Feb 6th and 7th, 2015 The Lama Farm and
Jung Society of Utah welcome the renowned poet, David Whyte, in a live
poetry evening and workshop for an early Valentine’s weekend event. Whyte’s
poetry readings and teachings take his audience on a fierce exploration into
the frontiers of the beloved and undiscovered self. For this author it seems
perhaps the boldest love affair any of us might hope to achieve in this
lifetime—a love for our once and future self—reminding us of the beauty of an
awakened life. Whyte’s venture into the inner-scape of self is
entitled “What to Remember when
Waking, Asking the Beautiful Questions.”
Put down the weight of
your aloneness and ease into the conversation…
All the birds and
creatures of the world are unutterably themselves,
Everything, everything,
everything is waiting for you.
—David Whyte “Everything is waiting for you”
Difficult Questions and Beautiful Answers
David Whyte is a poet, transformational
teacher and organizational consultant. One might question how these three
unlikely pursuits combine in a cohesive career, and be delighted to find it is Whyte’s
most particular and profound gift of inquiry through poetry which invites
participants in all three arenas to dare ask their own courageous, difficult
and beautiful questions. In each of his
disciplines, Whyte pushes his audiences to examine the inner world in our
diverse and sometimes disconnected aspects of life and thereby discover how
closely related the answers are in each. His impassioned and lyrical insight
offer balm, guidance and practical application for everyday people grappling
with a desire to reconnect or most simply, uncover their inner voice.
This February
Whyte makes his public debut in Salt Lake City to ask those very questions. Over
the past two years Whyte’s career has crystallized around the planet as his
poetry and prose reach new levels of recognition and familiarity. With this notoriety,
Whyte is sought out to teach and perform extensively to audiences entranced
with the modern mystic nature of his voice and themes. Co-sponsoring the event
are The LamaFarm a Utah mentoring and guidance organization cultivating inner-consciousness
and awakened living and the Jung Society of Utah. Machiel Klerk, founder of the
Jung Society, says “David Whyte's poetic vision is
similar to the depth psychology of Carl Jung with the notion that the human is
no accident but a carrier of meaning and of gifts, that there is an 'other
world'. This is what Jung meant as he defined the individuation process and the
collective unconscious. Poets explore these ideas in their own words suited for
their time, and David Whyte does that magically.”
Whyte has authored
seven volumes of poetry and four works of prose. To his devoted readers,
Whyte’s poems cast a web of sonorous and earthy self-discovery. In his live
readings, Whyte’s gift of penetrating human connection draws his audience into
the same web. Shifting seamlessly between reciting his own poems and quoting the
work of his favorite poets he weaves an irresistible spell of sound and
silence. Whyte’s performances call to mind firesides of old, in which audiences
disappear from the world of passive listener and enter into a journey alongside
him—the journey into the self .
A native of England,
Whyte now makes his home with his family in the Pacific Northwest. As a child, David, roamed the fields of his father’s
Yorkshire, England, memorizing aloud—to clouds and cows alike, the poems of the
romantic poets—Wordsworth and Keats to name a few. “My mother’s voice taught me a connection to
Irish folklore tradition coming right out of the ground and imagination of the
Irish.” And it was his “father’s
Yorkshire which had its own storytelling tradition and lent a grounded, steady
compassion and almost surreal honesty to the voice.” Whyte says, “In many ways I got schooled in
the two ends of the spectrum in human voice.”
“I was always naturally
interested in the voice and memorizing poetry. I started quite young and constantly
looked to the future with anticipation for building my repertoire; always
thinking what the next poem would be, even if that were only two or three a
year.”
It was
perhaps through his youthful learning to recognize the soulfulness in others’
words that Whyte began his own development in understanding human expression of
the inner voice. These early solitary recitations began a lifelong ‘courtship’
with his favorite poems and authors—well over 300 at last count—which Whyte
recites in his performances as they uniquely apply to the present moment of his
teachings.
By
education and training Whyte began his formal career with a degree in marine
biology, working as a naturalist guide and anthropologist in the Galapagos
Islands, Andes, Amazon, and Himalayas.
One can only imagine how he might have plied his craft as a wordsmith
pondering anthropological insights and guiding human conversation along the
trails and extremes such journeys offer. The combination of explorer of the
natural world and guide to seekers’ paths shifted from geographical boundaries
to human frontiers as his vocation in poetry emerged.
Speaking from his home
last month in the Pacific Northwest, Whyte offered his perspective on his
poetry and work and how he enters the conversation on the human experience. Whyte’s
transition from geographic to human interior exploration suggests an underlying
quest to discover his personal genius. “I think I
always intuited the human voice as a representation of our identity in the
world,” Whyte explains, “Everyone possesses a personal genius.” Whyte
says finding, or at the very least seeking our authentic voice through asking
questions of our deepest self is a means of uncovering this personal genius. “At the center of
every conversation is an invitation, just as there’s an invitation in good
poetry to the truth; to uncovering…your own particular way to be in that
truth. It has to do with your own genius,
not as Mozart, or Dylan Thomas or Madam Curie. I am thinking just of the way
you hold life as an individual.”
Why is it so difficult
to ask ourselves these questions and find our authentic voice? (VH)
Whyte describes his own
experiences discovering a ‘hidden voice’ that needed to be remembered or
gathered back into full expression within the body. “I remember when I was 13 or 14 [deciding] to have a consistency
of voice no matter who I was speaking to; to have it grounded in my body.” Learning to express his authentic voice at
that time, Whyte says ”Strangely enough, there are huge parts of your body you
don’t want to be in because of the hurt and trauma of living, ways you do not
want to share your voice. You actually try to escape from that psychologically,
so the journey into the voice is the journey back into the body, actually being
here. Poetry is a representation of that, an artful expression of the human
journey.”
How does our authentic voice
help us uncover our genius? (VH)
“Genius is not something we either have or we
don’t.” According to Whyte, “we all have genius to be revealed, an identity to
be shaped. By exploring our self-perception, releasing judgments we hold onto
in our physical bodies we help reveal our genius, which is often buried in the
darkest corners within.” Whyte
describes a “fully-embodied” voice as the place from which he strives to share his
poetry, a place that allows him to express his own genius. In an era when spiritual seekers ask
questions for which they find no answers and mid-life crisis newbies don’t have
a manual on which to cut their teeth, David Whyte gently and insistently urges
us with his deeply compelling point of view to explore our internal frontiers for the answers. He explains how as our
own voices explore difficult inner questions, we discover “the way the voice
represents the frontier of what you think is you versus what you don’t think is
you. Once these limits are exposed, [you] just might reach past them into
the possibility of who [you] actually are.”
Whyte’s teachings will captivate
Utahns at once for his guide-work in untamed frontiers and the discipline of his
philosophical and contemplative tradition.
As a powerful
storyteller, it is not uncommon for Whyte to recount experiences from his days
as a trail guide and anthropologist and share poetry from his current walking
retreats in Ireland, Italy, England and the Galapagos Islands. Such pilgrimages
have long been a practice of the seeking soul. Here in Utah we are fortunate to
have some of the most beautiful and untamed vistas of any wilderness anywhere on
earth. We have the opportunity to take to the trails and mountains with similar
intent, finding enough silence in nature to awaken, or free from sleep, a
certain element of the unconscious mind and possibly begin to examine those
interior frontiers. Speaking about ways to
begin an ‘embodied practice’ for self-exploration, Whyte says “our great
religious and contemplative traditions look at the way human beings are
constantly being invited into the new, emancipated sense of self in the world.”
Starting with the walks in the countryside he took as a youth memorizing a
favorite verse, Whyte’s expeditions into exterior frontiers introduce an
embodied physical practice for the parallel journey we are invited to explore
in his poetry—to find our voice and honest expression of self.
The poet has spent years
in spiritual practice uncovering his authentic voice. Whyte says “I sat Zen for years where the
beautiful questions are known as Koans, an Eastern contemplative tradition
asking the unanswerable questions.” Citing an example of such a question, Whyte
asks “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and goes on to describe what personal
meaning such a question might hold by feeling into the places of the body that
might be blocked by this query. A
possible answer, he goes on is “how much of my life is real, how much is what I
make up speaking back to me in my own voice?”
Explaining how we
separate from our manufactured perception of self, Whyte suggests we might
discover “…a deeper, more foundational self. Starting there can feel like a
kind of death, at least dismemberment or falling away. This is a letting go of
a part of you that can no longer speak the truth.”
What are the ‘Beautiful
questions’ you are asking us to remember when waking?(VH)
“These questions come from a part of
you already knowing and calling you, one who already knows the new truth to
which we belong,” Whyte says. “A place
from which to speak, dance or shape a life that can distinguish the authentic
you from the pattern of thousands of images told from the courageous human life
at the center of your existence.” As
suggested by answering the Koan above, we
“[don’t want] to be part of some other life, body…but right here at this
place, now! Taking only the steps you
can take, speaking the only words you can speak, making the only life you can
make.”
Why is the live
interaction you have with an audience so profound? (VH)
“On stage, there is a
kind of ritual invitation being made; strangely enough that invitation is to
the silence that lies as a context for all the beautiful language and truths
you hear in poetry. Quite often in a room full of people whether on stage or in
a conference room, I’m following the listening in the room--where the silence
is most profound.” When Whyte speaks to
an audience, something almost alchemical happens in the interaction. As he
describes “something quite new happens in performance; listening and responding
to the profundity of the silence…that’s where the magic and the art form are
and that’s where something new will happen at the same time.” Audience
members engage in dynamic interaction in response to the poet’s invitation to
discover our personal genius, to join what resonates from that selfsame voice
of authenticity and honesty with which he speaks. As
Whyte engages with an audience he dares us to ask the Beautiful Questions, to
risk discovering our unexplored interior frontiers, not necessarily because of
their innate beauty, but because of the beauty and genius we discover in
ourselves when we ask them.
Valerie
Holt is a writer, mentor and founder of The LamaFarm where the soul of the
seeker rises from the ground we break, dig on purpose.™ She is
thrilled to cohost David Whyte in February as he urges us to Remember the
Beautiful Questions as we are waking.
see the article as it appears in the CATALYST MAGAZINE Here
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