This Life At the center of this life there is a man I want to know again. He has a new house, a clear view of the mountain, and hidden in the close-grained wood of his desk a new book of poems. He has a new house, a clear view of the mountain, and hidden in the close-grained wood of his desk a new book of poems. He has left the life he once tried to love. Now it is only a shadow calling for another shadow, and this shadow wants to become real again. It falls against walls and fences and stairways, the dark penumbra of my belonging. Now let me cast my shadow against life before the spectre haunts me to my grave. Now let me cast my shadow against life before the spectre haunts me to my grave. At the center of this life there is a man I want to know again. He has a new house, a clear view of the mountain,

[01:06]

and hidden in the close-grained wood of his desk a new book of poems. That stanza was one of the first stanzas I wrote at an upstairs landing of a new old house which I moved into with my young son, and which became a place of spaciousness and silence, a place where I found I had hours and hours of time to myself and alone, where I could actually have the luxury of taking stock of my life, and of having things as you do in your own house, just exactly as you want them, and building a kind of layered tonality of color and light and experience that was exquisitely my own. And it felt like a marvelous blessing and luxury such

[02:13]

that I felt as if I had been given a special dispensation in that there should be a time in everyone's life where they're able actually to make a home of their own no matter how small that home would be. And this experience of being in this old farmhouse, now being filled with my own character, really made me ask questions about how we make homes in the world, how we fashion our belonging, and also the way that in a cyclical sense we are constantly making homes for ourselves, and then just as we have everything in place, and we are tacking up the last picture on the wall, there's a way in which we almost always at that point hear a knock on the door, and we're out again, orphaned into the world outside. You're out of the old house that you made for yourself,

[03:20]

and into a new territory which you don't quite recognize yet. It is a home for you, but as yet we don't recognize the territory, and so it seems as if we're actually being exiled and we're being orphaned. D. H. Lawrence heard this knock at the door, and he said, Who is that knocking at my door? Who is that knocking at my door? It is someone come to do me harm. Who is that knocking at my door? Who is that knocking at my door? It is someone come to do me harm. And then he catches himself, and he says, No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them. Admit them. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them. Admit them. Once we walk out of the house, we begin to make a new home for ourselves in the world, and we begin to fill that territory. And this is, in a sense, an account of how I filled

[04:24]

this house with my own life, and how the house filled me with life. Here's a morning poem, waking up with a dawn light coming through onto the landing, and the cedar in the house lighting up with that golden light, the house of belonging. I awoke this morning in the gold light turning this way and that. I awoke this morning in the gold light turning this way and that. Thinking, thinking for a moment. It was one day like any other. But the veil had gone from my darkened heart, and I thought, It must have been the quiet candlelight that filled my room. It must have been the first easy rhythm with which I breathed myself to sleep. It must have been the prayer I said, speaking to the otherness of the night. And I thought, This is the good day you could meet your love. This is the black day someone

[05:29]

close to you could die. This is the day you realize how easily the thread is broken between this world and the next. And I found myself sitting up in the quiet pathway of light, the tawny, close-grained cedar burning round me like fire, and all the angels of this housely heaven ascending through the first roof of light the sun had made. This is the bright home in which I live. This is where I ask my friends to come. This is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love. This is the temple of my adult aloneness, and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life. There is no house, there is no house like the house of belonging. This is the temple of my adult aloneness, and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life. There is no house, there is no house like the house of belonging. It's one thing to have the image and

[06:38]

identity of the traveler and the seeker. It can sometimes be more difficult to actually put down that identity when you find what you seek, and you find there's another death comes along in the interior family when you're actually presented with your own happiness, because you must take that happiness by the hand, you must claim your belonging, and you must leave this roving identity which may have been absolutely necessary to get you to this threshold, but now has to be sloughed off like an old skin and stepped out of. I awoke this morning in the gold light turning this way, and that thinking, thinking for a moment. It was one day like any other, but the veil had gone from my darkened heart, and I thought it must have been the quiet candlelight that filled my room. It must have been the first easy

[07:43]

rhythm with which I breathed myself to sleep. It must have been the prayer I said speaking to the otherness of the night, and I thought this is the good day you could meet your love. This is the black day someone close to you could die. This is the day you realize how easily the thread is broken between this world and the next, and I found myself sitting up in the quiet pathway of light, the tawny, close-grained cedar burning round me like fire, and all the angels of this housely heaven ascending through the first roof of light the sun had made. This is the bright home in which I live. This is where I ask my friends to come. This is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love. This is the temple of my adult aloneness, and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life. There is no house,

[08:44]

there is no house like the house of belonging. There is no house, there is no house, there is no house like the house of belonging. As the weeks and months went by in the house and I found my own rhythms around the property and around the garden, I found myself luxuriating deeply in the silence of the place, and the fact that, in a sense, I was able to leave myself alone and to plant myself in that place, almost as I was planting the flowers and vegetables in the garden, and allow myself to grow. And it was a reflection to me of, in a sense, of how we should treat one another, that we should allow each other our own lives, and not be tearing at each other in the way we tend to, demanding things

[09:51]

which, quite often, we're asked at bottom to supply for ourselves. Here's a poem called At Home, which has a quality of at-homeness and silence. At home amidst the bees, wandering in the garden in the summer light, the sky a broad roof for the house of contentment, where I wish to live forever in the eternity of my own fleeting and momentary happiness, where I wish to live forever in the eternity of my own fleeting and momentary happiness, I walk toward the kitchen door as if walking toward the door of a recognized heaven, and see the simplicity of shelves, and the blue dishes, and the vaporing steam rising from the kettle that called me in, not just this aromatic cup from which to drink, not just this aromatic cup from which to drink,

[10:55]

but the flavor of a life made whole and lovely through the imagination seeking its way, but the flavor of a life made whole and lovely through the imagination seeking its way, not just this house around me, but the arms of a fierce but healing world, not just this line I write, but the innocence of an earned forgiveness flowing again through hands made new with writing, and a man with no company but his house, his garden, and his own well-peopled solitude entering the silences and chambers of the heart to start again, and a man with no company, and a man with no company but his house, his garden, and his own well-peopled solitude entering the silences and chambers of the heart to start again. I felt as if I'd stumbled on an articulation of something I'd felt for a long time

[12:01]

around this inner well-peopled solitude. One of the great pleasures of being alone and of having silence is to actually greet all these inner memories that reside inside you, and inner landscapes, and the ability to let them arise and fall away in their own fashion, so that there's many an inner conversation you'd have from the beginning of the day to the end, and there's no greater loneliness a human being can feel in the world than when they're with another person from whom they feel estranged, and there's often no more feeling of closeness than you can feel when you're alone and give yourself over in a kind of attentive discipline to the inner voices, and inner conversations, and memories that make up an individual human life.

[13:05]

There's a poem that has the title, It Happens to Those Who Live Alone. It Happens to Those Who Live Alone. I was interested in the phenomenology of silence. Sometimes when you're on a boat, sailing out at sea by yourself, you'd hear voices or things being said to you, or if you're out in the wilderness there's an imaginatory auditory faculty that seems to be experienced by almost anyone who lives alone or journeys out alone, whereby the natural conversations they're used to seem to be pushed out in a kind of greater frontier into the landscape, or the seascape, or the place where they might be. This is an experience of the phenomenology of that. It Happens to Those Who Live Alone. It happens to those who live alone that they feel sure of visitors when no one else is there.

[14:11]

It happens to those who live alone that they feel sure of visitors when no one else is there, until the one day and one particular hour working in the quiet garden when the green bud at the center of their slowly opening silence flowers in belonging, and they realize at once that all along they have been an invitation to everything and every kind of trouble. That all along they have been an invitation to everything and every kind of trouble, and that life happens by to those who inhabit silence, like the bees visiting the tall mallow on their legs of gold, or the wasps going from door to door in the tall forest of the daisies. I have my freedom today because nothing really happened and nobody came to see me, only the slow growing of the garden in the summer heat and the silence of that unborn life making itself known at my desk,

[15:13]

my hands still dark with the crumbling soil as I write and watch the first lines of a new poem like flowers of scarlet fire coming to fullness in a new light, my hands still dark with the crumbling soil as I write and watch the first lines of a new poem like flowers of scarlet fire coming to fullness in a new light. I have my freedom today because nothing really happened and nobody came to see me. I have my freedom today because nothing really happened and nobody came to see me, only the slow growing of the garden in the summer heat. I remember reading a French philosopher once who said that the definition of an intellectual or even of a philosopher was someone who could

[16:18]

sit on a railway platform for an hour without a newspaper and be content and happy with themselves. In other words you'd let your mind roll and have the luxury and expansion and ability just to wonder where it would and that you would actually look at things and ask questions about the things you saw around you, even the quotidian everyday things, that would place your life in a totally different perspective. One phenomena that happens every day or I should say every night is a phenomena of darkness, the absence of light and I'm always interested in the complete change in the human character that occurs at night time and it doesn't really matter whether you're outside in the dark or inside the lighted house there is a totally different enclosed sense and a sense of

[17:23]

being surrounded by the unknown, your own unknown and perhaps your own fears too, as well as the great unknowns of the actual physical world which you literally cannot see as clearly. And I've always felt that the relationship to darkness is always something of a diagnostic of our relationship to the unknown and there was one night I was sat there in my little desk area on the landing alcove looking out at the darkness and the rain and I suddenly felt an almost comradely sense of affection and friendship for the night and this is a hymn to darkness really and it's really an exhortation to friendship with the unknown and with the night, sweet darkness. When your eyes are tired the world is tired also,

[18:28]

when your eyes are tired the world is tired also, when your vision has gone no part of the world can find you, it's time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own, it's time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own, there you can be sure you are not beyond love, the dark will be your womb tonight, the night will give you a horizon further than you can see, you must learn one thing, you must learn one thing, the world was made to be free in, you must learn one thing, the world was made to be free in, give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong, sometimes, sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn that anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you, sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to

[19:33]

learn that anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you, sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn that anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. One of the alternative lines I had for the last part of this poem was, anything or anyone that does not bring you alive you have made too small for you. Because I do feel that this experience cuts both ways, that sometimes even the most precious things in our lives will not bring us to any kind of sense of ourselves or to any sense of vitality or enthusiasm and sometimes even your own house which you've made and put together so assiduously

[20:34]

over the years and sometimes the work for which you studied so long and for which you sacrificed so much and sometimes your own children, your very own children become just another thing you're doing and somehow, somehow we've entered a kind of amnesia in which we've made them too small for us. We have somehow fashioned them in our imaginations and our minds and we've fashioned our responsibilities in such a way that they no longer make sense and they no longer grant life back to us. So this first line in the poem, when your eyes are tired the world is tired also, is really also harking back to an experience I had as a naturalist in the Galapagos Islands where I found that the largeness and entirety and cathedral-like nature of the world was totally closed off to me if I didn't also open up a kind of spacious vision

[21:38]

in my own perceptions and my own eyes and that the more my eyes were closed against the world the more the world seemed to be closed against me and it was as if not that the world was was somehow taking its revenge on me for not paying attention but I really felt after a while that the world was constantly trying to find me but where there were no attentive powers present there was no surface area for that world to find me. There was nothing that creation could actually see, that the person who is enclosed and cynical and narrow in their vision barely appears on life's radar screen and barely appears in the great ecology of being, the great chain of experience of which we're a part. So the act of actually paying attention in a fiercer kind of way is the act of showing up and the act of appearance. So this is the act of paying attention to the

[22:42]

night. When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your womb tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. You must learn one thing. You must learn one thing. The world, the world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn that anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. I remember writing these lines at the desk, the lines, you must learn one thing,

[23:43]

and not knowing what would follow in that great gulf of anticipation that came after that line, you must learn one thing. But I sat there almost with the hair standing up on the back of my neck in just pure and absolute anticipation. And there was almost like an inner collapse of this anticipation and a coming to rest in the line I found myself writing next. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. So this was the freedom, not from responsibility, but the freedom and spaciousness you would feel in a life that was your own. And I often think that it, that destiny doesn't have much to do with our normal images of that word, the images we have of

[24:47]

Julius Caesar or Madame Curie or Napoleon, that a person is living out their destiny if they're at the center of their belonging. And that you could live a very private life and you could have a very small house and a small kitchen garden. And if for you that was, that was the place where you would, you would live out your most pleasurable moments and the place where you'd be able to give your gift, in that instance perhaps the gift of hospitality, then it would seem like an enormous and spacious cathedral. You would have endless horizons within that small place. And perhaps people who came to it would actually experience it as a kind of palace of hospitality. Whereas a great and well-appointed house can be the most narrow place in the world if there's not the spirit of welcome to usher you through the enormous doors of the place. The place can actually

[25:48]

be barred to you. This next poem, All the True Vows, has to do with the way we can often fasten ourselves into houses which are too small for ourselves. Homes we've made that we gave ourselves to and dedicated ourselves to. And we feel a sense of loyalty which has become misplaced because you can actually no longer belong to it in a way that keeps you alive. In order to stay in the house you would have to haunt it. Not live in it as a real human being but actually haunt it as a kind of ghost. So this is a rather desperately fierce poem I wrote. One of those poems where you're not sure you want to hear the truths that you're beginning to enunciate. And it's called All the True Vows. I do feel that we're living in a time that any promises or vows or constructions or

[26:51]

organizations that are not built on true foundations go the way of the world and the tide of life is working to scour them away almost immediately. And that we must again and again return to the foundations on which our life is built at any one time and make sure that those foundations are real and true. All the True Vows. All the true vows are secret vows. The ones we speak out loud are the ones we break. All the true vows are secret vows. The ones we speak out loud are the ones we break. There is only one life you can call your own and a thousand others you can call by any name you want. There's only one life you can call your own and a thousand others you can call by any name you want. Hold to the truth you make every day with your own body. Don't turn your face away. Don't turn your face away. Hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were born with.

[27:52]

Those who do not understand their destiny will never understand the friends they have made nor the work they have chosen nor the one life that waits beyond all the others nor the one life that waits beyond all the others. Those who do not understand their destiny will never understand the friends they have made nor the work they have chosen nor the one life that waits beyond all the others. By the lake in the wood in the shadows you can whisper that truth to the quiet reflection you see in the water. Whatever you hear from the water remember it wants you to carry the sound of its truth on your lips. Remember in this place no one can hear you and out of the silence you can make a promise it will kill you to break. That way you'll find what is real and what is not and out of the silence you can make a promise it will kill you to break. That way you'll find what is real and what is not. I know what I am saying time almost forsook me.

[29:00]

I know what I am saying time almost forsook me and I looked again seeing my reflection I broke a promise and spoke for the first time after all these years in my own voice before it was too late to turn my face again. Seeing my reflection I broke a promise and spoke for the first time after all these years in my own voice before it was too late to turn my face again. No vow or promise should be broken lightly but I do believe that there are certain promises we make in a youthful dedication to the world that are not fully congruent with the person that we actually become as the years roll by and there's a certain sense of betrayal that

[30:03]

that comes with actually choosing a life that is more suited to yourself and that there's no way around that sense of betrayal except to make a kind of friendship with it and to to make whatever peace you have with that that old life so that you can live more fully in the new one. This poem also has a kind of exortory nature as if I'm speaking to myself in the mirror and telling myself as one does hopefully when other people are not around when you're trying to steal yourself for what you have to do and or perhaps what you have to say but this is a stealing myself for the rest of my life or for the rest of the day it's called what to remember when waking and I always feel that that moment of waking is a terrific passageway

[31:08]

it's a frontier between this inner silence this inner darkness this inner territory where your whole mind has been given a kind of free form ability to run in so many directions and to uncover things that you just haven't given yourself time for during the day and then as you wake you bring this whole cargo of of intimation and revelation from this other world into the day and that if you bring in your your strategic faculties too early you lose the whole gift of everything that has been gathered and harvested for you in that night so this is a reminder to myself to just keep that little and but incredibly important window open what to remember when waking in that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake

[32:15]

coming back to this life from the other more secret movable and frighteningly honest world where everything began there is a small opening into the day there is a small opening into the day which closes the moment you begin your plans in that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake coming back to this life from the other more secret movable and frighteningly honest world where everything began there's a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans what you can plan is too small for you to live what you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep to be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others to remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance to be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden

[33:22]

as a gift to others to remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance you are not a troubled guest on this earth you are not an accident amidst other accidents you were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged now looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be what urgency calls you to your one love what shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky what shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky is it waiting in the fertile sea in the trees beyond the house in the life you can imagine for yourself in the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk is it waiting in the fertile sea in the trees beyond the house in the life you can imagine

[34:26]

for yourself in the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk there's nothing like a winter night with the wind blowing and the rain lashing and yourself alone by the fire for giving you cause to think and cause to feel that you're actually not isolated by that weather but actually cradled by it and protected by it inside the warmth of your house this is a poem called the winter of listening in which i try to sum up the experience of the quiet winter thought that runs through the body that's very different from the more explosive and expansive experiences of summer although towards the end of the poem there's certainly

[35:29]

a little seed of summer already there being anticipated in the midst of the winter night it's called the winter of listening no one but me by the fire my hands burning red in the palms while the night wind carries everything away outside all this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense around every living thing what is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence what we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need what we hate in ourselves is what we cannot know in ourselves but what is true to the pattern does not need to be explained inside everyone

[36:31]

is a great shout of joy waiting to be born inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born even with summer so far off i feel it grown in me now and ready to arrive in the world all those years listening to those who had nothing to say all those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard all those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening and the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness silence and winter has led me to that otherness so let this winter of listening be enough for the new life i must call my own so let this winter of listening be enough for the

[37:32]

new life i must call my own every sound has a home from which it has come to us and a door through which it is going every sound has a home from which it has come to us and a door through which it is going again out into the world to make another home we speak only with the voices of those we can hear ourselves and the body has a voice only for that portion of the body of the world it has learned to perceive and the body has a voice only for that portion of the body of the world it has learned to perceive it becomes a world itself by listening hard for the way it belongs there it can learn how it must be and what it must do and here and here in the tumult of the night i hear the walnut above the child's swing swaying its dark limbs in the wind and the rain now come to beat against my window and somewhere in this cold night of wind and stars the first

[38:37]

whispered opening of those hidden and invisible springs that uncoil in the still summer air each yet to be imagined rose and here in the tumult of the night i hear the walnut above the child's swing swaying its dark limbs in the wind and the rain now come to beat against my window and somewhere somewhere in this cold night of wind and stars the first whispered opening of those hidden and invisible springs that uncoil in the still summer air each yet to be imagined rose there was one other tumultuous night that year which i experienced not at home but on a flight

[39:40]

to chicago and i do remember the drive to the airport was one through sluicing rain and the takeoff was delayed and finally took place in the midst of a storm and it seemed like all our way up into the heavens we were buffeted by turbulence and then all of our descent into chicago was also through the very turbulent skies of the of that particularly difficult winter and i remember as i was wedged there in the seat next to the next to the window looking out at the the darkness and the rain the clouds i remember wondering what i was doing i was in the middle of a particularly uh fierce schedule and uh wondering what my motives were for going to give this talk in chicago and what i was about and i find myself caught in this downward spiral

[40:42]

starting to verge on self pity there and which is very easy to do when you're traveling on modern day airlines but i did manage to catch myself and asked myself to do something which i am often exhorting others to do through my portrait which is which was to actually find an image that was resident in me that would make sense of all this tumult and of this packed itinerary and of my work and of this flying into these dark american cities and this appearance in these strange fluorescent lit rooms where i talk about um i talk about creativity poetry memory and choosing the life that is uh truly your own and the image that appeared to me was a was a foreign one to this situation because the image was of a holy well in the west of

[41:45]

ireland and it was of a holy well which is in the uplifted limestone region of north county clare called the burn a really incredible place of wild flowers and limestone rocks and pasturage and in many places in the burn there are old wells which have been places and focuses of contemplation and prayer for thousands and thousands of years long before christianity but have also been um subsumed within the christian story and are often now associated with particular saints but they're also associated with particular forms of healing and one well may be useful for the curing of the eyes or the ears another may be useful for the curing of the stomach but the particular image that i retrieved inside myself was of one night when i crept up to one of these wells and looked in and saw all the stars reflected in the surface

[42:52]

of the well and all of the stars i remember were this particularly scintillating color of blue and i was quite surprised and somewhat mesmerized by this this interior image and immediately was feeling a lot better for no reason at all except for the reason of finding myself by that well side again but it was that moment when i opened my eyes again and looked out of the window just as we were coming into the airport and there were all the blue lights of the runway of whole hair airport right beneath me and it was just as if in almost parallel fashion to the interior image i had retrieved in my own body i was dropping into these blue stars on the surface of the runway and i had this immediate knitting together of the two images and i realized that in a sense these airports

[43:53]

which i dropped into out of the night sky all over america were in effect my own my was my own well of nourishment this is where i did my work this is where i took my poetry out into the world this is where i made a difference this was the place where i and others could drink from the healing well of poetry and i had a particularly experience that night of of driving through the pouring rain in the back of the taxi being led into the building and up to the umpteenth floor of this glass and steel structure and being led sure enough into this brightly lit fluorescent palace of a auditorium and beginning my talk and there was a moment uh half an hour or so into the talk when i looked over and i saw a man by the window and behind him that window was totally

[44:56]

whitened by the reflection of the fluorescent light so you could see none of the stars outside at all but it seemed to me as i looked at that man that he was remembering something that was incredibly ancient as ancient as the stars because his mouth was open and he was looking at me as coleridge might have described him um echoing the beginning of the great poem the ancient mariner he looked he was looking at me uh like a three years old child there's just an astonishing innocence in it and obviously the poetry has had triggered these old memories and you felt as if he was actually walking into experiences which he neglected inside himself for years and i said to myself that's the reason i came when i looked over at that man and this is a poem which is dedicated to that particular evening called the well of stars blue lights on the runway like stars on

[45:58]

the surface of a well into which i fall each night from the sky emerging through the tunnel door of the jetway and the black waters of the night in the cities of america blue lights on the runway like stars on the surface of a well into which i fall each night from the sky emerging through the tunnel door of the jetway and the black waters of the night in the cities of america In the lit rooms of glass and steel, in the still and secret towers, under the true stars hid by cloud, and the steam-shrouded roofs of the mansions of money and hope, I come with my quiet voice and my insistence and my stories, and out of that second and deeper well I see again those other blue stars and that other darkness, closer even than the night outside, the one we refuse to mention, the darkness we know so well inside everyone. I have a few griefs and joys I can call my own, I have a few griefs and joys I can call

[46:59]

my own, and through accident it seems a steadfast faith in each of them, and that's what I will say matters when the story ends. But it takes a little while to get there. But feel the unburdening and the laying down and the willingness to really tire of yourself, and then step by step the ways the poets through time generously gave themselves to us, walking like pilgrims through doubt, combining their fear, their fierceness, and their faith. And then, step by step, the ways the poets through time generously gave themselves to us, walking like pilgrims through doubt, combining their fear, their fierceness, and their faith. And you now, and you now, in the front of the room, under the fluorescent light, by the reflected window, hiding all the stars you have forgotten, one more member of the prison

[48:00]

population whose eyes have caught the open gate at last. You are the one, you are the one for whom the gift was made. Keep that look in your eyes, and you'll gladly grow tired of your reflection. Keep that look in your eyes, and you'll gladly grow tired of your reflection. All this way, through the great cloud race between here and Seattle, just to look beneath your face. There, for all to see, there for all to see, the well of stars, and the great night from which you were born. There, for all to see, the well of stars, and the great night from which you were born. I suppose the well of stars is as detailed an exposition of how I work in front of a

[49:00]

phenomenology of what occurs when you're actually trying to engage in that conversation with a large audience, and to make that conversation real. But it takes a little while to get there, all the unburdening, and the laying down, and the willingness to really tire of yourself. And then step by step, the way the poets through time generously gave themselves to us, walking like pilgrims through doubt, combining their fear, their fierceness, and their faith. Walking like pilgrims through doubt. I often feel when we walk in the footsteps of these poets, as they're recited, you realize that they were men and women just like ourselves. They were not gurus, they were not saints, they did not set themselves up as religious teachers. They were ordinary men and women, just as we are, who were attempting to live out the one life that was their own, that they could call their own. And they did it in the midst of great doubt, and often great fear. Walking like pilgrims through doubt, combining their

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fear, and their fierceness, and their faith. And by walking in their footsteps, they seem to grant us the courage of their own articulation. And there's many a line in a poem which has propelled me in my own life through to places I certainly feel I could not have reached simply through my own words.

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