2016 Fall Convocation: David Whyte addresses graduates

hello everyone when we were called upon to reflect on our career aspirations on our chosen professions or on the very nature of the organizations in which we work and study David White directs our attention to what he calls the conversational nature of reality to change the nature of the questions we pose he asks us to consider how are we being invited to live what vocation enables us to feel most alive a poet philosopher David White has authored eight books of poetry pardon me four books of prose and numerous recordings three of his books focus on work and vocation and have topped business bestseller lists his body of work invites us to reimagine and rededicate ourselves to a deep understanding of our life's work he calls us to take up the invitation to the fiercer aspects of existence and in effect become larger more generous more courageous equal to the task of growing and maturing ourselves he is one of the few poets to take his perspective on creativity and vulnerability beyond the literary world that most poets inhabit an Associate Fellow at the Sayyed Business School at the University of Oxford he has developed a significant body of work on creativity and organizational development his pioneering work in the area of courageous conversations has brought him into some of the top organizations and executive education programs in the world David embodies a bardic lineage through his poetic eloquence and thoughtful commentary deftly illustrating human experience were reminding us to keep asking the kinds of questions large enough to live that David argues have no right to go away as they serve to do and sustained our engagement with our real work David does not simply write poetry for a living rather he lives at the edge of an authentically poetic existence and then he writes to tell about it his work summons us to tread fully tread toward fully inhabiting and feeling all of the arrivals and departures of what is essential on this human journey for his commitment to poetry philosophy and the leadership of courageous conversations that we need now more than ever it is my honor to present David white the degree Doctor of Laws honoris causa mr. David White by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Royal Roads University Act and in accordance with the recommendation of the Board of Governors at railroads University I confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa with all the rights privileges and honors here and elsewhere thereto appertaining mr. white will now be hooded by dr. Steve Grundy vice president academic and provost see president President Alan Cahoon will now present mr. David White with his degree it is a great pleasure that I now call upon dr. David wait to deliver the convocation address thank you sir president Chancellor faculty and students and loved ones of students it's a great honor to be here to have received this recognition when you think of how formalized the study is for your first degree in how hard you work it's lovely to have one come just out of the ether with no no late-night studying except of course for the study you put in yourself out of your own care and love and heartfelt wish to follow a path where there's no outside coercion on the subject and I do think that education is always something that that deepens in our understanding the longer we follow it and we think to begin with we're going in for a degree we think we're going in just for a job and when we get our job we think the job is for certain qualities certain personal ambitions and the job itself deepens and then it usually deepens into responsibility and leadership and at the same time we deepen into family into being a parent into being partners and we deepen into being citizens of our countries at the same time we have to keep all of these come stations alive and to my mind the courageous part of the conversation is the fact that as human beings we're inescapably vulnerable to caring for things and people that movers in a particular way each of us is made in a different way for the conversation of life and the great task is to find out what we care about and to risk ourselves on behalf of that caring and on behalf of the people who are within the bright circle of that caring and we're all standing on a very powerful threshold in history right now the forces that are at play in the world are really quite astonishing quite overwhelming quite difficult yeah we have an election in the country where I live now where I've made my home in the United States we could be just in for a difficult four years of of trauma we could be we could be at the beginning of the attempt to institute fascism in the world here and we don't know but we all have to be vigilant and we all have to pay attention and as your anthem says we all have to stand guard actually and be present and risk ourselves on behalf of what is most important to us so this is a piece I can't come on stage without without working with peace support to recited peace and this is dedicated to to all the graduates here but a particular graduate who I'm very fond of in my life and that's my Irish niece Marlene McCormack and I want to take you out to the west coast of Spain to a place called finis terrae in Spanish or Finisterre in English and and I want to take you to an experience that Marlene McCormack had on that cliff looking out over the broad Atlantic and I've known Marlene since she was a little girl on a farm in a beautiful valley and North Clare in the West of Ireland but like all little girl she grew up into a young woman and she left this paradisiacal farm and went off to do a degree in Irish drama at the University of Saigon and she went to study drama not to not to teach drama but to actually become a dramatist to become a playwright for which you get very little corroboration in the world I can remember when I went full-time as a poet there were no people rushing up to me slapping me on the back saying great career moved over there and I hear they're taking them on at Bombardier now in droves yes no people get very very silent and you meet a lot of silences in your life but the silence of the father-in-law is beyond all silences you've ever met in your life saying is there any shred of evidence to say you can keep yourself never mind my daughter in any manner to which you want to be accustomed but all of us whenever we're taking a taking an individual path always meet the equivalent of the father-in-law silence and Marlene also met this silence not much corroboration for becoming a full-time playwright especially in Ireland where the standard is so incredibly high and when she graduated deciding with this degree in Irish drama that the major corporations of the world would not be knocking on her door although I told her after working 25 years in organisations all around the globe a degree in drama is what would most prepare you for the corporate world actually you work with accountants drama you work with actuaries drama even you work with Paris fashion houses definitely there's a lot of drama there but wherever you go but Marlene in order to make this transition into her life was very good to herself and she went off to walk this very famous pilgrimage path called the Camino de Santiago de Compostela and it's an old thousand year old Catholic pilgrimage which has now become beautifully ecumenical in that people from all over the world all persuasions and no persuasions at all are walking this path there and you walk for a good few hundred miles you go for five to seven weeks and you go to Santiago de Compostela but then you have the possibility of going on another three days to the coast facing out to the Lemp Atlantic almost as a postscript and you arrive at Finisterre almost always in the late evening and you go through three rituals there and the first ritual is that you have a tappa spray of scallops and the scallop shell has been the emblem of your walk and in medieval times the pilgrim wore the scallop show woven into their clothes to show the local people that although they were strangers they should be given the benefit of the doubt and just a few weeks ago a man was exhumed from a grave in a monastic ground in England with the scallop shell woven into his tunic this man had gone to Santiago de Compostela in the 14th century and it had been the largest part of his life and I remember Marlene telling me about this ritual in these you go through three rituals in fact so nice and Marlene was saying I was a little puzzled by eating the scallop and the scallop shell and I said well you know you're following that scallop shell with an arrow beneath it almost all the way because incised into stone archways into into wooden pole most all along the way as the scallop shell with an arrow beneath it and it says go this way pilgrim don't go that way this is the way to Santiago de Compostela here and in a way when you're when you're eating and by the way I'm sure there's a vegetarian alternative for those who were worrying about what are you going to do when you get to the end and you don t see food early but in many ways the ritual is asking you to consume the essence of your journey how did you get to this place for all of you graduating today you know how did you get to this Finisterre in your life the place where ground turns to ocean how did you follow your individual conversation that brought you to this place when you're left to yourself when you're not when you don't feel bullied by circumstances when you don't feel coerced how do you hold the conversation of life and it's different from every other pilgrim moon who's taken the way no matter how many other people have walked the Camino before you no one has walked it in the way you will walk at you no one has held the conversation no one stands at this place in history as you stand here so what's the essence of the way you are made and then the second ritual Marlene went through was was that youth you burned something that you brought and so there are little fires all along the cliff edge and people usually burn a letter or or something that they brought or they write something and actually burn it or they burn an item and so these fires are going day after day after day they almost never go out because people are continually arriving I said to Marlene what did you burn she said I burned two postcards in the letter I said that's astonishing Marlene 23 years old and you had paper you didn't just get out your iPhone and delete a couple of traumatic texts you know although I'm sure there's a Camino app you know where you can and it will it will make a spontaneous flaming disappearance in your phone you never knew mmm no of course and we know what we know what's on that letter in those postcards and letters that other people would burn its previous forms of love and affection that a no longer in season they were deeply felt at the time but now they're no longer felt or they're no longer appropriate or they were never reciprocated and so we let them go at this cliff edge and then I said what was the third ritual Molly she said the third ritual is you leave an item if your clothing there at at Finister yeah so there are piles of clothes all the way along the edge of the ocean and you leave of course only something you could have brought with you you must have worn it or carried it so you leave there are piles of hats and gloves and scarves and rain pants and I said Molly what did you leave she said I left my boots and I love those boots they fit me perfectly I never had a single blister the whole way but after seven weeks they were finished I left those boots and walked away in my trainers she said it was really incredible because the Sun was going down it was a beautiful sunset but it just happened to be full moon at the same time with a full moon coming up behind me in the east and even after the Sun had dropped down below the far horizon the moon could still see the fallen Sun and it was reflecting it and it was so powerful that after the Sun had gone below the horizon I had a moon shadow that was walking across the water and we got into this conversation by my asking her what was the most powerful moment you had on the whole camino of the whole seven weeks and she said I saw my silhouette walking across the water I saw my shadow walking across water and I thought oh that's my new self walking into my unknown life as a playwright but then suddenly as the Sun fall further and the and the moon began to lose its reflective power the shadow began to disappear and I had a moment of panic but then I had a moment of realization I realized she said the most powerful moment on the whole Camino was when my shadow disappeared and I realized I would have to walk across that unknown sea myself I would somehow have to navigate this path into the future their great lines by a Spanish port actually Antonio Machado and if you ever want to free glass of red wine in a bar in Madrid you learn these lines in broken Spanish and shout them out in the bar and the rest of the bar will finish them with you and you'll get a free glass of red wine works like a charm but the lines are very powerful and they are coming aunty Noah Camino si se Camino L&R Alan da si si el camino' path maker there is no path you make the path by walking by walking you make the path path maker you may pass maker there is no path you make the path by walking by walking you make the path so this is the piece I wrote for Marlene McCormick and I'll I'll leave you with this piece as you all stand as individual graduates and as families on this Finisterre either of stepping off yourself of let or of letting go of a loved one into the great adventure of their of the next dispensation of their lives and this is called Finisterre for marlene McCormick the road in the end the road in the end taking the path the son had taken the road in the end taking the path the son had taken into the western sea the road in the end taking the path the son had taken into the western sea and the moon the moon rising behind you as you stood where ground turned to ocean no way to your future now accept the way your shadow could take walking before you across go water going where shadows go no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass except to call an end to the way you had come to take out each frayed letter you had brought and light there illumine corners and to read them as they drifted on The Late Western light to empty your bags to saw this and to leave that to promise what you needed to promise all along to promise what you needed to promise all along and to abandon the shoes that brought you here right at the water's edge to abandon the shoes that brought you here right of the water's edge not because you were given up not because you were given up but because now you would find a different way to tread and because through it all part of you would still walk on no matter how over the waves thank you very much you

Channel: Royal Roads University

Views: 15,906

Keywords: Convocation, Royal Roads, Life.changing

Id: 1KK7_Ff1FWM

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2016