David Whyte is an Anglo-Irish poet, born in Yorkshire in 1955 and living in the United States, whose poetry and prose explore soul, work, belonging and our relationship with the world, and who sums up his whole outlook as “the conversational nature of reality”. Writers on the soul such as Bill Plotkin draw heavily on his poems, and his images of soul as the life that is truly our own can be set beside Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching that the Soul is who we truly are.
Who is David Whyte? #
A poet who came to poetry by way of the sea and the mountains. He was born in Mirfield in Yorkshire in 1955, to an Irish mother and a Yorkshire father, and took a degree in marine zoology at Bangor University. In his twenties he worked as a naturalist guide in the Galápagos Islands, and later led natural history and anthropological expeditions in the Andes, the Amazon and the Himalaya.1
He moved to the United States in 1981, began working as a poet and speaker in the mid-1980s, and from 1987 took his poetry into organisations, speaking and consulting on leadership and creativity. He holds British, Irish and American citizenship and lives in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.1
What has he written? #
Both poetry and prose. His collections include Where Many Rivers Meet (1990), The House of Belonging (1996), Everything Is Waiting for You (2003), Pilgrim (2012) and Still Possible (2022). His prose books bring the same concerns into working life and relationship: The Heart Aroused, Crossing the Unknown Sea, on work as a pilgrimage of identity, and The Three Marriages, on work, self and relationship. In Consolations he sets out to rescue everyday words from the narrow or dismissive ways they are often used.2
What does he mean by “the conversational nature of reality”? #
That life happens in the meeting between ourselves and the world, and that we do not control that meeting from one side. Whyte has said that all his poetry and philosophy rest on this idea.3 He traces it back to his time in the Galápagos, where he came to feel that the only places things were truly real were at the frontier “between what you think is you and what you think is not you”. His own spirituality, he has said, was in the land, above all the Yorkshire moors, and one of the healing things about the natural world, for him, is that it is just itself.4
There is an echo here of the animist world. For people who live shamanically, everything is connected and part of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, and the world is profoundly alive, vibrant, and something that can be communicated with.5 Whyte writes as a poet, not as an animist, and his “conversation” is a different thing from a shamanic journey; but both put the relationship between ourselves and the more-than-human world at the centre. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Why is he so often quoted on the soul? #
Because his poems keep returning to it, in images that are memorable without being abstract: the soul as something small, bright and free inside us, a line already written, the one life we can truly call our own. The depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin, in Soulcraft (2003), names Whyte as chief among the soul poets he drew on, and says he could not complete a single chapter “without his poetic counsel”.6 See Who is Bill Plotkin, and what is soul initiation?
In Therapeutic Shamanism the Soul, with a capital S, is of the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer. Our middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer is built from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are; our Soul is our truest self, our true nature, wild and free and part of nature, and it is also the blueprint for what we are meant to grow into and become in the world. Most people these days have no knowledge of it, and so no knowledge of who they were meant to be.7 Whyte’s images and this teaching are not the same thing, and his word “soul” is not defined the way Therapeutic Shamanism defines it, but they point in a similar direction, towards a self that is found, not built. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
What does poetry have to do with shamanic work? #
More than might be expected. Everyday language is largely a middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer and left-brained thing, about labelling and defining. The Lower-World is largely beyond language. It is the realm of metaphor and imagery, evocative and symbolic, not literal and pinned down, and in that it is akin to poetry, painting and music. Great art suggests things, rather than spelling them out, and asks the reader or viewer to take part in making its meaning.8 See What can Mary Oliver’s poetry teach us about attention to the living world?
