David Whyte

[bell rings] Welcome to Wednesday with Clear Mountain.

We're here today joined by David Whyte, who we finally have gotten on.

David, thank you so much for joining us.

It's my pleasure.

Yeah.

Well, a brief introduction.

David Whyte was born and raised in Yorkshire.

His mother was Irish and his father English.

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As a little boy, David Whyte's idea of heaven was to sit in a large basket of clean linen while his Irish mother sang as she did the ironing.

David grew up to become a poet and philosopher loved around the world, and his writing seems to draw on both that lyrical beauty of song alongside the everyday groundedness of a basket of ironing that needs doing.

As a young man, David spent two years on the Galapagos Islands, a place that prepared him to be a poet by teaching him to pay attention, but which also nearly claimed his life when it caught him looking the wrong way.

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

I spoke with the poet David Whyte in 2025.

This conversation was made on the lands of the Gadigal and Turrbal peoples.

I think if I'm hearing you correctly, what you're describing is the idea of liminal space, right? It's that space between what was and what will be.

And I think the poet David Whyte, he is referencing Dante's Commedia, and there's a line from that, and he says, "I awoke in a dark wood of my life, and the way was wholly lost." And David Whyte, in response, he says, "How do you know you're on the right path?" He says, "Well, the path disappears." [laughs] And I think there's something about, okay, I built this beautiful life.

I climbed Mount Everest.

I'm very successful, but it's not enough or it's not my fullest expression of myself, and I can sense that something is missing.

Caregiving, moral responsibility, right? These don't always make me feel alive in the moment, but they're some of the most important things in my life.

So there's, there's sort of like this, this, this, like, exploration I wanna do probably has two kinds of gravitational pull, to use the David Whyte quote, the gravitational pull.

Two kinds.

One we're just gonna call aliveness, what draws me in.

So, um, in this moment I get that catharsis of really taking a moment.

If a lyric feels like it needs to be repeated, you know, one of my favorite poets, David Whyte, will often take a piece of a line and he'll repeat it many times, maybe three times, four times, to make sure it really sinks in.

And when I listen to him read, he, sometimes he's doing it for him, and sometimes he's doing it for you.

Oh, interesting.

They've gotten so used to performing the duties and the, the activities of this previous season that we don't really know what is required of us.

And I love what David Whyte, the poet, said about, uh, the seasons, um, in his, in his program, What's We're, What to Remember When Waking.

It's a fantastic Audible program.

But he talks about shifting between the seasons of life and how when he became a father, that changed his entire relationship to himself and to his, his partner and [laughs] now to this new creature who had joined their, their world.