I have a little piece that I wrote, which I think appears in the recording, called , The Seven Streams,” , and it’s a place up in the high country in the Burin in the Country Clare in the west of Ireland. This place always had a sense of deep rest to me. And at the same time, this introduction to the way you’re this ephemeral blow of a visitor in life. Two key lines in it which speak to what I said:
Come down drenched at the end of May.
With the cold rain so far into your bones that nothing will warm you except your own walking.
And let the sun come out at day’s end, near Slievenaglasha.
With the rainbows doubling over Moloch Moor and see your clothes steaming in the bright air.
Be a provenance of something gathered; a summation of previous intuitions.
Let your vulnerability walking on the cracked, slimy limestone, be this time, not a weakness but a faculty for understanding what’s about to happen.
Stand above the seven streams, letting the deep-down current surface around you and then branch and branch as they do, back into the mountain.
And as if you’re able for that flow, say the few necessary words and walk on broadened and cleansed for having imagined.
It’s quite interesting. I work with this dynamic actually with hard-bidden executives in the center of international financial companies, this idea that you need to redefine vulnerability as a quality and not something that you’re meant to push out of your life. It’s exactly the opposite.
Hopefully in the recording, when I learned that myself through speaking it out loud, myself, around vulnerability, it really helped me in my life, so I hope it helps others in the same way.
TS: Can you be more specific? What in your own life? How did you become more vulnerable and how did it express itself?
DW: Well, I would say that just in close relationships with a wife, daughter, or son. There are dynamics in life that are constantly erroneously reinforcing the necessity to be the center of all knowledge in life. And this of course comes in spades when you are a father or a mother. But it can also come when you’re with a friend and you’re doing well in your life and they are not and you find that you have all the answers in life and, of course, things turn around the next year and it’s quite the opposite. I found, for instance, with my daughter that I started actually looking for the edges of vulnerability in my discourse with her and actually trying to magnify them.
For instance, there was one day when we got into a little spat with one--another as you do as a father and daughter, and the conversation ended with me just telling her that she had to do something. She charged upstairs, of course, and there’s the wonderful and eternal sound of the door slamming upstairs. There was the possibility that I could have just left it there, and said, well she can just do it because in the long run, I know better. But I realized that it was connected to something else and that this is that dynamic of one of the difficulties of parenting, in that you’re constantly attempting to relate to someone who is not there anymore. They are growing so quickly and you also have this internal heartbreak that they are growing away from you and they are no longer the person who needed you in every facet of their life. So there are tremendous dynamics that are attempting to stop the child from growing.
After I collected myself, I went up and we sat down and I said, “Charlotte, tell me one thing that you want me to stop doing now as your father. And tell me another thing that you would like me to do more of.” And that was a beautiful moment and it really opened up the sense that I was trying to actually speak to her from where she was in her life now and not someone that I needed her to be. It was a lovely healing moment and it came just out of catching myself and instead of trying to reinforce the image of the parent who knows and protects the child from everything and protect yourself from it, to a beautiful proactive not-knowing. That would be an example of moving toward that edge of vulnerability.
In the workplace, that vulnerability might look very different. It’s not the same kind of vulnerability you would have with an intimate partner at home. Unusually vulnerability in the workplace has to do with simply admitting that you don’t have all the answers and therefore don’t need everyone’s help around the table in order to ascertain what the real pattern is and the best way of going out to meet that pattern. That is really necessary in today’s organizations where the technical world (and also the way people are making their identities through that technology) is changing so quickly.
Every area of your life—all three marriages in your life: marriage with another person, the marriage with your work, and the marriage with yourself—all call for a different form of vulnerability and it’s our job as individuals to find out what that vulnerability looks like.
TS: I’m curious to know a little bit more about the vulnerability with oneself. Pointers in that direction?
DW: Yeah. I’d say that one of the vulnerabilities is the extreme disappointment we have around the version of our life that we’ve established against what we’ve set ourselves to create when we were much younger. One of the vulnerabilities is putting an arm around yourself and saying that “It doesn’t look very good, does it?” compared to what your best hopes were. And finding the way through, in the midst of it all, to start to craft something that is closer to what you want. As soon as you do that and you start to get into the center, a lot of the peripheral stuff that you’re stuck to starts to naturally fall way so as soon as you start to move your focus away from all the ways that you’re trying to hold the world together, you start to find more, I find, a leverage point at the center. I think a lot of what What to Remember When Waking is about is about remembering this core conversation. If you take care of that, a lot of what takes enormous will and energy and rushing about on the edge starts to either disappear or take care of it self. Of course there is a part of us that is afraid that if we stop taking care of everything that it will fall apart. And luckily, the intuition is entirely correct and it will beautifully fall apart. Or it will come back to you at the center in a different way and you reengage it.
My feeling is, as I move along through the old great pilgrimage of life, that there is actually just a small contact point for every human being and that we’re mostly diluting our powers in trying to work with life in a way that’s too abstracted. For instance, you only need a certain amount of money to live out your dream in the future and you may have millions in the bank, but actually, if you took all those millions and focused it on what you wanted to do, it would actually distort and destroy the spirit of what you’re about. As an example, if you have millions, there may be only fifty thousand that you could take of that and take the initial step with. For most of us (this is not true if you’re starving or thirsty without food or running water and growing up in a shack at the edge of La Paz in Bolivia) in the developed world or the newly rich developing world, we have much more than we actually need in order to take the next step. It’s finding this contact point, this crucible, or the leverage point where things really happen. You can take a small step at the center of that pattern, and it has enormous consequences. Whereas, you could rush around killing yourself in a stressful way on the edge, and hardly move anything at all.
The central conversation, what to remember, is that it’s close in, it’s both right at the center of your physical body but it’s also in the way that physical body, once it’s got a sense of really powerful focus presence, has an effect on other people and is induced to things by other people that all the energy starts to come. If you take conversation, for instance, as a basis of understanding of reality, then what you’re trying to do is create a conversation that will float you along so you’re not having to do all the work. You’re just making sure that the conversation stays alive.
And I’d say that that’s one of the defining aspects of a good leader in an organization, especially if you’re at the top of an organization or near the top. You are chief conversationalist, actually. Your job is to make sure that the conversation stays alive. And where you have difficulty with that conversation, you bring in the other people to help you. Of course, everyone is a leader in one corner of the organization even if it’s just their own desk. And then you’ve also got leadership in your own life. You have to gather all the different parts of your self, in your personal life, around the table metaphorically (you can do this just sitting in your chair) and you have all these clamoring voices, but your job is to ask, “What is the central conversation?” and invite those parts of yourself to either come in closer and help you out or to go elsewhere and find a different place to dwell. I think I’ve spoken enough on that topic.
TS: As you’re talking, I’m inquiring about what the central conversation is in my life now or at other times. And what I’m reflecting on is that I’m only able to identify that by really spending some time with myself. It’s not like just in the midst of busy, busy, busy that that central conversation becomes apparent.
DW: Yes, so one of the disciplines I call for is the necessity to hiving off and eventually learning how to bring it back into the workplace and create an internal silence, even as you’re speaking with others. But I do think that it’s really necessary to have a contemplative discipline and that can be just going for a long walk every day, where you’re not simply going over your to-do list and all the things that are preying upon your mind and worrying you to death.
TS: Wonderful. I am talking with David Whyte, the author of the new Sounds True six-part series entitled What to Remember When Waking: Disciplines That Transform Every Day Life. David, I’m wondering, as we conclude here, it’s kind of like asking a storyteller to tell a story or a magician to do a final trick, it’s just so enjoyable to hear you recite a poem. So I’m wondering, David, if there’s a poem or two that you think might illuminate or point to some o f the discoveries that we’ve touched on here in our conversation together?
DW: Yes. One thing that we haven’t talked about much is the theme of invisible help that one of the things that we have to do out of that vulnerability is to ask for help. The help doesn’t just come in a human, social dimension, although there is plenty of that. But it also comes from the world itself and from the beauty of the world, whether it’s another person’s face or the face of a landscape or even the memories that we have of people who are no longer with us. As the Irish say, “The thing about the past is that it isn’t the past.” All kinds of elements are present to us, which are offering their perspective and understanding and I’d say, in many ways, comfort.
This poem is about getting yourself out of yourself. So you start paying attention to something other than your own worries or your own necessity to stay alive at all costs. It’s called Everything Is Waiting for You. It’s written in the style of an Irish poet, Derik Madden, who is one of my favorites.
Your great mistake 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 be abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. ,
Surely even you at times have felt the grand array and the surrounding presence and the chorus crowding out your solo voice. ,
You must note the way the soap dish enables you or the window latch grants you courage. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. ,
The stairs are the mentors of the things to come. The doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you. And the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream ladder to divinity. ,
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing, even as it pours you a drink. The cooking parts have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and the creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. ,
Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you. ,
That would be written in the form of my self giving myself a good telling off and reminding myself what is first order. It is a reminding to your self how much time you waste at the periphery, which disappears into nothingness and how much energy, which is given at the center, turns into this beautiful, surprising, something-ness, which is inviting you on and bringing all kinds of people into your life to share the adventure at the same time.
I’ll finish with this piece, which is called No Path. It’s a fierce little poem because it’s about our own ultimate disappearance. But there’s, I found, a marvelous kind of generosity at the end from the revelation, you could say. One of the great dynamics at the center of the revelation about the evanescence of life, about the way that everything passes away so quickly is that you must therefore be present to it. You must appreciate it. I lost a good friend of mine a couple of years ago. He was a big fellow and he loved everything. He loved food, drink, and good company. I said to myself, after he’d gone, “You know, heaven had better be a good place, “ because he was a Catholic theologian, too, “because it couldn’t actually be better than he appreciated this place here and the way he was so alive to everything he had been given here.”
This is a poem that takes a line from a famous piece of Chinese poetry called the Han Shin Poems or Cold Mountain Poems, written by a hermit who takes his name from Cold Mountain, so this is a famous line, which has become one of those koans, which is supposed to take you all the way to enlightenment, and that line was, “There is no path that takes you all the way.” I felt this question very intimately because whenever I walk in the mountains (I spend as much time in the mountains as I can), I always fall in love with the path itself. I remember traveling in the Himalayas and coming back with photos in the times when you actually developed them, and I found that every photograph I had taken was of the path itself and the way it winded it’s way through villages or over a path or through the snow.
Han Shin says, “There’s no path that goes all the way.”
Here is the poem entitled No Path.
There is no path that goes all the way. Not that it stops as looking for the full continuation. The fixed belief we can hold, facing a stranger that faces the trouble of a real conversation.
But one day, you’re not imagining an empty chair where your loved one sat. You’re not just telling a story where the bridge is down and there’s no where to cross. You’re not just trying to pray to a God you imagined would always keep you safe.
No. you’ve come to the place where nothing you’ve done will impress and nothing you can promise will avert the silent confrontation; the place where your body already seems to know the way, having kept to the last its own secret reconnaissance.
But still, there’s no path that goes all the way. One conversation leads to another. One breath to the next until there’s no breath at all, just the inevitable final release of the burden. And then, wouldn’t your life have to start all over again for you to know even a little of who you had been?
TS: David, thank you so much.
DW: Lovely.
TS: David Whyte, the author of a new Sounds True series What to Remember When Waking: Disciplines That Transform an Everyday Life
For SoundsTrue.com, I’m Tami Simon.
Many Voices. One Journey.
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