Krista Tippett, host:It Has Ever and Always Been true, as David Whyte Reminds us, That So Much of Human Experience Is a Conversation Between Loss and celebration. This “conversational Nature of reality” — indeed, This Drama of

So one of the dynamics you have to get over with is this idea that you can occupy a position of responsibility — that you can have a courageous conversation without being vulnerable. So I wrote this little piece in my Consolations book, on vulnerability, because it’s one of the great primary delusions we have. So shall I read a little piece of it?

Tippett:Yes, please.

Whyte:These are supposed to be consolations, but sometimes they’re like blows to the soul. [laughs]

Tippett:[laughs] I noticed that.

Whyte:“Vulnerability”: “Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

“To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances is a lovely, illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.

“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability” — how we inhabit our vulnerability — “how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.”

Vulnerability.

Tippett:A couple of other words in the Consolations book that I loved: “Rest” — I loved this — “is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.”

Whyte:Yes. Sounds like the definition of the perfect Sunday morning.

Tippett:I’m also intrigued by aloneness. We talked about how “alone” is the first word in that book, and there’s a dance that you name and tease out, between aloneness and belonging.

Whyte:Yes, well, there are two different forms of belonging, I suppose. And to have a sense of belonging in the outer world, where you feel a sense of freedom, comes from this ability to touch this deep foundation of aloneness. And I do feel if you can touch that sense of aloneness, you can live with anyone.

Tippett:There’s a lovely poem — it’s rather long — “The House of Belonging.” But these last lines, I wrote down: “This is the bright home / in which I live, / this is where / I ask / my friends / to come, / this is where I want / to love all the things / it has taken me so long / to learn to love. // This is the temple / of my adult aloneness / and I belong / to that aloneness / as I belong to my life. // There is no house / like the house of belonging.”

Whyte:Lovely. It’s nice to hear it read back.

Tippett:It’s really wonderful, again, that juxtaposition of aloneness and belonging, that inextricability.

Whyte:Yes. And I have this poem, actually, which I wrote out of when I was in the very intense period out of which that poem, “The House of Belonging,” came, when I wrote the book called The House of Belonging, and I was writing night and day. But I noticed, when I sat at this lovely little desk, which I still have on a landing at the top of the stairs, I noticed that I had this very different relationship to the world when I wrote at night. There was this other horizon outside the window that was drawing me and that was contextualizing what I was writing. So I wrote this piece. It’s called “Sweet Darkness,” and it’s about that same place.

Tippett:Great. Where were you? Where did you write this? On the West Coast?

Whyte:I did. I wrote it on Whidbey Island, in Langley, in the Puget Sound, north of Seattle.

“When your eyes are tired / the world is tired also. // When your vision has gone / no part of the world can find you. // It’s time to go into the night / where the dark has eyes / to recognize its own.” It’s time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. “There you can be sure / you are not beyond love. // The dark will make a home for you / tonight. / The night will give you a horizon / further than you can see. // You must learn one thing.” You must learn one thing. “The world was made to be free in.” You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. “Give up all the other worlds / except the one to which you belong. // Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn // anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.”

[music: “Púsi” by Amiina]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today with the poet-philosopher David Whyte. 

[music: “Púsi” by Amiina]

There’re some lines from this poem, “What to Remember When Waking.” “To be human is to become visible / while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.” What does that mean?

Whyte:Well, it’s really working with that earlier dynamic we worked on, of incarnation, of becoming visible in the world. And yet the gift that you’re going to give and keep on giving is an invisible gift that will take many different forms and that you learn more of each time you allow it to take a different form. And you move from your 20s into your 30s, and you suddenly find another, larger form for it, or a different shape that makes a different connection.

And then you deepen it in your 40s, and you get overwhelmed by it in your 50s, and then it returns to you again in more mature forms, settled forms, in your 60s. So this is the gift that keeps giving. And it’s that internal, deeper source. It’s you becoming more and more real and more and more visible in the world.

Tippett:One other word from Consolations, the book, is “genius,” which you describe as something which we already possess. So you’re proposing it as something that’s not just for Albert Einstein, but that is accessible to the rest of us. And you say, “Human genius lies in the geography of the body and its conversation with the world.” There’s your “conversation” again, “[t]he meeting between inheritance and horizon.” So help me understand that.

Whyte:Well, in the ancient world, the word “genius” was not so much used about individual people, it was used about places, and almost always with the world “loci.” So “genius loci” meant the spirit of a place.

And we all know what that intuitively means; we all have favorite places in the world, and it may be a seashore where you’ve got this ancient conversation between the ocean and the land and a particular geography of the way the cliffs or the beaches form. But it could’ve been the same in the ancient world, near a little bridge crossing a stream with a pool at the back of it, and a willow hanging over the pool. That place would be said to have a genius loci.

But a more sophisticated understanding would understand, it’s like this weather front of all of these qualities that meet in that place. So I think it’s a very merciful thing to think of human beings in the same way; that is, your genius is just the way everything is met in you. And it’s your job just —

Tippett:Physically — physically, as well as —

Whyte:Exactly, literally: all the struggles of your grandparents and your parents in arriving together and giving birth to your parents and giving birth to you, the landscape in which you were nurtured, the dialect or language in which you were educated into the world, the smells of the local environment. I mean, when I go back to Yorkshire, just the taste of the water off the moors is completely different. When I go to County Clare, the water there, again, has a spirit, because it comes off limestone there.

And so it’s really merciful, actually, not to think of genius as something that I’m going to get to by hard work, if I practice the violin 15 hours a day. It’s the innate gift that makes me want to practice the violin, actually. It’s the way everything meets inside me.

Will I have that conversation? And this is the experience of consummation, of a full incarnation in the world.

Tippett:I had this same conversation with John O’Donohue that I’m going to have with you now, which is the beauty of that thought, but the reality that that geography, for many people at any given time, is so harsh, and living with that reality of our global body, as well — the puzzle of that.

Whyte:Yes, that’s right. And this has always been there and always been true. And who knows? Any of us could be precipitated into awful circumstances at any time, and many of us go through those dark years where you just feel as if it’s just the movement of your own — your own movement that’s just creating body heat to actually keep you alive. We go through those very, very narrow places.

And John used to talk about how you shaped a more beautiful mind; that it’s an actual discipline, no matter what circumstances you’re in. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. And so the ability to ask beautiful questions — often in very un-beautiful moments — is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. And you don’t have to do anything about it, you just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.

Tippett:That’s what Rilke called “living the question.”

Whyte:Exactly. He’s always there before you. [laughs]

Tippett:Yes, he is.

Also, one way I’ve come to think about questions — the power of questions, is that questions elicit answers in their likeness. So you call forth something beautiful by asking a beautiful question.

Whyte:Yes, you do. You do. And then the other part of it, too, is that there’s this kind of weighted silence behind each question. And to live with that sense of trepidation, what I call beautiful trepidation, the sense of something about to happen that you’ve wanted, but that you’re scared to death of actually happening — [laughs] that’s — yes; none of us really feel we deserve our happiness.

Tippett:I want to ask you, before we hear some more poetry, this ancient, animating question, what does it mean to be human? I mean, that’s something you have reflected on with language and in thought all across your life, but how you would begin to answer that question now. And what do you keep on learning? What are you learning anew at this moment in your life, about what it means to be human?

Whyte:Well, one of the interesting qualities of being human is, by the look of it, we’re the only part of creation that can actually refuse to be ourselves. And as far as I can see, there’s no other part of the world that can do that. The cloud is the cloud. The mountain is the mountain. The tree is the tree. The hawk is the hawk. And the kingfisher doesn’t wake up one day and say, You know, God, I’m absolutely fed up to the back teeth of this whole kingfisher trip. Can I have a day as a crow? You know, hang out with my mates, glide down for a bit of carrion now and again? That’s the life for me. No. The kingfisher is just the kingfisher. And one of the healing things about the natural world, to human beings, is that it’s just itself.

But we as human beings are really quite extraordinary, in that we can actually refuse to be ourselves. We can get afraid of the way we are, and we can temporarily put a mask over our face and pretend to be somebody else or something else. And the interesting thing is, then we can take it another step of virtuosity and forget that we were pretending to be someone else and become the person we were, on the surface at least, who we were just pretending to be in the first place.

So one of the astonishing qualities of being human is the measure of our reluctance to be here, actually. And I think one of the great necessities of self-knowledge is understanding and even tasting the single malt essence of your own reluctance to be here: all the ways you don’t want to have the conversation, all the ways you don’t want to be in the marriage, you don’t want to be a parent, you don’t want to be visible in a leadership position, you don’t want to be doing this work.

And this is not to give it away. This is just to understand what lies between you and a sense of freedom in it.

And I think self-compassion has to do with this ability to understand and even to cultivate a sense of humor about all the ways you just don’t want to be here — so to embody your reluctance and, therefore, once it’s embodied, to allow it to actually start to change into something else. Things only solidify when they’re kept at a distance. As soon as they’re embodied, they actually start to take on a kind of seasonality. And you’re actually, by embodying it, by feeling it fully, allowing it to start to change into something else.

Tippett:Would you maybe also just read one more? Read “Working Together”?

Whyte:“Working Together.”

Tippett:Do you have that there?

Whyte:I have that in my memory, actually. “We shape ourselves / to fit this world” — “Working Together.” “We shape ourselves / to fit this world // and by the world / are shaped again. // The visible / and the invisible // working together / in common cause, // to produce / the miraculous. / I am thinking of the way / the invisible air // traveled at speed / round a shaped wing // easily / holds our weight.” I am thinking of the way the invisible air traveled at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. “So may we, in this life / trust // to those elements / we have yet to see // or imagine, / and find the true // shape of our own self, / by forming it well // to the great / intangibles about us.” And find the true shape, the true shape of our own self, by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.

[music: “Summer Colour” by I Am Robot And Proud]

Tippett:David Whyte’s books include The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, and The Bell and The Blackbird. His new, 2022 collection is Still Possible.

Special thanks this week to Thomas Crocker and all the good people at Many Rivers Press, for giving us permission to use David’s poetry.