Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Alison Whitmire: I first heard about David Whyte
six years ago when I started working with a CEO organization called Vistage.
David Whyte's poetry is quite literally part of the training curriculum
for Vistage Group chairs.
His work, his poetry, is so evocative
that it is what we use
to help connect leaders with a hidden part of themselves,
with an unclaimed part of themselves.
And so David is here today quite literally to open us up.
So without further ado, David Whyte
and his talk, "Life at the frontier and the conversational nature of reality."
(Applause)
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,
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 our 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.
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.
Put down the weight of your aloneness
and ease into the conversation.
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.
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, no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.
To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
Surely, 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, 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.
Put down the weight of your aloneness, the weight of your aloneness
and ease into the conversation.
The kettle is singing,
the kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink,
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, unutterably themselves.
Everything, everything is waiting for you.
This is a piece I wrote called
"Inevitably everything is waiting for you"
(Laughter)
to remind myself of the conversational nature of reality.
And to begin with, the title sounds vaguely positive -
everything is waiting for you -
until you realize that everything is waiting for you
including your own demise and disappearance.
And this demise and disappearance
is one of the difficult parts of the conversational nature of reality.
And what do I mean by "the conversational nature of reality"?
When you think about it,
there's no single element in the world
that's not bonded to, flying away from,
or catalytic with another element in the world.
And every creature,
even the smallest single-celled creature
is in a thousand different conversations
with a thousand other elements and dynamics and forms
in order to keep itself alive
and its environment alive.
And every ecosystem in the world is this astonishing meeting,
this conversation,
between various dynamics
that contribute to this central conversation of life.
I lived in the Galápagos Islands for a couple of years as a naturalist,
and the richest place in Galápagos is the western part of Isabela Island
where you're looking off into the middle of the Pacific
for a good few thousand miles to the Marquesas.
But in that place,
there's this upwelling current from below
that brings all of this astonishing richness and nutrients and oxygen
from the depths
up to the warmth of the surface,
and when that oxygen and those nutrients meet the warm water,
you get this astonishing efflorescence of life.
But not only do you get
oxygen-rich, nutrient-rich cold water meeting warm water,
you also have all of those elements meeting the air, meeting the land,
meeting different gradations of salinity and temperature.
Where all of those edges meet,
you get this astonishing conversation
and you get this astonishing depth and plethora of life.
And so it's an interesting question to ask yourself,
to ask the organization that you're a part of
but also to ask yourself as an individual identity,
How many edges in conversations are actually meeting inside me?
Or am I a monocultural idea, which I attempt to project upon reality?
(Laughter)
Because one of the essential dynamics of the conversational nature of reality is,
whatever you as an individual would like to happen in the world
will not happen exactly as you would like it,
but equally, whatever the world, your society, your organization,
the people you serve in life
want you to do
will also not occur.
You will not comply exactly as they would like you to comply.
And what occurs is this third frontier,
this conversational reality, actually.
And the ability to actually create an identity
where you can live at that frontier
is one of the great triumphs of a human life
and has been celebrated
in all our cultures and traditions since the beginning of time.
But it takes a different form of identity than the strategic part of your mind,
which sees yourself as a piece of ammunition
which you're going to fire at the target of existence, you know.
And so the whole - to my mind - the whole of existence,
the whole of creation,
is actually trying to find an internal anchorage inside us
which reflects its astonishing symmetry outside of us,
and that in order for an individual human being
or an individual organization
to live out its life,
it has to find that edge between its own particular signature and genius,
and what its being called into by its surrounding world.
And the ability to live at that live edge and to create an individual identity,
a leadership identity, if you're actually helping to run an organization,
or a civic identity,
where you're representing the future of your country, actually,
in a living imaginative way
is one of our necessary disciplines of this time.
And you could say at the moment, you know,
with those squares filled with people in Cairo,
you've got people there who are on an edge,
who are on a frontier,
and they are in conversation not only with what they know they want
but with this astonishing unknown,
which is about to come into incarnation
through the way that they're simply paying attention to the future.
And there was a great line by an early-20th-century Spanish poet,
Antonio Machado,
he said,
"Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino ..."
"Caminante - pathmaker -
there is no path.
Pathmaker, there is no path.
You make the path by walking.
By walking, you make the path."
And he's looking at what the physicists and students of complexity
would say is the iterative nature of reality,
that you actually change the world by actually meeting it
simply by being present
and simply by beginning a conversation.
That conversation can be verbal,
but the world can also be changed through your attentive presence.
And we all know this
and the way we can actually change the conversation with another person
through being attentive and present in listening,
but we also know
in the abstruse theory of particle physics
that the observer actually moves the world
by the way they are actually looking at that world.
So everything, no matter where you are, how you stand,
is being affected by the way you stand.
And so it seems to me that reality is constantly coming to our door
and saying, "Why not get with the program?"
"Why not come out from behind yourself,
get out from behind this wall you've set up for yourself
that you call you,
and meet something other than yourself?"
And there was a great old - what I thought was a Taoist poem.
I recited and read this poem to myself for years,
and I thought it was a Taoist sage and it was written about 2,000 years ago.
It turns out it was written by an Irish fellow, a Dubliner,
in the 1920s.
(Laughter)
But this fellow is a brilliant writer,
and he wrote in such a Taoist style that he gave himself a Chinese name,
which was [Wei Wu Wei].
But he was an Irish fellow,
and there I was saying, "Chinese sage, [Wei Wu Wei], dadadada,"
and it turns out, you know, that -
but this is a brilliant little piece written in the Taoist style, and he says,
"Why are you unhappy? Why are you unhappy?"
Just relax. He's Irish and he's a poet - he'll answer it for you.
"Why are you unhappy?
Because 98.98%
of everything you do and all that you say is for yourself,
and there isn't one."
"Why are you unhappy?
Because 98.98% of everything you do and all that you say is for yourself,
and there isn't one."
What does he mean by that?
There's no self that will survive a real conversation.
There's no self that will survive a real meeting with something other than itself.
There's no organization that will keep its original identity
if it's in the conversation.
And after a while,
you realize you don't want to actually keep that old static identity;
you want to move the pivot of your presence
from this thing you think is you
into this meeting with the future,
with the people you serve,
with your family,
with your loved ones.
And it's in this self-forgetfulness,
where you meet something other than yourself,
that all kinds of astonishing things happen.
And I worked for a good few years
with all of the top managers at the Boeing company
and working with the conversational nature of the business reality.
But at the end of it, they asked me to -
they commissioned me to write a poem for the triple seven aeroplane,
which was about to be launched
and which had just won a big aerospace trophy,
and there was to be a huge dinner in celebration of this trophy,
and they wanted a poem at everyone's placing.
And so I had the phone call from the executive,
saying, "Would you write a poem for the triple seven?"
And I said, "Poets don't do very well under these circumstances."
I said, "They usually write very, very bad poetry."
But I said, "I'll have a go at it,
and if I have anything decent, I'll send it to you,
but otherwise, you should just have a blank space there."
Pasternak said at the convocation for the five-year plan,
"The poet's seat should be empty" -
during the Soviet days -
at the convocation for the five-year plan, the poet's seat should be empty.
But anyway, I had a go at the old five-year plan,
and I sat down and I said to myself,
"You know, you spent a good deal of your life on aeroplanes,
so just put yourself back in that seat."
And I did.
And I had this sudden remembrance of what it's like to be on a plane,
where quite often
you have this astonishing creation outside the windows.
You can be flying into San Francisco,
the sun's going down over the Oakland hills,
the moon's coming up over the ocean, you know,
and it's absolutely astonishing.
You look inside the plane - everyone's reading People magazine.
You're flying over the Alps,
you're looking down at Mont Blanc, you know,
everyone's working on their BlackBerry.
So one of the dynamics of being up in the plane
is that no one really wants to face up to the reality of what they're doing, yes.
You look out of the window - there's no visible means of support.
(Laughter)
I'm not having the conversation; it's not occurring.
I'm in my own little world, and I don't have to participate.
But sometimes, as you're dropping down
through these astonishing levels of humidity and temperature,
you will sometimes be privileged with a view
of that white line passing over the curve of the wing,
and you realize that the forces that are holding the plane up
are as solid as concrete,
but they're made up of a conversation
between the velocity of the plane and the shape of the wing,
and you need both -
if you lose either end of the conversation,
you're going to arrive a lot earlier than you'd like.
(Laughter)
So you don't get to choose between yourself and this other,
between the shape of yourself and what's passing around you.
So this is the piece I wrote for the plane,
but also to look at the way
that human beings can travel enormous distances -
they don't have to do the work;
they simply have to have the conversation,
and the conversation does all the work for you.
The organization doesn't have to do the work;
it just has to have the conversation with the people itself.
The conversation creates a dynamic
whereby you look around and the work's being done.
So I don't have to take the world on as a burden and a weight;
I don't have to kill myself
even if I'm in a real position of responsibility.
I just have to turn to face towards what is actually calling me
and what I'm surrounded by.
So this is the piece,
and it's called "Working Together."
We shape our selves to fit this world,
we shape our selves to fit this world
and by the world are shaped again.
We shape our selves to fit this world
and by the world are shaped again.
The visible and the invisible working together in common cause,
to produce the miraculous.
We shape our selves to fit this world
and by the world are shaped again.
The visible and the invisible working together in common cause,
to produce the miraculous,
to produce the miraculous.
I am thinking of the way,
I am thinking of the way
the intangible air traveled at speed round a shaped wing
easily holds our weight.
I'm thinking of the way
the intangible air traveled at speed round a shaped wing
easily holds our weight.
So may we,
so may we, in this life trust
to those elements we have yet to see or imagine.
So may we, in this life trust
to those elements we have yet to see or imagine,
and find the true shape, find the true shape of our own selves,
by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.
We shape our selves,
we shape our selves to fit this world
and by the world are shaped again.
The visible and the invisible working together in common cause,
to produce the miraculous,
the miraculous.
I'm thinking of the way the intangible air
traveled at speed round a shaped wing
easily holds our weight.
So may we, in this life, in this life trust
to those elements we have yet to see or imagine,
trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine,
and find the true shape,
the true shape of our own selves by forming it well,
by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)