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.
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In his recent On Being conversation with Krista Tippett , Whyte reads his meditation on vulnerability: 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. Portrait of Whyte by Nicol Ragland Photography. Share Article Tweet. View Full Site. Add to favourites. Borrie, John :Portrait of David Whyte.
See original record Click to request to view this item, access digital version if available , and see more information. Usage Purchasing this Item This item is available as a high resolution download. Back to top. Take our survey. Thank you for sharing Alan. I take most every day. I get a wee bit irritable if I miss my nap.
It is really a community service when i get my afternoon lie-down. Thanks for the tip. Thank you for the inspiration, I also lost my beautiful Boerboel Zuri exactly one month today. Such a tragic accident, for she accidently swallowed her ball. Please be aware of the dangers of pet toys, especially balls.
We now have a little yorkie who appears to have the spirit of our Zuri. The dare is to take the steps to keep living with faith and understanding. God Bless!! Take good care with your heart.
Some one had verbalised — not just in the poem but in the book that went before — how I related to the world — some one had made it O, bloody K, to be the kind of woman, No! Thank you for sharing YOU. Thanks for the howdy. I just lost a good friend to cancer last Saturday and I feel raw. I know she is in a better place and that her loved ones were with her until the end and that she was a good mother, friend, wife, sister, daughter, woman.
How lucky am I to love her still. I am thinking of you, your friend, and your family. A friends dying rends the heart, cracking open the shell of protection we entomb around it.
As shearing as the pain is— it is grace reminding us we are alive, feeling, loving, and blessed…as excrutiating as healing can be. Strange how us humans are wired to learn more from failure and loss but if we really learn the right lessons then we can really feel the pleasure of the successes and love we enjoy!
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