“In Galapagos, I began to realize that because I was in deeply attentive states, hour after hour, watching animals and birds and landscapes — and that’s all I did for almost two years — I began to realize that my identity depended not upon any beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence,” says poet David Whyte.
In poetry, he says: “Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn // anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive // is too small for you.”
Whyte’s work is about preservation of the soul in corporate America, “My work as a poet and philosopher has matured into working with what I call “the conversational nature of reality,” which is the fact that we don’t get to choose so often between things we hope we can choose between…I began to realize that the only places where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you, that whatever you desire of the world will not come to pass exactly as you will like it.
But…whatever the world desires of you will also not come to pass, and what actually occurs is this meeting, this frontier. But it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier... out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. Half of what’s about to occur is unknown both inside you and outside you…one of the necessary tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself in the world, letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.”
Whyte got a degree in marine zoology and has worked as a naturalist in the Galpagos, Amazon and the Himalayas. He says, “When I was 14 years old, I saw Jacques Cousteau, the famous French marine zoologist, sail across our little television set in the north of England. I really couldn’t believe you could have work like this in the world. I was so astonished by it that I gave up all my art subjects and put myself into the salt mines of biology, chemistry, and physics. I emerged with a degree in marine zoology many years later…and found myself on the shores of the Galapagos Islands… experiencing those islands led me back into poetry and philosophy.”
Whyte believes, “All of us have this inherited conversation inside us, which we know is untouchable. It comes from our parents, from the way we’re made and all the rest of it. But that’s an invisible quality inside you. All the visible qualities that take form and structure will have to change in order to keep the conversation real…”
