"Ways of Seeing" - Interview with David Whyte

...I recognized in my Zen meditation moments of inhabiting
a greater identity.  The real discipline is to remain in that
greater identity and to sustain that sense of presence - so that
you see the essence of [things] that affects you very deeply when
you allow yourself to watch and deepen that attention...

What is asked of human beings on a daily basis, is to get out
of ourselves by paying attention to things other than ourselves.
To see in a way which is other than the way we have used to
name the world, other than the way we have been taught to see
the world, and then as a result have ourselves be seen by the world.

As in all great contemplative traditions, the  most nourishing thing
you can do is pay attention to [you immediate environment], but
it will also break your life apart, because the fixed identity that
had named the world and wanted it to be a certain way, in order
to prevent us from experiencing heartbreak, is found to be too
small.  To name/label is a smaller way of seeing.

Our way of staying safe is to assign names to what in fact cannot
be named.  It is the precise reason why poetry is so difficult to
write.  Because you're actually going to a part of you that doesn't
know what to say.  ...you are going to a part of you that radically
doesn't know and you are going to pay attention and observe 
from that place.  Then at that meeting place between what you
think is you and what you think is not you, that is where the
conversation happens.  And when you speak that conversation
out loud it comes out as poetry.  It is the same undoing of your
surface personality...

Interviewer: So how does one perceive the essence of things?

...listening is a deep form of looking...  I am looking at something
to see what it is saying to me, without imposing a voice upon it.

The implication of truly seeing is that the rest of the world must 
be perceiving the miraculous in you.  Which is quite humbling.
The only place to hold that sense of miraculousness without ego
is in silence...

Perhaps once you have established a relationship with silence,
with deep seeing and listening, then you can live in a way in
which you are not harmed by constant contraction [from noise
and chaos].  There is a reason why monasteries are quiet places.
There is a reason why artists go to quiet places, even when it is
just a quiet room to create.

Excerpts from "Ways of Seeing" - Interview with
David Whyte
by Judith van Leeuwen
From See All This
Sept 2022
with thanks to Kim Manley Ort

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Photo - Mystic Meandering