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.
I was recently interviewed by Ken Garrity on Radio Altrincham. He likes to talk to different personalities in the town. It seems I am one of them. I am certainly someone who spends half his life with people in the town, engaged in conversation. I suspect that half of ministry is about conversation in one form or another, some might say it is the whole of it. That is of course if you understand conversation as being more than merely talking and listening. I shared very openly with Ken, perhaps far more than he expected me to. So much so that he himself shared something very deep and personal, which he had only ever told his wife about before. It was a spiritual experience he once had. We had a great conversation. Somewhere in that space we met one another and the listeners to the station certainly met us. Not in the way either of us expected and no doubt not way the listeners were expecting too. That of course is the beautiful power of conversation, it is far more than the sum of its parts and leads to who knows where.
The next morning I went for a walk around Dunham Massey, I had awoken in great spirits and felt deeply connected to everything, it felt like the whole of life was speaking to me, that I was in deep conversation with everything. I don’t believe I have ever felt a deeper sense of connection. I was very much engaged in what David Whyte has called “The conversational nature of reality”. I returned home in good spirits looking forward to the day ahead. It was about 9am and as I passed the chapel gardens I noticed the telephone hanging from “The Wind telephone”. I took a closer look and realised it had been vandalised. I was quite upset by this. I know that the emotion wasn’t just about the damage to the phone, but a few other things floating around in my psyche. During our interview I had been talking about “The Wind Telephone” with Ken and the centrality of grief in my ministerial journey.
There has been a lovely response to what has happened in the wider community and the “Wind Telephone” will soon be repaired. The connection has not been severed, in fact if anything it has helped in engaging in conversations about love and loss. It has helped folk engage in those courageous conversations, the ones that are often difficult to have. I have noticed in the last few days how much every conversations I have had appears to have deepened in meaning. I don’t just mean the spoken word here by the way, I also mean the conversation with life and what I believe is at the core of life, what I call God.
The poet philosopher and former marine zoologist David Whyte sees our lives as focused on what he calls "the great conversation" we have with ourselves and the great mysteries of life which surround us. He calls this “the conversational nature of reality.” Like Whyte I have come to believe that the essence of any real conversation is attention. It is about paying attention to that space where we meet life and life meets us, I suspect that it is in this space that God truly comes to life, or at least this is what my experiences teach me.
The other day I listened to a wonderful conversation between David Whyte and my favourite interviewer Krista Tippett, I have listened to it before. It is taken from “On Being” and was first broadcast in April 2016. In it he describes his early career as a marine zoologist, and how scientific language grew inadequate to describe his experiences in the Galapagos Islands. Whyte said, “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 … 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 start to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.”
Later in the interview he describes the “Great Conversation” as finding this meeting point between self and other, stating that he realised that in fact reality lies “at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you.” And that It is incumbent upon people, then, to stop “abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience” and “hold the conversation at that frontier level.” He says that we must enter into what he calls “the conversational nature of reality.”
The anthem of Whyte’s conversational nature of reality is his poem “Everything Is Waiting for You.”, which we heard earlier. Here he encourages us to “feel the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice.” He insists that the frontier of this profound reality of the world can be and is found in “the intimacy of your surroundings,” in “the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom.” The key is in this line. That, “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.” That it is about being alive to everything and allowing everything to be alive to you. This is more than just being mindful, it is about being in conversation with everything and everything with you, in fact in you.
He makes a profound statement that humans are the only thing in creation that doesn’t want to be itself, that tries not to be itself and that the key is to become ourselves and this is done through conversation, with everything. Everything is waiting for us, waiting for us to truly become all that we were born to be. The problem for so many of us is that we reject ourselves, that we believe there is something fundamentality wrong with us. Nothing else in life feels, thinks and acts like this, only humans. It is only we who refuse to engage in the conversation. Everything is waiting for us.
For Whyte this began during his transformative experience in the Galapagos. Nature is one gateway into the conversation with reality, which of course we are all a part of, sadly at times we try to deny this. The problem we humans have often struggled with is that we have felt a part from, separate from nature.
Everything is waiting for us.
Whye points out that the conversation takes place in and through everything, even the seemingly mundane. In this poem he invokes the everyday familiarity of stairs, doors, phones, kettles, and cooking pots and he ends by harking back to nature ending with these amazing words: “All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.”
He ends by inviting us back to engage in the conversation, to not feel alone and alienated telling us that our true calling is simply waiting for us, it is waiting for us to simply engage. “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”
Everything is waiting for us.
I enjoyed a wonderful experience of this earlier this week. In deep conversation, walking and talking with a friend. Also during the “Singing Meditation” on Tuesday evening in the chapel gardens, when through getting lost in joy singing with others, in blending voices and sitting out in nature I felt fully engaged in the conversational nature of everything.
The next morning I woke very early and met a friend and walked down to Dunham Massey. It was wonderful to move through everything, the beautiful countryside, for a couple of hours, with virtually no one else about. We were powerfully alert, alive to everything and it seemed that everything was alive in us. We were in deep conversation with one another, but more than that with everything that we moved through. There wasn’t a prescribed plan we just kept moving, down different paths, some barely trodden, in many directions. We talked about life, our own and others, some real depth philosophy, psychology, theology and a whole lot more. It felt like we were comfortably ourselves, somewhere in that space, more came alive. At the same time we fully engaged with the sights, sounds, smells, noise and feel of everything. The ground at our feet had a particularly profound effect it seems. We even had time to bump into one or two folk we knew and continue the conversation.
Wednesday morning was one of those conversations that you never want to stop, well it doesn’t have to stop, it will continue, we just had work commitments that morning. It was though a wonderful example of the “conversational nature of reality” we met one another, ourselves, life and that which is the core of life as we walked and talked as we got lost in Dunham Massey.
Everything is waiting for you. Everything is waiting for all of us. The conversation is reality. The beauty and profound nature of reality is everywhere, in everything, even the kettle boiling as you make that cup of tea for a guest. All we have to do is bring our attentiveness to the frontier between self and the rest of creation, and then enter into conversation with it. We must come out of abstraction and back into the world again as Whyte did when he left the Galapagos island and began his real work.
The spiritual life is about living more spiritually alive. It is about increasing our sensitivity to life itself. It is about being increasingly affected and then becoming more effective in life. “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”
I have come to understand that at its core the spiritual life is about relationships; relationships with life, with each other, with ourselves and with God, whatever we understand God to be. And how do relationships develop? Well through conversation, through sharing ourselves with each other, not by losing ourselves, but becoming ourselves through our conversations with the other, lower and upper case. We relate through conversation and thus we grow spiritually, through relationship. “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”
If life has taught me anything it is that it is all about relationships, everything that really matters is about relationships. The key to all relationships is conversation, of some kind, it is about being alive and alert in spiritually intimate ways.
We have to believe we belong here of course, that we do not reject our humanity. Everything is waiting for us. More than that everything needs us to engage in the conversation of life. Life needs all of us. Everything is waiting for us.
Life is all about relationships; the spiritual life is all about relationships. Relationships with life, with each other, with ourselves and with God, whatever we understand God to be. And how do relationships develop? Well through conversation, through sharing ourselves with each other, not by losing ourselves, but becoming ourselves through our conversations with the other, lower and upper case. We relate through conversation and thus we grow spiritually, through relationship.
Everything is waiting for us.
So I invite you to join with me in the conversational nature of reality. “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”
Everything is waiting for us.
Below is a video devotion based
on the material in this "blogspot"
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