General Learning • Tenneson Woolf

February 27, 2018

The Heart Aroused

David Whyte remains close to me these days.

I’m not sure why. I find myself remembering, out of the blue, phrases and statements attributed to him. Like yesterday’s, “The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” Or, “Sometimes the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

Many of these phrases came to me many years ago. I’m in a period of searching, I think. Like many of us. A few layers down, even beyond the normal depth. Trolling the deep sea crevices. Periodically popping up for periscope view.

I don’t know David in person. I know and enjoy his writings and poetry. I have for the last twenty-five years. I love his invitation to both the exterior and to the interior.

In his 1994 book, The Heart Aroused, Whyte writes:

“The Heart Aroused attempts to keep what is tried and true, good and efficient, at the center of our present work life, while opening ourselves to a mature appreciation of the hidden and often dangerous inner seas where our passions and our creativity lie waiting.”

With most all of the people I’m working with, and living with, and communing with — these days, together, we are welcoming more heartfulness. More maturity. More willingness to sail the inner sea.

With work, it can’t just be a training. It must also be a retreat. It’s intolerable to fixate solely on the external.
With friends, we are quickly going to the rugged real, swearing and laughing together.
With community, it can’t just be time spent. It must also be genuineness as practice and at scale.

So many of us crave moments that are clear in connection, and with nothing hidden.

Heart. Aroused.
Humans. Being.
It makes a world of difference.

February 26, 2018

Antidote to Exhaustion

The poet David Whyte writes, “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. You’re so exhausted because you can’t be wholehearted at what you’re doing….”

A friend writes to me of his exhaustion. At work. With family. And of the emotional intensity that he underestimated. He’s apologetic. I so feel for him. My friend is so not alone in this intensity, nor in the thinly veiled disguises intended to deny the difficulty. The pattern is so much more than personal — it’s systemic and societal overload, perhaps even inescapable.

Another friend texts me, “What if you were to really believe that there is nothing wrong with you?” I smile, kind of. She knows that I’m wrestling to be thoughtful, yet not take these systemic patterns personally. I reply, “It would feel utterly freeing.” I’m glad to have friendships in which we remind each other that sanity is more than scrambling in a misguided system. They reset the intention to offering contribution.

All of my life, I’ve held some underlaying belief that all is not as it seems. All of my life, I’ve sought for what is beneath the surface. The river under the river. The thing behind the thing. I don’t fully understand why — I’ve just been oriented that way.

Except when I haven’t. Which has been often enough. You can’t live in the 21st century and not be seduced by at least some layer of over-stimulation, hyper speed, and uber scaling that satisfies because of it’s shimmer.

I’m amazed by the courage it takes to hold this path, to not just follow the sparkly. To stay thoughtful. To stay patient. To be fierce, and kind. To be awake, and not overburdening. It’s not one to do alone.

I’m grateful for the momentary sweetness we offer to ourselves and each other that wholeheartedness can guide the way. Not just rest. And not just caffeination.

To wholeheartedness. For all of us.

February 22, 2018

I Want To Hear Our Voices

In 2014 I wrote a poem, “I Want To Hear Our Voices.”

To help explore the uniqueness of men in inquiry together. For healing. For wholeness.

I wrote it after waking from a dream. It is the yearning that I hear in many men and in men’s work that comes from a place beneath the calcified surface.

I’ve shared it with a few people recently, who have asked me to share it further.

For inspiration…
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I Want to Hear Our Voices
Tenneson Woolf, January 2014

There is something I want in the company of men. I think it may be masculinity.
Theirs and mine.

Mine that has weathered away
like chipped paint,
flakes blown to the corner of the garage with the other dirt and debris,
where nearby hangs a rake and a hoe.

We’ve been silenced, men, haven’t we?
Our deeper knowing voices.
By ourselves. By societal habit.
Distracted by the games of contemporary life, the battle rooms of sport and work.

Addicted to the numbing of spirit
that comes from a bottle, a remote control, and wifi.

What is true for you, real for you, man?
For us, men?
I want to hear our voices.
Not the ones that we routinely speak
to impress our women, or silence them.
Not the guarded ones like when we first meet other men,
proving ourselves, chests puffed, feathers plumed, and cocks dragging.

Like, are you afraid that your youth is passing? I am. I’ve started dreaming about it lately.
It was always there for me.
But then, in a blink, it wasn’t.

I usually can’t squat to tie my shoe.
I have to get on one knee.
The man I see in the mirror
has wrinkled, squinted eyes like my uncles, like my grandmother. And what is left of my hair is cut very short.

because it’s the best way I know to work with absence.

I want to hear what is real to you. What aches to ooze
from your silence, your wound, from your buried DNA memory that knows we need each other.

Without apology. Without performance.

Just raw and true for you.
I want to hear what are you chasing in those images,
in your dreams,
or in that porn?

And what is chasing you? To be born.
To find you.
To claim you.

To call you, brother.

Men,
from the silence,
from the song,
from the drum,
I want to hear our voices.

February 21, 2018

The Crossroads Project — Art Meets Science in Climate Change

The Crossroads Project is a unique and inspiring kind of good, focused on sustainability, climate change, science, and art.

I know of it because of some of the work I’m doing with the Intermountain Sustainability Summit in Ogden, Utah, both last year and this year.

I love Robert Davies’ line as he talks about presenting the data on climate change to many audiences over the last five years. “It’s not that people weren’t getting it. They just weren’t feeling it.”

Enjoy this — performance art and performance science.