So the marriage with work. When you think about it, you do woo your work through all those early studies and dabblings, and then you commit to your work, and then you have to live with your work. But this is Frost on the subject, a portion of a poem called Two Trumps in Mud Time. where Frost is disturbed in the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression by two tramps, two hobos, coming to the corners of his farmyard as he's chopping wood. And he tells you early on in the poem that he loves chopping wood, and he'd do it whether he was paid or not. It's his own farm. But he knows immediately when he sees these two fellows out of the corner of his eye that they want him to hand the ax over so that they can be paid for doing something that he loves to do out of his own avocation. And the poem is very, very good because the central dynamic is the reader wondering whether he's going to hand over the ax or keep it himself.

[01:13]

So you're saying as you're reading, are you going to give the ax or are you going to keep it? You're going to give it, you're going to keep it. And it's very clever because he doesn't tell you. whether he does or not, but this is what he says at the end. He says, but yield, who will, to their separation. But yield, who will, to their separation. My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation. But yield, who will, to their separation. My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation as my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one and work is play for mortal stakes is the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sake. Yield who will to their separation, but yield who will to their separation. My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation, as my two eyes make one insight. Only where love and need are one and work is play for mortal stakes is the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sake.

[02:24]

So you could say this to yourself at any epoch in your life, whether you're just starting out, looking for your work, whether you're in the midst of it, or whether you're ready to change the whole thing, or whether you'd like to create a world in which there is no work at all, which is a forlorn hope, of course, but yield who will to their separation. My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation. as my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one, and work is play for mortal stakes, is the deed ever really done, for heaven and the future's sake. Yield who will to their separation, very grounded place. Work is where you'll find yourself, work is where you can triumph, work is where you can change the world and support yourself and those you love. Work is also where you can kill yourself most easily. Forget yourself, separate from yourself, lose yourself, destroy yourself.

[03:29]

Yield who will to their separation. lot at stake in work, because it's where you're visible in the world. You're going to either feel powerless or powerful in your work, or usually everything in between on every day. And it's where you're visible, where you'll perhaps make a difference in the world. It's also where your sense of self-worth is tested in the presence of others and what you think about yourself and how you value yourself and how you value others. It's where the stakes are often very, very high and things matter. And there's high drama in work. I was interviewed on the radio a couple of years ago. I was asked, how do you enjoy working in all these button-down, boring companies where there's no emotion and people don't say what they're thinking and da-da-da-da-da.

[04:36]

It was very antediluvian media understanding of the classic corporate workplace. And I said, I've never come across a workplace like that. I said, they're all like Shakespeare plays writ large with dramatic entrances and exits and nobles giving powerful speeches from the podium while the gravediggers are in the restrooms telling it like it really is. Midnight assassinations, and every epoch ends with a lot of blood on the floor. I said, this is your average organization. And especially if you're in a non-profit organization, those are the most machiavellian of all. As someone has said, because when the stakes are so low, people get really vicious. Every organization I worked in, whether it's an insurance company or a bank or a place that makes airplanes, cars, software, you've got these intense dramas which take place because so much is at stake.

[05:58]

So much is at stake. It's all dressed up with various necessities, shareholder value, and a lot of other meaningless things. But the meaning at the center is very, very powerful. I, as a person, am going to make a difference in the world. How do I go about doing that? Through my work. And there's a lot of work, of course, on leadership and followership and all this. But really, I think it's about creating a compelling conversation that others would want to join voluntarily. And that's how you get the healthiest workplace. But it's also how you get the healthiest commitment on your own part. You need to create a compelling conversation about your work that all the parts of you would want to join. The same leadership you're trying to enact in the corporation, in the organization, in the office, on the phone, on the screen, wherever your frontier is in your work.

[07:04]

The same dynamic obtains in trying to get the whole of you to not necessarily commit, but to be engaged with it, to be in conversation with it. And often our conversation about our work is very, very narrow. I'm doing it because of this. Yeah. You keep telling yourself that and sometimes it's just like a lifeline. It's the last thing you're holding on to on the lifeboat. I'm doing it for the kids. You're just holding on. Your knuckles are frozen. But what's it like to expand the conversation? And if you can't expand the conversation, if it's impossible, if it would kill you to do it, to know that you're supposed to let go. and go elsewhere. And you say, well, how am I going to be kept in the manner to which I'm accustomed? You're not going to be kept in the manner to which you're accustomed. If you want a real life, you have to risk yourself, you have to simplify, you have to do without certain things you think you need in order to go through this fierce kind of fire.

[08:14]

Revelation must be terrible with no time left to say goodbye. Imagine that moment staring at the still waters with only the brief tremor of your body to say you are leaving everything and everyone you know behind. Revelation must be terrible with no time left to say goodbye. Imagine that moment, staring at the still waters with only the brief tremor of your body to say you're leaving everything and everyone you know behind. Being far from home is hard, but you know at least we are all exiled together. When you open your eyes to the world, you're on your own for the first time. No one is even interested in saving you now. and the world steps in to test the calm fluidity of your body as if it believed you could join its vibrant dance of fire and calmness and final stillness as if you were meant to be exactly where you are as if like the dark branch of a desert river you could flow on without a speck of guilt and everything everywhere would still be just as it should be

[09:30]

as if your place in the world mattered and the world could neither speak nor hear the fullness of its old bitter and beautiful cry without the deep well of your body resonating in the echo. Knowing that it takes only that first terrible word to make the circle complete, revelation must be terrible, knowing you can never hide your voice again. And it's this voice, this voice which is invocation and avocation from vox, the ancient Latin word. Vox, you can hear an echo in that word. It's the human body making a sound. When Frost says, yield who will to their separation, my object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation. It's the voice you have inside you with the voices you're going to join in conversation in the world. And in order, there's a strange inversion in which in order to treat yourself seriously in the work, you have to act as if everyone else is alive and has work too.

[10:40]

In other words, your ambition isolated is going to actually stop you from consummating it. Because the full fruit comes from an iteration which you cannot predict. I always think if you're doing your real work, it will lead you in places you never, ever could imagine. I mean, look at myself. I was born a mile away from the dumb steeple, which is this old medieval marker next to Kirtley's Priory. that used to mark the edge of the monastic lens. It's actually the priory where Robin Hood in mythological story was bled to death by the mother superior of that nunnery. Unbeknownst to Robin Hood, she was the sister of the sheriff of Nottingham.

[11:42]

That's the story I grew up with. And he shot his arrow when he was dying out of the window and said, Barry, you wear this arrow lens. So, his grave's up in the woods there, and I used to creep to it when I was a child and sit in the confines of this Victorian edifice which had been erected over the mythological site, covered in ivy. It was like the secret garden or something. Of course, my Uncle Tom was a great joker. He said he was so weak the arrow landed on top of the wardrobe. So we can't put him in there. We have to take him outside. Yorkshire humour. But this dumb steeple, this boundary marker, was the place where the Luddites used to meet with their huge hammers. and they'd walk across the fields by the hundred and smash up the machinery that they thought was taking away their jobs.

[12:44]

So I actually was born in the epicenter of the Luddite psyche. And when you heard stories from your grandparents and from your friends' grandparents and things who were just a generation or two away from it, You knew where the sympathies of the local people lay, and it wasn't with the mill owners, and it wasn't with the military, and it was with the Luddites. So I grew up with this incredible sympathy for the dispossessed, you could say. And I come from long lines of the dispossessed on both sides. Irish side and Scots side and English side. So there's no kings or queens or reincarnated priests of the Temple of Isis, you know. They were sons and daughters of the soil, or the sea actually, a lot of herring fishermen on my father's mother's side.

[13:45]

And of course, you take that and then you add the inheritance, the Western inheritance of the poet as being the outsider, who by virtue of being outside has a perspective and remains unsullied by mainstream society. And then you bring all this into collision with the corporate world of late 20th century North America, which occurred. I had these invitations, powerful invitations, compelling invitations to go into this world. And here was this whole inheritance. And I never could have imagined in my wildest dreams that when I committed to going full-time as a poet, it would lead me into the heart of the beast, into the very center of the labyrinth. And I'd be working there and not only be thriving with it, but I'd actually feel that this is the catalytic crucible where our society is actually being formed for the future.

[14:48]

We're putting so much of the eggs of our identity into the basket of work that we're having to make it more meaningful. We're having to make it more real because we're spending so much bloody time there, more than anywhere else in our existence. And if we're not there, we're imagining a place we could be in our mind, where you could be doing something, working with others. And I do feel like because whenever anything is reduced to its absolute essence, it's all ready to turn into its absolute opposite. This is what in the ancient Greek world was called enantiodromia, the ability of something, once it actually becomes its fullest self, to turn into its opposite. which I think is what is happening politically now. So you had America, the U.S., going completely alone, relying on military power. We are it. We will go where we want to go.

[15:51]

And it leads to absolute vulnerability. a really pure kind of vulnerability in Iraq now, where it's having to genuinely ask back for that help. So it's like a friendship that's broken, that's all the more moving when you go back to call it together again. And I also think that in many ways, Bush represents the end of the American century. It's the... It's something taken so far to its furthest essence that it will not be able to reestablish itself again. It will be seen as empty and obsolete and unfashionable. So the attempt for this hegemony will be very difficult to reestablish. So perhaps the whole thing is coming to a head now, so it wouldn't come at a time where it could do more damage, actually, in the future.

[17:01]

So, Bush is actually a good thing in that he's emancipated the rest of the world into their own voices. Europe is having to find its own voice, the third world, developing countries, the Doha rounds of the agricultural talks and everything. Brazil is finding its own voice. France has always had its own voice. But there's an emancipation that's occurring. out of that reaction that I think is very, very healthy underneath all of the ill health on the surface. It's like a person who's going through this crisis in their body where it's falling apart, but it's representative of an underlying reorganization, that's a kind of nativistic ghost dance on the surface.

[18:04]

If we wear this kind of shirt, the bullets won't touch us. We won't be able to be hurt again in the way we were. How did I get onto that subject? Where were we? Work. Yes. Yes, the Luddites. Robin Hood. We're tracing it back there. We'll have an inquiry, a panel of people as to how we got into this subject. Yes. Things turning into their opposite. Yes, yes. Yes, they are ambition isolated. Yeah. It's very good to look at longing as a part of belonging and what it's like to keep your longing alive. And I mean a pure kind of longing.

[19:09]

You know, the longing that has to do with engagement with this beautiful and difficult world that we're a part of, that you treat it as if it's alive and not just a background. And it's one of the great tragedies of busyness, you know, in business and work, that this incredible world does become a background. It becomes a resource, becomes something you're going to extract your future from. and to have the innocence which I see not as a weakness but as a kind of faculty to be able to understand what everything is telling you about where you are in your life. And this is enacted too, I think, in our individual lives. I'm working a lot with midlife and dynamics of midlife at the moment. I wonder why. And it's going to happen to me sometime. So what would it be like to look at the vulnerability that comes with age?

[20:19]

And the vulnerability starts coming in a lot earlier than when your body actually starts breaking down. What would it be like to see that vulnerability not as a weakness, but as an actual faculty? That through your vulnerability, you're going to be able to perceive the world in a much larger way than you could when you attempted to be all powerful and to have all of your bases covered, you know? Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt marvelous illusion that there was a spring breaking out in my heart. Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt marvelous illusion that there was a spring Breaking out in my heart, I said, along what secret aqueduct are you coming to me?

[21:35]

Oh, water, water of a new life that I have never drunk. Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt marvelous illusion that there was a beehive here in my heart, and the golden bees were making white comb and sweet honey for my old failures. Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt marvelous illusion that there was a fiery sun in my heart. It was fiery because it gave warmth as if from a heart, and it was sun because it gave light and brought tears to my eyes. Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt marvelous illusion that there was God here in my heart. God. Is my soul asleep? Have those beehives that labor by night stopped and the water wheel of thought? Is it dry, the cups empty, wheeling, carrying only shadows? No, my soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake.

[22:37]

It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches its clear eyes open, far off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence. But if it's true that vulnerability is actually a faculty, and you could learn that later in life, why not learn it earlier in life? If that's going to be an initiation you're going to come to anyway, and you can hold out and hold out and hold out until your deathbed, when you face the ultimate vulnerability. But ultimately, the final initiation into power, the final understanding of power, is powerlessness. The only way you'd fully understand power is through powerlessness.

[23:40]

Someone once said, one way to come to love is to do without it for a long, long time. One way to come to love is to do without it for a long, long time. It's that the necessary understandings of the way human beings are made in the world, and they're made to belong to things. And then they're made to exile themselves from that belonging in order to come to another larger belonging. And all of those things you're faced in your work, you take your work as a lover, you know, and then you have to live with it as a wife or husband or partner, you know. But you must never forget that you're also the lover at the same time. There's a brilliant piece by the Greek poet Ritsos where it's called Marpessa's Choice. And Mapesa was given the choice of being the lover of the great god Apollo, but she couldn't do it, and she chose her mortal husband over Apollo.

[24:57]

So this is the poem that Ritsos writes, and he says...I haven't recited this for years, actually, so see if I still got it. It wasn't by chance that Marpessa chose Idus over Apollo. It wasn't by chance that Marpessa chose Idus over Apollo. I'm in big trouble if I can't remember the rest of this poem. Gosh, you're all deeply fascinated. It wasn't by chance that Marpessa chose Idus over Apollo, despite her passion for the god, despite his indescribable beauty, the kind that made Myrtle tremble into blossom as he passed. Wasn't by chance that Merpessa chose Ides over Apollo despite her passion for the god, despite his indescribable beauty, the kind of beauty that made Myrtle tremble into blossom as he passed.

[26:02]

She hardly dared raise her eyes above his knees, between his toenails and his knees. What incredible journeys. What indescribable journeys between his toenails and his knees. Still, at the ultimate moment of choice, Mepessa lost her nerve. What would she do with a bequest as grand as that? A mortal she would grow old one day. She imagined her comb with a tuft of white hair in it on the chair beside the bed where the immortal one lay shimmering. She thought of time's fingerprints on her thighs, her fallen breasts in the black metal mirror. Oh, no. And she fell against Ida's mortal shoulder as though dead. And he picked her up in his arms like a cloak and turned his back on Apollo almost arrogantly. Almost. A corner of the cloak was held back.

[27:06]

He turned his back on Apollo arrogantly, almost. There was a tearing sound, the sound of cloth ripping. A corner of the cloak was held back, trapped by the god's foot. It wasn't by chance that Marpessa chose Idus over Apollo despite her passion for the god, despite his indescribable beauty, the kind that made Myrtle tremble into blossom as he passed. She hardly dared raise her eyes above his knees, between his toenails and his knees. What incredible journeys, what indescribable journeys between his toenails. and his knees. Still, at the ultimate moment of choice, Mepessa lost her nerve. What would she do with a bequest as grand as that? A mortal, she would grow old one day.

[28:09]

She suddenly imagined her comb with a tuft of white hair in it on the chair beside the bed where the immortal one lay shimmering. She thought of time's fingerprints on her thighs, Her fallen breasts in the black metal mirror. Oh, no. And she fell against Ida's mortal shoulder as though dead. And he picked her up in his arms like a cloak and turned his back on Apollo, almost arrogantly. Almost. There was the sound of cloth ripping. A corner of the cloak was held back, trapped by the god's foot. So it's a brilliant, disturbing piece that tells you you should never choose between the mortal personality of the person you're living with and the immortal person you fell in love with. And that an individual human being doesn't get to choose between those two things.

[29:14]

And exactly the same with your work. And if you try and turn your back on either side of it, if you just went for Apollo and neglected the mortal, something desperate would happen at the end there. And if you turn your back on the immortal, on your innocence... on your great belonging, on the sacred, on what is really core, on what is transformative, what is beyond you, what is inspirational, what is grand, what is indescribably beautiful. You'll find yourself torn in two, you know. yield who will to their separation.

[30:24]

My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation, as my two eyes make one insight. Only where love and need are one and work is play for mortal stakes is the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sake. So I remember a kind of... abnegation having to, a personal abnegation having to occur for me to commit to this direction in which I'd be going. Because when I was invited into the corporate workplace, there were lots of things I felt could go wrong for my writing. For a start, I didn't want to sell out. I didn't want the work to be manipulated at all. And I didn't want it to be used to coerce people into moods or qualities that they wouldn't gladly walk into themselves.

[31:27]

The other thing was I didn't want to compromise my name as a poet. And I also didn't want to be known as a poet associated with work. But I'd be a poet first and foremost, which has to do with some unknown freedom which is not named. I'll carry his name only for a short while. But I remember, well, one of the things I was thinking, my mother's phrase was always, if you're asked sincerely three times, you have to go. So that can take different forms, of course. And each request has to be more sincere than the last. So I was given the equivalent of three invitations to come. And so I went through that door, and I realized that I had to risk a lot of the things that I wanted to keep precious. I realized I was in a kind of defensive mode.

[32:29]

You know, my work is more precious than actually finding out whether this is real or not, you know, whether the conversation is real. And I had to say, the hell with it, you know. Let the chips fall and I will do my damnedest, you know, to keep the whole thing integral and real, you know, and honest. And we'll go from here. And it's interesting because Campbell looks at that refusal of the call that when you're first asked, you always say no. That's often one of the diagnostic features of being exactly where you have to go. And I remember when I was asked, I met the person who's now my agent. I was giving a workshop in Manhattan, in New York City. And he came up to me afterwards and said, do you have any books in you you want to write? Because people have been trying to get us together for a while. And I mentioned about five or six books.

[33:30]

And then as an afterthought, I said, oh, and I should sometime talk about the place of poetry in the work world, because that's a lot of what I'm doing right now. And of course, Murphy's Law, I get a call 24 hours later when I'm back on the West Coast. Ned Levitt saying he's just met with an editor from Doubleday, and when I mentioned this thing, she leapt across the table and started tearing my jacket off. She's interested in this book, and I'm going, no, no, no, what about the other ones? And then mentioning all these other books, no, not interested, not interested. No, no, no. Well, I'm not interested in that one." And then they say, well, why don't you just come to dinner in New York when you're here the next time? And so I always feel that your work is always a conversation between what you want for yourself and what the world's asking you to do. And it should be a robust conversation and you should say no to it sometimes. But you should always stay vulnerable in your no.

[34:33]

and out there at the frontier. And so I went out there and had this incredible dinner, and I said no, and I felt really proud of myself. And then I went back another time, second dinner, even nicer place, and no. And then I went for the third time and as I was walking into the restaurant, I was hearing my mother's voice and I was saying, when you go for the third dinner, you've already said yes. I capitulated, and people say, why do you write prose? I say, bribery and emotional blackmail. But that book led me into places. It was such a bloody difficult book to write, because for a start, there was no other book you could have on your desk that you could crib from in any kind of imaginative way at all.

[35:35]

You could say, okay, this fellow's done this, or this woman's done this in this area, and I can do something parallel. I'd search. There was nothing on the shelves that brought poetry together with the deathly dynamics of the corporate workplace. So I was off on my own, alone. And And the despair in writing that book. One of the great secrets of writing is that you find that exactly the way you cannot write the book is exactly the quality you'll put in it. And it's like childbirth. You have to forget it each time or you'd never do it again. But you have to get stuck. If you just go off, rent a condominium in Florida and write for three weeks and the thing's done, 200-page manuscript, there'll be nothing in there that'll be new that isn't what anyone else has already said or done.

[36:43]

You have to get stuck. You've got to be where you can't do it. It's impossible. And it's impossible to get work I want. It's impossible to have the life I want. It's impossible to be happy at the level of happiness that I want in my work. And it's exactly the way you can't do it. That's what you're actually going to put into your work. That's what you're going to do. It's going to be a big part of what will be new in it, what will be the gift in it to other people. I had a lovely moment. I have this story in the book. Many of you might know it, In the Heart Aroused, where I get to this bridge in the Himalayas. And there's... There I am, Indiana Jones, and I can't cross this bridge. I'm too scared to go across the bridge, even though I've been a rock climber and mountaineer all my life. And if you remember in the story, just as I'm about to give up and go back down the path and go around two days around this other path, this wonderful little old Tibetan woman with a huge dung basket on her back appears in the path.

[37:56]

just sees my huge, bebooted Western feet on the path, you know, because she's looking for dung to throw in her basket. And she bows, says, namaste, turns around and goes straight across the bridge. And so I was in New York. You know, this is what I love about these mythological stories and poetry and the effect it has on people who'd never be working with this kind of stuff at all. There's this fellow from Brooklyn. He's in the workshop. He says, listen, he says, I love the story. I love the story. You're at the bridge. The bridge is down. The lady comes. The lady goes across the bridge. You follow. I love it. He says, but listen, in my life, the bridge is down. I look around. No lady. But I thought it was a beautiful arrival, you know, that he'd be using that metaphor.

[39:01]

Here he is, you know, he's a Brooklyn guy, but he's got this image, you know, in the mountains, the bridge, the woman, you know, and he's crossing the streets of New York, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and he's looking this woman, you know. And I said to him, I said, I think you're looking for my lady instead of yours, you know. It'll appear in a surprising way. You won't, you know, be able to say, as it's happening, here she is, you know. You'll only be able to look back and say, oh my God, you know, there she was. So look for your own lady. Hey, don't touch my lady. You know. You offend the family, you offend me. Let's break for lunch now.

[40:23]

And let's, if we're in here just before two. And we'll start right on two o'clock. And so then you can really enjoy your lunch and be ashamed to be out in this place and not take time to walk out. And there's a path that goes through the garden all the way down to the beach there. And there's also a high trail up there. If you go up by where the wood sheds are, just above here, but the muddy area, it joins a trail that goes out over the hills. So it's gorgeous up there. I was just up there at the break, so... Just so replenish yourselves and hope you enjoy this beautiful place. And we'll gather again at two. Okay, thanks. So, welcome back. Welcome back to the post-lunch trough.

[41:28]

We'll just wallow here for a while until we come awake in 45 minutes or so. But gorgeous day out there. Absolutely beautiful. The wonders of creation. And so I was thinking of a Hopkins poem. which is Pied Beauty. And it says, Glory be to God for dappled things, for skies of couple color as a brindled cow, for rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim, fresh fire coal, chestnut falls, finches' wings, landscape plotted and pieced, and all trades their gear and tackle and trim. Whatever is fickle, freckled, who knows how, with swift sour sweet a dazzled dim, he fathers forth whose beauty is past change. Praise him. Glory be to God for dappled things, for skies of couple color as a brinded cow, for rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim fresh.

[42:42]

Fire cold, chestnut falls, finches, winds, landscape plotted and pieced, and all trades their gear and tackle and trim. Whatever is fickle, freckled, who knows how, with swift, sweet, sour, a dazzle dim, he fathers forth whose beauty is past change. Praise him. I like Hopkins because you never know where you are in the poem until you do know where you are. So suddenly you're there. He met Yeats, actually, when he was a Jesuit priest in... Yates never knew that he was sitting with another poet who would be almost as famous as he is, but in a very different genre because nothing was published in Hopkins Life, not until his friend Robert Bridges had his things published. So who knows what secret garrets hold the poets of the future today.

[43:50]

That's probably someone off on the edge somewhere who is actually speaking to what's occurring today. And so there's equal parts of ourselves, too, that are off at the edge, composing the voice of the age, of your age, of your time. So how do you set up a conversation in a wider breadth as possible inside you, inviting the parts of yourself that might have been orphaned or that might have been seen as too dangerous to entertain in the mainstream direction of your life and bring them into the conversation? Because those parts look very different when they are part of an ecology of being and not just off on their own. They can be very dangerous just by themselves. But when they're actually acknowledged and brought in, something else, some other kind of cradling can occur.

[44:50]

But we'll often cut out the fiercer edges of ourself. and cut out the extremities of our experience, extremity of joy. Very hard to feel joy because you immediately know the transience of it is going to be taken away from you, so you pull yourself in from it. When you feel that incredible love for your child and you find yourself pulling yourself back because what would you do and who would you be if you lost them? And so we find that when we actually come to experience grief, we can't...we're just used to living in the middle, you know, and we find it difficult to get right to the bottom of it, to fall into it, allow ourselves to feel that extremity. And therefore, we're often dragging it around with us, you know, for much longer than it's appointed shelf life warrants. how do you walk into an experience and broaden as you go in.

[45:57]

We know how to go into an experience and narrow as we go in like this. It's like a man in an intimate conversation. It's going to be over soon and then I can... But no. Yes, I want the conversation. Then she faints and you can walk away because she's so surprised. I have a question. You talked about it seems like a paradox that you don't need to imagine Yes, you broaden yourself in a very simple way.

[47:04]

No, but I think that's true, actually. The metaphor is only as good as it's truthful and it works for you. Sometimes... you know, to broaden and widen yourself is to simplify yourself. Because you can be caught, for instance… I mean, if you look at Zen teaching, it talks about the way… you can put yourself into a very complicated, seemingly endless world of the strategic mind, or the monkey mind as it's called in the Buddhist tradition. So it actually seems enormous and you have all kinds of philosophical ramifications to everything that you do, but actually it's one little narrow doorway. and you're actually in this enclosure. So to broaden is to put that strategic mind into conversation with all the other parts of you, but it actually simplifies your whole character, simplifies your ability to be courageous.

[48:12]

If you look at Hamlet in Shakespeare, he's an instance of someone who has this astonishing mind, but he works over it and through it in such a way that it stops him from doing everything. until he's able to actually let it go and let it fall away. So that moment where he's about to commit suicide or he's thinking about it, but he talks himself out of it, which is the famous to be or not to be speech. To be or not to be, that is the question, whether it is nobler in the mind. This is actually a good poem about work, too. To be or not to be, that's if I can remember it. To be or not to be, that is the question, whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them, to die, to sleep, no more, and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. tis a...

[49:15]

consummation, devout, we'll get through this together. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished to die to sleep. Aye, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long a life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the proud man's contumely, the scorns of For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the insolence of office? Yes. Yes, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes when he himself might his quietus make bear odd kin. Who would these fardels bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, that unknown born from whose land no traveler returns, makes us rather bear those ills we have than flee to others we know not of.

[50:30]

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all. and thus the native hue of resolution is sickly door with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. So it's a brilliant line, thus conscience doth make cowards of us all. In that line really Shakespeare's talking about the strategic mind really. It's the part of you that's working through every ramification. So it seems to be incredibly broad. but it's actually only working with one faculty. And that's this quadrant faculty of placing things, you know, according to names and what will happen if you do this and what will happen if you do that. And not placing it also in conversation with the faculty of the imagination. Because conscience doth make cowards of us all. And thus the native hue of resolution is sickly door with a pale cast of thought.

[51:35]

and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. Lovely draining feeling at the end of that piece. You feel exactly the way Hamlet does here. Why bother? Thank you, by the way. I mean, there's a fierce piece. I worked with Hamlet. Oh my God, what was that? Fierce piece, yeah. Shouldn't invoke these energies. Who was that? What was that? Yes. But I was working at the Globe Theatre with a Shakespearean friend of mine, and we did Hamlet for executives. And this play would frighten you to death, frighten you to death just preparing for the day with Hamlet because... I mean, I started by saying, you don't spend a day with Hamlet and go away with a few good management tips.

[52:43]

Whatever... Well, this is true of all poetry really, but whatever context you've arranged for Shakespeare, he will always overwhelm it. There's no context you can arrange for it. It's going to overwhelm it. You're going to have everything in there. And one of the courageous things he does in that play is ask you to ask yourself, what if it's all about nothing? What if you've made the whole bloody thing up, you know? Just so you feel all right, yeah. What if you don't have the context at all? What's occurring? He doesn't say that that's true, he just asks you to ask the question. So this is a beautiful piece too where he's going so much into his confusion, but he does it in such a heartfelt way that that confusion actually turns into his opposite.

[54:05]

And Hamlet does turn towards action, turn towards movement. He's going to break open this miasma of confusion around his father's death. No one knows why the king died, you know. But he's brought in these management consultants called the players and he sets up the play in front of his father's murderer who's married his mother and plays out his father's death as far as he knows it would have occurred. And he's willing to break the shell of insanity in which he finds himself. First of all, he starts to emulate insanity. He says he's going to play. I'm going to play this as if I'm mad, you know. And we'll see what kind of reactions and what kind of truth I hear from people when they speak, you know, when they think they're speaking in the presence of the insane. But when you start to actually emulate an identity, you actually also start to become it.

[55:12]

And so no one really knows where the edge is, but he goes over it himself and actually does become insane for a while. But he's willing to put himself to the edge so he can find out what the truth of the situation is and break it open. So this is, you could call this a marital argument with the self. But he's also in a marital argument with the world. And that brilliant line where he says, something rotten is in the state of Denmark. So the name of the day actually was Hamlet and Enron. And we looked at the mass confusion that occurs where you have the authority actually promulgating corruption. You know, even as you have all of these banners hanging around the building with the words honesty and integrity, as they were at Henon, you know, and they had these Lucite blocks on the tables and desks saying honesty, integrity.

[56:27]

Probably in Lucite so it could be held there and couldn't escape, you know, get out and do anyone any harm. So how do you have a real conversation? And one of the hallmarks of a false conversation is confusion. One of the hallmarks of being in the presence of someone who's lying is confusion. So it would be great to ask yourself, if you are confused in your life, where is the falsehood, to ask yourself. Where is the falsehood? Am I generating the falsehood? Is there falsehood in what I've taken on in order to work? Is there falsehood in the organization? Is there falsehood in the whole contract I've made with it? And then I think one of the other dynamics of change, a compassionate way of changing is to

[57:33]

Arrange to get really tired of yourself. To slowly exhaust yourself around what is not necessary in your life. So you can just naturally let it go. So I can slough off like an old skin. You're just going to let go and you're going to step out from behind. So you all had a good hour, hour and a half over lunch. Any thoughts to bring back for the afternoon? Just got a short couple of hours here. Yes. I wonder if you would address the issue of if one has followed one's bliss as much as one thinks one could. Yes. And then as one gets older, one gets a mantle of so-called wisdom, which merely is could be rigidity, fear, of doing anything as silly again.

[58:48]

And it's simply because of having lived that one learns that one could have had danger. But back then it was great because one wasn't aware of that. How can one live that back then? Yes. Yes. Yeah, I do think that you... Did everyone hear that question? Yes. So it's how do you tell the difference between wisdom, where you're not having to go out and travel off to the Himalayas and have all these adventures and get involved in psychosexual groups or whatever. How do you tell the difference between that kind of wisdom of not wanting to do that anymore and stasis and being stuck and actually being afraid of any kind of risk in your life, which is one of the great hallmarks of the midlife period too. And I think it has to do with the way youthfulness takes on different forms at different periods in our life.

[59:55]

Because the cliché, especially for men, at 45, 50, 55, is to want that body back, that you had, that combustion engine of... of ability and the way you could just hurl it at things and other bodies and... Yes. On the football field, I'm talking about. And so you're looking for that engine, you know, so you buy the car, you buy the two-seater and... I have that piece in The Heart Aroused where I was looking in the Sunday Times in London and there was that BMW motorcycle for sale. It said, ridden for only six weeks through midlife crisis.

[61:01]

So I always say, if you're going to have a midlife crisis, rent it. The Hertz Prestige Collection has everything you need. Actually, I rented a Thunderbird two-seater from Denver Airport just in the fall last year, and I was driving along, and I was just having a roaring old time. I had the top down, the wind was blowing, and the music up, and I was saying, this is great. I'm going to have a little crisis along this road here, and I can do it all by myself, and I'm driving along in this thing, and it's this bright color, and suddenly I see a friend of mine, Trish Rainbow, by sheer coincidence, who's been on my Ireland tour and helps to organize things in Denver, and she's driving past going, saying to myself, there's no peace in the world. So I think youthfulness looks very different as you get older.

[62:14]

And you shouldn't take it so literally that it's going to look like it did in your 20s. It's the same thing in your 30s. When you get to your 30s, you're a different person than you were in your 20s and your 40s. There's a different harvest now. There's a beautiful poem by Rilke, actually. Looking out in his garden, the flowers are all dying, summer's coming to an end. And he says, already the ripening barberries are red and the old esters hardly breathe in their beds. Whoever is not rich now that summer goes will wait and wait and never be himself. Whoever is not rich now that summer goes will wait and wait and never be herself. The man who cannot simply close his eyes, certain that there is vision after vision, simply waiting to rise all around him in the darkness, it's all over for him. He's like an old man. No more things will happen. No more things will open. No more things will open. No more things will happen. And even the things that do happen will cheat him. Even you, my God, and you are like a stone that draws him daily deeper into your depths. Already the ripening barberries are red and the old esters hardly breathe in their beds.

[63:19]

Whoever is not rich now that summer goes will wait and wait and never be herself. The woman who cannot simply close her eyes, certain that there is vision after vision simply waiting to rise all around her in the darkness. It's all over for her. She's like an old woman. No more things will happen. No more days will open. No more days will open. No more things will happen. And even the things that do happen will cheat her. Even you, my God, and you are like a stone that draws her daily deeper into your depths. So, as I say, by the time you start to get into your late 40s, 50s, and you seem to be pulling in your physical necessities to go out to every horizon that you see, I think it's because there are other interior horizons which are opening up. And you're turning your face towards another kind of adventure, which is an interior kind of silence. And this interior kind of silence is not you going away from the world, but actually broadening yourself to be able to encompass it and to be able to appreciate the essence of people and things, and not always have to have an outcome.

[64:33]

but to be a well of appreciation and presence. And so that's a totally different kind of experience. But you've inherited this identity which says, climb the mountain, go to the horizon, sail the seas, do this. And so it's very easy to go back into that automatic mode. Especially if you're in a work, if you're high up in executive levels of corporations where there's fierce reinforcement every day of that hard charging part of yourself. So you go through the whole midlife turning thinking there was something wrong with you. Instead of realizing that you're actually not as interested anymore. Or if you are, you want to do the work in a totally different way. There's a way of placing yourself in the work that doesn't take all that energy and work. The story I love in my own life of that is when I lived on the farm in North Wales and the farmer who was a great breeder of dogs had this one dog that was seen in the whole area of Snowdonia as being the best dog people had ever known, sheepdog that is, for rounding up sheep.

[65:53]

If you ever see a sheepdog, the intelligence that's at work is really quite incredible. and their ability to hold together this amorphous mass and move it, you know, in a certain direction. And a good dog will use its eye, and it will walk up and open one eye wider than the other, and it will move the sheep, you know. And so when I first arrived on this farm, this dog, whose name was Kumro, which means Welshman, It was on its way out. It was laying in one back leg. It was blind in one eye. It had lost an ear in a fight. And it was just a kind of black and white rag doll of a dog. But it had a presence. It had kind of canine charisma, you could say. And the sheep knew it too. So you see the younger dogs working, and if you've ever seen Welsh collie work, they work in these great curving runs, you know, and they'll go running a curve around the flock and up the side of the hill and then down and back the other side, and they move the flock along.

[66:59]

So John would be working his younger dogs, and he was a good trainer of dogs. And then he'd call on Kumro. He had a special whistle for Kumro. Kumro would heave himself up off his rheumatic bones and just take a few limping steps towards the back of the flock, lean slightly in one direction, just show them his good eye. And the flock would move through the gate, you know. And the economy of action in that dog was absolutely astonishing, you know. This was a Django Reinhardt of the dog world. Joe Montana, you know, knew exactly where to place itself. And so I think that is the kind of faculty that you're looking for. That's your new youthfulness. That's your new apprenticeship, to learn how to place yourself with an absolute economy so enormous things can happen, you know? So you're going to be doing the work and you're going to be just as present, but you're going to be present in a totally different way.

[68:07]

And you're going to be just in the right place. And you're actually going to take more pleasure in being in exactly the right place than in getting the work done by running up the hillside backwards and forwards five or six times. In fact, you're not interested in that. And if it takes that, you're not going to bother. And I think there's something real about that. So you have to know where your energies are. So you have to make friends with yourself as you're going through this frontier. And I often think that the traumas in existence come through these great transitions. When you get far behind the curve of yourself, then something happens to make you realize where you really are, and you catch up with yourself suddenly. But it's like the velocity of hitting the present reality is so high that you atomize as you come into incarnation. And so if you can actually keep up with yourself, you lessen those traumas and it's more like a seasonal change as you're moving into the next period of your existence.

[69:10]

But sometimes you've got to look back and make friends with yourself over a barrier or look forward to parts of yourself that have gone ahead so you can actually bring them together. Here's a beautiful piece by Nina Bogan, who's gone over an awful boundary because she's lost a baby. So in the book, you suddenly realize as you're reading this book, it's called In the North. It's out of print, unfortunately, Gray Wolf Press. You can probably find it on Amazon amongst the secondhand books. But you suddenly realize that it's all about... this loss, and that she's trying to heal this incredible fissure which has opened up in her life. And you can feel before the loss, she was an innocent young woman, even though she was in her 30s or whatever. And afterwards, she wonders, is it all worth it?

[70:11]

and she feels somehow flawed and lost. And the book is about her building this friendship back. So this is one of the crucial poems. It's called Initiation. And she's remembering when she had that feeling in her body that she could go anywhere travel anywhere and she's remembering when she had her own house for the first time in the south of france she lives in france american born but lived in lives in france married in france to a frenchman and must have spent time in her youth in it sounds like provence to me but i'm not sure in the poem but here she is she's looking back from over this divide going back to meet yourself and she says At the crossroads, hens scratch circles into the white dust. At the crossroads, hens scratch circles into the white dust. There was a shop where I bought coffee and eggs, coarse grain chocolate almost too sweet to eat. When I walked up the road, the string sack heavy on my arm, I thought my legs could carry me anywhere, into any country, any life.

[71:20]

The air, dazzling as sand, grew dense with light. Bougainvillea spilled over the salmon walls. The road veered into the ravine. The world could be those colors, the mango, the melon, the avocado evenings releasing its circles of moon. I climbed the pink steps and entered the house as calm and ephemeral as my own certainty. I climbed the pink steps and entered the house as calm and ephemeral as my own certainty. This is my house, my key, my hand with its new lines. I am as old as I will ever be. This is my house, my key, my hand with its new lines. I am as old as I will ever be. At the crossroads, hens scratch circles into the white dust.

[72:21]

You look at the beautiful detail in this piece. It's just incredible. Marvelous part. The crossroads, hens scratch circles into the white dust. There was a shop where I bought coffee and eggs, coarse-grained chocolate, almost too sweet to eat. When I walked up the road, the string sack heavy on my arm, I thought I could... walk into any country, any life. The air, dazzling as sand, grew dense with light. Bougainvillea spilled over the salmon walls. The road veered into the ravine. The world could be those colors, the mango, the melon. The avocado evening is releasing their circles of moon. I climbed the pink stairs and entered the house as calm and ephemeral as my own certainty. This is my house, my key, my hand with its new lines. I am as old as I will ever be." It's a beautiful line, I am as old as I will ever be, because she's saying that she will,

[73:25]

she will always have that young innocent woman inside her. And she's also saying that in a way the innocent woman also will always have the loss ahead of her at the same time. She's claiming her life back, saying there's no other life I can claim but this one. And this beautiful moment where she sees her future emerging out of the lines of her hand. Instead of her future being fated by the lines she has in her hand, she says, this is my hand with its new lines. In other words, there's a new future. According to the way you shape yourself, that is actually emerging ahead of you. It was just... A year or so ago I had two people come to our house. We had a gathering of people. And one... We're having a gathering in a glass around the fire, and we have this fire.

[74:36]

It's a log fire, and then it's got a sitting place around it, tile sitting place on either side. And first person came, and he's a friend of mine, actually lives in India. Sorry, he's from India, lives in England. And he has this remarkable youthful face. And my daughter's quite shy of new people, so she'll often disappear. She'll be hiding behind me or her mother or under the stairs or whatever until she's got used to them. But she saw the face on my friend and she just ran straight to him. And he got down on his haunches and he was saying hello to him. They was like two old friends. And I thought, my God, what an effect a face has on... a person or on your reality around you, of what you can draw to you. And then another person came to the door and this person had a face that seemed crushed by disappointment, at least on that day.

[75:40]

Of course, my daughter saw that face and disappeared and came out slowly. But they just happened to sit on either side of the fire. And I was looking at them and I was saying to myself, you know, there's a totally different future for that face over there than there is for that face there. And that face over there doesn't even know what it's kept at a distance and what hasn't run to it, what hasn't come to it. The way you shape yourself is... And if you look, often we say, well, I'm going to work until I get to a certain point where I've got this amount of money in the bank or where I've got this taken care of or the kids have gone off to school or whatever. But all the time you're doing that, you're actually becoming someone. And quite often you're becoming someone who finds it impossible to do what you've been waiting for all those years. So this is about that shaping.

[77:16]

This is the only commissioned poem I've ever written. It was commissioned by Boeing for the 777. They won a big aerospace award, and they wanted a poem to put by everyone's table setting when they had the award. And they called me up. I said, poets don't work very well under these conditions, I said. I said, if there's nothing decent, you'll have to have a blank space. And Pasternak, the great Russian poet, said at the convocation of the five-year plan, the poet's seat should be empty. I thought, now wait a minute, I've spent half my life on airplanes, or I spend half my life on airplanes. There's some interior underground experience you've been having all along. And so I sat myself imaginatively back in the airline seat, and I was thinking of all the different dynamics and phenomena that occur. Sometimes you can be traveling through the most exquisite aerial countryside, you know, with these astonishing clouds and colors, and you're looking down on Greenland on one side, you know, and the sun setting, and everyone's just looking at People magazine or whatever, you know.

[78:30]

And it's just as if they really dare admit where they are, you know, 30,000 feet in the air in this metal tube traveling at 575 miles per hour, you know. And so part of the conscious mind just shuts down in order to be able to survive the incredible transition, physical transition that you're going through. So this is about the whole phenomena of being up there, and you don't really know what the hell is holding you up there. They talk about the magic of flight, and it's because it is a kind of magic for us. You can know the physics of it, it doesn't matter. When I worked at Boeing, there was a real... a real love of things that got up off the ground and traveled through the air. So you'd be working in a room with people, and this old 707 from 1963 that they had there would lumber onto the tarmac out there.

[79:37]

And everyone would run to the window, and they'd all be looking in. And then, yes, it did take off again, trailing black smoke behind it. But it's a miracle. That was the feeling. How the hell do these things... You get the feeling that even the engineers are saying, how do we do it? You know, the thing gets off the ground every time. And so this is going on unconsciously inside you when you're in the airplane, you know. But if you ever look out of your window over the wing, as the plane drops down through different temperature lines and humidity, you'll often see this solid white line of vapor around it. And you look at that and you realize that the forces that are holding you there are just as solid as the ground. But the forces are brought together through a product of the velocity and the shape of the wing. And without either, without that conversation between the two, you'd be out of there. You couldn't sustain the flight.

[80:39]

And so I was thinking about... The same thing for a human being, that if you can get the shape of yourself right, you can travel enormous distances in conversation with other forces. So this is called working together. We shape ourselves to fit this world, and by the world are shaped again. We shape ourselves to fit this world, and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause to produce the miraculous. I'm thinking of the way the intangible air passed at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. I'm thinking of the way the intangible air passed at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine. So may we yet trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine. And look for the true shape of our own self by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.

[81:42]

And look to the true shape of our own self by forming it well to the great intangibles about us. So this is, you know, we have all, we had that line earlier about having a watchful heart. And... and being able to pay attention to what's occurring around you because your life literally depends upon it. But you have to have a watchful heart for the things in the physical world but also all of those unspoken invisible things which as yet have no language. They have no language because you haven't entered the world fully yet, you're just learning it. So this is actually to have a watchful heart and to to allow yourself to give reality to intuitions and to qualities which may not be corroborated in the everyday conversation or on Fox News every day, but which are there in your body, starts to open out a whole different world.

[82:50]

And I think this is especially true as you get older. The invisible interior world, the space between things starts to open up in an enormous way. And I do think that in a way we're also starting to apprentice ourselves to this other world that lies ahead of us on the other side. And so what can seem like an absence in this world may be that you're actually already beginning to disappear and phase out into this other world. And you have to allow yourself the humiliations of that transition in order to move on. And, of course, this willingness to pay attention and work with qualities that are real but are not necessarily corroborated by others is called faith. and to have faith in your own experience and to follow it and to sit in it and rest in it and have a sense of humor about it but still be very serious about it.

[83:59]

This is the mark of a certain kind of triumph, I think, in an individual human life. And whatever qualities you have, They're there in order to open up another door. And it doesn't matter what the quality is. If it's a difficult quality, it's going to open up a difficult door for you. I'd like to work with a couple of poems. And this is really about the marriage with both yourself and a place that you might fall in love with. But I have two poems. One I wrote years ago for my friend Michael on this farm that I lived on. And one I wrote just for the most recent book where I had another visitation from him and I got up at about four o'clock on Christmas Eve morning at my parents' house in Yorkshire. And I felt him so close there and I just started writing to find out what was occurring in a way.

[85:03]

Each of us has our own way of finding out what's occurring. Through writing I have other ways too, but what's your way of actually finding out where you are? And you might not be able to explain it to others the next day. Oh, you never know, you might get a decent poem out of it, so... But this is... The first poem's called Tanagath, and it's written for Michael, who was a man I got to know through a long winter living out in a caravan in this farmyard, and he lived with his family in this old cottage. So there were three structures. There was the new farmhouse where John, the farmer, and his family lived. There was the old farmhouse, which was Tanegarth back, where Michael and Diane lived and their kids. Tanegarth was five or six hundred years old, grew out of the hillside. And then there was my caravan, which was from the 1950s. which was in the farmyard and threatened to blow away in the midwinter storms.

[86:11]

And I'd often find myself by the fireside with Michael. And Diane would have gone to bed, and we spent a whole winter talking about Blake, about art, about everything under the sun. And one of the things to know for the poem is that Michael had this incredible, incredible propensity for doubt. And he had this long Celtic face. He was from the Isle of Man, actually. This long Celtic face that was lined from top to bottom. He'd seen everything, actually. He'd been a traveling Shakespeare player, actually, during the 50s and 60s and things. And then finally he'd settled. He'd lived all over the place. Finally he'd settled on Tanegarth. But if he turned this face of doubt upon you, you'd be halfway through a sentence and you'd find yourself backing out, you know? LAUGHTER Because the force field, the gravity of doubt was so powerful that you knew the game was up, you know. So you'd be backing and filling and getting out of the sentence, you know, whatever declaration you were making.

[87:16]

But the thing about his doubt was it was absolutely sincere. This was one of his faculties. This was one of the ways that Michael was in the world. And it was absolutely real and innocent, actually. And it wasn't cynicism at all. He really wanted to know. And he especially wanted to know about Blake's angels and whether they were real or not. Or whether he just made a very good metaphor to say that we're always in discourse with worlds that we actually can't see clearly. And so he really, usually he would have a glass of brandy or something while we were doing this, and we'd always return to this angelic theme. And then we'd always, in the night, at one time or another, Michael would say, I love this place so much, meaning Tanegarth, I've found my place to die. So, it wasn't a few years...but a few years later that he did die actually. I turned up on the farm one summer's day after I'd moved to the States and he wasn't there.

[88:22]

Diane was there. I had tea with her. That was the day he was in hospital getting the results of tests and he found out he had leukemia that day and he was dead three months later. But before he died, Diane told me that he'd had this incredible remission when he'd come out of hospital. He'd been walking around the farm and she said all of the things that he'd read in Blake, he was experiencing himself in those last few days. So he was seeing and feeling and in discourse with all of these incredible presences, and then he died and he went. So he doubted, and then he'd found it, and then he'd done it. And so I came to write this piece, and this was for him. And I realized I couldn't talk about Michael unless I talked about the place. So this is Tanegarth, Allergy for Michael. It's full of Welsh names, and you just let them roll over you. So just like a sea of unpronounceability.

[89:24]

So this grass-grown hills, a patchwork lined with walls. There are a few names you should know, though. The Ogwen is the valley beneath. The Carnaby was the bowl of mountains behind the farm. So it was a really incredible place. And the Kaseg is the name of the stream that comes through the farm. And every little bend of that stream had a different name to it. And then when you looked down the valley, you looked out over the island of Mon, or Mona, or Anglesey, as it's called in English. And that was the old druidic center of Europe, actually. There are still lakes there. If you dredge them, they're full of all these gold pieces that were thrown in ritually on the island. People used to come from all over Europe to throw their possessions in these lakes in the Bronze Age. So those are a few of the names. This grass-grown hill's a patchwork lined with walls I've grown to love. 400 years at least, the hill farms clung tenacious to the weathered slope, over the ogwen and the green depths of Mon.

[90:27]

The eye has weathered also, into the gray rocks and the fields bright with spring, the wind-blown light from the mountain filling the valley, the low-back sheep following the fence, hemmed by dogs and John's crook's staff, the still valley filled with his shouts and the mewling of sheep pressed through the gate. Beneath Eirelen, the bowl of lava is stirred with mist. The dogs lie low in the tufted grass and watch with pure intent the ragged back of the last sheep entering the stone-bound pens. The rough ground of Wales lives in the mine for years, springing moor grass under feet treading concrete. The rough ground of Wales lives in the mind for years, springing moor grass under feet, treading concrete, hundreds of miles from home. And the ground has names, songs full of grief, sounds that belong to a single stream. Kesegs, the place of the mare. Cwmplefa, the valley of speech, utterance of wind. Thrydlas, the blue moorland filled by the sky. The farm passed down, yet never possessed, lives father to son, mother to child, feeding the people with sheep, the sheep with grass.

[91:33]

and memory with years lived looking at mountains. One single glance of a hillside darkened by cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes. And this world needs all the breath we have. Carneth Llywelyn, Carneth Dafydd, Carneth Uchaf, all the Carnedy, Irelan of the shining light, Druscoll, the endless ridge curving to nothing. One man I know loved this place so much he said he'd found his place to die. Years I knew him walking the High Moor Lines or watching the coals. in a winter fire. And die he did, and die he did, but not before one month's final joy in wild creation gave him that full sight he'd glimpsed in Blake. He too wrestled with his angel in and out of hospital. The white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountain's bracing sense of space. Now he was ready, now he was ready. His heart, so long at the edge of the nest, shook its wings and flew into the hills he loved, became the hills he loved, walked,

[92:35]

with an easy grace, cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years.

[92:39]

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