In this episode, David Whyte explores anxiety, beauty, and the unknown as a true map to emotional resilience. David shares how anxiety can be a doorway to deeper understanding and connection. He and Eric discuss the paradox of holding both joy and struggle, the surprising wisdom hidden in everyday emotions, and how poetry and language can bring us closer to the heart of life. This is an inspiring look at how we can build resilience by embracing life’s uncertainties.
Key Takeaways:
- Exploration of human emotions, particularly happiness and anxiety.
- Discussion of the duality of human emotions and the internal struggle between positive and negative qualities.
- Insights from David’s book”Constellations Two,” focusing on the rehabilitation of common words and their deeper meanings.
- The significance of the parable of the two wolves in understanding personal struggles.
- The relationship between anxiety and unspoken truths about care and vulnerability.
- The role of poetry in expressing and understanding complex emotions.
- The importance of recognizing and embracing both happiness and unhappiness in life.
- The concept of horizons as boundaries that inspire imagination and growth.
- The idea that nagging in relationships can be a form of love and care.
- Encouragement to engage in meaningful conversations and reflect on personal emotional landscapes.
David Whyte is the author of twelve books of poetry and five books of prose. David Whyte holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon and Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures and workshops. David’s life as a poet has created a readership and listenership in three normally mutually exclusive areas: the literate world of readings that most poets inhabit, the psychological and theological worlds of philosophical enquiry and the world of vocation, work and organizational leadership. His latest book is Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
David Whyte: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with David Whyte, check out these other episodes:
The Art of Poetry and Prose with David Whyte
Beautiful and Powerful Poetry with Marilyn Nelson
The Power of Poetry with Ellen Bass
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 00:01:08 We often take ourselves so seriously the name we carry, the identity we’ve constructed, the projects we chase. And yet, as David White reminds us, the whole endeavor might be just slightly absurd. In this conversation with poet David White, we explore the deep truths that reveal themselves when we let go of our need to name, to define, to fix. David talks about anxiety as a mask for unspoken truths about the real meaning of care, and about the strange, sacred humor that arises when we realize how much we don’t control. From Zen koans to Irish folklore to yak mangers in the Himalayas, David weaves together the poetic and the practical. And somewhere in all of it, he helps us see that maybe the goal isn’t to be extraordinary, but to recognize the unordinary beauty of what’s already here. This is an episode about loosening our grip. Living with paradox and letting language lead us closer to the world, not away from it. I’m Erik Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, David. Welcome to the show.
David Whyte 00:02:16 Very good to be with you again, Eric.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:18 Yes, I am very honored to have you back on and very excited to talk with you.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:23 And we’re going to be talking about your latest book, which is called constellations two, which is a series of essays about, I don’t know if you call them common words, but words that all of us would know that you are putting under a little bit more of a microscope, I would say. But before we get to that, let’s start like we always do with the parable and the parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. and the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
David Whyte 00:03:13 Well, that parable would have meant something very different to me a few decades ago than it does now. And with all of my Zen sitting and Zen study, but also the deep states of attention that poetry and walking around, I might say bring. I’d say the one you feed is the one that holds both together, actually, that you don’t choose. We’re always choosing between what we think are opposing qualities, and there’s actually some invisible part of you that’s able to hold both horizons and to live in the territory between those horizons. I was just working with the story of of the young Finn McCool out on the road. he’s taken in under the tutelage of a wild bandit called Cormac McCall. And Cormac McCall takes the young Finn under his wing and teaches him the ways of a warrior. But he shows Finn their spear, which is bound to a tree with tight cloths, and it’s bound to a tree. Because this spear is so full of the spite of killing, as it says in the Irish mythological tradition, it’s so full of the spite of killing that it will kill anyone.
David Whyte 00:04:30 It comes across. And McCall says to Finn, you must never unbind this unless your life is at stake, and then you can unleash the spear and use it. And so there’s an understanding that we mostly operate through cooperation, through kindness. But there are times for cutting through and for eliminating. I’m not saying people, but eliminating qualities that are standing in your way. And they take a kind of fierce, ruthless presence, actually. And so human beings have never been able to choose just from the standpoint of evolutionary survival between their kind of cooperative qualities that they hold and the necessity to take a stand in the world, that not choosing that ability to hold both sides of the world. You could say these inner and outer horizons are very necessary and very powerful. I often think that horizons are enormously powerful in an individual human life. And one of the essays in constellations two is horizon. The way that we’re constantly seeing edges between what we know and what we do not know. And the horizons out in the world are certainly representative of that.
David Whyte 00:05:51 There’s nothing more beautiful than a far horizon to a human being, whether it’s mountains or the ocean or a far plane. And we’re finding out, actually, through medical research, that human beings are actually much calmer, much more at home in the world and much happier, actually, when they’re looking at a far horizon, when they have their heads up and their eyes gazing into the distance. And we all know the forms of unhappiness we have from gazing too closely at our screens, you know, whether it’s a phone or a laptop. But it’s interesting to think that we also have an inner horizon. We have a horizon insiders between what we can understand or actually feel physically about ourselves and what lies beneath. But we often feel that horizon inside us as a horizon of resistance or disturbance. We often see it as negative, actually, because what lies below will actually break apart. What lies above, what lies below. In many ways is the latest edge of our growing maturity, but it’s way beyond the life that we have actually constructed for ourselves on the surface.
David Whyte 00:07:08 So when you unbind that spear inside yourself, it feels as if it’s going to destroy and kill your present life. And so the ability to live with both what is nourishing in the world and what feels like qualities that will end your life is a real necessity. So the ability to actually go inside yourself and physically lean against that horizon, almost rest against it, and get used to what feels like a horizon of resistance and disturbance until it opens into something else. Often the qualities we feel there are what in your story, your parable, would be Associated with the consuming wolf, and so the ability to live in the territory between those two horizons, to hold both wolves inside you is what is called for in life.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:03 There are so many things you said there that I would like to respond to, and I’m only going to be able to hit a couple of them. But one, when you were talking about fierceness, I couldn’t help but think about Manjusri, the Buddhist, and what would you call him? A deity, a figure, it doesn’t matter.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:19 But he wields a flaming sword, right? To cut through delusion. I also was thinking about, in one of your essays, you write about Zen, that one of the things about Zen is it refuses to choose between different things. And then the last piece, I think, underlies a lot of what I think the book is pointing towards, which is that these words that typically, as you said, might fall under bad wolf category, or we might put under negative emotion category or however we want to label them are actually very useful and instructive. And when I look at the words that I picked for us to talk about this may be a personality test here in disguise. Anxiety, shame, guilt, injury, nagging. You know, unhappiness. You know, I left alone. Moon and reverie and sojourn again. Diagnostic, perhaps. Yeah, but the point is that the reason I picked those words is because you help turn them on their head to a certain degree. You help us see where indeed those things anxiety, shame, guilt can be not good within us, right? They can be destructive, but they are also hugely constructive, seen in the right light.
David Whyte 00:09:39 Exactly. And that’s the task of all these micro essays, both in constellations one and two, is to rehabilitate words and language that we use against ourselves. My understanding is that if there’s a quality that we feel, whether it’s jealousy and hate, then there’s a place for it in the constellation of our identity, actually. It’s necessary to understand what hate is saying to you. What anxiety is saying to you in my essay on unhappiness, which is one of my favorite ones. I say, if we’re happy now, unhappiness is how we got here. You always get to your happiness through the travails of your discontent and your difficulties. You have being in the world and being at ease in the world. And happiness is actually knocking on our door telling us this is the way to happiness. So it’s a rehabilitation of so many parts of ourselves that we’ve consigned to the negative, to one world for another. When you’re not supposed to choose, you’re supposed to live in the intimacy between them. And I’m thinking now of a Zen cone, where at the end of the story says that not knowing is most intimate, not knowing is most intimate, and you can think about that in a love relationship with your partner, your wife, your husband, that the more you can see them as if you’ve seen them for the first time, the more possibility you have of loving them for who they actually are, rather than the illusory identity that you’ve granted them.
David Whyte 00:11:14 So resentful part of the partnership and, and so but also not knowing allows you to look at a bird. You know, I was trained in zoology and marine zoology, and we learned all of the Latin names of animals and birds. So you’re automatically in the presence of a bird singing out the double barrelled Latin name of it, as if that tells you what you’re looking at. It’s actually a delusion. It’s actually a gate I had to teach myself when I went as a young naturalist to the Galapagos Islands. Not to say the Latin name to myself, to let the bird announce itself literally through its behavior, through its song, through its presence, through its flight. You know, to get another essence that lies beneath the name. Yeah. So we’re constantly naming things in ways that allow us to handle it, or I should say, allow our strategic minds to handle it. Yeah. Because we can be so terrified by the fierceness of the world in our evolutionary past, when we were gathered at night around the fire, and you listened out into the darkness and heard all of these cries and trumpet calls, and I’ve had this experience.
David Whyte 00:12:28 Actually, in today’s world, in the African bush, you told stories, you know, about what was out there and the story helped you to make sense of your fears and also of your communal protection, psychological protections. But it didn’t mean to say that your stories were true about what you are hearing or what you are frightened of. And all of our great traditions going back for hundreds of thousands of years, always say that the real ability to be present in the world is through deep, prolonged, silent attention and the ability to shape a deeply attentive identity that can sustain that form of attention is how we come to ground in this world, and how we actually live in the territory between what we call unhappiness and what we only call happiness.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:27 I want to go back to something you said a couple minutes ago about once we name something, we cease to see it. I think Krishnamurti had that quote, which was something like, you know, once the child learns the name of the bird, they never see the bird again pointing to what you’re saying.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:42 And at the same time. One of the things poetry does is it it’s specificity about what it’s seeing. It’s seeing a birch tree, not a tree. Even the Zen koan, you know, it’s not a tree in the courtyard. It’s the oak tree in the courtyard. So there is also at the same time, the concept and the name takes us away from the thing. There are ways in times in which the name brings us closer to the thing.
David Whyte 00:14:10 Yes, Emily Dickinson said a word is dead when it is said. Some say, but I say it just begins to live that day. There’s a poet speaking. I mean, the task of poetry is to use language in a way which grants life and is just as moveable as the thing that you’re speaking of. And so it’s why you’ll almost never see the word God in good poetry. And if you do see the word God, it always brings the poem to a halt. You have to use language that opens up the physical quality itself, and opens up the silence behind that word and the kind of gravitational pull of the world.
David Whyte 00:14:52 I often talk about the conversational nature of reality, and the ability of a human being to create a more conversational identity in that world, but you could say that every conversation is based on a mutual invitation. And we all know the way in intimate relationships that the conversation stops when our invitations stop. When you stop making an invitation to your partner in a marriage or a relationship, almost always the conversation and the relationship is coming to an end. So the invitation we make is through our eyes, our ears, and then our speech. So poetry is invitational speech in a way, and it’s joining the invitational nature of the world. The world is constantly calling us out from any subscribed or circumscribed perimeter that we’ve laid down for ourselves in the in the dust around our feet. It’s constantly calling us over the horizon that we’ve arranged for ourselves. And it’s one of the reasons the world is so nourishing. It’s one of the reasons the world is so terrifying at the same time, and our ability to submerge in screens and not be physically present in the world is definitely one of the ways where we’re hiding.
David Whyte 00:16:10 And especially in North America, it’s almost become a cultural norm to walk into places where everyone has their head down in screens. You know where they are controlling, what they see, what they’re listening to in many ways. And the wilder, more abandoned edges of the world, you know, are kept at bay, where you don’t have control of who you meet, where the conversation leads you, how your physical body is behaving in the presence of other physical bodies. So inner and outer horizons, the conversational nature of reality, the invitational nature of reality that will never, ever lead us alone. Which which is why we so often get anxious about the world. But anxiety is one of the telling qualities that tell us we’re supposed to respond to a certain knock on our door in a way other than the way we’re responding to it now.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:08 So let’s move on to anxiety. It’s one of your essays, and I was wondering if maybe you could just read the first couple paragraphs of it?
David Whyte 00:17:18 Yes. Yeah, I was just revising this the other day, actually.
David Whyte 00:17:22 So this is the latest version or just a few sentences changed, but, crucial sentences. I think anxiety is the mask that truth wears when we refuse to stop and uncover its face. Anxiety is the mask that truth wears when we refused to stop and uncover its face. The disembodied state I feel when I pretend to put things right by worrying about them instead of conversing with them. The disembodied state I feel when I pretend to put things right by worrying about them instead of conversing with them. Anxiety is my ever present excuse for not truly resting into the body or the breath, or a world where I might find out that truth. Anxiety is the temporary helper. Going by the name of worry, who, when turned into our constant living companion, becomes our formidable jailer in the midst of anxiety. We always haunt the body like an unhappy ghost from the past, instead of living in it as alive. Anticipation of our future Anxiety creates the ghostlike sense of living timidly in our mortal friends so that we begin living in the world in the same way as a troubled guest, a guest who does not believe they deserve the rest, and hospitality that the body, the breath, or the world can offer.
David Whyte 00:18:58 Anxiety is the mind refusing to be consoled and nourished, either by the body itself, or by the beauty of the world that this body inhabits. Anxiety is an extended state of denial. The refusal to put right something that needs to be put right, because putting it right often means feeling real anguish, a real sense of the unknown, and the need to change at a fundamental level.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:31 That’s beautiful.
David Whyte 00:19:32 That last line is crucial about the refusal to feel real anguish. Anxiety is often a limbo state where we refuse to actually fall down into the grief that we’re actually feeling. You know, if you read back into our mythological past or even into the Bible, the King James Bible, you see people are constantly falling down, weeping or tearing their clothes. There was an understanding that a full state of physical grief is actually a form of enlightenment. We’ve all had that experience where we lose someone close to us, you know, without just breaks apart all of our defenses, and we break down weeping. And for many people, that is the nearest experience they will have to what is called kensho in the Zen experience of breakthrough, of enlightenment.
David Whyte 00:20:30 Actually, you’re on an edge. There’s nowhere else to be in the world. There’s no further place to go. You’re intimate with the loss. You’re intimate with your own physical body in the world. You’ve given up your hopes for an easy explanation, and you’re just plunged into the sheer physical absence of the person that you’ve lost. And there was a moment back in the 13th century where the great Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart was asked by someone, obviously in the state in a state of grief because he said, Where is God? Where is God? And Eckhart said, God is nowhere. God is pure absence. The person he must have thought a lot of the person he said this to. Because, you know, it’s asking a lot of the person to whom he’s speaking. So it’s probably someone who was a student of of Eckhart, that he’d be worthy of this description, that he’d be up to and able for understanding God in this way. That God is, is the far horizon of your you’re young, it’s where you’re being pulled to out of yourself.
David Whyte 00:21:37 Yeah, it’s the greatest context you can imagine. And, you know, even as you’re imagining it, that it will lead you to places that you still cannot imagine.
–
Eric Zimmer 00:22:07 Back to anxiety. I think part of the problem with anxiety is that I think it arises out of uncertainty. Let’s say I’m anxious about something. If that thing were to actually occur, I have developed some degree of capability of allowing myself to go into the grief, the heartache, the pureness of all these things we’re talking about. What I found harder to do is when that loss is looming and may or may not happen. And it seems those are the really difficult things to set down. The ones that could go either way.
David Whyte 00:22:43 Yes. Yes. So this is, you know, the powerful physical gift that deep silence gives you is to allow the world to be itself and to announce, as it goes along, what’s actually occurring. Because we all know how many of our anxieties will never actually come to pass. And we all know the way that things we should be anxious about will come to pass.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:09 Right.
David Whyte 00:23:10 So quite often.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:11 That we have no idea. Or even coming.
David Whyte 00:23:13 Yeah. What we’re worrying about is not what we should be worrying about. Precisely. And the ability to see to the center of the pattern also strips away all of these necessities that the surface that we think we need in order to be ourselves. Silence always leads you to a radical kind of Of simplicity and so many of the things that you’re defending on the surface, you realize are ridiculous and part of some absurd project that you decided are your ancestors decided to hand down to you, and you immediately eliminate a lot of the things you’re going to worry about just by paying attention in deep silence and starting to shape an identity that’s in that deep silence.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:58 The horizons that you were talking about. I was actually going to save that kind of end of the interview, because I think it is such a uplifting and hopeful, although there’s fear embedded in it. But ultimately, for me, it ends up being hopeful because this idea that there is a horizon out there that I can’t yet imagine is really consoling to me, because I think what we all tend to do is we have something that feels important to us, and it’s out there in the future and it’s uncertain, and we want it to go a certain way, because all we can imagine, as far as we are able to imagine, is how this thing we want won’t happen. And that’s as far as we can see. But a horizon says there is something beyond that.
David Whyte 00:24:46 The definition of a horizon that you can’t actually see what’s beyond it, but your imagination is drawn to it. Yes. And your physical body is drawn to it at the same time, we’re migratory creatures, actually. We came out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, following horizon after horizon. It was part of our ability to survive and be in this world, actually. But it’s also part of our joy, the joy of our beauty and of exploration. Often when we lose our relationship to beauty, we also lose our relationship to courage, which is really our heartfelt love of the world and care for the world. And so there’s another paragraph here in the essay on anxiety. The way we use it as a defense against beauty and against nourishment, and against all the ways that the world is actually giving to us. You know, through the blue of the sky, the green of grass, you know, the wind across the mountainside.
David Whyte 00:25:53 Constant anxiety is an unconscious defense against what is calling us to a deeper understanding, ever present anxiety actually covers over and prevents me from feeling fully what is preying on my mind, or what is trying to be gifted to me. Constant anxiety is our constant way of not paying attention. Anxiety is the trembling surface identity that finds the full measure of our anguish too painful to bear. Constant fretting is our way of turning away from and attempting to make a life free from the necessities of heartbreak. Anxiety is our greatest defense against the vulnerabilities of intimacy and a real understanding of others, allowing our hearts to actually break. Might be the first step in freeing ourselves from anxiety. That’s probably the most radical line I wrote in the essay. Allowing our hearts to actually break might be the first step in freeing ourselves from anxiety. There’s another essay in here called Care the word care, and my favorite line in that essay is care doesn’t care if you don’t want to care. Human beings don’t have a choice about caring. They always care about something.
David Whyte 00:27:16 Yes, and care is the measure of our heartfelt participation in the world. And the only way you can stop caring is to actually close yourself off from the world. Yeah. So opening up the path of care is also opening up the path of heartbreak. There is no sincere path a human being can take in this life without having their heart broken. And yet we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to find a path where we will not have that imaginative organ broken open and displayed to the world. Right?
Eric Zimmer 00:27:56 I had something I was going to say and it just zipped away. Okay.
David Whyte 00:28:00 The heartbreak of interviewing.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:05 You just redeemed that. That’s probably going to end up staying in the interview. Now. Chris isn’t going to cut it. Exactly. Yes. Anyway, I’m going to move on because it’s gone. But I’m going to stay with anxiety for a second. And I’d like to talk a little bit about what do we do with this? Because again, I think sometimes, yes, it’s a way of avoiding what we’re actually feeling.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:27 And I think in the other way, it’s what we talked about. It’s this uncertainty. And there is care in it because we are seeing that this thing really matters to us, and we don’t know what’s going to happen with it, which is, I think, what causes the anxiety. And you say that anxiety is difficult to shed because it always refuses to rest, and rest is where the answer to anxiety lies.
David Whyte 00:28:54 Yes. And actually rest lies under our anxiety. The very thing you’re being anxious about is the very thing you’re meant to converse with in a different way than your anxiety is allowing you to speak.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:09 That’s a beautiful way of saying.
David Whyte 00:29:10 Anxiety is both my protection and the sure indication of my deepest vulnerabilities, all at the same time. What seems completely wrong with my life, with the world, and with the time in which I live, is often my greatest manufactured defense against being fully part of this world, this body, and this time. What I worry about and fret about for my children’s future is often what keeps me from helping them into that future.
David Whyte 00:29:39 What I worry about, and what I am anxious about, keeps me in an insulated, busy state of mind that stops me feeling the true depth and vulnerability of how much I care, how much I want to make a difference, and how much I feel powerless to do it. So underneath anxiety lies this deep well of care. I care about something, but I’m afraid of caring to the depth to which it’s calling me, because it calls for a kind of physical vulnerability in the world that probably my parents or my schooling or my society did not initiate me into. So I need help. You know, you can get it from the poetic tradition, And from our great contemplative traditions that talk about the vulnerabilities. You know, we tend to think of Zen, for instance, and I’ve got an essay on Zen. We tend to think of it as this beautiful, clear state. And it’s all about polished floors and bronze bells and the clarity of sitting in silence. Very organized. But really, the path of Zen is the invitation to heartbreak.
David Whyte 00:30:49 And all of the Zen koans are often about physical breakdown, about not understanding something because you can’t stand being so fully invited, so physically into the world, and the breaking apart into tears are a great shout, or the moon reflected in the surface of the water in the bucket. The bucket breaks open, the water runs out, you know. And then it says, and then the monkey’s enlightened. And you don’t realize the physical experience of breakdown that the said monk went through at that time. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:26 Yep. It’s always monk. So-and-so stubbed his toe, hit his head, was struck by lightning, was locked in a tomb. There’s always something like that to your point, which causes this breakthrough.
I wanted to pause for a quick, good wolf reminder. This one’s about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that’s really that. We don’t think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life. Right. Habits don’t happen in a vacuum.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:54 They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding, I should do this, I should do that, I should do this. We get discouraged because we haven’t really thought about what we’re not going to do in order to make that happen. So it’s really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove? If you want to step by step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to Good Wolf Range and join the Free Master class. Let’s move on to a couple of the other things. There’s so many that I want to talk about, and the book is amazing in that way. I don’t know how many you wrote, but there’s a lot I ended up choosing like 25, and then I had to edit way down from there. So I want to make sure we get a little bit of a tour.
David Whyte 00:32:41 The number is important actually, because it was a part of the story.
David Whyte 00:32:45 I began very naturally writing these essays, and I created a reader circle and did 24 people signed up for it, and I did 24 one every two weeks for people. And that got me writing. And then I did another 24, and then I said, oh, I have a book. And then I added a few more and lo and behold, it came out with 52 essays in the first book. And all of the reviewers said, oh, a pack of cards of one for each week of the year. But it was just sheer luck that I put 52 out. And so I decided to do 52 again in the second one, just because the number had been so talismanic, so luckily talismanic for the first one. And I actually wrote 65 essays in seven months last year in a kind of delirium. And it was a delirium, actually. And then I chose 52 out of the 65 to put out in the book.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:37 I think that’s very interesting, because one of the things that I noticed in beginning to read the book, and this is a this is a feature of our modern life, right? That we’re going so fast is that at first reading of some of the essays, you know, I’m talking about the first hour in the book or so.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:55 I’m feeling impatient because I’m like, this is beautiful, but what’s the bottom line? You know, David, lay it out for me. What’s the bottom line? And as I had a little bit more time with it and I began to slow down, then they start working on a completely different level. And so I think a week is actually an interesting amount of time to think about spending with one of these.
David Whyte 00:34:18 As well, said Eric, because you’re not meant to start this book and read it all the way through, and it would probably kill you in the way it killed me to write it. You did.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:28 That? Yeah.
David Whyte 00:34:29 You’re meant to take one essay and spend a few days with it, actually, and they’re short enough that you can return to them. And yes, exactly the physical experience itself. It’s like poetry. You can’t speed read poetry. Poetry itself actually engages you to slow down to the same physical experience in which it was actually written.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:50 Yes. There’s an old Chinese line, something like read a book for the thousandth time, and the truth will emerge. And when I started studying with the Zen teacher, really? Seriously, I remember he was like, okay, here’s the book to read. And it was, I think it was Appreciate Your Life by, Mizuki Roshi doesn’t doesn’t really matter. But what I noticed was I was told and encouraged to read that book in a totally different way. This is in the last decade since I had this podcast and as part of having this podcast, I’m reading a lot, right? Because I’m trying to honor every guest by reading their things. I’m trying to understand the material, so it’s the way I show love to the guests, to the audience, right? But it’s fast. And I suddenly realized when I was doing this reading for my Zen practice, I was reading a book that I could have read in an afternoon for six months. Yes. And your essays, I think, provoke a similar thing. There’s a lot of facets as you turn the diamond around, you know, the diamond being the word.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:49 Right. There’s so many facets. And of course, there’s that thing that happens when we read, which is that if we truly are engaging, we are not the same person that we were the first time we read it.
David Whyte 00:36:01 Yes, exactly. I mean, the essays are written in a poetic fashion and in poetry you only need one line. Actually, they are like koans. In my essay on despair in the first book. The only line you need from that essay is despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go. Despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go. Everything’s in that line. You know the shelter that’s in despair. The invitation to give up. It’s a temporary form of giving up. Where we pretend we can’t go on. In a sense, in order to go down to another layer of ground. And so, yes. Prolonged attention. You’re much better reading one line and staying with that for a good few hours or one paragraph. Then you are running through the whole book, you know, so quickly.
David Whyte 00:36:48 So as you know, Eric, we have a our educational systems Commoditize learning. And I think actually one of the bright sides of what’s also going to have a big shadow, you know, with artificial intelligence is that we’re no longer going to be able to test people on rote learning. Right. It’s going to free us up. We’re going to have to reimagine what learning and testing what learning means. We’re going to have to go back to more of a, you know, the ancient oral inheritance of testing presence. Yes. And testing understanding at a deep level.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:26 What you say about only needing one line. It’s funny, when I listen to you read, there are so many lines that could be the line that I expect. That’s the end, right? Like you just hit it with the line that ends up and and then it goes on. And I say that as a compliment, not as a negative thing. Right. Because each of these lines is good enough that it could be an ending.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:49 And you’d have so much to ponder and reflect upon. Let’s move into another essay I am going to skip. Bye for now. To that, I really want to talk about guilt and shame because it’s really important, right? Those are really big things, but I feel like I want to hit one that just was the one that I most was like, That I didn’t see coming. And it’s about nagging.
David Whyte 00:38:14 Yes.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:16 You say nagging is love and listened to from both sides. Say more about nagging. I found it a really beautiful essay and surprising.
David Whyte 00:38:25 Well thank you. There’s a number of essays that are begun. Tongue in cheek. The one now you know. Yes, they are now. Where I say now is not what it was. Yeah, but then it goes into more serious territory. And I just wanted to choose something that we all have to work with in relationship. And I thought, have I ever come across a long term relationship where nagging doesn’t occur, you know, either in your own life or witnessing other marriages? Yeah.
David Whyte 00:38:56 And I realized what an emblem of care it is, actually. And if you’re in a relationship where you’re never nagged, you do have to ask yourself if the person really cares about you. I mean, we know all the evidence of the way that in relationship, especially for men, you’re going to live longer being in relationship, most especially with a woman who’s actually asking you if you’re taking care of yourself in the right way. And men live so much longer in relationship. Unfortunately, women don’t, so they need to kind of help. But but nagging is love and listened to from both sides. The helpless nagger and the equally helpless naggee nagging is something both sides want to turn away from. Something both sides would rather not experience, but something that is also an abiding and ancient necessity in every long term relationship. Love meets powerlessness. Love meets powerlessness. Nagging is our way of knocking on a door when those living inside most need our help but refuse it, or when we ourselves neglect again and again to ask for the necessary help.
David Whyte 00:40:14 Nagging is necessary in every committed human relationship. Because nagging is the way love tries to survive when it feels it has no other way.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:27 Yeah, the two lines there for me are when love meets powerlessness and then the last one. Nagging is the way love tries to survive when it has no other way. And yes, I love it because it goes back to these things that we see as negative point towards what we truly care about and what matters. And nagging is just another example of that. It is. There’s something that I want. There’s something deeper I want here in this relationship, and I’m not getting it. And it’s partially why nagging often the relationship advice is like, look underneath the thing. It’s not about the thing. It’s not about the trash being taken out or not being taken out. It’s not about it’s usually about something far deeper. Which gets to another essay that you’ve alluded to, which is where we’re feeling uncared for. So we’re nagging as an attempt because it’s the way we’re trying to keep love alive when it feels it has no other way.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:24 Just such a beautiful idea.
David Whyte 00:41:26 Yes, it can also be, you know, proactively helpful in a way that can help a person who’s refusing to get diagnosed, you know, for some kind of pain they have in their body. They’re just trying to soldier on. You know, most especially in the masculine psyche and the necessity to keep knocking on that door and to find different ways of saying it until it’s heard.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:08 I think that’s so tricky to figure out. I’ll give you an example. I’ve got a friend and her husband is taking terrible care of himself. Right. High blood pressure, you know, high cholesterol, way overweight, eating terribly, not exercising. And his father went in his 50s from heart disease. And he is now in his 40s. And they have young children. So she is really flummoxed by this and frustrated by it. Right, because she doesn’t want her kids or herself to be left without their partner in potentially 5 to 10 years. And so I think what you come up against here is this also love meets powerlessness.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:50 Like, what can you do that doesn’t destroy the relationship by trying to get somebody to do something they don’t currently want to do?
David Whyte 00:42:59 Yes. I mean, it’s the invitation on both sides is on the one side to say it in a way in which there are no defenses against what you’re saying. And on the person who’s being asked. It’s listening at another level. Yes, but sometimes in order for that listening to occur, you literally have to get down on your knees. You can’t just keep saying it as a logistical invitation. Get to the doctor, get to the doctor. It may actually necessitate you as the nagger going to another level of intimacy, literally getting down on your knees in tears and saying why it’s so important to you. You know, if that doesn’t work, it may be that the relationship is coming to an end. There are certain points, you know, where you try sincerely, metaphorically and mythologically three times. Yeah. And if it’s not received then you’re meant to hold a different conversation with that person.
David Whyte 00:44:00 But you won’t find out until you follow what looks like nagging on the surface to its foundation in a real invitational conversation that displays your vulnerability in why you’re asking this.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:14 And I think it gets to a really challenging thing, which is what are we willing to or able to live with in a relationship? And what is our relationship with ourselves about the trade offs that life inevitably involves? Yes, I’d like that to be your next book. Take the Serenity Prayer and write an entire book about how the wisdom to know the difference in lots of really knotty situations. Why don’t you tackle that one next?
David Whyte 00:44:43 Mark, that’s your next book.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:45 Actually, I honestly think it might be. I really sort of jokingly, but not because that idea of, well, you just accept the things you can’t change and you change the things you can is lovely on the surface. But boy, it’s complicated because we don’t know, right? You don’t know, am I? One more ask from the person changing.
David Whyte 00:45:06 Well, you know, there’s another level to this is the way we nag ourselves. We nag ourselves in unproductive ways. Nagging is, you know, you will often say to yourself in the mirror, oh my God, you know, you need to lose some weight, you know? But it’s really underneath that the need to be lithe, to be young, to be healthy in the world, you know, and the ability to actually talk to yourself in the mirror in a way in which you would want to listen to yourself, is a whole discipline in and of itself. If you talk to your friends the way you talk to yourself in the mirror, you’d never have another friend in your life, actually, right? So the ability to have compassion for yourself, you could say that’s a practice of deepening the conversation, deepening what looks on the surface like nagging. Yeah. The conclusion of the micro essay on nagging is nagging. Is that heavily disguised? Beautiful. But unlistened to invitation to a Better Life. We all want to receive nagging. Is that heavily disguised, beautiful but unlistened to invitation to a better life we all want to receive always despite ourselves. And always, always, always, always. Despite the other person trying to be brought out of the place where it is presently hiding. Nagging is love. Just love. unlistened to from both sides.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:30 That point you made about. We’re nagged quite often because we’re not really listening right to our conscience, to what is good for our health, to the courageous, beckoning path we refuse again and again to take. And I think that’s what’s so interesting also points to a lot about what you talk about in the essay on guilt. Right? Which is we tend to think we should move away from it, but it could be enormously instructive. So that nagging voice inside of us, I think, calls upon us to have some degree of discernment about is it nagging us unnecessarily and in unkind and habitual ways like you just described. Or is it nagging me because there’s a deeper call that I’m not answering? And like many things, that’s difficult to figure out. But one of the things that you’ve said multiple times, and I’ve heard you say it before, but I don’t think it landed for me in the same way that it did today, is that it’s about the conversations that we have with these things and going to a deeper level of conversation with them than we normally do. That seems to be an underlying theme of what you’re pointing us to in all of these.
David Whyte 00:47:39 Yes, and we can tend to think of conversation as just some kind of verbal exchange, you know. But the Latin roots, the etymology of conversation, lead us to its original meaning, which is inside out. Actually, converse means inside out, and you’re literally meant to bring the inside to the outside. That’s the true invitation in every conversation. We all know the satisfaction when we have an exchange and they’re rare, you know. Although you can make them less rare through practicing deeper conversations, we all know the pleasure and satisfaction we get when we suddenly say something we didn’t realize we knew, and that we we suddenly say something together. I mean, I’m having that experience with you, Eric, in this interview where we’re saying things about things I’ve written here, which I’d never quite said before. That’s incredibly satisfying. It’s bringing the inside of an experience out into the world again. Yes. And the essays themselves are meant to do that.
David Whyte 00:48:42 But it’s interesting to try and think of more than interesting to think of conversation as a physical experience of bringing the inside to the outside. Yeah. Not just what’s hidden verbally, but the physical experience that’s hidden under the words out into the world.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:01 That’s beautifully said. Let’s lighten things up here quite literally, because you say that humor is a disguised form of spiritual discipline. I’ve often called it a spiritual virtue. Levity is a spiritual virtue. Talk to me about how humor is a disguised form of a spiritual discipline.
David Whyte 00:49:20 Humor tells us that whatever context we’ve arranged for ourselves, in our minds, or in our religious beliefs, there’s always another context that makes your context absurd. Right. And just understanding that from the get go gives you a real sense of humor, a real ability to live at many different levels at once. And, you know, humor’s really big in the Irish culture, and it’s big because it fits with the Irish understanding that whatever you say always has another context that contradicts it. Exit.
David Whyte 00:50:00 Yeah. Yeah. And every conversation in the west of Ireland is actually based on this dynamic, every real conversation. You try to subvert the original basis on which the conversation started, and then everyone’s really happy. And you can go on to the next subject. Actually, I’m serious about humor. As serious about humor as the understanding. Now, however you’ve described yourself. It will not survive meeting with reality. I had this experience many years ago up in the Himalayas of almost dying from amoebic dysentery. I was hallucinating for three days and three nights, actually, in a yak manger at 10,000ft. And that’s outside where this family were keeping me alive, actually. And, the culminating experience after three days was sitting up covered in dried yak dung and straw, just laughing outrageously. The whole family ran out, actually, to see what was happening. And my experience was that this whole David White project was totally absurd. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And I had this name. I had this idea about myself, and it was just absolutely ridiculous.
David Whyte 00:51:15 And I was literally raving sitting up. But it was a real powerful breakthrough that stayed with me after I came out of the hallucination. And beneath me was this river in the valley, the high valley that came out of the slopes of Del Aguirre. And I realized, looking at the river, we’d given a name to that river, the Martian river valley. But actually you were naming something that was already gone. And you might as well try to understand the human being, you know, through this essential movement, through the world, through the way they hold the conversation of life rather than through any static nomenclature, we often will try to dismiss a person by labeling them. You see it in the adolescent behavior emanating from the white House at the moment. You know, naming and nicknaming people, giving people names that make them small in the eyes of the world that embarrass them, you know. You know, this is the way that we behave as adolescents in trying to keep the world at bay and trying to keep other adolescents at bay.
David Whyte 00:52:24 We want a more mature experience of the world. We stop naming people too early in the process. You know, we stop calling our wife wife, our husband husband, our partner partner. We start releasing them from the names we’ve given them. You’re good at this. You’re bad at that. You know it’s your fault. It’s my fault. And you start to let the words emanate from another, more movable, more conversational, more invitational, more vulnerable. Robustly vulnerable. Where vulnerability is not a weakness, but a strength, a place. And it’s actually not a place. It’s more of a wave form or it’s a tide. It’s. It’s the sea that lies beneath you and between you and the world. I have a whole book of love poetry called The Sea. And you actually. And it’s the ability to stay in love with a person by actually feeling that tidal give and take inside them. They don’t even know who they are. So how could you give them a name, right, and say you know who they are, they’re just finding out who they are.
David Whyte 00:53:38 We give names to our son, our daughter, and about who they are, but they’re often out in the world trying to find that out themselves. So how could you, even as a father or mother, name fully the child that you brought into the world? Actually.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:54 And as soon as you name it, it’s something else, right? I mean, that’s the Taoist view of reality. And Zen comes out of Taoism, which is that life is all process, it’s all event, it’s all relation. These things that we are giving nouns, they aren’t that way really at all. And the same thing happens if you dig deep down into the fundamental level of reality, right? If you get down into quantum physics, you find things aren’t things in the way we think they are.
David Whyte 00:54:23 Yeah, there are great lines in a love poem by Pablo Neruda. He says, when the rice withdraws from the earth, the grains of its flour, when the wheat hardens its little hip joints and lifts its face of a thousand hands, I make my way to the grove, where the woman and the man embrace to touch the innumerable sea of what continues.
David Whyte 00:54:48 El Mar innumerable. Continues to touch the innumerable sea of what Continues. So we’re afraid of what continues, because what continues may take the other person away from us. And that’s the risk we take, you know, in loving fully, it’s always the full measure of your ability to give the other person away to the world. And most of the time they come back to us. But there may be a tide that takes them away from us completely. Yeah. And that’s what we’re afraid of, is, is the change in the world that will break your heart. So the ability to understand that heartbreak is part of your sincere dedication to the other, actually, and the sincere dedication to our world at the same time.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:39 So listener and thinking about that and all the other great wisdom from today’s episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you’re taking away, what would it be? Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give you a tip on that. And it’s to start small. It’s really important when we’re trying to implement new habits, to often start smaller than we think we need to, because what that does is it allows us to get victories. And victories are really important because we become more motivated when we’re feeling good about ourselves, and we become less motivated when we’re feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change down the road. If you’d like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to Goodwolf.me/change and join the free masterclass.
I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to talk for a couple more minutes. In the post-show conversation. We may get into shame and guilt. We might get into injury. There’s so many good ones. Unordinary listeners, if you’d like access to that post-show conversation and all the other post-show conversations.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:54 AD free episodes. A special episode I do just for you each week. You can go to one you feed, join, and become part of our community and help support this show. David, thank you so much. It is always a pleasure to talk with you. I feel like I could do it for hours. Thank you.
David Whyte 00:57:10 Thank you Eric, that passed very quickly. Always a good sign. An experience of the timeless in the conversation. So thank you too.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:18 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.
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