Conversation: The Nature of Reality

I recently had the experience of being cut off from folk, from being able to communicate, to converse. I have been having mobile phone trouble. I phoned my mobile phone company over a couple of days and discovered that my software had become “corrupted”. It is not easy to speak with your mobile provider when your phone isn’t working, but thankfully I was able to use my landline. I was told that I would have to remove everything from my phone, save it to my laptop, relaunch the phone and then add everything back to the phone. This was a task way beyond my ability and so I had to call the company who made the phone and I was put through to a man named Alban. Alban who is originally from Albania. What followed was a three hour telephone conversation as he carefully guided me through all the steps, including several twenty minute phases where we waited for things to upload and download and other various technical things. During these blocks we got to know each other. We talked about our lives the things we have done in the past. Views about life, philosophy, politics, religion, music, sport, family, entertainment, the current pandemic and a whole lot more. It was a wonderful conversation, with a complete stranger I will never meet, in fact I will never speak to him again. It was a wonderful encounter, a beautiful conversation, and my phone seems to be working now.

I have been thinking about conversations ever since. I am discovering that they are deeperning, they seem more precious at this time. Whether that be the conversations in the supermarket, taking place behind masks, or the brief ones in the gym or street as I pass folk, moments of connection that are so precious. As well as the various phone calls I receive and all those Zoom conversations and other video based ones I have all week long. Last Monday I hosted the grief group, it was a quiet one, with only a few in attendance and yet it was so deep and rich in meaning. I loved the conversations we share in the poetry group. I reckon we share less poems each week and spend more time talking about the many varied things that the poems bring up.

I find it amazing how even though we are spending far less time in the company of people I am experiencing increasingly deeper conversations in my life. Thank God for that and thank God for modern technology, even social media. Where would we be without it.

Life is about conversation, good conversation. We spend most our lives in conversations, on all kinds of levels. Conversations are not of course always spoken, we are constantly in conversation with all of life, constantly engaging, speaking and listening.

Krista Tippet from “On Being” who spends much of life interviewing and engaging with all kinds of folk claims that “Good conversation is an adventure”. She states:

“I think of a good conversation as an adventure. You create a generous and trustworthy space for it, and prepare hospitably for it, so the other person will feel so welcome and understood that they will put words around something they have never put words around quite that way before. They will give voice to something they didn’t know they knew — and you will be a witness to thinking, revelation, in real time. This is one reason radio/podcasting is such a magical medium: everyone who listens joins that room, becomes a witness, the moment they push “play.” They are also there for the revelation. It’s a form of time travel. And if the conversation is edifying (one of my favorite, underused words), we all sync up in some mysterious way across time and space and grow a little together.”

Life is made up of conversation. We as humans have conversed in all kinds of ways over the years. People communicate in different ways in different cultures and sub-cultures within cultures, there has always been an etiquette in conversation. Now while conversation style has morphed and the methods of communication grown and expanded I suspect that the measure of good and bad conversation has remained the same. To quote William Spielgelman in “Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead”

“Here are some adjectives that do not apply to the best conversation: 'one-sided,' 'monopolizing,' 'condescending,' 'preachy,' 'abrasive,' 'hectoring,' 'loud,' and 'rude.' However many people it involves, conversation is, like chamber music, an exercise in intimacy, of give-and-take, of what Plato, who recorded the talk of one of history's first and finest talkers, called 'dialectic,' a word etymologically related to 'dialogue.' Conversation moves forward, or back and forth in starts and stops, like drama itself. That philosophy, democracy, and drama all began in fifth-century Athens says a great deal about the far from incidental relations among them.”

Conversation is not only about the ability to articulate oneself, it is about engaging in relationship with ourselves, with others, with life and with whatever we experience at the core of life. “The Creative Interchange” is a form of conversation. I am delivering this worship, this address but it is actually a part of wider conversation with life, with you who are listening and with all that came together to create it. You who are listeners will hopefully engage with the words shared and then engage and feed life in someway from it, leading to further conversation, engagement with life.

The goal of conversation is create understanding and connection between our thoughts and words. As Richard Saul Wurman has said “…conversations are an understanding machine, an imminently satisfying forum for the exchange of information.” I have noticed that tithey can be transformative too, they can change my whole psyche, my persona, they can bring to life my whole soul. So many times in the last few days I have felt transformed by a simple conversation.

Conversation though has been challenged for all of us these last six or months due to having to separate, to varying degrees, physically. We have had to adapt how we converse with one another. We are probably talking to one another less and perhaps this is why the conversation have deepened in meaning. I have also noticed a deeper conversation that can be had, that is often unspoken, a conversation with life itself and whatever we consider to be at the core of life, what some of us would call God and others give a different name. We are always in conversation; it is just that sometimes we speak and listen to words.

The philosopher poet David Whyte often speaks of “the conversational nature of reality.” He says that he became a poet, after a successful career as a marine biologist, because he felt a deeper need to communicate his experiences. As he states in a conversation he had with Krista Tippet:

“I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had in Galapagos. Science, rightly, is always trying to remove the “I.” But I was really interested in the way that the “I” deepened the more you paid attention. 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.

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 the other mercy is that 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, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and 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. John O’Donohue, a mutual friend of both of us, used to say that 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.”

I love the way that David describes the conversational nature of reality, that we are constantly in conversation, whether we are speaking or not, so long as we are alive, awake and fully engaged.

This is beautifully illustrated in his poem “Everything Is Waiting for You?”

After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

We are constantly in conversation, even if we haven’t spoken with someone for sometime. Life is about conversation, big and small. Conversation can happen anywhere and in any situation. Our tools for conversation are constantly changing and evolving. To enjoy a good conversation all that is required is for us to engage with life, to be alive and awake to the life around us, to take it in, to absorb it, to hear what it has to say and to respond in kind.

So let is join in the beautiful conversation, to engage in the conversational nature of reality.

Amen