CROSSING THE UNKNOWN SEA

This is one of the best books I have read this year, not only for its content but also for the sheer elegance of David Whyte's writing. I well remember his performances from the State of the World Forum in New York in September last year when he recited his poem Loaves and Fishes, which I have reproduced in this issue. The scene is set with Blake's idea of 'firm persuasion' in one's work and then a striking conversation with a stranger at a mountain farm in Wales. The man was stuck in his life and needed to move on, tried to commit suicide and failed. It was a turning point, as he found himself 'on the edge of himself, at the cliff edge of life'. Exhilarating but dangerous, as are some of the situations in which the author later finds himself as a guide on the Galapagos Islands. This first conversation raises the question that forms the subtitle of the book: 'work and the shaping of identity', something to which I gave a lot of thought in my early twenties.

In the next part we move into mid-Ocean, beginning with a life-threatening incident in the Galapagos which prompts reflection on the sheer brute power of the natural forces in those islands and the way that we tend to retreat from that cliff edge to safer ground – and less intensity, lesser aliveness. On this occasion the captain had been asleep and David is able to summon the captain in himself to deal with the situation. This corresponds to waking up to one's true self and vocation, not trying to be someone else but rather, as many great leaders are, 'unutterably themselves', taking on 'a full inhabitation of the vessel'. He quotes a wonderful poem by Stephen Spender called 'The Truly Great', those who 'from the womb, remembered the soul's history through corridors of light'. If we inhabit our lives fully, then we 'let everything ripen to the next stage of the conversation'. So does our work 'engage our deeper powers in any real conversation'? Are we slowly retreating from our own frontier?

The next evocative and powerful episode is the prelude to what was for me the most profound experience in the book. It is about how young albatrosses learn to fly. The only way into the air is off the cliff on which they are hatched. And they are so large and cumbersome that they only get one shot and if the wind is not right they plunge to a premature death at the bottom of the cliff. Next is this incident at the blowhole. I cannot describe the whole sequence here but suffice to say that he thrown into the air by a huge wave and lands up wondering if he is dead or alive. The sequel is staggering. He is sipping whisky a few months later with his mother in Yorkshire and she relates a dream she has had about him in which she recounts verbatim this event on Hood Island – 'in the dream I leaned down from above and took hold of you by the back of the neck. I lifted you out and put you safely back on the cliff. When I woke I felt so happy that I had been able to save you'. I need hardly say that David was staggered by this – and it is indeed staggering in its implications. As he remarks, there are larger forces in the world about which we know very little.

Now we come to the business or rather busyness scene with which we are all only too familiar. We get caught up in speed and suffer from 'the blurred vision of velocity itself, where those things germane to our humanity are dropped from our minds one by one'. Then we are in danger of losing 'sight of the bigger, unfolding wave form passing through our lives that is indicative of our central character'. In addition, we forget that our sanity is dependent on 'longer more patient cycles extending beyond the urgencies and madness of the office'. Good work does not get done at speed but with rhythm (as also in sport). David gives an example of a champion dry stone waller that makes the point in a beautifully Taoist way. These reflections give him the courage to go full time as a poet, a decision that is hard to explain to any father-in-law but one that he has vindicated at many levels. He gives a vivid description of his first real assignment in front of several hundred people.

'A Marriage with Silence' is the motif for getting in touch with our inner roots and obtaining a proper relationship with life and identity. All the doing eventually has to stop, giving way to the being that is the essence of life and of which doing is only an expression. As David observes, the serial events of our lives look different from our deathbeds where we experience 'tonalities, emotional presences, the eternal spreading out in ripples from the tiny dropped stone of the remembered moment'. Our relationship with time, he rightly observes, 'has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost on us when we are busy without relief'. This is brought home by his example from a memorial service when 'death taps us on the shoulder and asks us to encapsulate a life by its loves'.

All this has a special message for the young of all ages: don't disenfranchise yourself from reimagining our collective future, beware of getting stuck in the traffic jam of modern life, of being motivated exclusively by rewards and security; carve out your individual relationship between freedom and belonging. Work plays an important part here in 'making ourselves visible to the world'. Although Keats was so young when he died, he made his contribution, and we should be asking the same of ourselves. This book prompts us to ask ourselves profound questions about our values, our work, our relationships and our use of time. It comes from depth of the author's being, passionate, questing, striving, surrendering, fully engaged in the journey and conversations of life.