Bringing More Soul (and Poetry) Into Your Work
Episode Stats
Summary
When you think of areas of life that speak to the soul, you likely think of romantic relationships and natural landscapes. But my guest today says that the soul is involved in every kind of work, and poetry is an essential vehicle for examining what your work is doing to your soul and for learning to bring more soul into what you do. His name is David White, and he s a poet, a philosopher, and the author of multiple books of both poetry and prose. He s also a corporate consultant who uses poetry to help companies with their organizational leadership.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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When you think of areas of life that speak to the soul and elicit poetry, you likely
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think of things like romantic relationships and natural landscapes.
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You probably don't think of office work and cubicles, but my guest today says that the
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soul is involved in every kind of work, and poetry is an essential vehicle for examining
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what your work is doing to your soul and for learning to bring more soul into what you
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His name is David White, and he's a poet, a philosopher, and the author of multiple
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books of both poetry and prose, as well as a corporate consultant who uses poetry to help
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companies with their organizational leadership.
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We begin a conversation with David's background in marine zoology, how his experience being
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a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands influences ideas on the conversational nature
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We then discuss how the amount of time you spend in your job is greatly shaping who you
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are, the way we lose youthful idealism for our work, and the importance of inviting the
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David then unpacks what the ancient tale of Beowulf can teach men about having hard conversations,
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both personally and professionally, and bridging one outer and inner lives.
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We also talk about the importance of men having good friendships outside of the office, and
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along the way, David recites a few short, stirring poems that speak to these themes.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash white.
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So you are a poet, philosopher, writer, lecturer, and you've written a lot of books of poetry,
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poems, and we're going to talk about some of that today.
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But before we do, let's talk about how you got to be doing what you're doing today, because
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In fact, you have your degree in marine zoology.
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So how did you go from marine zoology to writing poems?
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Yes, actually, it's more accurate to say that, actually, I always have seen myself as a poet
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from when I was very little, actually, or however, seeing yourself as a poet is configured in a
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very young mind of a seven-year-old or eight-year-old.
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So sciences were really a kind of excursion for me.
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I was very influenced by the lyrical articulation of a wonderful mother, an Irish mother, growing
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up in the north of England, and her beautiful singing voice, as well as her storytelling voice.
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And I think early on, I always saw poetry as a secret code to understanding.
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And I felt quite early on when I was young that the adult world was living in a kind of
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amnesia of this basic code of the priorities of life.
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And I always felt that in poetry, in a sense, the original, powerful innocences of childhood
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So I was very happy in my initial disappointment with listening to the conversation of the adult
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I don't know if you ever had that experience, Brett, of listening to adults when you were
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a child and thinking that these people were actually quite insane.
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As to what their priorities were and what they were interested in.
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And so I was quite relieved to find poetry kept, it was possible to keep what I felt was
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really precious and really alive, to keep it vibrant into what we call adulthood or into
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But then you did poetry, you always thought you saw as a poet, but then you decided to
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Well, I was caught by the image of Jacques Cousteau, the great French marine zoologist and
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And he had a series on the television that was worldwide, really, back in the 60s, where
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he traveled on the good ship Calypso and made documentaries of what he discovered in the oceans.
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And particularly underwater, which was quite revolutionary.
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And so I was so moved by that life that he led that I just thought it was astonishing that
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You know, my images of work were all the images of a young boy, which was being a fireman,
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being a soldier, being a train driver, all of those.
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And my father was a skilled electrical jointer of the large cables that go into power stations.
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And then suddenly to see that you could have work that would take you over these blue water
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I mean, I remember standing with my mouth open in front of the television.
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And so just a year or two later, when I had to specialize, I made a kind of vow there, I suppose,
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in front of the television that I would follow the life of the dolphin aboard the good ship
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And in the British system, you had to, in Yorkshire, in the north of England, where I grew up,
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And so I chose sciences because I, even though I was writing poetry from quite seriously in my early
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teens, I always knew I could pick up a book of Wordsworth or Emily Dickinson myself.
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I wouldn't be able to pick up a book on ecological genetics myself.
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So I didn't think it was that great a sacrifice, actually, to do sciences.
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I just found it much harder than my more scientifically inclined mates, friends.
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You know, I had to work twice as hard they did to get the same results.
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But I did get the results to go to university and study marine zoology.
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And then, luck of the Irish, I mean, it was luck.
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I got this job in the Galapagos Islands as a guia naturalista.
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I learned, it was called later when I learned Spanish, a naturalist guide.
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And it totally transformed my world and my young adulthood, my young manhood.
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I was, I think I was 20, 22 when I went out there, 21.
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So really quite an astonishing opportunity for a young man to have.
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Well, after over a year there, a year and a half or so, the islands had completely transformed
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not only my understanding of what I thought was a scientific world, but it had completely
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You know, I went there with the unconscious sense that your identity depended on what you
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believed and your inherited beliefs, especially.
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And really, Galapagos didn't care about what you believed at all.
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And it was really inviting you into this deep, fierce, almost warrior-like sense of attention
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And I realized in very short order that my identity actually depended on the depth of attention
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that I was giving to things that were other than myself.
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And that the deeper the powers of attention I had using all my five senses, the deeper sense
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So really, I understood, I came to understand human identity as a kind of live conversation.
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And when you weren't meeting anything other than yourself, you had nothing in the way of
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They just, you were just making proclamations to the world, mostly defensive proclamations
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because you were so unconsciously afraid of it.
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So part of paying deep attention to the world is to become, first of all, consciously afraid
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because there's no way of really meeting this incredibly powerful set of elements we call
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And then finding the part of you that has the same kind of terrifying elemental nature
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And so getting beyond fear, in a way, by being fully in the conversation.
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And I had plenty of opportunity to be in those terrifying conversations, diving with all kinds
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of very powerful creatures under the water, six or seven different species of sharks down
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there and orca whales and angry male sea lions at times and almost drowning, caught in a kind
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So, and having various life-threatening adventures on the sailing boats on which we traveled from
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So, so it was a great old adventure for any young man or woman to have, actually.
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And I imagine those, that fear you experienced, those, and just all those experiences, like
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science, the language of science, it, it can only go so far in describing it.
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And poetry probably does a better job of, of capturing that, those, those, that experience
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I mean, science is marvelous to give us, especially around linear nomenclature.
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You know, Linnaeus, the great Swedish classifier who gave Latin names to everything and which
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So it was a way really of, of our all being able to talk about the same thing and know
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But it certainly didn't mean to say that the name we had given to an animal or bird or plant
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was actually accurate and that the world actually speaks back to you in its very, very own, very,
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And I mean, all great scientists actually discover that themselves, that, you know, whether it's
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a set of numbers and data that you're looking at, the data starts to speak back to you instead
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of you trying to manipulate the data to what you want the numbers to show you when you first
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started, you know, all scientists have to get beyond themselves.
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But I was really interested in speaking to this conversational identity where the world
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And, and when it talks back to you, it finds a much larger person than the one who first
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And it's someone who, what you might say in the old Catholic tradition has been, has been
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shriven, you know, the outer casing, the, the outer complications of being human have
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And what you're left with is this radical simplicity, which to begin with, you don't know what to do
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with at all, you know, because you were used to all the complicated names you'd given yourself
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and what you were good at and what you weren't.
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And this radical simplification, this elemental conversation actually puts you into a frontier
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conversation with the unknown, where to begin with, you're actually not meant to understand
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It's a bit like when you're at the beginning of a romantic relationship and you're so shy
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and you don't know what to say or how to say it or what to wear.
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So it's the same at the beginning of a passionate relationship with, with the world.
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And your work is exploring this conversational nature of reality.
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You spend a lot of time, not a lot, but quite a bit about our interaction with work, particularly
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you wrote this book decade ago, two decades ago called The Heart Aroused about bringing soul
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back into the corporate world, into the office space.
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And I think that's really interesting because I think most people, when they think of poetry,
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they don't think of poetry speaking to office work.
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They might think of poetry, maybe speaking to artisanal work or farmer, like a, like a Wendell
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But for some reason we, we, for me, at least, maybe there's just me, we often think, well,
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poetry, arts, literature has nothing to say about 21st century office work.
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Like why, why are we able to say, oh yes, we can have poetry about farms and agriculture,
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culture, but not spreadsheets and computer, sitting at a computer all day?
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Well, the intuition is a good one because the language we tend to use in the office is
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so de-racinated and it's been taken away from, from the racines, from the roots of real human
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So, so we use euphemism, we use jargon, we use, we use words to cover up what's actually
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going on because we don't actually face up to a lot of the, the hierarchical imperatives that
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until now have steered relationships in the workplace.
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So it's very hard to use the language of the office.
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You'll see none of my poetry used as the language of the office, really.
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You have to bring the greater human language to bear on the dynamics of the workplace,
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whether it's in the human resources department or in leadership or on the shop floor, you
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know, on the, uh, on the line where people are, uh, working, uh, actually doing physical
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So it just seems very, very evident to me that it's not a passive process to work.
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You can't work 40 hours a week in the classic sense and, and be someone else than the way
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you're made and not suffer from that covering over of who you are.
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The understanding, you know, whether it's in physical work or whether it's in the offices
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is while I'll recover myself at the weekend or on holiday.
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But actually you're actually practicing at being someone when you're in your workplace.
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Imagine if you played an instrument, Brett, for the number of hours, the same number of
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So say in a classic sense, if you practiced six, seven, eight hours a day at the piano,
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at the saxophone, at the violin, could you imagine how good you would get?
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And you wouldn't even have to have any musical proclivity.
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If you practiced so many hours a day, you would get incredibly good.
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So, uh, it's interesting to think that when you're in the workplace or on the phone or in
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the meeting room, you're actually practicing at being someone.
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And because you're practicing at it so much, seven or eight hours a day, five days a week,
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at least, and if you're in leadership, it stretches into the, into the weekends, there's no one
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else you're going to become than that person you're practicing so much at.
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So it's a very beautiful and disturbing question to ask yourself.
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By the way, I am in my work, you know, where I spend most of my time, who or whom am I practicing
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at becoming? Do I even want to become that person? Almost always because of the manipulations and
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coercions and besiegements of the workplace, we almost always start to actually cultivate a defensive
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kind of personality in the workplace rather than an invitational one.
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So a lot of my work, you know, as far as talking about the soul in the workplace is, is that
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simple movement from a defensive to an invitational identity. I mean, you can look at a definition
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of the soul as being that part of a person, you know, we don't need to attach it to any
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religious, any religious inheritance, but, uh, to my mind, the soul of a person is that part
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of a person that's trying to belong to the world in the biggest way they can, you know?
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And the soul can be quite ruthless in breaking down defenses that you've set up. Actually,
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sometimes we look on the outside and realize that we've sabotaged the work we were doing
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actually. And it looks as if you've actually inflicted self-harm, but to the soul, it may
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have been something it's been quietly engineering for years so that you could break out of this
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imprisonment. Being fired or being a disaster for the personality. It may be something your soul
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has been quietly preparing you for for years, yeah? So that you could break out of something
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that is incredibly deleterious and incredibly threatening to what is most precious to you.
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And that's the one life you can lead that no one else can lead in your stead.
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. You said, okay, soul's this idea. It's the bigger thing that wants
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to connect and engage with the world that's bigger than us.
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Yeah. It's the faculty of belonging in a human person.
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Faculty of belonging. And then you said personality. Is that like the ego, the self?
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Yes. And it's what I call, I call it the strategic mind. It gets called all kinds of things. You know,
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in the Eastern tradition, it's the monkey mind. William Blake actually called it Satan.
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And, but it's only Satan when you put it first, when you think that the thoughts you have are you,
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all the names you've given to your wife, to your children, to your intimate partner, to your work
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are real. Yeah. And instead of letting your wife speak back to you in her own voice, instead of the
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one you've thrown into her body through a kind of psychological ventriloquism, when you let your
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child speak back to you as the person they are, rather than what you're trying to shape them into,
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when you let anyone speak back to you in their own voice. I mean, this is a big thing around
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gender nowadays to just allow people to be themselves, whatever they call themselves and
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however they, what does it have to do with us, how they see themselves, except in the sense that
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we should be curious about it in a real foundational way, in an invitational way. Who's this person
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coming into my life now? Let them announce themselves instead of my, instead of my naming them.
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Let my work start to name itself. Almost always we find we enter a vocation with, with certain very
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simplistic goals and ambitions. And we find that it leads us in a, through the trials and humiliations
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of a career path to, to its true essence. We almost always come to understand the true essence of a work
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through, through, through humiliation and through a certain kind of outer failure.
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Yeah. And I want to talk, dig deep into that because you have, you have some great
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pros and insights about that, but also you mentioned that people go in with simple and sort of
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sometimes pure ideas of why they started a career. It's very soulful, but then eventually for some,
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for some, whatever reason, personality can take over, right? You forget that, that soulful reason why
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you joined. I mean, I know this happens to a lot of attorneys, like some attorneys, they go to law
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school thinking, well, I'm going to, you know, do some sort of social justice, environmental justice.
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I'm going to help the elderly. I'm going to help, I'm going to do a cause. But then they get to law
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school and they realize, oh my gosh, I have so many student loans. I can't, I can't pay them off,
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you know, working as a public defender. So I might as well take that corporate gig because I got to do that.
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Yes. Yeah. George Eliot, the great 19th century writer was brilliant on this slow process of
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disbelief and disappointment and giving up on what was not just an ideal, but was something that
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lived in the very real way inside you. So keeping your soul alive is incredibly important. It's very
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difficult in the American system. You know, French doctors, if they qualify, and it's very hard to
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qualify even to study, to be a doctor, you know, but if you make it, it's all paid for. So, so you
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appear in the world and you, you don't have to pay off all of these loans. So idealism in the French
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system is much, is much higher, which is a turnaround from the way we usually see, see the French. So part
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of it is the systems we've made and the, and the, the burdens we place on young people. And we're
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starting to reset, realize that societally. I know there's a movement to forgive student loans just
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because of the way it's, it's just crushing a whole generation, but also the way it's actually
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holding our economy back at the same time. There should be a way of letting yourself loose on the
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world in your twenties where you're able to invite what I call to invite the right kind of peril.
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Everyone in order to find their way has to invite the right kind of danger into their life. We all
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know what it's like to invite the wrong kind of danger into our lives. And part of the, the difficulty
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of the path of the human path is finding out what dangers you're supposed to call that are germane
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to your future work. So Galapagos, I thought I was going out there as a scientist who would impress
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everyone, you know, by taking people lecturing around the islands. That was the, that was the job of a
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naturalist guide was to be a police man or woman and an educator at the same time. But mostly, you know,
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you, the basic youthful image was of you being this immortal boy, God scientist who would tell
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everyone what was going on. And it wasn't long before I realized I knew, I knew very little of what
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was actually going on. And that this place not only was way beyond what I could understand, but it
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also terrified me. It terrified my scientific naming identity. And it terrified me as a, as an immortal
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young man, because I was put in physical touch with death on a daily basis there, whether it was above
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water or below it. And many times because we were living on this death dealing medium called the
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ocean a day after day after day where things go wrong on a regular basis, you know, I felt that threat
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against my physical person too. So, but I had unconsciously, I think, taken myself to that place in order
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to emancipate myself into the understandings and qualities that would actually make me a decent
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poet and, uh, and out of that, uh, a philosopher to a human philosopher.
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Well, let's dig into this idea more about finding the right kind of peril, um, because in your book,
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The How to Rouse, you have this great chapter where you do this mythopoetic exploration of the poem
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Beowulf. Now, I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this, men who are listening to this,
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they've, they've read that poem and it's something that it resonated with me. What's not to like about
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it? You got these, you know, monseline monsters. You do this exploration of how this poem can be used
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to help men in particular, I think, explore the fear of bringing soul into their work. So what do you
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think, what insights can we get from Beowulf on how to bring more soul into whatever work we have?
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Well, the particular story I work with is when Beowulf is called to the court of King Hrothgai,
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Denmark, because, um, at night, you know, after the feasting is over at two o'clock in the morning,
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after the gold and the silver and the horses and the land has been given out to all the champions and
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families that are loyal to the king, something awful, green, monstrous and dripping comes out of the
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local swamp, breaks down the stockade gate, fights off the guards, shatters the doors of the hall,
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makes its way into the hall and carries off a young man and young woman every night back into the swamp
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where it eats them alive. It's a very, very powerful image. And Beowulf invites himself
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to confront this monster. So here's this warrior, this received understanding of what it means to be
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a man. You know, when the, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. This is a John Wayne of the,
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uh, of the sixth or fifth century AD, but it's also the threshold whereby Beowulf is now going to
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step into his inner life. What rises out of the swamp is everything that has, is, has not been
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confronted in the upper world. And it's really interesting that the story is quite specific,
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that this monster who is known as Grendel carries off a young man and young woman into the swamp where
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it devours them. So whatever has not been faced, whatever you have not spoken to, you know, as you
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said, you know, you start off with this beautiful, precious idealism as a young doctor or a young
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lawyer, and the weight of the world comes down on you and you say, it's not possible for me to have
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that conversation. And in fact, that conversation makes me feel uncomfortable and I don't know what
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to do with it. Therefore, I'm going to push it away. I'm going to ignore it. It's all very well during
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the lighted hours of the day when you can use your willful strategic mind to keep those powers, uh,
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underground, you know, under the water. But at two o'clock in the morning, and this is very specific
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in the poem that it's in the early hours of the morning, which is, you know, from a medical and
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scientific point of view is when your system and your, your psychological system and your immune system
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is at its lowest ebb. That's when this powerful, monstrous form comes up and devours the young man and
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young woman in you. It's in many ways, it's devouring your youthful innocence. So we tend to
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think of innocence as something that is supposed to, through the processes of maturity, be replaced
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by experience. Yeah. And we pride ourselves on once having been innocent, but now we're experienced here.
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And so we don't get into so much trouble anymore, but you know, a sharper understanding, say William Blake's
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understanding. He saw William Blake, the great poet and engraver of the early 19th century, the early
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1800s. He saw innocence as a kind of faculty that was never supposed to be replaced by experience.
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Actually, innocence was supposed to take on experience as a good servant to its initial
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understandings of how it could perfect itself in the world. And so this is, you know, this is what is
00:29:07.480
most precious coming up from the swamp, you know, breaking in through our assiduously joined defenses
00:29:17.300
on the surface and carrying off the young man and young woman inside us. Yeah. And the way we feel that is
00:29:25.440
we lose our joy. We lose our sense of humor. We, we lose our ability to, to kick our heels together and
00:29:34.400
dance. Yeah. We've all seen the difference between a young calf, you know, in a field, or at least I have,
00:29:43.640
you know, having spent a lot of time out in rural England or a lamb, and then seeing the stolid cow
00:29:50.380
that it becomes or the stolid sheep, just chewing, looking vaguely off into the distance that happens
00:29:57.220
to so many of us as human beings. The fire that you had has been extinguished, but actually
00:30:06.020
you are the one who has extinguished it as much as any dynamic you've run to, run into it in the
00:30:17.340
world. Yeah. And part of it has to do with the closing off of our vulnerabilities. I do think that
00:30:23.180
the ability to understand our vulnerabilities, to live in them physically and not close them off is,
00:30:29.680
is intimately connected to our sense of robustness in the world. Yeah. When you're just an armored
00:30:36.260
personality trying to be right all the time and trying to smash everything that tells you that
00:30:41.940
you are, you might be wrong. We close off this innocent, invitational, intimate, uh, instrument,
00:30:53.560
you know, which is able to bring so much joy, not in only into our own lives, but into those
00:31:00.220
that we meet. Yeah. And poetry, poetry is meant to speak to this part of you and create a kind of
00:31:07.100
divine discontent. And I have a piece where, you know, it's, it's kind of addressing and inviting
00:31:14.200
this part of ourselves. It's called start close in, start close in, don't take the second step or the
00:31:21.300
first. Start with the first thing close in, the step you don't want to take. Start close in. Don't
00:31:27.840
take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing close in, the step you don't want to
00:31:31.960
take. Start with the ground, you know, the pale ground beneath your feet, your own way to begin
00:31:38.800
the conversation. Start with your own question. Give up on other people's questions. Don't let them
00:31:46.520
smother something simple. To hear another's voice, follow your own voice. Wait until it becomes an
00:31:56.220
intimate, private ear that can then really listen to another. Start right now. Take a small step. You
00:32:02.720
can call your own. Don't follow someone else's heroics. Don't follow someone else's heroics. Be humble.
00:32:11.120
Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Don't take the second step or the third.
00:32:20.820
Start with the first thing close in the step you don't want to take.
00:32:28.480
And going back to the Beowulf, that's what Beowulf did. Like he, you know, something about that before
00:32:34.320
that entrance, before he gets to the lake, he, he's given armor, a helmet from, you know, the king. So here's,
00:32:40.520
this is going to help you. And he has to get rid of it because it's, it's no use down there when he
00:32:44.760
goes to kill Grindle and any weapon he had that was given no use. In fact, he had to find a weapon
00:32:50.900
down there that ended up slaying the monster. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And yes. So it's this
00:32:59.280
radical simplification and this going down to a place where you feel you can't breathe.
00:33:06.320
And it's interesting how the people of Denmark, you know, that we missed a part of the story where
00:33:11.800
Beowulf actually confronts Grendel when he comes out of the lake, defeats him, you know, and Grendel
00:33:18.340
stumbles back into the lake, leaving a bloody wounded trail behind him, you know, and then they hear his
00:33:24.380
death cries there. So they think they're all free. And there's this great party starts up and they
00:33:28.880
celebrate Beowulf and his great, uh, his great feet and all his previous feats, you know, and the
00:33:37.060
party goes on all night and then Beowulf and his men go to another room. They sleep all the rest of
00:33:43.800
the night. They sleep through the day and they come back and they find the hall has been devastated again.
00:33:50.600
Something else has come out from the swamp, fought off the guards, broken down the door, carried off
00:33:57.820
another young man and woman, Grendel's mother. It's not the thing you fear. It's the mother of the
00:34:06.460
thing you fear. So when, when Beowulf decides to go down to the lake, he's going down to wrestle with
00:34:13.620
the, the very root of the problem, not just the way that it displays itself on the surface, but the
00:34:20.300
very, the very actual jointure and foundation of where this dynamic has come from. And there's an
00:34:28.620
interesting dynamic because the people of Denmark don't want him to go down into the lake. They say,
00:34:35.460
you've done your work. It's been great. You'd be here, take your horses, take your gold, take your land.
00:34:40.800
You know, we don't need you to go down there. Very. Thank you very much. Well, this is a very
00:34:47.000
common dynamic for consultants. When you go into a company and you're asked to come in to deal with
00:34:53.040
a presenting dynamic and you, you work with that and it goes away because almost everything does when
00:34:58.820
you go away with it. There's lots of, of research that shows if you just turn, change the lighting in
00:35:04.680
a room. Then a lot of difficult things will go away temporarily. Yeah. As soon as you start to
00:35:11.900
get towards the original dynamic that's been causing trouble in the company, everyone gets really
00:35:18.100
nervous. And almost always the management will say, that's great. You've done your work. I liked those
00:35:25.200
little changes. We don't need to actually address this. You know, it's too scary. It's in the
00:35:30.680
psychological area where quite often managers do not know how, they don't know how to navigate it.
00:35:39.740
Yeah. They have not had the psychological apprenticeship to the vulnerabilities and
00:35:48.200
difficulties of, of the human beings trying to work together to do something difficult. Yeah.
00:35:55.560
So I work, I mean, when I'm in the workplace, I work a lot with what I call the phenomenology of
00:36:02.380
conversation, which is just a fancy philosophical way of saying what happens along the way when you try to
00:36:07.820
have one, when you try to deepen it. Well, these things happen, these five things, these seven things
00:36:13.620
happen. And when you run into it, and particularly when you run into any of these frightening
00:36:19.840
milestones or phenomena, there's nothing wrong with it. And so I, and I have hundreds of poems
00:36:25.440
memorized. So I, I bring poetry in that illustrates in a very real, very physical way in the room,
00:36:32.020
what this looks like and why you're scared of having the conversation. And it's incredibly liberating for
00:36:39.480
people. And I, it's actually incredibly liberating for men because women have more of an innate
00:36:46.820
understanding of how conversations work. It's just that the inherited hierarchy quite often doesn't
00:36:53.220
allow them to display that knowledge. But men in the classic sense have this inherited sense that
00:37:01.700
yes, women are better at conversations, but I don't know what they do when they're,
00:37:06.140
when they're doing them much better than I am. You know, so men think having a real conversation
00:37:12.380
is all vague and woolly. So it can be incredibly invitational to men when they discover, no,
00:37:20.880
actually you can understand the whole process by which you deepen a conversation. And here are the
00:37:28.260
illustrations. So Beowulf is a very magnified representation of what it's like when you get
00:37:34.040
down there into the difficult place. You know, there's, I mean, there's an incredible translation from
00:37:40.260
the 1960s from a man called Burton Raffel that describes the hard place where you have to go to
00:37:48.640
have that conversation. And it's in the image of this pool where Grendel and his mother have lived for
00:37:57.920
centuries here. They call the huge one Grendel. If he had a father, no one knew him. Or if there were
00:38:06.400
others before them, hidden evil before hidden evil, hidden evil before hidden evil, they live
00:38:11.880
in secret places, wolf dens, where water pours from rocks then runs underground, where mist steams
00:38:18.540
like black clouds and the grows of trees hanging out over their lake are all covered with frozen spray
00:38:25.560
and wind down snake-like roots that reach as far as the water and help keep it dark. At night,
00:38:33.760
that lake burns like a torch. No one knows its bottom. No wisdom reaches such depths. A deer hunted
00:38:45.600
through the woods by packs of hounds, a stag with great horns, though driven through the forest from
00:38:52.340
faraway places, refuses to save its life in that water, prefers to die on that shore. It is not far from
00:39:02.020
here, nor is it a pleasant spot. It is not far from here, nor is it a pleasant spot. I always say you
00:39:11.300
can you see the English were into understatement even 1200 years ago being recited. But there's the
00:39:18.480
image of that stag dying on the shore, refusing to save its life in that water. That's the image of
00:39:27.400
masculinity which refuses vulnerability. There's nothing more masculine than the image of the stag with
00:39:34.960
the great tines, you know, against the sky. This story is saying, you know, whatever powers you have
00:39:43.420
in the outer physical world, their writ will not run below the surface of this lake.
00:39:50.920
And the deer will, you will die on the shore pursued by hounds. But Beowulf has something else. Beowulf goes
00:40:04.140
beneath the water and wrestles. There's this other image which I found incredibly puzzling to begin with,
00:40:11.820
and then incredibly useful. And that's this image of the trees around the lake feeding darkness into the
00:40:19.760
water. And I remember it was a beautiful image when I was first reciting this poem. I remember I was
00:40:25.960
working at AT&T, actually, out in New Jersey. And I remember they had a lake there with a fountain in
00:40:32.900
the middle. And after I'd worked with this poem in the morning with these executives, because they had a
00:40:38.360
difficult conversation to have. So this was a way of teeing up that conversation. I took myself around that
00:40:45.040
little lake with a little lake with a fountain. And I said, what is this image with the roots feeding darkness
00:40:51.020
down into the lake? I said, what's above the lake? We're above the lake here. Quite often, when we don't want to
00:40:59.440
have a conversation, we will actually feed darkness down into that theme to give us the excuse not to go down. And we do it
00:41:10.120
by saying, if I have this conversation, this will fall apart. If I have this conversation, I won't be able to
00:41:17.660
make a living anymore. If I have this conversation, these people won't respect me. If I have this
00:41:25.000
conversation, I won't have the same answers that I have now. I won't know where to go with it. So we
00:41:32.440
actually feed a kind of obscurity down there to give us the excuse not to go below the surface.
00:41:42.120
Somehow, Beowulf has this mature form of masculinity, which is actually the masculine joined with the
00:41:50.420
feminine of being able to make a friend of the unknown and make a friend of the darkness and go
00:41:58.840
down there to wrestle with Grendel's mother. So another thing that's hard for men with work,
00:42:06.220
so right there, there's that fear of those hard conversations is a fear. So you have to just
00:42:10.880
take that first step, go towards it. But then another thing you write about too with work,
00:42:17.500
particularly for men, is that a lot of men, they type their identity in their work.
00:42:21.900
Because that's what you're just kind of told from a boy, that you are what you do. Whenever you meet
00:42:26.780
some guy for the first time is like, well, what do you do for a living? But there's a lot of men who
00:42:30.540
can reach midlife or even they're 10 years into their career and they realize either I haven't
00:42:35.620
accomplished that much as I hope I wanted to, or it's been a complete failure, or I'm even in the
00:42:40.540
wrong career in the figuring this out in their forties, fifties. What insights have you, do you think
00:42:47.160
poetry can provide men who have that sort of heartbreak or sort of that realization that
00:42:52.920
their aspirations they had didn't work out the way they thought, or are they actually
00:43:01.780
Yeah, very good question. I think first of all, we have to contextualize this image of the classic
00:43:06.920
male and work and labeling themselves, because it's actually very magnified in North America,
00:43:15.040
way beyond many other cultures. If you're in Ireland, it can be sometimes impossible to find out
00:43:20.500
what a person actually does. They won't mention it actually, and it's seen as being very, you know,
00:43:26.200
closing a conversation down to do it or to name things too much. So there are lots of conversations
00:43:33.200
around work that are not held in the way they're held in North America. But what you're describing is
00:43:39.220
very North American male, and I think it just had to do with the way that the psyche was formed over
00:43:47.580
the last few hundred years and the struggle that was involved, you know. And I think the armor that
00:43:56.500
had to be put on psychologically in all of the dark things that were done to make a new society in North
00:44:04.500
America. So all of this has created a kind of isolated masculine identity in North America that I do
00:44:15.720
believe is breaking apart now in that we're, and I do think, you know, this elevation of this malign form
00:44:23.080
of masculinity into the White House is like a last ghost dance of that masculinity. We're seeing our
00:44:32.820
flaws crystallized, you know. We're seeing what is what we don't want, you know, written across the
00:44:41.100
heavens so that we can recognize it. And so the ability to have friendships outside of the workplace
00:44:52.220
is really, really important. It's representative of a much larger musical chordal ability of the
00:45:02.020
masculine soul, you know. One of the things I noticed coming to North America from Ireland and England was
00:45:07.540
that, was that American men mediated their emotional life. I'm talking about heterosexual men now,
00:45:16.440
but American heterosexual men mediated their emotional life through their wives or their girlfriends,
00:45:24.700
actually. And though they had close friendships when they were growing up at school with other men
00:45:30.020
and close friendships in college, it seemed to be something that was discarded once you went into
00:45:38.760
the workplace. This is not the same dynamic that you find in Europe. You know, there is a much more
00:45:46.040
powerful thread of adult male friendship in Irish and British society and probably in a lot of other
00:45:53.500
European societies and other societies around the world. I'm just speaking about the ones I'm
00:45:57.400
really familiar with. Yeah. So there, out of that comes a kind of isolation for the American male,
00:46:07.000
the Canadian male too, I'd say too. A necessity to keep reinforcing this perimeter that they've made
00:46:16.560
around them. One of the invitations in a really good friendship is to a kind of sense of mutual humiliation.
00:46:26.140
Yeah. When you have a close friendship over years, you will always humiliate yourself before your
00:46:34.360
friend. And you will always have to pick yourself up and reconstitute the relationship and they will do
00:46:42.640
the same thing. The other thing is in a long friendship, you will always insult your friend.
00:46:49.540
You will actually say something to them that they didn't want to hear. Almost always accidentally on
00:46:58.100
purpose, something that you've wanted to tell them that you haven't been able to tell them.
00:47:02.660
And then they get insulted and they walk off. But because the friendship has lasted for years,
00:47:09.000
by definition, they came back actually, and they forgave you. And you would have had to have done the same
00:47:16.500
thing to them. A really close male friendship keeps you connected to your sense of forgiveness,
00:47:25.880
of mercy, and of vulnerability in the world. When we lose that sense of comradeship, and we all know
00:47:36.400
the way, you know, one of the great things about, I mean, men come under a lot of pressure and a lot
00:47:41.220
of criticism right now. And it's just our time to take it, you know, in history, because the shoe's on
00:47:47.040
the other foot now. So we just have to take it. But one of the great things about masculine company
00:47:53.160
and companionship is this beautiful, when it's done right, you know, not in a sense of hazing, but this
00:47:59.200
beautiful sense of mutual humiliation, of having to have a sense of humor about yourself.
00:48:05.820
Yeah. But the people who are humiliating you, if they're good friends, have your best interests at
00:48:15.820
heart at the same time. They're doing it because you're getting far from yourself. You're pretending
00:48:20.560
to be someone you're not. You're getting above yourself, you know. And they're trying to bring
00:48:25.500
you back to a more grounded relationship. They're also trying to bring you back to what your gift
00:48:33.860
might be that they haven't yet received yet, but that they intuit is there. So one of the great
00:48:41.540
things about male friendship is robustness, you know, the ability to take knocks, to be humiliated
00:48:48.560
in one another's company, and to forgive one another at the same time through the natural
00:48:54.440
difficulties and distances of friendship over time.
00:49:00.000
So it sounds like one of the ways you build robustness into the inevitable setbacks, failures,
00:49:06.820
heartbreaks you experience at work is to foster, to nurture those friendships outside of work.
00:49:13.000
Yes, exactly. And that's representative also of a greater friendship with the natural world too.
00:49:19.180
You know, one of the great tragedies and diagnostics of a narrowed work life is when you,
00:49:25.720
when you stop sailing, you know, when you stop going out and climbing or being in the mountains,
00:49:33.620
when you stop enjoying the sky or the trees, you know, when you stop adventuring because you don't
00:49:41.620
have time for it or you can't find that person inside you, you know. So friendship with another
00:49:47.060
person, if we've lost those friendships, it's almost always, I feel, representative of having lost a
00:49:54.060
greater friendship with natural creation at the same time.
00:49:59.140
Because you're, it's, you're going back to this idea of like, it's, you're, you're looking,
00:50:03.880
you're exploring the conversational nature of reality, and it's hard to have a conversation
00:50:09.720
Yes. Yeah. And as we're coming towards the end of our, of our conversation here,
00:50:16.140
a real conversation always ends up with your physical and psychological breakdown. I always
00:50:25.020
say no one survives a real conversation in the manner to which, and it's why men won't have them
00:50:33.120
in a, in a relationship or marriage when they're young, because their identity is so connected to
00:50:39.100
the perimeter they've set up, uh, saying, this is me and this is not me. Yeah. Partly for evolutionary
00:50:45.660
reasons, you know, but the journey of a male into maturity is, is learning how to be broken down,
00:50:53.620
how to have a good sense of humor about it, how to know that there's always someone waiting for you
00:51:00.080
on the other side of that atomization, on the other side of that pulling apart. There's someone
00:51:08.040
calling to you and inviting you into a deeper understanding of what it means to be fully
00:51:15.160
male. Yeah. Which of course has to do with understanding the deeply feminine parts of
00:51:22.600
yourself that you've kept at bay. That's what Beowulf had to do. I'd say so. Yeah. Well,
00:51:29.160
as we end this conversation, is there a poem or a prose that we could end with that you think kind
00:51:34.080
of kind of touches on the themes we've been hitting, talking about today?
00:51:38.040
Yes. There's a poem called The Bell and the Blackbird. And this really has to do with the
00:51:45.420
unification of the inner and the outer worlds, you know, the bringing together of the masculine
00:51:51.060
and the feminine in many ways. And The Bell and the Blackbird is actually a, um, a kind of meme in
00:51:58.100
the Irish tradition. It comes from the story of a monk standing at the edge of the monastic precinct
00:52:04.520
back in, you know, there's a, a really remarkable form of Christianity extant in Ireland between
00:52:10.460
the fifth and the 10th centuries. It was called the Irish church or Celtic Christianity. And they had a
00:52:17.460
really incredible relationship with both their inner world and the natural world outside.
00:52:24.120
They didn't see the natural world as being competition to believing in, in their religion,
00:52:30.420
you know. So here's this monkey standing on the edge of the monastic precinct. He hears the bell calling
00:52:36.200
him to prayer. And he says to himself, that's the most beautiful sound in the world, which is the,
00:52:41.560
the call to the inner world, you know, to becoming more generous, a bigger person also, you know,
00:52:47.400
a large foundation. But at exactly the same time, because nothing's straightforward in the Irish
00:52:54.360
tradition, he hears the Blackbird calling from outside of the monastic wall. And he says to
00:53:00.960
himself, and that is also the most beautiful sound in the world, which is the world calling to you
00:53:09.320
just as it finds you. The physical world as it is with no changes, nothing. You've just got to meet it
00:53:17.400
as you find it, yeah. So this is the piece I wrote dedicated to that ancient Irish meme,
00:53:24.140
The Bell and the Blackbird. It's also the title poem of a collection I have of that name,
00:53:29.680
The Bell and the Blackbird. The bell and the blackbird. The sound of a bell still reverberating,
00:53:38.800
the sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field,
00:53:43.740
asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. The sound of a bell
00:53:53.640
still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you
00:54:01.580
to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage.
00:54:13.980
Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all. Wants you to walk to the
00:54:22.320
place where you find you already know you'll have to give every last thing away. The approach
00:54:30.060
that is also the meeting itself, the approach that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting
00:54:38.380
at all. That radiance you have always carried with you. That radiance you have always carried with
00:54:47.180
you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world
00:54:56.260
crying hallelujah. Well, David White, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your
00:55:01.880
time. Lovely. Thank you, Brett. Wish you well. My guest today was David White. He's a poet and
00:55:07.820
philosopher and the author of multiple books. They're all available on amazon.com. You can find
00:55:11.500
out more information about his work at his website, davidwhite.com. That's w-h-y-t-e dot com. Also,
00:55:17.220
check out our show notes at aom.is slash white. We can find links to resources. We can delve deeper
00:55:21.680
into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website
00:55:33.380
at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written
00:55:37.520
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00:56:04.820
Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what