#781: David Whyte, Poet — Spacious Ease, Irish Koans, Writing in Delirium, and Revelations from a Yak Manger AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Tim Ferriss Show

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

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:11:04

Episode Shownotes

David Whyte (davidwhyte.com) is the author of twelve books of poetry and five books of prose, including his latest, Consolations II, which further explores what David calls “the conversational nature of reality.”Sponsors:GiveWell.

org charity research and effective giving: https://givewell.org (If you’ve never used GiveWell 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. To claim your match, go to https://givewell.org and pick PODCAST and enter The Tim Ferriss Show at checkout.)Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save between $400 and $600 on the Pod 4 Ultra)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Timestamps:[00:00] Who is David Whyte?[06:25] Connecting with Henry Shukman.[10:32] Low times in the High Himalayas and a yak manger awakening.[15:17] The place from where David writes good poetry.[17:22] Invitational speech.[21:55] Catching up with the curve of one's transformation.[27:58] A revolutionary moment reflecting on parameters and regret.[37:41] "Everything Is Waiting for You."[40:54] The secret code to life and the agreed insanity of so-called adults.[46:47] Being found by the world in greater and greater ways.[48:52] Asking beautiful questions.[58:13] "Tan-y-Garth."[01:02:09] Memorizing poetry.[01:08:28] "Zen."[01:22:55] Courage.[01:24:15] How living in a trailer on the side of a Welsh mountain helped David develop as a writer.[01:31:14] Irish koans, French doors, and Tibetan bells.[01:38:30] Poetry as consolation.[01:42:03] The best place to hold a poem.[01:43:07] "Time."[02:00:01] Writing and reading good poetry.[02:04:52] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Summary

In this episode, Tim Ferriss engages with poet David Whyte, discussing his profound spiritual journeys, particularly during his experience in the Himalayas that catalyzed his creative process. Whyte reflects on the significance of 'invitational speech' in fostering human connections and the transformative power of regret in creativity. He emphasizes poetry as a vital means of understanding life's complexities, maintaining a childlike wonder in perception. Throughout the dialogue, themes of time, identity, and the delicate balance of intimacy and solitude are explored, revealing poetry's role as a conversational bridge between personal experience and universal truths.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#781: David Whyte, Poet — Spacious Ease, Irish Koans, Writing in Delirium, and Revelations from a Yak Manger) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is tim ferris welcome to another episode of the tim ferris show where does my job to interview world class performers to deconstruct how they do what they do, tease out the habits routines favorite books inspirations and so on you can apply and test in your own life i guess today i have wanted to have on for years,

00:00:20 Speaker_00
And in my mind, what he teaches, what he writes, his means of thinking, his frameworks, the way he tilts the lens, the prism of perception ever so slightly, all these things are incredibly practical. That's my perspective. His name is David White.

00:00:40 Speaker_00
You can find him at DavidWhite.com. White is spelled at W-H-Y-T-E. David White is the author of 12 books of poetry and five books of prose, including his latest, Consolations II, which I highly recommend.

00:00:53 Speaker_00
You should just get everything that he's written, frankly. But Consolations II further explores what David calls the conversational nature of reality.

00:01:01 Speaker_00
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.

00:01:14 Speaker_00
We'll 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.

00:01:26 Speaker_00
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.

00:01:36 Speaker_00
He also has hosted a live online series three Sundays every other month since 2020. And as I'm recording this, I have pages upon pages of notes that I took while David and I were having this conversation.

00:01:49 Speaker_00
It energized me for so many hours after we finished chatting. I hope it also has that galvanizing, inspiring impact on you.

00:01:59 Speaker_00
You can find David online, Instagram, instagram.com slash davidjwhite, note the middle initial, davidjwhite, and the website again is davidwhite.com. And we're gonna dive right into it.

00:02:11 Speaker_00
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?

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00:02:32 Speaker_00
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00:03:54 Speaker_00
So to claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferriss Show at checkout. Again, that's givewell.org to have your donation matched or to simply learn more. Check it out, highly recommend, givewell.org.

00:04:08 Speaker_00
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00:06:02 Speaker_00
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

00:06:07 Speaker_02
Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

00:06:25 Speaker_00
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 Schuchman. And I wanted to perhaps start with how you first met Henry. How did you guys connect?

00:06:41 Speaker_02
Ah, that's an interesting foundation from which to step up into our adventure together here, our conversation adventure. Henry Schickman, of course, is a fully-fledged Zen master. He's had Inca.

00:06:53 Speaker_02
He's in the Kawun 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.

00:07:09 Speaker_02
He was part in residence and I came to give a reading. 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.

00:07:24 Speaker_02
Then by sheer happenstance, we found that Oxford was a second home to us. Well, he'd actually grown up in Oxford and Oxfordshire. So from then on we would meet every thursday night in the book binders arms pub.

00:07:39 Speaker_02
And we would talk literature and then actually because strangely enough henry was just getting into sending a really fierce way.

00:07:48 Speaker_02
And I, at that time, was the old hand in Zen, so I suppose I was giving pointers or talking about koans, but unbeknownst to me, Henry would soon be driving a Lamborghini, passing a Zen Lamborghini, passing me at great speed in the future.

00:08:06 Speaker_02
But the great thing about Henry was he was the toast of the literary world in London. He was being published in the TLS, Times Literary Supplement. He was in demand as one of the up-and-coming poets. He also had a pipeline of novels.

00:08:25 Speaker_02
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.

00:08:38 Speaker_02
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.

00:08:51 Speaker_02
He was so famous as a young poet. It could be the only explanation. And in many ways he had died metaphorically gone so fully into zen which is you know a deep path of heartbreak is my latest essay on that.

00:09:06 Speaker_02
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.

00:09:17 Speaker_02
And so I asked Sam to make the introduction so we could contact, and we were so happy to find each other again.

00:09:24 Speaker_02
So it's really interesting at this new juncture, having spent so long apart, he's now coming full bore back into poetry, and I'm having another round of dedication in my Zen sitting. So the world turns. So we're Zen and poetic bros.

00:09:42 Speaker_02
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, Sam's always talking about ordinary mind, which is actually extraordinary.

00:09:58 Speaker_02
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.

00:10:07 Speaker_00
I'm going to come back and touch on a bunch of things that you mentioned. Part of the reason I wanted to invoke the great name of Henry is because he offered some suggestions.

00:10:19 Speaker_00
Well, I asked him if he could offer some fun avenues for exploration, and he said, totally fine to blame them on me. So I wanted to at least Let the audience know who Henry was before I started blaming someone.

00:10:30 Speaker_02
Lovely.

00:10:32 Speaker_00
I'm going to kick off the next stage in the adventure with the following. You had an awakening while half dead with amoebic dysentery in a yak manger in the high Himalayas. What were you doing there and what happened?

00:10:47 Speaker_02
Well i was in the yacht manger because that's the only place the tibetan family could find for me actually was more or less a one room hot they were in with five children. and I staggered in their death door really.

00:11:02 Speaker_02
How old were you at the time if you just place us in your life? I was in my mid-twenties or late mid-twenties.

00:11:09 Speaker_02
So that was the only place they could put me and I was in delirium in the yak manger for three days and three nights, which is a mythic period. How did you end up there in the first place? Well, I was trekking.

00:11:22 Speaker_02
I was on the Annapurna Trail when it first opened up. in the mid seventies so we wanted the first people along it.

00:11:31 Speaker_02
I'm very different experience and if you walked it today we had experiences that marco polo would have had him going into asia in the centuries we were often the first.

00:11:41 Speaker_02
Western a certain people had seen send me when we went off the main trail and not the side branches of the unfound villages up above in the mountains.

00:11:50 Speaker_02
And it was one of the in one of those tiny villages that i collapsed actually a mile or so before i got there and literally crawled in my hands and knees into the hamlet.

00:12:00 Speaker_02
And this family took me and i have a piece in my cycle of poems about pilgrimage about the love of the stranger and how powerful it is. I've had my life saved by strangers, not only in the Himalayas, but in South America and other places.

00:12:16 Speaker_02
There's something very powerful about the stranger's love. 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.

00:12:34 Speaker_02
which is actually quite comfortable in its dried form. Although it does tend to stick in your hair, particularly as my hair was quite long at that time. And as part of that hospitality, this family had a rice beer, which they brewed themselves.

00:12:52 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:04 Speaker_02
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 manger. And I went through all the different levels of hell that you see painted in all those Tibetan iconography.

00:13:20 Speaker_02
I had a really powerful experience of many of the images that I had seen. Probably I'd taken them in, being in the Kathmandu Valley and then going into gompers and temples, and I was sitting in them too.

00:13:33 Speaker_02
in meditation so i think i'd taken the man in a dream like form and then i had this three day experience of going through many of the experiences that a lot of this very powerful fears iconography. Represented.

00:13:50 Speaker_02
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. The whole family ran out and they all looked at me with their mouths open.

00:14:03 Speaker_02
Then they all stood in a row and it was like the scene from The Sound of Music where all the children are in a row with the smallest and the tallest. They all bowed at the same time towards me. It was just as if they just recognized something.

00:14:18 Speaker_02
Because it's in the air up there, the llamas they would meet, the spirituality you could cut with a knife in those mountains. It was just as if, We recognize this. They all bowed and they just left me alone, no fuss.

00:14:32 Speaker_02
That moment of breakthrough was realizing that the whole David White project was completely absurd. The project of David White itself, you mean? Yes.

00:14:43 Speaker_02
The name that I'd given myself and that was given to me was just like the name of the river in the valley below the Marciandi River.

00:14:50 Speaker_02
You were looking at something that 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. That, as yet, does not have a name.

00:15:06 Speaker_02
And that is actually the place in which you write good poetry, also. It's that from the unknown, below the horizon of your understanding, lying deep inside yourself.

00:15:17 Speaker_00
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 felt sense? Do you know when you're in that place?

00:15:35 Speaker_02
experience. And to begin with, when you're first walking into it, when you're either a young poet or an adherent of some kind of contemplative tradition, it's quite inchoate, it's quite vague. But eventually, you get this almost pinpoint sense.

00:15:53 Speaker_02
It's there in the classical place in the hara, down in the right below. Yes, and also in the heart. It's the place that's willing to engage with the fiercest conversations of existence in a way.

00:16:09 Speaker_02
It's the part of you that already knows it's going to have to give every last thing away.

00:16:13 Speaker_02
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.

00:16:26 Speaker_02
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 and different experiences.

00:16:44 Speaker_02
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.

00:17:03 Speaker_02
It's below language but it takes a linguistic form that's why if it's good portraits fresh is 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.

00:17:20 Speaker_02
It almost always comes from that place.

00:17:22 Speaker_00
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. So could you define or give examples of what you mean?

00:17:41 Speaker_02
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.

00:17:51 Speaker_02
It's a mutual invitation the fact that we're constantly being invited out of ourselves into larger and larger territories of.

00:17:59 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:12 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:31 Speaker_02
Your final gift to the world exactly so when you realize that you start getting out of the way soon you might as well you're going to have to anyway yeah i just will start practicing and when you think about it.

00:18:43 Speaker_02
Every conversation has 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 invitation is based on vulnerability.

00:19:00 Speaker_02
You only invite someone in when you feel you really need help understanding something or actual physical help.

00:19:10 Speaker_02
Loving help all the different forms of help so you got this trajectory the spectrum of qualities which all make up the phenomenology of conversation itself which is this beautiful latin word which means inside out converse

00:19:27 Speaker_02
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 are so nourishing for us, and there's a lot of medical research now showing that you're much happier when you're looking at a far horizon.

00:19:44 Speaker_02
You're in new york city now if you look out to not 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.

00:19:59 Speaker_02
the horizon of the planes 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 not 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.

00:20:21 Speaker_02
Open irish mother and your father. 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 love. This is a physical horizon.

00:20:37 Speaker_02
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.

00:20:56 Speaker_02
We often see that in a horizon as a line of resistance actually and difficulty and it's the horizon between what you know about yourself.

00:21:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:19 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:36 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:53 Speaker_02
And the intuition is correct, actually.

00:21:55 Speaker_00
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.

00:22:06 Speaker_00
So I read in an interview that you've done, and please feel free to fact check this, of course, I'll quote here, most people I believe are living four or five years behind the curve of their own transformation.

00:22:18 Speaker_00
Is that effectively a different facet or a compatible facet of what you're describing? Would you mind expanding on that?

00:22:29 Speaker_02
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.

00:22:45 Speaker_02
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.

00:23:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:23:14 Speaker_02
And quite often we've also had the experience of how to circumstances suddenly pulling the rug out from under us. All the things you've been investing in suddenly fall apart.

00:23:28 Speaker_02
And sometimes you realize, oh my God, I actually, I couldn't have done a better job of self-sabotage than I did over the last years.

00:23:36 Speaker_02
And sometimes it's the, it's what you might call the soul's attempt, you know, to break things apart unconsciously on the surface.

00:23:45 Speaker_02
That you refuse to do from your own willpower and so sometimes you know your life breaks down and you hit present reality with such velocity.

00:23:56 Speaker_02
That you break apart on impact and this is a time on a way of transformation but it's very hard to go through that way. There's another way of doing it, which is to stay up with the edge of your own. Seasonal maturation and that occurs below this.

00:24:16 Speaker_02
invisible line inside you.

00:24:19 Speaker_00
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?

00:24:33 Speaker_02
It's dwelling fully in the body, physical body, and so there are lots of different disciplines around that.

00:24:39 Speaker_02
We sometimes get forced into it through terrible illness, as I did in the yak manger in the Himalayas, you know, your outer life falls apart along with your physical body.

00:24:51 Speaker_02
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 matured in some way. It was almost as if it marked boundaries and frontiers of maturation.

00:25:08 Speaker_02
Or you can do it 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.

00:25:28 Speaker_02
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.

00:25:45 Speaker_02
So to go back to the image of our inner and outer horizons, 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.

00:26:01 Speaker_02
But the really fierce conversation is when you put what's below that horizon inside you, which is the unknown just about to be known in your life.

00:26:10 Speaker_02
About who you are and what you want in conversation with what lies over the horizon of what you're seeing. your ambitions or your desires in the outer world, or the actual physical line to which you're going.

00:26:24 Speaker_02
And when you put those two unknowns together, that's, I think, what we've called mystical experience, or enlightenment in a way. It's a powerful meeting of two unknowns, and your identity is the frontier between them, where you speak them.

00:26:44 Speaker_02
And in Dharma combat in Zen, The 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.

00:27:01 Speaker_02
But then the real student comes along, and that's how you get these marvelous koans and exercises, which are representations of the two unknowns sparking this incredible creative life.

00:27:16 Speaker_00
And if we don't come back to it, I will refer people to my first, maybe even my second conversation with Henry Schuchman on this podcast where we spend probably an hour on colons. So. All right, yes. If people want to dive into that.

00:27:34 Speaker_00
Also, the somatic awareness, and I don't want to 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.

00:27:52 Speaker_00
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.

00:28:04 Speaker_00
And if you have a better example that comes to mind, feel free to run with it. But I wanted to give people a real-world example of what this looks like in practice.

00:28:12 Speaker_00
And the particular story that I'm looking at in front of me relates to you having a good old conversation with yourself. at a restaurant when you did not have time to go and grab a book from your hotel. I don't know if that is enough of a prompt.

00:28:28 Speaker_00
I can certainly-.

00:28:35 Speaker_02
And led to the consolations essays and 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 son would walk.

00:28:55 Speaker_02
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.

00:29:04 Speaker_02
But almost always along the street, you would come across something really fascinating, like an 18th century fan 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.

00:29:22 Speaker_02
When 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.

00:29:35 Speaker_02
And it takes you in a clockwise direction across the river and through the seven suburbs of paris and i've done the sun would walk probably half a dozen times and never.

00:29:46 Speaker_02
Repeated the same journey but i was halfway through this walk when my phone rang and it was the observer magazine in britain the sunday observer which has millions of readers had.

00:29:59 Speaker_02
And they wanted me to write something for their philosophical column i got quite excited with such a large readership. But then I got the parameters right, it had to be a single word title, and it could only be 300 words.

00:30:14 Speaker_02
And I was so disgusted with the parameters. So I said, OK, I'll do it, and I snapped the phone off. And then I said, David, get over yourself. They've got their parameters. You've got yours. And then I said, what if you could write it in 300 words?

00:30:32 Speaker_02
There's many a moment in a human life where someone has actually changed other people's lives in less than 300 words. So I said, right. And then I started thinking.

00:30:43 Speaker_02
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, to decompress from my traveling and speaking and recompress to go out.

00:31:04 Speaker_02
I realized, my God, the number of strictures I put around, What I need in order to write, I need silence, I need quiet. I said to her, David, what if you could write everywhere, anywhere?

00:31:17 Speaker_02
I got to the end of the walk and I booked into this restaurant and I didn't have time to go back to my hotel, I didn't have a book, and I had no scintillating company. I said, what if you had an entertaining conversation with yourself, David?

00:31:31 Speaker_02
I asked the waiter, do you have a piece of paper? And he did, and it was a beautiful piece of watermarked paper with gold leaf at the edge, actually.

00:31:39 Speaker_00
Very nice paper.

00:31:40 Speaker_02
As only the French would pull out.

00:31:45 Speaker_00
Not the back of a receipt like you get in New York.

00:31:48 Speaker_02
Yeah, exactly. 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 wrote it, this is the piece actually.

00:32:06 Speaker_02
It was the first essay I wrote, it's just very short. The piece that appeared in Consolations is just a little longer than 300 words, but not much longer. Regret is a short, evocative, and achingly beautiful word.

00:32:23 Speaker_02
An allergy to lost possibilities, even in its brief enunciation, it is also a rarity.

00:32:29 Speaker_02
And almost never heard except where the speaker insists that they have none, that they are brave and forward looking and could not possibly imagine their life in any other way than the way it is.

00:32:40 Speaker_02
To admit regret is to understand we are fallible, that there are powers in the world beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past, but of the very story we tell about our present.

00:32:55 Speaker_02
And yet strangely, to admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins. The rarity of honest regret may be due to our contemporary emphasis on the youthful perspective.

00:33:12 Speaker_02
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 debilitate us, but put us into a proper, more generous relationship with the future.

00:33:32 Speaker_02
Except for brief senses of having missed a tide, having hurt another, having taken what is not ours, youth is not yet ready for the rich current of abiding regret that runs through and emboldens a mature human life.

00:33:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:34:05 Speaker_02
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 live better than our past.

00:34:23 Speaker_02
So i'm consciously i was really regretting all the ways i had myself in with all the parameters i felt i needed in order to write.

00:34:33 Speaker_02
I'm strangely just naming those different forms of reluctance release me completely suddenly i was able to write anywhere on trains boats.

00:34:42 Speaker_02
The tube in london left sides in ireland wherever and in fact i got so excited by the revolutionary aspect that. That had on my own life. But I thought there must be lots of other words we use in narrow and pejorative ways.

00:35:01 Speaker_02
We often use language against ourselves as a weapon against change. I got an essay on time there where we're constantly saying, time is our enemy, time is not on our side, time is slipping through our fingers.

00:35:16 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:31 Speaker_02
So i set up on the adventure which included writing these essays with the single word titles on vulnerability honesty friendship. The body death shame in all kinds of circumstances all around the world in my traveling so that's the story.

00:35:53 Speaker_02
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.

00:36:04 Speaker_02
Because often we feel we're disempowering ourselves with the regret and we're told not to have regrets but to just play on. The way forward actually may be through a fully felt sense of remorse over a way you could have been and what.

00:36:22 Speaker_02
a generosity you could have displayed and didn't. And by fully experiencing it, you could be precipitated into a deeper form of generosity in the future. Thank you for that.

00:36:38 Speaker_00
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients.

00:37:07 Speaker_00
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00:37:23 Speaker_00
So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash tim That's DrinkAG1, the number one. DrinkAG1.com slash Tim. Last time, DrinkAG1.com slash Tim. Check it out.

00:37:42 Speaker_00
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.

00:37:58 Speaker_00
I've thought of having this conversation in this form on this podcast for many years, and for whatever reason, just felt like the right time. What is that time for you now?

00:38:08 Speaker_00
CB This is going to 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, Fibula Friday, everything is waiting for you.

00:38:26 Speaker_00
It put words to a sentiment that I had had difficulty verbalizing, in part because I don't think I'd ever tried to verbalize it, if that makes sense.

00:38:39 Speaker_00
It never occurred to me to frame it in the way that you did, and 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.

00:38:54 Speaker_00
The everything is waiting for you, this is what prompted, I think.

00:38:57 Speaker_02
Oh, everything is waiting for you.

00:38:59 Speaker_00
Yeah. Yeah. Would it be too much insult to the work if I highlighted just a few lines?

00:39:05 Speaker_02
Not at all. I have it in my memory, too, if you need. Oh, you do? Oh, please.

00:39:08 Speaker_00
I do. Yeah.

00:39:09 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:21 Speaker_02
I'm not 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 your great mistake.

00:39:34 Speaker_02
Is to act the drama as if you're alone as if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

00:39:50 Speaker_02
Surely, even you at times have felt the grand array, the swelling presence, and the chorus crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you courage.

00:40:08 Speaker_02
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream letter to divinity.

00:40:25 Speaker_02
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing, even as it pours you a drink. The cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last.

00:40:41 Speaker_02
All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you. Fantastic. Thank you.

00:40:54 Speaker_00
So I want to 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. That's the line that stuck with me because much like these outdated

00:41:16 Speaker_00
constraints, outdated narratives, outdated stories that are four or five years old as we look at the current horizon internally, let's just say. The feeling of unnecessary burden that we impose on ourselves is something that I feel very deeply.

00:41:37 Speaker_00
And the aloneness, for instance, and this is something Henry has helped me to really hone in on,

00:41:45 Speaker_00
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

00:42:01 Speaker_00
a inherent heaviness with the label of loneliness and the identification as someone who is lonely is something that has been very enabling for me in the last few years as someone who's felt alone or lonely for a very high percentage of my life, I would say.

00:42:19 Speaker_00
So thank you for that poem. It really struck me and found it very

00:42:24 Speaker_00
helpful, and I wanted to have you on this podcast for many reasons, one of which is that I think for, and I don't want to imply that all of us Yanks are knuckle-dragging cretins who can barely make out a paragraph, but poetry, I think, gets relegated to the realm of optional

00:42:46 Speaker_00
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. But I wanted to rewind the clock for you.

00:43:00 Speaker_00
I just want to read this and you can tell me if this is fact-checked properly. 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.

00:43:13 Speaker_00
I saw it as a secret code to life, and I didn't understand how other people didn't see that.

00:43:18 Speaker_00
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.

00:43:28 Speaker_00
I would love to hear you comment on secret code to life, what that means to you, and then the agreed insanity of so-called adults.

00:43:40 Speaker_02
Witness the agreed insanity of our political discourse at the moment so we know how immature. 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.

00:43:57 Speaker_02
You realize that the priorities of the adult what these people are suffering from a form of amnesia they 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.

00:44:15 Speaker_02
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.

00:44:33 Speaker_02
As another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, said, no amount of exaggeration will do justice to what actually happened. And it's actually true, the main thing is to get the spirit of what occurred across.

00:44:47 Speaker_02
And then my father's Yorkshire storytelling tradition was very different. But those two linguistic inheritances came together in a very powerful way.

00:44:57 Speaker_02
And indeed, it was a Yorkshire, even though I was reading a lot of Irish poems, and I was reading a lot of Walter Delamere, and we had great poetry in our schools, actually, and good teachers, so I was lucky that way.

00:45:12 Speaker_02
But when I was about 13 or so, I was down in the little library in the town where I grew up, and I saw that top shelf was poetry. It was as if it was kept away from-. Like the stack of Playboys. Kids, yeah. I had to reach up.

00:45:26 Speaker_02
It was just before I went through my growing spurt. I had to reach up and I got hold of one of the poetry books and they write in the tipsy topsy tweenness of my two fingers and pulled it off. I remember it dropped down and I caught it.

00:45:42 Speaker_02
And then I opened it, and it was a joint volume by Ted Hughes, fellow Yorkshire poet not far from where I grew up, and Tom Gunn, who moved to San Francisco Bay Area, actually.

00:45:55 Speaker_02
First of all, I was surprised that they were 30 years old, both of them, and they were described as young poets. I thought, that's not young. They were impressive. But I read into the book, and I was just astonished.

00:46:10 Speaker_02
I said, oh, here are adults who have kept the primary vision of childhood alive into their maturity. I wouldn't have used that language as a child, but that's what I thought.

00:46:25 Speaker_02
And so I thought, oh, poetry is the secret code to staying alive, to staying present, to staying visionary. To William Blake, innocence was not a commodity that was going to be replaced by experience.

00:46:41 Speaker_02
Innocence was your ability to be found by the world in ever greater and greater ways.

00:46:47 Speaker_00
What do you mean by that found by the world in greater greater ways is that being unfettered by and 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 phenomena we have whereby.

00:47:09 Speaker_02
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 in and there's a kind of innocence you have in your teens.

00:47:24 Speaker_02
Which it's an innocence that we normally associate with innocence. But actually there's an innocence you can have in your sixties or seventies or eighties or fifties or forties.

00:47:38 Speaker_02
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 42nd year or your 53rd year or your 65th year or your 77th year.

00:47:56 Speaker_02
There's a new life, and in many ways, the innocence of the adolescent would not be able to grasp the life that the innocence of the 77-year-old would be able to grasp.

00:48:07 Speaker_02
So the ability to pay attention and everything is waiting for you is a poem that's telling you to pay attention as if you've seen everything just for the first time.

00:48:17 Speaker_02
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.

00:48:27 Speaker_02
And if you can open up the same unspoken part of you to meet the unspoken in the world and the spoken inside you and the spoken in the world, all kinds of astonishing experiences that are gratifying and powerful and timeless.

00:48:44 Speaker_02
all in themselves without you having to achieve anything beyond it, come into your possibility and your grasp.

00:48:51 Speaker_00
BF. It seems to me that if people are looking for ways to pull the gauze from their eyes, so to speak, or see the world anew in some respect, or themselves for that matter, that questions are a very useful tool.

00:49:09 Speaker_00
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 a follow-up question.

00:49:22 Speaker_00
Question number one, what helped you get here that you need to give away? Who are you when you're the best to yourself and the world around you? What is a beautiful, the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt?

00:49:34 Speaker_00
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?

00:49:47 Speaker_00
What would you be if you failed being yourself? What promise did I make sincerely that I now need to let go of? What would it be like to have absolute faith in your intuitions? These are excellent questions. Excellent, excellent questions.

00:50:04 Speaker_00
I could see myself journaling for pages on any one of these. And I suppose the meta question that I'd love to hear you speak to is, how have you generated these questions?

00:50:18 Speaker_00
Then could you explain me what is the beautiful question you've cradled through years of doubt? Yes.

00:50:27 Speaker_02
Well, many of those questions have come just spontaneously when I've been on stage. I mean, either on stage in front of 1,000 people or just in a small group working with people and working with the implications of poetry.

00:50:41 Speaker_02
I have hundreds of poems memorized, so I can extemporize and go depending on where.

00:50:46 Speaker_02
I feel the invitation is in the room so i will often paraphrase a piece and what i call the beautiful question the beautiful and disturbing question beneath the light and i often think a beautiful question is defined by the fact that it.

00:51:02 Speaker_02
It helps to shape your life as much by asking it as by having it answered. Asking the question is a form of deep attention and it's a form of attention that can be deepened actually.

00:51:17 Speaker_02
You can get an immediate reward but actually you can carry a question for years. Are 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.

00:51:33 Speaker_02
you've carried inside you?

00:51:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, the beautiful question, you've cradled three years of doubt.

00:51:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's a line from Tanagath. And Tanagath is the name of a Welsh farm on which I lived for a good few years. It became my base. I helped

00:51:50 Speaker_02
The Welsh farming family there with the 900 sheep, digging them out of snowdrifts and lambing and shearing and sending them off to market. And I would travel out into the world and then I'd come back again.

00:52:03 Speaker_02
And so I was part of the whole seasonal round for a good couple of years at Tanagha. But I got to know a 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.

00:52:20 Speaker_02
or in a field next to the farmyard. And he lived with his family in this old stone cottage. And we got to know each other.

00:52:28 Speaker_02
I was just in my 20s, just back from the Galapagos Islands, where I'd been a naturalist guide, and just about to set off into the Himalayas.

00:52:41 Speaker_02
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.

00:52:48 Speaker_02
He'd been a traveling shakespeare player he played leah actually had this long celtic face actually 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.

00:53:03 Speaker_02
But we would retreat into his cottage which was called the main farm was called tanaka. Which i think it was just means half way up the mountain and he and his family lived in tennegah back which means little half way up the mountain is just.

00:53:18 Speaker_02
The original farmhouse that grew out of 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.

00:53:30 Speaker_02
It was the same temperature in that cottage on a midsummer's day as it was. And he and I would sit by the fire. His wife, Diane, was a very religious woman. She used to disappear upstairs, 8.30 or so.

00:53:44 Speaker_02
And Michael would reach behind the couch for a bottle of brandy where it would hide.

00:53:50 Speaker_02
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 apart.

00:54:06 Speaker_02
But engraving with his main artistry. And his prized possession was this very thick book of illustrated Blake engravings. Yeah, it must have cost a fortune actually for him because they were very poor. a poor but rich family, actually.

00:54:26 Speaker_02
And his great doubt would find its maximum efflorescence. His great doubt would find its greatest question when he would look at this book and he would say to me, and this happened,

00:54:42 Speaker_02
Once we got into it over the weeks he does this question every night almost by the fireside that was. Wind and rain beating against the window he'd say do you think blake actually talked with the angels.

00:54:57 Speaker_02
Always adjust a metaphor that we stand in conversation with worlds greater than i can. I need to ask this question i need really meant it when i asked you want to know. And he had a very fierce way of asking questions.

00:55:14 Speaker_02
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, reversing your opinion because the well of doubt was so powerful in this face.

00:55:28 Speaker_02
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.

00:55:40 Speaker_02
The other thing he'd say almost every night was, I love this place so much, I found my place to die. He meant Tannegarth.

00:55:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:55:59 Speaker_02
And there was a little stream called the cassette, which when did its way through the farm land out of the mountains and every little elbow of that stream had a name.

00:56:11 Speaker_02
And there was one place which was called the place of the three dead Englishmen in Welsh. And this being Wales, that was not a place of tragedy. A victory lap.

00:56:25 Speaker_02
Yeah, something good had happened there in the 1400s, the place of the three dead Englishmen. But it was actually a little pool where we used to swim, the place of the three dead Englishmen. I used to imagine the blood.

00:56:36 Speaker_02
But the whole place is a mythic language and then the car near the mountains beyond that you know well anyway i came to the states and it was many years later that i went back.

00:56:47 Speaker_02
And i surprised them actually i walked out when i was on my way to island and i realized i have time. Stopping wells on my way to the ferry and there's no phone antenna got back so i just woke up. I saw Diane when I was about half a mile away.

00:57:04 Speaker_02
When you've lived in the countryside, actually, you can recognize people's silhouettes from a long way away. I hadn't seen her for two years, but she knew it was me, she started waving.

00:57:14 Speaker_02
I came up to the cottage and there was a smell of scones coming out of the doorway. I thought, perfect bachelor timing, this is great. We sat down, it was so good to see each other. Then I said, where's Michael? She said, oh, he's in the hospital.

00:57:30 Speaker_02
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 i had to leave to go to and i didn't come back that way and then i heard that he passed away so i missed him.

00:57:48 Speaker_02
Diane wrote me this incredible letter in which she said he died. In the last month before he died, he'd had this remission, and he'd come out and come back to the farm.

00:58:01 Speaker_02
In the letter, she said, in those last few weeks, he was experiencing everything he'd read in Blake. He was conversing with his angels.

00:58:13 Speaker_02
And so I wrote this poem, Tanagath, and I realized I couldn't talk about Michael without talking about what he loved. And what he loved was Tanagath and then all the Welsh names.

00:58:25 Speaker_02
I wrote this as an elegy 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.

00:58:38 Speaker_02
So it's called Tanagath, Elegy for Michael. This grass grown hills of patchwork lined with walls I've grown to love. 400 years at least the hill farms clung tenacious to the weathered slope over the Ogwen and the green depths of Mon.

00:58:56 Speaker_02
The eye is weathered also into the gray 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.

00:59:13 Speaker_02
The still valley filled with his shouts and the mewling of sheep rests through the gate. Beneath Eirellan the bowl of flava is stirred with mist.

00:59:24 Speaker_02
The dogs lie low in the tufted grass and watch with pure intent the ragged back of the last sheep entering the stone-bound pens. The rough ground of Wales

00:59:37 Speaker_02
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 that belong to a single stream. Kaseg is the place of the mare.

00:59:53 Speaker_02
Kumplava is the valley of speech, utterance of wind. Gryglas, the blue moorland filled by the sky.

01:00:01 Speaker_02
The farm, passed down, yet never possessed, lives father to son, mother to child, feeding the people with sheep, the sheep with grass, and memory with years lived looking at mountains.

01:00:16 Speaker_02
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.

01:00:24 Speaker_02
Carnath lwannan, Carnath dathath, Carnath uchath, all the Carnethi, Eirellan of the Shining Light, Droskull, the Endless Ridge, curving to nothing. One man I know loved this place so much, said he'd found his place to die.

01:00:42 Speaker_02
Years I knew him, walking the high moor lines or watching the calls of a winter fire in the cottage grate, and I he did. But not before one month's final joy in wild creation gave him that full sight he glimpsed in Blake.

01:00:59 Speaker_02
He, too, wrestled with his angel. In and out of hospital, the white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountain's bracing sense of space. Now he was ready.

01:01:12 Speaker_02
His heart, so long at the edge of the nest, shook its wings and flew into the hills he loved, became the hills he loved, walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt. His ashes are scattered over by Abba.

01:01:32 Speaker_02
The water continually saying his name as I still go home to Tanagath, speaking the names those I love.

01:01:44 Speaker_00
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 faith nursed in doubt.

01:02:02 Speaker_02
Yeah. Walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt. Yeah.

01:02:09 Speaker_00
Is there a developed skill to memorizing poetry, or is that just an innate sort of barred genetics?

01:02:18 Speaker_02
Well, certainly. You know, you go to Ireland, and people have it by the barrel load. You've only to poke someone in Ireland. Out it spills, you know, my goals were the same, so as well as my mother.

01:02:32 Speaker_02
But, you know, 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.

01:02:43 Speaker_02
And 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.

01:03:02 Speaker_02
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. But my memory is much better now than when I never had a photographic memory.

01:03:16 Speaker_02
So I had to work to learn them, but now I can memorize much more easily than when I was younger, actually. So I have a better memory now than I had 40 or 50 years ago through practice.

01:03:27 Speaker_00
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?

01:03:45 Speaker_00
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?

01:03:56 Speaker_02
There is a visual element, but it's kind of transitory. It moves through them very quickly. If you think of The Tanegarth poem is full of so much imagery, but I'm physically there on the farm when I'm reciting that.

01:04:08 Speaker_02
I've got the Welsh breeze coming out of Cwm Llefa. It means the valley of speech, Cwm Llefa in Welsh, and Ireland means the shining one. It's this ridge of light, so yes, I see them.

01:04:20 Speaker_02
But you know it's the meaning it's all the constellating qualities together the rhythm the beauty of the. So for instance you have the phrase you are trying to catch again and again so that would be a good one for you to learn because it.

01:04:34 Speaker_02
Obviously means something to you so just to take that line out of the palm and not feel you have to learn the rest of the palm.

01:04:41 Speaker_02
Walked with an easy grace cradled by the faith he knows 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 that reinforces it.

01:04:57 Speaker_02
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.

01:05:07 Speaker_02
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 made so to be able to have that phrase to take you.

01:05:21 Speaker_02
That's interesting you know when i first started off my repertoire of portrait that i'd written myself did not cover many of the. thresholds of experience that I was working with on stage or with people. I would memorize other people's poems.

01:05:37 Speaker_02
I'd memorize Antonio Machado in Spanish or Rilke from the German or Yeats or Seamus Heaney. 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.

01:05:55 Speaker_02
Now I mostly use my own column, my own poetry, but it's lovely to call on. Heaney R. Yates, too, at the same time. It's just a rich storehouse inside yourself.

01:06:06 Speaker_00
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?

01:06:27 Speaker_01
Yes.

01:06:28 Speaker_00
And if I were to memorize that line of yours, which you just recited, how would I try to best access that primary, or make an attempt to do that?

01:06:40 Speaker_02
But it should be there in the rhythm. And, you know, when you ask heartfelt questions, your voice naturally falls into iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is how human beings in English speak when they're on their edge. of revelation in a way.

01:07:02 Speaker_02
That's why Shakespeare used it so much. Blank verse, we call it, iambic pentameter, five beats.

01:07:09 Speaker_02
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.

01:07:30 Speaker_02
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.

01:07:46 Speaker_02
In the Greek theater, when the gods spoke, The audience could not take it in the first time, so the chorus would repeat it.

01:07:54 Speaker_02
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.

01:08:10 Speaker_02
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.

01:08:23 Speaker_02
And the language has to be invitational to that particular person.

01:08:28 Speaker_00
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.

01:08:36 Speaker_00
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.

01:08:51 Speaker_02
When I was at university, I started to practice all kinds of strange forms of meditation that were my own ideas of what meditation probably was.

01:09:04 Speaker_02
So in my little room up in the Welsh village above Bangor, where I studied marine zoology, I remember practicing all kinds of strange exercises.

01:09:14 Speaker_00
So hold on one second. I don't want to stop you before you get started, but we're going to come back to the marine zoology at some point, I suspect.

01:09:23 Speaker_00
But connect the dots here, or what was the catalyzing book, moment, conversation, TV program, whatever it was that sent you off to explore these different forms of real or created meditative practices?

01:09:39 Speaker_02
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 is so glamorous in every generation. The word itself remains hip no matter what we do. The Zen of this, the Zen of that, it's just a gorgeous word.

01:10:01 Speaker_02
You get caught by the glimmers of Zen, the black robes, the bronze bells, the reflective wooden floors, the quiet temples, the Yoda-like teachers. That probably was the original invitation that I felt, oh, what a remarkable path to take.

01:10:21 Speaker_02
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?

01:10:37 Speaker_00
Are you open to that?

01:10:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's the last being a Z or a Z, as you say so quaintly in your country.

01:10:45 Speaker_00
Z sounds better, I'll be honest. But if I say it, I sound like a pompous ass, so I have to hold off.

01:10:53 Speaker_02
So Zen, it's the last essay in the book. So Zen is a great, big, magnificent, all-embracing, seduction of a word. And that's what I felt when I first came across it.

01:11:07 Speaker_02
Zen is the 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

01:11:20 Speaker_02
and be let alone in our grief to fall in love with reality.

01:11:25 Speaker_02
Zen is a centuries-old, glamorous, disguised cover-up, inviting us in, in each succeeding generation, so exquisitely, so quietly, so subtly, so seductively into its grip, that we do not, to begin with, have any understanding of what we have become so innocently ensnared by.

01:11:49 Speaker_02
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.

01:12:03 Speaker_02
Amidst our hopes for polished wood, serene surroundings, the sound of bells, and the whispered shuffle of bare feet, We always find to our consternation that zen always begins and ends in tears.

01:12:20 Speaker_02
The first tears and then practice for our bodies and our restless minds. For our backs our knees and for our legs trying to sit up right on those strangely necessary black cushions.

01:12:35 Speaker_02
The next tears are for our hearts, our emotions, and our previously imprisoned minds. The last tears are for a joy and laughter that still, to our amazement, keeps a friendship and an understanding with our previous griefs.

01:12:52 Speaker_02
Zen is the journey we take through heartbreak. The last heartbreak, Zen retires from the field.

01:12:59 Speaker_02
Zen generously disappears and lets us alone, refusing to let us use the word so freely again, refusing to let us be fooled by what we originally needed to be so enticed by.

01:13:13 Speaker_02
Drawn towards Zen practice, we almost always fall in love with the word itself.

01:13:19 Speaker_02
Zen beguiles us with that barely breathing vowel sound that lives so eternally and so glamorously at its center, between the dashing capital Z and that oh-so-subtle brushstroke of an N. The word itself seems to be clean and rested, insightful and eternally hip, something inspiring.

01:13:42 Speaker_02
something that conjures light and space and a welcome order amidst a difficult world of besiegement, chaos, and successive, never-ending experiences of grief.

01:13:54 Speaker_02
We fall for the word as we fall for the deep silences that swim dreamily through the first panes of our practice.

01:14:01 Speaker_02
Zen welcomes us through its invitation to a sense of spacious ease, to freedom from worry, and thankfully, in our mind's eye, to a deeper form of rested presence.

01:14:11 Speaker_02
A presence we first saw in the clean perfectly proportioned spaces inherited so seductively from japan but then.

01:14:21 Speaker_02
Zen breaks down the divisions in our mind and body we find our sense of self breaks down to firstly from the inside out and then at the end from the outside in.

01:14:34 Speaker_02
We learn to bow in the center not knowing what we are rehearsing unconsciously preparing as we are to duck through the achingly low doors of the basement heartbreak will provide.

01:14:46 Speaker_02
We pass through those low doors as we pass into the difficulties of marriage or intimate relationship. Like the raw vulnerabilities we find in the commitments of marriage or in a long intimate partnership.

01:14:58 Speaker_02
Zen begins with the honeymoon of getting to know, graduates through difficult and unwanted surprises, and then culminates in a slow breakdown, day by day, through the trials and invitations of intimacy and heartache itself.

01:15:15 Speaker_02
As in a marriage, in Zen, we learn that the line between this body, another's body, and the body of the world is not where we thought it was. As in the love relationship we learned that what we thought we knew is not equal to what we are discovering.

01:15:32 Speaker_02
As in an intimate relationship we learned 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.

01:15:45 Speaker_02
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.

01:15:57 Speaker_02
Tellingly, as in relationship, the hardest thing to do in Zen practice is simply finding a way to breathe freely while staying connected to the world or the world of another.

01:16:10 Speaker_02
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.

01:16:25 Speaker_02
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.

01:16:38 Speaker_02
Like the essence of intimate relationship, the very essence of Zen might be giving up and giving in, not to our partner, but to what the essence and heartache of the partnership calls us to. Zen is surprising under its subterfuge.

01:16:55 Speaker_02
Zen's biggest surprise is that it seems to have more confidence in the incoherent life we first brought to it than the one we are trying to replace it with.

01:17:08 Speaker_02
We find ourselves seen at a core as one who generated difficulties, not because our essence is difficulty,

01:17:15 Speaker_02
But because difficulties were what we thought we needed in order to get through in order to be worthy of something better difficulty was needed friend difficult is how we thought things should be difficult is what we thought we were.

01:17:31 Speaker_02
In the attempt to give our old life away and have it replaced by the newly spacious clarity we first glimpses and we find it constantly returned to us. In a voice that says, we will never need anything more than what we already had.

01:17:47 Speaker_02
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.

01:18:05 Speaker_02
Zen frustrates us, wants us to find a way just by being the very essence of things that find their way. Zen in the old cliche, because it is so true, wants us to be the way itself.

01:18:19 Speaker_02
It might be that Zen as a word would like us to understand this one simple thing so it can go home and have a good rest.

01:18:28 Speaker_02
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.

01:18:44 Speaker_02
When we actually glimpse what we are, we and that hand seem to disappear altogether, simply because there's no need for a hand when the reluctant body that needed it has disappeared. Zen indeed is an old fraudster, but one with a heart of gold.

01:19:02 Speaker_02
Just as we are taken in, it relents, and to our relief, gives us all our money back. Zen, we realize in the end, is much humbler in its aims than we thought it was. Zen, we realize, is more realistic than we thought it was.

01:19:20 Speaker_02
Zen in the end is always surprisingly practical and helpful, and just wants us to do the simplest, most obvious thing.

01:19:29 Speaker_02
Zen doesn't waste its energy by choosing too early in the game and waits for things to make their own choice unimpeded by interference. Zen refuses to choose between light and dark, restlessness and order, between not knowing or having answers.

01:19:46 Speaker_02
Zen has a well-cultivated sense of humor and carries its own hidden cargo of amusement at all our self-deceptions and false choices.

01:19:58 Speaker_02
Zen is a true comedian at times, its most hilarious proposition being that you might not, after all, have to believe in your own thoughts. Zen is a true comedian.

01:20:13 Speaker_02
We walk towards Zen as if towards a door of light, but Zen practice moves us just as much and unerringly towards a door into the dark, into what until now we could not see or discern.

01:20:25 Speaker_02
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.

01:20:36 Speaker_02
Zen leads us on like the very best kind of guide, as if we might be equal to what we eventually find.

01:20:44 Speaker_02
Send us the ultimate kind of guide and that it disappears in the moment of our understanding to leave us with what we have found and more importantly and to our astonishment what comes to find us.

01:20:57 Speaker_02
Xanax is to begin with to follow the thread of heartbreak then to begin with heartbreak is the only thread we need to follow. Heartbreak has many difficult doors, almost all of them leading where we hoped and prayed we did not need to go.

01:21:16 Speaker_02
Reading between the lines, the old Zen teachers seem to think that one heartbreak was as good as another. So many doors.

01:21:24 Speaker_02
All heartbreak is giving up, but the mercy that lies in the path of heartbreak is that in the end, we will have to give up even our precious, well-guarded memories of heartbreak itself. In real heartbreak, something else always comes to find us.

01:21:42 Speaker_02
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.

01:21:58 Speaker_02
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.

01:22:20 Speaker_02
Finding a path where you don't care about things or other people that's the ultimate protection against heartbreak. But then you live a life in the abstract. You live a life that never makes any real sense. You live a life of loneliness.

01:22:38 Speaker_02
So finding out what you care about, even though we try and find a path where we won't have our heartbreak, and you're going to have your heart broken anyway, so we might as well get with the program.

01:22:48 Speaker_02
have our heart broken over something that we actually care about. So what do you care about? What do you really care about?

01:22:55 Speaker_00
What are your thoughts on the word courage and how this ties into what you're discussing? What is the etymology of the word courage?

01:23:05 Speaker_02
Well, it's very similar. And I'm sure you know, the first part of the word is from the French cour, heart. So it's really, it's what your heart felt about. And you are really only courageous about what your heart felt about.

01:23:21 Speaker_02
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.

01:23:32 Speaker_02
I mean, often we'll 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.

01:23:46 Speaker_02
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 the heartbreak.

01:24:03 Speaker_02
in loving. And the way you won't escape, there's no escape from heartbreak.

01:24:09 Speaker_00
CB. Unless you want to be one of the walking dead with a muted experience of life. You seem to have been, for lack of a better word, a seeker from a relatively young age. I would be curious to know how or why that

01:24:27 Speaker_00
started, if you can even 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.

01:24:39 Speaker_00
How did living in a caravan on the side of Mount Snowdon, if I'm saying that correctly, help you develop as a young writer? I can't leave the living in a caravan on the side of a mountain alone. The seeking, where does that come from?

01:24:55 Speaker_02
was actually the site of the Carnada Mountains, just a range over from Snowdon, but you were very close. Central Mountain in Snowdonia, you're right.

01:25:05 Speaker_02
But having lived there and the Welsh names being so specific to place, I can't let you get away with it.

01:25:12 Speaker_00
Please don't. Slap on the wrist. Just a quick side note. I remember my one and only time in Wales, went to something called the Dew Lectures, which was great, near Cardiff, I believe it was, or outside of Cardiff, and I rented a car.

01:25:24 Speaker_00
This is before google maps and i remember the.

01:25:28 Speaker_00
Some very kind woman at the hotel give me directions to get to some farmers market or something i want to explore and i wrote down everything phonetically and as soon as i got to the first sign i know i was completely fucked.

01:25:39 Speaker_00
It's just I could not read anything.

01:25:42 Speaker_02
So that's it. Yes, it's a revelation when you find out how they're actually pronounced, Jim.

01:25:49 Speaker_02
There's a lovely sign which says Tlaborcoides, which English tourists would be following trying to get to this mythical village, but it actually just meant public footpath. It sounds very dignified. Yeah, no, it's a magnificent language.

01:26:09 Speaker_02
It goes back 2,000 years. It's the language that was spoken in the whole island, really, when the Romans arrived 2,000 years ago.

01:26:18 Speaker_02
And a modern Welsh person can, or a postmodern Welsh person, can read a manuscript or make sense of one that's 1,500 years old. That's incredible. Yeah, it's so rich, and it has a very powerful

01:26:31 Speaker_02
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.

01:26:44 Speaker_02
Although I have a great store, living on a Welsh sheep farm, I have a great store of bad words. which were hurled at the dogs or the sheep, or even at me if I wasn't cooperating. Yes.

01:26:59 Speaker_00
So what happened on this mount that was not Mount Snowdon? I can't recall the other range. I apologize.

01:27:05 Speaker_02
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.

01:27:19 Speaker_02
After I left the islands, you know, where I'd lived aboard these sailing boats for almost the whole time.

01:27:26 Speaker_02
I traveled through south america and then i came back to north wales where i studied marine zoology the subject that took me out there in the first place. And i'd lived down in the village below ten o'clock in a village called garland.

01:27:42 Speaker_02
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 little bit extra too. I lived on very little there.

01:27:52 Speaker_00
In this instance, caravan is like what we would call an RV in the US, something like that?

01:27:59 Speaker_02
It's a trailer trailer. There we go. Now 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, from the 1960s or something, but it was a retreat for me, actually.

01:28:16 Speaker_02
In those days, there was 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 veterans still living in the woods.

01:28:25 Speaker_02
They were in retreat from PTSD, from violence, from a world which didn't understand what they'd gone through.

01:28:34 Speaker_02
And in many ways i was traumatized to buy galapagos but i wasn't traumatized by violence although i witnessed a lot of it in the animal world. I'm the marine world i was traumatized by beauty actually.

01:28:48 Speaker_02
The place was so astonishingly overwhelming lay itself. And I was just a minute part of creation. When you're in Galapagos, you feel as if you're on the planet before human beings evolved, nevermind took dominion, as it says in the Bible.

01:29:09 Speaker_02
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 atom bar documentary.

01:29:28 Speaker_02
I was witness to those both i was diving to as well as leading people to shore i was a naturalist guide. Taking people to shore i was witnessing those amazing images above and below water on a daily basis and i was paying attention in silence.

01:29:45 Speaker_02
It was only years later in Zen retreats I realized I was just recapitulating the experiences I'd had in Galapagos, but with no outer guidance. What do you mean by that? Recapitulating the experience?

01:29:56 Speaker_02
Well, there was no Zen master to say, oh, yeah, what you've just experienced and the falling apart that goes with that is the necessary part of the journey. It was a kind of self-compassionate act to go on retreat afterwards.

01:30:10 Speaker_02
And that was the caravan on the side of the Carneda Mountains in North Wales. And my friendship with Michael was perfect. It was a very internal conversation between two people in a way.

01:30:28 Speaker_02
In that cottage next to the fire, often through the winters, or when we were walking out with the dogs to go and fetch the sheep in.

01:30:37 Speaker_02
It was a necessary catching up with myself as we spoke early of that necessary ability to understand what kind of threshold of maturity are you on.

01:30:50 Speaker_02
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,

01:31:07 Speaker_02
which is your new self and the way your world will be perceived and joined by that self.

01:31:15 Speaker_00
When did you start your Zen practice? And for people who have no familiarity, what does it look like? How does it differ from Vipassana meditation or other types of meditation that people may have heard of?

01:31:32 Speaker_02
Well, it started in my mid-20s after I moved to the States. Mid to late twenties and there are two main streams of zen in a one is a chicken taza sitting which is simply. Following your breath and empty mind.

01:31:49 Speaker_02
The other form is the one that includes emptying your mind but also has koan work. Will you empty your mind around a beautiful question. So what is the sound of one hand clapping? Very powerful question.

01:32:04 Speaker_02
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.

01:32:14 Speaker_00
Marco, Marco was 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?

01:32:34 Speaker_00
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?

01:32:47 Speaker_02
Well, I'll give you an example. But this koan is actually out of the Irish tradition. But once you've studied koans, you realize they're in every tradition. And you just didn't realize.

01:33:00 Speaker_02
We have the Blue Cliff record with hundreds of numbered koans, all commented on by various then masters through the centuries. But actually, they're everywhere.

01:33:10 Speaker_02
And your intimate others in your life will provide them to you too, especially your children. The irish tradition there's a story which is a very brief description of a monk.

01:33:22 Speaker_02
Standing at the edge of the monastic precinct and this will 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.

01:33:37 Speaker_02
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.

01:33:57 Speaker_02
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.

01:34:07 Speaker_02
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.

01:34:16 Speaker_02
And he says and that's also the finest sound in the world which is the world just as it is just as it comes to find you. I've known that story for decades.

01:34:31 Speaker_02
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. We're supposed to stretch our identity between both those horizons and beyond both those horizons.

01:34:47 Speaker_02
But I actually had the physical experience of revelation in the car and 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.

01:35:01 Speaker_02
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.

01:35:16 Speaker_02
And through that door behind me comes my wife and she's got two Tibetan bells in her hand and she bangs them together. And all of us have been in a shop with Tibetan bows and you hit them and you get an awful sound. You don't get it right.

01:35:30 Speaker_02
And it 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.

01:35:40 Speaker_02
And at exactly the same time, I had the red winged blackbird outside, which here in the Northwest, the Pacific Northwest is the sound of spring. And the world just both collapsed and came together at the same time.

01:35:56 Speaker_02
And I put my hand out, I said, I can't talk to you right now. And I wrote this piece all in one go, which was the expression of my, and this is it, it's called The Bell and the Blackbird.

01:36:06 Speaker_02
The sound of a bell, still reverberating, the sound of a bell, still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field.

01:36:16 Speaker_02
the sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage. Either way takes courage.

01:36:36 Speaker_02
Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all. Wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know you'll have to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself.

01:36:59 Speaker_02
without any meeting at all. That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation, crying, hallelujah.

01:37:22 Speaker_02
radiance, you have always carried with you, as you walk, both alone, and completely accompanied in friendship, by every corner of creation, crying, Hallelujah.

01:37:36 Speaker_02
So that Cohen 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 says the monk is enlightened.

01:37:57 Speaker_02
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 run a hundred thousand miles in the opposite direction. But we're also completely and utterly connected.

01:38:13 Speaker_02
And if we knew how completely and utterly 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.

01:38:30 Speaker_00
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.

01:38:45 Speaker_00
And what that allowed you as direct access when you pulled that book off the top shelf with your two fingers and caught it, to that childlike innocence, again, not as a, uninformed, adorable naivete, but as much more.

01:39:01 Speaker_00
As an adult, what does poetry do for you, and what do you hope your poetry will do for others?

01:39:11 Speaker_02
It's a consolation, and that's one of the reasons I gave that name to the essays, actually. It's consoling both in the sense of putting an arm around you,

01:39:22 Speaker_02
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.

01:39:33 Speaker_02
The consolation is also an invitation that you have inside you the ability to find your way, and also to have good company along the way, and to help and invite others as you go.

01:39:52 Speaker_02
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.

01:40:06 Speaker_02
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 because we were so close.

01:40:20 Speaker_02
But I wrote my grief into a whole collection, which was everything is waiting for you, actually. And when I finished the cycle of poems, I said, my God, poetry has been such a good friend to me.

01:40:33 Speaker_02
I've gone through seven years of grieving in seven months, because poetry has allowed me to take each step along the way in such a powerful, invitational way. So when I first started also, I was a young poet. I wanted to be a famous poet.

01:40:52 Speaker_02
So poetry is a way that I could be successful in the world. And my ideas of what it meant to be a successful poet were being recognized, being published by the mainstream publishers, being celebrated.

01:41:06 Speaker_02
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.

01:41:23 Speaker_02
I suppose, in other words, other people will be memorizing my poetry by heart. or a line of it at least, or searching for it in a drawer when they need it. It's a very instinctual thing.

01:41:36 Speaker_02
Even a person who has never looked at a poem for 20 years, when they lose someone close to them in their life and they have no articulation for it, at the memorial service, they will have pulled out a poem to be able to speak to what they cannot say themselves.

01:41:51 Speaker_02
So that's my job, is to be able to help people who cannot speak for themselves suddenly. and that right themselves by recognizing it.

01:42:03 Speaker_00
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.

01:42:16 Speaker_00
I have digital, I have certain things like time printed out, and there's just something that is, I don't want to say transmitted, but the tactile ability to sort of paw through and peruse the work is fundamentally different for me.

01:42:36 Speaker_02
That's lovely. Thank you. Yeah. And thank God purchase very hard to handle on a Kindle. So it's very hard to find the form you want. So we've also produced these pocketbooks with a semi waterproof cover. Oh, perfect. Yeah.

01:42:50 Speaker_02
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 page.

01:43:01 Speaker_00
Yeah, kind of start with lifting weights before you go win the gold at the Olympics. The piece, Time, what prompted the writing of that particular piece?

01:43:13 Speaker_02
Well, the whole writing of Constellations II following the first constellations was so intense. It was written in a delirium between January and July of this year, 24. That's really fast. Yeah.

01:43:28 Speaker_02
It was 60 essays in seven months, 52 of which appear in the book. Each one a very intense drop into the abyss in a way. 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.

01:43:47 Speaker_02
with my wife, actually, and then I had 10 days to myself before my Tuscan walking tour began, which I lead every year. And so I booked into this castle in the Perugian countryside, as you do.

01:44:03 Speaker_00
As one does prior to their Tuscan walking tour.

01:44:07 Speaker_02
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 swash, David.

01:44:20 Speaker_02
And so I booked in for three nights and the place was so stunning and so silent.

01:44:28 Speaker_02
And so wonderful and the people who ran it was so hospitable and the food was so great and the surrounding countryside and horizons that we've been speaking about was so enticing.

01:44:42 Speaker_02
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.

01:44:59 Speaker_02
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.

01:45:18 Speaker_02
I started in the morning, I took a few breaks walking and finished at 11 o'clock at night or midnight with this piano player, me and the piano player in the Humphrey Bogart bar. In the middle of that day, I felt as if time was looking me in the face.

01:45:40 Speaker_02
And i felt as if i was well i mean the classic phrases 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.

01:45:55 Speaker_02
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.

01:46:10 Speaker_02
This is the only way I can describe it. and a sudden release from all the ways I'd been holding time hostage. One of the operative lines in the essay is, time is not slipping through our fingers, it is we who are slipping through the fingers of time.

01:46:29 Speaker_02
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. barely present to ourselves or to others.

01:46:46 Speaker_02
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.

01:46:58 Speaker_00
I don't want to be a greedy little piglet and ask for time. That may be asking too much. You've already generously shared a lot of your work.

01:47:05 Speaker_02
Well, you can edit out as much as you want. I would just maybe read some excerpts from it. Oh, yeah.

01:47:10 Speaker_00
I'm not in any rush whatsoever. I'm having so much fun.

01:47:13 Speaker_02
It's appropriate for you not to be in a rush if I'm going to read.

01:47:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, rush speed reading poetry is overrated.

01:47:22 Speaker_02
Could you give me time quickly?

01:47:26 Speaker_00
You don't want to do a keg stand with 30-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.

01:47:44 Speaker_00
perhaps in some ways like the Welsh. I mean, there's a power in naming.

01:47:47 Speaker_00
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.

01:48:09 Speaker_00
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.

01:48:23 Speaker_00
So without further ado, please, we'd love to hear.

01:48:25 Speaker_02
Yeah. So here's the piece 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.

01:48:44 Speaker_02
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. And Time is on our side. Time is not our enemy.

01:49:02 Speaker_02
Time is our greatest friend.

01:49:06 Speaker_02
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 starts to grant a greater, more spacious, more elemental, and even eternal freedom to every mortal, seemingly time-bound human life.

01:49:27 Speaker_02
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.

01:49:44 Speaker_02
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.

01:50:00 Speaker_02
Time only seems to be something in which I participate involuntarily. But time needs me voluntarily to deepen my understanding of its multivalent nature and help to mediate its life fully in my world. Time needs me.

01:50:21 Speaker_02
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 determined i may constantly cry that i need more time. Actually time needs more of me.

01:50:41 Speaker_02
More of our spacious uninterrupted timeless time to live out and understand both extraordinary deaths and it's incalculable are of horizons.

01:50:53 Speaker_02
Time teaches us that nothing at the surfaces as it seems but also that all the surface seeming of the world depend upon the all embracing multi-level presence of time.

01:51:05 Speaker_02
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 multidimensional radiant nature of existence.

01:51:23 Speaker_02
Time not only invites me below all surfaces, but in all directions at once, including frighteningly when time seemingly turns back towards me and looks me in the face.

01:51:36 Speaker_02
Time may seem always to be flowing away from me, but in deeper states of attention, I and time are reciprocal partners. We create a multifaceted conversational reality together not only through memory but through direct experience.

01:51:54 Speaker_02
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.

01:52:09 Speaker_02
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, previously time-bound manacles of my routine life.

01:52:23 Speaker_02
The sudden freedom felt when time is opened by the power of love always makes me click my heels. The entrance into time is always the threshold where we are asked to loosen our grasp on our previous fearful understandings.

01:52:41 Speaker_02
Love is time unanchored and led to be fully itself where the hours are rich and spacious with anticipation and the sudden sense that there is no immediate horizon to our possibilities without love and the all round attention love pays to the world.

01:53:00 Speaker_02
Time is where I feel most powerless without love. Time is where I feel most powerless because time passes and I will die.

01:53:10 Speaker_02
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.

01:53:27 Speaker_02
And all the ways i hold on to the people i love to strictly to narrowly and to unimaginably to my particular version of time.

01:53:39 Speaker_02
Whatever the version of time we arrange for ourselves time always feels like a powerful gravity a poll to our senses always drawing us to order clock to order an appointment to order sense that something should be happening now.

01:53:53 Speaker_02
Weather it is actually possible or not. Time is intimately connected with gravity. Astonishingly physicist tell are disbelieving is that everything gravitates toward places where time moves more slowly.

01:54:09 Speaker_02
And time seems to move more slowly the greater the master which it is near. The greater the gravity, the greater the slowing down of time.

01:54:20 Speaker_02
So that to our amazement, someone living on a mountaintop ages more quickly than their neighbors down in the valley. What physicists call mass, we could call presence. And as in a human life, presence is invitational.

01:54:36 Speaker_02
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.

01:54:57 Speaker_02
Timelessness is the foundation of all real charism and charisma. By creating a centered, timeless presence,

01:55:08 Speaker_02
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.

01:55:24 Speaker_02
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.

01:55:40 Speaker_02
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 of my regret. This arrow of time exists only at the surface of things.

01:55:54 Speaker_02
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.

01:56:16 Speaker_02
The meeting of time and the timeless is the place of my inevitable 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.

01:56:36 Speaker_02
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.

01:56:53 Speaker_02
When i stopped counting time as a way of controlling it i stopped my addiction to naming the hours and what should occurring those hours. That single pathway across the field suddenly branches to a hundred more.

01:57:08 Speaker_02
No one has explored that 30 minutes with my son or daughter fully spent lives for years as a precious binding memory. When we start measuring changes, if we knew what measuring change actually meant the human ability to measure time also stops.

01:57:27 Speaker_02
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.

01:57:38 Speaker_02
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.

01:57:54 Speaker_02
As our war against time quietens, we start to take joy in the increased security of the years, the entrancing aromas of rain on fresh leaves that we previously never gave ourselves the time to breathe.

01:58:10 Speaker_02
Time is left to itself to be itself and to grow what it needs to grow in every season of a human life.

01:58:18 Speaker_02
In a deeply rested state as we loosen our grip on what we think is time a sense of bodily tension falls away along with the falling away of a falsely measured self and out of that.

01:58:32 Speaker_02
We begin to experience that joyful radiance we call timelessness growing through every cell of our previously time bound bodies.

01:58:42 Speaker_02
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.

01:59:01 Speaker_02
And then memory and moment both disappearing and reappearing in the onward music. Each note exquisitely timed, but part of an onward unstoppable flow. This moment in time inherited from all previous times, rippling into the future for all time.

01:59:20 Speaker_02
Thank you. Thank you for giving me the time to read time. It takes me right back both to the Physical experience and hotel bar I might say at the end of the night with this. Brilliant pianist actually he was marvelous what a gift of a.

01:59:38 Speaker_00
location for your writing, what a blessing of a surrounding for your writing, and what a gift of a reading. So thank you for that.

01:59:47 Speaker_02
Just so long as the listener doesn't feel they need a Perugian castle in order to write.

01:59:54 Speaker_00
So you want to write poetry, step one. You've also written poetry in the tube, so it can happen anywhere. David, this has been such a wide-ranging and fun conversation. We've covered a lot of ground.

02:00:13 Speaker_00
Is there anything else that you would like to chat about, or anything you'd like to point my listeners to, ask of them, questions you'd like to pose? Anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind to a close?

02:00:32 Speaker_02
That's quite an invitation, Tim. I think we could... Spend the next week here, actually. Well, the broadband's pretty good. Except you're in a hotel room in New York, so I'm in pleasant surroundings.

02:00:44 Speaker_02
I see the shades of night have fallen fast outside your window there.

02:00:48 Speaker_00
Time lapse of the sun going up and down.

02:00:51 Speaker_02
I think for now, we've had a marvelous conversation. But I'd say the whole limitation from poetry is that it's possible to speak what you think is impossible to say. and once you've said it, you are freed into a larger territory.

02:01:12 Speaker_02
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.

02:01:25 Speaker_02
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,

02:01:34 Speaker_02
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. CB.

02:01:46 Speaker_00
And certainly, I recommend people get their hands on anything that you've written, including your latest, Consolations 2, which further explores what you call the conversational nature of reality, which is a wording I absolutely love.

02:02:01 Speaker_00
And people can find you at DavidWhite.com, all things David White, W-H-Y-T-E.com.

02:02:09 Speaker_00
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?

02:02:26 Speaker_00
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.

02:02:37 Speaker_00
It seemed undecipherable, much like I might look at some contemporary art and there's a plaque explaining what it means, and it's an otter duct taped to a piece of Velcro, and I'm like, I don't get it. I just don't get it.

02:02:49 Speaker_00
And then I came across certain poets, Mary Oliver, certainly Hafez, and many others who made sense to me, finally. And I was like, oh, this can exist. And that opened the door for me to engage.

02:03:05 Speaker_00
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 in engaging.

02:03:17 Speaker_02
Yes. Well, I think, you know, just to find 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.

02:03:33 Speaker_02
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.

02:03:47 Speaker_02
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. You do not have to walk for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to.

02:04:02 Speaker_02
let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. That's the wild geese, right? I believe that's, yeah. That, the imitation you want, is one, the voice that speaks to you, yeah.

02:04:14 Speaker_02
Robert Bly's translations of Antonio Machado, Seamus Heaney'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.

02:04:33 Speaker_02
Only once you've got the love for poetry. But there is a lot of bad impenetrable poetry too, so your intuition may be entirely correct. Yes.

02:04:42 Speaker_00
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. I really appreciate it.

02:04:57 Speaker_02
Lovely. Absolutely. And I'd just like to say that you're a really marvelous and invitational conversationalist. And it comes from that robust vulnerability of wanting to know, really. And you really feel that as a sincere reaching out across the ethos.

02:05:15 Speaker_02
So that's much appreciated. Thank you very much.

02:05:18 Speaker_00
Well, thank you. That really means a lot. coming from you and really feeling invigorated and excited to explore in the outer realms and the inner realms.

02:05:32 Speaker_00
So I think I'm gonna get straight into a meditation session after this and then go get a bite to eat. But really appreciate the time.

02:05:40 Speaker_02
Lovely, yes. Don't neglect those fantastic bars and restaurants in Manhattan.

02:05:46 Speaker_00
To everybody listening, we will link to everything we discussed in the show notes. As per usual, a Tim Dump blog slash podcast, just search David White, he'll pop right up.

02:05:55 Speaker_00
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.

02:06:12 Speaker_00
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.

02:06:24 Speaker_00
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 kind of like my diary of cool things.

02:06:36 Speaker_00
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.

02:06:48 Speaker_00
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.

02:07:03 Speaker_00
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 8Sleep.

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02:08:51 Speaker_00
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.

02:09:09 Speaker_00
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?

02:09:17 Speaker_00
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?

02:09:25 Speaker_00
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.

02:09:38 Speaker_00
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.

02:09:49 Speaker_00
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.

02:10:04 Speaker_00
More than 100,000 donors, including me, yours truly, have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion, and that includes Tim Ferriss Show listeners who've donated close to $1 million, 960k or so now.

02:10:18 Speaker_00
To date, rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save more than 200,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more.

02:10:26 Speaker_00
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.

02:10:39 Speaker_00
To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferriss Show at checkout. Just to let you know where you heard about this.

02:10:47 Speaker_00
So to claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Tim Ferriss Show at checkout. Again, that's GiveWell.org to have your donation matched or to simply learn more. Check it out. Highly recommend it. GiveWell.org.