Welcome on a beautiful, glad-to-be-alive morning here at Green Gulch. I thought I'd start with a glad-to-be-alive poem. We'll get to the more miserable ones later. And this is Derek Mahon waking on a morning such as this on the east coast of Ireland looking out over the Irish Sea in a deeply passionate marriage with his work. But more importantly, with life, with the frontier that work has taken him to in life. And today we're working with the three marriages, and it's a very wide interpretation of marriage because you have the marriage with another person, which is the received understanding of marriage. And when I speak about marriage with another person, I mean official or not, whether you're

[01:07]

in a partnership, whatever gender you are, in my presidential campaign, I am for gay marriage, so I may not be able to take Alabama, but... And even if you don't have a partner at the moment, the longing for a person who's actually over the horizon is a kind of marriage too. So this first marriage with another person includes everyone, most people I can think of. There are a few stalwarts who are very glad not to have anyone in their life at all, but usually that's a passing phase and the longing returns. Yes, we need a little less reverb, and thanks very much, yes. Is that good? Can you hear? Yes. That's a lovely sound, actually. Thank you, that's perfect. Don't touch it.

[02:07]

And then there's the marriage with your work, and I often say your work must be a marriage, otherwise why would you have put up with so much over the years, you know? There's something larger than the everyday grit and difficulty that keeps you going through the door. Sometimes it's because you're supporting a family and that holds you to it. Sometimes it's because the harvest, as you realize, will come a few years down the way, but in the midst of it all there's some kind of remembering of a greater context that you're attempting all the time. And then there's that, the most difficult marriage of all, perhaps, which is the marriage with that changing, movable, eccentric frontier called your self, and staying close to yourself,

[03:14]

close to the frontier of where you actually are. I often think, you know, a hall like this where we're steeped in the discipline of silence and we'll take some time for silence, because we should take advantage of the atmosphere in here and the amount of silence that's actually in the walls and ingrained in the floors here, for us all to take a step in that direction. But there's a tremendous marriage with silence which is necessary in order to understand who you are now, independent of the cacophony of inherited voices, and inherited voices from your culture, from your society, but also inherited voices from the previous epochs of your own existence. Who you were a few years ago, who you were just a few months ago, who you were yesterday, but to have the freedom to appear, you know, right at the edge.

[04:18]

I'm having an interesting experience in my life right now, the frontier of having spent, you know, 20-odd years making a place for myself as a poet, and first of all saying it in a whisper to myself, and then to a few people that I knew, and then out loud, and then to insurance agents, and border guards, and passport forms, you know, poet just, and then having in many ways inhabited that house, you know, lived in that house, it's suddenly the name poet isn't important to me anymore, suddenly. So there's some other frontier which is appearing, but of course there's a tremendous inheritance of, there was a necessity at a certain tidal epoch in my life to be the poet, and it was

[05:20]

a real necessity, there was nothing illusionary about it as far as I can see. I may change my mind later in the day, but, so who's here now? And as I was writing my last book of poetry, that was one of the great dynamics of writing, it was a pleasurable exploration, a willingness to say, who's here now, who's actually alive, and what do you want, and who do you want to be with, and how do you want to be with them, and how do you want to be in this world, a sense of freedom, independent of the daily necessary constraints of your work, your relationship, and the life you've built that you call yourself. So this is the title poem from, oh no, I was going to start with Derek Matton, wasn't I,

[06:24]

so let's... Why should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and the high tide reflected on the ceiling? So Derek Matton, he's an Irish poet, so he's waking up at the frontier, not only of his own life, but of all the Irish poets that have been before him, and it's quite a radical thing for an Irish poet to write about happiness. So he's got this incredible inheritance of loss behind him, and this inheritance of loss has nurtured him, because as Chesterton said about the Irish, they're a strange people, all their love songs are sad and all their war songs are happy, and it's true about... So here he has this tremendous gift, which has nurtured him, how to live in the world and feel just as Irish when you're defeated and destroyed as you would if you were successful. In fact, Ireland's only just beginning to explore what it means to be successful in the modern

[07:31]

or post-modern sense of the word. And so he's having to clear away, because he's going to write a poem about happiness. This is a whole departure, and he's having to... You can feel him on the back foot in the first line, because he's saying, why should I not be glad? It's a defensive line in many ways. Why should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and the high tide reflected on the ceiling? There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. The poems flow from the hand unbidden. The poems flow from the hand unbidden, and the hidden source is the watchful heart. The sun will rise in spite of everything, and the far cities are beautiful and bright. I lie here in a riot of sunlight, watching the daybreak and the clouds flying. Everything, everything, everything is going to be all right. We could turn that down a little bit more, actually.

[08:34]

Why should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and the high tide reflected on the ceiling? There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. The poems flow from the hand unbidden, and the hidden source, the hidden source is the watchful heart. The hidden source is the watchful heart. The sun will rise in spite of everything, and the far cities are beautiful and bright. I lie here in a riot of sunlight, watching the daybreak and the clouds flying. Everything, everything is going to be all right. So there's an astonishing frontier. Everything, how many times are you driving on the way to work saying to yourself, with utter conviction, everything is going to be all right. And of course the line is only meaningful if you took that line just by itself, you've got a very bad Hallmark card. But it, you open the card, it says everything is going to be all right.

[09:41]

Thank you. Yes, thanks. But it's built on an incredible foundation, and the foundational line in that poem is the poems flow from the hand unbidden, uncalled for, and the hidden source is the watchful heart. Because he's saying that he's in a profound state of attention, the kind of attention that you're attempting to cultivate when you sit on a black cushion in a room like this day after day, week after week, month after month, you're actually cultivating a watchful heart, an ability to actually appear at the frontier of your own existence. Not somewhere far back, working the edge by remote control from the inside, but actually appearing on life's radar screen. And of course when you appear, the corollary of that is that you're vulnerable. There's no way of appearing, of being in a real conversation, of any kind of intimacy

[10:45]

with another person, with your work, with yourself, without you risking yourself, and being touchable, risking and becoming aware of your own mortality. There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. When Madden says that, he's not saying just look on the sunny side of life and be positive. I think he's saying when you're living your own life, you can take a hell of a lot of dying. What kills us is when we're attempting to live someone else's life, and then even the successes are a kind of defeat. Why should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and a high tide reflected on the ceiling? There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that.

[11:47]

It's a beautiful break for freedom, if you know the Irish tradition, that line. He's just right at the edge there, and he's got the whole inheritance, but he's also stepping out of it at the same time. There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. The palms flow from the hand, unbidden, uncalled for, and the hidden source, the hidden source is the watchful heart. The sun will rise in spite of everything, and the far cities are beautiful and bright. I lie here in a riot of sunlight, watching the daybreak and the clouds flying. Everything, everything, everything is going to be all right. So I love that sense of freedom that you can feel in a good poem. I was working with a group of water engineers in Oxford just before Christmas and for the holidays, and one of them came up to me at the break, and of course many of them haven't

[12:49]

touched poetry or seen it for years, and one of them came up to me and said, I don't know whether to go in on Monday morning, change everything, I don't know whether to resign, I don't know whether to buy a Harley Davidson and drive off somewhere, you know. But I thought it was a beautiful expression of the freedom that you can find in a great line. I had those lines I read last night, good poetry begins with the lightest touch, a breeze arriving from nowhere, a whispered healing arrival, a settling into things, then like a hand in the dark, it arrests the whole body, stealing you for revelation, in the silence that follows a great line, you can feel Lazarus deep inside, even the laziest, most deathly afraid part of you, lift up his hands and walk toward the light. Good poetry begins with the lightest touch, a breeze arriving from nowhere, a whispered

[13:53]

healing arrival, a word in your ear, a settling into things, then like a hand in the dark, it arrests the whole body, stealing you for revelation. I love that moment in a room full of water engineers, where they're looking at you and they suddenly realize this is really serious stuff. And they're implicated, and the worst of it is they don't want to leave, you know, they don't want to leave the room. It's like the moment in the ancient marina where the wedding guests are stopped by the bells and the singing, and they can't move from the place where they're rooted until the mariner has finished his tale.

[14:54]

This is where you are, this is the frontier of your existence, of course, Coleridge was actually speaking to a whole society too, at the edge of a certain kind of wild discovery in the Romantic period when he wrote that piece. So he's speaking not only to an individual, individuals on the way to this wedding feast, but also the whole society that was emerging at that time. Good poetry begins with the lightest touch, a breeze arriving from nowhere, a whispered healing arrival, a word in your ear, a settling into things, then like a hand in the dark, it arrests the whole body, stealing you for revelation. In the silence that follows a great line, you can feel Lazarus deep inside, even the laziest, most deathly afraid part of you, lift up his hands and walk toward the light. This poem belongs to you, this poem belongs to you and is already finished, of course

[16:19]

I wrote that without the rest of the poem being finished, so it was a lovely, that was my break for freedom there, so you had the rest of the... So instead of the weight of the poem, you know, how am I going to, what's this about, you know, you've got Keats, Yates, Emily Dickinson looking over your shoulder, just your average writing session, you know, so, but what am I going to say to advance the frontiers of human knowledge, yeah, so, little break for freedom here, this poem belongs to you and is already finished, yeah. It was begun years ago, and I put it away knowing it would come into the world in its own time, in fact, you have already read it, and closing the pages of the book are now abandoning the projects of the day, and putting on your shoes and coat to take a walk, it has been long years since you felt like this, you have remembered what I remembered when

[17:23]

I first began to write, this poem belongs to you and is already finished. It was begun years ago, and I put it away knowing it would come into the world in its own time, in fact, you have already read it, you have already read it, and closing the pages of the book are now abandoning the projects of the day, and putting on your shoes and coat to take a walk, it has been long years since you felt like this, you have remembered what I remembered when I first began to write, you look up from that poem, the whole hall is empty, people walking off, where did they go, the administration asks here, to some frontier experience, at the Pelican Inn, just over there.

[18:25]

So, we'll have a great day together, and exploring these three marriages, and making ourselves dangerous again for the world, that's one of the great tasks of poetry is to make you dangerous again, but if you could just turn to someone sitting near to you, and just have a word about what you're looking forward to in the day and what's brought you here, and maybe a word or so about yourself, as they say, act as if you understand what I'm asking you to do, so. It's worked for all of your educational career, so why change things now? Spend a few minutes just getting to know someone you haven't come with. You can bring your conversations to a graceful conclusion, so perhaps we could just hear

[19:33]

from a few people around the room, either something you said yourself, you surprised yourself with, or something you heard another person saying, they're looking for, what you're looking for out of the day, we'll get a feeling for the pilgrimage here, so. Not only are the old, previous selves not terribly useful to me on the threshold I am now, but the tools I used to use to answer the question, who is in residence now, are particularly useful at this point. So, you know, who's in residence in the West that's important to me now, which is one of the questions you presented to us last night. It's a big unknown, because none of the means of answering that from the past are really cutting it anymore. Very good, yeah. There's a friend of mine, Patrick McCormack, lives in County Clare, who I'll be seeing in a few weeks. Out of

[20:39]

his element, I'll be seeing him in L.A., but he's a big, strapping fellow, but he talks about certain people, but also certain parts of yourself, with the image, the metaphor of people as potatoes. And he says there's some people you can boil them and boil them and they're never done. So there are parts of us, you know, who are like that. And if you try to take them head on, you know, they're just, they're immovable. And what you have to do is actually build a larger life around them, so they're just like rocks with a stream going around them. They can be quite beautiful, you know, with the pattern of your life actually moving around them, around the rock. But if you're coming down, I don't know if you've ever been river rafting, and you're fixated on a rock that you are not going to hit. Watch the rock, watch the rock, watch

[21:43]

the rock, the rock. It's the center of your world, and so naturally you are drawn to it. But to look at other flows, you know, natural flows that are occurring around these hardened parts of ourself, this can be quite useful. We were talking about how fast the river flows as you get over it, and how the tiles are staying that way forever. I don't have anybody to play with today, but somebody's here. And how fast it's going down. Paul, you know, the wine grows the same, but it seems like the place we inhabit has things that grow up around it, and they can't have all that space. And so, I guess we need to be calm. Do I dare? No. Yes, and because of the speed, it seems to me there's an all the more compelling need

[22:55]

for silence the older you get. I often think, you know, there's many people having children quite late now in their life. And, of course, they're more mature, and in many ways they're better parents. But in other ways, you know, they'll say, I don't seem to have the patience that I had when I had my first one 20 years ago, or whatever it was. But I often think it's not patience, it's just that parts of you are turning towards silence in a very powerful way. And, of course, silence is a very rare commodity when you have a child in the house. And so it's actually that need for silence that you're looking for, that you have to make for yourself, you know. And, of course, that will help you to be more present as a mother, as a father, too, at the same time. I had the image, you know, of crossing that bed of dry leaves last night in the reading. And I do think at midlife there's part of us crossing quietly a boundary that we're

[24:04]

actually unaware of on the surface. And then you feel this utter disconnect between what you've established on the outside and this empty space where the interior identity has already moved across this invisible boundary, and you're left to the other side. So it's almost as if you're in invisible dialogue across this boundary with a part of you that's already crossed over, already knows its mortality, already is starting to establish a dialogue with the other side, what lies beyond. I'm reminded of the work of Henry Goldsmith in the United States. He's an artist who uses nature as a symbol of creation, space, and creates the most extraordinarily beautiful construct with incredible patience and dedication and vision and love.

[25:11]

And they are completely walked away by nature. They are these monuments that have no meaning. They are created by a certain angle, and they know it. And, you know, I think he's representing his work through this conversation and wondering what is the line, what is the delicate balance between belief and attachment? And I guess, you know, I'm not entirely sure if I were a manager of his work, but I'd like to be up on the moors in all weathers, trying to keep it together, yes.

[26:12]

And the reverse of that is that he shows how self-conscious he just has to do this one piece at a time. I wonder if it's not, I often think that balance is not something that the soul is very interested in, actually. That's the, just, you know, because Wittgenstein said you can't enter any world for which you don't have the language. It's very true. So immediately the strategic mind goes to this lovely word, balance, which means I'm going to put so much on this side and then so much on that. And after I put so much on this side, I'm going to see how much that's come up. So I'll have to put a little more on this side then, which means I've got to watch this side then. So this is actually the part of your faculties that you need in order to make sure there

[27:21]

are cornflakes in the cupboard for the kids in the morning, you know, and that there's money in the bank and you pay the mortgage. But it's also a part of you that's actually terrified of the true revelation. It's necessary to keep you alive in the instance of your existence, but it's more afraid of change and you need another part of you and you need a larger metaphor. So, you know, perhaps attachment is necessary. Well, of course it's necessary. And it's part actually of a cycle. So you have to know where you are in the cycle as to whether you should be attached or not. Yes. And then when the grip has loosened naturally, you know, like my 18-year-old son now just about to sail off into the world, you know, then there's of course there's still an attachment, but it's not the same attachment you had before. And I'm not saying, well, I'm going to balance my attachment with I'm going to create all

[28:23]

kinds of interest for myself, you know, and not think about it and, you know, have this over here. That's not the choice. It's more where I am in the story in that particular because we're meant to be attached anyway. And, you know, one of the great difficulties in Zen sitting is becoming attached to non-attachment. So perhaps it's more, there's a lovely piece by Rilke where he has an alternative image to balance. And he says, My life is not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me. I stand before it like a tree. And I am only one of many mouths. And at that, the one that would be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes that are somehow always in discord. Because death's note wants to climb over. And in the dark interval reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on. Beautiful.

[29:27]

My life is not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me. I stand before it like a tree. I am only one of many mouths. And at that, the one that would be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes that are somehow always in discord. Because death's note wants to climb over. The end of the attachment. Because death's note wants to climb over. And in the dark interval reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on. Beautiful. So how do you make the language, the metaphor, large enough so you have some freedom? And that seems to be a theme of the morning, the break for freedom. The couching the phrase in such a way that you're actually in a new and larger world, shaping yourself so that you're freed from your previous enclosure.

[30:36]

There's a beautiful piece by Seamus Heaney called The Railway Children, where you feel in the poem that he's stuck in his present life. Here he is, you know, he's top poet at Oxford and Harvard simultaneously. And he's just about to win the Nobel Prize, you know. And where do you go from this place? And he remembers how he used to play on the railway embankments in the north of Ireland when he was a child. And this is the piece he wrote. It's very, as I say, it's this very Celtic ability in this poem to slip through, not to be held in place. Not to be held by a name you've given yourself or been given by others. And he goes back to his childhood, not to become a child again, but to remember those instinctual joys that were like a compass bearing inside him. Just like a direction. I mean, when you're a child, that's the beauty of being a child.

[31:38]

You're all direction. You don't know where you're going to arrive. You've no detail at all. And that's the freedom of, you have this compass rose, you have this pull to your true north. And you know you belong to the world in a certain way, but you have no idea how it's going to play out. So he says, when we climbed the slopes of the cutting, the railway cutting, when we climbed the slopes of the cutting, we were eye level with the white cups of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires. Like lovely freehand they curved for miles east and miles west, beyond us, sagging under their burden of swallows. We were young and thought we knew nothing worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires in the white pouches of raindrops, each one seeded full with the light of the sky, the gleam of the wires, and ourselves, so infinitesimally scaled, we could stream through the eye of a needle.

[32:39]

And ourselves, so infinitesimally scaled, we could stream through the eye of a needle. When we climbed the slopes of the cutting, we were eye level with the white cups of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires. Like lovely freehand they curved for miles east and miles west, sagging under their burden of swallows. We were young and thought we knew nothing worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires in the white pouches of raindrops, each one seeded full with the light of the sky, the gleam of the wires, and ourselves, ourselves so infinitesimally scaled, we could stream through the eye of a needle. So this is an ancient Irish motif, Celtic, it's in the Welsh, Scots,

[33:49]

but it's in a lot of native cultures around the world. The unwillingness to be named in a way in which you're going to be placed in a box. So he's been naming himself, naming himself poet this, poet that, Harvard, Oxford, and suddenly the whole thing is like a heavy cloak you've been wearing that's just drenched with the weather you've been travelling through. And the weight of it is enormous. Not only that, but spring is actually just appearing in the air, so you're too hot in it, too, you know. And it's just completely inappropriate. But it's this incredible cloak, you see, it cost you a lot of money. You were so proud of it for so long, how could you put it down? And this, one of the mythological teachings is this ability, one thing to change into another, become something else.

[34:52]

And I got this, you know, at my mother's knee quite early because I was very interested always in ancestry and my grandmother's life, my grandfather's life, where they'd come from, and my mother's life. But I have about five parallel childhoods for my mother, which all existed together. And my sisters all have different childhoods for my mother because she'd tell them different things. And you could barely piece the thing together. And then if you talked to my mother's sisters and brothers, they'd have different parallel versions, too. And as Oscar Wilde said, no amount of exaggeration would do justice to what actually occurred. And it's true, you know, if you're telling a story, you should be attempting to create the essence of what occurred. And if you just told exactly what had happened, there is no exact thing that happened anyway.

[35:54]

But if you just attempted to do that, you would in no way convey what actually occurred on a mythological level. So one of my favorite stories is two fellows in a bar in Ennistymon after mass on Sunday. And one fellow says to the other, Patrick, did you see James yesterday after market? And Patrick says, well, I did and I didn't. This is a normal conversation in Claire if you've ever been there. And trying to get a straight answer. I didn't, I didn't, he says. And the other fellow says, how do you mean you did or you didn't? You either saw him or you didn't. And Patrick says, well, I was walking down Market Street, you know, and I thought I saw James coming towards me. And James was coming the other way and thought he saw me coming towards him. But when we got up to each other, it was neither of us. So you let the other person alone, you see.

[37:12]

Let them announce their own name in the conversation. Take it another step, you know, there's a Palestinian walking down the street, thought they saw a Jewish person coming towards them. Jewish person thought they saw a Palestinian. When they got up to each other, it was neither of them. So without the name, there's a possibility of something occurring. But the discipline is that you have to give joyous names to the things that arise. And that may be one of the central disciplines of poetry, actually. But it also may be one of the great keys to existence, too. That you still have a bold articulation without the necessity of all of these inherited names. That's why it's so bloody difficult to write something decent, you know.

[38:14]

Because you've got to be at that edge, at that frontier. I often think, you know, when you're writing prose, especially non-fiction, I feel a kind... When you're trying to convey facts, I always feel it's this incredible masquerade. Because the facts can be marshaled in so many different directions. Whereas where you work, if you're writing a novel, there's a tremendous freedom. And in many ways it's much more factual. It's much more true to life. Even though it can go anywhere, it's actually very clearly representing a fierce dynamic in life that you're attempting to convey. So, just a couple of other things and then we'll... Hmm.

[39:18]

Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the phenomena of midlife, too, of crossing over the boundary, you know, when you're in midlife, you start having conversations with people, with as many people who have gone from your life who are actually present at the moment, you know. And many times the conversations are more real with the ones who have gone than the ones who are still alive and around you, you know. And there's an emerging personality, person, that you're only just beginning to discover once they've left you, you know. So it gives you an intimation that you may be much larger

[40:23]

than the identity you've arranged for yourself. Yeah. Let's just start in on the marriage with our work, because that seems to preoccupy us most of all, at least in this culture. And this is a beautiful little poem that was very powerful to me in my own work. It's written by a 15-year-old Russian boy, Anatoly Ivanushkin. I found it in the anthology of Russian children's poetry. And I found it just at the moment where I was making my break for freedom in my work and declaring myself as a poet. And there was almost nothing in the calendar and nothing in the checkbook. And we were living on very, very little. There's that wonderful book which says, Do what you love, the money will follow. But there's often quite a hiatus.

[41:24]

It doesn't say how long, you know. But for the first part of the title, it's true. Do what you love. But you never know how long that hiatus is. And it's often a necessary gap in which you're forged and tested and to see whether you're serious or not. In most native traditions, you have to ask three times before you're admitted, whatever door you're trying to go through. You ask sincerely three times, you're rejected twice. And so part of being tested is that you have to... I think one of the dynamics of courageous entrance is a radical simplification. Radical simplification. That in order to get through, you do have to pass through this eye of the needle.

[42:26]

And you have to simplify yourself down. And this occurs throughout life. Not only a person, a young man making his way as a poet. But when you get to 30, when you get to 40, when you get to 50, when you get to 60, there's an equivalent radical simplification that occurs. Or has to occur. Or you won't be admitted. You'll still be in the house. Living in it, in a way. Well, instead of living it, you'll be haunting it. As a kind of ghost. And nothing, including yourself, will seem real. And there's an amazing quality of impersonation that occurs. And the impersonation is incredibly subtle, because you're actually impersonating yourself. And if you can't tell you're doing that, it's incredibly difficult for other people to see it too. But everyone, including yourself, also knows that something isn't quite right.

[43:30]

Something hasn't moved. But here's Anatoly Ivanishkin. This was a very powerful poem for me. Today, as many days before, the sun has lit a streak of fire in the sky. Today, as many days before, the sun has lit a streak of fire in the sky. But in the morning of the new day, I am pushed from the hastening trolley bus like a cork from a bottle. Men and women love the dawn for its freshness, for its promise of new beginnings. In the morning, therefore, I am not frightened that I have chosen to live a life unlike that of other young men. In the morning, therefore, I am not frightened that I have chosen to live a life unlike that of other young women. Today, as many days before, the sun has lit a streak of fire in the sky. But in the morning of the new day, I am pushed from the hastening trolley bus like a cork from a bottle. Men and women love the dawn for its freshness, for its promise of new beginnings.

[44:37]

In the morning, therefore, I am not frightened that I have chosen to live a life unlike that of other young men. So there I was in the shower in the morning with young family, nothing in the checkbook. And I would shout out this line. In the morning, therefore, I am not frightened that I have chosen to live a life unlike that of other young men. And I wonder if that young boy knows how much courage that he gave to me. And how much of a gift that line was across the thousands of miles. Who knows whether he wrote anything in the rest of his life at all. But one good line, one good word, bread for a thousand, will just unlock the door. So just to have that line in my body. In the morning, therefore, I am not frightened, which of course meant I was terrified.

[45:41]

But there was also this other flow in there too, which was just as powerful. In the morning, therefore, I am not frightened that I have chosen to live a life unlike that of other young men. But I couldn't have done it by saying, well, I'm going to invest in Microsoft, which was just appearing at that time. And I'll work over at Boeing and I'll get a certain amount of money in the bank. And then once I've got the kindergarten paid, taken care of, then I'll make a little place for myself. That's the whole strategic mind saying, it's never going to happen, don't even think about it. It's the part of you that is incredibly skillful at creating language which will close the experience off completely. And so there's a necessary vulnerability, I feel, to being on that edge.

[46:44]

Just in the way you commit to another person when you say, will you marry me? When you say, shall we live together? When you make that first tentative step, what are you doing on Saturday night? You're risking yourself. You could be rebuffed. You could be embarrassed. You could be humiliated. You could be making a big mistake. And you don't know. You don't know. You're having to appear and you're having to find out. Apprentice yourself to your desires. Now there's a lot of inherited talk in a lot of our traditions about giving up on desire. And it's in the Zen tradition too, but it's not so straightforward. It's cloaked in lots of ways in what it's taught.

[47:46]

But I think it's actually impossible for a human being to give up on desire. And I think what we're looking at is a different kind of experience where you're learning to find out what your true desires are. And the great question is, well, how do I distinguish my true desires from those desires that create great catastrophes and destruction in my life? And the question is, you don't know. You have to find out. You have to find out how you belong to the world. And you can use the great traditions to give you parameters that say, well, generally, if you do this, it leads to something quite horrible. But in your case, you may be a one in a million exception. Why don't you try it? But you wouldn't know it's in your body until you'd actually attempted it.

[48:57]

So this is a beautiful piece of commitment. It's like a marriage with his future life. And he's making a vow, which he's going to hold to. In the morning, therefore, I am. I am not frightened that I have chosen to live a life unlike that of other young men. Another phenomenon that appears out of this, which came to me in a very powerful way with the loss of my mother, is the necessity for staying in friendship with all the people you've been. We talked about getting out from under the cloak of who you've been. But those people are just like you. You also don't want to be under the cloak of people that you know either. But still, they're real people. They're individual souls. And you must allow them to have their own life. So you have to also allow yourself to have had your own lives. And I remember after I'd lost my mother,

[49:59]

and I was wanting to have those conversations that you want to have with the person who you were close with. And I'd see her in my mind's eye when I was out in the woods and she'd be standing beneath a tree. Or when I was back in Yorkshire, I'd see her on her old bench. But I realized after a while that I was seeing her just at the end of her life. I was seeing her when her body had broken down, when she had trouble walking, when she'd lost the beautiful singing voice that she had when she was in her 20s that I used to hear in the kitchen as a child. And the legs she had that would take her for miles across the fields and the hills and things like this. And I thought, you know, I should see her in all the different levels and all the different parts of her existence here. And I only had to say that to myself once and then I started to see her when she was younger. And I even began to see her before she'd born me or my sisters

[51:00]

or married my father and see her when she was a young girl. And I thought, you know, if you have to do that with another person, you must have to do it with yourself. That you shouldn't just see yourself as this latest wave breaking on the shore, but you should have a friendship. Even though you're not held by them, you should have a friendship with all the people you've been. And I think actually one of the great diagnostic features of whether you're on track or not is to look back at the young man or woman you were. You know, if you're in your 20s, you can look back to when you were 13 or 14. If you're in your 50s or 60s, you can look back to the young woman on the edge of her adulthood, you know, at 18 or 20, that you were. And ask yourself, would that person be proud of who I'd become, who they'd become? Would they be friends with me? Or would they be disappointed? Would they feel betrayed?

[52:01]

Now, of course, there's lots of things that you grow into as you get older that the younger person would find extremely boring, you know. But the question is, you know, you'd probably be able to tell them, you know, well, actually, you know, it looks boring, but, you know, the fruits are actually worth all the work putting in. The harvest is worth all the work. And you could probably convince them. And you may be doing work that, when you were 20, you would have said, you know, is that what I'm going to do with my life? But if you can tell them, you know, and explain it, the question is if you can't explain it to them. If there's nothing you could say that would convince them, you know. In other words, if you'd betrayed that compass bearing that you had inside you and you were off somewhere else having convinced yourself that that's what you should do. This is my imagining my mother just before she left Waterford to come to England.

[53:32]

And she actually left the first time when she was 15. She went back again, 16 came back. She worked in the dark satanic mills of Yorkshire when she was 15 years old. And she was so young that when she finished her day's work, she used to go and play in the park, you know, afterwards. This was the dark 50s, you know, after the war, when, Second World War, when there was, when the society was prostrate and people were glad to have work of any kind. But my mother was incredibly excited to leave Waterford and go out, you know, into the world. And this is myself imagining her by a place called the Milepost, which is a little collection of houses just a mile outside of Waterford, looking into her future life. And I imagine myself there with, with my sisters and my father, looking at her, you know.

[54:35]

But we were invisible as she was looking out into, we don't, we didn't actually exist yet. But from my point of view, we were looking at her. And so this is called looking. And then let's take a break. I'm going to break down any moment and look in the table of contents. I'm holding on. Looking. My mother is a young girl again, standing at the edge of a field near the Milepost, ready to leave. Across the field, invisibly, we stand together, together and each alone, waiting for her to see us, her son, her daughters, her husband. We raise our hands to catch her sight.

[55:37]

We raise our hands to catch her sight, but she cannot see us. She's too young for us yet. She only sees the sky and the green fields beneath, the way young eyes do. And she looks at the road leading away towards us and feels on her skin the clear breath of sunlight. She is made for the world in her own way. She is life about to make life. She is a youth about to blossom out of a particular tragedy into her own kind of triumph. She is herself, but she is all of our past and all of our future too. She is looking and waiting, as we wait, for everything to come true. She is looking and waiting, as we wait, for everything to come true. We raise our hands to catch her sight, but she cannot see us. She's too young for us yet.

[56:38]

She only sees the sky and the green fields beneath, the way young eyes do. And she looks at the road leading away towards us and feels on her skin the clear breath of sunlight. She is made for the world in her own way. She is life about to make life. She is youth about to blossom out of a particular tragedy into her own kind of triumph. She is herself, but she is all of our past and all of our future too. She is looking and waiting, as we wait, for everything to come true. So it's a great question to ask yourself. What would it mean for everything to come true in both senses of the word? Let's take 20 minutes.

[57:39]

So if we can be back in just before that, just after half past, and we'll start at 25 to the hour. Okay, thanks. David, before that, I just wanted to thank you.

[57:49]

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