Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

From David Whyte’s “Everything Is Waiting for You“

David Whyte, On Being Conversation — “Seeking Language Large Enough”

Link to the podcast/transcript

It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conversational nature of reality — indeed, this drama of vitality — is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theology, psychology, and leadership — his insistence on the power of a beautiful question and of everyday words amidst the drama of work as well as the drama of life. The notion of “frontier” — inner frontiers, outer frontiers — weaves through this hour. We surface this as a companion for the frontiers we are all on just by virtue of being alive in this time.

David Whyte is the author of many books of poetry and prose. He grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father’s Yorkshire. He now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. He holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has worked as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands. His books include The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, and The Bell and the Blackbird. His latest collections are David Whyte: Essentials and Still Possible.

Tippett: Would you read the poem “Everything Is Waiting for You”?

Whyte: I’ll not only read it, I’ll recite it, actually.

Tippett:All right, excellent.

Whyte:I have it in my memory, and I was just in a room full of many hundred people this morning, reciting this very poem. And this piece is written almost like a conversation in the mirror, trying to remind myself what’s first-order. And we have so many allies in this world, including just the color blue in the sky, which we’re not paying attention to, or the breeze or the ground beneath our feet. And so this is an invitation to come out of abstraction and back into the world again. It’s called “Everything is Waiting for You.”

“Your great mistake” — your great mistake — “is to act the drama / as if you were alone.” Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. “As if life / were a progressive and cunning crime / with no witness to the tiny hidden / transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny / the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, / even you, at times, have felt the grand array; / the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding / out your solo voice. You must note / the way the soap dish enables you, / or the window latch grants you courage. / Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.” Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. “The stairs are your mentor of things / to come, the doors have always been there / to frighten you and invite you, / and the tiny speaker in the phone / is your dream-ladder to divinity.” The tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity. “Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the / conversation. The kettle is singing / even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots / have left their arrogant aloofness and / seen the good in you at last. All the birds / and creatures of the world are unutterably / themselves. Everything” — everything, everything — “is waiting for you.”

Tippett:I love that line, “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”

Whyte:Exactly, yes. And you could take that into a relationship or marriage, with good results. [laughs] “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”

Tippett:And you make the point, also, that that “everything” that is waiting includes things that will surprise us in both directions — [laughs] that that everything also includes your own demise.

Whyte:Exactly. Yes, half of all human experience is mediated through loss and disappearance. And this is one of the reasons why we won’t have the conversation.

Tippett:Because we don’t want to go there. We don’t want to open that, acknowledge that possibility.

Whyte:No. If you have a really fierce loss, the loss of someone who’s close to you — the loss of a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a friend, God forbid, a child — then human beings have every right to say, Listen, God, if this is how you play the game, I’m not playing the game. I’m not playing by your rules. I’m going to manufacture my own little game, and I’m not going to come out of it. I’m going to make my own little bubble. And I’m going to draw up the rules. And I’m not coming out to this frontier again. I don’t want to. I want to create insulation. I want to create distance.

And many human beings do that for the rest of their lives. Many do it for just a short period and then reemerge again. But all of us are struggling to be here. One of the great theological questions is around incarnation, which simply means being here in your body — not anywhere else, just here with life’s fierce need to change you, and the fact that the more you’re here and the more you’re alive, the more you realize you’re a mortal human being and that you will pass from this place.

And will you actually turn up? Will you actually have the conversation, given that is so? Will you become a full citizen of vulnerability, loss, and disappearance, which you have no choice about?