Relationship: The Perilous Path of Loving a Person, a Path or a Place. : Admit

September 7th session summary from the series 'Admit, Commit, Submit'

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Photo: © David Whyte

ADMIT : Summary From the September 7th Session

I’m very happy to be here, speaking to you, though with a little trepidation, because it is certainly with regard to a very fierce theme: that is, relationship and the succession of qualities which have only recently become apparent to me. As you read in the subtitle, these are the three themes of admit, commit, and submit.

Submit, of course, is a controversial word in our present world, a world in which we wish to be independent and free from coercion by others. Submission is not about being forced into something by another; it is about what arises between you and your intimate partner, or between you and the partner you long for in your life. It is about what arises between you and the work that brings you alive, between you and the house or the place in which you want to live – what is arising from the relationship itself. Submission can also be understood in the sense of omission.

We submit, in a very powerful way, to what is present, to what is already here and inviting us. But if we are in a long and unhappy marriage, for example, we are also submitting to all the ways in which we are not being nourished, not being fed, all the ways we feel life is passing us by. We will work with this powerful dynamic of submission more thoroughly in the third Sunday in this series. ‘Submission’ is a theme that every great religion speaks of, but which we find so difficult, in our times, to understand. I am still working with the dynamic of submission myself, still uncovering what it asks of me. But to begin with, this first Sunday turns to admitting. And then, on the second Sunday, to committing: that is, being entirely present to what we have admitted.

The whole dynamic of admitting, to me, has to do with the way we are very much afraid of our deeper selves and what that self seems to want. We have learned to be afraid of ourselves, because the adult world that raised us often told us not to have confidence in our desires – or found those desires eccentric to the cultural or familial inheritance into which we were born. To admit what you want is to look inside yourself at a very deep level. As Paul says in Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Here, it is being known by God. But whether we believe in God or not, it is also the act of allowing ourselves to be known by creation itself – by whatever comes to meet us in the outer world.

In this series, I’m not working solely with human partnership. Some people have written to me saying, “I don’t actually want a human partnership.” That may be true, but all of us want some deep form of intimacy. Often, the reason we don’t want a partnership is because we fear it will interfere with our intimacy with work, with the pursuit of our own path, with the way we hold a house or home, or with our relationship to a landscape. The ultimate, of course, is to have these intimacies gathered together: to live with a partner who allows us to inhabit the world in the ways we long to. To admit what we are actually experiencing deep down – what we dare not articulate in the family we grew up with, or even in the family we have made now, or in the constellation of people we’ve placed around us to reinforce our defences. We can be most shy in admitting what we want with those we are the closest. Even in our closest friendships we must recognise that the way we arrange our lives on the surface is often a deeply layered defence against admitting what we truly want.

During the COVID lockdown I had a friend who was going through a very difficult and traumatic time of separation from his partner. I was on the phone with him almost daily as he lived through a crisis of shame, retracing the breakdown of the relationship, and the unwillingness to admit what he truly wanted. Of course, if you are going through divorce or separation, you are asked to explain yourself over and over again. Yet sometimes the simplest explanation of all is this: “I want something else.”

An Irish friend of mine, Patrick McCormack – a great font of wisdom in my life – once said, “Never explain. Your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe you.” We have that same dynamic inside ourselves: the surface self which does not believe what we want. That part of us can feel like an enemy – strangely enough, an enemy of our deeper desires. But we don’t disarm that enemy by fighting at the surface. We disarm it by dropping down into the physical experience of the body. And that depth is almost always encountered in silence.

The way we drop down into the body is through the breath. Every contemplative discipline, every religious tradition tells us this: the breath is the way through. I feel quite at home joining them, because it has been true in my own experience. To admit what you want is to drop silently into the physical sensation of what you feel now, and then to discover, to your amazement, what you have been feeling for years.

I always have a wry smile when people tell me they are in a long-distance relationship. I often think to myself, “Is there any other kind?” Even when you are just a few feet away from one another in the kitchen, there is always a distance to be crossed. A relationship is always the ongoing invitation to close that gap. Not to close it completely – for then we also lose our sense of self – but to close it enough that sparks can leap across the space between us. That spark, that current, is what keeps a relationship alive, even across a lifetime. We need that loving word of admission because of what we find when we truly allow ourselves to look. We are astonished by what we uncover beneath the surface – by the desires we have long denied ourselves, by the unhappiness at the core we could not quite acknowledge, could not face, and so were forced to defend against or explain away.

This is one of the most difficult dynamics in relationship: when on the outside things appear fine – content, happy, secure – but at the centre something essential is not being met. The ability of a couple to drop down into this place together, to speak what at first seems disturbing, is one of the great and necessary tasks of a real conversation. The disturbing conversation is in fact the saving conversation for only those willing to stay close enough for those sparks to leap across, will remain together.

One of the first experiences of admitting is almost always aloneness. We feel it as loneliness, but also as a strange magnetism, for the underlying dynamic is that when we are lonely, we are always lonely for something or someone. Aloneness is the gravitational field that pulls us toward what we long for. Human beings need proximity – physical proximity, imaginative proximity, creative proximity to a future not yet known but beginning to emerge. Even if we cannot articulate it, even if we cannot yet speak it, our bodies feel this gravitational pull unconsciously and long for it.

When I began writing the short essays which became Consolations, I discovered this truth for myself. The form itself was born out of a certain loneliness, a need to be met in a new way: a need to consummate that loneliness through the act of writing, and in turn through the larger community of readers who would be drawn into orbit by the words. Looking back, I see how many kinds of aloneness were at play – loneliness not as a pejorative, not suggesting there was something wrong with being alone, but aloneness as a field of gravity drawing new worlds into being, and drawing me in turn into their orbit. To be alone is to stand at the threshold of something both waiting to arrive and waiting for us to arrive. It is to feel the astonishing magnetism of what is about to find us, and to recognise that this, too, is intimacy – the intimacy of being met by a world that has been moving inexorably toward us all along.

One of the earliest thresholds of difficulty we encounter as infants comes when, no matter how loving our mother and father might be, we realise there are certain ways they cannot be there for us. Suddenly, we find ourselves alone with a particular way of being in the world, or with a particular inner experience. They cannot understand a certain part of us – nor could they. No parent ever can. This is no failing on their part, so long as they are present in all the ways they are able. But there is no human being who can be there for another in every way that would prevent them from experiencing loneliness. In fact, if that were possible, it would halt the child’s own maturation. For the child, however, it can feel like a moment of horror: to realise that this all-encompassing, almost god-like figure cannot be there in the ways we do not yet know how to be there for ourself.

It is a beautiful and disturbing practice, as an adult, to take yourself off alone and simply sit, watching how you inhabit your body. To sit with the question of what it is to be alone. When we are alone we inhabit our bodies as a question rather than an easy answer; with others, we are almost always trying to be right about something. The great discipline in the Zen tradition is to be natural in any situation, until we can carry the stillness of aloneness into the company of others without losing our self. But if we have no discipline, or if we fall away from it, or if we deny ourselves the necessary time alone, then with others we are constantly making defensive statements. We do not even realise how much of the time we are trying to be right.

It can be helpful to think of being alone as practising an instrument. When you first pick up the guitar, you feel awkward; your posture is wrong; your wrist aches, your fingers burn, the strings bite until your fingertips harden. At first, every note buzzes or goes dead. But then comes that moment when you hear a pure note for the first time – a note that resonates through the body of the guitar and, astonishingly, through the body of yourself. I remember my first guitar, which I saw in the window of Woods Music Shop in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. I watched it for months as I saved enough to buy it. Thank God it was still there when I finally had the money. I still own it – though it now rests at a friend’s house in Oxford. I hardly play any more, but it remains sacred to me, because it was on that guitar I first discovered that pure note of music.

To treat ourselves as we would an instrument – an astonishing instrument – is one of the great invitations of a human life. The more you learn about the human body, the more astonishing it becomes: thousands of interlocking systems, working together, rarely breaking down, despite the complexity. A vast orchestration, unified by something as simple as the breath. Suddenly you realise: to be alone in the body is not to be alone at all. The body is already in ceaseless conversation with everything around it, whether we speak or not, whether we define ourselves in relationship or not, whether we say we are in the right place or not.

And yet, we remain afraid – afraid of what we want, afraid of admitting what we want.

I have always felt in my own life that admitting is a form of coming home – of rediscovering the path I have been on all along, and rejoining the astonishing inner life that accompanies me. To admit is to enter an intimate relationship with what is actually happening inside: what I want, what I have wanted for years, or what is now being asked of me at a new stage of life. At every threshold – the shift from our thirties to our forties, from our forties to our fifties, from our fifties into our sixties – we are invited into new territory we never imagined. We are asked to revisit what is old but unfinished, to pay attention to what is new within the old, and to step into what is utterly new, never encountered before. The body becomes a crossroads between what has long been ignored and what is now calling for attention. Admitting is to live at that crossroads, to listen to the voice inside; like another person dwelling within us, constantly trying to send messages, messages we are equally skilled at ignoring.

My old friend John O’Donohue used to say of our dreams that they are like letters from a close friend, delivered each morning, which most of us refuse to open. Instead, we more often rush straight into the day, leaving behind the revelations our inner life has carefully written out for us. One practice is to pause on waking, even briefly, to re-enter the body that experienced the dream, and to hold it there – even if we cannot interpret it with the conscious mind. The other night, I dreamt I was cycling through rock tunnels, knowing that outside there was a walled garden. I knew, on leaving the tunnel, I would have to turn right to reach it. The tunnels were not frightening: there was enough light to find my way. They felt like conduits, carved through concentrated stone, leading me towards something new. Eventually, I saw the light at the end, and beyond it the walled garden. At that very moment, as if appropriately timed – I woke. Who knows what it means? Perhaps I am passing easily through what only looks like solid rock into a new experience, a new paradise, a new work or a new companionship waiting to welcome me. But I will not know unless I remain in my body, unless I sit quietly with the physical experience of admittance – listening to that serious, powerful voice beneath, the voice of the deeper self.

The poem, My Courageous Life arose from the same perspective – from being told, in no uncertain terms, that there is always another context more powerful than the one we inhabit; that there is always a wildness waiting, unexpressed, into which we are being invited.

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My courageous life 
wants to be 
my foundation, 
showing me 
day after day
even against my will, 
how to undo myself, 
how to surpass myself, 
how to laugh as I go 
in the face 
of danger,

how to invite the 
right kind 
of perilous love,
how to find 
a way 
to die 
of generosity.

--excerpt from My Courageous Life

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From where I speak, I am looking out at a small carriage house at the bottom of my garden. I remember writing there, at the desk, looking out the window, when I had a very powerful experience: of a stream passing in front of me. Suddenly, I was in a wood I used to play in as a child, in the fields of Yorkshire. On the far side of the stream stood myself, calling me over – a part of me that had gone ahead in my life, but a part with which I had not yet caught up. It is interesting to think of the part of us that has gone ahead as the part that is serious about its desires: for a life with another person, for another form of intimacy, for a deeper engagement with our work, or for a freedom beyond the confines of where we are now on this side of the river, this side of the stream. And of course, the stream is flowing. You will have to wade, to swim, to keep your head above water for a short while as you cross. Crossing the river, crossing the stream, crossing the unknown sea: everything worthwhile takes courage. It takes a heartfelt meeting, a crossing of the waters, a stepping out of the boat onto a surface you do not at first believe will hold your weight.

There is something strangely emboldening about having found your way. It gives the body energy, because you can actually rest even as you move forward. That is the way I feel when I am walking in a beautiful landscape. I move quickly – I am a fast walker – and yet there is a sense of ease, of restfulness, of beauty, of being in constant exchange with the horizons and the textures and the colours I pass through. It is one of the reasons my poetry tours are all walking tours. After the deep immersion in poetry, insight, and conversation in the morning – after food, after fellowship – you go out into the world again. You walk. The air blows through you and then you see who is there underneath, who has been listening at a deeper level.

There is an old Zen story of two novices at the very bottom of the hierarchy in a monastery. They were so far back in the hall they could never hear the Zen Master, who spoke in the quietest of voices. Years later, when both had become Zen Masters themselves, they met again. One said, “Do you remember those talks our Master gave – the ones we could never hear?” The other replied, “Yes, I remember straining our ears, catching only a word or two.” The first then said, “Strange, isn’t it? I’m starting to hear what he said now.”

So often in life something is spoken to us – perhaps through our own voice, perhaps through another – and it stops us in our tracks. Yet we do not stop long enough. We are halted, but not deeply enough. We begin a new conversation, but we refuse to follow it through. And still, some part of us remains faithful. Some part holds the words, matures them at the centre, and continues to call us on.

That may be a key line when looking at admitting in the realm of relationship: how to invite the right kind of perilous love. For every kind of love that is good for us is always slightly perilous. Without that edge, we begin to fade, to go stale, to lose interest. We grow bored when there is no peril in our lives. One of the great tragedies of our time is that children are not allowed their own intimate relationship with peril. Parents are so fearful of the world that they rarely allow their children to risk themselves, day by day. And then we wonder why, as adults, they find it hard to risk themselves in the perilous intimacies of love. Whatever I most deeply want for myself will feel dangerous to the surface part of me that has kept its defences up for so long. It is this edge of peril that gives intimacy its wildness, that gives sexual intercourse its wildness. It calls for wholehearted participation. It calls for courage. It calls for risking ourselves. “To die of generosity”. That, I think, is a theme I will return to in the Third Sunday, when we look at submission.

I want to close today with a piece that carries this same sense of admittance at the deepest level. It is in a poem called Mameen. Mameen is a high mountain pass in the heart of Connemara, close to where John O’Donohue lived. It looks southward over the Atlantic and northward into the interior hills and valleys. It holds a sense of threshold – between an inner life and an outer life, between one world and the next. It is also a migratory flyway for the birds that move up and down the west coast of Ireland, and in the local imagination it is a migratory pathway for souls. A place where the living meet the presence of the dead.

There is a cave there where St Patrick is said to have stayed; and now to commemorate his sojourn there is a small chapel built into the stone. John and I used to stand there before groups who had walked up with us on my Irish walking tours. One year we experimented with silence. After both of us had spoken, we simply gave people silence out of which they could say whatever they wished. It was extraordinary: again and again, people welcomed in the presence of the dead, or of loved ones who were ill and confined to bed. The whole atmosphere was one of privilege: the privilege of being alive at all. We were immersed in poetry, in fellowship, in conversation. We were out in the wind and rain, our senses fully engaged. It was like an orchestral playing of the human soul. Out of that came a desire to welcome our ancestors, who had bequeathed this privilege simply by surviving and also to welcome those who were not with us and were on the edge of their own leaving, who were surely feeling that same privilege, though from a hospital bed rather than a mountain pass. After John’s death – to my own shock and deep disturbance – I found that every time I gave people silence in this place, they would, without prompting, begin to speak of the dead. They would speak of the privilege of life, of friendships across the invisible threshold. Out of that silence, I wrote this piece for him.

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Mameen

Be infinitesimal under that sky, a creature
even the sailing hawk misses, a wraith
among the rocks where the mist parts slowly.

Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed
by circumstance, how great reputations
dissolve with infirmity and how you,
in particular, stand a hairsbreadth from losing
everyone you hold dear.

Then, look back down the path to the north,
the way you came, as if seeing
your entire past and then south
over the hazy blue coast as if present
to a broad future.

Remember the way you are all possibilities
you can see and how you live best
as an appreciator of horizons,
whether you reach them or not.

Admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary, you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim,
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.

--from River Flow: New & Selected Poems

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Thank you for accompanying me on this journey into admitting – into undoing the way we try to control the revelation that is always issuing from the centre of our own bodies, from the horizons of our lives. Horizons that are always trying to bring us into new territory, into a new dispensation – that crossroads of invitation where we admit that, at our depths, we are in a very different place than we have yet allowed ourselves to inhabit at the surface.

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THE MYTHOLOGY OF IRELAND: Seen From Nine Extraordinary Pilgrimage Places begins November 9th. To learn more about this series and to register, visit the series page here.