In this episode, Pádraig Ó Tuama explores how to find wisdom in the things you’re struggling with by looking more closely at the emotions, desires, and stories beneath our experiences. He and Eric discuss why fear and anger often point to deeper needs, how to stay present with difficult emotions without becoming consumed by them, and why some lessons simply can’t be rushed. Pádraig also shares insights on belonging, the stories that shape our identities, and what healthy communities can teach us about questioning our beliefs. Along the way, they explore poetry, prayer, desire, and how paying closer attention to what’s happening within and around us can help us meet life with greater curiosity and openness.
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Key Takeaways:
- Look beneath fear, anger, and hatred to understand the deeper needs driving them.
- Why belonging can sometimes reinforce conflict and polarization.
- Learn to stay with difficult emotions without becoming consumed by them.
- Some forms of wisdom can only come with time—and can’t be rushed.
- Question the stories and beliefs that shape your identity and sense of belonging.
- Pay attention to what your circumstances are asking of you instead of wishing you were somewhere else.
- Healthy communities make room for disagreement, criticism, and complicated stories.
- Explore what your desires reveal about you—and why getting what you want doesn’t necessarily end the wanting.
Pádraig Ó Tuama was born in Ireland and is a poet with interests in language, religion and conflict. He presents the Poetry Unbound podcast from On Being Studios. With poems featured in the Harvard Review, Poetry Ireland, Ploughshares, and other publications. Ó Tuama has also published work in theology and conflict analysis. In 2025, Copper Canyon Press published the US edition of Ó Tuama’s Kitchen Hymns. In that same year, W. W. Norton & Company published the US edition of 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Anthology. Ó Tuama lives in New York City.
Poems mentioned in this episode:
Having Confessed by Patrick Kavanagh
This is a Hymn by Lorna Goodison
Connect with Pádraig Ó Tuama: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama, check out these other episodes:
How to Embrace Life’s Paradoxes with Rosemerry Wahtola-Trommer
How to Live the Questions of Life with Krista Tippett
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Episode Transcript:
Padraig O Tuama 00:00:00 To force yourself into the lessons that only time can tell. Can be difficult if somebody has a chronic illness and they’ve had it for five years. That can be difficult for people around them to know how to speak. But there’s something about meeting somebody else who’s been through that, too, where time has done the work in both of them.
Chris Forbes 00:00:22 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:07 I got sober in rooms that run on stories about getting better. Someone said they’d been where I was and then they made it out and that gave me hope. Padraig O tumor sees the power in these stories, and he also sees the people they leave out. When someone says, Jesus fed me when I was hungry. The people who are still hungry feel bereft. Every group rewards certain stories and ignores others, and Padraig thinks the braver groups are the ones that make room for criticism. We also get into the hungers underneath the two wolves, and we share a poem about being lost in the woods that I’ve loved for years. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Padraig, welcome to the show.
Padraig O Tuama 00:01:48 Hi, Eric. Nice to be with you.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:49 I’m really happy to have you on. I’ve wanted to have this conversation for several years now since I saw you at the on been gathering, so I’m glad that we’re finally able to do it. We’re going to be discussing a number of your different books, one of which will be Poetry Unbound 50 Poems to Open Your World.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:07 And I know you also have a new work of poetry called Feed the Beast also, and we’ll have links in the show notes to all that. But we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In 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, well, well, 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.
Padraig O Tuama 00:02:50 I’ve been thinking about this a little bit, Eric. In preparation, I suppose I’m interested in the hungers of both of the wolves. You know, you said greed and hatred and fear for the bad wolf.
Padraig O Tuama 00:03:01 I think hatred and fear are manifestations of some deeper hungers. So. Yeah. And whenever I hear that parable, and I’ve heard it before, I’ve always wanted to go a bit deeper in the in the hungers of both wolves, and to recognize that maybe there’s three wolves or five or. Yes, but maybe the hungers of some of the wolf that has deemed the bad one have intelligence is underneath them. Maybe they’re directed in a poor way, but there’s something to be learned from both, I suppose. Yeah, that’s where I go.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:31 Well, I agree with you. I don’t think there’s two wolves inside of us. I think I’ve, you know, I could probably count 30 without even trying very hard inside me. Say a little bit more about that. You’ve done a lot of work in conflict resolution over the years, so you have encountered people who hate each other. Yeah, right. They come in hating each other. Talk to me a little bit more about the hunger underneath that, what have you learned is the hunger that’s sort of fueling that.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:56 Or what are some of the hungers? I’m curious.
Padraig O Tuama 00:03:59 Yeah. Well, in any situation where there’s people who are representatives of groups that are being brought together, where there’s longstanding hate and predictable hate occurring, there’s many things. There’s many layers going on. You know, maybe there’s deep grief and fear about the future. It’s fear for safety. Those things can go on. But there could also be a profound sense of group belonging. You know, I know that if I demonstrate my hate for this other group, there’s another group that will say to me, hey, you really belong to us because you perform your hate very well. And so hate can be an initiation in that way. And so underneath the practice of hate, in that way, there can be grief and shock and worry, as well as a certain intelligence of how it is that we make certain sacrifices in order to belong to a group. There can be fear as well, in the sense of it can be easier to stick with the performance of a hate that you know, than risk the possibility of opening yourself up to learning something about the other that might shock you about them, and then be about yourself.
Padraig O Tuama 00:04:59 Inside a room. Sometimes I think that, you know, when it comes to people who have had a long standing hate towards each other in groups. I suppose occasionally it’s possible that two groups can have equal but opposite power, and usually there’s disproportionate power on one side. And then usually there is an argument about what the disproportionate power is and who has it. Often a group with power doesn’t want to acknowledge that they have power, because then with power comes accountability. You would hope. And so those things too, are present in a room, so there can be a hunger to acknowledge some of the journey of learning that you’ve come on, because that might mean that therefore you’d be open to some more accountability. So all of those things can be present in a room. Yeah, yeah. We all know this though. You don’t just need to be a conflict mediator to know it. You know this because of your friends or your family, or because of where you vote or whether maybe you don’t vote.
Padraig O Tuama 00:05:52 But, you know, in the environments where polarization happens, there’s always a lot of dynamics and you can feel them very clearly.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:59 You can if you’re looking to feel them. But many people aren’t, right. They’re happily polarized. You know, there are content in that space. I think there also probably has to be a big element of deep resentment over what’s happened in the past, right? There’s been a lot of harm done or perceived harm anyway.
Padraig O Tuama 00:06:17 Yeah, harm or perceived harm. But I think even groups of people who are very happy in certain performances of polarization. You have a group of friends or a family or, you know, mostly people have circumstances in their life where they do have to live with subtlety. Even those who say they don’t. There is some relationship in their life where they are having to think, well, no, I need to think about this in 4 or 5 levels. And so partly I think that is a great resource for mediation is to say, what are the relationships in your life that that you have to think about? They’re important to you, but you have to work at it and to think, what are the skills you use? They’re very, very naturally.
Padraig O Tuama 00:06:53 And what would it be like to think about using those in this room, and what’s the risk of using those skills in this room? And so we would go, yeah, I love the person we’re talking about in terms of in my family, but I don’t love people here or person in my family annoys me. But people here might hurt me, you know. So and then suddenly you’re talking about something very interesting in terms of the multiple skills that all of us have.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:15 Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So in your book, In the Shelter, you throughout the book are saying hello to lots of different things. Right. You say hello to the lists and the day and the tiredness and the coffee and the coffee. Hello to the happy accident of the changing story. Hello to the fear of fear. Hello to here. Hello to the storm. It goes on and on. I could do 150 of them. There’s a lot of them. What are you saying hello to today?
Padraig O Tuama 00:07:43 I’m saying hello to Covid booster.
Padraig O Tuama 00:07:46 That’s me feeling like I have Covid. Okay, I’m saying hello to a year that has had a grief in it, and am trying to try and pay attention to the ways that grief works. I am saying hello to deadlines, and I’m saying hello also to the need for asking for help. Those are some of the things I was saying hello to a world in war and saying hello to a world that there’s war. About what the war is about.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:18 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are all things to say hello to. You just talked about grief there. And grief is something I’ve been dealing with some of also. And somewhere you quote the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, and you say that he recommends that you live at the heart of the emotion. Time has its own work to do. And, you know, one of the things that I’ve been reflecting on as I go through a difficult time is living at the heart of that emotion, like really giving ourselves to it, what the work is that time is going to do on us isn’t obvious at that point.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:54 You know, I often refer to sort of, you know, there’s that saying when one door closes, another door opens, right? But I often think we don’t talk about the dark hallway in between. Right. One door closes and the other isn’t open yet, and you’ve got a period of walking in the dark and having the faith that this is doing something in me and for me. But you don’t see it.
Padraig O Tuama 00:09:15 Yeah. I think about that line from Patrick Kavanagh. Every day I actually have it on the mug that I’m drinking tea from at the moment. Oh, okay. I got it printed on there, but that’s only recently. I’ve been thinking about that line for a long time. You know, I’m wondering if reading it. The line is from a poem of his called Having Confessed, and it’s instructions to somebody who has just been to confession, Catholic confession, you know, and he’s in a certain sense saying, what would you know about the state of your soul? You know, confession.
Padraig O Tuama 00:09:43 The idea is to say, here’s what I did wrong. And Patrick Cavan is taking confession very seriously, but also taking truth very seriously in a psychoanalytical sense, the sense of how difficult it can be to know what we’re talking about. So the poem starts off by saying, having confessed, he feels like he should go down on his knees and beg for forgiveness for having dared to view his soul from the outside. Lie at the heart of the emotion. Time has his own work to do. And so I think what the poem is, is an invitation to, to notice, to pay attention. I don’t take it that it’s an invitation to wallow. I don’t think that’s a wise thing to do. I think it’s helpful to to notice and also to find something to keep you busy enough. And also, I know for me, certainly in the last year and has been a year of difficulty, there has been a way in which it’s been a necessity to regularly remind myself of the world that I live in, a world where I’m going through something difficult, but like, that’s just one.
Padraig O Tuama 00:10:41 There are wars, there is hunger, there’s climate change. And to to not think about what I’m doing with my money or to to think about how I’m keeping aware of those things, not to overwhelm me or not to minimize what I’m going through either, but simply to just think, well, here’s the world that I’m in, and to lie at the heart of the emotion of that and lying at the heart of it. I love that lying. But again, I don’t see it as wallow. I think of it as notice.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:06 Yeah, yeah, I think that’s so interesting. It’s such a nuanced line between wallowing in an emotion and being open to it, between, you know, looking at things outside of us to give us perspective versus minimizing, you know, using that to minimize what we’re going through. Because things are very they’re very nuanced, you know, area in your word there, which is to notice and pay attention, I think is the key like is to keep checking in. Like where okay, where am I here.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:34 You know. Oh boy.
Padraig O Tuama 00:11:35 What’s happening today?
Eric Zimmer 00:11:36 Pretty self-involved the last couple of days, like completely self-involved. Okay, time to turn the direction outward. Yeah. Oh, I’ve been going, going, going for a couple of days and having, you know, like, it just keeps shoving the hard thing aside to keep moving. Well. Maybe it’s time to pause and allow that hard thing a little bit of time, you know, kind of in my heart. And so it’s all very nuanced. Yeah.
Padraig O Tuama 00:11:57 And your question too was about time. You know, that line of time has its own work to do. You know, there’s there’s jokes about is there an app for that about anything? And I don’t think there’s anything new in wanting quick solutions, but there’s something very old in saying quick solutions don’t last necessarily. And so time has its own work to do. There are certain things that I’ll only recognize and come to terms with when I am the age that somebody else was when they went through it.
Padraig O Tuama 00:12:23 So I’m 48 now, but when I turned 32, I began to think about my dad in a particular way because he was 32 when I was born. And I found myself thinking, you know, when you’re younger and you have these expectations about how how sorted parents should be. And then when I started to get to the age that my parents were when I was born or when I was 10 or 20, something changed in me where I thought, God Almighty, sure, I don’t know what I’m doing. What kind of a parent would I have been to the 20 year old me? A bewildered one, I’m sure that’s not working with time has its own work to do. Which is that to force yourself into the lessons that only time can tell can be difficult. If somebody has a chronic illness and they’ve had it for five years, that can be difficult for people around them to know how to speak. But there’s something about meeting somebody else who’s been through that, too, where time has done the work in both of them, not necessarily.
Padraig O Tuama 00:13:14 Their circumstances are in any way similar, but there has been a work of time in them, just something like that. And you can always recognize when you’re around somebody who has a wisdom of time in them where they their anxiety is in pressuring you into rushing through something that you haven’t been put through yet.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:33 Exactly. Makes me think of that Roca line. Have patience with everything that remains unresolved in your heart, you know. Yeah, yeah. Another thing that you do is that? If somebody asks you if you believe in God. You answer with a story from your day. I think I understand that correctly, so I can’t resist.
Speaker 4 00:13:54 Ha ha ha.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:55 Do you believe in God?
Padraig O Tuama 00:13:58 I went to a pub last night with a friend, and it’s a pub that used to be an Irish bar in New York that I used to go to fairly regularly before, when I lived really nearby. And so the woman, Joanne, who is the main bartender, recognized me when I went in. It’s been over a year since I’ve been in there.
Padraig O Tuama 00:14:16 So, you know, I remind her of my name just because I’m sure she’s loads of people she recognizes. But I just noticed the scale with which she was warm but wasn’t asking too much. The ease and the welcome, which is about, you know, running a good business, but also the way within which I think she has practised the art of deep familiarity without in any way asking people to explain themselves. I was really struck by the almost therapeutic level of levity and familiarity that she holds in her ways of responding to people, and I’m assuming that it isn’t just me who notices that in her, but many other people, too. Molly’s on third Avenue at 23rd. That’s the place to go if you’re in New York. Pint of Guinness.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:03 If you need to figure out whether you believe in God, head to Molly’s. Head to Molly’s.
Padraig O Tuama 00:15:08 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:09 I love the way you respond to that question in that way. I’m sure it would leave many people unsatisfied with that answer, but I love that.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:18 That’s the answer nonetheless.
Padraig O Tuama 00:15:19 It is the answer today. Yeah, yeah. Do you believe in God? Is a question that is. That’s about asking our minds to do something that I suppose I’d like to say. I find it difficult for my mind to do, which is to imagine something outside of what we understand existence to be. It is to go into the mysteries of the universe, and to ask what the emotion of an atom is. it is to ask what the design or the intelligence of a quark is. What do I know about any of that? And when it comes to theology, I’ve spent many years studying theology. So it isn’t that I’m just meandering around vaguely. I’ve thought a lot about it, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I have become convinced that it is the material reality of life in terms of what am I doing to help others stay alive? What am I doing to stay alive? What are we doing for the planet? What am I doing to notice the world that I’m in? That this is my response to the question of God.
Padraig O Tuama 00:16:17 I like the question of God not because I believe in God, but because I like the attention it asks me to pay to meaning to matter, to, vast on certitude. So therefore, I always want to answer the question of do you believe in God with the story of the day or the story of the night before? In case there isn’t a story of today.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:38 My primary spiritual practice for a number of years has been Zen Buddhism. And, you know, we do koans in Zen, right? And, you know, do you believe in God is essentially a koan to me, right? Like you said, there isn’t an answer. Answer, right. And in a Zen Kohen, there isn’t an answer. Answer. There’s a mystery underneath the answer. Or there’s a realness or a immediacy underneath, whatever the answer might be. A lot of the Zen koans are about inhabiting a different place than you normally do. And so, you know, I think, do you believe in God? You’ve turned it into a personal koan in that way, which is a really beautiful thing.
Padraig O Tuama 00:17:15 Krista Tippett has this great thing when she has been facilitating public conversations about something that might be divisive, where she might have had four people as part of an interview, and two of them have one particular approach to a public issue, and two have a different one. And she’ll say, before we talk about what you’re doing and, you know, we’re not frightened of disagreeing, but before we talk about what we’re doing, let’s take this public issue and tell me what’s around it for you. Tell me what it opens up. And so within the context of that, therefore, people begin to speak about their own story. They begin to speak about a big change that happened in their life, something that has been a central meaning in their life. And that isn’t to say, oh, we’ll all arrive at a nice neutral middle of the fence, middle of the road fence dwelling opportunity. No, in a certain sense, what it does is it is it sharpens their disagreement because there has been the possibility of understanding when you say this, actually, you’re also saying many other things.
Padraig O Tuama 00:18:13 So what gathers around me in the question of God and the question of belief in God is growing up Irish and Catholic. I was born in 1975 and is growing up Irish and Catholic and gay, and the secrecy that religion and Irishness brought along with that. It has been living a life that, since I was 11 or 12, has been very heavily influenced by evangelicalism, British and American evangelicalism. I have never been an evangelical, but I have been around a lot of evangelicals for 20 years. I’d say the age of 12 to 32, that tinged words like Christian for me, I don’t like that word, because mostly what that meant for the people who was asking me was, I want was, have you stopped being Catholic yet? they might be happy to hear that I.
Speaker 4 00:19:00 Have poor gays.
Padraig O Tuama 00:19:02 So, yeah. Have you stopped being Catholic? Okay. And yes, to one note or the other. Not that I’ve stopped being Catholic. Catholicism is in my DNA. If you cut me, I bleed the rosary.
Padraig O Tuama 00:19:10 My God. But it’s also family. It’s also history when it. When it comes to the question of God, when you look at the question of Irishness and God and Irishness and religion, it is years and years and years of study. Three degrees in theology. All of those things are around there for me. And it’s disappointment with religion as well as having had the most beautiful experiences. Sometimes when going on a retreat to a monastery, or still putting on choral music, when I need some quiet music to accompany me or. Yeah. So it’s all of those things. It’s going every year to Handel’s Messiah, if I can. All of those things are all gathered around the question of that. I don’t have children, but it is the recognition that I think were I to have had children, I would have wanted to have brought them up in a religion, because I think it’s really good to have a story against which to make your own decisions, and to have the conversation within the particularity of a tradition in order to be able to say, actually, I reject that tradition because what work that tradition has done to give you the because and I am a better person for having been so religion infused along with all the pain that that brought.
Padraig O Tuama 00:20:15 I am a much better person for having had that, and having had the language and the literature of the struggle in order to figure out what I think.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:41 I love that last point, because there are a lot of people who I know, a lot of them. A lot of people listening to this podcast would relate with this, because I’ve heard from many of them that, you know, spirituality is of interest to them, but they have really bad experiences from a particular tradition. But to look at it in that way, as if that tradition, like you said, gave you something to define yourself and not define yourself, that’s not the right word, but.
Padraig O Tuama 00:21:09 To fight against.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:10 It, to fight against, you know, and to see what you really believe and see the ways in which it falls short and see the ways in which it really does give beauty. There’s a nuance in there that is, I think, done correctly, is helpful in the spiritual path versus the sort of I’ve never really had any belief in any particular thing in any particular way.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:32 It’s just all very nebulous.
Speaker 4 00:21:35 Yeah. Well, I’d be curious.
Padraig O Tuama 00:21:36 To hear anybody who has never had any belief in any particular way as to how they’d say it, but certainly one of the things that a religion does is it provides a normative narrative for you, a way within which your religion is saying, here’s a way to look at the world, or where to look at time, where to look at afterlife, if their religion believes in that. Here’s a way to look at virtue and ethics and surprise and all of those things. And I.
Speaker 4 00:21:58 Think.
Padraig O Tuama 00:21:59 Everybody has stories that they use to hold their life together. And that might be a religion, and it’s in its parables, or it might be a cultural tradition and it’s parables. It might be the story of survival of a people who’ve been oppressed. It might be the story of an identity and finding dignity in that. It can be any of these things. It could be a national constitution. What I think is important is within all of those is to have the capacity to ask very, very serious questions.
Padraig O Tuama 00:22:27 And if questions aren’t allowed, well, then it’s a dangerous system. I apply that equally to Catholicism as I do to the LGBTQ community. I’ve heard some people say, you know, when you join the LGBTQ community, you know, everything’s much better because you know, everybody there is just there for love. And you’re like, that’s bullshit. No they’re not. There is ordinary as any community of people, and there’s all kinds of ambitions and desires and jealousies and other things going on. If I can’t question the narrative, well, then it’s a dangerous thing, because then all kinds of threats about betrayal and expulsion and exile come in. Are you a proper gay? You know, all of these kinds of things can happen that can happen in the local yoga studio, as well as in the local library, as well as in the environmental activism group, as well as in the religiously evangelical group. All of those groups will have to pay attention to how do we respond to the person within our group who asks questions about the story the group tells about itself? And that’s a test for the group.
Padraig O Tuama 00:23:29 And certainly we’re not talking about the great moral narrative at all. We’re talking about what’s happening in the room between the people.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:37 Just this morning, I was listening to a punk band I love called Against Me, and they have a song called I Was a Teenage Anarchist, and it’s about exactly this, like they got into the punk rock community because it felt like it was free and it was open. But over time, right as soon as the singer Laura Jane Grace, as soon as she started to think differently or ask questions, she started to be ostracized, right? The scene grew too rigid and the scene itself became the new authority. Yeah. You know, and I think you’re right that any group I have wrestled with this in my own life in finding spiritual community and sangha in that I think for a lot of years I would wander in and I would see those same dynamics and they would cause me to wander out instead of realizing that any group I wandered into was going to have some element of that in the question is, how is it dealt with? How is it handled? Because every group of.
Speaker 4 00:24:31 People.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:32 Is ultimately a group of people. And in all our messiness.
Speaker 4 00:24:37 Yeah, yeah.
Padraig O Tuama 00:24:37 I’m very interested in taking old stories, biblical stories, and I am nobody new in doing this. But to take an old story, to try to enter into it through a curious pathway over, you know, from the writings that have come over centuries, people have been doing that. And Jewish midrash has been asking questions about the gaps between the words for millennia. So there’s one here which is really about asking questions about belonging and taking the story seriously enough to take the story seriously. There’s a text early in the book of Genesis where the Adam and Eve character, you know, have eaten from the tree, and then they’ve suddenly realized they’ve eaten the fruit of the tree, and they’ve suddenly realized they’re naked. And the God character comes down and is looking for them, and they’re hiding because they’ve realized they’re naked. And then the God character makes them coats of skins for them. The text says, Now God made Adam and Eve coats of skins and dress them.
Padraig O Tuama 00:25:25 And the poem is called The Butcher of Eden. And when he was finished, he scraped fat from the backs of stretched skins. Wipe the blood so the seams bit. The thread with teeth and said. Dress yourselves in these. And they said, what is this verb? God shoved his knife into the earth and said, it’s like make believe, but for your body. They looked at all the meat still steaming from when it was alive. God said, eat and watched while beasts of Eden fed on beasts of Eden.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:07 That’s beautiful. And beautiful is even the wrong word. May be beautiful in a very striking way. Yeah.
Padraig O Tuama 00:26:13 I’m interested in what it means to take any story that has been part of shaping me, and to look into its edges. The story of Ireland, the story of, you know, Irish nationalism, the story of religion, the story of being a man. The story of being a gay man. All of these to ask serious questions and to do so knowing I can.
Padraig O Tuama 00:26:35 That’s my job. And it can be done playfully. It can be done intelligently. It can be done, you know. But to become overly defensive of those stories is to miss some of the subtlety and the brilliance and the wildness that’s present in those stories. Yeah, that’s the thing. But the better the story is in terms of gathering a community around the wilder it is.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:54 Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at once.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:37 And take the first step towards getting back on track. There is a poem that you love which is also one of my favorite poems, and it’s called Lost by David Wagner. It’s one of the few poems I know by heart. I know about 8 to 10 by heart, probably. And there’s a line in there that he talks about. You know, you must treat being here as in present, in this location and in this place. You must treat it as a powerful stranger. And I’ve heard you talk about how that powerful stranger isn’t always benevolent. You know, that powerful stranger could be challenging. And that to be here takes an ability to, you say, I think, a robust ability to tell the truth. You say a little bit more about any aspect of that poem or what I just said, or it’s one of my favorites. And I just when you said it was one of yours, I was like, well, we got we should talk about that because that’s quite a poem.
Padraig O Tuama 00:28:34 I do love the poem. It’s a poem of instruction, really, to somebody who’s lost in the woods and the title is lost and the opening sentence is just two words stand still. The trees around you and the bushes near you were not lost. Wherever you are, it’s called here and you must treat it as a powerful stranger. There is a way, and it can be helpful if the circumstances are correct, where maybe you could take that and just think, oh, let me relax into the moment. Let me relax into the now and look around and it’s all lovely. And and when those circumstances lend themselves to that kind of ease of heart, of looking around, just a readjustment that’s pleasant and maybe even beneficial, that can be great. And that poem can work on that level. But wherever you are, am treated as a powerful stranger is an invitation to recognize that you know, the thing that you might be lost in might be a global pandemic. It might be a war. It might be a relationship that has suddenly changed very, very seriously.
Padraig O Tuama 00:29:33 It might be something threatening and powerful is an amoral word. It just says, if this thing is a powerful stranger, what’s happening? You don’t know what’s happening. To be alert, perhaps to be ready to defend yourself, but also to look. And I really like the neutrality of that instruction, which is to say, just look, it’s a powerful stranger. And what’s your relationship with that powerful stranger going to be? And what can you do during the time? What is within your capacity to respond to during the time? There might be nothing like in the context of a global pandemic. You know, for most people it was just, you know, try not to get it, try not to spread it. You know, I wasn’t out making the vaccine or, you know. Yeah. And so, like, what I could do in response to that powerful stranger was to that. And, but then also to try to support people whose jobs were putting them in harm’s way, while they were trying to help people not be in harm’s way, or all of those things.
Padraig O Tuama 00:30:31 They’ve got friends who are medics, who’ve got friends who, you know, a friend who’s a firefighter. I’ve got friends who were involved in teaching, you know, and that they were out and doing work all the time. And the question for me is in terms of what can I do in response to the power of a stranger of Covid that is not getting in the way of the fact that their jobs are certainly more demanding? While other people were complaining about not being able to leave the house. So the people were like, I’d like to get back to my house because I’m exhausted with the extra work I have to do. All of those things come to my mind when I think of the powerful stranger that circumstances can be.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:26 I’m going to attempt to bring two different things together here from that poem and something that you’ve said. You have mentioned you like to reread things, but you say part of the concern in rereading a text often is that in so doing, you read less and recognize more. You glide over familiar words, you glide over familiar presumptions.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:47 And so with time you aren’t reading what’s there, you’re reading what you think is there. And another line from two lines from that David Wagner poem are no two trees of the same day, Raven? No. Two branches of the same terrain. Right. There’s this newness all the time and ideally. Right. You know, he’s he’s positing that for them. That’s the way in which to look at things. And I’d love to hear you expound a little bit on some ways in which rereading, which is something that I do in my Zen tradition and other things, ways that we can do that, that give us that perspective of Raven and Wren.
Padraig O Tuama 00:32:26 Well, partly, I think, if you want to I mean, I really like rereading, but I know other people that don’t. So I mean, I don’t know enough to know whether people should or shouldn’t do it. But if you want to reread something, it can just be helpful to ask yourself, what am I noticing this time that feels new? Or what felt monumental for me the last time I read this book that this time actually doesn’t feel so monumental.
Padraig O Tuama 00:32:51 You know, you might think, oh, I was close to tears when I got to the end of that chapter the first time I read it. Maybe that won’t happen this time, but you’ll be noticing something else. You’ll be noticing that you’ve thought about that chapter a lot since in the intervening time. Or it might be that there’s a hero character that you have thought to be very fine, as you’ve thought about your own work or your responsibility and your family or whatever. And it might mean in the second time reading it, or the third or the 20th that you begin to think, I think that character has flaws, which isn’t to decimate them, but it is to see them in a new way. I think to reread something is to bring your own life back into the conversation with the book, and that can be anything from, you know, the Lord of the rings to a Scripture or a country’s constitution also. But just, you know, you mentioned, Eric, that, you know, poems off by heart.
Padraig O Tuama 00:33:42 And just because you know them off by heart, it doesn’t mean that you’ve exhausted the possibilities of what those poems can reveal to you. To know something off by heart is to have it and ready at your disposal, to bring into conversation to the circumstances within which you’re brought to recite it. And that’s going to change it because the audience is not just you, it’s what’s happening to you in the moment, and then the timeless words that you’re reciting. William Waters is a great book called Poetry’s Touch, which is looking at the word you in poetry. And he’s saying that poetry seeks an audience, and the audience isn’t just the first person to read it, or the first time that person reads it. It is the changing circumstances of a life as you return again and again to something that is so important that you’ve learned it by heart, or you’ve kept a bookmark in it, or you’ve had it printed out.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:32 Yeah, a couple of things you said there really struck me. And I think that being in conversation with, you know, I was in 12 step programs for a number of years, a recovering heroin addict, and we would have big book meetings, write the AA big book, and you would read the same chapters again if you kept going to the meeting.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:49 Right? You kept you. Sooner or later you circled back to all of it, and it was somewhat new every time. But I think it was made new by the fact that I knew that I was going to probably have to discuss it, and I was probably going to have to say what it meant to me. And there was an easy path there, which was to say the same super wise thing I said last time. Right. But there’s a deeper way in which it says, what does this mean now? And so I think that idea of asking good questions and of considering yourself in conversation with is a really great thing. Like, I had never thought of Powerful Stranger in the way that you referenced it, right? I think I was more reading the poem in that sense of relax into the woods, right? Like be present with what is but suddenly recognizing like, oh, powerful stranger, that might not be a good thing. Recast the the entire poem. And so I think there are ways of re-engaging with text.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:46 And you’ve helped point out, you know what several of those are.
Padraig O Tuama 00:35:49 Yeah. Oh, the power of a stranger might be that hungry wolf you’re talking about.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:53 Yeah. Another thing that you have talked about that I found really intriguing is you talk about, in circles of faith or spirituality, that we give a lot of time to the testimony. What being involved in that spirituality or or whatever has done for us. And certainly if I reference AA, right. AA is 85% testimony. And that is in many ways a really good thing, right? Me hearing someone else’s testimony that they were able to get sober and get through what I got through was really helpful because it gave me hope. But you point out that there’s another side to this, and it’s that, you know, if someone is saying, Jesus fed me when I was hungry, we hear that. But those who are still hungry feel bereft. Or if someone’s talking about the deep peace they get from meditation and we meditate and we’re not getting deep peace, right? We feel like there’s something wrong with us or we’re failing in some way.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:52 So say more about that, because I think that’s a really nuanced point. That testimony can be either really encouraging, but it can also be deeply discouraging. Yeah.
Padraig O Tuama 00:37:02 Well, I think any testimonial is a certain form of initiation, which is about do you have the story of becoming a member of this group, or reaffirming your commitment to this group in a way that you can share it with the group, and the group will accept if you’re ever in a group like a 12 strap group or something like that, and somebody comes along and says, oh, this is my first time. And then they share something and it’s very powerful. People might go, oh my God. It feels like you’ve been one of us for years. You know, you see that kind of affirmation is true and powerful and kind. But I wonder who else is hearing that and thinking, oh, nobody’s ever said that to me about my story. And not just the point of view of comparison. There’s always going to be reasons to undo your own sense of stability with comparison, but it is to say what is being rewarded and what is being ignored and what is being punished.
Padraig O Tuama 00:37:51 A testimonial is a certain way of communicating that you are a member of a group, and I’m always interested in a group. Is it easy to join and difficult to join? Is it easy to leave? Is it hard to leave? Does somebody else make you leave? Who gets to say what gets to stay? These are serious questions about what’s happening in any group. Reaffirmation, narrative experience. There is a border around what kind of stories are likely to be told. And the braver groups, I think, allow for the stories that are being told to include elements of deep criticism. People might say, I hate coming to this group. I keep coming because it helps me in this part of my life. But actually certain things really annoy me, and not just because I’m grumpy, but because they really annoy me. That’s a really fine capacity that a group can have to hold critique. And what that can do is to signal to other people, oh God, I don’t need to drink the Kool-Aid.
Padraig O Tuama 00:38:44 I can just think. Does it help? Rather than do I believe absolutely everything that the group proposes about itself and testimonial based groups, I think, always have to pay attention to how much of their own ideology is being affirmed. It’s a certain form of benevolent group hostility, seemingly benevolent group hostility that can come across if all of the stories that are chosen or are rewarded in a particular way, are of a kind that demand obedience or demand and stick at it until it works for you. Well, what if it’s not going to work? Whatever kind of effort and pain is being demanded of the storyteller to fit in. Does the group have the capacity to hear? Actually, your demands don’t work for everybody, and some groups do. And those groups, I think, can do something very interesting.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:35 Yeah, it does strike me as we talk about this. There really are. I hate to use these words. I’ll use them for ease of purpose. You know, although I don’t even want to use them.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:44 Good groups and bad groups. But that’s not what I mean to say. But to your point, you know, I can think of groups I’ve been in where there’s absolutely no room for believing anything different, you know, or even questioning, you know. And when I talk about AA, right. I’m not talking about a monolith. Right. That’s the thing I often think that I want to say to people is like, don’t go to a meeting and think you’ve experienced AA. You need to go to a bunch of meetings to see. Because, you know, in my town of Columbus, I could point you to some groups that I think are some of the most beautiful things on the planet, and I could point you to some groups or I’d be like, I really I wouldn’t advise that. But even in some of those groups, people are getting what they need.
Padraig O Tuama 00:40:24 Exactly. Well, that’s the thing. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:26 And so, you know, it’s really difficult to judge. And the other reason I love groups is I do think that if we can do it, it shines a real light on ourselves and how we respond to other people and what comes up in us.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:39 It’s a it’s a different opportunity for healing than in one on one conversation. Because I think we all react to groups. We we show up and we’re new and we don’t know the people, and we’re instantly judging them and wondering what they think of us. And there’s all this stuff going on, and that can be really instructive to watch and learn and be like, oh, isn’t that interesting?
Padraig O Tuama 00:41:02 Yeah, for sure. There’s no such thing as a perfect group and I wouldn’t want to join a perfect group. There’s some groups that are doing really, really important work how to become very self-protective and one of the consequences of such self-protection is that maybe they fortify their borders to an extent that might not be needed. Or maybe they say, oh, let’s not have that story, because that story will query the narrative of healing that we’re all about. That narrative will always push its way through. Let there be no doubt the group will face its own hostility. That will always happen. And so I think in all the flawed groups we’re a part of, it’s just a good idea to recognize we’re not looking for a perfect group.
Padraig O Tuama 00:41:37 And so therefore relax. Yes. The recognition that the group is complicated is an indication that it’s a group and that it’s doing its work. And if your group is set up for communication and you find that actually your group doesn’t have great communication, that doesn’t mean you’re a bunch of hypocrites. It just means you’re doing the work. And the question is, is can you talk about the lack of communication in your group about communication? If you can’t? Well, then you have work to do. But if you can go, oh, what a brilliant group that can face its own subtleties, face its own hostilities, faces own threats. Those kinds of groups are brilliant indeed.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:11 What is a poem that is really alive for you? Now, that’s not one of your poems. You’ve collected 50 of them. You do a podcast. I don’t know how frequently you do it called Poetry Unbound, where you bring a poem out and you discuss it. I’m curious what’s really alive for you now, or I’ll give you a choice.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:30 Be on that. What poem has felt really alive to you as you’ve gone through grief?
Padraig O Tuama 00:42:36 There’s a poem by Lorna Goodison. She’s a Jamaican poet, and she was the poet laureate of Jamaica for a number of years. And it’s an older poem of hers called. This is a hymn hymn, and it has the cadence of a lullaby, cadence of consolation. And she’s basically in the body of the poem, looking out to people who were felt overlooked or outside. And she’s saying, this is a hymn for you. What’s great is that it isn’t proposing some doxology. It isn’t proposing some creed that people should believe in. It isn’t proposing religion. It isn’t proposing that these individuals were right or wrong or, you know, it isn’t making an enemy out of whoever it is, whatever group that they were wishing to belong to into which they don’t belong. It’s just saying, here’s the hymn. Here’s a small moment of something that you can recall with a simple melody. Ultimately, that’s what a hymn is.
Padraig O Tuama 00:43:27 It has a simple enough melody that you know within hearing your verse and a chorus, you should be able to continue to sing it around. I love the humility that she has to say, this is a hymn and not explain what a hymn is. It’s like a song. He was saying, here’s your Constitution, here’s your Constitution, here’s your Constitution. Somebody might say you and you need to define what a constitution is. And the response is to say, no, here’s yours, here’s yours. And she’s offering that out. And I think that is a beautiful, gentle poem. But underneath its gentleness lies a restraint in the writing to not try to justify why she’s making the offering and restraint in that way is an indication of extraordinary artistic control. And I love the artistic control that Lorna Goodison demonstrates in that old poem of hers. Yeah, you find it online. This is a hymn. Lorna Goodison well, we.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:24 Will put a link to it in the show notes. So we’re nearing the end of our time, but I wanted to end on a topic of prayer.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:31 You speak fairly eloquently on prayer, and I could read a bunch of different things that you’ve written, but I’m going to just tee up one thing and I’m going to let you just then go wherever you want. And you say that true prayer only really needs one thing, and you’ve said it’s a recognition of need. Say more about where you are with prayer right now, what you believe that sentence or anything you want to say about prayer, and maybe even for maybe a slight spin for people who are like, I don’t know, prayer doesn’t sound like it’s for me. And again, we’re not trying to talk anybody into prayer, right? That’s not our job. But it is always nice.
Padraig O Tuama 00:45:08 To talk you out of it. I’m very good at that.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:12 Yeah. All right. I’ve teed it up. You do with it what you like.
Padraig O Tuama 00:45:15 Well, sometimes I prefer to think about desire than prayer. What is it that you want? What is it that you want to ask for? Prayer in French is where we get the word prayer from in English.
Padraig O Tuama 00:45:26 It means to ask. And. Yeah, what is it that you want to ask for? And what’s your relationship with your asking? A silly story at the beginning of Covid, I had been overseas and saw it a very quickly come home to Ireland because at that stage everybody was worried that the airports in different countries were going to close. So I didn’t want to be stuck overseas for a long time anyway. My suitcase, a small suitcase, got absolutely trashed on the way back. Irreparably. That’s okay. It was a global crisis, so I thought, I’m going to need to buy a new suitcase. So there was a particular kind of suitcase that I liked. It’s made out of recycled materials, so I kept an eye on the company’s website. Nobody was going anywhere, so I was in no rush. And because they only make from whatever recycled materials they have, the colors tend to be one color for a while because they’ve just gotten a big shipment of something. Anyway, after a while, you know, a couple of months where I checked the website, maybe every ten days or two weeks, a color came up that I liked.
Padraig O Tuama 00:46:21 So I bought the suitcase. Lovely. It arrived a week or two later, and to my shock though, I found myself going back on the website of this company just looking at what new colors came in, not thinking, oh, I might have chosen the wrong one because I liked the color that I bought, but I missed my looking. I missed my wanting. I missed my desire that the fulfillment of desire in itself can be a crisis. The silly example of the bag can indicate something much more complicated for us. It might be that you think I’m looking for the one there are romantic partner. And yet when you find somebody where you think this feels like a great fit, you still might find yourself missing looking. Or you might think. That job that I really want, that promotion, that recognition that I really want. When I get it, there will be something in me where my yearning, my desire will be ceased because it would have been gratified, and it probably won’t. Your hunger will find a new way to look.
Padraig O Tuama 00:47:21 And so for me, the question is about prayer. It’s not about where it’s going to, but where it’s from. And what’s my relationship with my desire? What writing, what walking, what thinking, what quietude, what talking to my friends, what being honest about what a damn hypocrite I am. What practices of that kind do I have to help me acknowledge the complicated way within which desire lives in me, and to find something that’s good enough to hold that you can call it a prayer. You can call it meditation. You can call it talking to your best friend. You can call it whatever you want, provided it’s doing the work. And that, I think, is necessary because our desires have many levels to them and they can drive us. And the question is, is where will they drive us? That’s what comes to mind when I think about prayer.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:07 Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:22 And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at once. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today when you feed Net book, we are at the end of our time. You and I are going to continue in a post-show conversation where I want to explore this idea of desire and fulfillment and craving and the distinctions of all that. And we’ll also have you read a poem or two of your own. Listeners, if you’d like access to the post-show conversations, add free episodes. Special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a poem, and the pleasure of supporting something that matters to you. You can go to one you feed. Padraic, thank you so much. This has really been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate.
Padraig O Tuama 00:49:25 It. Thanks, Eric. Slowly to be with you.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:27 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. Share it 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.
