On Grief, Belonging & Intimacy with David Whyte and Gayle Karen Young
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Maurizio Benazzo: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, wherever in the world you are. My name is Maurizio Benazzo.
Zaya Benazzo: My name is Zaya thank you for being here. Welcome everyone. And this feels like a such a special time of the year that it's perfect for a reflection through poetry.
So we have today two very special guests. We're delighted to have with us Gayle Karen Young and David Whyte. Welcome. So
Maurizio Benazzo: let's start by reading a brief bio.
Gayle Karen Young was on the path to becoming a Zen monk when she pivoted to become chief culture and talent officer at Wikipedia. Now works with cultivating leadership, bringing expertise in leadership development, change management, strategic communication, and organizational transformation to both corporate and nonprofit client.
She's passionate about global women's issue and supporting women in leadership. A self proclaimed geek, she's deeply interested in the intersection of technology and human rights. She divides her time between San Francisco and Whidbey Island in Washington. Thank you, Gayle, joy to have you with us. And then David Whyte.
David Whyte is the author of 12 books of poetry and five books of prose, bringing rich experiences from his years as a naturalist guide and leader of expedition in the Galapagos Island, Andes, the Andes, Amazon, and Himalaya. Whyte's work unique, uniquely bridges three distinct worlds.
The literary realm of poetry, philosophical inquiry, and organizational leadership through what he terms conversational leadership. He has received honorary degrees from Newman College and Royal Road University. And since 2020 has hosted three Sundays, a live online series exploring poetry and the human experience.
He now calls the Pacific Northwest home. Thank you, David. Joy to see you again and be with you. Thank you. Thank you, both. Welcome,
Zaya Benazzo: both.
Maurizio Benazzo: Hi, good to be here.
Zaya Benazzo: Your poetry has nurtured my soul for many years. So I just want to express my gratitude, David, for sharing so many states and reflections that speak deep, deeply to my heart and my soul.
So your books have been a companionship, so it's a delight to be here with you and with you, Gayle.
David Whyte: Lovely. That's good. Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: That's
David Whyte: why we, that's why we write them, to be companion, to be in other people's lives. So thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: And honestly, often poetry is where I turn when My mind feels exhausted when I have reached the limit of finding answers anywhere else.
And I just need to feel and poetry for me is the most immediate door to posing and feeling and reflecting and just being in the present moment. So I'm just curious if we can start by, maybe you can, each one of you reflect to what is a life for you in this season of your life, in this season of your work experience and your walking and sharing your heart with the world?
What is a life right now for maybe Gayle? We start with you. All
Gayle Karen Young: right. Like you, I think David's poetry has been an incredible guide, and I was thinking this morning as we were thinking about this talk in front of us that the oldest poem is actually a poem of lamentation, of grief. And so there's a way that poetry has, over 4, 000 years, this poem is inscribed on one of those cuneiform tablets.
Has been used as a vehicle to help us understand this river of loss that we're all fundamentally a part of, and that David speaks so eloquently to. I think your poem, The Well of Grief, was one of my early poems about this idea that there's actually a turning towards it. As I turn away a little bit from the sunlight.
There's a turning towards grief that's available, and that there are rich coins at the bottom of a deep well, that if we can be with it. Because to be human is to love what's ephemeral and we get a real sense of that loss in this turning of the seasons. I'm looking at the bare branches in our garden, and there's a way that in this quieting of the world, we come into what it means to be with loss, but also what it means to be with light.
And it's funny that you started the bio with with being a Zen monk, I've just re entered chaplaincy. And I think it's because, we are in a period of time in Zen chaplaincy where we need accompaniment. We need to be accompanied in all sorts of ways because it is our nature to love what's ephemeral.
So I'm happy to go more into that, but I'll give it a pause for a moment and turn it over to David.
David Whyte: Yes, I think one of the themes. That might be good to work with is the seasonality of grief and intimacy and the way it changes through a human life and the way grief about one thing changes as we change and as we mature and the way grief about a person who's alive or may have passed away Changes according to the generosity that we inhabit as human beings.
Grief is all about absence. And in many ways, it's the absolute essentiality of that absence. It's like tasting the essence of the person who you were with while they were alive. But only after they've gone and therefore an invitation to experience that essence in the moment that that you're actually with the people who are still inhabiting your lighted hours.
I think grief and intimacy, and then also the other quality in the title is relationship.
And and there's a strange way in which we. We participate in the griefs and difficulties of our loved ones, especially in an intimate relationship. Gayle all has an intimation of the griefs I went through in nursing my mother and father along with my sisters and then losing them. And of losing close friends in my life, I've lost a good few close male friends in the shape of John O'Donohue and Bennett White and and on it goes, it's it's quite extraordinary, really.
And so those people live as strange kinds of living shadows in Gale's life. And there are people Gale has lost previously. Which I, who I never knew but who I understand live live in Gale as a puzzling question. And and.
Gayle Karen Young: Just to say that, you get the, an interesting shape of somebody by the absence they live behind.
So I remember sitting in a circle of David and his friends in Ireland, as they were all reminiscing about John O'Donoghue, and you could feel the bigness. This education and this ongoing relationship that they, they very much still had with this entity.
David Whyte: Yeah. He always had to, he has a way of dominating the crowd, even from the other side.
Zaya Benazzo: So we're grieving the form that we're used to, not grieving the relationship that transformed, even though the form has changed. Yes. So
David Whyte: the, I, the the eminence of loss, which is everywhere. Is really really powerful invitation in a way to say, dare you be present, dare you show up dare you feel to the depth to which you feel dare you love to the point at which you will feel the pain of that love in, in their future disappearance either you will disappear or they will disappear.
The so there's some kind of invitation into the unknown side of our existence in intimacy in grief and in relationship, which is ever present.
Zaya Benazzo: And since we started with the grief conversation, I wonder if you can also reflect about collective grief, which I think has been very present for many of us.
In these times of anxiety and polarization and certainties and times also of profound global suffering for many of us who have been tuned to what's happening in the Middle East, what the genocide in Gaza have been experienced profound states of anguish. David, you speak in your last book very profoundly.
Anguish and what anguish does with grief and and our helplessness to that no matter what we do and what steps we make and what longings we have for peace. nothing changes, at least in the, in this scale of time, in this immediate scale of time, short time, not the deep time. So if you can speak about your reflections of collective grief, and how do we hold and walk together with that?
Gayle Karen Young: I'd say a few things. I think this part of the reason that I went back into Zen chaplaincy, as I said, was to be an accompaniment with, to have the internal capacity to walk alongside and not turn away from it. Because in a world where we are fundamentally distracted, devout, dispersed. There is something so important about the ability to coalesce the attention and to have the presence to be alongside and not turn away from what's on the screen or what's in the world and not to go into where we go in dysregulation, which is the patterns of trauma, abandonment, isolation, unregulated moral outrage, right?
But to still find our center, to still Love to still care, to still be present to what is there, because I do believe that our ability to witness and to be collaborative and to bridge and to see across difference and to make whatever baby steps forward we can make towards rather than turn away from is the work of our time is part of the work that we are here to do and to not so much.
Take one side or the other or go into both sides ism, but to see the myriad forms of the grief and the traumas that there are the layeredness interconnectedness to be welcoming of the deep complexity and the tapestry of our history that is so interrelated, and to be able to hold the nuance of that and not just tell simple stories about other right.
It's so easy to do whether we're in this polarized time in America, or are they're looking at the Middle East to come temptation to tell a simple story of otherness and othering is so rampant. And I think part of our capacity to be with grief is the capacity to be with the complexity of it and the complexity of who we are that we bring to a particular given moment.
Our, the complexity of our identities, our pains, our unique struggles, and the way that they can feel so isolating, abandoning, and also, self reinforcing, this I ness. That gets us away from the fundamental internet connectedness that we are, and I think part of the grief is being able to turn towards that, which can be exquisitely painful.
It's so much easier to think about this thing way over there, right? And you added time as an element, which is such a beautiful element to it, right? This Yeah, we can talk about time more in a moment, but I also want to give an opportunity to respond as well. Yes
David Whyte: I, all of our great artistic and religious traditions ask us to step over whatever line we have arranged between who we think we are and what we think is the world, between what you think is you and what you think is not you.
And in the Buddhist tradition, there's there's the Bodhisattva vow. Yeah. Which is what which is sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. No one knows what this means, actually. Even when you take the bow we don't know what it means to save a human being. We just know that it's an invitation to some form of intimacy with people who we have not yet, but who will somehow be met along the path.
Yeah, it's the invitation to get beyond yourself. And in the Christian tradition, it's that very simple invitation, which is so radical, which is to love your neighbor as yourself. And we know how difficult it is just to even love your actual neighbor who hasn't done very much against you and who has just simply annoyed you over the garden fence.
Yes. So we know how difficult that is, but to radically love whoever lies over the fence you put between you and the world. And this is a little piece I wrote called called Just Beyond Yourself, actually. And it was an experience I had of of in a way, I often think that one of the great threshold moments of maturity in a human life is when you arrange incredibly tired of yourself.
Just fed up of what you've been saying, how you've been saying it, and who you've been saying it to, yeah? And you just let it go. And and you step off into a real unknown. And you let an unknown part of you that lies beneath the horizon you've explored inside yourself meet something in the world that lies over the horizon of what you've been saying.
You've seen as a barrier before in the outer world. So this took place at a place in County Clare in Ireland called Cachar Anadiris, which in Irish means the fort of the high door. And it's a little lane, a little boring where two walls meet at the top of the ridge. And then there's a little door of light there, actually.
The That the name is much older than the road, actually, and the walls at the side of the road. They're just probably five or six hundred years old, but the name probably goes back thousands of years. It just happens to have recapitulated the name in the place. So you walk up that lane and you feel as if you're going to walk through that door of light and walk off into the thin air.
And I had this very physical experience of that happening at a very crucial moment in my life. So this is. Just beyond yourself. Just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be. Half a step into self forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet. Half a step into self forgetting. And the rest restored by what you'll meet just beyond yourself.
It's where you need to be half a step into self forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet. There's a road always beckoning. There's a road. Oh, when you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon. And deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time. That's how you know it's the road you have to follow.
That's how you know it's where you have to go. That's how you know you have to go. That's how you know it's just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be. It's just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be. This just beyond yourself, of course, can't be It's Achieved with the, when you're holding your usual everyday conversation with yourself and the world, which is usually a repetition of what you've been saying for a good few years, reinforcing everything in place.
We often use our mind just to go through and make sure everything's where it should be, meeting anything other than ourselves. And the only place to begin with where you meet anything other than yourself is in silence. And so the ability to cross over into another person's shoes, into another person's world, into another person's griefs and difficulties.
Happens in deep attentive silence that we call compassionate presence from the outside. It has to do with really seeing, really hearing, and having a place inside yourself where you're affected by what you're seeing and hearing. So the great French writer and philosopher Camus said said that we need to We need to feel to the point of tears.
We need to pay attention to the point of tears. And that's not an invitation to modeling sentimentality. That's an invitation to really. Allowing yourself to be moved by who you're in the presence of and what you're in the presence of. I
Gayle Karen Young: add a couple of things too, which is, I think, we were talking about collective grief as well, and we need collective grieving rituals.
I brought a group of activists to Costa Rica who were Uyghur, who were Argentinian, who were Tibetan, who were Turkish. So from every different continent, almost. And we did a collective grieving ritual, which was incredibly powerful, and it was powerful because people got to name things that they didn't otherwise get a moment to really name in honor.
Because part of grieving is honor. It's the MartĂn Fructal that grief is praise for what you have, and praise is grief for what you've lost. I'd have gotten that backwards. But this whole thing about collectively grieving and being co witness. So it was really meaningful. For the Uyghurs to witness the head of the next Cuban movement speak about boats that never leave the shores of Cuba, that leave the shores of Cuba and never arrive on another shore, and to feel what is specific about that form of loss, but also what is deeply connected to the universal.
And to find that deep interconnection there where you have people from different movements who are able to be in relationship to one another at the shared level creates that a different ground from which to act on. And I really do believe that if we can't understand a little bit of what it is we're grieving because we love and because we love so deeply, then it's very hard to really engage what grieving actually is, which is a learning process.
Mary Frances Potter wrote this brilliant book called The Grieving Brain. It's a neuroscience of grief. We grieve because we love, like we are fun that we are attached. And that, that has a whole I would miss David, not because I cognitively miss him, but because my nervous system is actually hooked into his, there are ways that we co regulate as part of coexisting.
I feel this with my dogs who are sitting just outside the door. Awaiting our presence, and if we left the house, they would engage in the first throes of grief, which is protest, and then despair. But to understand that grieving is also part of learning. It's funny, I went to the grocery and I was listening to this lecture with Mary Frances, and I left the house, and as I was going down the driveway, they started howling, and I thought, there's the protest part.
David Whyte: Could have been me, you never know.
Gayle Karen Young: You were gone out of the house by then. And this is the other thing that's so universal, like elephants, monkeys, dogs. This is not just a human thing. When you separate out protests. despair. These are such universal things. And it was so eerie to me in that moment to realize birds, birds experiences because of the ways that our nervous systems are wired for attachment and opposition to separation.
And yet the need that we have, because we fundamentally love what is ephemeral, including ourselves, it's just, as a developmental psychologist, you have to become somebody to become nobody, right? Even this thing that we call ourself is something that we need to begin the process of letting go of.
Zaya Benazzo: At some
Gayle Karen Young: point we'll develop. I'll let, pause there, I'll let you join in as well. No,
Zaya Benazzo: I really resonate with what you shared about the collective ritual for grief. We've been traveling to indigenous communities in the last two years and very much every community we visited, they had a form of ritual for grieving.
And I remember in one of the communities, the elder said, which really struck me, but took me months to really understand what he meant. And We have forgotten how to cry. We used to have elder women who would teach us how to cry. And I was like, what do you mean, teach us how to cry? And then coming back here in the West and feeling how buckled up we are all, how, protective we are, how, oh, he said, we used to talk and cry.
Like we don't see that in our world. It's not acceptable to talk and cry. And we were in a space together with a large group in Japan and some of the women were crying and there was not even a an object of grief. It was not something we collectively agree we're going to grieve, but their tears. Melted my heart.
And I started crying too, not because of something, but again, that shared tenderness, intimacy that comes through our shared grief. I mean are beautifully touching on that. And I wonder, David, I was really moved in your book when you spoke also about anguish and how that comes together, like anguish leading to grief and eventually intimacy.
They're all interwoven. You say anguish fully felt is also the first stop on the road to recovery and healing. For a moment, we have given up solution, let go of easy answers.
Gayle Karen Young: Yes. It's just the similar to what you say about despair taking you in when you have no place else to go.
David Whyte: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go. It's that Gayle just said, you have to be somebody in order to become nobody. And this is the other side of it, where you have to become nobody in order to be somebody again. And the nobody is the person You didn't know that you find in your grief.
We've all had that experience of losing someone close to you that cuts you to the quick where you actually feel the anguish, anguish, which is a total physical presence combined with. An inability to, or even a lack of will to do anything about it, but just the invitation into the abyss of the absence.
Yeah. And you go into that grief and the tears of that loss. And then you look in the mirror for the first time, perhaps many hours later. And when you look in the mirror, you see someone you've never seen before. In your own face, yeah, and that's the new person who's emerging from the other side of the loss of the grief, from that foundation inside yourself, which you didn't know was there, which is only accessed through pain and grief and loss, all the ways you're absent from what you desire in your life.
And yet, strangely enough. The absence itself is realized as a kind of inverse calibration of your intimacy of the person who's gone. It Mike Staircott, the great Dominican mystic of the 12th century said, Oh, 13th century was asked, uh, what is God by one of his parishioners. And I think The parishioner must have deserved this answer because it's quite a, it's quite a powerful answer that, that not everyone could take.
But he said when he was asked, Who is God or what is God Eckhart said, God is pure absence. God is it's every it's the horizon that you move towards that holds everything that's absent in your life right now that you know you need. And you ensure it, you will not be complete without experiencing that.
So it's not only the invitation to the horizon, actually, it's the invitation to what lies beyond the horizon. It's the furthest edge you can move to. So he's really saying God is pure invitation. God is pure invitation. What are you being invited into in your life right now? And if you allow yourself, we often want to allow ourselves to feel grief and pain because we know that intuitively that.
We'll feel the full invitation of where we're, we need to go protection, our protection against grief, same protection that we have against the invitation. Against feeling, living to the point of tears as Camus said of feeling the full the full power of our vulnerability. And I say power because vulnerability is our ultimate invitation to ask for help beyond the boundaries of where we've asked for help before.
It puts you into, vulnerability puts you into relationship with the world. In a robust and foundational way.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. And just to carry in that thought of vulnerability I just, I'm curious if you can both reflect how you invite vulnerability in your relationship, but also Gayle, I'm curious in your work with organizations, the place we the least expect to find vulnerability, how can you invite there?
And create space for grief and vulnerability as well.
Gayle Karen Young: Through the doorway, I would say, of both courage and love. And I don't think it's an accident that the word courage has heart embedded in it. So often we're asking leaders to be courage about, courageous about something. To stand for something to to stand for a future that they care about, to define that.
And that courage gives them more latitude for action, right? But when you ask leaders about why what in their past has led them to be courageous, why they've stood up for something, it has to do with what they've cared for. And so putting them through inquiry, inviting them into a conversation about what that is one of the ways to invite leadership.
To invite that sense of vulnerability into place again, and really honor it when it's there, I think there's something about when you're working with culture, amplifying. Where you can what's there instead of diminishing. So often, I think we talked about the lack of vulnerability, the lack of ability to cry, it drives me bonkers people apologize for their tears, oh, I'm so sorry, particularly I think in America, it's a lot of apologizing for the vulnerability.
And I might refuse to do it. I just refuse. I think cheers are a great pointer to what's important. And I named that instead. This is part of what how culture change happens in society systems institutions is by the way you start different telling different stories about elements of elements of behavior, elements of process, what you model.
And there is a real ability to model the kind of vulnerability that is, that rests on a foundation of strength. This, not the dissolution of throwing out all of your unprocessed stuff. I still think we need that boundaries. Let's just be real. But but there is a particular form of vulnerability that can come about a genuine story and seeing the response to it.
Especially if it invites people to look at a shared horizon, which I think any relationship does, right? Like when I met David, it's oh, the horizon of my life has fundamentally gotten reoriented. And there's a lot of beauty to that. And there's grief to that as well. I live on Whidbey Island, which is It's a beautiful island in the Pacific Northwest, but I'm not living in San Francisco.
So this reorientation of horizon and invitation to a big horizon is part of what leaders do in organizations and institutions, and that's part of what we're asked for. Sometimes we can use grief to step into that because it's so deeply tied to what we love and what we care about. So how does the very invitation to grieve, a way of life, a way of being a country that we've lost?
That we are trying to find our way into, a lot of conversations in America about progressive patriotism because of my work with the Hearthland Foundation, what does that look like? How do we redefine it, reimagine it? Because everything has to be remade day by day. Every relationship, every every institution, every culture, every society that takes or it takes a remaking over time.
And that comes with both love and loss. You look like you're about to dive
David Whyte: into something. Yeah, I was just the last, I first of all, I have just things that were coming out of what Gayle was saying around relationship, intimate relationships are, um,
It's a, it's an everyday invitation to vulnerability and therefore it's often the place where you're the most defensive. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yes.
You, where you try not to care at times, and you can't, and it's often quite amusing, the way a human being will say, I really don't care, and you say it with such passion and care. If you don't care so much, then why are you shouting? I don't care. It's such a high level. And so I have there are two little pieces I wanted to read.
One is from my essay on care in Consolations 2, which is just out. And it looks at the way we're just made to care. There's nothing you can do about it. So you might as well get with the program because if you try not to care, then you start to lose your sense of discrimination between what you really care about and what you don't care about.
You just start not to try not to care about everything. And then you lose the horizons that are beckoning you towards deeper forms of vulnerability and understanding the path of care and
Gayle Karen Young: the richness available on the other side of that too, like all of the lots. At some point, I'll talk about my friends who, the one who worked with ISIS extremists, but this
David Whyte: is care.
So this is a series of micro essays that are taking words that we often use in pejorative ways or words that we often use against ourselves or in unproductive ways and trying to look at the underlying nourishment that lies there. So this is taking the word care, which we use in so many different ways.
Care doesn't care. That often we don't want to care that doesn't care that often we don't want to care carry something we are made to do and carry something we are helpless to guard against in both senses of the word. That is all the ways we care and all the ways we care one by care. We are born into an interwoven network of care.
And finding out exactly what we individually care about amidst everything the family or the society into which we were born cares about may be one of the great tasks of a human life. Care is the invisible shaper of our individual and communal identities. The power of care is demonstrated by the way it shapes our lives just as much by its absence.
As by its necessary presence, being neglected as an infant can haunt us through the rest of our days, whatever the nature of our neglect to crucial thresholds of our growing, restoring our sense of being cared for, or deserving to be cared for is also one of the timeless and often dramatic necessities of a human life, whether we only, we are only seeming to care or trying hard not to care, care, we are surprised to find.
Both lives and sleeps deep in our body at a seemingly cellular level and is grown, matured, and shaped from this seemingly hidden involuntary car, whether we are conscious of it or not, even trying not to care. We demonstrate that care is almost always there underneath even the most uncaring disguise care can surface and overwhelm us with the power with which it awakens when it is suddenly out of nowhere, discovered, found and felt.
So the essay goes on from there. But just to understand that that care is living at the heart of our identity and, and it's surrounded by a forest of defenses against against the undoing of our outer identity that care necessitates and the undoing of our defenses against others.
Care's going to be, care is going to be ruling your life, whether you care or not. Yeah, exactly. So why not get with the program and find out what you care about now in your life. And of course, care itself has a seasonality that goes. Intimately connected to the seasonality of grief of of intimacy and presence.
What do I care about now? I care about things differently than I did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Or it has a different coloration or even it's completely and radically reconfigured itself. And the things I'm under the delusion that I care about, actually, I stopped caring about them you. Fifteen years ago, I haven't caught up with myself.
Gayle Karen Young: I should add to you that grief can be such a great clarifier of that. Because, when you're feeling a great grief, and someone's passed, you know how some things get very clear? The bullshit can just fall away. You're just less interested. And engaging in some things and you're like that's actually not worth it.
This is not worth my life energy. There's a particular kind of clarity that can sometimes come out of a deep grief that I think can actually be really really beautiful. You're about to say something great.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. And that clarity, you actually continue the center to bring me even more clarity to what I wanted to say that, that clarity.
It's the essence of loving your neighbors is the clarity that allows you to feel yourself so clearly so deeply that you are open and able to love the other, because until you have that clarity, even the relationship with the other is based on a lot of fences. Between us. Yeah. So
Zaya Benazzo: it's beautiful. In a relationship.
Yeah. When I reached that place of I don't care, that to me is like turning and saying, okay, that's the wound. That's where the pain is that I don't want to feel.
Maurizio Benazzo: I don't want to feel it. It means I don't, it's too much for me. It's too painful. It's too painful. I don't want it. It's not,
Zaya Benazzo: I don't care.
And it's not true. The care is low. The care is there. It is buried underneath the pain. And yeah, yes,
David Whyte: I think that's something he needs addressing, the because all of us are overwhelmed with care for what seems like a desperate world at the moment. And, I was at the beginning, I was saying, that our great traditions tell us to love our neighbor as ourselves, tell us to help save all sentient beings.
But that was, that invitation was within the context of a very powerful practice. You are meant to be practicing and becoming someone who was large enough to care. Beyond the boundary of yourself. And now we're, human beings have always lived in a desperate, difficult, and seemingly cruel world since the beginning of time.
We lament our present political circumstances, but human beings have always lived under cabals of mendacious adolescents, ruling the countries, since the beginning of time. We are no different. Yeah. So we're Human beings have always had to find their way, their happiness, what they care about, and to make a life of integrity amidst the difficulties of the world.
And in previous times, though, we had a smaller circle that impinged upon us. We just had a power outage, so the internet was down and we were sat there in the candlelight with the f ers last night, and the dogs and I was thinking, oh, this is, this is what all evenings were like until just a hundred years or so ago.
The darkness, you'd only, you might see a neighbor at the door, come to your door. You might travel seven miles in a day, if you had somewhere that you really had to get to. But now there's something awful happening in every part of the world. And if you notice, 25 years ago, you, the newspapers would only have had the news from your country.
And very few things from around the world now a newspaper or a, or an internet newspaper can find something that will catch you, and have you have you just either disgusted or unhappy or grief stricken from every country in the world. We've got 5 billion people. billion people on this planet.
Something awful is happening somewhere in the day and the internet will catch it and bring it to your door. So you were only meant to understand that previously, if you were part of a practice, that said, in Buddhism, it was understood that, that pain and grief were the ultimate foundations of human life.
Yeah. So if you don't have that practice, All of this coming into your, through your door can be absolutely overwhelming. So we need discretion. We need to stay away from the internet for great parts of the day, actually, and then come to it as our most mature self, instead of having it turn us into frightened adolescence as the first thing we open in the morning.
Yeah.
Gayle Karen Young: And as an escape from feelings. So I mentioned it. Too long. Who was a Jordanian activist, but he was working in deescalating people who are on their way to becoming extremists, trying to catch them earlier in the cycle. And part of the piece of that, that he really deeply understood was that the inability to feel individual and collective shame was part of what radicalized people.
This is not about me. This is about them. And if I make them do something. Then I will be fine and I will not have to feel all the things I feel and there are no, there's not a one of us with a history without shame, I can speak for the Chinese context and the cultural that we, we don't get that.
We don't, and so our ability to be with ourselves and our ability to be with what's out there in the world from a really grounded place where our nervous system is not just continually yanked. Yeah, I really believe that it really shapes onset so that we can have a response to shape towards compassion and openness rather than closure and judgment.
I know I'm at my worst when I am my most righteous. By the way, it's very fun to be there. Like they have, I like it. It's great. I get to be right? But it's bullshit. Like it's not real. But I am at my worst when I'm my most righteous, because that's what I'm my most, I'm at my most closed right, and my most unwilling degree my, my most unwilling to be tender towards what I really love.
All
Zaya Benazzo: right. Yeah. And I've heard you both beautifully speak about, David, you speak about the foreground and the background. And Gayle, I heard you speak about the invisible and the visible. Like we were, we live in a world that everything is right here. It's immediate. It's fast. It needs to be getting. to be done.
So we get we move with this kind of short term view of life and the urgency of everything. Every moment is urgent and we lose track of the background of the invisible that holds all of that. And the deep time perspective. So how do we remember, how do we connect with that vastness that is behind everything we call ordinary or mundane?
And I feel that for me often is the medicine. When I can connect to that vastness behind the immediacy, the timelessness behind the urgency.
David Whyte: This is a piece that speaks to that, actually, it's called it's called the bell and the blackbird.
Zaya Benazzo: And,
David Whyte: One of the, one of the great invitations in all our great contemplative traditions is not to choose too early in, in the dynamic of what you're seeing or hearing.
We're always being invited in multiple directions at once. And quite often they distill down to two directions where, shall I go this way or shall I go that way? And. To hold them both until they break open into something else that, in a way, unifies them both is one of the great necessities of going through different thresholds of attention.
So this is about not choosing. It's, it's an old kind of Irish koan in a way it's an image from the Irish tradition of a monk standing at the edge of the monastic precinct. And and this is part of a tradition where where the revelations of Christianity could be felt through the leaves in the trees, stag silhouetted against the hill as well as much as through a written text.
The Irish koan. Church had this remarkable relationship with nature. So the monk is standing on the edge of the precinct and he hears the bell calling him to prayer. And he says, that's the most beautiful sound in the world, the call to depth, to silence, to being away from everything. And then at the same time, he hears the call of the Blackbird from over the monastic wall.
And he says, that's also the most beautiful sound in the world. And in the story, that's all you get. There's nothing more. It's a little like, the Koans in the Blue Cliff record, that's all you get, you're meant to hold it as a question. And I did hold this, I did hold this Koan as a question for 20 years or more, actually, I would revisit it, and, but I was, one day I was sat at this very desk, actually, and the French doors were open, and it was, Of spring, that first day of spring when you can smell the greenery again and the earth and the sunlight was coming in and Gayle came through that door back there actually with two Tibetan bells and she knocked them together.
And the, and she hit them exactly right the first time. And the sound of the bell went straight through me. And at that very moment, I heard the red winged blackbird outside in the garden. And in the Pacific Northwest, the red winged blackbird is the sound of springtime, because it's migratory in this part of the world.
And it's the most beautiful song. And I heard them both together, and I suddenly understood this koan in the very, The core of my being, so the first thing I had to do was say, I can't talk to you now. This is my study. So she retreated with the bells, but this is the piece, I wrote it all in one go, called The Bell and the Blackbird, the sound of a bell still reverberating, the sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you.
To wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. The sound of a bell, still reverberating. Or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field. Asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage. Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all.
Wants you to walk to the place where you find. You already know you will have to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself, without meeting at all. That radiance you have always carried with you. That radiance you have always carried with you. As you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation crying, Alleluia.
That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of creation, crying, Hallelujah.
Zaya Benazzo: That
David Whyte: self that is no self at all. The part of you that already knows you will have to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting at all. That radiance you have always carried with you, as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship, by every corner of creation, crying, Alleluia.
So that radiance, we only ever feel that radiance when you've not as an achieved place where you willfully got to feeling joy and radiance. I will be happy. I will be joyous. I will be. Oh, there's no chance. That's just your mind telling berating you again. Now joy and happiness is through a radical undoing at the edges of our defenses.
So you can hear. Yeah, you can hear. Can you say that
Zaya Benazzo: again? Yes. That's beautiful.
David Whyte: Joy, I think I, a radical
Zaya Benazzo: undoing. Radical undo at the edges.
David Whyte: The edges of our defenses. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Zaya Benazzo: Oof.
David Whyte: Hear the birdsong again, you can feel your response to the birdsong, they're one conversation the bell going right through you, the sense of the privilege of existence, of the light finding you again, and finding a part of you that it didn't find yesterday.
Gayle Karen Young: You have a line from another of your poems, Attention is a hidden discipline of familiarity. And I think about that with Mary Oliver as attention being the this beginning of devotion. No, there's this thing in that koan. There's a Zen koan that you sometimes quote as well about the hell is when you can't hear the bell, the sound of the bird.
David Whyte: Yeah. The koan itself is the sound of a bird calling, announcing the difference between heaven and hell. And I worked with this koan again for a couple of decades, visiting and now. Just so simple, heaven is if you heard the bird and hell is if you didn't hear the
Gayle Karen Young: beautiful,
David Whyte: simple as that.
Gayle Karen Young: You can imagine the way that we're so preoccupied that we forget to hear. And I think about Dasher Keltner's work on, on, on awe. And this is that interconnectedness we're speaking to this capacity just to feel in connection with what's out there, the way the light is shining through the trees right now, the way it looks on the face of a loved one to let yourself be in relationship.
And you can get that also with moral beauty, when you see acts of people doing amazing things, in incredible courage, like this is one of the core sources of awe. So the ability to remain connected to that, and not just be jaded, and pretend, our minds are inherently predictive machines. We want to pretend as though we know what's going on, because it's safer for us.
Our neighbor, our nervous systems like it, but Jane Hirshfield. And what is usual is not what is always, what is usual is not what is always. So to let ourselves be surprised to still hear the calling of bird or the bell, that I think is one of these core capacities that keeps us in proper relationship with what is and not so distracted, dispersed and divided as Roshi Joan would say, so addicted to the things that.
that are deliberately designed to yank our attention in ways that are not intentional.
Maurizio Benazzo: Which brings also what you were saying about the silence, but the sound, the silence is looking for silence is not for the sake of silence. It's to be able to listen because you will not have heard the bells and you would not have heard the birds singing.
unless you were in silence. So that's the beauty, not silent. Sometimes in the modernity, we think, Oh, I need to And you lock ourself into a room, soundproof so I can be silent and you only hear the noise in your head and fight with your head. Silence is in front of a bird, silence is in front of a tree.
Silence is to be open to anything that comes to you and be able to receive. Silence is, you got it.
Gayle Karen Young: And be in relationship too.
Maurizio Benazzo: It's relationship. Silence is relationship. Yes. And it goes back to loving the neighbor. Because only in silence you can love your neighbors.
David Whyte: There
Maurizio Benazzo: was,
David Whyte: There was some, I forget which mystic eastern poet it was who, uh, who said he sits inside the shrine room all day so that God has to go out and praise the rocks.
It also reminds me of I remember asking a friend of mine where his wife was and she said, he said, Oh, she's off on retreat. She's fallen in love with humanity, but she doesn't like anyone in particular. Yeah. We've all. We've all we've all used spirituality and the vocabulary of spirituality and the forms of spirituality as a defense.
Guest: It's a
David Whyte: phase that every human being goes through. and is vulnerable to actually in every epoch of our existence.
Maurizio Benazzo: When we were in, during our journey with indigenous culture, filming through the indigenous culture, the last couple of years, one of the culture was saying that these white people, they came, they cut all the tree and they build this big house.
And the indigenous went there and said, what do you do in the house? So it's so we know we can talk to God and say, wait, You cut the trees to talk to God, to make a house to talk to God, it's just that that yeah, another one who says my church is, this is my church when he was on the boat.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you both so much for weaving your beautiful hearts and your wisdom and helping us undo and and defend the place. We've been protecting because it's too painful to be with.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: And
Maurizio Benazzo: yeah, I wanted to scream, I don't care, basically. And that is that the tear are coming. So thank you so much for your time.
David Whyte: Yeah. All
Gayle Karen Young: the
David Whyte: best. Thank you very much. Thank you. Wish everyone well. Thank you.