I keep thinking about a line from David Whyte’s interview with Krista Tippett on her radio show On Being. In his work, David argues for what he terms the “conversational nature of reality.” By this I understand him to mean that reality occurs at the frontier of where you end and the world begins; and vice-versa, where the world ends and you begin. Reality, then, is an utter and direct interplay between our selves and the world, a conversation so to speak. David argues that one of the fundamental disciplines of sincere living is to engage in what he calls “essential conversations” of reality. He also says mysteriously that no self survives such a conversation intact, that the truthfulness and honesty of such an encounter is transformative.
He says the first step in having an essential conversation is to stop having the one you are currently having. His believes that we must stop, become deeply silent, take time, and feel the frontier between ourselves and the world. Only this can set the stage for an essential conversation. He then says what I find so haunting and daunting. He says that having such a conversation is hard enough for an individual, but collectively it is infinitely more difficult. As an example, he references the collective conversation America is currently having in response to globalism. We are stuck in an old conversation. Think about the whole “America First” platform. This is an idea that we wish were true. It is not on the frontier of what is actually before us.
There are so many ways to go with David Whyte’s idea. What are the essential conversations that we need to have, both personally and collectively? There is one I want to briefly have here. I have spent most of my adult life profoundly dismayed at our culture’s relationship to the earth and to the environment. Collectively, we seem to fail to recognize the interdependence between nature and ourselves. The depth of this fundamental truth is apparently beyond the current capacity of our collective consciousness. Using David Whyte’s perspective as a lens, a long time ago during an essential conversation with reality, human consciousness created story that the earth was created for us to have dominion over. At least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, this creation of reality even gets expression in the Bible. In other words, it is a very old conversation.
The often unconscious assumption that the earth is here for our consumption, that it is here to satiate our needs, is so entrenched in our collective psyche that an environmental movement cannot succeed if it leads with morality and political correctness. You cannot successfully shame an ancient conversation that formed the reality in which human beings live on this planet. A moral appeal comes too late to the conversation and thus does not reach deeply enough into our psyche.
What would it look like if we had the courage to once again have the reality-forming conversation about our relationship to the earth? Could I sit in the dirt with an oil-drilling executive and stay quiet? Could I let go of trying to convince him of my perspective? Could we find the beginning again? Could we touch the dirt and reforge our reality? Remember no self survives an essential conversation of reality and remains intact. Are both of us ready to transform?
Obviously, I am not just talking about the environment. I am musing about how to heal a great split in our collective psyche. We must forge a connection between us that precedes our differing beliefs. We must sit quietly in the dirt.