Notes from workshop with David Whyte, Whidbey Institute 12/06

Christy Lee-Engel

The way that imagination helps us to create/focus on our lives in a simpler, more primary way when we
are so often distracted the 2nd, the 3rd (that which gets in the way of getting to primary ground)
- having an adult-adult relationship with creation (beneath jargon)
We will invent languages that persuade us/ fool us so that we think we’ve gotten there

A sense of constant renewable harvest – most acute when you can gather it up
How can you harvest your own gifts?
Sometimes they are not available
Sometimes everything ripens at once (all the walnuts on the tree ripen at once – have to
compete with the squirrels!)
The many hours of practice it takes, even to play an instrument badly!

Hamlet: “readiness is all”

Readiness: (what does the fruit feel when it’s ripe?)

Inquiry… Resisting the impulse to act before it’s ripe…How to be ready for the unexpected, for what you
never asked for?
Looking for how to ask the next question that is big enough? puts you in the gravity field of your own life

Midlife initiation: sense of powerlessness - losing your anchorage is important

One of the dynamics is around vulnerability – reframe this as a mode, a facility of paying attention
Whatever context you’ve invented for yourself, there is another context, much bigger, that
makes yours absurd – makes the “whole project of your life absurd.”

Seamus Heaney “sometime, take the time to drive out West”

Rilke’s “Swan”
Move to the element to which belong, that gives you grace just by being it it.
The first instinctive joys of childhood – difficult to return since you then also return to that
which shut them down.
Theme in the room today of putting down the weight, the burden

For Heany there were railway tracks

You have to go back through the same doors
to break the magic spell.

Letting your hero sit down “afraid to take another step.”

Living Together
with a partner, w/ self, w/ your art:
Next book will be “The Three Marriages”
to person, to vocation (not the job but what stands behind), to the shifting self.

(Poem) “in this light we hunger for maturity”

Simone Weil: “We love others for the hope of satisfying our own desires, not for their desires. If we loved them
for their own desires we would love them as we love ourselves.”
Need to love other for the very thing that might take them away from us: their own desires

Are you still falling in love with your own future? The grace of your own disappearance? A great test of
midlife. Sense of humor required!

Pilgrimage place in the Connemara (poem)

Identity depends on the depth and breadth of our perception and the more that is revealed

Blake: “There is a moment in every day that Satan cannot find”

You must be able to be the ancestor of your own future happiness that would stretch across time
Discovering your own phenomenology of discovery
Which way are you? How are you made? What do you love to do and how?
Be gentle entering back in – it can be painful to revisit something you have neglected.

Past • Present • Future

Middle age: internal conversations with people who are gone, continue to live at internal
thresholds.
(poems and stories about old friend Michael)
Poem “files it in memory”
How friendships are forged.

Imagination
Not just ability to make something new; faculty for holding together the complexity of the human
life
We don’t have a lexicon for this but important for the faculty of creating our own happiness,
own house of belonging.
We need to apprentice ourselves to this faculty. Good poetry holds the key, asks questions in
ways mainstream doesn’t recognize
of its time.
Poetic tradition: tremendous stream of knowledge incredibly nourishing and refreshing.

“A lightening raid on the unspeakable” Thomas Merton

Sleep
All the things you hold together in the day are being atomized and put back together while you sleep
Opportunity for newness, or to pull back into concreteness (“confirming the 10,000 things” – Dogen)
(enlightenment: “when things speak back to you in their own voice”)

Opening window of silence in the a.m. to see who’s there.

There are certain qualities to each part of the day, with certain revelations available. (certain “offices” in
the Catholic church) – based on physiology, of self and world.

Spiritual communion
People looking for safety and the guru. Necessity for good sense of humor regarding oneself, and a good
community. Ability to subvert your own (?) and be just another one of the lads and lassies.

Good poetry is listened onto the page – you’re writing to that listening ear, asking you to say the next
thing- the listening audience asking for the next thing.
Inside our own bodies, too – physiological istening
Not just you, living the talk – the frontier between you and not you, at the edge, not too far
back.

One hand clapping – what’s it like to live in exile? Stop trying to be one hand and the other hand

Relies on iteration between speaking and listening, put into conversation

(poem trans Gary Snyder) There’s no path that goes all the way

Widening the time and territory of visitation until your identity is lived more and more from that place