David whyte beginning

Wait longer than you would, go against yourself, find the pale nobility of quiet that ripening demands, watch with patience as the silhouette emerges and the leaves fall, see it become a solitary roundness against a greying sky, let winter come and the first frost threaten, and then wake one morning to see the breath of winter has haloed its redness with light.

David Whyte is an internationally renowned poet and author, and a scintillating and moving speaker. Behind these talents lies a very physical attempt to give voice to the wellsprings of human identity, human striving and, most difficult of all, the possibilities for human happiness.

His talks, to audiences of all persuasions, on everything from literature to leadership, heartbreak to healing; mindfulness to mythology, weave poetry, story and commentary into a moving, almost physical experience of the themes that run through every human life: joy and loss, vulnerability and vitality, courage and despair, beauty and necessary heartbreak.

He draws from hundreds of memorized poems, his own and those of other beloved poets such as Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Keats, Pablo Neruda, Fleur Adcock and the sonnets of Shakespeare.

He is the author of ten books of poetry, three books of prose on the transformative nature of work; a widely-acclaimed, best-selling book of essays, and an extensive audio collection. Tippett: I think, on the surface, most people would say that corporations would be the least poetic spaces in our midst. You talk about the drama of work.

And what did you learn there? I work with companies and their leadership teams all around the world. But to begin with, all I knew was my bitterly-earned experience within nonprofit organizations. Whyte: Yeah. Whyte: And if you want Machiavellian politics, then a good nonprofit or the English department at the university is exactly the place to go. Whyte: I went full-time as a poet never imagining that I would work in the belly of the beast in the corporate world.

I grew up from long lines of rebels in the dispossessed on both my Scots Yorkshire and on my Irish side. And then I grew up in an area of West Yorkshire which was raving socialist and where the Luddites used to march across the fields to break up the machinery. So my blood inheritance was around disbelief and around skepticism around any large, abstract organizations, whether they were government or private.

Of course, he was talking about the territory of human relationship that the workplace was entering and the movable human relationship and the movability that the organizations had to have. The only place that came from was from the individuals who actually worked within the structures.

So it was the breaking apart of many of those structures. There are still plenty of dinosaur ones left for us to still go and live in if we want them. All of our difficulties are now become more subtle and more invisible between us. I suppose you also mean a conversation within and without — with the world as well? All of us have this inherited conversation inside us, which we know is untouchable. All the visible qualities that take form and structure will have to change in order to keep the conversation real.

Just as we go through the different decades of our life, we have to change the structures of our life in order to keep things new, in order to keep our youthfulness.

And I do think there is a quality of youthfulness which is appropriate to every decade of our life. It just looks different. We have this fixed idea of youthfulness from our teens or our 20s. Whyte: Yes, exactly. Innocence is, in a way, the ability to be found by the world. Tippett: After a short break, more with David Whyte. His new book, David Whyte Essentials , is a collection from his various writings, and it includes a few new pieces.

Follow or subscribe to get this and other extras in your feed as soon as we release them. Today with David Whyte, the English poet and philosopher who brings both of those disciplines into the drama of leadership at work as well as deepening in life. Tippett: I want to talk a little bit more about the corporate sphere just before we move on.

So I wonder what you have learned about — how does poetry land in the middle of a workplace, in working life? What does it do in us and for us in that context?

Whyte: Well, I always say that poetry is language against which you have no defenses. But you have to say it, also, with the intimacy of care and of understanding at the same time. You can also hear it in a marital argument. You get beautiful echoes and chords and repetitions in marital arguments.

But in a good marital argument, when one person has said the truth, both people are emancipated into the next stage of the relationship. Unfortunately, if you are not the person who said it, you have to have a little rear-guard action where you deny it.

You can turn your face away from what was said, but when you turn your face back, it will still be waiting for you. One is just as a poet, with the intimacy of my readers and my listeners and audiences. Then I work in the theological and psychological worlds. First of all, one of the powerful dynamics of leadership is being visible. One of the dynamics you have to get over with is this idea that you can occupy a position of responsibility, that you can have a courageous conversation without being vulnerable.

Shall I read a little piece of it? Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others.

More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity. To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances is a lovely, illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance.

Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

Whyte: Yes, well, there are two different forms of belonging, I suppose. And to have a sense of belonging in the outer world, where you feel a sense of freedom, comes from this ability to touch this deep foundation of aloneness.

And I do feel if you can touch that sense of aloneness, you can live with anyone. Whyte: Yes. I was writing night and day, but I noticed when I sat at this lovely little desk, which I still have on a landing at the top of the stairs — I noticed that I had this very different relationship to the world when I wrote at night.

There was this other horizon outside the window that was drawing me and that was contextualizing what I was writing, so I wrote this piece. Whyte: I did. You must learn one thing. You move from your 20s into your 30s, and you suddenly find another larger form for it or a different shape that makes a different connection.

And then you deepen it in your 40s. And you get overwhelmed by it in your 50s. And then it returns to you again in more mature forms, settled forms, in your 60s.

We all know what that intuitively means. Literally, all the struggles of your grandparents and your parents in arriving together and giving birth to your parents and giving birth to you, the landscape in which you were nurtured, the dialect or language in which you were educated into the world, the smells of the local environment. When I go back to Yorkshire, just the taste of the water off the moors is completely different. When I go to County Clare, the water there, again, has a spirit because it comes off limestone there.

Will I have that conversation? This is the experience of consummation, of a full incarnation in the world. There are many people in Syria now just trying to preserve their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website.

We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.

Necessary Necessary. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information. Non-necessary Non-necessary.