Life is Full of Invitations

You can call David Whyte (b. 1955) an all-rounder, but somehow even this falls short as a description of all that he encapsulates. Whyte walks the line, living amid paradoxes. He operates on the border between culture and nature, between poetry and prose. He addresses boardrooms of large multinational companies and knows three hundred poems off by heart. He travels the world and teaches us to stand still and listen.

David Whyte may not be a household name among the general public, but few speakers are as in demand as he is. He has written several bestsellers that never go out of print. His TED Talk has been viewed more than a million times. The people who know his work can’t get enough of him. For them, David Whyte is not just a poet or a speaker, but someone who embodies a prophetic allure. He grew up in Yorkshire, in the inviting and tranquil landscape of Emily Brontë, all the while dreaming of his mother’s native country, the magical and mythical Ireland. As a child, he reported a feeling of being “kidnapped” by poetry, a feeling which was only ever briefly interrupted by seeing Jacques Cousteau on television, causing Whyte to momentarily drop everything to become a maritime zoologist (he eventually returned to poetry).

With his low, sonorous voice, he speaks to me over Zoom, from his home on an island near Seattle. In this house, he wrote The House of Belonging, where he formulated what it means to have a home. But the house he wrote about then is not the house it is today; through various renovations, it has tripled in size. And Whyte knows that no home lasts forever. Sooner or later, there’s always a knock on the door. Once you have found a home, a departure will follow. Life happens in cycles. Soon Whyte will go to England, then Denmark, Kenya, South Africa, and England again. He feels at home when he’s on the road. “Travel is a collective human experience. Life is full of invitations. Invitations that you provide yourself and invitations you accept.”
David Whyte has a language of his own, in which aphorisms and proverbs are key. To do him justice, because we don’t want to confine him to the limits of the traditional interview, we chose to let him speak through his own core concepts instead of through responses. Welcome to the world of David Whyte.

The Destination

“When we think of a pilgrimage, we think of a destination, whether it is Rome or Kyoto or Santiago. But on the way there, you always deviate. Something calls you, you are called. Deviating from the road is part of the road itself. You will go astray anyway, by definition, even if you end up exactly where you had planned to end up. Because the journey transforms you. You walk and change, you change by walking. So your destination is never the place you planned to reach. You have changed, so that place is different than you thought it would be.

But even when you’re not traveling, you can be in a constant state of change. At least, if you are open to that. Traveling sharpens your vision, traveling allows you to see things as if you have never seen them before, so that you no longer take what you see for granted. Every Zen student knows that transformation essentially depends on the intensity of your attention. Are you present or not? Most people are not very present. Even if they live in a house with a beautiful view, after a while, they no longer see that view. Their gaze has lost its freshness. The world is much bigger and richer for those who can see with fresh eyes. You step into the kitchen, and you see your wife as if for the first time. You can see your children every day as if for the first time. You stand in front of the mirror, and you greet a reflected stranger. Traveling can bring us back to that deep primal experience of life, that direct contact, which only comes about when we forget all the stories and thoughts we have formulated about life, which we have wrongly come to see as life itself. That primal experience is still available if we learn to be present.”

The Stories of the World

“As a child in Yorkshire, I had a deep connection with the landscape. And through my mother, I was also in touch with the wild imagination of the Irish. Those were parallel worlds, into which I entered in turn, without ever forgetting or losing the other world—I had Ireland at my disposal in my mind, and around me were the hills and mountains and valleys and streams and brooks and rivers of Yorkshire. There were old monasteries there, ruins, castles, myths. Yorkshire is not unique in this. Every place, anywhere in the world, has its own stories. We no longer know all of those stories. But many are still available if we open ourselves to them.

When you travel, you pass through an environment that is waiting to speak, to make itself known to you. The aborigines have ‘song lines,’ songs that belong to a certain place, and that you should sing when you are passing through. We should do that everywhere. Every landscape is a palimpsest, and so the conversation we have with each landscape is also layered.

The same goes for people. We only see each other’s outer shell; we have no idea of the inner wealth. Our own identity is very layered also, much more layered than we think. And when we travel around, preferably on foot, we witness all those layers of nature and subconsciously think about our own layers. As a child, I did not know all this, I did not yet have the right knowledge, but I did feel the presence of that knowledge, of that knowledge of the world. I was always outside, often on my own, exploring. I was often in a kind of concentrated daze, I walked around very attentively. Every year I chose a horizon, a view, to explore. I walked there, with my friends or alone, or I cycled. I had to learn to climb mountains to reach my horizons. That was normal back then, a child who was always outside. In the past, children learned to disappear and reappear. Now everyone lives in a herd. If you live in a herd, straying suddenly becomes a bad thing.”

THE GREAT MISTAKE IS TO ACT THE DRAMA AS IF YOU WERE ALONE

‘Whether we want to or not, we are in a conversation with our environment. We are connected to it. It is up to us to enter that conversation deliberately. If you don’t, everything will pass you by and you will be left behind unconnected. If you remain unaware of the ups and downs of your environment, of how everything is constantly changing, how everything blossoms and dies and is born again, then you remain an outsider. An outsider who continues to apply his maps to a world that doesn’t adhere to maps. You can read in a book what season it is, but you can also go outside and feel it. As an observer you are not outside the story, you are in the middle of it. Eventually you discover that you are not just an observer at all. You are part of it.’

The conversational nature of reality

‘The world is talking to you. Enlightenment is not a state of supreme joy, nor is it an absence of suffering. Every path you choose inevitably leads to pain. There is no life possible that is at the same time insular and safe and yet full and rich. Enlightenment is knowing you are in a true conversation between what you think is you and what you think is outside of you. It is precisely on that border, that frontier, that the richest life can be lived. When you are properly attuned, you will see plenty of opportunities that your former, isolated self would not have seen.

I’ll give you a concrete example: we’ve all experienced receiving wise advice from someone that we completely ignored because we thought we were above it, we were Clint Eastwood, we were John Wayne, we didn’t need anyone. Ten years later you think, oh God, that was exactly the advice I needed. I could have saved myself seven years of misery if I had listened. The question is: what is the invisible advice you are ignoring right now? I lived for two years as a biologist in the Galapagos Islands, where the environment is just wild.

Sailing around, without lights to help you navigate, without GPS, being sharp was an absolute requirement. You had to read the water and sense the tides. You were forced to live in a deep, attentive, silent state. Otherwise, you just wouldn’t make it. If you don’t listen to the signs around you, the world will devour you. Thousands of people try to achieve that attentive state every day when they sit down on their meditation cushion. That’s the first step. But the conversation between the world and you is reciprocal. You listen to the world, but you also must talk back. My favorite way to do that is through poetry. But it is also more abstract than that: your steps in the world, your voice, everything about you is also part of the world. You can’t not be in conversation.’

The importance of asking beautiful questions

‘You nourish the conversation by asking beautiful questions. A beautiful question is an invitation. The world invites you because it wants to know you, and you can invite the world back to get to know it. You do this by asking questions, out loud and to yourself. Once you stop sending invitations, you will stop receiving them, and then every relationship is doomed, every friendship, every marriage. An example of a nice question is: which invitations do I extend when I walk into a place? Is the invitation: come closer or rather: leave me alone? The more inviting you make your life, the more invitations you will receive.’

The horizon

‘You can walk all the way to Santiago for six weeks without seeing anything. When you are stuck in the superficial, strategic part of your mind, everything of value passes you by. But if you walk the same path in a deeper state – perhaps because you have just lost someone, perhaps you have been heartbroken, perhaps you are at some other crossroads in your life – then your experience becomes entirely different. Everything is heightened. Our identity is not so much related to our ideas about ourselves or our beliefs, but rather to the depth of attention we pay to the world we travel through. The more wonderful your attention, the more wonderful the world becomes. A frontier is nothing more than a horizon.

The beauty of a horizon is that it is defined by what you cannot see, by its unreachability. As soon as you move towards a horizon, you enter a relationship with the unknown. Physiological research has confirmed that moving towards a horizon has a great, blissful effect on people. The view keeps us sane, how the horizon slowly changes as we get closer, how we change with it. And then there is also the horizon within ourselves, in our body. There is an inner boundary line that we cannot see below. We don’t know what’s going on underneath. We encounter that borderline when we first start meditating. We sit down, we remain silent, and then we panic. We turn our gaze inward and discover there is nothing there, we are hollow. You have to overcome that resistance, that is the price you pay to really get to know yourself, to descend deeper. All those foundations that your mind has built, all those decades of work, they all crumble as you descend. The essence of the pilgrimage is that, by moving towards an outer horizon, that borderline with the unknown, you also meet your inner horizon, your inner Santiago. Each trip consists of two trips. If you walk both journeys with full attention, you can call yourself enlightened.’

The beauty of a horizon is that it is defined by what you cannot see, by its unreachability. As soon as you move towards a horizon, you enter a relationship with the unknown. Physiological research has confirmed that moving towards a horizon has a great, blissful effect on people. The view keeps us sane, how the horizon slowly changes as we get closer, how we change with it. And then there is also the horizon within ourselves, in our body. There is an inner boundary line that we cannot see below. We don’t know what’s going on underneath. We encounter that borderline when we first start meditating. We sit down, we remain silent, and then we panic. We turn our gaze inward and discover there is nothing there, we are hollow. You have to overcome that resistance, that is the price you pay to really get to know yourself, to descend deeper. All those foundations that your mind has built, all those decades of work, they all crumble as you descend. The essence of the pilgrimage is that, by moving towards an outer horizon, that borderline with the unknown, you also meet your inner horizon, your inner Santiago. Each trip consists of two trips. If you walk both journeys with full attention, you can call yourself enlightened.’

Innocence is the ability to be found by the world

‘Innocence is nothing more than a state of receptivity. We learn to think about innocence as if it were a temporary state that we then grow out of, innocence as being replaced by experience. But that way of thinking is detrimental to your creative abilities, to your inner resources. Innocence is a state of deep wonder and openness. You must open yourself up to be found by the world. You can also know innocence when you are seventy or eighty. Innocence is a skill that you never have to unlearn.’

Poetry is language against which you have no defenses

‘As a child, looking at the adults around me, I thought: what are these people doing? These guys are crazy. Their world is crazy. They have forgotten all about their childhood, all basic understanding of the world has become alien to them. I saw adulthood as a certain type of amnesia. It wasn’t until I started reading poetry that I understood that it was possible to maintain that original imagination as you grew older. Just as we are defenseless against some experiences, we are defenseless against good poetry. It penetrates everything. Thanks to poetry, my conversation with the world deepened immensely. Life contains beauty, I understood, it contains horrors, and it contains horrible beauty.

Throughout your life you are constantly disappearing. The child you were disappears. The young man disappears. If you could meet your old self, he or she would not believe anything you say. He or she would never take your advice. And in addition to these metaphorical disappearances, there are also real disappearances that you must relate to. The people you lose. Suddenly they are no longer there. You are healthy, until suddenly you are not. And at the end of the ride, you disappear completely. Poetry teaches you to accept that, to endure it, and to realize that you are part of that beauty, and that you must first appear to then disappear.