Then I work in the theological and psychological worlds. First of all, one of the powerful dynamics of leadership is being visible. 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.
Shall I read a little piece of it? 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 undercurrent 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 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.
Whyte: Yes, well, there are two different forms of belonging, I suppose. And to have a sense of belonging in the outer world, where you feel a sense of freedom, comes from this ability to touch this deep foundation of aloneness. And I do feel if you can touch that sense of aloneness, you can live with anyone. Whyte: Yes.
I was writing night and day, but I noticed when I sat at this lovely little desk, which I still have on a landing at the top of the stairs — I noticed that I had this very different relationship to the world when I wrote at night. There was this other horizon outside the window that was drawing me and that was contextualizing what I was writing, so I wrote this piece. Whyte: I did. You must learn one thing.
You move from your 20s into your 30s, and you suddenly find another larger form for it or a different shape that makes a different connection.
And then you deepen it in your 40s. And you get overwhelmed by it in your 50s. And then it returns to you again in more mature forms, settled forms, in your 60s.
We all know what that intuitively means. Literally, all the struggles of your grandparents and your parents in arriving together and giving birth to your parents and giving birth to you, the landscape in which you were nurtured, the dialect or language in which you were educated into the world, the smells of the local environment.
When I go back to Yorkshire, just the taste of the water off the moors is completely different. When I go to County Clare, the water there, again, has a spirit because it comes off limestone there. Will I have that conversation? This is the experience of consummation, of a full incarnation in the world. There are many people in Syria now just trying to preserve their lives and the lives of their loved ones. This has always been there and always been true.
And who knows? We go through those very, very narrow places. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind.
The ability to ask beautiful questions, often, in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life.
And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. Tippett: Yes, he is. You call forth something beautiful by asking a beautiful question.
Whyte: Yes, you do. What are you learning anew at this moment in your life about what it means to be human? The cloud is the cloud; the mountain is the mountain; the tree is the tree; the hawk is the hawk. Can I have a day as a crow? You know, hang out with my mates, glide down for a bit of carrion now and again? But we, as human beings, are really quite extraordinary in that we can actually refuse to be ourselves. We can get afraid of the way we are. We can temporarily put a mask over our face and pretend to be somebody else or something else.
And the interesting thing is then we can take it another step of virtuosity and forget that we were pretending to be someone else and become the person we were on the surface at least, who we were just pretending to be in the first place.
Whyte: So one of the astonishing qualities of being human is the measure of our reluctance to be here, actually. And this is not to give it away. This is just to understand what lies between you and a sense of freedom in it. His latest collection is David Whyte Essentials. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.
It is distributed to public radio stations by PRX. Scott Russell. Frank van Eijs. Celebrities Born in United Kingdom. Danielle Bowman Football Player. Rowan Alexander Sawday Poet. Lee Jasper Politician. David Grace Snooker Player. Glenn Tipton Guitarist.
Mike Conway Race Car Driver. Whyte has written seven volumes of poetry and four books of prose. Pilgrim is based on the human need to travel, "From here to there. He describes his collection Everything Is Waiting For You as arising from the grief at the loss of his mother. Pilgrim was published in May His latest book is Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, an attempt to 'rehabilitate' many everyday words we often use only in pejorative or unimaginative ways.
He leads group poetry and walking journeys regularly in Ireland, England and Italy. Whyte moved to the United States in and began a career as a poet and speaker in From he began taking his poetry and philosophy to larger audiences including consulting and lecturing on organisational leadership models in the US and UK exploring the role of creativity in business.
In this way, Still Possible hovers above the numinous and the unknowable — what we pray for, what we pass on, what mystery awaits and, in the end, what it might mean to be happy. Let the apple ripen on the branch beyond your need to take it down. Let the coolness of autumn and the breathing, blowing wind test its adherence to endurance, let the others fall.
Wait longer than you would, go against yourself, find the pale nobility of quiet that ripening demands, watch with patience as the silhouette emerges and the leaves fall, see it become a solitary roundness against a greying sky, let winter come and the first frost threaten, and then wake one morning to see the breath of winter has haloed its redness with light.
David Whyte is an internationally renowned poet and author, and a scintillating and moving speaker.
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