David Whyte The Conversational Nature of Reality One of the things the Irish say is that “The thing about the past is, it’s not the past.” [ laughs ] It’s right here, in this room, in this conversation. Of course, 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. Yes, 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. 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 thi...
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