The goal of real love is always to set the beloved free.

~ Martha Beck, Steering By Starlight

 

John Bowlby (by The School of Life)

Among our deepest and seemingly most natural aspirations is the longing to form stable, satisfying relationships: to thrive in partnerships that are good for both people. It doesn’t seem much to ask. A lot of people are looking for roughly the same thing. But the painful fact is that very large numbers of relationships have one difficult episode after another, or seemingly intractable miserable conflicts running through them; relationships feel like a struggle, rather than a support. It’s one of the biggest questions: why is it so hard for us to have the happy, constructive relationships we all want?

 

The huge – and not yet fully digested – insight of psychoanalysis is that the challenges of relationships do not start over dinner in an interesting restaurant or a college bar. They start, in fact, when we are children. There is no more important period of our lives than childhood; a good childhood is the bedrock of a happy life and a bad one just about dooms us to enduring misery. It was the contribution of the great psychoanalyst John Bowlby to trace the tensions and conflicts we have with our partners back to our early experience of maternal care. 

  

His ideas are sound in part because he drew so deeply and honestly on his own experiences in order to formulate them. Born in 1907, Edward John Mostyn Bowlby had a quintessentially upper class British childhood. His father was a famous and highly successful doctor, with a knighthood and royal connections. Young Bowlby hardly saw his parents and was looked after by a lovely nanny, Minnie. But Minnie was an employee, and when John was four, she was sent away. His parents weren’t being deliberately callous. They (like pretty much everyone else at the time) didn’t realise how wounding her departure could be. At seven, Bowlby went off – in line with the conventions of his class – to boarding school, to a realm from which maternal warmth was rigorously excluded. 

 

Bowlby was a brilliant medical student and an imaginative researcher. In 1952 he made a film, A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital, which showed the suffering a child went through when they were institutionally separated from their parents. In the wards mothers were not allowed to hold their sick children, for instance, for fear of spreading germs. Visiting times were punitively restricted.  

  

When he was a consultant to the World Health Organisation in the early 1950s, Bowlby wrote a report, ‘Maternal Care and Mental Health’. He attacked prevalent assumptions (including those vigorously maintained by his own mother), arguing that kindness does not smother and spoil children. And he asserted the importance to both child and mother of developing an intimate and enjoyable relationship. This initiated a wave of reform: the visitation rules of many health institutions were reformed – a dry, bureaucratic move that ended countless afternoons of quiet sorrow and evenings of solitary anguish. 

 

Bowlby poignantly invokes loving care that a little boy needs: ‘all the cuddling and playing, the intimacies of suckling by which a child learns the comfort of his mother’s body, the rituals of washing and dressing by which through her pride and tenderness towards his little limbs he learns the values of his own…’ Such experiences teach a basic trust: that difficulties can be managed; that slip-ups are only that and can be put right, that we are naturally entitled to be treated warmly and considerately, without having to do anything to earn this and without having to make special pleas or demands. ‘’It is as if maternal care were as necessary for the proper development of personality as vitamin D for the proper development of bones.’

 

The ideal parent is there when the child needs it. They are good at actually listening to what the child is saying. They help the child work out for itself what it is feeling. The ideal parent is not anxiously hanging around trying to micromanage everything. The ideal parent makes it feel that problems, difficulties and dangers don’t always have to be avoided: they can be coped with, solved or skillfully overcome. Such a parent makes the child secure. Not just that the child feels secure at particular moments but that they take this security with them into the tasks of life: they become secure people, so that they are less urgently in need of external validation, less devastated by failure, less in need of markers of status to reassure themselves of their own worth – because they carry within them a stable, reasonable, secure sense of who they are. 

  

But the fact is that we often don’t quite get the maternal care we need. Parents – without meaning to let anyone down – go wrong in endless ways. They are inconsistent: at one point they are hugely available, happy to play and do things; then suddenly they are sternly busy and remote. Or they might be sweet and tender – but equally they might be angry or grumpy. They are around, then they disappear. They might be busy almost all the time, or very much preoccupied by work or social life. Their own fears, anxieties or troubles may keep them from providing the wise, generous attention the child needs.

 

In a book published in 1959 called Separation Anxiety Bowlby looks at what happens when there isn’t enough maternal care. He described the behaviour of children he had observed who had been separated from their parents. They went through three stages: protest, despair and detachment. The first phase began as soon as the parent left, and it would last between a few hours and a week. Protesting children would cry, roll around and react to any movement as the possibility of their mother returning. 

 

If something like this is frequently experienced, then the child craves the attention, love and interest of the parents but feels that anything good may disappear at any moment. They look for a lot of reassurance – and get upset if it is not forthcoming. They are volatile: they take heart, then they despair, then they are filled with hope again. This is the pattern of what Bowlby called ‘anxious attachment’. 

  

But the degree of separation from the parents may be greater. the child could feel so helpless, they become detached: they enter their own world. To protect themselves they become remote and cold. They are, Bowlby says, ‘attachment avoidant’: that is, they see tenderness, closeness, emotional investment as dangerous and to be shunned. They may, in truth, be desperate for a cuddle or for reassurance, but such things look far too treacherous. 

 

The focus of Bowlby’s thinking was about what happens to a child if there are too many difficulties in forming secure attachments. But the consequences don’t magically get restricted only to the age of 8 or 12 or 17. They are life long. The pattern of relating that we develop in childhood gets deployed in our adult lives.  

 

Our attachment style is fed by early experiences: it defines our individual way of being with others. It’s how we sense what other people are up to, how we frame our own needs, how we expect things to go. It’s a pre-existing script that gets written into our adult relationships – usually without us even realising that this happens. It all feels obvious and familiar (even when it is uncomfortable). We take this with us, from partner to partner. 

 

In line with Bowlby’s views about how children relate to their parents, there are three basic kinds of attachment we have to other adults. 

 

Secure attachment is the (rare) ideal. If there is a problem, you work it out. You are not appalled by the weakness of your partner. You can take it in your stride, because you can look after yourself when you have to. So if your partner is a bit down, confused or just plain annoying, you don’t have to react too wildly. Because even if they can’t be nice to you, you can take care of yourself and have, hopefully, a little left over to meet some of the needs of your partner. You give the other the benefit of the doubt when interpreting behaviour. You realise that maybe they were just busy, when they didn’t show any interest in your new haircut, or insights into the news. Maybe they had a tricky time at work, that’s why they are not interested in your day. The explanations are accommodating, generous – and usually more accurate. You are slow to anger, quick to forgive and forget. 

  

Anxious attachment is marked by clinginess: calling just to check where the other is and keeping tabs on what they are up to. You need to make sure that they haven’t left you – or the country. Anxious attachment involves a lot of anger because the stakes feel very high. A minor slight, a hasty word, a tiny oversight can look – to the very anxious person – like huge threats. They seem to announce the imminent breakup of the whole relationship. Anxiously attached people quickly become coercive and demanding and focus on their own needs – not their partner’s. 

 

Avoidant attachment means that you would rather withdraw, and go away, than get angry with or admit you need the other person. If there is a problem, you don’t talk. Your instinct is to say you don’t really like the other person who has hurt you. Avoidant spouses often team up with anxious ones. It’s a risky combination. The avoidant one doesn’t give the anxious one much support. And the anxious one is always invading the delicate privacy of the avoidant one. 

  

Bowlby helps us towards more generous – and more constructive – ways of seeing what our partners are doing, when they upset or disappoint us. Almost no one in truth is purely anxious or avoidant. They are just a bit like that, some of the time. So, alerted by Bowlby, we can see that a partner’s apparent coldness and indifference is not caused by their loathing of us, but by the fact that a long time ago they were too badly hurt by intimacy. They are protecting themselves out of fear. They deserve compassion, not a character assassination. 

 

And it opens possibilities of self-knowledge which can help one reform (if only a little) one’s own behaviour. Perhaps I work so hard because I can’t trust anyone and because a long time ago, I felt that work might help me to secure the fleeting unreliable love of my parents. 

  

Bowlby died in September 1990 in his early eighties, at his summer home on the Island of Skye.

 

There’s a powerful, modest but very real principle of hope at work in his theories. It took a long time for Bowlby’s ideas about the importance of the early bond between the mother and child to get broader recognition and support. But it did happen, eventually. There was no single dramatic revolutionary moment. Many thousands of people changed their minds in small ways: an idea that sounded stupid, came to seem mildly interesting. The slow revolution took place at dinner tables and at school gates, at conferences in out of the way places and in careful cost-benefit analyses worked out by civil servants. It is a process of social evolution in which there are few obvious heroes and many necessary participants who can never know exactly what contribution they made: so that today a child facing a frightening operation is surrounded by love and kindness and her parents get to sleep in a bed beside her.

 

How long it took in history for this need to be taken seriously – and so touching it should have been by this particular man, whose family background, childhood, and education could have been expected to close off any such sympathetic insights.

 Research shows that in the UK population:

 56 per cent are securely attached

 24 per cent are avoidantly attached

 20 per cent are anxiously attached

 

John Bowlby  -The School of Life Articles | Formally The Book of Life

 

 

 

Why, Once You Understand Love, You Could Love Anyone

(by The School of Life)

Irrespective of whether you consider Jesus a popular itinerant preacher or the Son of God, there’s a very odd thing about his views on love. He not only spoke a great deal about love: he went on to advocate that we love some highly surprising people.

 

At one point – described in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel – he goes to a dinner party and a local prostitute turns up – much to the disgust of the hosts. But Jesus is friendly and sweet and defends her against everyone else’s criticism. In a way that shocks the other guests, he insists that, at heart, she is a very good person.

  

There’s another story (in Matthew, chapter 8) where Jesus is approached by a man with leprosy. He’s in a disgusting state. But Jesus isn’t shocked, reaches out his hand and touches the man. Despite the horrendous appearance, here is someone (in Jesus’s eyes) entirely deserving of closeness and kindness. In a similar vein, at other times, Jesus conspicuously argues that tax collectors, thieves and adulterers are never to be thought of as outside the circle of love.

 

Many centuries after his death, the foremost medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas defined what Jesus was getting at in this way of talking about love: the person who truly understands love could love anyone. In other words: true love isn’t specific in its target; it doesn’t fixate on particular qualities, it is open to all of humanity, even (and in a way especially) its less appealing examples.

  

Today, this can sound like a deeply strange notion of what love is, for our background ideas about love tend to be closely tied to a dramatic experience: that of falling in love, that is, finding one, very specific person immensely attractive, exciting and free of any failings or drawbacks. Love is, we feel, a response to an overt perfection of another person.

 

Yet – via some admittedly extreme examples – a very important aspect of love is being pushed to the fore in Jesus’ vision. And we don’t have to be Christian – that is, we don’t have to believe there’s an afterlife or that Jesus was born to a virgin – to benefit from it.

  

At the heart of this kind of love is an effort to see beyond the outwardly unappealing surface of another human – in search of the tender, interesting, scared and vulnerable person inside.

 

What we know as the ‘work’ of love is the emotional, imaginative labour that’s required to peer behind an off-putting facade. Our minds tend fiercely to resist such a move. They follow well worn grooves that feel at once familiar and justified. For instance: if someone has hurt us we naturally see them as horrible. The thought they might themselves be hurting inside feels very weird. If a person looks odd, we find it extremely difficult to recognise there might well be many touching things about them deep down.

  

If unpleasant events happen in someone’s life – if they keep on losing their job or acquire a habit of drinking too much or even develop cancer – we’re somehow tempted to hold them responsible for their misfortunes.

 

It takes quite a deliberate, taxing effort of the mind to move ourselves off these deeply established responses. To do so might mean taking an unappealing-looking person and trying to imagine them as young a child, unselfconsciously playing on their bedroom floor. We might try to picture their mother, not long after their birth, holding them in her arms, overcome by passionate love for this new little life. Or perhaps, drunk and passed out, ignoring their desperate cries.

  

We might see a furious person in a restaurant violently complaining that the tomato sauce is on the wrong place on their plate – but rather than condemn and feel superior, we might try to construct a story of how this individual had come to be so impossible, and how powerless they must feel in a world where something (and not what they are ostensibly complaining about) has frustrated them to the core.

 

The more energy we expend in thinking like this, the more we stand to discover a very surprising truth: that we could potentially see the loveable sides of pretty much anyone.

  

That doesn’t mean we should give up all criteria when searching for a partner. It’s a way of saying that the nicest person will eventually require us to look at them with imagination as we try to negotiate around some of their gravely dispiriting sides.

 

And, of course, the traffic won’t ever be all one way. We too are deeply challenging to be around and therefore stand in need of a constantly imaginative, tender gaze to rescue us from being dismissed as merely another everyday monster – or leper.

Why, Once You Understand Love, You Could Love Anyone -The School of Life Articles | Formally The Book of Life

 

Necessary Trouble: A Conversation with Poet David Whyte

Lois P. Jones interviews David Whyte

 

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

 

THERE ARE POETS who are theologians and philosophers. There are theologians who have brought their ideas to industry and the workplace. There are industry trailblazers who have employed their philosophy to inspire leadership. Then there is David Whyte.

Whyte’s life as a poet has created a readership and listenership in three normally mutually exclusive areas: the literary world of readings that most poets inhabit; the worlds of philosophical, psychological, and theological enquiry; and the world of organizational leadership. The author of nine books of poetry and four books of prose, Whyte holds a degree in marine zoology and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galápagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, the Amazon, and the Himalayas. For over 20 years he has been developing a body of work and a series of seminars focused on the conversational nature of reality.

His dynamic recitation and explication of poetry creates a bridge to individuals grappling with the challenges of life and leadership that are difficult to articulate. I was introduced to Whyte’s work fairly recently, when I attended a talk inspired by his most recent collection, The Bell and the Blackbird, which focused on living between the enlightened and the everyday, the invisible and the visible, the disappearing and the becoming.

As a poet and a seeker of self-knowledge, I wanted to meet the man behind the words and learn something of his repertoire of over 350 poems. Many podcasts, CDs, interviews, and books later, I’ve returned to the collection that found its way into my life during a time of paralyzing indecision. The Bell and the Blackbird is a collection of effulgent and profound work, but it’s also a way of being in the world.

 

I live my life in widening circles,

that reach out across the world …

 

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours

 

LOIS P. JONES: As you’ve told it, the title of your collection The Bell and the Blackbird recalls a recurring meme in Irish poetry of a monk standing on the edge of the monastic precinct and hearing the bell calling him to prayer, saying to himself that the call to silence is the most beautiful sound in the world. Simultaneously, he also hears the call of the blackbird from outside the monastic walls and says to himself, that’s also the most beautiful sound in the world. The call to both deepen and continue to expand our reach into the world brought to mind Rilke’s widening circles. Is it possible to achieve both, and why is this concept so important to you and your present work?

DAVID WHYTE: The sound of the bell is the call to prayer, to depth, to a greater context than the one you are inhabiting. The blackbird is the world calling to you as it finds you now and perhaps, even more importantly, as it finds itself, with no need for improvement. Hearing the bell and hearing the blackbird, at one and the same time, is the encapsulation of a way through all our present difficulties in this polarized, conflict-ridden world. In fact, it may represent the essence of contemplation, not as passivity or removal from engagement, but bringing together that simultaneous sense of intimacy and distance that all human beings feel at one and the same time in one physical experience. We live at that crossroads of intimacy and distance in a marriage, in a work, and indeed, just walking across the park. Every day we are constantly trying to eliminate distance or create it in our lives, we are constantly trying to create intimacy or run a hundred miles from it; our unhappiness lies in constantly choosing between the two. The image says there is (a) way to hold both by understanding the essence of our identity as always being at that crossroads, that the foundational miracle of human incarnation is the ability to experience and hold them both together at one and the same time. You are irretrievably alone, and you also belong to others and to the world in ways you cannot ever fully comprehend. Both are true, and letting that meeting place come alive inside you is where good poetry and perhaps more importantly the life human beings have wanted for themselves since the beginning of conscious time become a real possibility.

 

That radiance

you have always

carried with you

as you walk

both alone

and completely

accompanied

in friendship

by every corner

of the world

crying

Allelujah.

 

LOIS P. JONES: In a world that relies heavily on escapism, you continually invite your readers to come to ground in reality. As I consider the body of your most recent collection as well as the arc on which it travels, I’m brought to the recurring theme of invitation. There’s even a gorgeous piece invoking the sacred called “Prayer for Invitation.” Do you believe it is our own power we sometimes fear in the invitation to examine the self?

DAVID WHYTE: Perhaps more accurately, it is our fear of not being large enough, generous enough, or brave enough to fully incarnate that power. One of the reasons we refuse to make proper, clear invitations to others, why we are fearful of making invitations, whether in leadership in the corporate world, or in the intimacies of a marriage, is that the invitation is always interpreted and received in larger ways than we intended. A real invitation always leads to a real conversation, to a way forward, not to an arrived platform. It is many times a way forward we do not feel we are equal to: part of this way forward is to start to learn to have faith in the conversation itself as our way forward in a good work or a good marriage — a little like writing poetry.

LOIS P. JONES: In the section “Blessings and Prayers,” the poet examines the act of blessing in various contexts. It seems to take on broader connotations than the distinctive Christian archetypes. What is a blessing to you in the truest sense of the word?

DAVID WHYTE: I have a very physical sense of that extraordinary power, having grown up on a daily basis with my Irish mother’s tradition of “blessing.” She was extraordinary in this regard in being able to wish things for people they did not even know they needed. We tend to think of blessing as simply wishing the best for someone else, but a real blessing is far more transformative in its power and agency. A real blessing is a brave articulation of powers or circumstances that the receiver has not the confidence nor the imagination to wish for themselves. We might even, in a poem, be able to get beyond our own boundaries and wish the same for ourselves.

 

I pray for you world,

to come and find me,

to see me and recognize me

and beckon me out,

to call me

even when I lose

the ability to call on

you who have searched

so long for me.

 

I pray to understand

the stranger inside me

who will emerge in the end

to take your gift.

 

LOIS P. JONES: The last two sections of The Bell and the Blackbird focus on your poems of Australia and Japan. You’ve said “[w]e are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.” As an itinerant traveler, is there a particular, radical aspect of David Whyte you’ve never shared before?

DAVID WHYTE: Probably around my love of regional cuisines, and I might say, seeking out the often obscure, cultural settings in which they are served! I will walk a long way for a very short meal! A famous noodle shop in a remote rural town in Japan; a local, as yet undiscovered back street restaurant in Provence. A paella shack on the Andalusian coast; an outdoor barbecue or Braai in the wilds of South Africa. My constant traveling and speaking, and through those travels, being hosted so generously around the world, though it can be exhausting, has its many compensations!

LOIS P. JONES: There is marvelous lyric compression in your poem “One Ear”:

 

After the heat,

my head resting

on a cool

buckwheat pillow,

one ear listening

to the river.

 

LOIS P. JONES: You are familiar with a legion of poets and have studied and sat with Zen teachers. Did immersion in the Japanese landscape allow for your sense of internal concision, and if so, in any particular way?

DAVID WHYTE: Having grown up with the last gasp of a classical education in the North of England, and in the midst of a veritable thicket of inherited English and Irish poetry, I was always intrigued by the natural openness, the freedom, the spaciousness, and the easy vernacular of the Chinese and Japanese poets. In my first wanderings through the Himalayas in my 20s, I carried The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse, and was astonished at the clarity with which it described both the landscape and peoples I saw, but more tellingly, the essence of the journey I was on myself. Later, when I came to the States, I was more than inspired by the easy vernacular of the Chinese and Japanese influenced poets Gary Snyder and Robert Sund. My first book, Songs for Coming Home, is an homage to that lineage. Only after that book, and that apprenticeship, did I begin to build in a facility for narrative out of the inherited English, Irish, and Welsh traditions I had grown with.

LOIS P. JONES: The various sections of The Bell and the Blackbird point to ways in which we might use the imagination, especially the sensory imagination to both deepen and remain present in the world. In the current sociopolitical climate, I’m often drawn to the shelter of my writing nook, yet none of your poetry or essays shy away from the human condition. What particular area concerns you as a poet right now, and how do you look to reimagine it?

DAVID WHYTE: As I said at the beginning of this interview, I don’t think we get to choose between the necessary shelter of our writing nook and taking that work, and the way of being we have shaped in that writing, out into the world. Climate change is perhaps our greatest test ever as a species. Does the way we were shaped by our evolution preclude us from having the imagination, the global communal willpower to change? I am an Irish and Yorkshire rebel, something of a Luddite, a poet who needs at times for the world to go away, whether it is warming or not. I work with others in my own very idiosyncratic way. My very success in speaking, writing, and reading makes me inclined — out of a very ancient evolutionary impulse, and like many others who are successful — to harvest while I can, even if it may, unwittingly, contribute to it being the last harvest for others. How do I get beyond myself and even beyond my artistic inheritance and help the broader ecological situation, rather than hinder it? This is a daily question for me, a daily trouble for me, but it’s good trouble; it’s necessary trouble. If you are a completely happy person in today’s world, you are not paying attention!

 

Just Beyond Yourself

 

Just beyond

yourself.

 

It’s where

you need

to be.

 

Half a step

into

self-forgetting

and the rest

restored

by what

you’ll meet.

 

There is a road

always beckoning.

 

When you see

the two sides

of it

closing together

at that far horizon

and deep in

the foundations

of your own

heart

at exactly

the same

time,

that’s how

you know

it’s the road

you

have

to follow

 

That’s how

you know

it’s where

you

have

to go.

 

That’s how

you know

you have

to go.

 

That’s

how you know.

 

Just beyond

yourself,

it’s

where you

need to be.

 

Lois P. Jones is a poet and poetry editor of Kyoto Journal, host of KPFK’s Poets Café (Pacifica Radio), and co-host of Moonday Poetry.

Necessary Trouble: A Conversation with Poet David Whyte - Los Angeles Review of Books (lareviewofbooks.org)

 

 

 

 

Sweet Darkness

Written and read by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

“Sweet Darkness” from The House of Belonging by David Whyte. Copyright © Many Rivers Press, Langley, Washington. Used with permission of the poet.

This poem was originally read in the On Being episode “The Conversational Nature of Reality.”

 Sweet Darkness | The On Being Project - The On Being Project

David Whyte: Self Portrait

Resilience: A Conversation with David Whyte

Start Close In by David Whyte

START CLOSE IN,
DON’T TAKE THE SECOND STEP
OR THE THIRD,
START WITH THE FIRST
THING
CLOSE IN,
THE STEP
YOU DON’T WANT TO TAKE.

START WITH
THE GROUND
YOU KNOW,
THE PALE GROUND
BENEATH YOUR FEET,
YOUR OWN
WAY OF STARTING
THE CONVERSATION.

START WITH YOUR OWN
QUESTION,
GIVE UP ON OTHER
PEOPLE’S QUESTIONS,
DON’T LET THEM
SMOTHER SOMETHING
SIMPLE.

TO FIND
ANOTHER’S VOICE,
FOLLOW
YOUR OWN VOICE,
WAIT UNTIL
THAT VOICE
BECOMES A
PRIVATE EAR
LISTENING
TO ANOTHER.

START RIGHT NOW
TAKE A SMALL STEP
YOU CAN CALL YOUR OWN
DON’T FOLLOW
SOMEONE ELSE’S
HEROICS, BE HUMBLE
AND FOCUSED,
START CLOSE IN,
DON’T MISTAKE
THAT OTHER
FOR YOUR OWN.

START CLOSE IN,
DON’T TAKE
THE SECOND STEP
OR THE THIRD,
START WITH THE FIRST
THING
CLOSE IN,
THE STEP
YOU DON’T WANT TO TAKE.

-DAVID WHYTE, RIVER FLOW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS