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Tetra gramon blessing of the Morning Light the blessing of the Morning Light to you may it find you even in your invisible appearances may you be seen to have risen from some other place you know and have known in the darkness and that
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carries all you need may you see what is hidden in you as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter May what is hidden in you become your gift to give may you hold that shadow to the light and the Silence of that shelter to the word of
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the light may you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance this new morning this being seen again new and newly alive it's so beautiful tell me how that poem came to be I had a very good friend uh he was quite well known John odonahue and uh he wrote on the Celtic world I first knew him when he was poor as a church mouse as a priest in the heart of konara and he became a worldwide phenomena really with his book Anam Cara
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he was a philosopher poet I'm a poet philosopher in a way I came to philosophy through poetry he came to poetry in a way through his studies of the great German philosophers actually and actually had a post-graduate from
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heidleberg and and all the greats you know great German philosophers but he and I were so close very close friends we spent a lot of time together and I always imagined that he would have been the person who said the last words over
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me being having been a priest for 17 years but he passed away at the height of his powers at 52 years old wow yes and it was a really a terrible shock for me at the time and was like losing a part of myself uh and every Easter until he left the priesthood he would lead a mass at this ruined monastery called camro so it'd be up depending what time Easter was that year uh it'd be up before the light to get there to greet the light
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and to lead the mass and because John was so articulate thousands of people would come actually and the ruins would be filled with people and so I used to think about him I would be on the west coast at 10:00 the night before the same time as him and uh thinking about him getting up and leading this math and then came the year when he was no longer alive and and Easter came and I thought of him and and so that PO is dedicated to JN Adu so
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beautiful the blessing of the Morning Light to you may it find you even in your invisible appearances you know the way we can walk into a room and the person people are seeing is not necessarily the person who's actually appeared we have something that we're carrying some grief or some difficulty with a loved one or our own health and we don't feel like we we should overwhelm people on the outside so we create something of a mask and quite
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often it's not just in defense it's in care for other people but the great tragedy of the Mask is you you start to think that that's you yeah so the ability to to open a Road between the what I call the inner Horizon inside a
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person to the outer Horizon and to create a conversation between them we're very aware of of the effect on outer Horizons on our life uh we love Horizons and in fact there's a lot of medical uh research at the moment showing that when
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you're looking at into the far distance when you're looking at Horizons your physiology changes and you're actually in a much happier State than when you're looking at things that are close up which makes a lot of sense sense when
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you think about the good that a good walk does for you when you're able to get your head up you know and look and we know what it's like to live next to the Horizon of the sea or the mountains or and one of the beautiful dynamics of
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her of a horizon is that by definition there's something over it and there's something over it that you can't see actually it belongs to the unknown and of course mythologically the outer Horizon represents the future What Lies
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over it is going to come into your life if you move towards it and more and more of the unknown will be revealed to you but always there'll be another Horizon ahead of you yeah so it's a very it's a very ancient dynamic in the human soul
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but it's really interesting to think about the fact that we also have an inner Horizon but we quite often have a very different relationship with that Horizon we often see it instead of of a line of invitation we see it as a line of
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resistance almost like a barrier and that's often where I keep my griefs below there and I won't allow myself to articulate them I haven't been taught how to speak from that unknown that lies below that Horizon in a way and in many
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ways I've joined the communal social conspiracy of keeping it hidden the things we learn in a family that are unspoken that you learn unconsciously to keep keep unspoken and they're almost always the things that we feel at the deepest
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level that's what the great French philosopher Camu encouraged us to do which was live to the point of Tears he said uh which is not an invitation to modeling sentimentality but an invitation to feeling everything as
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deeply as you can and uh that involves going down below this Horizon that we know normally feel as a line of resistance so to be able to put the inner Horizon in conversation with the outer Horizon immediately is a very powerful thing for a human being and other other human beings recognize that it's happening unconsciously and are drawn towards it and they call it Charisma and when you take another step and you put what is below the Horizon
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inside you in conversation with with what is Beyond the Horizon outside you that's when we recognize spiritual power in another person in many ways it's the representation of mystical experience the inner unknown inside a human being conversing with the unknown that lies Beyond them and so you suddenly get this enormous spectrum of experience so that's all in that line the blessing of the Morning Light you may find you even in your invisible
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appearances may you be seen to have risen from some other place you know and have known in the darkness and that carries all you need there's the sense that always when you drop below that in inner Horizon it's it's new territory
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but it's also an old memory at the same time oh this is how things should this is where I came from this is my true home in my body in this life in this incarnation would you say there's resolution there well there's resolution
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in the sense of just being but just being in relationship to all other beings you've kept the road between this deep inner self open and What Lies Over the Horizon so that's the whole invitation in the poem is is for you to let the
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light find you at its deepest level this is very powerful in the ENT uh dogen zeni in the 12th century uh one of the great teachers a great Zen master said if you go out and confirm the 10,000 things this is delusion but if
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the 10,000 Things Come and confirm you this is Enlightenment it's a beautiful description of Enlightenment because it's so practical and every day actually because it's really saying Enlightenment is not some arrived platform where
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you're going to be immune to the griefs and difficulties of Being Human no Enlightenment is just being in a real conversation at the edge the furthest Edge you can be at there's no other place you can be actually so you can be
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enlightened when you just actually stumble at the beginning of a path into something that's other than you and you sincerely engag with that that's a form of Enlightenment you and of course there's the path that goes beyond that
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moment may it find you even in your invisible appearances may you be seen to have risen from some other place you know and have known in the darkness and that carries all you need may you see what is hidden in you as a place of
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hospitality of hospitality and shadowed shelter May what is hidden from you become your gift to give May hold that shadow to the light and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light may you join every previous
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disappearance with this new appearance this new morning this being seen again new and newly alive but actually the most powerful line in the poem because I often say portra is the act of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you
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knew and I often say quite often didn't want to know much you were quite you were quite happy in your former delusion actually not knowing so a form of emancipation you and an emancipation we always have to get used to we're not used to a certain kind of Freedom so we'll go back into the and put the manacles on again but the line I overheard myself saying was may you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance this new morning this
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being seen again new and newly alive and I had this sense of just almost like remembering all at once all of the disappearances I'd been dragged in my life unwillingly and most of the time human beings do go into their
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disappearances unwillingly there's no human life that isn't like the cycles of the Moon where we're on the up and up for the first half of the cycle and then we're waning and then there's three days and three nights of every metaphorical
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month when the moon disappears and you don't know what's going on and you think you're supposed to know what's going on know all the time but no no you're just meant to not know if you did know something it would be the wrong thing if
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you did say something it'd be the wrong thing to say if you did go in a certain direction you'd be off the path you should be on so you're not supposed to know most human beings tend to think well I'm only really alive when things
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are on the up and up when everything's illuminated I can name things and and in the second half of the cycle there's something wrong with me there's something wrong with the world and there's something wrong with God and so I'm just going to wait until the cycle comes round which means that most human beings are at war with reality 50% of the time so what would be it be like to get with the program and go willingly into the cycle
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of disappearance so the great beautiful question coming out of those last lines for me was what what is The Disappearance I'm going through now that I'm not aware of that I'm subtly being dragged into against my will yeah I'm
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not looking at it I'm refusing to look at it and the longer I refuse to look at it the more dire the circumstances become whereby I'm forced to look at it we all know that dynamic in our lives and have witnessed it in other people's
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lives this new morning this being seen again new and newly alive and of course that last line is speaking to a kind of radical Simplicity and almost always what's asked of us is a kind of doing and some kind of radical simplification in our life the human foot is a true Marvel of engineering with 26 bones 33 joints and over 100 muscles and tendons it's built for flexibility balance and natural movement unfortunately today's narrow
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world learn more at Vivo barefoot.com Tetra and embrace your human nature do you think we're always aware of the inner Horizons unconsciously I I think we are yeah it's where our sense of dis inner disturbance comes from which is the
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experience most human beings have most of the time of not feeling quite equal to circumstances and uh we're trying to bring that inner Horizon into conversation with what lies outside US I have a I did a whole series uh one of my
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three Sunday series on shame earlier this year and then one of the essays in my new volume of of constellations it's called Shame I think the first line is something like shame is not as shameful as it might seem actually it's simply
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that abiding human Dynamic whereby we're always trying to be equal to circumstances outside outside of us and naturally feeling as if we don't measure up a lot of the time and it's it happens along a spectrum and a gradation
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anything from me feeling I'm not equal to the questions you're asking just even a slight sense of how am I going to answer that that's a tiny little bit of Shame if I don't actually feel as if I'm really meeting you you know or just a
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conversation in a cocktail bar and there was something you wanted to say and you missed it you know and afterwards when you're walking home you said oh I wish I'd have said that that's a very mild innocuous form a shame but then the
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depth of Shame proceeds along a whole Spectrum to the point at which you'll feel you shouldn't actually be here in alive you you shouldn't be in this body you're you're not worthy of actually meeting all everything around you or the
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people you're with so the ability to feel the vulnerability of of Shame completely transforms it because I can feel unequal to circumstances but it can actually allow me to invite the learning and the understanding that
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that's giving me in other words I can Apprentice myself to my reluctance I can Apprentice myself to my dis from where where I am if I'm in the presence of a really charismatic person and I feel charismatically challenged myself I find it hard to believe you ever find yourself charismatically challenged John Adu could do it to me no but I I remember feeling in the presence of Sheamus heene in a very lovely way actually I met shamini three
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times in my life and one the greatest ports of the the last 70 years you the greatest port in Ireland acknowledged you know for the last 50 years or so and uh my hero you know from when I was quite young so to meet him and I had three different meetings during my life each time I felt incredibly shy but shy shyness is the wholeway of presence you know it's here's another quality that we felt ashamed about but actually shyness is is an appropriate
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experience to have when you're in the presence of something that you desire deeply and you don't know how to begin the conversation at all it's like being in the presence of someone you're deeply attracted to and you're suddenly all
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fingers and thumbs and you don't know what to say what to wear where to put your body or that's a sign that you're in the presence the hallway of something you desire deeply so to be able to feel that and Apprentice yourself to your
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difficulties yeah part of the task of these essays in the constellations books are to rehabilitate words but more more particularly the quality be that lies behind words that we use in pejorative ways so regret for instance very un has been very unfashionable over the last 50 years or so you're constantly meeting people say who I who say I regret nothing and uh my thought always is you need to get out more where have you been all your life
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yeah I often think that life is just one humiliation after another and that's actually how we we learn you know uh but regret for being a bad father for instance true sincere regret of being a bad father can turn you into a very good
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grandfather so that you can you can have real love and affection but also time presence for a grandchild that you realize you never gave to your own son while they were way were here so regret can be this beautiful turning towards so
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for instance I haven't written actually a piece on this but reluctance is an everyday part of human life the reluctance to be here or to go somewhere we're constantly being just the way human social life is we're constantly finding ourselves in circumstances my wife wants to go there or my friends want to go there but when you think about it we were born in this beautiful form of reluctance to be here that cry you hear from a child when
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they're born is not the sound of someone who is happy to be here they've gone through this astonishing painful trauma and they've been taken from this rent-free environment next to the midnight heartbeat of their mother and either squeezed out into the world or taken out of their mother's body and then valves and uh tissues open and close in a in an infant's body that never open and close to the rest of their life you go through this one
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physiological transformation in which you expel the fluid from your lungs that initially surrounded you and you take in what feels like poison which is oxygen you hear this cry which causes Joy with for everyone around yeah I was in Morocco and in Morocco if you don't know who said anything you always say it was roomie so I was told in Morocco that roomie said we're born crying with everyone around us laughing and the object is to go out laughing
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with everyone around you crying and it's so to be able to Apprentice yourself to your own reluctance for instance and just to start to observe how much you feel reluctant about and that there's actually nothing wrong with
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it I often think that life is so full of difficulty grief and loss every human being at one time or another has the right to say listen God even if they don't believe in God people say listen God I am not having this conversation
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it's too painful it's too hard it's too heartbreaking I'm turning my face away I'm going to look at things that are that are more pleasant yeah and so uh reluctance is our Birthright but part of turning our face back actually is actually initially actually turning your face back to your reluctance yeah cuz only you feel reluctance in this particular way no other human being feels reluctant with the same coloration and the same background story
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as you do so to be able to step into oh that's right I feel reluctant about this and it's fine being reluctant yeah I'm reluctant for a reason actually and almost always my reluctance is actually an inverse calibration of the very necessity to go through that door because I know what I'll have to give up to go through that door we have this phrase writers block but that's what it is actually it's the unwillingness to to go through the door
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yeah we call it right of the block but it's actually a fear of dying yeah you're going to die the intuition is it feels like in your body you're going to die if you do that and the intuition is correct in a metaphorical sense yeah tell me more about that about the idea of writing is dying well it's really dying away from the surface Carz that we've grown we know this very well in the Zoological animal world the way animals shed their skins
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yeah and one of my poems called fire in the earth is has the image of Moses in it before the burning bush and I don't know if you remember but when the voice of God speaks from the flames and says Moses's name the next
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thing that said is God's voice says take off your shoes yeah you're standing on Holy Ground and I was once reciting the piece in New York City and there was a there was a hidic man you know in full regalia at the front and he came up afterwards
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he was very excited and he said do you know what the verb is in the original biblical language what the actual Hebrew is yeah for When God says take off your shoes I said no he said God says shed your shoes and it's the same verb for an
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animal shedding its skin so the idea is these shoes are brought you here but now they're falling apart actually so just step out of them onto the ground the ground that's been holding you all along so I do think the dying
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for human beings is a kind of of shedding of a skin and we've all been through experiences where we go through a kind of uglification in our surface lives we make ourselves deeply unattractive to other people and it's
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this instinctual knowledge that we need to reset our relationship with the world and our present Dynamic of friendship is actually keeping us in place or even a relationship we've all been through you know in our younger days where you
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wanted to end a relationship you didn't know how to end it so you you indulged in bad behavior and you just hoped that they'd find you deeply unattractive and go away because your axis of earos is actually looking for something else to
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come along it yeah and it's not this person but you don't have the courage to tell them that it just isn't right so we have this way of shedding our skin for this new complexion to arise from the inside do you remember the
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poem yeah I've got two Moses poems actually this is the burning bush poem yeah so one of them is the opening of eyes that day I saw beneath dark clouds the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out I knew then as I had before life is no passing memory of what has been now the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read it is the opening of eyes long closed it is the vision of far off
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things seen for the silence they hold it is the heart after years of secret conversing speaking out loud in the clear air it is Moses in the desert Fallen to his knees before the lit Bush it is the man throwing away his shoes as
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if to enter Heaven and finding himself astonished opened at last fallen in love with Solid Ground beautiful that's great that day I saw beneath dark clouds the passing light over the water and I heard heard the voice of the world speak
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out I knew then as I had before life is no passing memory of what is been now the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read it is the opening of eyes long closed it is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they
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hold it is the heart the heart after years of secret conversing speaking out loud in the clear air it is Moses in the desert Fallen to his knees before the lit bu it as the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter Heaven and
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finding himself astonished opened at last fallen in love with Solid [Music] Ground l M NT element electrolytes have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best add element electrolytes to your daily routine perform better and sleep deeper improve your cognitive function experience an increase in steady energy with fewer headaches and fewer muscle crank
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life so visit drink LM nt.com Tetra and stay salty with element electrolytes [Music] lmnt tell me about writing how do these come to be doeses it start with a line does it start with an idea well when you're first apprenticing
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yourself to writing it starts with ideas and uh almost always you've got to let go of the first idea or to deepen it so I think real writing comes from from actually getting below uh The Horizon of the place where you mediate
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things through language so other words you go to the the unspoken you tend to think when you're a young poet that you're going to go inside and eventually find this place from which you'll know exactly what to say but at my experience
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is it's almost the exact opposite you're going to go to the place inside you that doesn't know what to say and that's the place that's going to speak and that's what's miraculous that what puts what's below the Horizon inside you in
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conversation with what lies Beyond the Horizon outside you and that's the language that's going to speak to everyone and it's language against which we have no defenses which is one of my definitions of poetry tell me
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practically what that experience is like you can't describe it practically you have to say it in poetry actually you have to have the numinus because it is an experience of the numinous it comes out of a very physical feeling of edge
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inside you so for instance Sheamus heene he used a very masculine image he called it the coal face where you're digging at this seam and you're getting all this astonishing fuel but it's it's some Edge inside you from which language emerges I
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was in Granada a few years ago and Granada is really in this steep valley with the alambra the famous Fortress Palace on top of one Ridge and then it that falls down to the river I think it's the river Duro down below and
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then there's a steep facing Hillside but that's covered in small houses and Alleyways and Secret Gardens it's called the albine and I go there to write actually partly because any time of night and day you can go out and get a coffee or a tapers or you can be on your own rhythms you know but one of the things that I would do religiously every morning was go out to my favorite coffee house that I discovered which was called
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Barista Duran and it's by by the side of this little bridge over the tiny River so extremely hot in the city but this river is coming out of the Sierra Nevada at 9,000 ft so it's cool water glistening water and there are trees
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along the side of the stream and there were birds in the trees but I was sat on the bridge waiting for the coffee shop to open and I'm just aware of the complete Stillness around me except I suddenly noticed after a little while
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that there's a river or even a a little rivulet of air which is passing along the top of the trees and disturbing the tessellations of leaves right at the top all the way down but on the lower half of the trees the leaves are absolutely still so I'm realizing there's a parallel stream that's moving to the stream below but in between there's there's Absolut abolute Stillness and I asked myself the beautiful question which was why is that
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so beautiful to human beings when you're looking at a moonlit Lake and it's absolutely still and you're seeing the reflection the full reflection of the moon in the lake until a zephyr of air comes along and the whole surface breaks
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into a kaleidoscope of and shards of of shimmering moons you know and then the Zephyr disappears and the moon Recon institutes we always find that incredibly astonishing so I took that into the coffee shop actually and I got my pen
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and paper out and I probably had about half an hour of just writing lines that were describing the surface experience yeah and then suddenly the title came which was a seeming Stillness yeah and then suddenly a physical inner correspondence a kind of inner experience so the first stanza went something like this a seeming still we love the movement in a seeming Stillness the breath in the body of a loved one sleeping the highest leaves in the
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silent wood a great migration in the sky above the Waters of the Earth the blood in the body the first soft stir in the silence beneath the strident voice the internal hands of the Mind always looking for touch thought thoughts
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seeking other thoughts seeking other Minds The Great arrival of form through all our hidden themes so that was the hallway into the poem those were the first steps it's just the physical descriptions of all the beautiful forms you know when your
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child is an infant every parent has a moment where they say to themselves oh my God have they stopped breathing yes and you put your hand against their mouth and you're so relieved you feel that warm breath and the moment in an
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argument when a your loved one's voice softens you know and you hear forgiveness or you hear understanding in the voice yeah then the next lines came which took me deeper yeah and the next lines are we all a sunlet moment come
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from a long Darkness what moves us always comes from what is hidden what seems to be said so suddenly has lived in the body for a long long time so that that is that description of what you're asking about really out of nowhere but if you're physically in that place and you've learned how to stay in that place I mean one of the reasons we won't ground ourselves in the body is you're actually grounding yourself in the unknown you're grounding
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yourself in the frontier of your next maturation which is actually half known and half unknown so we'd much rather stay up in the head where we can name things exactly and know everything and not be surprised you know so to drop
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down into the bodies to properly is to put immediately put yourself into the unknown this body never stops maturing never stops growing older yeah so you're actually engaging with your own mortality in an unconscious way but
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you're also starting to engage with with the uh seasonality of your experience yeah instead of absenting you're from that yourself from that maturation so for instance in the Romantic tradition colid and Keat talked about the primary
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imagination which is this ability to go down to the central tonality of your body for them uh the ability to think up new things which is what we normally talk about as the imagination that's the secondary imagination or the fancy they
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called it yeah very precise yeah the primary IM in ination is the ability to drop down into the part of you that is keyed into or Central to the constellation of events and qualities that you're surrounded by at any one time so by going to that place you're immediately in conversation with things as they are stretching right out to as far a horizon as you can see or imagine unconsciously and then what you start to make conscious through
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articulation where're all a sunlet moment come from a long Darkness what moves as always comes from what is hidden what seems to be said so suddenly has lived in the body for a long long time so I suddenly realized oh we're
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talking about the breath here you know we're everything's breathing around us but we've also got this breath which we turn away from yeah one of the things I've always experienced in Zen Retreats is by the Third day you suddenly realize
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no matter how many Retreats you've done before how much effort you're putting into the breath that you're actually overriding this naturally rested autonomic system which will if you leave it alone will breathe in the way it's meant to breathe will be good for your body and will give and take it's a a an archetypal ground of generosity knowing when to give and when to take yeah and the invitation is always to let yourself
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radically alone yeah so the next lines are our life is a breath then a coming and a going a bridge between singing a separate self and learning to be selfless a bridge between singing a separate self and learning to be
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selfless breathe then as if breathing for the first time as if remembering with what difficulty you first came came into the world what strength it took to take that first impossible in breath and turn it into a cry to be heard by the
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world your essence has always been the first vulnerability of being found of being heard and of being seen and from the very beginning the one who has always needed and being given so much invisible help this is how you were when
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you first came into the world this is how you were when you took your first breath in this world this is the unspoken unknown place from which you could live your life for the rest of your days this is the raw vulnerability
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of your every day and this is how you will want to be and be remembered when you leave the world so halfway through that poem actually I had my oh my God here we go moment it suddenly dropping below the Horizon and getting very Fierce yeah overwhelming your surface understanding of parallels of of invisible there's nothing technical happening it's something else yes it breaks open into yeah would you view it as a form of channeling no cuz
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it's coming from in you so it's not yeah no it's uh it's a deep form of conversation so people always say I didn't write it myself s i It Was Written yeah that's not my experience and I don't think actually it is it is
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an accurate experience of what channeling is not what's happening we're meant to be participants yeah so we're half of every conversation so you're certainly in in a meeting with powers larger than yourself but those powers in some ways
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strangely seem to are asking you to make it real yes and that poem is really about the invisible speaking into the visible yes so it's literally asking me to make what cannot be seen seen and what cannot be said said yes to bring it
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out do you feel like it's in service to something well increasingly yes I mean when I was younger I felt it was in service to me becoming a great poet you know and being acknowledged for my powers and being kept in the manner to
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which I wanted to become accustomed but with maturity you realize that you're transforming lives actually and that's actually the most satisfying thing when people come up to you and say oh you helped me through a really dark time oh that poem that line I all I needed was that line and that line actually turned my life around yeah yeah you realize the responsibility of that and you realize also that that's actually the the pearl without
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price that ability to reach out and give to others that's what's Remembered in a human life you know when you're at a memorial service you're never really moved by their achievements what you're moved by is by what they loved in their life when
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you hear what they loved and when you hear stories from others about how they were transformed by by something they said or by the way they were and you said the word responsibility that's I think it's a funny word to use
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I suppose in it's a sense of not the weight and burden of responsibility but literally the ability to come out and meet to respond I see yeah the world says something to you and some response is yeah is needed yeah so it could be
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deep silence sometimes the responsibility yeah in in the first book there are 52 essays yes how did you pick the words well I started in a very natural way actually I was uh I remember I've worked in Paris with a big fashion house
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for years with their leadership and I was walking uh through the streets of Paris I used to on my day off I would take this long circular walk through Paris I called it my Sunwood walk I set off in the morning near the Lou and head towards the maray where the sun in the East and then whatever would catch my eye a little mum here a little Art Gallery there uh an oer stand you know I would get caught up by then I'd look at the sun again and
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see it had moved and I'd follow the Sun so each time you did it you go a different anticlockwise circuit through Paris so I was coming towards the end of this walk and the phone rang it was my assistant she said Oh The Observer magazine and
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Sunday Observer wants you to do a philosophical column so I got very excited it was 2 million people you know read The Observer on a Sunday morning and she said there's just two stipulations and I said what that and
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she said it has to be a single word title and you've only got 300 words well immediately I felt that reluctance I was talking about earlier why does it have to be a single word title and 300 words is barely time for
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an Irishman to catch his breath you know so I walked you know a few hundred yards few hundred meters and I said get over yourself David what what what is this you know I just said asked the beautiful question which was what if you could
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have a single word title and say it in 300 words and so I got to this restaurant where I booked in and I sat down and uh I asked for some if they had any paper you know I got my pen out and I wrote regret across the top of the
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page and I think what that was about was all the strictures i' put on myself about what I needed in order to write and it wasn't just length or title it was I needed to be home I needed to be in my studio I needed a proper two weeks
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at home in fact I needed four weeks CU I needed a week you know to transist and a week afterwards all of these things I I said what if you could just write anywhere what if you could and then immediately of course what that brings
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up is all the times you never rol yeah because you had all of these stipulations yeah self-imposed rules exactly and we have the same thing in the you know all the times I was never generous yeah all the times I never got
45:26
over myself all the times all the times all the times and so I wrote regret yeah and I was so pleased with what it did for me and what I felt it would do for the reader you know in rehabilitating this word as I said earlier that ability to
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to have a regret fully experienced puts you into a better relationship to the Future because when you fully experience it as the Greeks said using this beautiful word anano dromia which means once something becomes its
45:59
absolute Essence it immediately starts to turn into something else yeah so as soon as you concentrate it into its absolute Essence it can no longer stay in that form it starts to mature so I sent regret off and I said I'd love to do that for a lot of other qualities in my life that I'm interesting that it went from something that you resisted were almost uh insulted by the suggestion yes and then it turned into a whole new
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model for work for you yes yes and of course it's a daily experience in marriage and relationship the things we find ourselves in high dudgeon about is Regret in the first book uh it say so much of today's life happens on
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48:08
Tetra and get started today so this was the piece that ended up inspiring the whole project although at the time that you wrote it you didn't know that yes and uh I started right away writing I was so excited about what
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a opened up from it's such a great feeling isn't it yeah when you make a discovery yeah and see a new possibility that wasn't there before it's a very exciting feeling I love it yes so I got uh 24 of them and I uh of different words um such as uh friendship and alone and uh shyness giving honesty uh longing vulnerability I started a reader Circle as a way of getting me to write more so people signed up and paid a subscription
49:02
I think I got a hundred people to pay $100 each and it was like getting in advance on the book in a way and then that was so successful I then said well let's do another reader Circle and before I knew it another year later I had
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48 and then I wrote another few and I said oh let's do the book and so it was all it was very organic very natural by sheer luck when the book came out every reviewer said oh 52 essays you know a pack of cards one for each week of the
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year and I said to myself oh that was sheer look because I did I never thought of the 52 as representing so there was something really natural and wonderful about the whole thing yeah so the second volume had to have 52 yes which seemed
49:47
impossible at one time but here's regret yeah from the streets of Paris yeah regret is a short evocative and ACH ly beautiful word an allergy to Lost possibilities even in its brief Annunciation it is also a rarity and
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almost never heard except where the speaker insists that they have none that they are brave and forward-looking and could not possibly imagine their life in any other way than the way it is to admit regret is to understand we are fallible that there are powers in the world Beyond us to admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present and yet strangely to admit
50:35
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
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province of Youth that it takes a hard one maturity to experience the depths of regret in ways that do not overwhelm and debilitate us but put us into a proper more generous relationship with the future except for brief senses of having
51:15
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 for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own to regret fully is to appreciate how high the
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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 how high the stakes are exactly very beautiful did you write it in that one sitting I did yeah many of the other essays were not written in in one sitting and this latest generation of of essays in the uh in the second constellation books are are a bit fiercer edgier and very few of them were
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written in one sitting actually they were taking everything I had to write in a way I would have to uh walk away and come back I was having physical experiences too it's because I started really writing this I had to go
52:52
at them last summer and got a lot of rough UHS but really I only started writing in Earnest this January and so I've written 52 essays uh between January and July and the effect especially of going from word to word if I hadn't finished one I would look at
53:12
another if I if I reached an edge I couldn't get further on I would then turn my face to another essay I was working on the cumulative effect was very Fierce on my psyche and my body so I was at a Retreat a place in the middle
53:28
of Perugia actually and uh I was writing an essay on time and I had this astonishing out ofbody experience in the middle of writing as if I was looking in on myself and as if my body was turned inside out the experience of writing on time was
53:47
turning me inside out there's one line in that essay where I say time is not slipping through our fingers we are slipping through the fing fingers of time and that was the moment where everything broke open so very very physical experience would you like to read time I could yeah so again we often use the word time in very pejorative ways there's never enough time we say where am I going to find the time I have to make time as if
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that would be even possible so the whole the whole unconscious use of our word time at the the Strategic surface of Our Lives is time as the enemy really so this is trying to look at the actual reality time is on our
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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
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eternal freedom to every Mortal seemingly time bound human life time is not slipping through our fingers time is here forever it is we who are slipping through the fingers of time memory and the traces of memory grant me a sense of time passing and also enable me to learn how I remember through time and how I learn and how I put those memories and that learning into conversation with the future shapes my identity for good or for
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ill time is 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 the world time
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needs me 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
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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 nothing could happen and nothing could be remembered in our lives where it not for
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that strange multi-dimensional multi-level quality we reduce to calling time not the functioning of a single human cell nor the vast weather systems passing through our skies or through the surrounding Cosmos of our planetary systems time is both the ground beneath our feet and the spacious sky under which everything is allowed to happen time may take a linear form in my mind but only because my senses are narrow my mind given to defensive
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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
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seemingly turns back towards me and looks me in the face time may seem always to be flowing away from me but in deep states of attention I and time are reciprocal partners in crime we create reality together and not only through memory but
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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 being in love time radiates out from the very place where I am standing unbinding me from my well-fitted previously time bound manacles the entrance into time is
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always the threshold where we are asked to loosen our grasp on our previous fearful understandings falling in love is time unanchored and let to be fully itself where the ours are rich and spacious with a sudden sense that there is no IM
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immediate Horizon to their possibilities without love and the all round attention love pays to the world time is where I feel most powerless because time passes and I will die so I hold on to aversion of time mediated
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through control exhausting my very power to live through the very force of my grip living fully means letting go of the way I hold time and all the ways I hold the people I love too strictly too narrowly and too unimaginatively to my version of time whatever version of time we have arranged for ourselves time always feels like a gravitational pull to our senses always drawing us towards its compelling and Unstoppable presence to a clock to an
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appointment to our sense that something should be happening now whether it is actually possible or not time in the physical world is actually part and parcel of gravity astonishingly physics tells us that everything gravitates towards places where time moves more slowly and time seems to move more slowly the greater the mass to which it is near what physicists call Mass we call presence and is in a human life presence is Invitational presence
1:00:23
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
1:00:44
me timelessness is the foundation of real charism and real Charisma by creating a scentered 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
1:01:04
territory to run 100 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 100 shards cannot heal itself the child I
1:01:23
lost will never return to me the regrets I have are things I can only live and heal again in my imagination or with others in my future but this Arrow of time exists only at the surface of things when I die the individual atoms
1:01:40
and molecules of my body experience not time passing but merely a change of state a transition from an ordered world to one at another level newly disordered but also full of equally new potential the me in of time and the Timeless is
1:01:57
the place of my inevitable transformation time tells me with some Glee that we are all compost for 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
1:02:18
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 stopped counting time as a way of controlling it I stopped my addiction to naming the hours and what should occur in those hours the single pathway across the field suddenly branches to 100 more no one has explored when we start measuring change as if we knew what measuring change
1:02:49
actually meant the human ability to measure time also stops therefore on a silent Retreat or in in a monastery we make all the outer ours repeatable so that day after day nothing on the outside seems to change we stop time on
1:03:04
the outside so that we can concentrate on the way things change and grow on the inside we dwell in the deepening and broadening seasonal sense of presence we call the Timeless as our war against time quietens we take joy in the increased
1:03:26
accurity of the ears 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 that
1:03:43
rested State as we loosen our grip on what we think is time our sense of bodily tension Falls away too along with the falling away of a falsely measured self that joyful Radiance we call timelessness growing through every cell
1:04:00
of our previously time bound body like now as I write these last lines listening to the miracle of hands moving over the keys of a late night piano memory meeting the moment in each note and then memory and moment both disappearing and reappearing in the onward music each note exquisitly timed but part of an onward Unstoppable flow This Moment In Time time inherited from all previous times Rippling into the future for all time very
1:04:34
beautiful I finished the essay in the bar of the Castle Hotel where I where I was staying beautiful pianist actually yeah and I was in there alone with him so yeah welcome to the house of macadamias macadamias are a delicious
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coconut white chocolate and blue blueberry white chocolate visit House of macadamias tocom [Music] tetra is it unusual for the surroundings to work their way into your writing no they do I think they do color whether I
1:06:19
mention them or not yeah I can write everywhere now where I wrote timelessness was this beautiful castle Retreat that I treated myself to and before I went there I said if I can get an essay every day it will my conscience will be clear on having paid the outrageous amount to stay at this place and it worked exactly as I for once in my life it worked out exactly as I wanted and I just felt an incredible timelessness and spaciousness
1:06:49
there and someone else I'm I love to cook which means I'm always spending too much time in the kitchen yeah so someone else was cooking I had this glorious room I had an amazing Horizon around around me spaciousness if I wanted to go
1:07:05
out and talk to someone I could actually and there was music in the bar and so I I did write an essay every day for seven days that time one was written in one day actually are you changed by the writing yes so the person who sat to
1:07:23
write that yes and the person who completed it are two different people exactly yeah and it's always the case I think if you write from a depth obviously if you're just writing above the Horizon of the Unspeakable then
1:07:39
you're not changed by it you may have strategic changes in your life oh you know I understand how that works now whereas before I didn't but as a person uh you're being shaped at a deeper level now you have to practice and catch up so
1:07:54
you may have an insight you know coming out of time but you have to stay with it in order for it to mature in your body because we are creatures of forgetting we do forget can you write something and understand it in the process of writing
1:08:12
it as it happens and then after not fully understand it yes you can sometimes H you go back and you go oh my God you know I'd forgotten that experience yeah I've forgotten that and so it's an invitation to physically
1:08:31
get back into the experience it happens less now but I just heard someone recite one of my poems back to me actually in Ireland and it was a poem from very early in my repertoire and I was really moved by it as if it was written by another person yes and I remembered a certain coloration of Innocence I had at that point which I'd lost and I've started I've just started memorizing the poem again so I can actually walk back into it and practice
1:09:03
it again because it's something I I don't want to I don't want to forget yeah yeah I mean it happens on and off the page when I was in Scandinavia a couple of years ago I was working with a big consultancy company very creative
1:09:20
company I work in the organization world in the same way I work anywhere else with a big repertoire of poetry and I use it to look at the phenomenology of conversation and deepening conversations with in groups of people as well as in
1:09:33
an individual heart and mind and work with that in very practical ways into organizational life and I have for years you I got drawn into that world accidentally and have not yet escaped from it but I was with this really creative group but I'd been sitting intensively you know sit Zen and I could feel things maturing that feeling of something is about to happen and you're just on the edge and you need to keep paying attention it's ripening it's
1:09:59
ripening day by day so I had this very intense cup of days in uh Copenhagen and then I was with a very intense friend he can't do anything without Absolute Total headbanging intensity I call him the headbanger that's his Mo that's his way
1:10:15
of being that's his way of holding the conversation so his intensity was also magnifying mine and then we both got in the car and drove across cross the bridge you know the long 12mile bridge between Denmark and Sweden to go to this
1:10:31
summer camp that his consultancy holds for all their people it's all of these tents at this beautiful Manor House in the Swedish Countryside and I was working in this boat house overlooking this Lake for two days and I was with him our our conversations were intense in the drive up there the time at this listening to the other speakers at this conference was very intense my working in the boat house all the time I'm feeling this
1:10:59
ripening this ripening then we jump in the car to drive back and in true to form he says to us right we're both going to tell each other on this drive the deepest darkest most awful difficult love relationship we've had in our lives
1:11:16
here and I'm going to start so it's that dark lady in each of Our Lives the the woman who you had totally gone for but it was absolutely really really bad for you at the same time and and so he starts you know and he goes a good half
1:11:33
hour or so or 45 minutes then I go 45 minutes then we get out of the car on the way at the Stone Circle by the Baltic Sea except it's not a stone circle this is a viking Monument so it's in the shape of a Viking ship you know
1:11:49
massive Viking ship the sun's going down the Silhouettes of the stones the Silhouettes Of people things are getting very very intense indeed and I can feel this building from the inside out then we get back in the car and we drive back
1:12:03
across the bridge we'd had a calm drive over but on the way back this enormous storm came in there were boats almost being turned over sailboats in the water below us and we almost got blown off the road there were rainbows in the middle of tornadoes and God knows what you know and we come across the bridge and the storm passes he drops me outside my hotel and I go up put my bags in my room and I go straight out in the streets cu
1:12:31
the streets are empty everyone's still in their rooms looking out through the window saying there the storm stopped yet and there's this gorgeous quiet on the back streets of Copenhagen there's all of this late light reflected in the puddles
1:12:49
along the water and I stood looking along the street and I had this sudden question just rise after nowhere which was what if you've done your work David what if it's actually complete what you came to do you've done
1:13:06
and the songs you have sung are being sung by the ones you would want you what if you've done your work and I allowed myself to say yes which is you know in the ancient human intuition if your work is done you're not long for this world you're on your way so I felt that trepidation of saying it and then I had an experience of actually having died when I said that and having immediately come back into my body and it was just as if I had died
1:13:41
and now I was able to come back in and witness the effect of my work on others but I could do it from a point of totally letting it go and not controlling it so much and that's stayed with me ever since yeah but it's still something I have to
1:14:00
practice most days it's with me the whole way but there are times where oh I'm acting as if I haven't died yeah and then I get back into that physical bodily memory and it it completely transforms everything yeah you stop
1:14:15
trying to make things happen you're just privileged everything's a bonus you know I get to talk to Rick the only thing that can go wrong is something can go wrong and who cares if it goes wrong so so and it's really
1:14:32
changed my work too I started building things for for the Legacy I started in the seven or eight people who work with me I've started letting go of my overbearing artistic control over the way things should be because you know how it is
1:14:50
when you're an art everything counts every last little syllable cintilla yes yes so that tends to tends to roll over into all the secondary aminations but now I'm sat at the meeting table there and say oh actually
1:15:05
you know this meeting will be going on without me actually so I actually get the bonus of being here and just giving the wheel a spin every now and again and actually just coloring it because people are going to be taking this work without
1:15:19
you David so so just be there with it in a conversational way but it's very powerful experience that still needs practice seating home magnifying conveying to others absolutely because you're still you exactly yeah yeah that's amazing tell me a little bit about the experience of hearing the poem read back to you well it was been read by someone who had lived with the poem more than I had and the poem had carried through very very difficult
1:15:58
times so he was more of a companion to the poem in many ways when he recited it back to is more his poem than it was mine understood yes we see that happen with songs as well when certain artists do rendition of a song it becomes their
1:16:13
song essentially exactly Yes actually didn't stop me from realizing how I could improve the poem now all these decades later so I probably will make a new slightly new version of it with my now with my experience but it was just a beautiful
1:16:32
sense I have another poem about Legacy which is uh called one day where I say one day I will say the gift I once had has been taken the place I have made for myself belongs to another and the songs I have sung are being sung by the ones I would want beautiful then I will be ready for that voice and the still silence in which it arrive Liv And if my faith is good then we'll meet again on the road and we stop and laugh and drink
1:17:04
together again from the deep well of things as they are so it was that sense of of Legacy I suppose it's a reiteration of the of the work having been done at a certain level yes the gift having been given and given back yes and the way
1:17:27
art lives on beyond the uh author of its origin yeah I want to go back to the story you told of writing the piece looking at the river flowing and the parallel streams it seems like you live in a state of attention that goes
1:17:55
beyond the way many people do and it sounds like you can do what you do because you live in that way would that be accurate I would say so and I can do what I do better because I've practiced but it seems to me that it belongs to all Humanity because you can recognize you know the disciplines of attention and intentionality in almost every contemplative and artistic tradition and then the corroborations that come back around for instance
1:18:31
around uh being found by the world the world always comes to find someone larger than the person who started the process of attention and I started really apprenticing myself to that phenomena uh as a naturalist guide in
1:18:49
the gpus islands so I've ridden since I was little since I was seven years old and the probably under the influence of my Irish mother with all her stories and poems and you just get it by osmosis in the Irish culture and and then I wrote
1:19:04
really seriously from when I was 13 years old or so a very serious young man and writer but then I fell in love with Jac kusto the great French Marine zoologist and his series on the television you know following the life
1:19:22
of the dolphin and so I con seeed the notion to do the same thing you know and so I gave up my art subjects and as I always say put myself into the salt mins of biology chemistry and physics which were very difficult for me actually but
1:19:37
I by working twice as hard I managed to keep up with my peers and then I got a degree in Marine zoology and I'd had to give up writing in a way even though I kept reading poetry in order to concentrate on biology chemistry and physics and then I by sheer Luck of the Irish I found myself in the gapusan itself but the galapagus: cycles of life and death when I'd been there three months I said thank you God I've had the experience now can I go
1:20:31
home it was very terrifying and we lived on this death dealing medium called the ocean we're on small sailing Yachts I worked for you worked for both the national park and for the company you were a naturalist guide people can't go
1:20:45
ashore without being in the company of a naturalist guide every company needs one on every boat uh but you have to be uh certified and trained by the the guides Institute there in the Charles Dow station and so we were a
1:21:00
company that had these sailing Yachts there were there was no GPS at the time everything was done by dead reckoning there's huge distances between all the islands and most of the sailing was done by night so we had quite terrifying
1:21:14
experiences getting between the islands and I had a number of near drownings and then you were witnessing life and death you know animals that you'd get to know as individual characters and wild animals have definitive characters just
1:21:27
like human beings have actually you can tell one land uana from another just from their behaviors and and on and on and on so you'd lose these friends you know these creatures that you knew they'd be on dead on the beach the next
1:21:42
time you came and they had no fear of humankind so you got very close to them so uh there came a time where I just had to turn my face towards that the part of the world that didn't care whether you as a human being lived or
1:22:00
died it had much bigger fish to fry than your individual human life and to learn to live with that when I started to do that my identity started to change in a very foundational way my way of being and I realized very quickly that my identity depended not on my beliefs but on how much attention I was paying to things other than myself so the first state of attention is no attention at all where we're not really hearing looking or if we do hear
1:22:35
or anything we're all it's all just passed through our own experience how does this redound on me how does this benefit me or you're projecting your voice into other people like a ventriloquist you know trying to get them to say what you want them to say all of these ways of interacting with the world that are just interactions they're not an intimate kind of physical alchemical exchange and then I started to notice
1:23:04
the deeper my attention to things other than myself the the fiercer and deeper my own identity became and the deeper place I could call on my own voice yeah so you know you might be caught up in your complaining to yourself for
1:23:22
instance about something the crew were doing to Haze you you know as a new guide on the boat and you're walking along but gpus would never let you alone it would never let you stay in this smaller person so you'd be walking along
1:23:36
the path by the beach and there'd be a galapagus: and if you really see the hawk looking back at you it's looking back at someone very different than the one who began looking at what you thought was Hawk yeah you start to change in that being
1:24:11
seen and then that drops away and what is left is this just the living conversation between you both you you're neither looking at a h nor are you a person being looked at at the HW you are that conversation that
1:24:30
alchemy that dance between what you think is you and what you think is not you you both disappear yeah and then this kind of exstasy appears this Radiance out of that surface undoing and this sense of the Timeless
1:24:48
and the sense of being rewarded by things just as they are not as a Prelude to something else happening but a reward in and of themselves so I used to be able to look just at the silhouette of a bird flying against the sky and you know they talk
1:25:10
in the Zen tradition of the pearl without price you know it's that experience this experience of being given a treasure in the glimpse of the of the bird that's where that all started and that that was reinforced later by my uh Zen practice when did you first pick that up I would I'd been experimenting in all kinds of weird ways with meditation before I went off to gpus trying different things by myself CU I had no teachers or anything so I was
1:25:42
reading about Zen I was I read a bit about Transcendental Meditation I so I would just attempt it in my own room and then after uh galapagus: took up Zen as well as iido the Japanese martial arts form which is really no martial art
1:26:02
at all really and then I worked with various then teachers but it was only in those Retreats that I started to realize oh I'm just recapitulating what I experienced in those islands looking at at birds and animals and landscapes for hours in
1:26:17
silence and so you realize that in our evolutionary past we would have spent a lot of time in silence we would have spend a lot of time hunting where you had to wait for and pay attention and not make noise and not talk to your just there in absolute presence you know cuz if you missed the moment you could Mis feeding yourself and your tribe you know yeah it was life and death yes yeah so and of course you would have had a very powerful
1:26:47
experience with the animal you were hunting too it would have been a heartfelt experience not you just taking a trophy home but uh Part of Yourself dying too and I had that experience myself in galapagus: and I'm about to kill it yeah and just what I had to give over there was a sense of I could be taken by these Waters too or what by what lies in them you there a lot of dangerous creatures in the water there or circumstances you know and I can't
1:27:42
complain I'm part of this whole cycle so if I'm clubbed on the head too as part of this so it was a real physical giving over and a real step in my maturity and it made sacred the eating of the fish beautiful
1:28:01
yes yeah so that might be good for me to read death yeah let's do it how did you choose to do one on death when did it come in the series I can't remember now actually I think it was there as a challenge it's it's the ultimate in a way you know so
1:28:19
as an essayist are you going to write on death you dare you write on death are you up to it you know yeah so I think that was part of it but I'm not sure actually I can't remember I have had you know I've had a lot of experience of death in my life and I've been around quite a few uh dead bodies you know in one place or another and I've had a a number of near-death experiences drowning in galapagus: in the Himalayas all of which were accompanied
1:28:58
by very powerfully profound emotional and psychological changes so death has been a companion but also uh I'm you know I'm trying to write this from the point of view of everyone so so that's why the first line is death happens only to
1:29:17
other people death will never find me death happens only to other people while I am alive and strangely death when it comes happens only to another person even when I am in the midst of dying myself all around us on the planet every
1:29:36
day and in ways we cannot bring ourselves to think about hundreds of thousands of people pass away saying goodbye to their lives and to their loved ones we walk in witness with death the longer we live and we walk alone but
1:29:51
often secretly speaking with those with whom we have walked and talked during their lives but even as we mourn or celebrate those we know those we knew and loved we unaccountably live on our hearts beating Faithfully looking on
1:30:09
death as we do unconsciously on other people as a strange form of miracle that can never be fully understood death is something that only happens to other people and that somehow and unaccountably takes them from our daylight out
1:30:25
death happens only to other people even when it happens to myself I always become another surprising person the closer I get to the doorway of my own disappearance if I am conscious and able to Bear witness to my going then in that
1:30:41
disappearance someone else starts to appear someone who I do not fully recognize who has lived for years beneath my busy daylight hours the mercy in dying if I am able to pay attention is it stripping away of my previous
1:30:58
priorities and my previous sense of self the person who is dying is not the person I thought I was all along the person who is dying is a new and unfamiliar being I am now getting to know as I go if I lose my wits before dying then
1:31:17
death really does happen to someone else if I keep my wits then death becomes the beginning beginning of a new friendship with someone from whom I spent a lot of time hiding over the years someone I barely let breathe in the midst of my
1:31:33
misplaced priorities and unneeded busyness a new friendship with someone we realize we have neglected all along felt fully in this new friendship Death Becomes irrelevant or becomes just the magnifying necessary background to this
1:31:50
astonishing delayed getting to know how we live shapes how we die with reluctance or with courage and almost always with a good measure of both but dying well involves undoing the way we lived but did not fully live death happening to someone I am becoming allows me to understand who I was and wasn't in my life I am brought to understand that what stopped me from living courageously is the same fear that will stop me from dying
1:32:23
courageously lyy the approach to death is almost always felt as opportunity refused or accepted by the ones dying and by the ones witnessing at their bedside opportunity for confession for forgiveness for a blessed forgetting that releases everyone concerned death strangely and poignantly becomes the opportunity to relive and to reimagine almost all people approaching death once they are through the early torments of Letting Go glimpse a radical
1:32:57
Simplicity they never felt they deserved or possessed a Simplicity that allows them if they are brave enough to make a new friendship with themselves with their loved ones and with the world in our home approaching the end in
1:33:12
those last days surrounded by family or very often in a hospital bed attached to tubes and blinking graphs with often only the understanding hand of a tired nurse to hold us we experien visions and dreamlike meetings with those we loved
1:33:27
and knew often going back to Childhood or just as amazingly forward to a sense of being both welcomed and thoroughly forgiven pallative nurses tell us again and again working at the bad sides of the dying that these two dynamics of
1:33:43
meeting and of forgiveness are constants to be witnessed again and again the near-death experiences of those who temporarily die no matter the trauma speak of similar mercies witness as in witnessing themselves and looking down
1:34:00
on their own body combined with Serenity and even a sense of choice as to whether to stay or go the person who dies is never the person who held on so grimly and so tightly and for so long the person who dies is never the person who until now
1:34:18
had never been given the chance to appear the one who dies in the end is the one who realizes that all their life they unconsciously sought and quite often refused an absent affection and sometimes in contradiction
1:34:34
how much Love Actually surrounded them all along or how through everything they were held and helped by those familiar faces Who Bore witness to their growing their struggles and their hards sought happiness no the person about to die is
1:34:51
always the one becoming another unfamiliar and newly astonished person the one who can't believe what an extraordinary Ordinary Miracle it has all been the one who realizes what a privilege it was even to say no to love
1:35:08
the one who is astonished that they were willing to miss so much or at times give so little and who forgives themselves for missing so much and forgiving so little the person who dies is not the unforgiving person who came into the
1:35:23
cancer into the illness or the hospital bed the person who dies is the one who begins to forgive themselves in the light of all the Forgiveness they suddenly in it they are about to receive death happens to someone else to
1:35:40
someone who appears at the end to the one who has finally given up on many of the nonsense priorities that run their days death happens to this hardly recognizable newly simple vulnerable being now now watching the evening light
1:35:55
or hearing the gentle rain against the window death happens to the person seeing the face of all Humanity in the single pair of disbelieving eyes sitting by the Bed Death happens to this extraordinary body about to leave the
1:36:11
body that breathed itself so courageously and through all difficulty to come to this particular end we can all be assured that death only happens to someone else someone I have yet to meet someone I am about to meet not me reading or writing this essay hoping despite the title that death will stay far away not me who wonders if I will be equal to all the saying goodbye not me who hopes above hope that by technological Wizardry I
1:36:42
can live forever it's an old fear and a true one that death always comes to find us it's just that mercifully and thankfully and even Faithfully and consistently in the end it does not really find us with just a little help and a little letting go death only comes to find the person we have always secretly wanted to be wow death only comes to find the person we have always secretly wanted to be beautiful what an ending surprise
1:37:23
ending that essay will be the death of [Laughter] me tetr gtin is a podcast tetramin is a website tetramin is a whole world of [Music] knowledge what may fall within the sphere of tetr gramon counterculture tetr grattin sacred geometry tetron the Avant tetr grattin generative art tetr grattin the tarot tetr grattin out of print music tetragrammaton biodynamics tetr grattin graphic design tetr grattin mythology and Magic tetr Graton obscure film
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tettim Beach culture tettim esoteric lectures tettim Off the Grid living tetr gamitin Al spirituality tetr gamitin the cannon of fine objects trettin muscle cars tetr gtin ancient wisdom for a new age upon entering experience the artwork of the day take a breath and see where you are [Music] drawn pad.com is everything you write ultimately about yourself no no it's through the lens of yourself it's through the beautiful story you've
1:39:06
made but it has to then join everyone's story yeah but is that not the story of everyone yes if you if you tell it in a big enough way but not if you just tell it in the me me me m m Mo yeah but enough about you let me talk about me
1:39:29
again not in that way yeah do you remember where you were when you wrote that [Music] one I think I finished at at Castle resc at the the Italian writing retreat but uh every essay I try to have a line where where I or the reader will
1:39:51
say my God can that be true yeah yeah so the surprise death only happens to other people yeah and and so you're startled because you know that part of you has felt that actually but you've never articulated it God that could be
1:40:07
true actually that's how I've experienced it I remember as a child you know I remember losing a friend as a was quite young to a car accident and uh and I remember thinking actually in his life he could still be alive we just think
1:40:22
that he's gone but actually cuz I had very near misses where I was almost knocked by a car and I said maybe to other people I was actually killed there but I still live on so it is it's deep in our intuitions in a way I don't
1:40:35
know if you ever had that experience I and uh I do think actually When We're Young we're not supposed to understand death a child's not really supposed to understand dying yeah and their childhood would be would be the less for
1:40:53
it I think we're supposed to feel as if we're Immortal for the first side first half of our life yeah and there's enough grief and difficulty in in in the average existence without death exactly and then when you're ready for it when
1:41:09
you have to understand it you slowly have to turn your face towards it do you remember in childhood your first experience of death I remember my grandmother dying and my not wanting to look in the coffin to see her something
1:41:27
I've regretted to this day but I wasn't ready for it at that time I too young I was uh 13 I think yeah and then I'd had the experience before that of losing that friend to the accident yeah and then I had another one of uh a good friend of mine dying in the same longdistance race that I ran in Jonathan Walker his name was I still remember I have a funny way of carrying him is that when I'm asked my name in a coffee shop to put on the
1:42:00
coffee at Starbucks or wherever I always I will often say Jonathan and it's my way of remembering him yes but that was a big shock to my system and then increasing amounts as I as I Grew Older I lost um two or three friends in the rock climbing and mountaineering fraternity when someone passes doing an activity that you do how does that impact you with that activity well I certainly kept on running but it was uh it was a big shock to my system
1:42:40
because this boy Jonathan Walker was shaped like a polo he was like a Greek god he had this man of blonde hair the longish blonde hair down to his shoulders thick blonde hair he was absolutely handsome you know and built
1:42:57
like a Greek God and he died at the Finish Line literally falling over the finish line from probably a a heart trouble that hadn't been diagnosed you know you wouldn't look at a 13-year-old child or 14 15 maybe and I had a a really powerful
1:43:19
experience afterwards of we were gathered around because he'd been carried into the changing room so they could administer you know first aid and uh and try to resuscitate him so we were all gathered I was little with a little
1:43:32
circle of friends and I remember the uh assistant Headmaster Mr jesset came out to talk to us and he said something to us and we all nodded and I turned away and I walked about 20 yards and then I just collapsed he told us that he
1:43:51
died but I couldn't take it in you know but I'd heard it somewhere inside me but my Surface personality just couldn't face it so I turned and then I literally collapsed on the ground wow so the power of the word you know the power of something being transmitted to a very deep part of you yeah the part of you as Camu said that livs to the point of Tears yeah yeah but it was good when I looked back it was good for me I was uh you know to be able to
1:44:29
experience uh that level of grief so so quickly without keeping it at Bay was very healing [Music] yeah Ry Ry carries the same beautiful half awake half asleep sense in its sound as it does in its dream like meaning Ry is a rare and neglected state
1:44:57
in our times asking us to pay attention to simultaneous inner and outer horizons with rested bodily depth and with a broad listening amplitude Ry is an antie to much of the over Focus over delineation and branding
1:45:16
of our identities most especially in an age where we are drawn like moths to a flame burned and distressed Ed by the internet from one state of narrow Focus to another the combined state of rest and Broad diffused attention that revery implies and the luxuriant sense the word communicates invites us to inhabit our bodies Our intellects and our imaginations simultaneously where neither the mind the body nor the imagination are given
1:45:50
precedents yet all of them are felt and in inhabited in deeper ways that are not possible when we attempt to focus on them in separation to be in a state of revery is to inhabit multiple layers of our Consciousness all at once to be fully
1:46:07
aware of every bodily internal feeling while hazily hearing and seeing every Ambient sound and sight to be present in this time now while inhabiting the Timeless employing the mind to reinterpret the Future and even
1:46:21
reimagine the past the word revery recalls to each of us the luxuriant sense of rest we might feel in front of an open fire perhaps even nodding off of the body rested and resting deeper while all the time acutely aware of the sound of rain
1:46:39
brushing against a window the logs crackling and the sound of children playing mutely in the distance a hammock by the ocean inhabited without a phone and rocked by the arriving seab Breeze holds the same invitation Ry is our
1:46:54
ability to take it all in all at once without making a job of work or a task out of taking it all in Ry is our multivalent multi-talented ability to connect to all levels all at once and all without effort Ry is always despised by those
1:47:13
who do not like the broad Freedom it grants us from other people's wishes and other people's control those who wish to control others lives and to make them conforming members of a classroom an office or an army do not like the way
1:47:27
revery puts us beyond the bounds not only of the controlling minds of others but also beyond the part of our own mind that is easily manipulated by others Ry and daydream puts us Beyond manipulation Ry has always been the foundational imaginative Cornerstone of every child's life and every child's sense of safety free free from the rules and regulations of oppressive adults Ry is the Refuge and Sanity of all prisoners and all who are confined
1:48:04
justly or unjustly by walls put into place by others Little Wonder our work environments our Educational Systems and the present unimaginative views of the mental health industry deplore Ry asking us to sacrifice our ability to advance
1:48:20
on a broad front for constant unimaginative short-term focus a focus that can then easily be manipulated by others the medical community and drug industry wielding their diagnosis of ADHD might be the most guilty in
1:48:36
medicalizing stigmatizing and monetizing revery ignoring all the ways that revery is a viable alternative way of being present in and to the world our stigmatization of Ry has large costs on the sizable portion of the population that does not conform to a smaller but more powerful percentage of people whose priority on constant focus and constant linear achievement makes a kind of Shadow dictatorship for us all revery must be
1:49:08
reclaimed despite the fact that approximately 15% of the population doesn't share the majority short-term emphasis on constant focus and despite the fact that this must have conveyed some kind of evolutionary advantage on
1:49:22
the broader human population there is apparently according to the drug industry the doctors who serve them and the coercive majority something wrong with every single one of the 1200 million people who do not wish to participate in their coercive overly
1:49:39
focused World Ry is subversive to control a subtle form of rebellion against other people's priorities in China young adults are lying flat refusing to join the exort to focus and eat bitterness in Japan many young people are refusing to leave their rooms both are signs of helplessness but both are push backs against coercive societies asking them to be one way when they want to be another R is often our refuge and our sanity and when we come
1:50:13
out of our rooms and combine it with an outer active life might be the very best kind of Sanity Ry might be a refuge from other people's priorities but it is also a rewarding state in and of itself in Ry parts of his meat join together Converse and even heal that which our isolated intellect is powerless to enjoin ideas understandings and direct physical apprehensions of others form in the cross fertilization and conversational crosscurrents out
1:50:45
flowing dreamlike states of revery provide Martin Luther King's power lay not in in the fact that he had a plan his power was much more conversational more Invitational and all the more convincing in that invitation because he
1:51:02
told us out of a Ry that he had a dream Ry magnificent I've never thought of Ry in that light and it's very beautiful how would you compare Ry and awe I think uh or is a direct overwhelm of One's Own senses by what lies outside
1:51:28
of you MH where rever is more more of a a dreamlike conversation you're having with reality where you can be mulling on the past yeah to the point at which it almost Comes Alive around you yeah and then you can bring that to bear on what
1:51:47
you want for yourself in the future and you might be thinking of an old love or an old relationship or a time you were happy or a time that you were deeply sorrowful and sad and you bring that into conversation with the present and
1:52:02
and with the future all at once and you also bring it into conversation with the the ambient surroundings with with what only looks like the background background is always becoming foreground and uh I find you know in deeper states of attention particularly you know the fiercer deeper states of intention ality that one of the phenomena that occurs is that background becomes just as important as foreground the first time I ever went to
1:52:32
Hawaii I was going on a Zen sashin so I was getting straight off the plane going to this Zeno and the suburbs of hon Lulu and and sitting facing a wall for seven days yeah 9 hours a day and in half hour periods and I remember on the way there I was sat next to a young man my age and he was so enthusiastic about going back to Hawaii and he was going to be renting Jeeps he was going to be surfing he was going to be hula hooping he was going to
1:53:01
be he was going to buy himself a set of Hawaiian shirts he was doing everything and then finally after he'd been talking for quite a while he realized I hadn't said anything and he said what are you going to do for your week here and I said I'm going to be looking at a wall for seven days but you know in that seven days I had an experience of a why that was of the absolute Essence the first sounds of the insects in the morning because she starts
1:53:32
sitting Before Dawn the first appearance of the pale tropical light the sound of a gecko skittering up a wall the sound of bread fruit falling onto a galvanized tin roof outside the sound of rain culating onto tropical leaves uh the
1:53:51
movement of your Shadow across Ross the wall as the sun went and at 8:00 every every morning someone in a neighboring house an ordinary house not not in the Zeno would put on a flask of of Kona coffee and a few molecules of that
1:54:07
coffee would we through the Zeno and because we were all pretending to be Japanese it was just green tea so that was my morning coffee and uh you know at the beginning of the week oh this will have to do instead of my coffee by the
1:54:21
end of the week it was it was my morning coffee and I was enjoying it just as much anticipating it and having my senses sharpened and heightened by that deep silent experience yeah so I've gone back to Hawaii many times since and I've
1:54:38
always had to recall that experience in order to bring myself took a away and it came from being in one place and letting what looked like the background become foreground so that's in many ways that's re it's a deep state of attention that that holds all other forms of attention at the same time the word Ry has a religious connotation as well yes well um it actually comes from the French rev which is a dream a Ry a small dream yeah
1:55:09
but uh I don't know I've forgotten the Latin now whether it comes from the Latin often the Latin has a deeper meaning to it so so I think you're thinking of of reverence yeah which uh uh to Revere so are they not related I don't they
1:55:24
might be but I don't know enough about that particular uh atmology whether the two actually are bonded they should they should belong to each other it seems so yes rever and reverence and rever to rever someone I suppose when you rever
1:55:40
someone you are in a semi- dreamlike state actually there was a line about linear progress linear yes the the shadow dictatorship of the those who prioritize linear progression linear progression yes yeah yeah one thing coming after another if you've done this you need to be on to the next thing you can't rest and you shouldn't be diverted but the most interesting things happen during those diversions that's where life is exactly yes everyone's
1:56:15
heard how for a lot of people the way their uh their Spirit was broken in the classroom by The ununderstandable Adult World you know and uh the inability of the teacher to speak to the whole the whole spectrum of human experience and then when you
1:56:38
get a teacher who can do that it's really remarkable it's everyone remembers that teacher yeah who's able to see your spirit and find a way for it I was incredibly lucky I had uh I had three great teachers you're lucky if you
1:56:53
get one yes but I had them in junior school but in my secondary education I had a a Latin and Classics teacher who was complete genius I had a physics teacher was also remarkable and I had an English master as we called him in our school yeah who really took me under his wing and told me that I had a gift and that meant a lot to me at that time you know stayed with me so very lucky and it really is luck of the draw we have no control over these
1:57:26
things I suppose we don't I suppose we feel we don't uh there are uh some theories that uh we make unconscious invitations to the world and and somehow create things but I I consider myself incredibly lucky I got the last gasp of
1:57:43
an old classical education in a way just before it died out yeah uh so I had Latin and Greek and the and Greek mythologies and all the old I had the Bible stories and was taught in a really Fierce way where a lot was expected of
1:58:00
you and I had the best of the modern world in that we had a co-educational school so it wasn't just at a boy school as many of those traditional schools were so can you tell me about the Bic tradition well the Bic I mean the Bic tradition is that ritual tradition of of poetry and storytelling in which in which you're taken out of yourself by someone who's a real practitioner in the art and the Bic system always implies a lineage and a
1:58:37
tradition you've had this handed to you you've learned the stories from other people you've learned the lineages from other people you've learned uh thousands of lines of poetry you've you've learned how to extemporize in the old Irish
1:58:53
tradition you were 21 years before you became a fully fledged Druid man or woman if you specialized then the last seven years were spent in your specialization so for for OLS as they were called who were the poetic BS they
1:59:09
spent the last seven years concentrating on nothing but the Bic Arts so you learned all the stories all the lineages who was belong to everyone where everything came from but you were also taught uh extemporization so we only have a few anecdotal stories passed down you know but one of them involved being immersed up to your neck in freezing cold water in a mountain lake with your mouth full of Pebbles and then being asked to
1:59:43
extemporize 300 lines of blank verse on a given subject say the moon or a butterfly or the first Bud of spring so you learned how to find that part of you that could speak under the most difficult circumstances and then the other one was
2:00:00
you would spend months immersed in a darkened house with other poets you were not allowed to see the light and you were three months in there where you can imagine you would go through all kinds of psychological spaces I imagine and
2:00:16
almost uh psychotropic experiences and I'm sure they also use psychotropic drugs too because there are many traditional mountaintops in Britain and Wales and Ireland where it's said if you spend the night alone on the top of
2:00:32
the mountain you will either wake up a poet or insane one or the other so all of these ATT Testaments to the fierce emphasis on You Know The Bard the poet actually held the history of the people and all those stories that were attached
2:00:51
with them the ability to extemporize in the present and therefore to open up the future so they held past present and future together and they were very powerful people it carried on into the uh the Celtic Church which was an alternative for about 500 years from the Catholic church so the Irish church was almost like a communal Irish druidic inheritance you know they felt that you could have the revelation of Christianity from seeing a
2:01:22
deer silhouetted against the sky as much as you could uh The Story coming out of Palestine and everything was taught in threes when the Trinity came as a story it was seen as the crown on the head of their teaching rather than something
2:01:37
that was a competing story everything was memorized nothing was written down until Latin came and then the church started writing them down they started writing down the old themes and stories so for instance there's a tiny
2:01:52
poem by William Butler Yates called the song of the wandering Angus Angus being one of the ancient Celtic gods of Truth and beauty and he was always wandering all over the place and uh making women fall in love with him and turning buds into Blossom as he passed and so Yates writes this just after he's Met m gone who became the love of his life Yates walked into this sophisticated Suare ready to impress everyone he was a very
2:02:25
impressive young man but he sees this woman standing beneath this glass window with a curved top and there's an enormous spray of apple blossom in the vase on the window sill and she's standing beneath this talking to someone but the apple blossom is falling onto her hair so there's this shower of natural apple blossom falling and covering her hair and he looks at her and she's the most beautiful woman in his eyes he's ever seen and he's
2:03:01
straight over there of course and he finds that she's also the most intelligent woman he's ever met in his life so he falls totally and utterly in love for the rest of his life and she uh was interested but within a short while
2:03:15
she she just wanted to be really good friends and so William Butler Yates proposed to her at least half a dozen times during his life and she said no each time being an intelligent woman she wanted a different kind of man but Yates
2:03:32
The Marvelous thing about Yates is he never stopped loving her and he had to just make himself larger and larger and he wrote her into his ir and in fact he wrote her into the transformation of Ireland because part
2:03:48
of Yates in this circle's necessary work at the time was Was preparing the Irish mind for revolution so that it could be free not just as a reaction against the British but to have their own mythologies and their own stories and their own
2:04:06
foundation so he wrote These plays in which this feminine hero Kathleen nulan was the major character and Kathleen Holan could be a young maid or an old woman in the same play but it was the same person it was Ireland and he wrote
2:04:25
these parts specifically for M gon and she played Kathleen nulan on the stage so he just kept loving her but having to give her away and having to write her into his work but this is the piece he wrote not long after he'd met her it does hold
2:04:41
past present and future together because it's a young man's love poem but it's also an older man looking back at the same time so he says uh in the poem The song of the wandering Angus he says I went out to the Hazelwood because a fire
2:04:57
was in my head and cut and peeled a Hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread and when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out I dropped the berry in a stream and caught a little silver trout when I had
2:05:15
laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire flame but something rustled on the floor and someone called me by my name it had become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair who called me by my name and ran and Faded through the brightening air now I am old with wandering through Hollow lands and hilly lands I will find out where she went and kiss her lips and take her hands and walk through long and dappled grass and
2:05:47
pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the Moon the golden apples of the sun wow I remember hearing a story you told of being asked three times which means the answer was yes yes that was that came directly from
2:06:09
my mother uh but it's also it came to my through my mother because it's it's very powerful in the Irish psyche even right to the point of going in someone's house in the west of Ireland and if if they say well you have a cup of tea and you
2:06:23
say you say yes right away they think you're really forward you're supposed to say no no you're great I'm Grand I'm just on my way oh go on have a cup of tea yeah no I'm no I'm great I'm great and they say will you have a cup of tea
2:06:35
and third time you know they're serious so so you you say yes yeah and uh it's the same with a musical instrument I play fiddle you know and I have to be in practice to be able to play at the standard that's played in County class
2:06:51
so if I'm in practice I might have it along with me but I'd still be shy because the standard is so incredibly High even in the local pump so I'd be asked to play and if someone said will you will you give us a tune and you say I will right away they'll say Jesus he's a forward he thinks a lot of himself you know so you say no no I'm out it you know I'm not up to it right now go on go on no no and then maybe 10 minutes later
2:07:17
they say will you join us said go on then I will yeah so it's a a test of sincerity in a way so I've had times in my life where I've been asked sincerely three times and I've gone because of it I've got over myself someone's seen
2:07:33
something in me that I haven't seen or that I'm afraid of yeah the first invitation I had into the corporate world was someone who was standing at the edge of this line after I'd given a keynote talk in Washington DC it was a
2:07:46
psychological conference and he waited till the end you know so I knew he would wanted to talk to me and in best American fashion this is 30 years ago now best American fashion he said we have to hire you and best Anglo
2:08:01
Irish fashion I said for what and he said to come into Corporate America and I said for what and he said a beautiful thing actually he said the language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory we're about to enter
2:08:16
and I just heard the language that's large enough that was into a more conversational work environment which we we did go into actually yeah tell me about that experience well you know as a very serious young man as a poet so and
2:08:30
in the milu I grew up with you didn't Sully your art form in any large institutional world you know whether it was governmental or or business oriented so I said no I I'm not going to do that you know and behind that was I'm a
2:08:47
serious poet you know I'm not going to create some kind of propaganda for you your organizations because I didn't understand what I was being asked of you plus I had a very cliched understanding of the Work World MH from my inheritance
2:09:01
I grew up in a raving socialist part of West York the Lites used to meet in the field next to the place where I grew up actually to train before they marched across the fields and broke up the new weaving Machinery that was taking their
2:09:15
jobs or which they thought was taking their jobs and then on my on my other side I'm from long lines of Irish and Scottish Rebels so the corporate world represented something that was like a shith for me it was a it was the big
2:09:31
bad overreaching all too powerful inhuman world uh very naive view of it really so he asked me and I said no and uh he said well give me your phone number and let me call you so he called me once I was back home on Whidby Island
2:09:49
and I said no again even though he was I I said you're very kind and I I know you're sincere and he said right I'm coming out to Whitby Island to see you I said are you and uh he said I am and are you home next weekend I said I am and I said you're welcome and so I called my mother up actually and told and told her about this whole series of conversations and she said ah you've said yes already and I said how do you mean I said yes
2:10:18
already if you're asked sincerely three times you have to go so I said you're right mother yeah so as soon as he arrived I said my mother's told me I have to do this anyway we had great old conversation he was a man called Peter
2:10:34
block very imaginative man very funny in a wonderfully Jewish way uh very insightful and I worked with him and another man called Joel Henning and to my gratification I should say to my surprise to begin anyway but then to my
2:10:52
gratification I found that I didn't have to compromise my work at all well if it was about compromise why would they pick you you know they they chose you for you yes yes I just know I I just had no idea what I'd be involved with but I was
2:11:07
involved with people who were trying to deepen the conversation and trying to work to Better Together in better ways what what was your experience there I I understand that that was their intention but what did you find when you were
2:11:18
there I found that they were pushing me first of all they were really enthusiastic about the Poetry being brought to bear on their on their everyday difficulties which is what I did yeah how did they see that how did they see poetry helping corporate life you know just that image I used earlier about about the invisible self you know walking into a room and people just seeing the outside well that's true of of leadership you know and so if you
2:11:47
only see the outside you'll only get the outside from other people too so the ability to bring that authentic core without overwhelming people with your difficulties or your particular way of being is an immediate invitation for other people to
2:12:04
speak from that core to to have a proper conversation so that's just one little example but over the years I developed these Seven Elements these seven steps for deepening any conversation so the first element our
2:12:20
step is to stop the conversation you're having now not to re-engineer it not to ameliorate it not to rethink it just stop it entirely and so identifying the conversation you need to stop having and all of us have one yeah and if you don't know what it is just ask your wife ask your husband ask your partner ask your colleague they'll tell you right away the conversation you need to stop having yeah ask your customer if you're an
2:12:49
organization you me example of a conversation that we' need to stop I remember when my organization first got Beyond four people or so and suddenly you could feel it as an organization rather than me just having a few people working for me and yet in the office my desk even when I was away dominated everything I was empty there was no picture of me there but it might as well been you know hair white sitting overlooking the throne yeah overlooking
2:13:25
so my assistant Julie was very subtle she said I've heard about these two Consultants they're really good at at helping and by this time I'd been working in the organizational world for years and I said to myself wait a minute does this consultancy thing really work am I going to waste money on other people coming into my organization and they said fine and they came in and they interviewed everyone beforehand you know and then they got to
2:13:51
me after they'd interviewed everyone else and we were three questions into it and I knew where the problem was in the organization Mah yeah was me and I needed to stop being that person who was there whether I was there or
2:14:10
not at least to begin the process I mean there's still a dynamic of it now all these years later that I always have to work with so we stopped that invisible conversation that was that was occurring Julie took that desk and then I took a
2:14:27
desk you know a tiny little thing at the side because I was hardly there and most of the time I was up in my own study writing you know uh was much more appropriate and so that was one you know IBM for instance way back in the ' 80s it had this program which was dos which they sold to Microsoft and they didn't realize is that they weren't a hardware company they were actually a software company but they they couldn't start that
2:14:56
conversation about being someone who produced computers and produce but all the future lay with Microsoft who took that and ran with it yeah so there was a conversation that needed to be stopped Apple understood what its its true Essence was in a way so you stop the conversation in the first step that in order to drink from a deeper well in order to drop down to another level and it's really amazing when I'm working in organizations you can send
2:15:29
people off from a team that you're working with they worked together for years send them off into on their own say what's the conversation you all need to stop happening they come back and they've all got the same thing they just
2:15:41
never said it to each other they're all going why have we never for some reason it's just so much there that it feels as if it's a necessary part of the culture so the second element is then having a friendship with the unknown with silence
2:15:58
because the first proclivity is to replace the conversation immediately with another one before you've had time to actually be open to something new and then that brings you to a bump in the unknown with that something new
2:16:15
which is always experienced to begin with as a kind of trauma actually this can't be what I'm in being inv invited into and and it's exemplified by Dante's waking in a dark wood the first lines of the Comedia and then that the next step
2:16:32
after that is the step that dantey took through the woods which everyone takes which is following the path of vulnerability and confronting your your difficulties and your reluctances and he meets them in the form of the lion the leopard and the Wolf but they're all representations of our own flaws yeah and then after that you have to ask for help out of your vulnerability and that's when he met Virgil who says will you follow me if
2:17:04
you're serious about becoming a poet and he says I will and then he goes through the gate that says give up all hope you and which is perfect for the path of the poet so these are just examples of the way you can bring poetry to bear I can
2:17:21
talk all day about stopping just stopping the number of poems that are about about just bringing things to a Hal or things being brought to a halt against your will yeah and then the relationship with silence and that
2:17:37
difficulty with our friendship with the unknown and then the next stage you know which is that running into something as DH Lawrence said uh who is that knocking at my door who is that knocking at my door does someone come to do me harm
2:17:54
then he says no no it is the Three Strange Angels admit them admit them who is that knocking on my door so I have seven of these Elemental steps so stopping in order to drink from a deeper well making a friend of the unknown
2:18:12
Second Step third element is coming to ground with a bump yeah in the dark wood fourth is following the path of vulnerability yeah and it's also the path of artistry actually and the fifth is uh asking for help yes and there are
2:18:32
two kinds of help visible and invisible help visible help is transactional help that's difficult for us to ask for you know you won't even ask a person to take the other end of a table you'll try to do it you'll ruin your back trying to
2:18:46
carry it yourself you know but then there's invisible help which we've normally associated with ancient religion and and Angelic Realms and other parallels but you can think about invisible help in a very practical way invisible help is the help that you do not as yet know you need if you're not paying scintillating attention you walk straight past it all of us can remember times in our lives where we were offered help and we said
2:19:16
don't need it I'm fine yeah and seven years of drama later you look back and you say oh my God if I'd only was right there yeah if I could have said so the question is what invisible help am I walking past right now where am I not looking am I really paying attention and even the identity that's asking for help starts to bring it into when I was first investigating this element of asking for help I spent a whole year where every day I would ask
2:19:49
someone specific for help of one kind or another so that's the transactional help I'd call someone I'd email someone if it didn't occur to me I'd think something up and two things were were remarkable about that first of all the buoyancy
2:20:05
that came into my life yeah and the second was how much people wanted to help yes there's nothing like being needed yes and being needed for something that you're admired for that the other person doesn't have you're
2:20:23
really good at this would you come and help me with it and so I realized oh my God you know we're so shy of asking for help but the world is crying out to be asked for help and then the next one is an extension of that is making the
2:20:42
invitation so when you think about it leadership is not just conversational leadership it's Invitational leadership what invitation are you making to your people what invitation do they think you're making to them and then shaping a more
2:20:57
Invitational identity which is really interesting just to have that phrase is really a beautiful Co and beautiful question that will carry you along long way walking out this door how could I be more Invitational yeah yeah and then you
2:21:13
get all kinds of subsidiary questions such as uh what invitation does my wife think I'm making to her on a daily basis have I stopped making invitations what invitation do I think my partner my husband my loved one my
2:21:31
daughter my son you know my colleague what invitation do I think they're making to what invitation do I want them to make to me will I actually ask for it they may not be able to give it but they might actually be able to do it so so that's a huge one you know is is the Invitational element uh all of these elements I've established in my mind through coming across them accidentally in a way in Port hearing myself on stage
2:21:59
either in front of organizations or in front of a general public suddenly say something go oh my God yeah that's that's the next step that you look for once you've established this and then the last step I call Harvest and that's the ability to bring
2:22:16
in the Harvest of everything you've been working towards yeah uh both in the sense of it might be harvesting a profit but harvest in the sense of when you've produced a piece making sure it gets out into the world
2:22:33
and that you're there with it when it's out so that's another kind of harvest then there's the celebration which is associated with Harvest so many places you've just achieved something really marvelous together and split
2:22:49
second later the next you're on to something else there's no celebration there's no saying let's go out to dinner let's look at what we've done let's slap each other on the back let's just go out on the River on a boat for a day and
2:23:01
just say we did that and we're quite remarkable and let's just give it a rest for a moment before we turn our face enthusiastically to the next yeah sewing and then the real corollary of harvest though is are you harvesting in the
2:23:20
hours of the day in which you're working or are you working in a dynamic of conditionality I'll get to my happiness when I've done this project yeah I'll do what I really want when the kids are through school when the house is paid
2:23:38
off when I'm in a better relationship when I've got this amount of money in the bank when I'm retired and the ultimate conditionality is I'll get to when I'm dead yeah when all the responsibilities have gone yeah so are you
2:24:00
harvesting in the hours of the day in which you're dedicating yourself because it's not a passive process to work you're shaping an identity it's like practicing you think of most people in what we call ordinary jobs are are no real ordinary
2:24:15
jobs but you're working eight nine if you're in leadership 10 11 hours a day imagine if you practiced a a musical instrument for 8 9 10 or 11 hours a day wouldn't matter if you had any musical proclivity at all you would become
2:24:31
incredibly good at the clarinet at the piano at the saxophone yeah so you're becoming incredibly good at whoever you're practicing at being in the hours of the day so Harvest asks you to say by the way I am in my I every day
2:24:51
who am I practicing at becoming do I actually want to become that person so in and that brings you back to stopping yeah but in that's I was going to say in some ways the seven steps are not necessarily in order because the
2:25:09
seventh step might live with you through the whole process exactly yeah yeah and in fact that's why I use the word elements yeah more it's better than the linear but sometimes it's useful to have the linear progression because they do
2:25:22
actually work as a linear and they're certainly good for those in the corporate world who are in a linear state of mind and then later you can say but actually you can think of them as elements yeah they live in parallel some of them going on at once sometimes one part of your life you're having to stop another part of your life you're taking the path of vulnerability in a relationship so we're multivalent we're moving along 10 temp