Conversation

The poet David Whyte's speaking voice (along with his late-friend John O'Donahue's) goes with me on long road trips.  When you listen to someone as often as I've listened to David Whyte, that person becomes part of your psyche and outlook.  His books interest me less than his spoken meanderings on CDs, especially Clear Mind, Wild Heart.  Sometimes a person comes into your life just when you need what they have to say--and this is the case, for me,  with David Whyte.

Often he uses the word, conversation, to describe not just conversations between people, but the conversations we live.  Whatever we do can be regarded as questions--and the questions are as important as answers.

His newest book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, reflects on the meaning of words, starting with Alone.  I have only read the sample of the book on Amazon so far, but the idea of the book intrigues me as much as the actual book.

How often in a conversation with a kindred-spirit friend does the talk pivot around the different understandings of a single word?  How often (among family members and friends) do we assume that we all share the same understanding of a word?  Our understandings of words are built, a layer at a time, by our experiences--and then re-shaped as we encounter new people and places and ideas.

I've given my writing groups a challenge for June, and I'm doing it myself: Make a list of words and put one word on the top of each page of a small notebook.  Going from one page to the next, write whatever comes up around that word.

Writing is, first of all, a conversation with ourselves. As we write one thing, then reconsider the words we set down, we keep going deeper and deeper into the cave of our own minds.  At some point, we wind up saying something we didn't know we knew, or we surprise ourselves by the words that appear on the page.  Maybe we say all the obvious things first (puppies are cute; bad things happen to good people; Paris is beautiful....)

But as we continue the conversation, new insight shows up that wouldn't have come up had we not pushed the pen across the blank page.

We can keep saying the same things over and over again, or we can push through the wall and find that what we always thought or believed about the subject is no longer what we think or believe to be true.

This happens, too, when we move our private conversations out into the larger world.  When we attempt to publish it, when we read it to a group or send it as an email, we widen our conversation to include other people who may or may not get it or love it. But we so want to be seen and understood that we go back to the drawing board, as it were, over and over, until the conversation comes alive.

Reading a book in which the writer talks in his or her own real voice, without too much literary artifice, I feel I'm invited into a conversation.

Truth has many facets and nuances.  Conversation keeps me from believing that my first draft is the whole truth.  It cracks open places that were closed and takes me down paths I never would have discovered without the other person and exactly what she said, or asked.