Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with David Whyte (davidwhyte.com), 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.”
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. He is the recipient of two honorary degrees: from Neumann University in Pennsylvania and Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. He has also hosted a live online series, Three Sundays, every other month since 2020.
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.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: David, such a pleasure to finally meet, and I wanted to give a deep bow to the person who made the introduction, this is Henry Shukman, and I wanted to perhaps start with how you first met Henry. How did you guys connect?
David Whyte: Well, that’s an interesting foundation from which to step up into our adventure together here, our conversation adventure. Henry Shukman, of course, is a fully fledged Zen master. He’s had inka, he’s in the Koun Yamada Roshi tradition, which is the same tradition I sat in, although I sat with a lot of masters, different masters. Henry and I met at the William Wordsworth Foundation in the English Lake District. He was poet in residence, and I came to give a reading, and we were in many ways two young poetic blades and we got on like a house on fire together. I remember driving all over the place and taking walks with him.
And then by sheer happenstance, we found that Oxford was a second home to us. Well, he’d actually grown up in Oxford and Oxfordshire. And so from then on we would meet every Thursday night in the Bookbinders Arms Pub, and we would talk literature and Zen, actually, because strangely enough, Henry was just getting into Zen in a really fierce way. And I, at that time, was the old hand in Zen, so I suppose I was giving pointers or talking about koans. But unbeknownst to me, Henry would soon be driving a Lamborghini, a Zen Lamborghini, passing me at great speed in the future.
But the great thing about Henry was he was the toast of the literary world in London. He was being published in the TLS, Times Literary Supplement, he was in demand as one of the up and coming poets, and he also had a pipeline of novels. And so when fate took us apart, and I came back to live in the States full time, and he seemed to disappear. And I tried to find out a number of times where he was, and because I couldn’t find anything on him on the internet, obviously I didn’t look hard enough, but I couldn’t find anything so I thought he must have passed away, he must have died. Because he was so good at what he did, he was so famous as a young poet, it could be the only explanation.
And in many ways, he had died metaphorically. He’d gone so fully into Zen, which is a form, a deep path of heartbreak, as my latest essay on Zen says. And he emerged 20 years later, as I say, as a fully fledged Zen master, and he appeared on the Sam Harris app, he appeared on the Sam Harris app, and we were both on it together. And so I asked Sam to make the introduction so we could contact, and we were so happy to find each other again.
So it’s really interesting at this new juncture, having spent so long apart, he’s now coming full bore back into poetry, and I’m having another round of dedication in my Zen sitting. So the world turns, so we’re Zen and poetic bros, you could say. 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 Zen is always talking about ordinary mind, which is actually extraordinary mind. And so it’s lovely to have him back in my life and to work together, and just to have the friendship actually is really marvelous.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to come back and touch on a bunch of things that you mentioned. And part of the reason I wanted to invoke the great name of Henry is because he offered some suggestions. Well, I asked him if he could offer some fun avenues for exploration, and he said, “Totally fine to blame them on me,” so I wanted to at least let the audience know who Henry was before I started blaming someone.
David Whyte: Lovely.
Tim Ferriss: And 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?
David Whyte: Well, I was in the yak manger because that’s the only place the Tibetan family could find for me, actually. It was more or less a one room hut that they were in with five children, and I staggered in there at death’s door, really.
Tim Ferriss: And how old were you at the time? If you just place us in your life.
David Whyte: I was in my mid-20s, or late, mid-20s, yes. So that was the only place they could put me, and I was in a delirium in the yak manger for three days and three nights, which was a mythic period.
Tim Ferriss: How did you end up there in the first place?
David Whyte: Well, I was trekking. I was on the Annapurna Trail when it first opened up in the mid-’70s, so we were one of the first people along it. And very different experience than if you walked it today, we had experiences that Marco Polo would’ve had going in through Asia in the centuries — we were often the first Westerners certain people had seen, certainly when we went off the main trail and up the side branches and found villages up above in the mountains. And it was in one of those tiny villages that I collapsed, actually, a mile or so before I got there, and literally crawled on my hands and knees into the hamlet, and this family took me in.
I have a piece in my cycle of poems about pilgrimage, about the love of the stranger and how powerful it is. And I’ve had my life saved by strangers, not only in the Himalayas, but in South America and other places. There’s something very powerful about the stranger’s love. And so I was very appreciative of the hospitality this family gave me, even though all they had for me was this. Luckily it was quite a deep capacious manger and full of straw and dried yak dung, which is actually quite comfortable in its 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. And all families in those mountains brew their own rice beer. But some of the rice beer a family will make is terrible and they get a bad reputation for their rice beer. But this family’s rice beer was like strawberries and cream, and it was the only thing I could sip 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. 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 gompas and temples, and I was sitting in them too in meditation, and so I think I’d taken them in in a dreamlike form. And then I had this three-day experience of going through many of the experiences that a lot of this very powerful, fierce iconography represented.
And then it all blew open on the third day and I sat up laughing uproariously and swaying from side to side with my hands out, and the whole family ran out and they all looked at me with their mouths open, and then they all stood in a row and it was like the scene from the Sound of Music where all the children are in a row with the smallest and the tallest, and they all bowed at the same time towards me. It was just as if they just recognized something, because it’s in the air up there, the lamas they would meet, and the spirituality you could cut with a knife in those mountains. And so it was just as if, oh, we recognized this, yeah. They all bowed and they just left me alone, no fuss. And that moment of breakthrough was realizing that the whole David Whyte project was completely absurd.
Tim Ferriss: The project of David Whyte as Self, do you mean?
David Whyte: Yes, and the name that I’d given myself and that was given to me was just like the name of the river in the valley below, the Marsyangdi River. You were looking at something that had actually already passed. That what was real about your identity is actually what’s just about to precipitate out of the seasonal edge of your existence, and that as yet does not have a name, 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
David Whyte: Oh, yes, yeah, it’s a very physical experience. And to begin with when you’re first walking into it, when you’re either a young poet or a young adherent of some kind of contemplative tradition, it’s quite inchoate, it’s quite vague. But eventually you get this almost pinpoint sense in your, it’s there in the classical place, in the horror, down in the right below —
Tim Ferriss: In the belly.
David Whyte: Yes, yeah, and also in the heart, and it’s the place that’s willing to engage with the fiercest conversations of existence in a way. It’s the part of you that already knows it’s going to have to give every last thing away. It’s the part of you that lives at the center of the pattern. And this is what Coleridge and Keats called the primary imagination, and the ability to think up new things was only the fancy, or the secondary imagination. But the central physical tonality from which you’re able to meet the fierce conversations of existence, that to Coleridge and Keats was the primary imagination.
But it’s also Buddha nature, it takes on different names in different experiences. It’s a place from which you’re useful to other people, either in articulation. And strangely enough, you’re useful because your articulation is beginning from a place below the horizon, whereby meaning is mediated by language. It’s below language, but it takes a linguistic form. And that’s why if it’s good poetry, it’s fresh. If it’s good literature, if it’s good speech, if it’s invitational speech, if it’s surprising speech, if it’s loving speech, if it’s affectionate, invitational speech, it almost always comes from that place.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
David Whyte: Well, I often say that all my work is based on the conversational nature of reality, but you could also call it the invitational nature of reality. It’s a mutual invitation, the fact that we’re constantly being invited out of ourselves into larger and larger territories of self-understanding and understanding about the world, larger and larger territories of generosity, and the ultimate generosity of giving ourselves completely away at the end of our lives, of getting out of the way. I often think that one of the great frontiers of human maturation is where you realize that actually it might not be a tragedy that you’re going to die, the rest of creation could actually be quite relieved to see you go.
Tim Ferriss: Your final gift to the world.
David Whyte: Exactly. So when you realize that, you start getting out of the way sooner. You might as well, you’re going to have to anyway.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, might as well start practicing.
David Whyte: Yeah, and when you think about it, every conversation, as its foundation, has an invitation in it. When the invitation stops, the conversation really stops. You may still be exchanging blather, but actually the conversation stopped. And the other thing is invitation is based on vulnerability. You only invite someone in when you feel you really need help understanding something, or actual physical help or loving help, all the different forms of help. So you’ve got this trajectory, this spectrum of qualities which all make up the phenomenology of conversation itself, which is this beautiful Latin word which means inside out, converse.
And so to go back to your original question, I work a lot with inner and outer horizons. And we all know the way out to horizons are so nourishing for us, there’s a lot of medical research now showing that you’re much happier when you’re looking at a far horizon. You’re in New York City now, if you look out to all the buildings, it’s quite nourishing to see that extraordinary landscape, that profile against the sky. And the same with mountains, the same with the city.
If you grow up in the Midwest, you grow to love the horizon of the plains. And we all know how wonderful it is to walk through a landscape and watch the horizon come towards us. And the beautiful thing about a horizon is that it’s got something over it, that’s the definition, and that what’s over it is the unknown that’s inviting you.
When I was a child, I grew up in a very hilly part of Yorkshire of an Irish mother and a Yorkshire father, and when I got to about seven years old I would set myself a new horizon every year that I would try to reach. And I had a constant relationship with horizons that I loved.
Tim Ferriss: This is a physical horizon?
David Whyte: Physical horizons, yeah. But we also have a very physical horizon that’s also a non-physical horizon at the same time inside us, and that horizon is often not perceived in quite as nourishing a way. We often see that in a horizon as a line of resistance actually, and difficulty. And it’s the horizon between what you know about yourself, and as I said earlier, what’s just about to precipitate out of the seasonality of your being, what’s just about to emerge from the leading edge of your maturation that’s coming from some unknown place inside you.
And all of us have had the experience of suddenly realizing, oh, my God, I’m a different person. I don’t have those desires anymore, I don’t want those things that steered my life and motivated me for so long. And it can be quite a shock to a person, and the invitation to go below the horizon from which that revelation has come is often refused. We will stay in the old ambitions because we don’t know who we are without those aims and those goals, and we feel as if our life is falling apart. And the intuition is correct, actually.
Tim Ferriss: If I could interject for one second, just for framing this, I’m curious if this is effectively overlapping with what you’re saying, and it might be helpful for people to hear in these words. So I read in an interview that you’ve done, and please feel free to fact check this of course, but I’ll quote here, “Most people I believe are living four or five years behind the curve of their own transformation.” Is that effectively a different facet or —
David Whyte: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Is it a compatible facet of what you’re describing? Would you mind expanding on that?
David Whyte: Yes, I think one of the great disciplines of a human life is to catch up with yourself. This part of you that lies below the horizon of your understanding is the part of you that’s already matured into the next dispensation of your existence. It doesn’t need the same things that you think you need at the surface of your life now. And so you know intuitively that if you drop below that horizon, your surface life will fall apart, and so might many of your friendships or relationships, you don’t know, they may or they may not, but you’re afraid. You’re afraid that you’re putting things in jeopardy, and this is why we turn our face away from that edge of maturation.
And quite often we’ve also had the experience of outer circumstances suddenly pulling the rug out from under us. All the things you’ve been investing in suddenly fall apart. And sometimes you realize, oh, my God, I couldn’t have done a better job of self-sabotage than I did over the last years. And sometimes it’s what you might call the soul’s attempt to break things apart unconsciously on the surface that you refuse to do from your own willpower. And so sometimes your life breaks down and you hit present reality with such velocity that you break apart on impact. And this is a time honored way of transformation, but it’s very hard on us to go through it that way. There’s another way of doing it, which is to stay up with the edge of your own seasonal maturation, and that occurs below this invisible line inside you.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
David Whyte: It’s dwelling fully in the body, physical body, and so there are lots of different disciplines around that. We sometimes get forced into it through terrible illness, as I did in the yak manger in the Himalayas, where your outer life falls apart along with your physical body. And when my children were growing up I used to notice that every time they had a real illness, whenever they emerged from the illness, they’d matured in some way. It was almost as if it marked boundaries and frontiers of maturation.
Or you can do it with this physical dwelling that’s in all of our great contemplative traditions, where you stop putting your identity in your thoughts, you go to this deeper autonomic body that’s able to breathe by itself without any will, and from that place you then inhabit the mind, you then inhabit thought. And you don’t give up your intellect, your intellect just becomes a good servant to what we might call the soul’s desires, the faculty of belonging inside you.
So to go back to the image of 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. But the really fierce conversation is when you put what’s below that horizon inside you, which is the unknown just about to be known in your life, about who you are and what you want, in conversation with what lies over the horizon of what you’re seeing, your ambitions or your desires in the outer world, or the actual physical line to which you’re going.
And when you put those two unknowns together, that’s I think what we’ve called mystical experience 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. And in Dharma combat in Zen, that’s often what’s being, the Zen master is throwing out something from the unknown and the student is supposed to actually access the unknown to meet it. And almost always they fail, they choose something from their thinking mind. 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.
Tim Ferriss: And if we don’t come back to it, I will refer people to my first, maybe even my second conversation with Henry Shukman on this podcast, where we spend probably an hour on koans.
David Whyte: Oh, right, yes.
Tim Ferriss: If people want to dive into that. Also, 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.
David Whyte: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: It’s very much a skill development program with a logical progression, so I’d encourage people to check that out.
I would like to come back to conversations and invitational questions, and if you have a better example that comes to mind, feel free to run with it, but I wanted to give people a real-world example of what this looks like in practice, and the particular story that I’m looking at in front of me, it relates to you having a good old conversation with yourself at a restaurant when you did not have time to go and grab a book from your hotel. I don’t know if that is enough of a prompt, I can certainly —
David Whyte: It was a revolutionary moment in my life, actually, and led to the Consolations essays, and led to the writing of the first one, with the title “Regret.” And I was in Paris, I’d done a lot of work with a company in Paris, and on my days off, I would do this circuit through Paris that I called my sunward walk, where I just started off in the morning towards the east with the sun coming up. And I would follow the sun down whatever street it was shining down, 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, and then you came out 20 minutes or an hour later, and the sun had moved. So then you follow the sun down that street, even if it’s just a one shining behind the clouds.
And you go the whole day that way, and it takes you in a clockwise direction through, across the river and through the suburbs of Paris. And I’ve done this sunward walk, probably half a dozen times, and never repeated the same journey. But I was halfway through this walk, when my phone rang, and it was The Observer magazine in Britain, The Sunday Observer, which has millions of readers, or had, and they wanted me to write something for their philosophical column. And I got quite excited with such a large readership, but then I got the parameters for it, it had to be a single word title, and it could only be 300 words. And I was so disgusted with the parameter. So I said, “Okay, 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? There’s many a moment in a human life where someone has actually changed other people’s lives in less than 300 words.
So I said, “Right.” And then I started thinking, as I was on my walk, of all the other parameters that I’d placed upon myself, that I needed to be in my study in order to write, that I needed two weeks in my study in order to write, that I needed another two weeks, one at each end, to decompress from my traveling and speaking and recompress to go out. And I realized, my God, the number of strictures I put around what I need, in order to write, I need silence, need quiet. And I said to — “David, what if you could write everywhere, anywhere?” So I got to the end of the walk, and I’d booked into this restaurant and I didn’t have time to go back to my hotel. I didn’t have a book, and I had no scintillating company. So I said, “What if you had an entertaining conversation with yourself, David?” And I asked the waiter, “Do you have a piece of paper?” And he did. And it was a beautiful piece of watermarked paper, with gold leaf at the edges actually. As only the French would pull out.
Tim Ferriss: Not the back of a receipt like you get in New York.
David Whyte: Yeah, exactly. And I wrote “Regret” at the top of the page and I said, “That’s interesting. And why regret?” And this was the title for the philosophical piece I was going to write. And so I wrote it. And this is the piece, actually, it was the first essay I wrote. It’s just very short. The piece that appeared in Consolations is just a little longer than 300 words, but not much longer.
Regret is a short, evocative, and achingly beautiful word, an elegy to lost possibilities. Even in its brief enunciation, it is also a rarity, and almost never heard, except where the speaker insists that they have none, that they’re brave, and forward looking, and could not possibly imagine their life in any other way, than the way it is. To admit regret, is to understand we are fallible, that there are powers in the world beyond us. To admit regret, is to lose control, not only of a difficult past, but of the very story that we tell about our present. And yet, strangely, to admit sincere, and abiding regret, is one of our greatest, but unspoken contemporary sins. The rarity of honest regret may be due to our contemporary emphasis on the youthful perspective. It may be that a true useful regret, is not a possibility or a province of youth, that it takes a hard-won maturity to experience the depths of regret in ways that do not overwhelm and debilitate us, but put us into a proper, more generous relationship with the future.
Except for brief senses of having missed a tide, having hurt another, having taken what is not ours. Youth is not yet ready for the rich current of abiding regret that runs through, and emboldens, a mature human life. Sincere regret may in fact be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide, where we missed a previous one, or experiencing timelessness with a grandchild, where we neglected a boy of our own. To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are, in even the average human life. Fully experienced, regret turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past.
So unconsciously, I was really regretting all the ways I’d hemmed myself in, with all the parameters I felt I needed in order to write. And strangely, just naming those different forms of reluctance, released me completely. Suddenly I was able to write anywhere, on trains, boats, the tube in London, cliff sides in Ireland, wherever. And in fact, that I got so excited by the revolutionary aspect that essay had on my own life, that I thought, there must be lots of other words we use in narrow and pejorative ways, that we often use language against ourselves, as a weapon against change. I got an essay on time there, we were constantly saying, “Time is our enemy. Time is not on our side. Time is slipping through our fingers.” Time, if it could speak, which it does speak actually, but time would be very surprised to find out that it’s our enemy. And nothing could happen without the incredible, astonishing, life-giving properties of time itself. So I set off on the adventure, which included writing these essays, with these single word titles, on vulnerability, honesty, friendship, the body, death, shame, in all kinds of circumstances, all around the world, in my traveling.
And so that’s the story that you called on, it was a revolutionary moment in my life. It’s really an interesting invitational question actually, to choose a regret to feel fully, because often we feel we’re disempowering ourselves with the regret, and we’re told not to have regrets, but to just plow on. But the way forward actually may be through a fully felt sense of remorse, over a way you could have been, and weren’t. A generosity you could have displayed, and didn’t. And by only experiencing it, you could be precipitated into a deeper form of generosity, in the future.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you for that. I do want to encourage everyone to read, certainly as much as they can of your work, but “Time,” which I have printed out with tons of highlights, in my suitcase somewhere, which is right next to me, caught me at the right time, which is another reason why we’re having this conversation. I’ve thought of having this conversation, in this form, on this podcast for many years, and for whatever reason just felt like the right time.
David Whyte: And what is that time for you now?
Tim Ferriss: 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, 5-Bullet Friday, “Everything Is Waiting for You.”
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. 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 —
David Whyte: “Time.” I have it. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, “Time.” Great. “Everything Is Waiting for You.” This is what prompted, I think.
David Whyte: Oh, “Everything Is Waiting for You.” Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So would it be too much insult to the work if I highlighted just a few lines that struck me?
David Whyte: Not at all. I have it in my memory too, if you need.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you do. Oh, please.
David Whyte: I do, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If you’d do us the honor, that would be beautiful.
David Whyte: Yeah. “Everything Is Waiting for You.” And it’s a very ancient human sense that things are actually just about to come and find you, and they’re going to find someone deep inside you that you don’t fully know yourself, and echoed in the Zen tradition, again and again.
Everything Is Waiting for You
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you [courage].
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
Themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you.
Tim Ferriss: Fantastic. Thank you. 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 eased into the conversation.
David Whyte: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the line that stuck with me because, much like these outdated constraints, outdated narratives, outdated stories that are four or five years old, as we look at the current horizon internally, let’s just say. The feeling of unnecessary burden that we impose on ourselves is something that I feel very deeply. And the aloneness, as a for instance, and this is something Henry has helped me to really ho[m]e in on, 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 an inherent heaviness, with the label of loneliness, and the identification as someone who is lonely, is something that has been very enabling for me, in the last few years. As someone who’s felt alone or lonely for a very high percentage of my life, I would say. So thank you for that poem. It really struck me and found it very helpful, and I wanted to have you on this podcast for many reasons. One of which is that I think for — and I don’t want to imply that all of us yanks are knuckle dragging cretins, who can barely make out a paragraph, but poetry I think gets relegated to the realm of optional, frivolous, decorative. But I certainly feel like there’s much more to it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to arrive at that conclusion.
I wanted to rewind the clock for you. It seems, and I’m reading here, I just want to read this, and you can tell me if this is fact checked properly. All right. “I’ve been writing poetry since the age of seven or so, probably under the influence of my Irish mother. I was taken by poetry. I saw it as a secret code to life, and I didn’t understand how other people didn’t see that. I often thought witnessing what passed for adult conversation — great wording — that all these so-called adults were actually inhabiting a kind of agreed insanity.” All right, I’ll stop there. So I would love to hear you comment on the secret code to life, what that means to you, and then the agreed insanity of so-called adults.
David Whyte: Yes. Well, we can certainly witness the agreed insanity of our political discourse at the moment, and so we know how immature our supposedly adult world can be, and I just felt it as a child. I think most children have had it, and it just gets covered over. You realize that the priorities of the adult, what these people are suffering from a form of amnesia, they’ve forgotten the primary radiant experience of what it’s like to be a child. And so poetry always carried that living element, that current for me, whether it was Irish poems, in Irish from my mother, or her stories, and the mutability of her stories too.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by that? The mutability.
David Whyte: The stories were never the same. They always had some kind of wonderful extemporaneous change in them. As another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, said, no amount of exaggeration will do justice to what actually happened. And it’s actually true. The main thing is to get the spirit of what occurred across. And then my father’s Yorkshire storytelling tradition was very different. But those two linguistic inheritances came together in a very powerful way. And indeed it was a Yorkshire, even though I was reading a lot of Irish poems, and I was reading a lot of Walter de La Mare, and we had great poetry in our schools actually, and good teachers. So I was lucky that way. 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 the top shelf was poetry. It was as if it was kept away from —
Tim Ferriss: The stack of Playboys.
David Whyte: — Kids, yeah, and I had to reach up. It was just before I went through my growing spurt. And so I had to reach up, and I got hold of one of the poetry books, right in the tipsy-topsy, tweenness of my two fingers, and pulled it off. I remember it dropped down, and I caught it, and then I opened it, and it was a joint volume by Ted Hughes, fellow Yorkshire poet, not far from where I grew up, and Thom Gunn, who moved to San Francisco Bay Area actually. And 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, 30s seemed like they were past it. But I read into the book, and I was just astonished. I said, “Oh, here are adults who have kept the primary vision of childhood alive into their maturity.” I wouldn’t have used that language as a child, but that’s what I thought. 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. Innocence was your ability to be found by the world, in ever greater and greater ways.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by that, found by the world in greater and greater ways? Is that being unfettered by a metastasized collection of labels and concepts, that prevents you from seeing, and feeling clearly? Is it something else?
David Whyte: That’s a very articulate description of one aspect of it, Tim, yeah. But it’s that phenomena we have, whereby there’s actually a form of innocence to every epoch in our life, if we’re mature enough, strangely, ironically, to use that word, to step — there’s a kind of innocence you have in your teens, which it’s an innocence that we normally associate with innocence. Yeah. But actually there’s an innocence you can have in your 60s, or your 70s, or your 80s, your 50s, your 40s. 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, 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 you.
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, and that everything is speaking back to you in its own voice. You’re just not hearing it, and everything is coming to meet you in an unspoken way. And if you can open up the same unspoken part of you, to meet the unspoken in the world, and the spoken inside you, and the spoken in the world, all kinds of astonishing experiences that are gratifying, and powerful, and timeless, all in themselves, without you having to achieve anything beyond it, come into your possibility, and your grasp.
Tim Ferriss: 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. 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. Question number one, what helped you get here that you need to give away? Who are you when you’re the best to yourself in the world around you? What is the beautiful question you’ve cradled through years of doubt?
It is too precious to ask, the question which you are afraid the answer will come back as “No.” And I’ll keep going, but I may come back to that one. How can you be friends with your longings, with what you want? What would you be if you failed being yourself? What promise did I make sincerely, that I now need to let go of?
David Whyte: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: What would it be like to have absolute faith in your intuitions? These are excellent questions. Excellent, excellent questions. I could see myself journaling for pages on any one of these. And I suppose the meta question that I’d love to hear you speak to is, how have you generated these questions? And then could you explain the what is the beautiful question you’ve cradled through years of doubt?
David Whyte: Yes. Well, many of those questions have come just spontaneously when I’ve been on stage, and I mean either on stage in front of a thousand people, or just in a small group working with people, and working with the implications of poetry. And I have hundreds of poems memorized, so I can extemporize and go depending on where I feel the invitation is in the room. So I will often paraphrase a piece, and unearth what I call the beautiful question, the beautiful and disturbing question beneath the line. And I often think a beautiful question is defined by the fact that it helps to shape your life as much by asking it, as by having it answered. Asking the question is a form of deep attention, and it’s a form of attention that that can be deepened, actually. You can get an immediate reward, but actually you can carry a question for years, that you suddenly realize is now being answered in a completely surprising way. And the particular question you chose out, which is, what’s the doubt you’ve carried inside you?
Tim Ferriss: The doubt. Yes. Yeah. The beautiful question you’ve cradled through years of doubt.
David Whyte: Yeah. That’s a line from Tan-y-Garth. And Tan-y-Garth is the name of a Welsh farm on which I lived for a good few years. It became my base. I helped the 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, then I’d come back again. And so I was part of the whole seasonal round, for a good couple of years at Tan-y-Garth. But I got to know a fellow pilgrim, who’d come to light on the farm with this family. His name was Michael. And I lived in a caravan in the farmyard, or in a field next to the farmyard, and he lived with his family in this old stone cottage. And we got to know each other. I was just in my 20s, just back from the Galápagos Islands, where I’d been a naturalist guide, and just about to set off into the Himalayas. And he was at the end of his artistic life, or I should say no, he was in the full maturity of his artistic life.
He’d been a traveling Shakespeare player. He’d played Lear actually. He had this long Celtic face actually, with all these horizontal lines on it. And we got to know each other, working with the sheep, and building walls, and walking in those — for two years or so. But we would retreat into his cottage, which was called — the main farm was called Tan-y-Garth, which I think in Welsh just means “Halfway up the mountain.”
And he and his family lived in Tan-y-Garth Bach, which means “Little halfway up the mountain.” It was just the original farmhouse that grew out of the mountainside. It was just a stone cottage with the back wall of the mountain. And there was a fire in there going all through the summer, as much as it was going through the winter. It was the same temperature in that cottage on the midsummer’s day as it was in the middle of. And he and I would sit by the fire. His wife, Diane, was a very religious woman. She used to disappear upstairs, 8:30 or so. And Michael would reach behind the couch for a bottle of brandy, where it would hide. And then we would start these incredible conversations. And I discovered very soon he was a lover of Blake, William Blake. And then I discovered that Michael himself was an engraver, like William Blake. And it was much later on, I discovered Michael was also a poet, but engraving was his main artistry. And his prized possession was this very thick book of illustrated Blake engravings.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, nice.
David Whyte: Yeah. And it must have cost a fortune, actually for him, because they were very poor, very poor, but rich family actually. 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 once we got into it over the weeks, he’d asked this question every night almost, by the fireside, with the Welsh wind and rain beating against the window. He’d say, “Do you think Blake actually talked with the angels? Or was it just a metaphor that we stand in conversation with worlds greater than our ken?” And he would ask this question, and he really meant it. When he asked it, he wanted to know. And he had a very fierce way of asking questions, actually, if you ever made a declarative statement, he would ask you a fierce question about it, and you’d find yourself backing out of it, and reversing your opinion. Because the well of doubt was so powerful in his face. So doubt was really his way of paying attention. So through the years, we got to know each other, and I’d go away and come back, and go away and come back. And the other thing he’d say every night, almost every night was, “You know, I love this place so much, I’ve found my place to die.” And he meant Tan-y-Garth.
And if you looked after that window, you’d see fields. And if there were four corners to a field, three of them would have names. Yeah. And there was a little stream called the Caseg, which wended its way through the farmland out to the mountains. And every little elbow of that stream had a name. And there was one place which was called “The Place of the Three Dead Englishmen” in Welsh. And this, being Wales, it was not a place of tragedy.
Tim Ferriss: Victory lap. Yeah.
David Whyte: Yeah, something good had happened there in the 1400s at 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. But the whole place was a mythic language. And then the Carneddau Mountains beyond that.
Well, anyway, I came to the states, and it was many years later that I went back. And I surprised them, actually. I walked up one day. I was on my way to Ireland, and I realized, “Oh, I have time to stop in Wales on my way to the ferry. And there’s no phone in Tan-y-Garth Bach, so I’ll just walk up.”
And I saw Diane when I was about half a mile away. When you’ve lived in the countryside, actually, you can recognize people’s silhouettes from a long way away. And so I hadn’t seen her for two years, but she knew it was me. She started waving. And I came up to the cottage. And there was the smell of scones coming out of the doorway. I thought, “Perfect bachelor timing. This is great.”
So, we sat down. It was so good to see each other. And then, I said, “Where’s Michael?” And she said, “Oh, he’s in the hospital, and I’m afraid it’s serious. He has leukemia, and so he’s in for tests and treatment.” I said, “Oh, my God.” And so I was there a couple of hours. And I had to leave to go to Ireland and I didn’t come back that way. And then I heard that he’d passed away. So I’d missed him.
But Diane wrote me this incredible letter in which she said, “In the last month before he died, he’d had this kind of remission, and he’d come out and come back to the farm.” And in the letter, she said, “In those last few weeks, he was experiencing everything he’d read in Blake.” So he was conversing with his angels. Yeah.
And so I wrote this poem, “Tan-y-Garth.” And I realized, I couldn’t talk about Michael without talking about what he loved. And what he loved was Tan-y-Garth, and then all the Welsh names. I wrote this as an elegy because I was poor as a church mouse at that time. I couldn’t afford to just jump on a plane and go to his memorial service. So I sat down to have my own memorial service, and I wrote this piece. So it’s called Tan-y-Garth, Elegy for Michael.
“This grass-grown hill’s a patchwork lined with walls I’ve grown to love. Four hundred years at least the hill farms clung tenacious to the weathered slope over the Ogwen and the green depths of Môn. The eye has weathered also into the grey rocks and the fields bright with spring. The wind blown light from the mountain filling the valley. The low backed sheep following the fence, hemmed by dogs and John’s crooked staff.” John, the farmer. Yeah. “The still valley filled with the shouts and the mewling of sheep pressed through the gate. Beneath Yr Elen, the bowl of Llafer is stirred with mist. The dogs lie low in the tufted grass and watch with pure intent. The ragged back of the last sheep entering the stone-bound pens.
“The rough ground of Wales lives in the mind for years, springing moor grass under feet, treading concrete, hundreds of miles from home, and the ground has names, songs full of grief, sounds that belong to a single stream, Caseg is the place of the mare, Cwm Llafer is the valley of speech, utterance of wind, Fryddlas, the blue moorland filled by the sky. The farm passed down, yet never possessed, lives father to son, mother to child. Feeding the people with sheep, the sheep with grass, and memory with years lived looking at mountains. One single glance of a hillside darkened by cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes. And this world needs all the breath we have: Carnedd Llewellyn, Carnedd Dafydd, Garnedd Uchaf, all the Carneddau, Yr Elen of the shining light, Drosgl the endless ridge curving to nothing.”
“One man I know loved this place so much. He said he’d found his place to die. Years I knew him walking the high moor lines or watching the coals of a winter fire in the cottage grate. And die he did. And die he did, but not before one month’s final joy in wild creation gave him that full sight he’d glimpsed in Blake.”
“He too wrestled with his angel. In and out of hospital, the white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountain’s bracing sense of space. Now, he was ready. His heart, so long at the edge of the nest, shook its wings and flew into the hills he loved, became the hills he loved. Walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he’d nursed for years in doubt. Walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he’d nursed for years in doubt. His ashes are scattered over by Aber, the water continually saying his name, as I still go home to Tan-y-Garth, speaking the names of those I love.”
Tim Ferriss: Wow. 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.”
David Whyte: Yeah, “Walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he’d nursed for years in doubt.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Is there a developed skill to memorizing poetry? Or is that just an innate — bar genetics?
David Whyte: Well, certainly you go to Ireland, and people have it by the barrel load. You’ve only to poke someone in Ireland and out it spills. And my uncles were the same as well as my mother.
But it’s just you learn one line at a time. But you learn it because you love it and you want to have it. And I found, when I was young, walking, I used to spend a lot of time alone walking out in the countryside, that if I could just call up a line, then it wasn’t something that was occurring in the abstract. I was actually having a powerful primary experience that the poet had when they wrote it. And especially if you got it, as we say, by heart.
So, you really just learn one line at a time, and then you have to learn the seams between the lines, which is often quite a trick. Yeah. But my memory is much better now than when — I never had a photographic memory, so I had to work to learn them. But now, I can memorize much more easily than when I was younger, actually. So, I have a better memory now than I had 40 or 50 years ago.
Tim Ferriss: Through practice.
David Whyte: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Through practice.
David Whyte: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Is that cultivated ability? What are the helpful constituent ingredients of that? In other words, are you focusing on the musical cadence in a sense to help you memorize? Do you imagine visuals? Are you actually seeing, in your mind’s eye, the words themselves? If you had to tease out some of the components of this improved ability, how would you try to do that?
David Whyte: There is a visual element, but it’s kind of transitory. It moves through them very quickly. If you think of the Tan-y-Garth poem, it’s full of so much imagery —
Tim Ferriss: So much.
David Whyte: — but I’m physically there on the farm when I’m reciting that. I’ve got the Welsh breeze coming out of Cwm Llafer, which means “The valley of speech,” Cwm Llafer, in Welsh. And Yr Elen means “The shining one.” It’s this ridge of light. So yes, I see them. But it’s the meaning. It’s all the constellating qualities together, the rhythm, the beauty of the phrase.
So, for instance, you had the phrase you were trying to catch again and again. So that would be a good one for you to learn because it obviously means something to you. So, just to take that line out of the poem and not feel you have to learn the rest of the poem. “Walked with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he’d nursed for years in doubt.” So that’s obviously important to you. So, to learn that line, and then to be able to embody the experience when you recite the line, it reinforces it.
And it works as a beautiful question, actually, as you deepen your understanding of what it means to pay attention to the world through all the ways that you doubt it. All the ways you’re reluctant to be here. All the ways you don’t want to have the conversation, thank you very much. All the ways you just don’t believe, those are you, those are the way you’re made. So, to be able to have that phrase, to take you —
So it’s interesting. When I first started off, my repertoire of poetry that I’d written myself did not cover many of the thresholds of experience that I was working with on stage or with people. So I would memorize other people’s poems. I’d memorize Antonio Machado in Spanish, or Rilke from the German, or Yeats, or Seamus Heaney.
So I still have all those poems in my memory. But now, I’ve written my way into almost every threshold that I want to speak about. So now I mostly call on my own poetry. But it’s lovely to call on Heaney or Yeats, too, at the same time. It’s just a rich storehouse inside yourself.
Tim Ferriss: The word “primary” has come up quite a bit in this conversation.
David Whyte: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
David Whyte: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. 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?
David Whyte: But it should be there in the rhythm. And 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. Yeah. And that’s why Shakespeare used it so much. Blank verse, we call it, iambic pentameter, five beats.
But if you think of the times where you’ve had to communicate something very poignant, very vulnerable, to someone else, maybe you’re leaving a relationship, maybe you’re giving the news of someone’s death, which is going to affect the person in a very powerful way, you will always fall into a rhythm. And it’s a poetic rhythm actually. You will always repeat yourself, three times usually, and in three different ways. It has to be said, it has to be heard, and it can never be heard the first time.
In the Greek theater, when the gods spoke, the audience could not take it in the first time, so the chorus would repeat it. That was the job of the chorus, was to repeat the revelation of the gods because human beings could not understand what was being said the first time. So that’s why we’re so careful in our speech.
So poetry is not some abstracted art. It’s how human beings speak when they’re trying to create language against which there are no defenses. This has to be heard and it has to be heard in the spirit in which it is being conveyed. Yeah. And the language has to be invitational to that particular person.
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to come back to something you said in the very beginning of our conversation. And I may be misquoting, I jotted it down quickly, but, “Zen is a deep path of heartbreak.” And I would like to keep that in mind, but hear you describe how Zen entered your life. And why Zen?
David Whyte: Yes. Well, 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. And 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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. 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?
David Whyte: 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. So the Zen of this, the Zen of that, it’s just a gorgeous word. So, you get caught by the glamours of Zen. The black robes, the bronze bells, the reflective wooden floors, the quiet temples, the Yoda-like teachers. Yeah.
And so that probably was the original invitation, that I felt, “Oh, what a remarkable path to take.” But it is. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Would you mind reciting that piece? Are you open to that?
David Whyte: Yeah, it’s the last, being a Zed, or a Z, as you say so quaintly in your country.
Tim Ferriss: Zed sounds better. I’ll be honest. But if I say it, I sound like a pompous ass, so I have to hold off.
David Whyte: So, yeah, Zed or Z, Zen, it’s the last essay in the book. So, “Zen is a great, big, magnificent, all-embracing seduction of a word.” And that’s what I felt when I first came across it. “Zen is the beguiling and charming philanderer of the first order, that good-looking stranger who lets us fall in love and then runs off with someone else so that we can fall out of love with the word and be let alone in our grief to fall in love with reality.”
“Zen is a centuries-old, glamorous, disguised cover-up inviting us in in each succeeding generation so exquisitely, so quietly, so subtly, so seductively into its grip that we do not, to begin with, have any understanding of what we have become so innocently ensnared by. We do not have a clue as to the way we are being taken in so swiftly and so unerringly into the currents that lead to the edge of our own necessary physical and emotional breakdown. Amidst our hopes for polished wood, serene surroundings, the sound of bells, and the whispered shuffle of bare feet, we always find, to our consternation, that Zen always begins and ends in tears.”
“The first tears in Zen practice are for our bodies, and our restless minds, for our backs, our knees, and for our legs trying to sit upright on those strangely necessary black cushions. The next tears are for our hearts, our emotions, and our previously imprisoned minds. The last tears are for a joy and laughter that, still to our amazement, keeps a friendship and an understanding with our previous griefs. Zen is the journey we take through heartbreak. At the last heartbreak, Zen retires from the field. Zen generously disappears and lets us alone, refusing to let us use the word so freely again, refusing to let us be fooled by what we originally needed to be so enticed by.”
“Drawn towards Zen practice, we almost always fall in love with the word itself. Zen beguiles us with that barely breathing vowel sound that lives so eternally and so glamorously at its center, between the dashing capital Z and that oh, so subtle brush stroke of an N. The word itself seems to be clean and rested, insightful, and eternally hip, something inspiring, something that conjures light, and space, and a welcome order amidst a difficult world of besiegement, chaos, and successive never-ending experiences of grief. We fall for the word as we fall for the deep silences that swim dreamily through the first pains of our practice.”
“Zen welcomes us through its invitation to a sense of spacious ease, to freedom from worry, and thankfully, in our mind’s eye, to a deep form of rested presence, a presence we first saw in the clean, perfectly proportioned spaces inherited so seductively from Japan. But then, as Zen breaks down the divisions in our mind and body, we find our sense of self breaks down too. Firstly from the inside out, and then, at the end, from the outside in.”
“We learn to bow in the Zendo, not knowing what we are rehearsing, unconsciously preparing, as we are to duck through the achingly low doors of a basement our heartbreak will provide. We pass through those low doors as we pass into the difficulties of marriage or intimate relationship. Like the raw vulnerabilities we find in the commitments of marriage or in a long, intimate partnership, Zen begins with the honeymoon of getting to know, graduates through difficult and unwanted surprises, and then culminates in a slow breakdown day by day through the trials and invitations of intimacy and heartache itself.”
“As in a marriage, in Zen, we learn that the line between this body, another’s body, and the body of the world is not where we thought it was. As in a love relationship, we learn that what we thought we knew is not equal to what we are discovering. As in an intimate relationship, we learn that who we thought we were is not who we are now in the midst of all the disappearing boundaries. Almost always in relationship, what we think we have to give is not actually what is needed, what we thought was love might not have been love at all, and what we thought we had to give up is not after all what is being asked for.”
“Tellingly, as in relationship, the hardest thing to do in Zen practice is simply finding a way to breathe freely while staying connected to the world or the world of another. Breathing is foundational to both coming to know, and letting go of what we think we know. Like the things we think we know about relationship, all the things we thought we knew about Zen will have to be given up at the end.
Even then, Zen and the intimacies of relationship both ask us to give up the very last thing, the very thing for which we thought we had already given everything up. Like the essence of intimate relationship, the very essence of Zen might be giving up and giving in, not to our partner, but to what the essence and heartache of the partnership calls us to.
Zen is surprising under its subterfuge. Zen’s biggest surprise is that it seems to have more confidence in the incoherent life we first brought to it, than the one we are trying to replace it with. We find ourselves seen at a core, as one who generated difficulties, not because our essence is difficulty, but because difficulties were what we thought we needed, in order to get through, in order to be worthy of something better. Difficulty was our needed friend. Difficult is how we thought things should be, difficult is what we thought we were.
In the attempt to give our old life away and have it replaced by the newly spacious clarity we first glimpse in Zen, we find it constantly returned to us, in a voice that says we will never need anything more than what we already had. We’re told, in no uncertain terms, that we were more miraculous in our simple wish to find a way, than any abstracted, spacious place we could reach through sitting in silence. And yet, sitting in silence is how we will find the way.
Zen frustrates us, wants us to find the way, just by being the very essence of things that find their way. Zen frustrates us, wants us to find the way, just by being the very essence of things that find their way. Zen, in the old cliché, because it is so true, wants us to be the way itself. It might be that Zen, as a word, would like us to understand this one simple thing, so it can go home and have a good rest.
Zen begins by being the hand seemingly raised to keep us at bay, and then, slowly and imperceptibly, it seemed to be the hand that rests on our shoulder, telling us we might be fine just as we are. When we actually glimpse what we are, we and that hand seem to disappear altogether, simply because there’s no need for a hand, when the reluctant body that needed it has disappeared.
Zen indeed is an old fraudster, but one with a heart of gold. Just as we are taken in, Zen indeed is an old fraudster, but one with a heart of gold. Just as we are taken in, it relents, and to our relief, gives us all our money back.
Zen, we realize in the end, is much humbler in its aims than we thought it was. Zen, we realize, is more realistic than we thought it was. Zen, in the end, is always surprisingly practical and helpful, and just wants us to do the simplest, most obvious thing.
Zen doesn’t waste its energy by choosing too early in the game, and waits for things to make their own choice, unimpeded by interference. Zen refuses to choose between light and dark, restlessness and order, between not knowing or having answers.
Zen has a well-cultivated sense of humor and carries its own hidden cargo of amusement, at all our self-deceptions and false choices. Zen is a true comedian at times, its most hilarious proposition, being that you might not after all have to believe in your own thoughts. Zen is a true comedian.
We walk towards Zen as if towards a door of light, but Zen practice moves just as much. And unerringly towards a door into the dark, into what until now we could not see or discern, so that we might better understand what we might have hidden there, but also, so that we might better understand the underlying miracle of light itself.
Zen leads us, on like the very best kind of guide, as if we’re equal to what we will eventually find, like the very best kind of guide, as if we might be equal to what we eventually find. Zen is the ultimate kind of guide, in that it disappears in the moment of our understanding, to leave us with what we have found, and more importantly, and to our astonishment, what comes to find us.
If Zen asks us to begin with, to follow the thread of heartbreak, then to begin with, heartbreak is the only thread we need to follow. Heartbreak has many difficult doors, almost all of them leading where we hoped and prayed we did not need to go.
Reading between the lines, the old Zen teachers seemed to think that one heartbreak was as good as another. So many doors, all heartbreak is given up, giving up. But the mercy that lies in the path of heartbreak is that in the end. We will have to give up even our precious, well-guarded memories of heartbreak itself.
In real heartbreak, something else always comes to find us. On the other side of heartbreak, there’s an experience of timeless radiance that cannot be described from this side of heartbreak.
So for now, sitting Zen. And carrying the silence from sitting into our lives, heartbreak is all we need to know. There’s more, but heartbreak is all we need to know.
Tim Ferriss: Heartbreak is all we need to know.
David Whyte: All of us spend so much time trying to find a path, where we won’t have our heart broken. And really, the only way you can find a path where your heart won’t break is by not caring. Finding a path where you don’t care about things or other people, that’s the ultimate protection against heartbreak.
But then, you live a life in the abstract. You live a life that never makes any real sense. You live a life of loneliness. 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, and have our heartbreak broken over something that we actually care about.
So. What do you care about? What do you really care about? Yes.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
David Whyte: Well, it’s very similar. And I am sure the first part of the word is from the French “coeur,” or “heart.” So it’s what your heart felt about, and you are really only courageous about what you’re heartfelt about.
We use the word in the abstract, the word “heart” in the abstract, but it’s really an invitation into the body, into the physical body, what you’re heartfelt about, and to allow yourself to be heartfelt.
I mean, often, we’ll create a barrier between ourselves and our children, exactly because we care about them so deeply. We can’t believe how devastated we would be, if we lost them. We would be if we lost them. So it’s very hard to feel that heartfelt love at its depth, because it always, heartfelt love, in its ultimate, always has to give something away, has to give the other person away.
So the courage to love is the courage to feel the heartbreak in loving, and the way you won’t escape. There’s no escape from the heartbreak.
Tim Ferriss: Unless you want to be one of the walking dead, with a muted experience of life.
David Whyte: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: You seem to have been, for lack of a better word, a seeker, from a relatively young age. I would be curious to know how or why that started, if you can even answer that question, and then, to come back to the, “All paths lead to Shukman” line of questioning. You can answer either or both of these.
How did living in a caravan on the side of Mount Snowdon, if I’m saying that correctly, help you develop as a young writer? I can’t leave the living in a caravan on the side of a mountain alone. But, the seeking. Where does that come from?
David Whyte: It was actually the side of the Carneddau Mountains, just a range over from Snowdon. But you were very close.
Tim Ferriss: I was close.
David Whyte: Snowdon, central mountain in the, yeah, it’s Snowdonia, you’re right. But having lived there, and the Welsh names being so specific to place, I can’t let you get away with it, so —
Tim Ferriss: No, please don’t, 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 DO Lectures, which was great, near Cardiff, I believe it was, or downtown Cardiff.
David Whyte: Yeah?
Tim Ferriss: And I rented a car, this was before Google Maps, and I remember some very kind woman at the hotel giving me directions to get to some farmer’s market, or something, I wanted to explore.
I wrote down everything phonetically. And as soon as I got to the first sign, I knew I was completely fucked. It was just — I could not not read anything.
David Whyte: No. Yes, it’s a revelation when you find out how they’re actually pronounced, Tim. There’s a lovely sign, which is, it says, “Llwybr Cyhoeddus,” which English tourists would be following, trying to get to this mythical village, but it actually just meant “Public footpath.” So, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds very dignified.
David Whyte: But yeah, no, it’s a magnificent language. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
David Whyte: 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, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible.
David Whyte: Yeah. It’s so rich, and it has a very powerful poetic tradition, which is still alive to this day, within the language. So it was lovely to be bathed in that language. I learned how to pronounce it, and a host of words. I never learned how to have conversational Welsh.
Although, 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.
Tim Ferriss: So what happened on this mount that was not Mount Snowdon? I can’t recall the other range, I apologize.
David Whyte: Well, when I finished my stint in the Galápagos 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. And I traveled through, after I left the islands, where I’d lived aboard these sailing boats for almost the whole time.
I traveled through South America. And then I came back to North Wales, where I’d studied marine zoology, the subject that took me out there in the first place. I’d lived down in the village below Tan-y-Garth Farm, in a village called Gerlan.
And then I found this caravan in the farm, and found I could have it for free if I helped the farmer. And then I’d get a little bit extra, too. I lived on very little then, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So, in this instance, caravan is like a — What they call an RV in the US, something like that?
David Whyte: No, it’s a trailer.
Tim Ferriss: Trailer. There we go, all right.
David Whyte: No. Yeah, it’s on wheels. It was a cute caravan, but caravan is a very romantic name. It was rounded from the 1960s, or something, but it was a retreat for me, actually.
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. They were in retreat from PTSD, from violence, from a world which didn’t understand what they’d gone through.
And in many ways, I was traumatized too, by Galápagos, but I wasn’t traumatized by violence, although I witnessed a lot of it in the animal world, and the marine world. I was traumatized by beauty, actually.
The place was so astonishingly, overwhelmingly itself, and I was just a minute part of creation. When you’re in Galápagos, you feel as if you’re on the planet before human beings evolved, never mind, took dominion, as it says, in the Bible.
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 often overwhelmed when we see the gorgeous images in an Attenborough documentary.
But I was witness to those both I was diving to, as well as leading people ashore. I was a naturalist guide, taking people ashore. I was witnessing those amazing images, above and below water on a daily basis, and I was paying attention in silence.
It was only years later, in Zen retreats, I realized I was just recapitulating the experiences I’d had in Galápagos, but with no outer guidance.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by that, recapitulating the experiences?
David Whyte: Well, there was no Zen master to say, “Oh. Yeah, what you’ve just experienced, and the falling apart that goes with it, is a necessary part of the journey.”
So it was a kind of self-compassionate act to go on retreat afterwards. That was the caravan on the side of the Carneddau Mountains, in North Wales. And my friendship with Michael was perfect. It was a very internal conversation between two people, in a way, in that cottage next to the fire, often through the winters, or when we were walking out with the dogs, to go and fetch the sheep in.
So 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, and how easily we turn away from that threshold, because it’s so scary that you’re losing your previous desires, you’re losing your previous ways that you wanted the world to be, and you’re stepping into an unknown, which is your new self, and the way your world will be perceived and joined by that self.
Tim Ferriss: When did you start your Zen practice? 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?
David Whyte: Well, it started in my mid-20s, after I moved to the states, and mid- to late 20s. There are two main streams of Zen. One is Shikantaza sitting, which is simply following your breath, and empty mind. And the other thought form is the one that includes emptying your mind, but also has koan work, where you empty your mind around a beautiful question.
So what is the sound of one hand clapping? Very powerful question. What’s it like to be one hand moving through space and time, that doesn’t meet anything other than itself? It’s a tragedy.
Tim Ferriss: Marco, no Polo. Now, are these questions, I’d love to hear your perspective on this, are they powerful because they productively break the logical or rational mind?
Is it a tool for escaping the tyranny of epistemological arrogance, thinking that you can solve for everything with left-brain analytical thinking? What makes a question like that powerful?
David Whyte: Well, I’ll give you an example of what, 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
David Whyte: That we have The Blue Cliff Record, with hundreds of numbered koans, all commented on by various Zen masters through the centuries. But actually, they’re everywhere. And your intimate others in your life will provide them to you too, especially your children.
But in the Irish tradition, there’s a story which is a very brief description of a monk, standing at the edge of the monastic precinct. And this will be the edge of a monasticism, which had an incredible respect and sense of revelation in the natural world.
The Irish church, pre-Catholic, was non-hierarchical, at least, a very different kind of hierarchy, equal place for women in that monasticism. And the word, “the revelation,” could be understood as much through the sun on the leaves, moving in the wind as in the Bible.
So there’s a monk on the edge of the monastic precinct, and he suddenly hears the bell, calling him to prayer. And in the story, he says, “That’s the most beautiful sound in the world,” the call to depth, to silence, to prayer.
But immediately, at the same time as the bell is ringing, he hears the blackbird singing over the wall, and he says, “That’s also the finest sound in the world, which is the world just as it, just as it comes to find you.”
Well, I’ve known that story for decades. 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. But I had actually had the physical experience of revelation in the koan, sat in this very place where I am now, and it was Easter morning.
Just in front of me here, behind the screen, are French doors, and I had the French doors open, so that the beautiful spring day could be both smelt and heard through the door. And I’m sat, I’ve got an empty page, right here on my desk.
And through that door behind me comes my wife, and she’s got two Tibetan bells in her hand, and she bangs them together. All of us have been in a shop with Tibetan bells, and you hit them, and you get an awful sound, you don’t get it right, and it takes you about five or six times, before you get the pure note.
Well, she hit it the first time, and the note went straight through me. And at exactly the same time, I heard the red-winged blackbird outside, which here in the Northwest, the Pacific Northwest, is the sound of spring.
The world just both collapsed and came together at the same time. And I put my hand out, I said, “I can’t talk to you right now,” and I wrote this piece all in one go, which was the expression of my, and this is it. It’s called “The Bell and the Blackbird.”
The sound of a bell, still reverberating, the sound of a bell, still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling, from a corner of the field, the sound of a bell, still reverberating, or a blackbird, calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits, either way, it takes courage. Either way, it takes courage.
Either way, wants you to become nothing but that self, that is no self at all, wants you to walk to the place where you find, you already know, you’ll have to give every last thing away. The approach, that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting at all, that radiance you have always carried with you, as you walk, both alone and completely accompanied in friendship, by every corner of creation, crying, “Hallelujah.”
That radiance you have always carried with you, as you walk, both alone, and completely accompanied in friendship, by every corner of creation crying, “Hallelujah.”
So that koan had lived inside me for years, as an abstract, and then, a semi-abstract, and then, suddenly, the Moon is in the reflection in the bucket. The bucket breaks open, and the Moon disappears. And the Zen story, it says, the monk is enlightened.
But we are, we don’t get to choose. We’re both alone, completely and utterly alone. And if we knew how alone we were, we’d run 100,000 miles in the opposite direction, but we’re also completely and utterly connected.
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.
Tim Ferriss: We chatted a bit earlier about the impact, the meaning, the revelation of poetry for you, when you were seven, eight, nine years old, observing the agreed upon insanity of so-called adults.
David Whyte: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: 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 an uninformed, adorable naivete, but as much more. As an adult, what does poetry do for you, and what do you hope your poetry will do for others?
David Whyte: Well, it’s a consolation, and that’s one of the reasons I gave that name to the essays, actually. It’s consoling, both in the sense of putting an arm around you, and saying, “There’s nothing wrong with what you’re experiencing, and there’s nothing wrong of the depth of heartbreak, with which you’re experiencing it.”
But the consolation is also an invitation, that you have inside you the ability to find your way, and also to have good company along the way, and to help and invite others as you go. So the poetry, when I first started, was just a brilliant art form, in and of itself. It was just a pleasure to learn it, to recite it, to learn to be able to write it myself, and then, to work with it, with other people.
It was just so explosive in my life, and so nourishing and so inviting, and maturing, all at the same time. I remember when I lost my mother, and I was so grief-stricken by that loss, because we were so close. But I wrote my grief into a whole collection, which was “Everything Is Waiting for You,” actually.
When I’d finished the cycle of poems, I said, “My God, poetry’s been such a good friend to me. I’ve gone through seven years of grieving in seven months 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. So poetry is a way that I could be successful in the world, in my ideas of what it meant to be a successful poet, where being recognized, being published by the mainstream publishers. Being celebrated.
But now, my definitions of what successful in poetry are to do with helping others, that the poem actually speaks to another heart and mind, and will be taken and carried by that heart and mind, and given to others, yeah.
I suppose, in other words, other people will be memorizing my poetry by heart, or a line of it, at least, or searching for it in a drawer, when they need it. It’s a very instinctual thing.
Even a person who has never looked at a poem for 20 years, when they lose someone close to them in their life, and they have no articulation for it, at the memorial service, they will have pulled out a poem, to be able to speak to what they cannot say themselves.
So that’s my job, is to be able to help people who cannot speak for themselves, suddenly earn that right themselves by recognizing it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. At some point, and I never do this, but I would love to have a number of signed or inscribed books of yours. Because I really feel like I would like to have the physical copies of your work. I have digital, I have certain things, like “Time” printed out. And there’s just something that is, I don’t want to say transmitted, but the tactile ability to paw through and peruse the work is fundamentally different for me.
David Whyte: That’s lovely. Thank you. And thank God. Poetry is very hard to handle on a Kindle, so it’s very hard to find the poem you want. But we’ve also produced these pocketbooks with a semi-waterproof cover.
Tim Ferriss: Perfect.
David Whyte: Yeah, and they just fit in a jacket, so you can take them out and peruse, yeah. But the best place to hold a poem is in your mind and heart, actually. But to begin with, you have to start with the page.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, start with the lifting weights before you go win the gold at the Olympics. The piece “Time,” what prompted the writing of that particular piece?
David Whyte: Well, the whole writing of Consolations II, following the first Consolations, was so intense. It was written in a kind of delirium between January and July of this year, ’24.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God, that’s really fast.
David Whyte: Yeah. 60 essays in seven months, 52 of which appear in the book. Each one a very intense drop into the abyss, in a way. And it reached its culmination in, I think it was May or the end of April. first of all, I was in Rome working with the Vatican there, and 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.
Tim Ferriss: As one does prior to their Tuscan walking tour. Yeah.
David Whyte: In order to write. And I’d seen this place for a long time, but it was so phenomenally expensive, I said, “I can’t afford to stay there.” But then I said, “If you get an essay a day, your guilt will be assuaged, David.” And so I booked in for three nights. And the place was so stunning, and so silent, and so wonderful. And the people who ran it were so hospitable, and the food was so great. And the surrounding countryside and horizons that we’ve been speaking about were so enticing. I just felt the bottom drop out from me. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let’s extend this.
David Whyte: Exactly. So I went down, thank God I could stay in the same room because I was writing so well in there. And on the fourth day, I wrote “Time.” I started it in the morning.
Tim Ferriss: That was in one day you wrote that?
David Whyte: I wrote it in, I don’t know, probably seven or eight or nine hours. I started in the morning. I took a few breaks, walking, and finished at 11 o’clock at night or midnight with this piano player, me and the piano player in the Humphrey Bogart bar in the hotel. But in the middle of that day, I felt as if time was looking me in the face. And I felt as if I was, well, I mean, the classic phrase is the out of body experience. But I felt as if all the walls were looking back at me and everything was corroborating my experience of time that I was speaking. So it was an out of body experience looking back at myself. I mean a really physical experience of being out of my body. Time looking me in the face. A kind of breakdown with time as I looked back at time and held its gaze. This is the only way I can describe it. And a sudden release from all the ways I’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. 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. And 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
David Whyte: Well, you can edit out as much as you want. I will just maybe read some excerpts from it.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I’m not in any rush whatsoever. I’m having so much fun. And more than fun. I mean, it’s —
David Whyte: Well, it’s appropriate for you not to be in a rush If I’m going to read an essay called Time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Rush. Speed reading poetry is overrated.
David Whyte: Could you give me Time quickly?
Tim Ferriss: Best I can tell. You don’t want to chug, do a keg stand with a 30-year-old French wine. That’s not how you do it. All right. So I would love for you to recite it, and I feel also immense gratitude for you in a way, harnessing the power of naming. Perhaps in some ways like the Welsh. I mean, there’s a power in naming. And when you give words to feelings or fleeting insights or experiences that people have that are profoundly impacting, but perhaps get lost in the shuffle of life, when you’re able to freeze frame it, capture it on a page with memorable language, that’s a real service, I think, to providing people with the coordinates of that experience such that they might more readily access it again. If that makes some sense.
David Whyte: You’re very kind. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So without further ado, please.
David Whyte: 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. 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 start with one right at the beginning. Yes.
Time is on our side. Time is not our enemy. Time is our greatest friend. If we can come to know time in its own intimate, unfolding way and not through the abstract measure we have made of it, time starts to grant a greater, more spacious, more elemental, and even eternal freedom to every mortal, seemingly time-bound human life. Time is not slipping through our fingers. Time is here forever. It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time. Memory, and the traces of memory grant me a sense of time passing and also enable me to learn. How I remember through time and how I put those memories and that learning into conversation with the future shapes my identity for good or for ill.
Time lies at the center of my identity. Time only seems to be something in which I participate involuntarily. But time needs me voluntarily to deepen my understanding of its multivalent nature and help to mediate its life fully in my world. Time needs me. Needs me to live through all its many appearances to give it life and amplitude. Time exists in a field of possibility which I influence and partly determine. I may constantly cry that I need more time, but actually time needs more of me. More of our spacious, uninterrupted, timeless time to live out and understand both its extraordinary depths and its incalculable far-off horizons.
Time teaches us that nothing at the surface is as it seems, but also that all the surface seemings of the world depend upon the all-embracing multi-level, presence of time. Time may take a linear form in my mind, but only because my senses are narrow, my mind given to defensive postures, to surfaces and unimaginative forms that restrict my understanding of the multi-dimensional, radiant nature of existence. Time not only invites me below all surfaces, but in all directions at once, including frighteningly, when time seemingly turns back towards me and looks me in the face.
Time may seem always to be flowing away from me, but in deeper states of attention, I and time are reciprocal partners. We create a multifaceted conversational reality together, not only through memory, but through direct experience. Seeing the multitudinous face of time itself and courageously holding its gaze is one of the great thresholds of religious transformation. When my sense of time breaks out of the linear, so does my identity in the deeper timeless states of love or newly being in love, time radiates out from the very place where I am standing, unbinding me from the well-fitted, previously time-bound manacles of my routine life. 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. Love is time unanchored and let 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, time is where I feel most powerless. Without love, time is where I feel most powerless. Because time passes and I will die. So I hold on, of course, to a version of time mediated through control, exhausting my very power to live through the very force of my grip. Living fully and giving freedom to those who live with me often means letting go of the way I hold onto time, and all the ways I hold onto the people I love too strictly, too narrowly, and too unimaginatively, to my particular version of time.
Whatever the version of time we have arranged for ourselves, time always feels like a powerful gravity, a pull to our senses, always drawing us toward a clock, toward an appointment, toward a sense that something should be happening now, whether it is actually possible or not. Time is intimately connected with gravity. Astonishingly, physicists tell our disbelieving ears that everything gravitates toward places where time moves more slowly. And time seems to move more slowly the greater the mass to which it is near. The greater the gravity, the greater the slowing down of time. So that to our amazement, someone living on a 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. Presence invites other presences towards it. Presence slows time down and opens up possibilities of experiencing the timeless and the eternal. The depth, amplitude and invitational nature of my presence slows time for everyone around me. Timelessness is the foundation of all real charism and charisma. By creating a centered, timeless presence, I invite everyone unconsciously to make the choice to join me there. Or should they be afraid of what might happen in that slow, spacious territory of possibility, run a hundred miles in the opposite direction.
What is disturbing about time in my mortal human world is that my personal surface experience of it is irrevocable. The glass broken into a hundred shards cannot heal itself. The child I lost will never return to me. The regrets I have are things I can only heal in my imagination, 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. 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 at another level, newly disordered, but also full of new potential. 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. Even though my time will come to an end, time does not pass. Even though I will pass, time will carry on to eternity. Therefore, a proper relationship with the foundational nature of time is my own everyday doorway into the eternal. When I stop counting time as a way of controlling it, I stop my addiction to naming the hours and what should occur in those hours. That single pathway across the field suddenly branches to a hundred more no one has explored. That 30 minutes with my son or daughter fully spent lives for years as a precious, binding memory.
When we stop measuring change, as if we knew what measuring change actually meant, the human ability to measure time also stops. Which is why on a silent retreat or in a monastery, we make all the outer hours repeatable. So that day after day, nothing on the outside seems to change. We stop time on the outside so that we can concentrate on all the ways things change and grow on the inside. We dwell in the deepening, broadening, and maturing sense of presence we call the timeless. As our war against time quietens, we start to take joy in the increased acuity of the years. The entrancing aromas of rain on fresh leaves that we previously never gave ourselves the time to breathe. Time is left to itself to be itself and to grow what it needs to grow in every season of a human life. In a deeply rested state, as we loosen our grip on what we think is time, our sense of bodily tension falls away. Along with the falling away of a falsely measured self. And out of that, we begin to experience that joyful radiance we call timelessness, growing through every cell of our previously time-bound bodies.
Just like now, as I write these last lines in the quiet late-night hours in a hotel bar in Italy, listening to miracle hands moving softly over the keys of a perfectly tuned piano, memory meeting the moment in each note, and then memory and moment both disappearing and reappearing 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.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
David Whyte: Thank you for giving me the time to read “Time.” It takes me right back, both to the physical experience and the hotel bar, I might say at the end of the night, with this brilliant pianist, actually. He was marvelous.
Tim Ferriss: Well, what a gift of a 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.
David Whyte: Just so long as the listener doesn’t feel they need a Perugian castle in order to write.
Tim Ferriss: 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. 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?
David Whyte: That’s quite an invitation, Tim. I think we could spend the next week here, actually.
Tim Ferriss: Well, the broadband’s pretty good.
David Whyte: Except you’re in a hotel room in New York, so I’m in pleasanter surroundings. I see the shades of night have fallen fast outside your window there.
Tim Ferriss: They have indeed. Yes. It’s like a time-lapse of the sun going up and down.
David Whyte: I think for now we’ve had a marvelous conversation. But I’d say the whole invitation 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. And you will eventually make a prison of that territory too, but that’s going to be the end of that season. And you’ll learn how to get out of the prison earlier. You’ll be able to recognize when you’re impersonating yourself instead of being yourself. And you don’t have to write it yourself. You can just read good poetry. Or learn how to start to speak, even in just a hesitant, broken, stuttering way, what you feel needs to be said to a loved one, or to a colleague, or to a friend, or to yourself in the mirror, that’s the invitation I’d like to leave people with.
Tim Ferriss: And certainly I recommend people get their hands on anything that you’ve written, including your latest, Consolations II, which further explores what you call the conversational nature of reality, which is a wording I absolutely love. And people can find you at davidwhyte.com. All things David Whyte, W-H-Y-T-E, dotcom. And I would kick myself if I didn’t ask, for people who are inspired by this conversation, who want to dip their toes into the waters of poetry, aside from your own poetry, are there any starting points you might recommend for intrepid readers of poetry?
Because for instance, I’ll admit something embarrassing. For me, for a long time, and maybe this was from going to schools where I was presented with this stuff, but I would end up reading poetry that seemed impenetrable.
David Whyte: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It seemed just 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.
David Whyte: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then I came across certain poets. Mary Oliver, certainly Hafez, and many others who made sense to me, finally.
David Whyte: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And I was like, oh, this can exist. And that opened the door for me to engage. So I’m wondering if there are other poets or collections that you might put on a shortlist for people who are shy but interested in engaging?
David Whyte: Yes. Well, I think just to find the doorway in is always so personal. And so I’d advise going along the bookshelf, pulling them down and putting them back up until you find a voice that speaks to you. And to have faith. And that voice will lead you to a lot of other voices. 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 is so invitational, actually. She’s so engaging. She’s so simple. She’s so clear. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tim Ferriss: That the one. Wild geese, right?
David Whyte: Yeah. That’s the invitation you want, is one, the voice that speaks to you. Yeah. And Robert Bly’s translations of Antonio Machado. Seamus Heaney’s poetry. And are are so many — Emily Dickinson. There are so many clear voices. And there is some impenetrable poetry that’s worth giving your time to, but only if you feel it’s worth giving. Only once you’ve got the love for poetry. But there is a lot of bad impenetrable poetry too. So your intuition may be entirely correct. Yes.
Tim Ferriss: It’s one thing to be impenetrable with a purpose and on purpose.
David Whyte: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
David Whyte: Lovely. Absolutely, yeah. 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. So that’s much appreciated. Thank you very much.
Tim Ferriss: 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. So I think I’m going to get straight into a meditation session after this, and then go get a bite to eat.
David Whyte: Lovely.
Tim Ferriss: But really appreciate the time.
David Whyte: Yes. Don’t neglect those fantastic bars and restaurants in Manhattan.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I won’t, I won’t. And to everybody listening, we will link to everything we discussed in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog/podcast. Just search David Whyte and it’ll pop right up. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, both to others and to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.
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I love this so much. Thank you, Tim.
Visit Zambia one day, Tim.
Be sure to contact me when you do so. We can meditate together 😉
—Bob, Zambia.
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