Facing The Unknown And Finding Meaning - David Whyte

Foreign.

Somebody that I've wanted to have on the show for a very long time. Mr. David White. And we are live in Seattle, so you might hear some of Seattle in the background. So enjoy the conversation. Don't mind the buses and the biker gangs that maybe roll by throughout the conversation. All right, Mr. David White, welcome to the Mantalk Show. Thank you so much for being here. I am very excited to be speaking with you. I want to start off with the question that I think will frame the rest of our conversation, which is what is the conversational nature of reality?

Conversatio. You know, in Latin, it's a beautiful word, converse. It means inside out, actually. So. So when you're conversing, you're bringing the inside to the outside and the outside to the inside. And it's where they meet that you have a real possibility of feeling completely alive, vibrant, even joy.

That very, very rare quality.

And so we often wonder, why can't I sustain joy and happiness inside myself? Well, you can't because it's actually. It's actually at a meeting place. It's where you meet the world that you have the possibility of a certain. Certain qualities of. Of radiance, presence, joy, and what looks like from the outside. Charisma. Yeah. Which is really. Charisma is really a. Is really the.

What we call a powerful invitation from what a powerful invitation looks like from the outside.

You're being invited into something and you don't know what. Yeah. But you know, it's going to call on you being larger. It's going to make you larger, and it's going to, in a way, kill you in the process. It's going to shrive off, to use that old Catholic phrase, the smaller part of yourself.

Can you maybe just contextualize, shrive off for the people that may not have.

Heard of be shriven of your sins was an old. Was an old Catholic phrase. And when you went into. Into confession and. But it was also used in a daily. A daily basis. It simply meant to. To undo the surface in a way, to molt.

And so many of. So many of the really crucial thresholds of existence have to do with this molting, this undoing, this giving up, which is why it can be so difficult for the young masculine psyche.

Especially to understand the true calling that's there in, say, in the Zen tradition, in the Christian contemplative tradition, in our great indigenous traditions, you know, of. Of being out alone in the wild, learning about yourself and the world at the same time.

In the beginning, you were talking about.

This sort of call and this conversation and how the way that we want it to go is inevitably not the way that it's probably going to unfold. And I feel like that is a challenge that a lot of men that I've worked with and spoken to over the years really struggle with is that they feel this pull, they feel this call to do something. The unknown sort of beckons to them and then that unknown territory can be brutal. I mean, I think it can evoke a lot of fear for a lot of men because within us is almost this drive to control.

Right.

Control the outcome. Yeah, control the results. March towards a very specific aim and goal. And the thought and the notion of having something larger than us influence us.

Yes.

I think can be quite disconcerting how. What would you say to that?

Yes. And it's connected to the, the young male's need to separate from the father. And you can talk about your actual individual father, but you can talk about the, the father ness of the world. Whatever, Whatever's telling you what to do, you will go in the opposite direction.

What direction to go?

Yeah. You know, my, my, my son is actually a good poet, although he only writes when he's. When his heart is broken. And unfortunately he's really happily married at the moment, so there's been no production for years. Well, not for. He's been happily married for years, so there's no poetic production. But, you know, growing up he was surrounded with. With poetry and literature and.

And.

When he started to get into the realm of heartbreak in his teens and late teens, he started writing poetry and, and he started leaving them around the house accidentally on purpose for me to find. He'd never admit that he was following in his father's footsteps writing poetry, but it was just. I can do it too, dad.

And, and it was good stuff, actually. So we even in the best. And we had a very good father son relationship. There's that necessity to be this unique being and, and you know, living in the male body. We're all. When we're young, we're all about perimeter. You know, we're looking at our muscles. We. This is where. This is where my defined muscle ends and this is where the world starts. You know, this is me and this is not me. And that, you know, that is, that's one way to enlightenment as. That's as good as anything else. One form of delusion that's as good as any other delusion to get to.

But eventually I still get caught in the. That sometimes.

Yes, but eventually you have to understand that the perimeter is not where you think it is. Yeah. And in fact, that the perimeter really doesn't exist.

And, and you start to get interested in the permeability of life. And, and, and if you're a biological science, you, you realize, you know, when you're studying, you're studying the human body, how permeable we are to things outside ourselves. So we have that initial concentration. I am this body. I am, I am this. Whereas, you know, as a generalization, this is. You know, there are many women who have a very masculine experience with world, but women feel that permeability, you know, as soon as they're into adolescence. It's, it's a different way of, of inhabiting a body. And.

And so.

Anything that is concentrated or immovable is always fair game for the movability of the world. So it will, I always say arrogance will always take care of itself. And, and I certainly hope that's true with the present regime in the White House.

Arrogance is its own cure. You will be humiliated. You will be returned to the ground of your being. You will be shown to not be a very special person at times. You know, that's unique and different from everyone else. And at the same time you are, but not in the way you've established for yourself.

Yeah.

You will go through breakdowns. Yeah. So most people, whether we're men or women, are normally, we're, I'd say, six or seven years behind the curve of our actual maturation. Part of us has matured into life in a very powerful way at our center. But it's laid over with the way we're trying to control existence. And we only get down to that inner horizon, that inner ground, when.

We go through the usual traumas of existence. The end of a marriage or a relationship, coming home with the note on the table saying I've gone, you know, or the note from the boss saying, we don't need you anymore in your work, or looking in the mirror and realizing you've lost your old fire for your original ambitions, then who are you? Then you're asked to have a relationship with the unknown. And how often are we, especially young men, rewarded for not knowing? When you're young, when you're growing up, when were you rewarded for putting your hand up in the classroom and saying, sir, miss, I've absolutely no idea what you're talking about, but I'd love to know. I'd love to know. And that's actually the experience of a lot of people growing up. And so the part of us that comes up with easy answers. And I can think of many easy answers, for instance in marine zoology that are completely wrong now that if I'd given them at the time when I learned, when I went through my, my degree course, I would have been rewarded for it. But they've actually been shown to be absolute nonsense now. So the not knowing mind is a very powerful thing for a young man to be introduced to. And from then on it's a long apprenticeship. But you're right, it's to do with this attempt to control everything.

I studied Jung for a long time and in Jungian psychology, the unconscious is sort of. He calls the unconscious in a man the anima. Right. The feminine. And I think as we look more and more sort of modern day neuroscience and neurobiology is looking, what we're starting to find is that the unconscious is responsible for the foundation of our attachment, how we actually show up in relationships.

Yeah.

And I think for a lot of men this, this notion that there's a part of them that they don't know about.

Yeah.

It does require a certain degree of, of humility, you know, because I think what you're saying is very accurate. Like we're, we're rewarded for knowing, we're rewarded for performing, we're rewarded for being right all the time. And so much of our worth and our value can become hinged on just knowing, knowing, knowing, knowing, knowing. And so even just the act of saying, I don't know.

I think for some men can feel like a great leap of faith into.

Dissent, you know, into downfall, into destruction because there's, there's some threat that comes along with it. I recently, I mean, I've had people like Martin Shaw on the, on the show, but I had Michael Mead on and we spent the entire conversation because he's all about myth and, and whatnot and archetypes. And we spent the entire conversation talking about the, the function of descent, psychological descent, physical descent, the, the breaking down and decay.

Yeah.

And I think one of the things that I, is that when we stay in this sort of adolescent form of masculinity or manhood, we, we prevent this descent, this falling apart that it sounds like you're, you're touching on and you're pointing towards that comes with the molting and the, the entering into this sort of unknown. Right. And so can you maybe just say a little bit more about that? The function of the unknown, like, is part of the conversational nature of reality about being in relationship with the unknown externally and then also within you.

Exactly. I'M really interested in horizons in a human life. You know, the edges between what we can see and not see. The edges between what we can hear and what we're not hearing in a friend's voice, a wife's voice, colleague's voice.

And there's a lot of research at the moment, medical research, showing that we're much happier when we're in relationship to a far horizon. And especially if you're walking towards it. And one of the remarkable things about. About horizons is how much we want them in our lives. We pay far more for a house with a. With a far view. Yeah, we love to walk by the. By the oceanside with that swaying horizon off in the distance. And we love to see the mountains. And one of the powerful things about a horizon is that by definition, there's something over it that you cannot perceive. And there's something about having a rested relationship with the unknown. It's there, but it's not asking you to do anything about it. You know, it's not asking you to give an answer. So this is a very, very powerful relationship. But we tend to think only of horizons in the outer world. But it's interesting to realize that we actually, each of us have a physical experience of an inner horizon inside us. And this is the level below which we're often trying to get in order to find out what our true feelings are about something. And actually, that is a dynamic that young men have great difficulty with. Women seem to. When we're. When we're young men in relationship, we're astounded at the ability for articulation of our female partners. You know, I'm talking about heterosexual, heterosexual relationship now. We're astounded that they can go straight in and find out how they feel about something. We look down when we're young men, and what do we see? Nothing. Yeah. It's not as if we see the wrong thing. We just see nothing and we feel nothing. We come across this horizon of what actually feels like resistance. It's actually a ground inside us, and it quite often feels immovable. And so we turn away from it. But this inner horizon is the horizon that lies in the invitation in all of our great contemplative and meditative and prayerful traditions, the ability to go to what looks like a door that eventually, as the Zen tradition says, is no door at all. Yeah. And lean against it, you know, until it falls open. I always say that the thing about immovability is what is most immovable is what moves most in us in the End. Yeah. And actually I do think that we as males, we intuit that. So I know, I know fatefully, if I explore my immovability, the game is up. Eventually I will go through some kind of radical change and I don't feel I'm ready for it. No, I'll actually leave that stone, like immovability in my center because at least it's something I can live my. I can orbit around, I can, I can have as a, as a stepping stone.

It's like a pillar of the identity that can get sort of solidified.

These two horizons are really remarkable to put in conversation with one another. And in the Zen tradition, you're supposed, you're paying attention in deep silence so that that outer horizon can come and find what looks like a line of immovability inside you and start to. The movability of the world starts to create a movable symmetry inside you. You're paying so much attention to how everything changes. You know, you start to become seasonality yourself. And then the next step is putting what lies below the horizon inside you, which is completely unknown to begin with, in conversation with what lies over the horizon outside you. And this is what we call, this is what we call.

Mystical experience. From the outside, it's actually a very grounded way of being in the world. But from the outside you get all of these astonishing phenomena. The ability to live at the center of a pattern, to perceive patterns before other people can see them, to write incredible literature from what Coleridge would have called the primary imagination, which is this deep.

Deep immersion in the world so far in that it finds an immersion over the horizon outside of yourself.

So that's, that's the conversation that we're engaged in that's not spoken about. That's the conversational nature of our, of our reality. As Teilhard de Chardin said, event events are soul sized, you know, and you. I always think of the soul as that part of that faculty inside us that's trying to belong to the world in the greatest way it can. And, and it has a kind of take no prisoner's attitude to that. And the soul would much rather fail at, at its own life than succeed at someone else's. Yeah, it doesn't see mistakes in the same way an outside pair of eyes or judgment sees our life. So that's a little lightning raid on horizons. But I think it's part of the conversational nature of every young man's voyage into the world. The willingness to get to a place where you allow yourself to be Broken down.

You almost have to. It's almost like, for the way I would describe it, within myself when I was younger, was contending with this impenetrability.

Yes.

That I had. That I had really built within myself. And I don't even know necessarily where it came from. You know, I don't know if it's just part of being male, you know, or if it's necessarily societally imposed or something that. That is also a biological byproduct of just having copious amounts of testosterone ripping through your body and, you know.

Sort of propelling you towards things in a different way. But it's contending with that impenetrability. Did you have something that you wanted to get into? I noticed that you opened to something.

Yes. I have a very short micro essay on ambition, which I thought we could work with. But I just wanted to say I think it is part of our evolutionary inheritance, you know, our ability to survive, to carry a necessary stone like impenetrability to the slings and arrows of difficulty and misfortune. I always. I always say man or woman or any thing in between. On the. On the gender spectrum, everyone has the right to say, listen, God, life is so painful and difficult. I'm not going to have this conversation. I'm going to pretend the world is made in a. In my own way. I want it to be made. Everyone at one time or another in their life says that even if you don't believe in God, you say, listen, God, Listen, life. Listen. I'm not dealing with this. This can't be true. It can't be. It can't be true that there's so much heartbreak and, and heartache in the world and loss. So, you know, this is why young men especially attempted into video games and the world of video games and, and why they're so addictive, because it reinforces my sense of control. If I feel I'm going to die, I can restart the game. You know, I can buy the invisibility cloak. That's a great one for the masculine psyche, you know.

Right.

So I can't be found. Yeah. And.

I have control over all of these parameters.

In some ways, it diminishes the joy and the thrill of the game itself. I remember when I was young, I played this game on Nintendo 64 called Goldeneye. And it was a James Bond game. And.

Best Game Ever is just phenomenal, phenomenal game. But I remember at one point you could get a cheat code where you actually were invincible, or you could get another cheat code where you got Something called the Golden Gun. And it was a one shot kill. And it made the game so boring.

Yes.

You know, it made the game so boring. And so I think this is, there's this intersection between what you're talking about, about venturing into the unknown is almost a prerequisite for finding meaning and purpose in life. And that when we over index on control, we actually do. The thing that cuts us off from being able to venture towards meaning and purpose is that.

Yeah, I think there are, and I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned in video games. It's only where addiction overrides all of the qualities that we're learning. You know, we learn, for instance, you know, if you're in playing Civilization or something and you're struggling to get money all the way through, and then suddenly you build things in such a way that you're flooded with money and suddenly money becomes completely unimportant. I mean, that's a great, that's a great lesson for someone who in their outer world has the ambition to be, to be rich.

And on that point, that might be a good place for me to read this micro essay.

Yeah.

Although actually, I wonder. Let's just stay with horizons a little bit actually. Because.

I am first and foremost a poet and in many ways I've established my whole philosophy through poetry and through the attention that poetry makes you pay to the world. And Coleridge said that no poet begins in philosophy or they write very, very bad poetry. These are my beliefs. Who cares?

I don't want to hear your tedious beliefs. But he said every. He said no poet begins in philosophy or they write very bad poetry. But every poet becomes a philosopher.

Because it's about going down into that unknown territory beneath the horizon where you don't know what to say. And speaking from that place. That's where poetry comes from, is not you finding this place that knows what to say. No real movable, lifelike poetry comes from the place beneath that horizon where you don't actually know what you're going to say. And you surprise yourself. You overhear yourself saying things you didn't know you knew. You overhear yourself saying things you didn't want to know. Thank you very much. Because you were quite happy in your protected perimeter that you'd built for yourself. So this is a piece, it's called.

It's called Blessing for the Morning Light. And it's the way that the light comes to find us every morning, actually. And I often recite this to myself, actually, just to set myself straight with the world. We wake from sleep having gone through this incredible physiological and imaginative revolution in our. And the more we learn about the physiology of sleep, the more astonishing it is actually if you read, read the latest research and what our bodies do and go through and where we learn, do the most learning. So when we awake in the morning, we are carrying this cargo of revelation into the world. And the great tragedy of turning towards your to do list right away, as the to do list was put together by the person you were yesterday.

And there's been no chance for you to actually look at the world as if you're seeing it again for the first time.

So I wrote this actually for the. After the death of a friend of mine who, he was a priest for 17 years, became a very famous author, although when I first knew him it was just a very poor priest in the heart of Connemara in the west of Ireland, but a great speaker at that time and quite known in some circles. But he went on to write this million copy, best selling, multi million copy best selling book called Annam Cara, which means soul friend in Irish. But he used to read, he used to lead a morning mass at Easter every year in this gorgeous ruined monastery. All this white stone and. And tracery, stone tracery, where the old windows would have been called Corkham Row in North County Clare. And I often used to think of him. I'd be 10 o' clock the night before, eight hours different, you know, thinking about him getting up to lead that mass. And because he was so articulate, thousands of people would come. So I'd think of people crammed into this monastery that I often walked in by myself. And then he passed away at the height of his powers at 52 years old. And.

The next Easter that came around, John wasn't there anymore. He'd left the priesthood many years before, but still I thought of him. So I wrote this piece. But in writing it for him, I uncovered this whole understanding which I hadn't quite had until I'd written a piece. So. Blessing for the morning light.

The blessing of the morning light to you. The blessing of the morning light to you. May it find you even in your invisible appearances. The blessing of the morning light to you. May it find you even in your invisible appearances. May you be seen to have risen from some other place you know and have known in the darkness and that carries all you need. May you see what is hidden in you as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter. May what is hidden in you become your gift to give. May you hold that shadow to the light and the silence of that shelter. To the word of the light. May you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance, this new morning, this being seen again, new and newly alive. May you join every previous disappearance with this new appearance, this new morning, this being seen again, new and newly alive, the blessing of the morning light. You may find you even in your invisible appearances. We all know that phenomena of walking into a crowded room or into a workplace and saying hello to everyone. But the person who people are seeing is actually not the person inside us. We're going through some dread, we're going through some illness, we're going through some vulnerability in our relationship. We're worried our relationship's going to come to an end. And none of that is on the surface. And it's not just done in protection. People are often being quite kind in not indulging their deeper heartbreak in and implicating other people's lives in it. So there's a necessary part to it. But the only trouble is, you know, if you have that as a modus vivendi, a modus operandi, you eventually start to think that this identity on the surface is you.

So the, the ability to stay in touch with the invisible you.

And this, this is a very powerful tradition in poetry. And a lot of male poets. Locker said, I am, or is it Jimenez? Either Locker or Jimenez in the Spanish tradition said, I am not this I, I am this I walking beside me, I am not this I. Or I think more accurately walking inside me, I am not this I. I am this other I walking inside me. And then the ability to bring what to begin with is untouchable and invisible into conversation with the world.

To start, to begin with. You know, we're taught this false kind of fluency in language where you're taught to be able to say things rapidly, to come to conclusions, to name things early on. But much better to have a, in poetry at least to have a cracked, broken voice which is only able to perhaps make a mouse like sound to begin with. Yeah, but it's your sound, it's your understanding. It's a great trouble with a lot of these poetic MFA programs, young poets, men and women, get hot, housed into a pretty good poetic voice. Yeah, but it's also a poetic voice that sounds like everyone else's voice in the workshop and it also sounds like the teacher's voice. And, and you all start sounding, having the same kind of titles. Yeah, like things recently, for instance, the, the fashionable title would be something like what Salt Knows. Yeah, that would be a Very. That's over the last 20 years and everyone's got their, their equivalent. Yeah, but you're much better staying 100 miles away from other poets if that's going to happen. And just reading the ones in the tradition who set you on fire and starting to work your way in with your own mistakes, you know, and find your own inimitable voice that's not getting, not getting cultivated by other people. So that's part of this invisibility to. There are lots of forms of invisibility that, that we're being invited into. So I think it's, it can be comforting for a young man to know that, that under this inability to speak my emotions, underneath this inability to feel what I feel.

Underneath this inability to bring those two things together, feelings and emotions and articulation, there's something really quite astonishing waiting for me to bring those two poles together. The great German speaking poet Rilke said, stretch your well disciplined strengths between two opposing poles because inside human beings is where God learns. Isn't that incredible? Stretch a well disciplined strength between two opposing poles because inside human beings is where God learns.

That's so beautiful. It's.

I mean there's many things that came to me as you were talking. I think one of a line from Alan Watts just kept ringing out, right. There's far out people and there's far out far in people. And it's almost like we can find a deeper understanding of who we are and, and what, you know, life is all about by choosing to go in one of those directions. And one of my mentors talked about growing down into ourselves and that, that has always stuck with me of like my mission is to grow down into myself.

Lovely, deeper.

And, and I've always found that in the moments where I have.

Written something, it's come from a very unknown place. And I've found that when I'm working with people, when I'm working with men and I'm guiding them through something.

Oftentimes people afterwards will ask like why did you do that? Or why did you say that? Or why did you ask that question? And what I love about your framework is that it's in many ways it's that I'm in a conversation inside of myself with an, a larger unknown.

Yes.

Non rational, non linear version of me while also tuning, being attuned to or present to the conversation that's happening within the other person.

Yes.

And oftentimes the conversation that they don't know is happening or that they don't know they need to have about Their past, about some pain that they're carrying. I wonder if you can maybe articulate a little bit about how does a man start to begin to cultivate some presence with this horizon that we're talking about with the unknown, when it can feel vague.

Yes.

Or terrifying. How does one go about that?

Well, my way in was through poetry. And I was first inspired by my mother and her, her repertoire of memorized poetry that she had both in English and Irish. And, and then I started to read poetry and, and I started writing poetry when I was seven years old or so. But when I was 13 or 14, I really started to understand its import in my life. And.

I don't know if you remember the dynamic when you were a young boy.

Of listening to the adult world in their conversations and saying to yourself, these people are insane. Their priorities are completely backwards. And I wouldn't have been able to articulate it this way, but my feeling was these people have lost the primary visions of childhood. They no longer.

In awe of what they're discovering. And, and When I was 13 or 14, I was down in the local, local library in Yorkshire where I grew up. I had an Irish mother, but Yorkshire father grew up in Yorkshire in the north of England. And the poetry was on the top shelf and I was just at that age, you know, 13 or so I was, I had to really get up on tiptoe, get my, the ends of my fingers around the spine of a book and I pulled it down and it fell into my hands. And it was actually a joint authored book of poetry by Tom Gunn and Ted Hughes. Tom Gunn actually moved to San Francisco, became a poet there and chronicled the whole, the whole HIV epidemic. Yeah, but this was pre that era and the book fell down and I started reading it, standing there and I just felt as if a passing hawk came down, got its claws into me and carried me off into the distance. It was that physical an experience of being taken out of this body into a greater body of the world. And I also, when I read it, I said, oh, these are adults, adult men too, who have kept the primary vision of childhood alive into adulthood. And they've done it through, they've done it through poetry. So that was a further encouragement to my deepening my experience.

You know, it's interesting. I've, I, I've read a lot of your work, you know, and I've tuned into a lot of your conversations over the years and your, your work has had a very profound impact on me and I've heard you talk a lot about Your mom and the relationship with her and. And how influential she was. But I'd love to hear about a little bit, if you're comfortable with it, the relationship with your father and maybe how he influenced.

Your. Your work and how you view the world and.

Yeah.

And because I think fathers can be so impactful. You know, you were talking before about following the footsteps.

Like, I.

You know, in an effort to know my father better, I pursued opera. You know, he was a. He sang in the. In the choir, in the chorus, in the Edmonton opera.

Pause.

Seattle biker gang has joined us now.

Leader of the pack. Yeah. Right.

But my. You know, my father, he. He sang with the Edmonton opera chorus. And, you know, this is in northern Alberta in Canada, and it's. It's kind of a rough and tumble place. And. And I was working construction. I was 18 years old at the time, and I was working construction in the gravel pits in northern Alberta.

Wow.

During the winter night shift, you know, minus 40 degrees outside. I'm working outside. And didn't like the direction of my life, but there was just this pull to know something about him. Deeper.

Yes.

And it. And it brought me into his world, and I'm very grateful for that. I think in many ways, it sort of saved my life from the direction that it was going. Which was not good. Yeah, it was not good. I was. I was lost. Aimless.

Yeah.

And I think that's the case for a lot of men. So I would love to hear maybe about how your father influenced you.

Well, as time goes by, I've realized that I can't talk about my father without talking about my grandfather. My grandfather was born in 1898, and he went into the first World War and the trenches of the first World War in Flanders when he was just.

Just 18 years old. Yeah. So. And he had three years in the trenches, actually, and it traumatized him for the rest of his life. Yeah. And he didn't speak about it, and you couldn't speak about it. It was just beyond the pale. Ordinary people couldn't understand what had happened there and how many millions of men had died and in what state. State they'd died. And. And how many of those deaths had been witnessed by other men. And. And so he kept that omerta. That silence, you know, for 50 years until I was 7 years old or so. And then he started to talk to me about what he'd experienced. And of course, I was seven years old. I had all my soldiers, my. And all the rest. And so I was. And. And so I was really Enthusiastic about finding out about this. And I said, oh, granddad, did you kill any Germans? You know, in a really enthusiastic voice. And this look of absolute grief and sadness came over his face. And he said, oh. He said, son, I killed hundreds of them. I was a machine gunner. Yeah. And I still see many of their faces to this day. Well, that just stopped me in my tracks, you know. And he was so sad. I could feel it. I could feel that male grief.

Carried from youth into his adulthood. Yeah. So my, my father had to live with that silence. Yeah. And live with that inarticulation around his father's pain. So of course, my father inherited that pain as you do when it. When it's not spoken of and not resolved.

And so he had a difficult relationship with my grandfather. I had a much better relationship with my grandfather than my father did. My father was astonished that.

My grandfather started talking to me and he kept asking me about the stories. So. So obviously a grief in my father for not having had that transmitted. So I had an idyllic relationship with my father until I was seven years old. And then for some reason, when I was 7.

This eruption of anger occurred inside my father towards me. And it wasn't anything I was doing really. It was everything I was doing and nothing I was doing all at the same time. It was just, I think it was the sins of the fathers, you know?

Yeah.

The. The anger that he didn't know what to do with and that I represented the next, the next generation. I represented, you know, what he had been to his own father and his helplessness around that. Almost.

Almost as if you were getting what he had always wanted from his dad.

Yeah. So that was, that was remarkable.

So that was a very powerful dynamic. At the same time, my father was always a good provider and present. Yeah. And when I think of, you know, all the fathers who have not been providers, I see it as being a really marvelous thing that he always looked after the family. And. And also it's interesting too.

I talked earlier about. About sons having to separate from their fathers, you know, so that you do go through a stage where your father did absolutely. No, no. Right. At all.

You know, that's what I have in my future. That's great. Yeah. I have a four year old, so.

Yeah. And. And my mother was so such a wonderful woman that it was very easy to. To look to my mother for everything good that I'd inherited. But this was just a couple of years ago, actually. I was. I have an aquarium in my kitchen and I had an aquarium when I was a kid, you know, for years, and, and I was looking into the aquarium and I was just very proud of the whole ecology that I'd built in there in a self sustaining ecology. I'm looking and then suddenly I felt the shade of my father by my side. And I suddenly remembered all of the hours that we had looked as males do, you know, not at each other, but at something else while they're talking, driving.

Throwing axes, whatever it is, chopping trees. Yeah, yeah. And I suddenly remembered all of those hours that we'd spent in mutual interest around the fish and talking about the fish. And I suddenly. Mike, I said, suddenly said, oh my God. I've always ascribed my going into marine zoology to my mother's invitation for me to do whatever I wanted to do in life. Yeah. And I completely neglected all the hours that my father and I looked into that underwater world that we had in our living room. And, and, and so it was a great question. I said, how many other qualities have I neglected? You know, one of them was, was my father's ability for real friendship with other men. And he had one really close.

Man friend who actually was called My Week in Yorkshire. If you've got very close friends of your mother and father, you call them auntie and uncle, actually. It's an old tradition. So he was my Uncle Tom and he was a really remarkable man. And their friendship was incredibly close. And so I drew inspiration. I've got an incredible circle of male friends around the world, actually, mostly back in Britain and Europe, but here in the States and, and.

I think I drew inspiration from my father's relationship with Tom. And when Tom died.

It was probably the greatest trauma of my father's life until many years later when he lost my mother. And.

So that was a really powerful inspiration. So, I mean, I'm actually, even at this late age in my life, I'm. I'm discovering new qualities that I'm now allowing my father to have given me. It's fascinating the way our story changes. The more we mature, the more our past actually matures along with us. You know, we start to understand things we, we just couldn't understand before.

Yeah, it's like, it's hard to.

What is the David Foster Wallace what the hell is water? I don't know if you've ever read his essay on what the hell is water, but it's no fish. Fish can't. You know, there's two young fish swimming through the water and the old fish comes along and says, water's beautiful today.

Right.

Old Fish swims away, and the two younger fish are like, what the hell's water?

Yes.

But I wanted to return to anger.

Yes.

And its role in a man's life. And I was wondering if maybe you wanted to dive into anger. Because I think you have a very important take that men could use.

Yes.

So if you want to say anything about it and then maybe dive into it.

So we tend to see anger as this inchoate force at the surface, destructive. So I wrote this little micro essay in order to get to the bottom, because I felt. I felt to myself, well, all the origins of anger are in our. Are actually in a deep form of care which were helpless to actually.

Bring into our world. Yeah. So this is anger.

Anger is the deepest form of care. Anger is the deepest form of care for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family, and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion. The internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect, and those things for which we are willing to hazard and even imperil ourselves.

What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability. When it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body's incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life. The unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies. The unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly. To hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our minds with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness. A powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice or way of life to hold it.

What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing. In the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring, for a son, in Our wanting the best in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling. There is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability. Our anger breaks through to the surface most often through our feeling. There's something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability. Anger too often finds its voice strangely through our incoherence and through our inability to speak. But anger in its voice, pure state, is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague.

Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things. We are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding. We're often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, or who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness, they're simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love's vulnerability. They're simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love's vulnerability. In their helplessness, they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representations of this inner lack of control.

But anger truly felt at its very center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here. It is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate, and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface, what we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror opposite of its true internal essence.

What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror opposite of its true internal essence.

It always leaves me a little speechless.

Talk to me about the intersection between powerlessness and anger is something that.

Esther Perel and I have spoken about a couple times, that there's something within us as men that when we feel or make contact with that sense of helplessness or powerlessness, our sort of immediate response is rage, you know, anger. So I'm wondering if you can maybe unpack that or if there's even something difference that's being evoked right now.

Yes. Well, I mean, you can immediately see its actual practical, physical, evolutionary necessity, you know, and rage in defense, physical defense of people you love.

But. And so the inability to actually be able to do something about something that doesn't involve physical defense, actually, it's. It involves another kind of deeper cradling or holding which our physical bodies.

Are unable to do. We have to be able to hold another person in our heart and our mind. And that heart energy is often what we feel lies below the horizon of our.

Our inner line of resistance. Yeah. So opening the heart is always. Is always a very powerful path for a human being to take. And Albert Camus, the great French writer and philosopher, had a beautiful invitation. It was just one simple line. He said, live to the point of tears. Live to the point of teaching tears. And this is not an invitation to model in sentimentality. This is asking you to feel things right to their essence. If you just have an edge of dread about something, then feel that dread more. Don't resist it. Get to the center of it until it starts to change into something else. The Greeks had this beautiful word which we don't have in modern English, which is enantiodromia. And it means the ability of something, once it becomes its absolute essential self, to start changing into something completely different. And quite often it's complete opposite, which is why immovability always changes into incredible fluidity once you've got through that.

Once you've got through that. So to be able to feel things until they actually start to have a life of their own and start to mature, I mean, you could say. I mean, this is a received understanding in. In. In psychology that.

That parts of us, when they're traumatized, refuse to grow older until that trauma has been resolved.

And. And so. And stay stone, like inside you. For good reason.

Yeah.

It doesn't want to move on until it's being healed, actually. And it may be that it would be very destructive if it moved on. So to find the parts of you that are stuck, this is a wonderful thing, actually. It's not a pejorative thing. Yeah. And to feel the stuckness even more.

To get right to the heart of your stuckness, your inability to say it.

And then you start saying it. It's very. It's quite remarkable, really. Yeah. Yeah.

It's brutal, though. It's right. I find it. There's. There's something beautiful and brutal about it.

This is why in all real warrior traditions, there's always been a parallel discipline of poetry. Yes. You look at Samurai, the Japanese tradition, Chinese tradition, Indian Tradition, the ability. And then we've got. In the west, we've got the first World War poets.

Sassoon and people coming out of the. Poetry is the way in for. Quite often it's the way in for. For anyone at all, man or woman or anything in between. It's. But for men it's a real doorway.

We all instinctively understand what poetry represents.

We even use the phrase that even people who've hardly ever read a line of poetry in their life will come away from a football game saying it was sheer poetry, that touchdown. You know.

We instinctively understand about the verve and vitality and mutability and movability and tidal forces of the world. If you can capture them in speech and if you can capture them in movement on a football field, why couldn't you catch it in your own voice?

So I would say besides the practical activity of something that concerns all young men, heterosexual men, which is getting into real conversations with young women, I would recommend poetry rather than a Maserati. You know.

I've never been Maserati.

Not that you can afford the Maserati at that time, but exactly now. The two seater sports car. No, poetry, the. The. The entrancement of the ear, the self discovery. It's not just. It's not just the art of seduction. It's the understanding in the feminine psyche through real poetry that the masculine is actually unfolding itself.

What do you mean?

It's articulating itself. It's finding things out about itself that it didn't know. And it's happening in real time as it's being written or spoken. That's what's entrancing about poetry. Not being seduced by it, although there is that we are seduced by it. But it's the. It's the entrancement of the unfolding of another through that articulation. I've got an essay on brand in here. You know, men get stuck on brands. This is me. This is what I. This is my mo. This is what I do. This is my core competency.

Yeah.

And I just. I've got a. The essay looks at the imprisonment of. That a human being shouldn't want to be a brand.

Interesting.

Yeah. You should want a brand for your drug or your beer or your. But not for yourself.

I mean, it's a very. I think it's a very.

Timely topic in many ways.

Yeah. And it's representative of many of the ways we. We give a kind of protective name to ourselves. Yeah. So I think it would. That's a possibility. What were you thinking?

Of, well.

I feel we could just keep all this in. But.

I would love to explore apprenticeship. There's also just a couple lines.

One of the things that I'd be remiss to not touch on is forgiveness. Because one of the things that I've really seen within the majority of men that I've ever worked with is this.

Complete bewilderment about forgiveness. Like, what is it? I mean, we're so linear, Right. It's like I literally have men say, how do I forgive myself? Give me the three to five steps.

Yeah. And.

And it seems to be one of these things where forgiveness is, is a kind of enigma within our lives. You know, something that is foreign. Yeah. And I find that in some ways it's because we as men, you know, we. We use punishment as such a driving force in our lives. You know, if you're going to do something, punish. If you failed, punishment.

Yeah.

If you forgot, punish. Do you want to be motivated? Punish. And so punishment is sort of this, this internal tool that so many men use until we break ourselves of that, you know, until it breaks us down.

But then forgiveness seems like a complete anomaly. So talk to me about forgiveness.

Yes. I mean, forgiveness comes through self knowledge. And we tend to think of self knowledge as me finding out what my powers and abilities are and then giving them in the world. But self knowledge is as much about understanding my flaws and difficulties. All the ways I'm reluctant to be here, reluctant to have the conversation, all the ways I'm afraid, and.

All the ways I want reality to be different than it is. So the ability to understand your own difficulties and flaws always allows you to understand someone else's difficulties and, and, and to account for what in the old days we call our own sins. You know, it's just a Latin term that meant an archery term, actually, that meant to miss the mark. Yeah. There were no vats of boiling oil that time. Yeah.

My grandfather, My grandfather used to say that I'm going to boil you in oil. Heavy duty oil. It was like, it was like this very common saying as a kid. I thought it was hilarious. And as I got older, I was.

Like, I'm going to boil you oil. Punishment. Yeah. You know, punishment dynamic in the masculine psyche, even in, even in humor. So the ability to actually go into your own woundedness allows you to have patience with other people's wounds. Why would anyone else in the world be perfect? You're not perfect. Yeah. And you start to be able to say, you know, everyone's trying their best and it's Actually never very good, you know, including myself, you know. But. But so we're all in this. As Leonard Cohen said, we're all just walking each other home, you know. And so this is my piece on forgiveness. Again, another micro essay in consolations. These were. These essays were written as literally as. As consolations for people around words that we use in pejorative ways. Yeah. So it's as if forgiveness is something that I. That I give to you. It flies from my body into your.

I forgive you. You know, it's almost like an accusation. Doesn't sound like it to me.

Whipping the baseball at somebody.

Yes. So this is a. This is me.

Trying to overhear myself get to a deeper level with the word. So constellations is made up of 52 words, which I wanted to rehabilitate because we so often, especially in the masculine psyche, use words against ourselves.

So forgiveness. Forgiveness is a heartache and difficult to achieve because, strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. It not only refuses forgiveness, not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself. The only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to may be that the part of us that was struck and hurt can never forgive. That, remarkably, forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. Forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting and perhaps not actually meant to forget. If, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system, our psychological defenses must remember and organize against any future attacks. After all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded. Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, unforgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simply forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm not only around the afflicted one within, but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow. And through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to the one who first delivered it.

Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life. A beautiful question and a way of shaping the mind to a future. We want for ourselves. An admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application, then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama, rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing, and eventual blessing.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity, and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity. We allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft. The great mercy is that the sincere act of trying to forgive, even if it is not entirely successful, is a form of blessing and forgiveness itself. The great mercy is that the sincere act of trying to forgive, even if it is not entirely successful, is a form of blessing and forgiveness in itself. At the end of life, the wish to be forgiven is ultimately the chief desire of almost every human being in refusing to wait, in extending forgiveness to others. Now we begin the long journey of becoming the person who will be large enough, able enough, and generous enough to receive, at the very end, that absolution ourselves.

Absolutely wonderful.

I love the notion of forgiveness, sort of calling us into a broader, larger form of existence.

Yes.

You know that it. It's almost like it requires something of us.

Yes.

And.

And that there's a. That there's a choice in there. You know, it's. I like what you were saying at the beginning is that there's, you know, sometimes we're almost like, demanding forgiveness.

Yes.

Versus it being a request. Right. Will you forgive me? My wife is a marriage and family therapist, and one of the things that we always talk about with couples is. Is the request of forgiveness.

Yes.

Because that request of forgiveness can often open the door to a deeper understanding of what might actually need to happen for forgiveness to be possible versus the just. Forgive me. Why? You know.

Damn it. Yes.

I'm sorry. You know, why won't you forgive me?

Yeah.

And so I'm wondering if you can just speak a little bit more about that. That broadening into a larger version that forgiveness.

Yeah.

And. And maybe the. The drawing closer to the original wound, which is part of the reason why I think it's.

Yeah.

So damn hard to forgive. To let go.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, when you draw into the wound itself, you realize how shared that wound is between all human beings, and you start to understand perhaps why the other person reacted in that way or why they didn't know what they were doing or they did it, or why they were careless. Yeah. And the remarkable thing about.

A real act of forgiveness is how freeing it is actually. Not just for the person who you're forgiving, but for you. You realize you've been carrying this burden of needing to forgive on refusing to forgive.

And you've been saying. It's been taking up an enormous amount of energy inside you and. And the ability to. I have a. Lines from a poem. It was a perfect day out on an island off the coast of Connemara. It's called Inishbothin. And.

And everything was perfection about the day. I took a group of 30 people on my Irish walking tour there. And everything about the day. You know, the sailing out there with the tide behind us, the. The light. I heard the corn crake. I'm a bit of an ornithologist, so that was the first time I'd heard the corn crake, which echoes through Irish literature, but which I'd never heard. And then this ruined chapel where. Where my friends sang Irish Gregorian chant. And. And then. And then we ended up at the perfect pub with the perfect Guinness and superb food. Lovely Irish welcome. And in it, I say it was the way standing still or looking out, holding your drink or laughing with the rest, you realized part of you had already dropped to its knees to sing, to pray, to fall in love with everything and everyone again. And that someone from deep inside you had come out into the sea light to raise its hands and forgive everyone. In your short life, you thought you hadn't.

Someone deep inside you came from such joy, and from that joy came forgiveness of a particular person. In my life I had an image of. And that someone from deep inside you had walked out into the sea light to raise its hands and forgive everyone. In your short life, you thought you hadn't. Quite often, you know, the peripheral parts of us that we haven't allowed to fall away, haven't forgiven.

But the leading edge of yourself, which is also the deepest part of you, has actually forgiven a long time ago. And you've just not dropped down into that. That powerful experience that you're carrying as a kernel, but a clo. A closed kernel inside yourself.

I wanna.

So forgiveness is your freedom. Not just. Yeah, you're not just freeing the other person, but you're taking off a very heavy cloak.

Yeah.

There's a kind of liberation that comes along with it.

Yeah.

You've talked about.

Friendship requiring forgiveness on an almost consistent basis. You know, and I. I like that because I think, you know, we, as men, you know, a lot of the data and the research shows that our. Our social circles are Just collapsing, you know, that men have less and less and less friends and a smaller social circle. But I. I like that notion that friendship is sort of this. This territory and this practicing, you know, this sort of practice ground, this gym of forgiveness, you know.

Yes. Late.

The not responding to the text messages or the call or.

Yeah.

Forgetting the birthday or, you know, whatever it is. And that. That friendship sort of requires that. And so can you just get to that?

Yeah. First of all, I. I just like to point out some cultural differences because my observation, experience is that friendships, male friendships, are still very much alive in Britain and Ireland and.

Most of Europe, I'd say, and that it's a peculiarly American loneliness around male friendship. There's a dynamic whereby it's probably inherited from the loneliness of the frontier, which to begin with were mostly males as the country expanded.

And. And often males in competition with one another. But there's a way in which in American society, you know, men make their friends really early on and. And through college, and then once they're in work, it's as if they have. That momentum has to carry through the rest of their lives. But quite often. I was really surprised when I first came to this country that friendships were so often predicated on whether you were working together or not. And as soon as you stop working, you never saw the other person. As soon as you weren't actually in a collegiate relationship, it was gone. Which means, actually, I'm talking about heterosexual relationships now, that men run their emotional life through their women.

And are looking for permission for the next set, their next level of maturity through the feminine psyche quite often, which is not healthy, most especially for the women. So, yeah, you know, when I went, I went back to live in the Cotswolds for a couple of years, I was still coming backwards and forwards, actually, in Britain, but there's such a great healthy third space in the pubs, you know. So every Thursday night I get together with the local lads and there were people. There was everyone from local laborers, entrepreneurs, rich landowners, all guys, though. And, you know, we had our normal guy talk. But also there was a serious dimension to it. Yeah. And that's still there. And I've got so many male friends with whom I have a really powerful artistic conversation. A calligrapher friend who, our sons were born together many decades ago in Oxford, you know, a stone carver friend up in. Up in Wales. But it goes on and on. So this is something that.

American men need to know about themselves without feeling bad about themselves. You know, it's a dynamic of Their inheritances is this lack of. Of powerful friendships that endure whatever passage I'm going through in my life. You know, I'm not going to stay out of touch just because I moved to Cincinnati and they're still in Seattle. Yeah, I'm actually going to keep that relationship alive. And friendship is. Is an art form and, and takes application as an art form. Needed. You should. Your intuition should be telling you when things are starting to fall away. I'm going to give him a call. Yeah, I had it this morning, actually. I've got a friend in Copenhagen. I said it's been too long. We need to keep the thread, you know, alive, you know, So I sent him a text. Being missing you. Let's have a catch up at the weekend. You know, all of us have this internal meter about unconscious meter insiders telling us our electrometer as. As Coleridge would have described it.

Telling us what the state of our friendship is. So don't let your friendships go away. They're the best thing in your life. Actually. Let me read this. Yeah, very short, please. Another micro essay. Friendship.

Friendship is a mirror to presence. Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another's eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses.

As we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. You know that dynamic whereby you always say what you should not say to your friend and you've been biting your tongue for a long time, but you'll say, you say, I'm not going to say. I'm not going to say I said it. And they always walk off in a huff, you know, and.

The great testament is, do they come back? Did they forgive you? And will you forgive them when they did the same thing? And in fact, the definition of a long friendship is that you've forgiven each other many times.

Otherwise you wouldn't still be friends. Yeah.

Sounds like the foundation of a good marriage as well.

Yeah, exactly. The old friendship in marriage, I mentioned it earlier. That's a really powerful part of.

Keeping that relationship together. Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another's eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs when we're under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.

In the course of the years. A close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves. To remain friends, we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins, and encourage the best in them, not through critique, but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Through the eyes of a real friendship, an individual is larger than their everyday actions. And through the eyes of another, we receive a greater sense of our own personhood, one we can aspire to, the one in whom they have the most faith. Friendship is a moving frontier of understanding not only of the self, but and the other, but also of a possible and as yet unlived future.

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationships. It can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love, and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent child relationship.

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life. A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble. A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble, of overworking, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence. Through the eyes of a friend, we especially learn to remain at least a little bit interesting to others. When we flatten our personalities and lose our curiosity in the life of the world or another. Friendship loses spirit and animation. Boredom is the second great killer of friendship. Boredom is the second great killer of friendship.

Through the natural surprises of a relationship held through the passage of years, we recognize the greatest surprising circles of which we are a part, and the faithfulness that leads to a wider sense of revelation independent of human relationship. To learn to be friends with the earth and the sky, with the horizon and with the seasons, even with the disappearances of winter. And in that faithfulness take the difficult path of becoming a good friend to our own going.

Friendship transcends disappearance. An enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way, even after one half of the bond is passed on.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement. The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone of friendship is witness the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another. To have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

I was listening to a conversation with you, and I think it may have been from your essay on time, which anybody that knows me knows that I have a very specific relationship with time and have written about it. And it's always fascinated, I see.

For a number of reasons. And so I. I withheld the urge to talk to you about time the entire conversation, to be honest. But you wrote what physicists call mass, we call presence.

Yes.

And I heard that line, and I was in my gym. I just stopped and I paused it and I sat down, and there was something that was so profound about it to me. Yes. And I was hoping that you could just maybe unravel that a little bit more. What physicists call mass, we call presence.

Yes.

And even just the notion of presence, because I think presence is something that, for us as men, is so valuable that we can cultivate and bring.

But.

And it does feel like it has a gravity when somebody. The men that I've been around and that I've mentored with that have a very strong presence. I mean, it's like there's a weight to it. And so I would just love for you to talk about that.

Yeah. Solidity. Yeah. And heerness. Yes. And that's why I start that essay on friendship with. Friendship is a mirror to presence, of seeing what you're longing for in another person.

Yes. Mass, the valency of. Of mass, the way it attracts other things to it gravitationally. But also, if you have a molecule, you know, the different kinds of valency and invitations for other molecules to join it. So there's something about.

About a field of gravity being very similar to a field of invitation. And so the ability of someone, through their presence, to. To make an invitation, even without.

Using words, to make that invitation. And I have one line in another poem that says one day you woke up and realized you were an invitation to everything, which is absolutely true, actually. And when you think about it, all conversations come to an end. All Conversations come to an end when the invitation in the conversation comes to an end.

So there's something powerfully invitational about charisma.

About presence. You're being asked for something, and quite often you don't know what you're being asked for, but you know that you want to know what you're being asked for by this person, you know, in. In the presence of. Of a powerful or saintly person. I mean, I felt it in the presence of Seamus Heaney, who represented something very powerful in the poetic tradition for me, and incarnated it, lived it out, actually. A person of incredible integrity. And when Seamus Heaney died, there were 80,000 people at Croke park watching a hurling match, I think. And they all stood to attention and. And applauded him. His face came up in the screen. He was just a part of the Irish psyche. But I met him three times in my life, and each time I felt an invitational presence. I felt a gravity. Yeah. And. And that I was being invited into another form of a. A deeper form of apprenticeship with the art of poetry and the responsibility of poetry.

The fact that many people in the tradition were jailed or sent to gulags in the Soviet system and to this day are being persecuted in many countries around the world because the poet says what cannot be said or what should not be said. So there's a. The apprenticeship to poetry is not only the apprenticeship to the art of saying and speaking and rhythm and silence and beauty. It's the apprenticeship to the whole tradition that lies behind it. So I do.

Really, really.

Think that as a young man.

You should choose something and do it wholeheartedly. And if it's not your bag, in the end, you'll find out, but you'll only find out by doing it wholeheartedly. But almost always, if you've let yourself follow something you care about, then it will take you in and you can follow it for the rest of your life. I remember when my mother passed away, and I was in so much grief around her because we were so close. It's like part of myself had gone.

And I wrote for about six months or so, or seven months, and I wrote most of the cycle of poetry in the book, everything is waiting for you. But at the end of it, I said to myself, I was so thankful to poetry. I said, you know, I've gone through seven years of grieving in seven months.

Through being able to articulate it. Poetry has been so good to me in so many ways.

And it's so good for other people and almost always the best things we apprentice ourselves to are things that give us satisfaction and our gifts to others at the same time. The other thing I would say, you know, which.

The masculine psyche hides from itself at the beginning, is that there's no path, no road of apprenticeship, no path you can take in life without having your heart broken. And to look at the way we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to find a path where we won't have our heart broken.

It's part of the longing for a professional armor. You know, I'm a lawyer. I'm this person, I'm that person. I'm there in the hierarchy, or I'm over here in the hierarchy, protection. And to understand that there's no sincere path you can take, that's not going to break your heart. You'll always get to a place where you say, jeez, I can't do it. I'm not up to it. I'm not big enough for it. And that. And it's a very real place to be because it's actually true.

You're not able for it by yourself. You have to ask for help. Invisible help. Invisible help to cross that chasm.

So I think.

I think apprenticeship is a lovely word. It gives a. It gives a sense of learning a craft or art, but also the. The sense of contact you need with the essence of it all the way through. And then having something that's just part of your psychological and physiological muscle memory at the end of the time.

I mean, it used to be that I would have to have some specific conditions to write. You know, I'd need to study, I'd need a desk, I'd need silence, I'd need space. Around the time when I was writing, I'd need quiet, you know, and then it would take me quite a while to get into it, warm up, get it now. It's just, you know, after all these years, it's just blank page, pen on paper. It's right there. It's just. But that's after years of working with it, and all of those years of reluctance and frustration and difficulty are there in the moment of. It's right there.

Yeah.

They haven't been left behind. It's just understood. Yeah. Yeah. You've learned some kind of immediate penetration into the essence of the art.

I think there's two things I want to say to that. One is, I think it's why a lot of men are struggling, is that they have nothing. They don't feel like they're being apprenticed to anything.

Yeah.

And they don't they're not being apprenticed by anybody. And I've been very fortunate to have two men in their 70s at different points in my life.

Marvelous.

Play this very mentorship based apprentice role.

And it, you know, it dramatically changed the course and the trajectory of my life. I mean, it almost always, always happened in moments of my life where I was about to fall off the cliff.

Yes.

And. And then, you know, somebody was sort of there. And so I'm very grateful for that.

Yeah.

The other thing is, just on a personal note.

I wanted to thank you for. This is going to be hard.

The.

Letter that you wrote.

After your mom passed.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Didn't think this was going to happen. Didn't think I was going to talk about this.

My mom passed last February. We're coming up on her.

Yeah.

The year of her passing.

Yes.

From terminal cancer. And I read that at the celebration of Life. I couldn't seem to. I didn't know what else to read. And then a friend of mine messaged me and said, because he knows how much I love your work, and he said, have you seen this? And I said, no, I didn't even know that. That, you know, written this.

Yeah.

And it found its way into my mom's celebration of life. And so I just wanted to thank you for those words because they really. They really meant a lot.

The word apprenticeship is used in that poem, actually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was just a bit of a side. But apprenticeship, I think, is one of those things that, you know, I think in some ways we apprentice ourselves to. To. I think a lot of men are trying to apprentice themselves to something and, you know, poetry seems to be the thing that for you has been this apprenticeship. And I wonder how maybe if there's any sort of like tactical directional advice that you can give to a man about how he finds a sense of apprenticeship in life when he feels so lost at sea.

I certainly know the power of it myself. You know, I was a rock climber and mountaineer from when I was 13 years old. And I was in the mountains and on very steep cliff faces with older men, many of them very, very compassionate, if.

Stolid, you know, north country men from the very powerful Yorkshire accents and. But there was an incredible sense of looking after, being looked after sometimes in a very fierce way.

And. But.

An ultimate sense of care. So that older man, younger man, apprenticeship is a really powerful dynamic. And.

I think sometimes if it's not there naturally, you know, there was a natural ecology of older men and younger men in the climbing Community is to go out and look for it and to go out and ask for it. And I got it in my later life through. Through poets. You know, they talk about dead poets, but they're not dead poets. Many of the poets are more alive than many of the people I know who are actually alive. You know, their voices are so vibrant and still calling to you and still to teaching you. Wordsworth, for instance, William Wordsworth and Seamus Heaney. Now he's passed over to.

So, yes, to apprentice yourself to an art form, to apprentice yourself in the company.

In the context of this interview, which is about men to older males. But also there's another dimension, which is to apprentice yourself to yourself, which is a line in one of my poems called Coleman's Bed. Apprentice, I say apprentice yourself to yourself.

Take yourself on as a study. As a study. You know, look at everything and don't be judgmental. You know, look at how all the ways you're reluctant, for instance. Yeah. To be here or to have conversations and start looking at the phenomenology of reluctance. Oh, I don't want to talk with that person. Oh, I don't want to do this this morning. Oh, I don't. Where does that come from? What is it? Just start to look at everything about you as a clue and a doorway, and all those pathways start to converge after a while. Yeah. And so, yes. Apprentice yourself to yourself.

I love that.

Be a new enunciation. Make yourself a door through which to be hospitable even to the stranger in you.

Beautiful. Yeah, beautiful. Well, we will wrap up with the final question, even though I would selfishly love to sit here and just chat with you for hours. So we'll have to do round two where I can talk to you about time.

That would be a pleasure. Yes.

My wife. I was standing in the kitchen the other day before I flew out here, and she said. She said, how are you feeling about the interview? And I said, great. And she said, are you excited? And I said, yes. And she said, what's the most important question you have to ask?

Yeah.

And I was like, you know, I have no idea.

Yes.

I have no clue.

Questions. Yeah.

And she really got me with the, you know, with the question of, like, what's the most important question need to ask?

Intelligent woman. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. She's a. She's a sharp one. She really is an incredible human being. And I sat with it for a while, and I couldn't come up with. With anything specific about what I wanted to ask you outside of. Of this, which is how does one go about properly thanking somebody when they've had a very profound impact on their life and that other person doesn't know?

Yes.

How do you thank somebody when there's kind of a mystery there?

Yeah.

You know, and words don't seem sufficient sometimes.

Yeah.

When the gravity of that other person's impact is. Is so profound.

Yes.

And so that. That's the question I wanted to leave you with, because I think we all.

Yes.

I think we all have people in our lives who are present in our life in a way that isn't physical.

Yes.

And they influence us.

Yes.

And it can be a kind of mystery of, you know, whether they're dead or they're alive. Of how do I give thanks to that person?

Yes.

How do I praise them? How do I, you know, share my gratitude with them? So I'll leave that impossible question with you. One impossible question given to me. I'll leave one with you.

You. Well, gratefulness is a. Is a. Is a gorgeous dynamic, and it takes so many different forms. Yeah. So to see. To feel thankful. I mean, we're. We're thankful for the sky, really. And we don't have the measure of its beauty or its giftedness in our articulation. And yet we still. We still think through good poetry, through good literature, where the sky appears in our mythologies, in our stories, in our hearts and minds. So I think it's through. Through the deep, appropriate attentiveness that you're feeling in the situation, in the moment in which that presence is felt, either physically or at a distance.

So. And then it's more of a. The gratefulness takes a form of conversation, actually. And Brother David Stendall, rest. Great, great Benedictine thinker would say gratefulness is the heart of prayer.

Gratefulness is the heart of prayer. Silent gratefulness is a form of deep attention to the other person. So when you think about it in the. In the role, in the instance of a writer or a poet, the greatest thanks that the poet or writer can receive is someone reading their work. Yeah. With the presence with which it was written or attempted to be written. So that's the ultimate thank you is the ability to.

Meet on the level at which the gift was given and was meant to be given.

Beautiful. Well, thank you very much for your time. Your presence, your work, your words, your poetry. It's. It really has been a. A true blessing in my life.

It's. It's lovely. Very much so. Thank you. And as I said, you've obviously read my work, and I have, and read it closely. And that's, that's the greatest act of, of gratefulness and, and a great compliment. So thank you very much, Beauty.

Thank you.

I look forward to the next time.

Thank you. And for, for everybody that's out there, do not forget to man it forward. Share this conversation with somebody that you think will enjoy it. This might be something to listen to with a friend, with a partner. And until next week, we'll see you then.

Sa.