In the ever-expanding landscape of intellectual discourse, few conversations resonate as profoundly as that between Krista Tippett and David Whyte. Each a luminary in their own right, Tippett, the esteemed host of the acclaimed podcast On Being, and Whyte, the celebrated poet and philosopher, converge in a dialogue that transcends time and space.

In their conversation, Tippett and Whyte engage in a dance of ideas, exploring the contours of the human experience with depth and nuance. Against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world, their dialogue serves as a beacon of wisdom and insight, offering solace and guidance to those grappling with life’s most profound questions.

While this conversation took place in 2016, it continues to resonate. In a chaotic world, the wisdom imparted by Tippett and Whyte serves as a source of hope and inspiration, reminding us of the power of dialogue and the transformative potential of human connection. As we navigate the complexities of the modern age, their words remain a testament to the enduring capacity of the human spirit to find meaning and purpose amid the chaos.

This conversation has been edited for print and permission purposes – listen to the full episode at onbeing.org.

This interview first appeared in Issue 04 of The Beautiful Truth. Get your copy here. For a limited time, get a FREE tote bag with every order before Christmas – visit our shop.

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

KT: Would you explain, for people who don’t know – you talk about growing up; it was your mother who was Irish, and your father was from Yorkshire, and that there was this interplay in you between “imaginative” Irish and the “grounded” Yorkshire.

DW: Ireland has its own kind of grounding, but it’s grounded in the imagination and in subverting the foundations of everyday life. And Yorkshire is very much here in the world, very workaday, but sometimes Yorkshire is so grounded, it’s surreal, and it comes out – it turns into its opposite. So Yorkshire’s a place where the Industrial Revolution started in the world, but it’s also the place of Emily Brontë’s moors, the wildness of the Dales; quite remote places.

I remember when I was seven or eight years old, realising that I wasn’t supposed to choose between the two places, even though they were so different. I was supposed to live out my life. Nowadays, I would put words into my mouth as a seven-year-old and say I was supposed to live out the conversation between them both. But it was something felt physically, very close. And of course, my work as a poet and philosopher has matured into working with what I call the conversational nature of reality, which is the fact that we don’t get to choose, so often, between things we hope we can choose between.

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KT: I was very intrigued to learn that you actually got your degree in marine zoology and that you actually began your working life as a naturalist and were in the Galápagos, the Amazon and the Himalayas. Were you also writing poetry then?

DW: Well, I’ve written poetry since I was very small. I had powerful experiences with poetry where I felt literally abducted, taken away by poetry, just like a hawk had come down and taken me in its claws and carried me off. And I remember reading Ted Hughes when I was young – and he must’ve been young then too – and having that feeling, and a very powerful sense that this was language that adults had written, who had not forgotten the primary visions and insights of childhood.

But when I was 14 years old I saw Jacques Cousteau, the famous French marine zoologist and inventor of the aqualung, sail across our little television set in the North of England. And I couldn’t believe you could have work like this in the world. You could actually follow the life of the dolphin, aboard the good ship Calypso. And I was so astonished by it that I gave up all my art subjects and put myself into the salt mines of biology, chemistry and physics.

Then I emerged with a degree in marine zoology, many years later. And then, through sheer luck and fortune, I found myself on the shores of the Galápagos Islands as a naturalist guide. That was really astonishing, and that experience in those islands led me back into poetry and philosophy.

KT: It does illustrate some of the conversations that are – this phrase you mentioned a moment ago that’s so pivotal for you, the “conversational nature of reality” – some of the conversations you have worked with between things that might not seem to naturally belong together, but that have been your life and the stuff of your philosophy and your poetry.

DW: Yes, I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had in Galápagos. Science, rightly, is always trying to remove the “I.” But I was interested in the way that the “I” deepened, the more you paid attention. And in Galápagos I began to realise that because I was in deeply attentive states, hour after hour, watching animals and birds and landscapes – and that’s all I did for almost two years – I began to realise that my identity depended not upon any beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself, and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.

And I began to realise that the only places where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you; that whatever you desire of the world will not come to pass exactly as you will like it, but the other mercy is that whatever the world desires of you will also not come to pass, and what actually occurs is this meeting, this frontier.

But it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you.

John O’Donohue, a mutual friend of both of us, used to say that one of the necessary tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself and the world – letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.

KT: I love the Consolations book. The subtitle of that is “The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.” And the word that comes first is “alone.” And I think it’s – one of the important observations you make there, and a thing that’s really basic, but hard for us to take in, is that “one of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves.”

DW: Yes, that’s right. I mean, I’ve often felt like the deeper discipline of poetry is overhearing yourself say things you didn’t want to know about the world, and something that actually emancipates you from the smaller self out into this larger dispensation that you actually didn’t think you deserved.

And so one of the things we’re most afraid of in silence is this death of the periphery. The outside concerns, the place where you’ve been building your personality and where you think you’ve been building who you are, starts to atomise and fall apart. And it’s one of the basic reasons we find it difficult even just to turn the radio off, or the television, or not look at our gadget, is that giving-over to something that’s going to actually seem as if it’s undermining you to begin with and lead to your demise. And the intuition, unfortunately, is correct. You are heading towards your demise, but it’s leading towards this richer, deeper place that doesn’t get corroborated very much in our everyday, outer world.

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KT: I first started hearing about you in the 90s, I think, and especially this book The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America …

I think, on the surface, most people would say that corporations would be the least poetic spaces in our midst. What you bring into the open is the difficult fact that all of this complexity of being human, and all of these things we carry, we don’t actually check at the door of our workplaces.

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DW: I went full time as a poet, never imagining that I would work in the belly of the beast, in the corporate world. I grew up from long lines of rebels in the dispossessed on both my Scots Yorkshire and on my Irish side. And then I grew up in an area of West Yorkshire which was raving socialist and where the Luddites used to march across the fields to break up the machinery. So my blood inheritance was around disbelief and scepticism around any large, abstract organisations, whether they were government or private.

“I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had in Galápagos.”

And so when I went full time as a poet, I was only a year into it, and I spoke in Washington DC at a large psychological conference. And at the end of the conference was this line of people, and at the end of the line was a man who, in best American fashion, said, “We have to hire you.” And I said, in best Anglo-Irish fashion, “For what?”, unenthusiastically. And he said, “To come into corporate America.” And I said, “For what?” And he said a marvellous thing. He said, “The language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory that we’ve already entered. And in your work, I’ve just heard the language that’s large enough for it.”

And of course, he was talking about the territory of human relationship that the workplace was entering, and the movable human relationship, and the movability that the organisations had to have. And the only place that came from was from the individuals who actually worked within the structures. So it was the breaking apart of many of those structures. And I don’t think we quite realise how over-structured our organisations were, just 25 years ago or 30 years ago. I mean, there are still plenty of dinosaur ones left for us to still go and live in, if we want them.

KT: I think we’ve realised that, every once in a while, when we engage with an organisation that’s still structured that way, that hasn’t managed to change, and you realise how unwieldy and inefficient and ridiculous it is, and bad for us.

DW: Yes, and of course, we still have a long way to go; it’s just that our difficulties have become more subtle and invisible between us. And so that’s what I work with – whether it’s inside yourself or with the people you’re trying to bring together to do things that a single person can’t do alone.

And really, that’s the definition of a corporation. It’s from “corpus,” Latin, meaning “a body.” It’s a group of people trying to do something you cannot do if you try to do it by yourself. That’s the only definition. That’s the simplest, core, radical simplicity at the centre of every organisation.

KT: You also extend this idea that there’s no self that will survive a real conversation. You say there’s no real organisation that will keep its original identity, if it’s in a conversation. I suppose you also mean a conversation within and without; with the world, as well?

DW: All of us have this inherited conversation inside us, which we know is untouchable. It comes from our parents, from the way we’re made, and all the rest of it. But that’s an invisible quality inside you. All the visible qualities that take form and structure will have to change in order to keep the conversation real; just as we go through the different decades of our life, we have to change the structures of our life in order to keep things new, in order to keep our youthfulness.

And I think there is a quality of youthfulness appropriate to every decade of our life. It just looks different. We have this fixed idea of youthfulness from our teens or our 20s. But actually, there’s a form of youthfulness you’re supposed to inhabit when you’re in your 70s or your 80s or your 90s. It’s the sense of imminent surprise, of imminent revelation, except the revelation and the discovery is more magnified. It has more to do with your mortality and what you’re going to pass on and leave behind you, the shape of your own absence.

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KT: I’m really interested in this question of what poetry works in us. And so I wonder what you have learned about how does poetry land in the middle of a workplace and working life? What does it do in us and for us in that context?

DW: Well, I always say that poetry is language against which you have no defences. Otherwise, it’s not poetry, it’s prose, which is about something.

KT: I love that.

DW: Poetry is that moment in a conversation where you have to have the other person understand what you’re saying. And sometimes it’s when you’re delivering terrible news, news of a death or an accident, and you have to tell the other person, and they have to hear it. And you have to say it in such a way that it’s heard fully. But you have to say it, also, with the intimacy of care and of understanding at the same time.

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KT: So that’s the litmus test of poetry.

DW: Yes, so I work in three different worlds. One is just as a poet, with the intimacy of my readers and my listeners and audiences. Then I work in the theological and psychological worlds. But really, I work with exactly the same dynamics that we’re all afraid of.

“Poetry is that moment in a conversation where you have to have the other person understand what you’re saying.”

First of all, one of the powerful dynamics of leadership is being visible. One of the vulnerabilities of being visible is that when you’re visible, you can be seen, and when you can be seen, you can be touched, and when you can be touched, you can be hurt. So all of us have these elaborate ways of looking as if we’re showing up, and not showing up – except, in an organisational setting, it has tremendous consequences on other people’s lives. We’ve all worked in organisations where someone is sitting there at a crossroads or nexus in the organisation. They’re there, but they’re not there. And because of that, they’re blocking everything that’s trying to come through their particular portal.

So one of the dynamics you have to get over with is this idea that you can occupy a position of responsibility – that you can have a courageous conversation without being vulnerable.

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KT: A couple of words in the Consolations book that I loved: “Rest” – I loved this – “is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.”

DW: Yes. Sounds like the definition of the perfect Sunday morning.

KT: I’m also intrigued by aloneness. We talked about how “alone” is the first word in that book, and there’s a dance that you name and tease out, between aloneness and belonging.

DW: There are two different forms of belonging, I suppose. And to have a sense of belonging in the outer world, where you feel a sense of freedom, comes from this ability to touch this deep foundation of aloneness. And I do feel if you can touch that sense of aloneness, you can live with anyone.

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KT: There are some lines from this poem, “What to Remember When Waking.” “To be human is to become visible / while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.” What does that mean?

DW: Well, it’s working with that earlier dynamic we worked on, of incarnation, of becoming visible in the world. And yet the gift that you’re going to give and keep on giving is an invisible gift that will take many different forms and that you learn more of each time you allow it to take a different form. And you move from your 20s into your 30s, and you suddenly find another, larger form for it, or a different shape that makes a different connection.

And then you deepen it in your 40s, and you get overwhelmed by it in your 50s, and then it returns to you again in more mature forms, settled forms, in your 60s. So this is the gift that keeps giving. And it’s that internal, deeper source. It’s you becoming more and more real and more and more visible in the world.

KT: One other word from Consolations, the book, is “genius,” which you describe as something which we already possess. So you’re proposing it as something that’s not just for Albert Einstein, but that is accessible to the rest of us. And you say, “Human genius lies in the geography of the body and its conversation with the world.” There’s your “conversation” again, “[t]he meeting between inheritance and horizon.” So help me understand that.

DW: Well, in the ancient world, the word “genius” was not so much used about individual people, it was used about places, and almost always with the word “loci.” So “genius loci” meant the spirit of a place.

And we all know what that intuitively means; we all have favourite places in the world, and it may be a seashore where you’ve got this ancient conversation between the ocean and the land and a particular geography of the way the cliffs or the beaches form. But it could’ve been the same in the ancient world, near a little bridge crossing a stream with a pool at the back of it, and a willow hanging over the pool. That place would be said to have a genius loci.

But a more sophisticated understanding would understand, it’s like this weather front of all of these qualities that meet in that place. So I think it’s a very merciful thing to think of human beings in the same way; that is, your genius is just the way everything is met in you.

KT: Physically.

DW: Exactly, literally: all the struggles of your grandparents and your parents in arriving together and giving birth to your parents and giving birth to you, the landscape in which you were nurtured, the dialect or language in which you were educated into the world, the smells of the local environment. I mean, when I go back to Yorkshire, just the taste of the water off the moors is completely different. When I go to County Clare, the water there, again, has a spirit, because it comes off limestone there.

And so it’s really merciful, actually, not to think of genius as something that I’m going to get to by hard work, if I practise the violin 15 hours a day. It’s the innate gift that makes me want to practise the violin, actually. It’s the way everything meets inside me.

Will I have that conversation? And this is the experience of consummation, of a full incarnation in the world.

KT: I had this same conversation with John O’Donohue that I’m going to have with you now, which is the beauty of that thought, but the reality that that geography, for many people at any given time, is so harsh, and living with that reality of our global body, as well – the puzzle of that.

DW: Yes, that’s right. And this has always been there and always been true. And who knows? Any of us could be precipitated into awful circumstances at any time, and many of us go through those dark years where you just feel as if it’s just the movement of your own – your own movement that’s just creating body heat to actually keep you alive. We go through those very, very narrow places.

And John used to talk about how you shaped a more beautiful mind; that it’s an actual discipline, no matter what circumstances you’re in. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. And so the ability to ask beautiful questions – often in very un-beautiful moments – is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. And you don’t have to do anything about it, you just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.

KT: That’s what Rilke called “living the question.”

DW: Exactly. He’s always there before you.

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KT: One way I’ve come to think about the power of questions is that questions elicit answers in their likeness. So you call forth something beautiful by asking a beautiful question.

DW: Yes, you do. You do. And then the other part of it, too, is that there’s this kind of weighted silence behind each question. And to live with that sense of trepidation, what I call beautiful trepidation, the sense of something about to happen that you’ve wanted, but that you’re scared to death of actually happening; none of us really feel we deserve our happiness.