in a way.
That's why Shakespeare.
used it so much. Blank verse we call it Iambic Pentameter five beats, you know?
But
If you think of the times where you've had to communicate something
Very poignant, very vulnerable to someone else.
Maybe you're leaving a relationship.
Maybe you're
Giving the news of someone's death.
Which is
going to affect
The person
In a very powerful way.
You will always fall into a rhythm.
And it's a poetic rhythm, actually.
You will always repeat yourself.
Three times usually.
And in three different ways.
It has to be said, it has to be heard, and it can never be heard the first time.
In the Greek theatre.
When the God spoke.
The audience could not take it in the first time. So the chorus would repeat it. That was the job of the chorus was to repeat.
The revelation of the gods because human beings could not understand what was being said the first time.
So that's why we're so careful in our speech. So
Poetry is
Not some abstracted art. It's how human beings speak when they're trying to create language against which there are no defenses.
This has to be heard.
And it has to be heard in the spirit in which it is being conveyed.
And the language has to be invitational.
To that particular person.
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
Here you describe how
Zen entered your life and why Zen.
When I was at
University I started to
Correct. It's all kinds of strange
forms of meditation that were my own ideas of what meditation probably was.
So in my little room up in the Welsh village above Bang where I
Studied marine zoology.
I remember practicing all kinds of
Of strange exercises.
So hold on one second. I don't wanna stop you before you get started, but we're gonna come back

But connect the dots here, or what was the catalyz book, moment, conversation, TV program, whatever it was, that sent you off to explore?
These different forms of
Real or created.
Meditative practices.
Well, as I say in my essay on Zen, Zen is a big old fraud of a word.

Because it's so cool.
The word, you know, is so glamorous in every generation. It's the word itself.
remains hip no matter what we do. So
The Zen of this, the Zen of that.
It's just a gorgeous word. So you get caught by the glamours of then, you know, the black robes, the bronze bells, the
reflective wooden floors, the quiet temples, you know, the
Yoder like
Teachers, you know. And so that probably was the original
invitation that I felt.
Oh, what a remarkable path to take.
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.
Would you mind reciting that piece?
Are you open to that?
Yeah it's the last
Being a Z or a Z.
As you say so quaintly in your country.
Z sounds better, I'll be honest. But if I say it, I sound like a pompous ass. So have to hold off.
Ha ha ha
So um
Zen. That's the last essay in the book.
So it's a great, big, magnificent, all embracing seduction of a word.
And that's what I felt when I first came across it.
Zen is a beguiling and charming philanderer.
Of the first order.
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.
Ensnare 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's then.
Always begins.
And ends.
In tears.
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.

And an understanding.
With our previous griefs.
Then is the journey.
We take through heartbreak.
The last heartbreak.
Zen retires from the field.
Then generously disappears and lets us alone.
Refusing to let us use the words so freely again.
Refusing to let us be fooled.
by what we originally needed.
To be so enticed by the same.
Drawn towards Zen practice.
We almost always fall in love with the word itself.
S and beguiles us with that barely breathing vowel sound that lives so eternally.
and so glamorously at its centre.
Between the dashing capital
Z
And that.
Oh so subtle.
Brush Stoke.
Of an end.
The word itself.
seem to be clean and rested, insightful.
And eternally.
Yep.
Something inspiring.
Something that conjures light and space and a welcome order amidst a difficult world of besiegement.
Chaos.
And successive.
Never ending.
Experiences.
Um
Grief.
We fall for the word as we fall for the deep silences that swim dreamily through the first panes of our practice.
Then
welcomes us through its invitation to a sense of spacious ease.
To freedom from worry and thankfully in our mind's eye to a deep form of rested presence.
A presence we first saw in the clean
Perfectly proportioned spaces inherited.
So seductively from Japan.
But then.
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.
A heartbreak.
Will provide.
We pass through those low doors as we pass into the difficulties of marriage, our 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 heart take itself.
As in the marriage.
In Zen we learn that the line between this body
Another's body.
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.
All 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.
Then it's 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.
And the one
We are trying to replace it with.
We find ourselves seen at a car as one who generated difficulties, not because our essence is difficulty.
But because difficulties.
Well 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 a way.
Just by being the very essence of things that find their way.
Then in the old cliche because it is so true.
wants it to be the way itself.
It might be that zen is 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.
Then indeed.
is an old fraudster.
A one with a heart of gold.
Just as we are taken in
It relents.
And to our relief.
Gives us all our money back.
And where you realise in the end.
is much humbler in its aims.
Than we thought it was.
Then we realise it's 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 his 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.
Then
Has a well cultivated sense of humor.
and carries its own hidden cargo of amusement.
At all our self deceptions and false choices.
Zan is a true comedian at times.
It's most hilarious proposition.
Being
That you might not.
After all.
Have to believe.
In your own.
Not.

Yeah.
And as a true comedian.
We walk towards them as if towards a door of light.
But then 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.
Send leads is on.
Like the very best kind of guide.
As if we might be equal.

And it's 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 the same thing.

Uh.
If Zen asked us to begin with
To follow the thread of heartbreak.
Then to begin with.
Heartbreak.
is the only thread we need to follow.
Heartbreakers many difficult doors.
Almost all of them leading.
Well we hoped.
And prayed.
We did not need to go.
Reading between the lines, the old Zen teachers seem 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.
A 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.
Ha ha
Heartbreak is all we need to know. Heartbreak is all we need to know.
All of us spend so much time.
Trying to find a path where we won't have our heart broken.
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.
Um
Loneliness. Yeah.
So finding out what you care about.
Even though we try and find a path where we won't have our heart breaking. You gotta have your heart broken anyway. So
We might as well get with the program.
Have our heart broken over something that we actually care about.
So what do you care about?
What do you really care about?
What are your thoughts on the word courage and how this ties into

What is the etymology of the word courage?
Well wow, it's
Very similar.
And
I'm sure you know the first part of the word is
From the French Ker.
uh hearts. So it's really m it's what your heart felt about.
And you are really only courageous about what your heart felt about.
You know, 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 will create a barrier between ourselves and our children because we care about them so deeply.
We can't believe
How devastated 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 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
A heartbreak.
In nothing.
And the way you won't escape.
There's no escape from the heartbreak.
Unless you want to be one of the walking dead.
With a muted experience. Exactly. Yeah.
You seem to have been
For lack of a better word, a seeker.
From uh
relatively young age.
I would be curious to know.
How or why that?
Sh
If you can even see it.
Answer that question and then
to come back to the all paths lead to Shukman.
line of questioning, you can answer either or both of these. How did living in a caravan on the side of Mount Snowden, 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 mountain alone. The seeking
You know, where does that come from?
It was actually the side of the Carnage Mountains, just a range over from Snowden, but you were very close, Snowden.
Central Mountain in the
It's snow don't yeah. You're right. So
But having lived there and the and the Welsh names being so specific to place, I can't get away with this. Please don't, please don't slap on the wrist. Just a quick side note, I remember right on my one and only time in Wales went to something called the Do Lectures, which was great near Cardiff, I believe it was, or outside of Cardiff.
Yeah, 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 farmer's market or something I wanted to explore and and I wrote down everything phonetically.
And as soon as I got to the first sign I knew I was completely fucked.
It was just I could not read.
Anything. So that's No, they're uh Yes, it's uh it's a revelation when you find out how they're actually pronounced, Jim. There's a lovely sign which says Clubber Coethas.
Which
English tourists would be following trying to get to this mythical village. But it actually just meant public footpath.
Sounds very dignified.
But uh 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. And a modern Welsh person can uh or a postmodern Welsh person can read a manuscript or make sense of one that's fifteen hundred years old. Incredible.
Yeah, it's it's so rich and it has a very powerful
Poetic tradition.
Which is still alive to this day 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.
Although I have a great store living on a
Well sheep farmer have a great
Star of bad words.
Which I bet Which were uh the dogs or the sheep. Yeah.
Or even at me if I wasn't cooperating, yes. So what happened on this mount that was not Mount Snowden? I can't recall the other range. I apologize.
Well, you know, when I
finished my stint in the Galapagos Islands. I was there almost two years.
I had reached
Both an impasse.
And some incredible invitation that I couldn't quite discern at the same time.
After I left the islands, you know.
Where I'd live aboard these sailing boats.
For almost the whole time.
I traveled through South America and then I came back.
to North Wales, where I'd studied marine zoology.
The subject that took me out there in the first place.
And I'd lived down in the village below Tanagarth farm in a village called Gerland.
And then I found this.
Caravan.
In the farm and found I could
Have it for free if I help the farmer and then I get a
A little bit extra too.
I lived on very little days. In this instance caravan is like uh what we would call an R V in the US, something like that.
Trailer. Trailer. There we go. All right.
No.
It's on wheels. It was a cute.
Caravan, but uh but it's a caravan is a very romantic name. It was rounded, you know, something from the nineteen sixties or something, but
It was a retreat for me, actually.
In those days there were still a lot of Vietnam veterans living out in the woods.
When I first came to this island where I live now, a lot of Vietnam vet veterans still living in the woods.
They were in retreat from
PTSD from violence from a world which
didn't understand what they'd gone through.
And in many ways I was traumatized too by Galapagos.
But I wasn't traumatised by violence, although I witnessed a lot of it in the animal world.
And the marine world.
I was traumatized by beauty, actually.
The place was so astonishingly, overwhelmingly
Itself.
And
I was just a
a minute part of creation. When you're in Galapagos, you feel as if
You're on the planet before human beings evolved, never mind took dominion, as it says in the Bible, you know?
You're just a visitor.
And all your ambitions, your ideas of what
Are subsumed under this
astonishing immensity which you're witnessing every day.
I mean, we're all often overwhelmed when we see the gorgeous images in an Attenborough.
Documentary, yeah.
But I was witness to those both. I was diving to as well as leading people ashore. I was a naturalist guide.
Taking people ashore.
I was witnessing those amazing
Images.
above and below water on a daily basis, and I was paying attention in silence.
It was only years later in Zen retreats I realised I was just recapitulating
the experiences I I'd had in Galapagos, but with no outer guidance. What do you mean by that?
Recapitulating the experience.
Yeah.
what you've just experienced and the falling apart that goes with it.
is the necessary part to the journey.
It was a kind of self compassionate act to go on retreat afterwards and that was the
Caravan.
on the side of the Carnegie Mountains.
in North Wales.
And my
Friendship with
Michael was perfect.
It was a very
internal conversation between two people in a way.
In that cottage next to the fire.
Often through the winters, you know.
Or when we were walking out with the dogs.
To go
Fatch the sheep in.
It was a necessary
Catching up with myself as we
We spoke early.
of that necessary ability to understand what kind of
Threshold of maturity are you on?
And how easily we turn away from that threshold because it's so scary that you're losing your previous desires.
You're losing your previous
ways that you wanted the world to be.
And you're stepping into
An unknown.
Which is your new self.
And the way your world will be perceived.
And joined by that self.
When did you start your
Zen practice and for people who have no familiarity
What does it look like?
How does it differ from
Vipasana meditation or other types of
of meditation that people may have heard of.
Well, it started in my mid twenties.
After I moved to the States.
mid to late twenties. And
There are two main streams of Zen.
You know, one is uh Shikantaza sitting, which is simply
Following your breath.
And
Empty mind, yeah.
The other form is the one that includes
Emptying your mind, but also has coan work.
While you empty your mind around a beautiful question.
So what is the sound of one hand clapping?
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.
Marco. Marco with no 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 makes a question like that powerful?
Halala.
Give you an example. All right.
But this koan is actually out of the Irish tradition.
But once you've studied coins you realise they're in every tradition.
Hm and you just didn't realize.
Yeah, we have the Blue Cliff record in with hundreds of numbered coans.
all commented on by various then masters through the centuries, but actually
They're everywhere.
And your intimate
others in your life will provide them to you too.
Especially you children.
In the Irish tradition there's this 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.
the Irish church, in a pre Catholic
Was
Non hierarchical.
At least a very different kind of hierarchy.
Equal place for women.
In that
Monasticism.
And
the revelation could be understood as much through
The sun.
On the leaves moving in the wind.
As in the Bible, you know.
So 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.
Finest.
Sound in the world.
Which is the world.
Just as it is.
Just as it comes to find you.
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 the world outside, yeah.
We're supposed to stretch our
identity between both those horizons and beyond both those horizons.
But I had actually had the
physical experience of revelation in the Khan sat in this very place where I am now.
And
It was Easter morning.
Just in front of me here, behind the screen are 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 bows 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 no.
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.
Which i here in the northwest, the Pacific North West 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 goal, which was the expression of my
And this is it. It's called the Bell and the Blackbird.
Sounds like
Have 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.
Have a bell.
Still reverberating.
Or a black bird.
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.
Once 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.
That
Mm.
That's
Radiance.
You have always carried with you.
As you walk.
Both alone.
And completely.
A come it in friendship.
By every
corner.
of creation.
Crying.
Hallelujah.
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
Cohan had lived inside me for years as an abstract and then a semi abstract, and then suddenly
The moon is in
The reflection in the bucket.
The bucket.
breaks open and the moon disappears. And the Zen star it says the monk is enlightened.

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 a hundred thousand miles in the opposite direction.
But we're also
completely and utterly connected.
And if we knew how completely unnaturally connected we were, we'd also run
A thousand miles in the opposite direction.
And somehow
The human task is to hold that aloneness and togetherness together.
in an invitational conversation. Yeah.
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 adult. Yes.
And
what that allowed you as direct access when you pulled that book off the top shelf with your two fingers and caught it.

childlike innocence, again, not as a
uninformed, adorable, naivete, but as much more
As an adult
What does poetry
do for you and what do you hope you will do for
Others.
It's a consternation.
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.
The consolation is also an invitation.
That
you have inside you the
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
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, I 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
Point I wanted to be a famous poet, so
Portugal is a way that I could be successful in the world in my
ideas of what it meant to be a successful pot 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. Yeah.
I suppose in other words.
Other people will be memorizing my poetry by heart.
Or a line of it at least, or
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 point for twenty years when they lose someone close to them in their life and they have no articulation for
At the memorial service they will have pulled out a poem.
to be able to speak.
to what they cannot say themselves.
So that's my job is to be able to help people.
who cannot speak for themselves suddenly.
And that right themselves. Yeah.
By recognizing it.
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 I would like to have the physical
copies of your work. I have digital, I have
Certain things like time.
Print it out.
And there's just something
That is uh I don't want to say transmitted, but the tactile ability of
Two
sort of paw through and peruse the work is fundamentally different for me.
That's lovely. Thank you. Yeah.
And uh thank God poetry's very hard to handle on a Kindle. So it's very hard to find the poem you want. So But we've also produced these pocketbooks with a semi waterproof cover.
Oh perfect.
Yeah, and they just fit in a jacket. So you can take them out.
And Peruse, yeah. But the best place to hold a palm is in your
Your mind and heart, actually. But to begin with, you have to start with the pace. Yeah, you can start with the lifting weights before you go win the gold at the Olympics.
The peace time.
What prompted the writing?
Of that particular piece.
Well, the whole writing of Constellations Two
Following the first constellations was so intense.
It was written in a kind of delirium.
Between January and July of this year, twenty four. That's really fast. Yeah. So it was sixty essays in seven months, fifty two of which appear in the book.
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.
First of all, I was in Rome working with the Vatican there.
With my wife actually. And then I had
Ten days to myself before my
Tuscan walking tour began.
Which I lead every year.
And so
I booked into this castle in the Peruvian countryside.
As you do.
Enough as one does prior to their Tuscan walking tour. Yeah.
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 a swag, David.
And so I booked him 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.
Was so enticing.
I just felt the bottom drop out from me.
And I entered this.
magnified experience of timelessness.
So in the first three days I got three essays. I said, Right.
I'm staying seven nights. Yeah. Let's extend this.
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. That was in one day you wrote that.
I wrote it in I don't know probably
Seven or eight or nine hours.
I started in the morning, I took a few breaks.
Walking.
And finished it.
eleven o'clock at night or midnight with this piano player, me and the piano player.
And they Humphrey Bogart.
Bar. But in the middle of that day
I felt
As if
Time was looking me in the face.
And I felt as if
I was
Well I mean the
classic phrase is the outer 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.
kind of breakdown as time as I looked back at time and held its gaze. This is the only way I can describe it.
And
A sudden release from all the ways I've been holding time hostage.
One of the operative.
Lines in the S.
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.
Because we have such a narrow approach to time itself. We're barely present a lot of the time.
Bally
Present.
To ourselves or to others, yeah.
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.
Well, I don't wanna be a greedy little piglet and uh ask for time. That may be asking too much. You've already generously shared a lot of your work.
Well, you can edit out as much as you want. I I would just read maybe read some excerpts from it.
Oh yeah, I'm not in any rush whatsoever. I'm having so much fun.
It's appropriate for you not to be in a rush if I'm going to read.
Yeah, Rush speed rooting poetry is overrated.
Could you give me time quickly?
You don't want to
Do a kegstand with you know thirty year old French wine. That's not how you do it. All right. So I would love for you to recite it and
Feel also immense gratitude for you.
In a way, harnessing the power of naming.
Perhaps in some ways like the Welsh. I mean, there's a power in naming and when you
Give words.
to feelings or
fleeting insights or experiences that
people have that are profoundly impacting, but perhaps get lost in the shuffle of life.
When you're able to freeze frame it, capture it on a page.
with memorable language. That's a real service, I think, to providing people with
the coordinates of that experience such that they might more readily access it again.
If that makes some sense. Very kind. Thank you.
Thank you. Yeah. So without further ado, please.
We'd love to hear that.
Peace.
Written between
Early morning and
Late at night.
So this is a word we use in very pejorative ways.
Time is our enemy. Time is not on our side.
And time is slipping through our fingers, all of those things, yeah.
So I thought I'd start in a very radical way. All of these essays have a line in them where the reader is supposed to cry out, Can that be true? So I'd start with one right at the beginning, yes.
Um
Time is on our side.
Time.
Is not our enemy.
Time.
is our greatest friend.
If we can come to know time in its own
Intimate unfolding way.
And not through the abstract measure we have made of it.
Time stars to grant to greater.
More spacious.
Or elemental.
and even eternal freedom.
To every mortal.
Seemingly.
Time bound.
human
Life.
Time.
Is not slipping through our fingers.
Time is here forever.
It is we
Who are slipping through the fingers of time.
Memory.
And the traces of memory grant me a sense of time passing.
And also enable me to learn.
How I remember through time.
And how I learn.
And how I put those memories and that learning into conversation with the future.
Shapes my identity.
For good.
Or for ill.
Time.
lies at the center of my identity.
Time only seems to be something in which I participate involuntarily.
But time needs me.
Voluntarily.
to deepen my understanding.
Of it's multi.
Valent
Nature.
and help to mediate its life fully in my world.
Time.
Needs.
Me.
needs me to live through all its many appearances to give it life.
And amplitude.
Time.
exists in a field of possibility which I influence and partly determine.
I may constantly cry that I need more time.
But actually.
Time
Needs more.
Of me.
More of our spacious
Uninterrupted.
Timeless time.
To live out.
And understand.
Both his extraordinary depths.
And it's incalculable.
Far off horizons.
Time teaches us that nothing at the surface is as it seems.
But also that all the surface seemings of the world depend upon
They all embracing.
Multi-level presence of time.

Time may take a linear form in my mind.
But only because my senses are narrow.
my mind given to defensive postures to surfaces and unimaginative forms that restrict my understanding.
of the multi dimensional.
Radiant.
Nature.
of existence.
Time not only invites me below all surfaces, but
But in all directions at once.
Including frighteningly.
When time seemingly turns back towards me.
And looks me in the face.
Time may seem always to be flowing away from me.
But in deeper states of attention.
I
And time.
Our reciprocal partners.
We create a multifaceted.
conversational reality together.
Not only through memory.
But through direct experience.
Seeing the multitudinous face of time itself.
and courageously holding his gaze.
is one of the great thresholds of religious transformation.
When my sense of time breaks out of the linear
So does my identity.
In the deeper
Timeless states of love or newly being in love time.
radiates out from the very place where I am standing.
unbinding me from the well fitted.
of previously time bound manacles of my routine life.
The sudden freedom felt.
When time is open by the power of love.
Always.
Makes.
Me click.
Might.
Eels.
The entrance into time.
It's always the threshold where we are asked to loosen our grasp on our previous fearful understandings.
Love is time unanched.
And let to be fully itself.
Where the ours are rich and spacious with anticipation in the sudden sense
That there is no immediate horizon to our possibilities.
Without love.
and the all round attention love pays to the world.
Time is where I feel most powerless.
Without love.
Time is where I feel most powerless.
Because time passes.
And I will die.
So I hold on, of course, to a version of time mediated through control.
Exhausting my very power to live through the very force of my grip.
Living fully
And giving freedom to those who live with me.
Often means letting go of the way.
I
Hold on to time.
and all the ways I hold on to the people I love too strictly.
Too narrowly.
And too unimaginatively.
To my
particular version of time.
Whatever the version of time we have arranged for ourselves.
Time always feels like a powerful gravity.
A pull to our senses.
Always drawing us toward a clock, toward an appointment, toward a sense that something should be happening now.
Whether it is actually possible or not.
Time is intimately connected with gravity.
Astonishingly, physicists tell our disbelieving ears.
That everything gravitates toward places
Where time moves more slowly.
And time
seems to move more slowly the greater the mass to which it is near.
The greater the gravity.
the greater the slowing down of time.
So that to our amazement.
Someone living on a mountain top ages more quickly.
and their neighbours down in the valley.
What physicists call mass
We could call presence.
And as in a human life.
Presence is invitational.
Presence invites other presences towards it.
Presence
Slows time.
Down.
And opens up.
possibilities of experiencing the timeless and the eternal.
The depth.
Amplitude.
And invitational nature of my presence slows time for everyone around me.
Timelessness.
Is the foundation.
Have
Real
Charism.
and charisma.
By creating a centered timeless presence.
I invite everyone unconsciously to make the choice to join me there.
Or should they be?
afraid of what might happen in that slow, spacious territory of possibility.
Run a hundred miles.
in the opposite direction.
What is disturbing about time in my mortal human world?
Is that my personal surface experience of it is irrevocable.
The glass broken.
Into a hundred shards.
Cannot heal itself.
The child I lost will never return to me.
The regrets I have are things I can only heal in my imagination.
Or with others in my future.
who might benefit from the sincerity.
My regret.
This arrow of time.
exists only at the surface of things.
When I die.
the individual atoms and molecules of my body.
Actually experience.
Not time passing.
But simply a change of state.
A transition from an ordered world
to one and another level.
Newly disordered.
But also full of new potential.
The meeting of time and the timeless.
It's the place.

Disappearance.
And transformation.
Time tells me with some glee.
That we are all
Compost.
For many future lives.
And many future worlds.
Time.
never comes to an end.
Even though
My time will come to an end.
Time does not pass, even though I will pass, time will carry on to eternity. Therefore
A proper relationship with the foundational nature of time.
Is my own.
Everyday doorway.
into the eternal.
When I stop counting time.
As a way of controlling it.
I stop my addiction to naming the hours and what should occur in those hours.
That single pathway across the field.
Suddenly branches to a hundred more.
No one has explored.
That thirty minutes with my son or daughter fully spent
Lives for years.
As a precious
Binding.
Memory.
When we start measuring change as if we knew what measuring change actually meant.
the human ability to measure time also stops.
Which is why on a silent retreat or in a monastery.
We make all the outer hours repeatable.
So that day after day.
Nothing on the outside seems to change.
We stop time on the outside.
So that we can concentrate on all the ways things change.
And grow.
On the inside.
We dwell
In the deepening.
Broadening.
and maturing sense of presence.
We call the timeless.
As our war against time quietens.
We start to take joy in the increased acuity of the years.
The entrance aromas of rain on fresh leaves that we previously never gave ourselves the time to breathe.
Time.
is left to itself.
To be itself.
And to grow what it needs to grow.
In every season of a human life.
In a deeply
Rested state.
As we loosen our grip on what we think is time.
Our sense of bodily tension falls away.
Along with the falling away of a falsely measured self.
And out of that
We begin to experience that joyful radiance.
We call timelessness.
Growing.
Through every cell.
of our previously time bound bodies.
Just like now.
As I write these last lines.
in the quiet late night hours.
In a hotel bar in Italy.
Listening to Miracle Hands.
Moving softly.
over the keys of a perfectly tuned
Piano.
Memory.
Meeting.
The moment.
In each note.
And then memory and moment both disappearing and reappearing.
And the onward music.
Each note.
Exquisitely timed.
A part.

Unstoppable flow.
this moment in time.
Inherited.
From all previous times.
Rippling into the future.
Uh.
Yeah.
Time.
Thank you.
Thank you for giving me the time to read time. It takes me right back both to the
Physical experience and the hotel bar, I might say, at the end of the night with this.
Brilliant pianist, actually. He was marvelous.
What a gift of a
Location for your writing.
What a blessing of the surrounding for your writing and what a gift of a
Reading. So thank you.
For that.
Just so long as the listener.
Doesn't feel they need a Peruvian castle in order to write.
So you wanna write poetry.
Step one.
You've also written poetry.
In the tube.
So
Can happen anywhere. David, this has been such a
Such a wide ranging and fun.
conversation. We've covered a lot of ground. Is there
Anything else that you would like
Two
Chat about.
Or any
Thing you'd like to do.
Point my listeners to
Ask of them.
Questions you'd like to pose.
Anything at all that you'd like to add before we
Wine to a close.
That's quite an invitation, Tim. I think we could
Spend the next week here actually. Well the broadband's pretty good. You are in a hotel room in New York, so uh I'm in pleasant surroundings. I see the shades of night have fallen fast outside your
Outside your window there of the sun going up and down.
I think for now we've had the marvelous
Conversation but I'd say, you know, the whole
Limitation from poetry is that it's possible
Two
speak what you think is impossible to say.
And once you've said it, you are
Breed.
into a larger territory.
You'll eventually make a prison of that territory too, but
That's going to be the end of that season.
And you'll learn how to get out of the prison earlier.
You'll be able to recognize when you're impersonating yourself instead of being
Yourself.
And you don't have to write it yourself, you can just read good poetry.
Or learn how 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.
That's the invitation I'd like to leave people with.
And certainly I recommend people
get their hands on anything that you've written, including your latest Constellations two, which further explores what you call
the conversational nature of reality, which is a wording I absolutely love.

And people can find you at David White dot com. All things David White W H
Y T E
dot 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
undecipherable. Much like I might look at some contemporary art and there's a plaque explaining what it means and it's you know an otter duct tape to a piece of Velcro and I'm like, I don't get it. I just don't get it. And then I came across certain poets
Mary Oliver certainly uh Fez
And many others who made sense to me finally. And I was like, Oh
This can exist. Yes. 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 short list for people who are
Shy.
But interested and engaging.
Yes.
Well I think you know, justify its
The doorway in is always so personal.
I'd advise going along the bookshelf, pulling them down and putting them back up until you find
A voice that speaks to you.
And to have faith.
And that voice will lead you to a lot of other voices.
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.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk.
On a hundred miles through your desert.
I have to walk for a hundred miles.
Through the desert, repenting.
You only have to
Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. That's the wild wild geese, right?

Yeah.
That the invitation you want is one the voice that speaks to you, yeah.
Robert Blyse.
Translations of Antonio Machado.
She Mass Heeney's poetry and
There are so many Emily Dickinson.
There are so many clear voices.
There is some impenetrable poetry that's worth giving your time to.
But only if you feel it's worth giving one only once you've got the love for portrait.
Yeah.
But there is a lot of bad impenetrable poetry too, so your intuition may be entirely correct. Yes.
It's one thing to be impenetrable with a purpose and on purpose when it starts to veer off that track is when it gets a little
Complicated. Well, David, this has been such a joy. Such a gift.
Really appreciate it.
Lovely, absolutely.
And I'd just like to say that you're a really marvelous and invitational conversationalist and it comes from a
from that robust vulnerability of wanting to know, really.
And you really feel that as a sincere
Reaching out.
across the ether, so.
That's much appreciated. Thank you very much.
Oh, thank you. That really means a lot.
Coming from you and
Really uh feeling
Invigorated and excited to
Explore in the in the outer realms and the inner realms. So I think I'm gonna
get straight into a meditation session after this and then go get go get a bite to eat. Uh, but really appreciate the time. Yeah.
Don't neglect those fantastic.
Oh, I wasn't.
To everybody listening, we will link to everything we discussed in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog slash podcast. Just search David White and I'll pop right up.
And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary.
Both to others and to yourself.
And thanks for tuning in.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out.
every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading,
albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then
I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash.
Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.
Thanks for listening.
This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. I have been using 8 Sleep Podcover for years now. Why? Well by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed.
8 Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the Pod, and I'm excited to test it out, Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats,
and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second.
First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool, even in a heat wave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that.
Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. And for those snore heavy nights, the Pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring.
Plus with the Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them because these types of metricks are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV.
Their heart rate tracking as just one example is at 99% accuracy. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner, great, you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own.
ideal temperatures. It's easy. So go to 8sleep.com slash Tim and save between$400 and$600 on the Pod 4 Ultra. 8Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.
This special offer is valid until December 14th.
With millions of nonprofits in the United States and around the world, how do you find the few that could actually make a big impact with your donation?
Today's sponsor, GiveWell, Makes It Easy, and they've been a sponsor of this podcast for a very long time. I am a huge fan. Why am I a huge fan? Well, GiveWell researches charitable opportunities in global health and poverty alleviation.
and directs funding to those that have the highest impact. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high impact giving. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site for free. They have 39 staff researchers, including researchers with backgrounds in economics, biology, and much more
They spend more than 50,000 hours each year looking for the giving opportunities that will maximize each dollar of your donation impact.
You can make tax deductible donations.
to the recommended funds or charities and GiveWell does not take a cut. More than 100,000 donors, including me, yours truly, have used GiveWell to donate more than$2 billion.
And that includes Tim Fair Show listeners who've donated close to$1 million to date.
Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save more than 200,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more.
If you have never used GiveWell to donate,
You can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. So you can make your money.
Go.
further with the help of GiveWell. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferris show at checkout. Just to let them know where you heard about this. So claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferris show at checkout.
Again, that's givewell.org to have your donation match or to simply learn more. Check it out. Highly recommend givewell.org.