![]() ![]() On every path you take in life, whether it’s an intimate relationship, the relationship to a child, the relationship to your work and vocation, or the relationship to yourself, you will have your heart broken. So both the ground that you come to and the soil from which the new harvest is grown. Humiliation has that beautiful root of humilis, meaning ground or soil. It is lovely to hear you talk about welcoming the humiliation. You have to have this willingness to give yourself over to it and humiliate yourself in the ‘doing part.’ Then you start to understand, as you practice the art, where your nourishment is coming from, and eventually you feel the nourishment in every portion of the cycle, even the part at the beginning where you don’t know what you’re doing. But it takes a lot to lay the groundwork properly-both in the outside world with material work and in yourself with an art form such as poetry, painting, sculpture or dance. So the ‘doing part’ is just one portion of our lives, the harvest part. If you look at the way real craftspeople work: they spend a third of their time preparing, a third of their time working, and a third of their time cleaning up. Innocence is not something that should be replaced by experience. You can start impersonating yourself, and so everything you start doing becomes tedious to yourself and everyone else, even though it’s done at a great level of competency. And there’s also this necessity in life and art to radically simplify, to get back to innocence. There’s an authenticity to you taking the only step you can take. But wherever you are, the conversation feels real, and it feels real to everyone around you. Of course, some people only begin it on their deathbeds. One of the merciful and perhaps beautiful things about conversation is that by definition we don’t have to have the whole conversation at once, we only have to begin it and then the conversation itself seems to create its own flow and buoyancy. And what happens is this actual conversation, this meeting place. The reality.īut just as importantly, whatever the world demands of you will not occur either. ![]() Relinquishing belief is actually just coming to the truth of the matter. So it’s about relinquishing the belief that we have control over everything? My time in those islands led me back to another passionate embrace: poetry-a language, to my mind, far more accurate in describing the human relationship to reality. I wanted to go back to my comforting books, but Galapagos would not let me go from its gory and passionate embrace and I was forced to look, forced to have the conversation. It was quite terrifying as a young scientist. They insisted on having lives of their own. I got to those islands in freshly-minted scientific arrogance where I soon found that none of the animals had read any of the zoology books I had read. I certainly went through this giving up early on in my twenties when I worked as a naturalist in the Galapagos Islands. That’s the crux of it: the listening ear. The hardest part is giving up the name you are going under, the story you’re a part of-giving up your idea of where the conversation is going. What about you? What’s the hardest part about conversations for you?ĭAVID WHYTE: I think the hardest part of any conversation is paying attention to something other than yourself, creating a real-life frontier. LINDY ALEXANDER: I have to say, I find starting conversations the hardest part.
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