2019 ACPE Annual Conference Thursday Morning Keynote: David Whyte

good morning hope everybody's doing well like many of you I am a lover of poetry I know that poetry is I feels like it's having a resurgence at least in our country and I know so many of you use poetry in your work with students and so I wanted to offer this to you in this high place it is as simple as this leave everything you know behind step toward the cold surface say the old prayer of rough love and open both arms those who come with empty hands will stare into the lake astonished there in the cold light reflecting pure snow the true shape of your own face wouldn't that be a great poem to open a unit of CPE with well they are of course the words of our speaker David White over the last 20 years David has been developing workshops and seminars in the conversational nature of leadership something that's remarkably similar to the reflective work that we do with students and the people we serve every day at the core of David's work are questions that are also central to our work questions of meaning and purpose he explores how we see our lives and our deaths how we view others and their presence or absence and perhaps most importantly what we dare to believe and what we are afraid of believing an honest appraisal of our relationship to God the nature the natural world darkness the appearance and disappearance of form and friendship and the difficult apprenticeship to our own disappearance he's the author of nine collections of poetry three prose books and one collection of essays please join me in welcoming a warm welcome to this morning's speaker David White [Applause] thank you I always say when was such an enthusiastic welcome there's always plenty of room for disappointment well it was a beautiful morning here having come from over the Atlantic I was up before dawn so I saw the Sun come come up and I was thinking of a good friend of mine who passed away a good few years ago who rarely saw the dawn being of Irish descent and as they say in Ireland pity the man who wakes up in the morning and that's the best he'll feel all day there should be a gradual improvement as you get into the hours of waking but he was remarkable man he was a priest for 17 years and he sat by the death beds of hundreds of people and was a great consolation to them and I just want to say that this constituency here is one of my favorite constituencies of many constituencies that I speak to your work in sitting by those who are making this great transition out of this extraordinary light or helping those people to become witnesses to other people's going I think is one of the most extraordinary disciplines in life and it's also discipline that's needed at every stage of life and I think one of the one of the great threshold realizations at death is is the realization and understanding of one's own generosity or lack of it we we get we get traumatized through loss we get traumatized through injury either physical or emotional but we also are strangely traumatized by not being able to be generous to other people in their lives and of course all of you would know intimately though that's one of the great regrets at the end of our time here there were times where I was not as generous as I could have been I did not give myself I trapped myself in a personality or an identity in which I wasn't able to give my gift either over a over a long period of my life or at crucial moments in other people's lives so the invitation to be generous I think is one of the great invitations of the center of existence and this friend of mine Irish friend his name was John O'Donoghue many of you may know his work actually he was when I first met him he was poor as a church mouse in a priest of a small parish in the heart of Connemara in the West of Ireland but then he slowly became more and more famous and and spoke to the hearts of millions around the world with his his teachings and his thoughts and then eventually he left the priesthood he said he said the two best days of his life were joining the priesthood becoming a priest and leaving the priesthood alone it's a little like owning a boat but he and I used to go off for these these kind of philosophical weekend's together we'd booked into a hotel in the Irish countryside or the north of England countryside they have these wonderful country house hotels and we would walk and talk and argue and philosophize and write and take time to ourselves and be together and eat and drink for the whole weekend usually in the reverse order of priority that I mentioned there but but it would take you three months to recover from one of these weekend's but it was very good for both for our writing and our philosophy but we were one remarkable evening in two remarkable evenings actually in this story but the first one we just finished dinner and I was in a kind of reverie thinking about my father who was in a bit of trouble at that moment and I said to my I said two out loud almost not even to John but just to the dining room in Chapel I said you know my father's in a bit of trouble I'm thinking of giving him some money and this was in the north of England and you know English dining rooms are quite quiet you just hear the sound of knife and forks on China and suddenly John in his big Irish way said how much you're thinking of giving him and the whole room turned round you know and I said I don't know I haven't really thought about he said how much you think you've given him I said I don't know a thousand pounds I said he said a thousand pounds he said go against yourself he said give two I said and the whole room is witness to this yeah invitation I said all right I'll give two he said and then he said go against yourself again give for four thousand pounds I said thank you John a friend in need is a friend that's all right I said I'll give four and I and and then he lifted his hand over the table and we shook on it you know so it was a done deal and so I did give my father four and it was actually exactly the right thing to do and I said if I'd have just given him the 1k he would have limped along and then fallen back into the same dynamic he'd been it but the four just gave him breathing space just it was the generous thing to do and afterwards I said wasn't that a great thing for a close friend to do for you to make you more generous to invite the part of you the best part of you out into the world here so I said that was a great thing but nine months later we were in Ireland actually and a wonderful place called Boleyn hinge with a big salmon river running by the side of it and obviously at this dinner John had forgotten this conversation because at the end of the dinner he said you know I've a really close friend and he's in a bit of trouble I'm thinking of giving him some money and I said how much you think he of giving him John and he said I think a thousand euros he said he was Irish you know thousand euros I said go against yourself give to John looked at me across the table he said Jesus holy sent Mary and Joseph tonight she said I'm in this for for I said you are right so he had to give the four so this is a piece this is a piece that was based on that conversation but also the way you know if you have a good friend there they're good for you not only in a medicinal way but they're they're good as witnesses to your generosity and to inviting out the best part of you and also you can be you could not only have a human friend in that way but you can be friends with the greater world in a way that you'll allow it to bring out the best part of you so this is called just beyond yourself and in this poem there's a there's an image of a road which is just over the back of where John used to live in County Clare and in Irish it's called qajar and odorous which is a lovely Irish name it means the fort of the high door and it's it's very accurate actually because when you stand at the bottom looking up to the Karen and odorous there's a lane the boring as they say in Ireland with two stone walls on either side of you and these two stone walls meet in perfect Italian Renaissance perspective right at the top of the hill with just a little gleam of light lighted like a door between them and I've often felt when I walked up that that green road that stony road that I could just walk straight off through that door and in to the thin air of my new life just off beyond myself here and one of the great it seems to me one of the great invitations of life is to get over yourself yeah get over your initial reaction get over your lack of generosity get over your narrowness yeah and risk yourself in the world and you never regret having been too generous at times unless you're consistent to generous with one person but mostly it's the other way that we're going to rinse this is just beyond yourself just beyond yourself it's where you need to be just beyond yourself it's where you need to be half a step into self forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll need just beyond yourself it's where you need to be half a step into self forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet there's a road always beckoning there's a road always beckoning when you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time that's how you know it's where you have to go that's how you know it's the road you have to follow that's how you know it's just beyond yourself it's where you need to be just beyond yourself it's where you need to be half a step into self forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet half a step into self forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet there's a road there's a road always beckoning when you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time that's how you know it's the road you have to follow that's how you know it's where you have to go that's how you know it's just beyond yourself it's where you need to be it's interesting to think of your identity lying not within you or without you but at the very place where you meet the world and this is what I call the conversational nature of reality the fact that whatever you desire of the world will not happen exactly as you would like it to happen but equally whatever the world desires of you will not happen exactly as it wants it you to happen there and what actually happens is this meeting between what you think is you and what you think is not you and actually this is the only place where things are real not in the abstract of what I've made up for myself about the world nor in the abstracts of what the world is made up about me but in the very place where I meet the world that edge that physical sense of edge that psychological sense of edge the place where I'm actually uncovering and re understanding both the world and myself at the same time and this we tend to think of self-knowledge as my coming to understand what my great gifts are in the world and then giving them this is one-half of self knowledge but the other half of self knowledge is also understanding all the ways I'm afraid of having that conversation all of my reluctances all the ways that I want to be an abstract version of myself and and of course this is exactly the most generous gift we can give to someone who's in the process of dying because the normal consolations around everything's going to be all right yeah simply not enough yeah and the ability to understand the single mold essence of that person's reluctance to go though both their reluctance to leave this incredible world and the reluctance to disappear into what might lie on the other side of that threshold these are very powerful arbiters of our identity and it's interesting to think that when a child is born you know when you hear the cry of that child it's not the sound of someone who's happy to be here I was just in Morocco just doing a kind of education around the Sufi tradition there and one of the great Sufi poets Rumi said that you were born in this life crying while everyone around you is laughing and the object is to leave life laughing while everyone else around you is crying yeah but when you hear that child I it's it's the sound of trauma of being born into a conversation that they don't as yet know how to hold my wife and I had a niece born just a year and a bit ago and it was a difficult birth and the cord was wrapped around her neck and she was facing the wrong way and although everyone was in the birthing room everyone was traumatized by the possibilities of the things that could go wrong but eventually everything was righted and Elizabeth appeared in the world with their cry of reluctance and then everyone was laughing around her and and so happy and so relieved so I wrote this I wrote this piece dedicated to that that moment which we've all experienced that moment of entry into the world through the passageway of difficulty and reluctance I wrote it after I was in a little circle my wife was speaking and I had my notebook out and we were with a group of people executives and and she used this beautiful old english word cleaves and it's it's the only word in the english language that means to hold together and to split apart at the same time and in the King James Bible it was said that two people cleaved together in marriage and when you think about it it's totally accurate about the state of marriage you know the word cleave one moment you're in they're totally together until especially with the masculine psyche you say the wrong thing and then you cleaved apart you know and every intimacy is avoid a parallel voyage of closeness and Farah partners at one at the same time here so this is called cleave and now I wrote it for Elizabeth's birth but it's for all of our the way we came into this world when the child is born they go through this incredible physiological metamorphosis valves open and close in the heart and the lungs that will never open or close again for the rest of that child's existence here and fluid is expelled from the lungs and they take that first breath of what to begin with feels like a toxic environment and just moments before they were in this rent-controlled beautiful environment no to-do lists no alarms in the morning no emails nothing no no bills to pay just that beautiful clothes dark heartbeat of your mother everything taken care of and then you're out in the world and you're supposed to be happy about these circumstances yeah cleave to hold together and to split apart at one in the same time cleave to hold together and to split apart at one in the same time like the act of being born like the act of being born breathing in this world while lamenting for the one we've lost cleave to hold together and to split apart at one in the same time like the act of being born breathing in this world while lamenting for the one we've lost no one needs to tell us we're already on our own word way no one has to remind us of our intimate and everyday embrace with disappearance we were born saying goodbye to what we love we were born saying goodbye to what we were loved we were born in a strangely beautiful reluctance to be here not quite wanting to breathe in this world we're here and we're almost always not we are present while not quite wanting to admit we have arrived not quite arrived in the in the mind yet always arriving in this body always growing older while trying to grow younger always growing older while trying to grow younger always in the act of catching up have saying hello or saying goodbye finding in each new and imagined future the still lived memory of our previous precious life cleave to hold together and to split apart at one in the same time like the act of being born like the act of being born breathing in this world breathing in this world while lamenting for the one we've lost no one needs to tell us we're already on our own would way no one has to remind us of our intimate and everyday embrace with disappearance we were born saying goodbye to what we loved we were born in a strangely beautiful reluctance to be here not quite wanting to breathe in this world we're here and we're almost always not we are present while not quite wanting to admit we have already arrived not quite arrived in the mind yet always arriving in this body always arriving in this modoch always in the act of catching up of saying hello or saying goodbye finding in each new and imagined future the still lived memory of our previous precious life it's lovely to think about what your being witness to when you're sat by the bedside of someone who's saying goodbye to this life because they're not just existing in the present the past the present in the future are all together in one conversation and they are that conversation between what has occurred what they were what they could have been what they weren't and the possibility of stepping into a larger dispensation out of that understanding and of course one of the powerful reflectors is that you're not only witness and trying to be compassionate to the other person's reluctance to go or reluctance to be in the state that they're in yeah but you're also witness to your own reluctance to be sat at the bedside who's got of someone who is going through such a difficult passage way to be able to identify the ways that you don't want to have this conversation that you don't want to be present to this pain and this difficulty and the consequences of understanding that you are only here for a short period also I was asked to give a TED talk on the future a couple of years ago two or three years ago and that was the theme of the whole TED conference in Vancouver and but one when I replied to the invitation I said you know you can't really talk about the future without talking about the past and the present at the same time now none of them exist in isolation the future just just addressed by itself is always an abstract just as as the the now is always an abstract when it's addressed without the context to the the past or the future we we live actually in the time of the tyranny of the now every teacher and guru worth their salt is saying is just now now now now nothing else just now and I've always you know the thing the Irish always say the thing about the past is it's not the past yeah it's actually alive not only your imagination but actually in your physical body and all of you work with trauma know that that's true the past is actually alive now and if you're in a marriage you find that out - you think you're addressing you think you're in addressing an adult you know [Laughter] just turn this off that was my wife actually Dondre she sends time talking about her but I'll talk about myself you think you're addressing an adult but actually just because of something you said a few seconds before you could be addressing someone who's seven years old who had a trauma with their parent or with their friends or with their physical injury you're you're addressing it a continuum you're the conversation between the past the present and the future and it's interesting to think of our lives in the same conversational way there's I was just in Spain a few weeks ago and if you ever want a free glass of red wine in Madrid you stand at the bar and you shout out these lines in broken Spanish and and then everyone finishes the lines with you and you get a free glass of vino Tinto yeah this is guaranteed and the lines are very famous there by antonio machado a great Spanish port and he says come in aunty Noah Camino si se camino al and are alined ah si si el camino path maker there is no path you make the path by walking by walking you make the path Tammy 1908 Camino se hace camino al and are alined are si si el camino being a Spanish poet he's referencing this great pilgrimage in the north of Spain called the Camino de Santiago de Compostela which so many hundreds of thousands of people who are walking from all around the world these days the understanding that the path is like what the mathematicians would call an iterative equation your life takes the form according to what you feed into it but also what you allow to be fed into it by what is outside of you when I was I've written poetry since I was young since I was seven or eight years old but when I was 13 or 14 years old I saw Jacques Cousteau that great French marine zoologist sailing across our little black-and-white television set and I couldn't believe that there was work like this in the world yeah you could live on the good ship Calypso you could follow the life of the dolphin and you could dive under those waters and you could make a living yeah so I was so astonished I gave up all my art subjects and put myself into the salt mines of biology chemistry and physics and then I appeared years later with a degree in marine zoology only to found that everyone else had been watching Jacques Cousteau at the same time and they were all graduating with me you know I wanted to follow the life of the dolphin but it was about 0.5 dolphins per graduate when I came out and but by sheer luck of the Irish I I got this job as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador one moment I was I was doing my studies until the wee hours in the morning in North Wales and the next I was dropped onto the beaches of the Galapagos Islands and it's an old joke but I found that none of the birds or animals had read any of the zoology books that I had read there and it was really frightening you know we'd learned this way of naming the world which is called Linnaean nomenclatures the latin names that we give to birds and animals and and the man who conceived it was a Swedish scientist back in the 18th century and he was a genius because why because he allowed us all to talk about the same things together all around the world you could identify a bird and you knew that someone in a different country was addressing the same animal that you were but the thing about the Latin nomenclature is it didn't mean to say that the name was actually accurate in what it was describing it just allowed you to talk about it so you you got this impression if you took it literally that the world was made into boxes but and that everything had to fit in this box including yourself but when I got to those Islands I found that all of the birds and animals inhabited this incredible and uncontrollable continuum I was also so found because we lived on small boats on sailing boats that that the way these blokes got around the island was complete Islands was completely disturbing to me there was no GPS at that time there were no navigation navigation lights in the islands all of the navigation was done by dead reckoning and all of the navigation was done at night between these far-flung islands I I understood something about navigation before I went there but I couldn't understand how the crew were bringing us into these obscure bays and Coletta's in the middle of the night they were holding a conversation that I couldn't understand and it was really disturbing to me the world around me was holding a conversation that I couldn't understand it was really disturbing to me especially around mortality I was I was put into witness with animals and birds that I would get to know almost on the personal basis over the weeks I was there and then I would find them dead on a beach the next time I'm being eaten by other animals and part of me just wanted to go home I said I've seen this God the Galapagos is wonderful can I go back to my zoology books yeah please it was calling a level of understanding risk and generosity out of my own identity which I didn't think I was equal to and what I had to do was take the first step in what I think everyone has to do in deepening the conversation I'm writing a book at the moment called seven steps for deepening any conversation a timeless way seven steps for deepening any conversation I always say the first step in deepening the conversation is to stop having the one you're having now not to improve it not to ameliorate it not to make it more efficient just stop having it it's interesting if you're a leader in an organization you can go up to any of the people who work for you and say what's the conversation I need to stop having and they'll look at you first to see if you're serious yeah and when they find you are serious they'll just tell you right away and you say wait a minute take 20 take half an hour to think about it yeah walk around the building you know take note I already know what you need to start doing here and then you go to the next person they tell you the same then this year you can go to your wife or your husband and say what's the conversation I need to stop having they'll tell you right away go to your son or daughter what needs to stop coming out of my mouth they'll tell you right away him one of the most difficult conversations to stop is to stop having is the one between you and your adolescent son or daughter why because you're actually trying almost always because the the gradient of maturation is so steep in an adolescent you're almost always trying to address someone who is actually no longer there you're trying to address the child you knew just a few years ago and if they're an adolescent you're trying to address the child who once respected you yeah now you're just walking embarrassment as you come into the room here what you're wearing what you're saying there's nothing you can do about it absolutely nothing it's really good for your total humiliation yeah and humiliation in Latin means being returned to the ground of your being so this is one of the most difficult commits usually it takes place like a kind of Doppler effect you've just passing in the corridor of the kitchen and you just hear the near sound as you go past and the near sound is you saying something deeply unhelpful to your adolescent child or daughter and they've lived with you under the guise of respect for years so they know exactly how to say something equally unhelpful bacteria and then you say the next unhelpful thing and then they say the next unhelpful thing and then you find yourself like me on the steps with your hand raised about to say that last deeply satisfying unhelpful thing that you've earned the right to say through all your sacrificing but just as you're about to say it it's all interrupted by the huge sound of the bedroom door slamming and the whole house vibrating and I found myself in this position I'm standing there on the stairs of my hand raised and I said wait a minute David they said this is not a real conversation how do you make the conversation more real take your own advice that you you deliver so liberally around the planet you know how do you make this a real comment first of all stop the one you're having now No don't improve it don't rethink it just stop so I took my hand down close my mouth turn myself around walked into the kitchen I did what all were all Irish English Welsh Irish people do under deep trauma put the kettle on for a cup of tea yeah now ever since you threw all that tea in Boston Harbor you've never wanted to make a decent cup in your lives again there you said we're never making its coffee from now on everything every year or so I try to get a decent company it's impossible no but you know if you make a proper cup of tea it takes you a good 15 minutes you have to warm the pot the water axe actually has to be boiling when it hits the tea you can't bring the tea back out with the warrant no none of this and tea coat the whole thing anyway it's a kind of ritual and it allows you to calm down so I made this tray tray for my daughter and I took my mother's her grandmother's Delft you know blue and white China and I made this lovely tray and I'm just saying don't rehearse what you're going to say don't think of what you're going to say have a proper conversation yeah because the corollary of stopping the conversation is that you must have a relationship to silence it immediately puts you into a relationship with the unknown and if you're asking someone on their deathbed to stop the conversation they're having now you've got to be able to hold silence in your bones so that they can actually in a sense in the unspoken realms contract with that understanding you never know they might have got there before you - yeah and they might be asking you to actually join their silence and their unknowing that they've arrived at whereas you're just trying to supply an answer of some kind here and they don't want any answers at that point they just want to be able to pay attention without having an easy reply to what they're being confronted with there so I carried the I carried then I carried the train I had my my daughter's favorite cookies on chocolate cookies on the tray you know and then I went up and in the differ more Invitational voice I knocked on the door and I said come on Charlotte I said I'm sorry what it for whatever my part is in it let's try and have a proper exchange you know anyway she came out of the door with her head down and her arms folded she walked down the stairs with her head down and her arms folded and she sat on the couch with her head down and her arms folded but then I did notice one I was looking at the cookies here and I said I have a chance but all time saying don't say anything don't say anything you know and then finally after we'd been there a while and we were drinking the tea just out of nowhere without planning it I said Charlotte tell me one thing you want me to stop doing as a father and tell me one thing you want me to do more of and she looked at me and I knew we were in to a proper conversation to a proper exchange because in a sense I'd asked her who she was yeah but of course the adolescent doesn't even know who they are they haven't caught up with themselves so you're in this unknown together here she knew exactly what I wanted what she wanted me to stop doing in fact she had a dozen things she wanted me to stop doing her she didn't know what she wanted me to do more of because in order to understand that she'd have to understand what she wanted and of course in in the gradual goodbye to this life where we'll all be trying to find out what we want at the deepest level what the deeper forms of desire are that are good for us which direction we want to actually move in and at that point you realize you don't need to be any kind of spiritual athlete you don't need to be breasting the tape winning the gold medal yeah you can crawl across that line you can limp across it there's lovely moments in the Pali text which are the earliest texts about the talks that Buddha gave in his lifetime and like all religions Buddhism became over complicated you know and over theologizing over the centuries but the parley texts are really the actual clear understanding of the man and what he was saying here and there's one lovely talk where one of his followers who's a bit of a rogue and a drinker and likes to party yeah but who's a sincere follower of Buddha nonetheless stands up at the end of one of Buddhas talks and he says he says I don't know how you do it Buddha but you're obviously so integral you're so trusted you're so perfect in all your actions here but whenever I tried to follow the path I just fall down immediately he said do you have any advice Buddha and Buddha said yes he said just fall in the right direction just make sure if you're falling towards the way you should be going there's a lovely you know in Ireland there all of these wonderful bachelor farmers they're a dying breed at the moment they're still out there and they live you know quite lonely lives just every now and again coming down to the pub to have one or two you know but because they live alone all the time and because they're out with animals and and with the landscape and with the sky and the weather they're often you know quite extraordinary philosophers and I've had many a sit-down with some of these farmers you know and they'll always have something to say to you that'll just stop you in your tracks you know or have you think about the world in a different way but there was one fellow Michael Murphy he was well known in a village that I knew you know and he had a very close relationship with that ancient Celtic deity known as alcohol in them so he probably wouldn't drink for weeks at a time but then he'd come down and have one or two too many you know and and then he he'd come out of the bar and make his way home you know falling in the right direction hopefully and but there's one time he came out at the bar and there was a guard standing right on the opposite side of the road a policeman as this.n like in Ireland you know and Michael sees this policeman looks at him and turns 90 degrees you know this way but he's got one foot up on the sidewalk and one down on the road you know so he's walking along like this as he's going and the guard the policeman says michael maier you're drunk and without missing a beat Michael Murphy says thank God for that I thought I was lame but it was just himself yeah just himself yeah but it's interesting now to think that we don't get to choose between we often think you know the the road that someone is following the pilgrim path in life is just on the horizon that we can see outside but it's interesting to think of this internal horizon which is equally as powerful and that our pilgrim path as individuals is to walk the path between the horizon we see on the outside and the horizon we perceive as a foundation inside us and with your feet in that foundation and your eyes on that horizon you are the pilgrim path and you don't have to move a single inch this interior horizon always seems like a kind of barrier in the body to begin with there was a great Welsh mystic called henry vaughan lived in the 1600s and he called it they called this inner horizon a deep but dazzling darkness a deep a dazzling darkness it's deep because it's foundational it's dazzling because to begin with it just reflects your surface personality it's hard to get beneath yeah so the understanding is this radical undoing to come down to this internal foundation that then allows you to see the proper horizon that you belong to out in the world our refusal to step down onto this inner foundation creates horizons that are too close in on the outside the deeper we go the further the horizon we can voyage to in the outer world you know I was in a museum in Paris not long ago and I was looking at all of the different body language from all the different epochs of our history and it was incredible every form of human body language children women men the gods yeah it was really incredible and I was just seeing it all through the perspective of body language but you know the one form of body language that was not there in that in all the epochs of human history was this there was no one and isn't it incredible that that is the most prolific form of human body language that we see today in this world I was just in Morocco just a few days ago it's the same everyone yeah and of course sometimes there is a far horizon there but most the time we're actually narrowing the conversation narrowing the perspective narrowing our sense of horizon yeah when do we get our heads up and look further when do you take time to settle into your physical body in the way it's feeling in the way it's experiencing to rest into the body without being distracted away from that internal horizon you've only to leave your phone behind in your hotel room and go for a 20-minute walk you are a different person without the phone than you are with it this is a piece I wrote and it's it's a piece that looks at that internal and external horizon there's a story in the Irish tradition of a monk standing on the edge of the monastic precinct and he hears the Bell calling him to prayer and he says to himself that's the most beautiful sound in the world is the call to silence to death yeah but at the same time he hears the Blackbird calling from outside in the fields in the woods and he says to himself and that's also the most beautiful sound in the world what's lovely about the meme in the Irish tradition because it occurs again again and again through the centuries and in poetry and the image of this monk hearing the bell and then hearing the black bear you don't you're never told which way he goes because actually when you think about it we don't get to choose as human beings if you think of the Bell the Bell is is this call to depth it's always the question the unconscious question each of us had has before I throw myself at reality should I add you Kate myself a little more should I go deeper should I understand the bigger context should I get another degree should I rehearse my instrument a little more in my room before I play it in public these that's the bow and the Blackbird is the world as you find it just as you find it and of course it's because we don't get to choose between always having to go deeper and always having to meet the world just as you find it always trying to understand your friends perspective from a deeper level and always having to meet them just as you find them here always struggling for a greater understanding of your marriage or your wife or your husband you know and just having to meet them every day and the way you find them always trying to understand the mystery of your child's pilgrimage in the world and always having to provide for them and help them in the best way you can at the same time so this is called the bell and the blackbird it's the title poem of my latest piece the sound of a bell the sound of a bell still reverberating or a black bird a black bird calling from a corner of the field the sound of a bell still reverberating or a black bird a black bird calling from a corner of the field asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper into the one that waits the sound of a bell still reverberating or a black bird a black bird calling from a corner of the field asking you to weigh akin to this life or inviting you deeper into the one that waits either way takes courage either way takes courage either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know you'll have to give every last thing away the approach that is also the meeting itself without any meeting at all that radience you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world crying Alleluia the approach that is also the meeting itself without any meeting at all that radience you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world crying Alleluia the sound the sound of a bell still reverberating or a blackbird a blackbird calling from a corner of the field asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper into the one that waits one of the mystery of you know I was telling you about John or Donahue but he passed away at the height of his powers fifty-two years old just passed away in his sleep it's a big shock to me because I always thought he'd be saying the last words over me not the other way around you know but I remember when he died I said heaven had better be a good place you know because he loved this place so much you know he found this life such a heaven he was never neutral about everything you'd say during a cup of tea John he said I could kill a cup of tea he'd say yeah will you have a lamb chop pewter he said I'll take three of them you know and he was never neutral about anything he loved this life so much and it was quite a shock to hear him you know to see him to see him go like that you know and and where was he he'd always held the conversation between the beauties of this life and the frightening invitation that lies on the other side of that threshold and the interesting dynamic is no matter what corroborations our own theological inheritance gives us here no one knows the details of what lies on the other side of that barrier and whatever it is it's probably so different from what our human imaginations can comprehend it might as well be a complete disappearance you have to risk yourself by just giving out who you are it's a magnified version of what we have to do to be a good father and to be a good mother to give up our sense of control over our children's lives to let them go to give up our sense of control over the people who work with us while making sure that good work is still done to get the sense of control from the conversation that we create together that I'm if I'm a leader I'm actually a kind of chief conversationalist my job is to make sure the conversation is real but then we have the conversation with the world with our work with another we also have the conversation with that tricky moveable frontier called ourselves in the mirror which strangely like another person in a marriage is constantly changing and constantly becoming someone who to begin with you don't recognize and I always think that at every threshold in our lives we always meet the new South in the form of a stranger and to begin with we always turn away from that stranger and say you can't be me I don't recognize that person that in order to get to a real sense of participation of joy we have to go through a kind of radical undoing we spend a lot of time doing in order to undo you learn how to play the violin with scales you learn how to play in rhythm you how to you learn how to accurately hit the notes but in order to play real music you have to go through a kind of radical undoing in order to join that frontier where things really happen it's interesting to think of the way we hold conversations in life you know especially in our work and especially how much time we spend in our work today it's interesting to thinking if we today in today's world we've privileged work above almost any other activity in our lives it's really in many ways our real religion because you spend more time than than you do in almost any other aspect of your life more time than you do in your places of worship if you have one more time than you do in the natural world more time than you do even with your loved ones yeah it's really interesting to ask yourself by the way I am in in all of those hours who are my practicing of becoming because imagine if you played an instrument the same number of hours that you spent in your work if you spend 8 9 10 11 12 hours a day playing the saxophone or the violin or the piano can you imagine how good you would get at it and you wouldn't need even any proclivity for music if you played 8 9 10 hours a day you would become very good indeed so who are my practicing of becoming by the way I am in my workplace by the way I hold the conversations because you can bet your bottom dollar that is who you're becoming so the really sobering question is by the way I am in my work do I want to become that person who I'm practicing and becoming because there's no one else you'll become than that person there's nothing else you're practicing more assiduously so do I have a place for a real harvest in that work do I have a place for that radical undoing for joy for a happiness for a sense of humor for perspective here and when you think about it if you look taking from the Irish tradition in the Irish tradition a sense of humor is always understood as a kind of spiritual practice because the sense of humor always tells you that whatever context you've arranged for yourself there's always another context that makes your context absurd and actually every conversation in the West of Ireland is based on this dynamic subverting the original foundation on which the conversation began and then once it's done you move on to the next subject and you subvert that I was at a wedding a proper three-day Irish wedding a couple of years ago and I you know the you need a break from these weddings it's constant little and so I went down to one of my favourite pubs the it's a lobster and seafood pub right down by the water and I was in there just having a little break but there were two lads two fellows at the bar you know and I was halfway down my pint of Guinness and they said what's he doing here then well I'm at a wedding you know you're at a wedding a hurry it's a wedding finish no the wedding's still going on they said why are you here then I said I'm just trying to get away from all the drink that's a perfect Irish conversation but then you take a step into something deeper something something that's that's calling you I lived after I'd left after I'd left the Galapagos Islands I I left those islands and I really did not know what to do with the rest of my life it was a kind of death in my early 20s I had no more ambitions in marine zoology but I didn't know what I was going to do in my life so I'd stopped the conversation second step I was in conversation with the unknown yeah but the third step is coming to ground in new territory that you don't recognize here and in order to come to that ground I went and I lived on a sheep farm in North Wales with it was myself the Welsh farming family and 900 sheep on a mountainside in North Wales and in many ways I was I was like a Vietnam veteran except I hadn't been traumatized by violence I'd been traumatized by beauty in the Galapagos Island sir and I didn't know what to do with the rest of my life I didn't know how to follow up on that conversation to take it deeper in a way that place had subverted my existence but I had not yet replaced it with anything so I lived on this farm and and I would I would just pay for my rent and and very simple life when I was beginning to write by helping to look after the Sheep you know in this plant to be to be done all the year round lambing in the snow digging them out of snowdrifts and and bringing them down off the mountains and then I would be in my little caravan in the farmyard and I'd try to right and there was one day I was trying to write and I heard someone working right outside the caravan I said I can't believe it I made out in the middle of nowhere you know this is the perfect place to write and this someone you know making a lot of noise and I look out and it's this man who's just moved onto the farm with his family moved into this old cottage and he's building up this dry stone wall well to build a dry stone wall properly where there's no cement is quite a skill actually you build two walls they lean in slightly you've got throughs that hold the outer wall in the inner wall and then you've got an upright an upright level of stones on the top it's quite a skill and I just happened just through the way my life had gone in where I'd lived I'd done a lot of dry stone walling and I could tell this fella did not know what he was doing so I was writing and looking out the window writing it and there's this dr. Seuss like wall which is being built you know it looks as if it's going to go any moment and I'm saying don't interfere just right just right don't interfere just writer so I anyway finally there was no writing done you know and I said I'll make the fellow a cup of tea you know so I put the kettle on made the tea you know and then I I took it out and he was just putting the last stones on the top level here and I said hello I just want to introduce introduce myself I'm David white and would you like a cup of tea he said oh I could kill a cup of tea here and anyway took his gloves off put the tea on the top wall and the whole wall collapsed with the tea inside there there I said come on let's build this wall together and and and that's how we got to know each other actually his name was Michael Michael Higgins yeah so we got to know each other through that winter and he was then in his late 60s which seemed as old as the hills to me then man of great experience you know but he'd he'd had this bohemian life he'd been a Shakespeare player he played King Lear and we got to know each other and we got we were looking after the Sheep we're out on the mountainsides and the in the perishing cold wind and snow and hail and we had lots of walks together and work together and we got to know each other and one of the themes around Michael's life was that he was really interested in a poet called William Blake some of you may have known know about Blake he lived a couple of hundred years ago in London he was really a genius and a one-off he didn't he just sprang out with his own tradition really in his own theology and he was seen as being slightly insane that in this time and he was constantly conversing with the angels and his wife complained about it all the time that he talked with the Angels more than he talked with her but he was a brilliant artist painter visual artist and a brilliant poet and I used to sit with Michael by the fire and his wife was a very fierce Jehovah's Witness but she always went to bed early and when she went upstairs Michael would reach behind the chair and there be a little bottle of brandy and we'd have a glass of brandy and then we talked and Michael would always talk about William Blake and his great question because he had the a very fierce way of asking questions her he had this lined face horizontal lines you know which was just made for doubt Michael's way of holding the conversation of life was through doubt but it wasn't cynicism it was doubt that really wanted to know what the answer was here and if he ever turned this face on you when you were halfway through a declarative sentence you'd find yourself backing out and contradicting yourself before you got to the end of the line because it was so powerful you know but he used to turn this face on me almost every evening you say do you think Blake really talked with the Angels or is it just a metaphor that we stand in conversation with world's greater than our own and when he and he'd asked this question almost every night and I'm we and it would lead to further conversations but I never had any real straight answer to it it was just a gateway to a deeper conversation did Blake talk with the Angels and this would go on another thing he used to say was you know I love this place so much I found my place to die meaning Tana Garth farm where we left here it was really a beautiful place he looked down the egwin Valley where Arthur used to pasture his horses in the myths out over the Isle of Anglesey which was the old druidic center of Europe unum out to the Irish Sea and then behind you with this great bowl of mountains the Carnegie mountains here full of Welsh names you know and if there were four corners to a field three of them would have names it's kind of Aboriginal song lines in this area and you'd always be saying the names wherever you went and there was a little stream came through the farm which was called the cassock or the place at the mayor the female horse and every little elbow and corner of that stream had a different name and there was one place where it opened out into a little pool which in Welsh was called the place of the three dead Englishmen and this being Wales this was not a place of tragedy or something good had happened there back in the 1400s place of the three dead Englishmen you know so we were to live Englishmen living on this world farm but with all of these Welsh names and they're just the Welsh language is still alive 2,000 years later there are millions of people speak it and everyday basis and it was the language used around us you know we just learned all the Welsh swear words around the farmers and this she but it's a beautiful old language you know we certainly learned how to pronounce the names you know and so so Michael would say I found my place to die well anyway our time went on and we go for long walks and one other detail Michael was absolutely head-banging ly obsessive about making sandwiches and we're taking forever to make a sandwich and we're going out for a walk I'd be sat there with my boots on by the fire are we going are we going I just finished this sandwich are we going are we going Michael are we going and I'm almost done with him you know and make his balls a sandwich but then we walk a hundred yards of the track he'd sit down open up his pack and eat the sandwich and I'd say Michael why he said I'd only be thinking about it the whole way around the walkers I didn't answer so this went on and on so we got to know each other we became really close friends you know and with this question these two things you know did Blake talk with the Angels and I love this so this place so much I found my place to die and anyway I used to go away and come back I'd travel to the Himalayas I go to South America I'd come back but one day I went away and I came to North America and I I didn't go back and then one day a couple of years later I was on my way to Ireland I was driving through the mountains of Wales and I'd set off early with the chance that I could walk up to tanigawa and see Michael and Gwen his wife Diane his wife and and the foot and the Welsh farming family and I walked up through the fields and Diane was standing in the cottage door when you live out in the country people and you walk about a lot people can recognize you just from your silhouette in been 2 years since you seen me I was a mile away and she was waving you know she could tell it was me I came up there was scant smell of scones coming out of the door and had just arrived at exactly the right time as her coming out the oven we sat down we had a lovely reunion but I said where's Michael and he and she said oh he's in he's in hospital having further tests he's got leukemia yeah and I said I won't see him she said no he won't be back till after you've gone you know so so anyway I had to go I went to Ireland I came back a different way I never saw him again because I I got a letter three months later that he passed away but Diane said in the last weeks when he he was home he'd had a kind of remission and she said he was experiencing everything in life that he'd read in Blake and he was having those conversations when there so anyway I was I was far away at that time I was I was too poor to to be able to buy a ticket at short notice and get to his memorial service so I sat down to write this piece for him and I'll finish with this piece it's called tena goth allergy for Michael and it's full of its full of the Welsh names because I said to myself you know when you're at a memorial service what what can you say about the person that conveys who you're losing here and of course what you have to what you have to convey is what they loved in life and as soon as you iterate what they loved you start to get a sense of who's gone yeah what they're what hole their absence makes in life so you'll hear a lot of wolf names in this just let them let them roll pasture you know and and this is the allergy for Michael hare this grass-grown Hills a patchwork lined with walls I've grown to love there is an image of the farmer in here his name was John they used to have this battered shepherd's crook made out of aluminium and it was battered because he used to get really angry at his dogs when they didn't do what what they wanted but he wouldn't hit the dog he just hit the wall with the shepherd's crook so it was bent you know it's wonderful you'd hear his voice and his shouting in Welsh up and down the valley here this grass-grown hills a patchwork lined with walls I've grown to love for hundred years at least the hill farms clung tenacious to the weathered smoke over the egwin and the green depths of maan the eye as weathered also into the grey rocks and the fields bright with spring the windblown light from the mountain filling the valley the low back sheep following the fence hemmed by dogs and John's crook staff the still valley filled with his shouts and the mewling of sheep pressed through the gate beneath aerelon the bowl of lava is with missed the dogs lie low in the tufted grass and watch with pure intent the ragged back at the last sheep entering the stone bound pens the rough ground of whales lives in the mind for years springing more grass under feet treading concrete hundreds of miles from home and the ground has names the ground has names songs full of grief sounds that belong to a single stream kassig is the place of the mayor comes lava is the valley of speech utterance of wind frivolous the blue moorland filled by the sky the farm passed down yet never possessed lives father to son mother to child feeding the people with sheep the sheep with grass and memory with years lived looking at mountains one single glance of a hillside darkened by cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes and this world needs all the breath we have karna through ellen Kenneth's death if ganna through have all the karna the ear Ellen of the shining light Kruskal the endless ridge curving to nothing one man I know love this place so much he said he'd found this place to die one man I know love this place so much he said he'd found his place to die years I knew him walking the high moorlands or watching the coals of a winter fire in the cottage great and died he dead and died he did but not before one month's final joy in wild creation gave him that full sight he'd glimpsed in Blake he too wrestled with his angel in and out of hospital the white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountains bracing sense of space now he was ready his heart so long at the edge of the nest shook its wings and flew into the hills he loved became the hills he loved walked with an easy rest cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt walked with an easy rest cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt his ashes are scattered over by ABBA the water continually saying his name as I still go home to Tana goth speaking the names of those I love I got to these less lines I was I came back a year or so later after Michael was long buried and we sat by the fire and died and his wife and the kids were there and they said read the poem to us you know because it had been published by them so I read the poem and I got to the last line his ashes are scattered over by ABBA well Abba was a waterfall and John and Michael and I used to go over there and we'd sit there and the other thing Michael used to say was this is where I want my ashes scattered here and I actually I said he was buried he'd been cremated but and so I assumed that's that's where he was actually you know I said his ashes are scattered over biabber and Dayan threw her hands up and said all he's still on top of the Wardrobe so it was in the palm and he had to go so he's over there by the waterfall yeah this grass-grown hills a patchwork lined with walls I've grown to love 400 years at least the hill farms clung to the tenacious to the weathered slope over the egwin and the green depths of maan the eye the eye as weathered also into the gray rocks and the fields bright with spring the windblown light from the mountain filling the valley the low back sheep following the fence hemmed by dogs and John's crook staff the still valley filled with his shouts and the mewling of sheep pressed through the gate beneath ear Ellen the bowl of flavor is stirred with missed the dogs lie low in the tuft of grass and watch with pure intent the ragged back of the last sheep entering the stone bound pens the rough ground of way love lives in the mind for years springing more grass under feet treading concrete hundreds of miles from home and the ground has names sounds that belong to a single stream kassig is the place of the mayor cult lover is the valley of speech utterance of wind for it left the blue moorland filled by the sky the farm passed down yet never possessed the farm past sound yet never possessed lives father to son mother to child feeding the people with sheep the sheep with grass and memory with years live looking at mountains one single glance of a hillside darkened by cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes and this world needs all the breath we have Karla Fluellen ganas death gana through have all the car neti air Ellen of the shining like croscill the endless Ridge curving to nothing one man I know love this place so much he said he'd found his place to die years I knew him walking the high moorlands or watching the cause of a winter fire in the cottage great and died he did and died he did but not before one month's final joy in wild creation gave him that full sight he'd glimpsed in Blake he too wrestled with his angel in and out of hospital the white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountains bracing sense of space now he was ready his heart so long at the edge of the nest so long at the edge of the nest shook its wings and flew into the hills he loved became the hills he loved walked with an easy rest cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt his ashes are scattered over by a bow the water continually saying his name as I still go on to Telegraph speaking the names of those I love so thank you for the listening ear and just want to say how much I hold you're working great respect as you are witness to all of the things the person is loved in their life and all of those holy names but and all of the things they have not loved enough that they regret but I regret that actually puts them into the ground of their own being again a regret that actually gives them a better and more immediate future that's waiting for them so thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: ACPE: The Standard for Spiritual Care & Education

Views: 9,547

Rating: 4.9487181 out of 5

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Id: pCeWuJ-2X_E

Length: 82min 2sec (4922 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2019