“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.”

I remember, when I was seven or eight years old, realizing that I wasn’t supposed
to choose between the two places even though they were so different. I was
supposed to live out my life, nowadays, I would say — I would put words into my
mouth as a seven-year-old and say I was supposed to live out the conversation
between them both. But it was — something felt physically very close. And, of
course, my work as a poet and philosopher has matured into working with what I
call “the conversational nature of reality,” which is the fact that we don’t get to
choose so often between things we hope we can choose between.

that this was language that adults had written who had not forgotten the primary
visions and insights of childhood.

And in Galapagos, I began to realize that, because I was in deeply attentive states,
hour after hour watching animals and birds and landscapes — and that’s all I did
for almost two years — I began to realize that my identity depended not upon any
beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually
depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than
myself. And that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to
broaden and deepen your own sense of presence. And I began to realize that the
only place where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you
think is you and what you think is not you. That whatever you desire of the world
will not come to pass exactly as you will like it.

But the other mercy is that whatever the world desires of you will also not come to
pass. And what actually occurs is this meeting, this frontier. But it’s astonishing
how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting
themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper,
broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the
conversation at that frontier level.

Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you. John
O’Donohue, a mutual friend of both of us, used to say that one of the necessary
tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself in the world. Letting the world speak
in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.

“one of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep

reluctance to be left to ourselves.”
I’ve often felt the deeper discipline of poetry is overhearing yourself say things you
didn’t want to know about the world. And something that actually emancipates you
from this smaller self out into this larger dispensation that you actually didn’t think
you deserved. And so one of the things we’re most afraid of in silence is this death
of the periphery, the outside concerns, the place where you’ve been building your
personality, and where you think you’ve been building who you are starts to
atomize and fall apart.

And it’s one of the basic reasons we find it difficult even just to turn the radio off,
or the television, or not look at our gadget — is that giving over to something
that’s going to actually seem as if it’s undermining you to begin with, and lead to
your demise. And the intuition, unfortunately, is correct. You are heading toward
your demise, but it’s leading towards this richer, deeper place that doesn’t get
corroborated very much in our everyday outer world.

And this piece is written almost like a conversation in the mirror, trying to remind
myself what’s first-order. And we have so many allies in this world, including just
the color blue in the sky, which we’re not paying attention to, or the breeze, or the
ground beneath our feet. And so this is an invitation to come out of abstraction and
back into the world again. It’s called “Everything is Waiting for You.”

Your great mistake — Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice
You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you courage.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. Alertness is the hidden discipline
of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
The tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you.

everything that is waiting includes things that will surprise us in both directions,
including your own demise. Half of every — of all human experience is mediated
through loss and disappearance. And this is one of the reasons why we won’t have
the conversation. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to acknowledge that
possibility.

And if you have a really fierce loss, the loss of someone who’s close to you, the
loss of a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a friend, God forbid a child — then
human beings have every right to say, “Listen, God. If this is how you play the
game, I’m not playing the game. I’m not playing by your rules. I’m going to
manufacture my own little game, and I’m not going to come out of it. I’m going to
make my own little bubble. And I’m going to draw up the rules. And I’m not
coming out to this frontier again. I don’t want to. I want to create insulation. I want
to create distance.”

And many human beings do that for the rest of their lives. Many do it for just a
short period and then reemerge again. But all of us are struggling to be here. One
of the great theological questions is around incarnation, which simply means being
here in your body. Not anywhere else, just here with life’s fierce need to change
you. And the fact that the more you’re here and the more you’re alive, the more
you realize you’re a mortal human being. And that you’ll pass from this place. And
will you actually turn up? Will you actually have the conversation given that it’s so
— will you become a full citizen of vulnerability, loss, and disappearance, which
you have no choice about?

Sadness - you walk with it as a companion, I think, more openly than we’re taught
to do. And perhaps that’s also something that poetry allows.

And I describe it more from my own experience as wistfulness and poignancy. A

kind of elegiac approach to life. An elegy — a good elegy, looking at it from the
poetic point of view, is always a conversation between grief and celebration. The
grief of the loss of the person and the celebration that you were here at all to share
the planet with them.

And we have that initial shock — I had that shock, was such a close friend to John
O’Donohue, who we’ve mentioned. And he was — I’m a poet-philosopher, he
would’ve been a philosopher-poet. And we were like two bookends. And there was
always someone in the world I knew who was travelling and speaking from the
same place, although using slightly different language and a slightly different
accent, I would say. [laughs] But when he went, it was like the other half of me
disappeared. And we have this physical experience in loss of falling toward
something. It’s like falling in love except it’s falling into grief.

And you’re falling towards the foundation that they held for you in your life that
you didn’t realize they were holding. And you fall and fall and fall and you don’t
find it for the longest time. And so the shock of the loss to begin with, and the
hermetic sealing off, is necessary in grief. But then there comes a time when you
finally actually start to touch the ground that they were holding for you. And it’s
from that ground that you step off into your new life. And it’s been a very strange
phenomenon in that instance, for instance, of losing John, whereby I’ll start a
sentence and feel like John has finished it. Or I’ll hear John speaking, and I’ll start
in his voice and finish in my own. And sometimes we’re both talking together,
which happened a lot when we were actually together.

And so there’s this really astonishing melding that occurs, which is a kind of
dreamtime, which human beings start to move into in their maturity, actually,
where what is past, what is present, and what’s about to occur are not so clearly
marked out. One of the things the Irish say is that “the thing about the past is it’s
not the past.” It’s right here in this room, in this conversation.

This is another delusion we have that we can get — take a sincere path in life
without having our heart broken.

Yeah. All of us have this inherited conversation inside us which we know is

untouchable. It comes from our parents, from our — the way we’re made, and all
the rest of it. But that’s an invisible quality inside you. All the visible qualities that
take form and structure will have to change in order to keep the conversation real.
Just as we go through the different decades of our life, we have to change the
structures of our life in order to keep things new, in order to keep our youthfulness.
And I do think there is a quality of youthfulness which is appropriate to every
decade of our life. It just looks different.

We have this fixed idea of youthfulness from our teens or our 20s. But, actually,
there’s a form of youthfulness you’re supposed to inhabit when you’re in your 70s
or your 80s or your 90s. It’s this sense of imminent surprise, of imminent
revelation, except the revelation and the discovery is more magnified. Fiercer,
more to do with your mortality and what you’re going to pass on and leave behind
you, the shape of your own absence.

“Innocence is what we allow to be gifted back to us once we’ve given ourselves

away.”
(The quality of youthfulness) is like a deep memory at the same time, and a giving
away. Innocence is, in a way, the ability to be found by the world. It’s not a state of
naivety. It’s the ability to be found by the world you’re now inhabiting. And part
of what we find is we’re just supposed to give ourselves away, actually. I often feel
that one of the real signs of maturity is not only understanding that you’re a mortal
human being and you are going to die, which usually happens in your mid 40s or
50s — “Oh, I am actually going to die. It’s not someone else I’m going to
become.”

But another step of maturity is actually realizing that the rest of creation might be a
little relieved to let you go. [laughs] That you can stop repeating yourself, stop
taking all this oxygen up, and make way for something else which you’ve actually
beaten a trail for. And it could be your son, your daughter, could be people you’ve
taught or mentored, it could be — the more generous you are, the more that circle
extends into our society and those who go after us.

(poetry is) language against which you have no defences. Otherwise, it’s not
poetry. It’s prose. Which is about something. And so poetry is that moment in a
conversation where you have to have the other person understand what you’re
saying. And sometimes, it’s when you’re delivering terrible news, news of a death
or an accident. And you have to tell the other person, and they have to hear it. And
you have to say it in such a way that it’s heard fully. But you have to say it, also,
with the intimacy of care and of understanding at the same time. You can also hear
it in a marital argument. And you get beautiful echoes and chords and repetitions in
marital arguments. In a good marital argument, when one person has said the truth,
both people are emancipated into the next stage of the relationship. Unfortunately,
if you are not the person who said it, you have to have a little rear guard action
where you deny it. But eventually you have to say, “I wish I’d have said that.”
[laughs] And you’re both actually in this new place. You can turn your face away
from what was said, but when you turn your face back, it will still be waiting for
you.

one of the powerful dynamics of leadership is being visible. One of the

vulnerabilities of being visible is that when you’re visible, you can be seen. And
when you can be seen, you can be touched. And when you can be touched, you can
be hurt.

So all of us have these elaborate ways of looking as if we’re showing up and not
showing up. Except in an organizational setting, it has tremendous consequences
on other people’s lives. We’ve all worked in organizations where someone is
sitting there at a crossroads or nexus in the organization. They’re there, but they’re
not there. And because of that, they’re blocking everything that’s trying to come
through their particular portal. So one of the dynamics you have to get over with is
this idea that you can occupy a position of responsibility, that you can have a
courageous conversation without being vulnerable. So I wrote this little piece in
my Consolations book on vulnerability because it’s one of the great primary
delusions we have.

“Vulnerability”:

“Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can

arrange to do without; vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying,
ever present, and abiding under-current of our natural state. To run from
vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature; the attempt to be
invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most
especially to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in
refusing our vulnerability, we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence
and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

“To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances is
a lovely, illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully
constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but
it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with
accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers,
powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath.
The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how
we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our
intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous
citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers,
reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and
completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking
fully through the door.”