Ticket No.3 is a short, weekly newsletter format from The Alpine Review, where we share three things that drew our attention. If you only want to hear when the next Alpine Review is ready, you can opt-out of Ticket No3 here.
This week I’m trying something new by including a brief voiceover introducing this week’s tickets. I respect your time and believe providing background on the topics may help you decide whether you’ll find this valuable or not. This week, my starting point was David Whyte.
Overheard — David Whyte on the Waking Up App
Go against yourself
David Whyte’s lectures and conversations on Sam Harris’s Waking Up app are very good. Here’s bootleg audio taken from the app (this is of dubious legality, but please do give the app a try!) where Whyte tells the backstory of his wonderful poem “Just beyond yourself”, which took place at an annual thinking retreat he’d have with his friend, the late John O’Donohue. A little gem of a backstory.
And I said to myself afterwards: “was it not a great thing for a friend to do?”. You know, one of the qualities that lies at the heart of friendship is encouraging your friend to be the best part of themselves, and to be the most generous.
People of note — David Whyte
The conversational nature of reality
The best David Whyte primer has to be this conversation with Krista Tippett from 2016 (in the pantheon of podcasts, OnBeing has to be up there with the best).
Here is Whyte, on seeking language “large enough” to accommodate the territory we aim to explore:
And at the end of the conference was this line of people, and at the end of the line was a man who, in best American fashion, said, We have to hire you. And I said, in best Anglo-Irish fashion, For what?, [laughs] unenthusiastically. And he said, To come into corporate America. And I said, For what? And he said a marvelous thing, actually. He said, the language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory that we’ve already entered. And in your work, I’ve just heard the language that’s large enough for it.
(If you are even remotely involved with corporations, you’ll agree that the language there could benefit from being expanded sometimes.)
Other notable OnBeing conversations I’ve enjoyed over the years include Pico Iyer (“The urgency of slowing down"), Alain de Botton (“The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships”), Jacqueline Novogratz (“Towards a Moral Revolution”).
Dept. of Celtic Wisdom — John O’Donohue
The Inner Landscape of Beauty
If you’ve followed up to this point, congrats. By now you should be sufficiently intrigued to know who is John O’Donohue. Here he is, also with Krista Tippett in 2008. The episode remains to this day an OnBeing “most beloved” episode.
While you’re at it, pick up or download O’Donohue’s best-known book: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom.
I call them tickets because they opened a door in my mind and briefly turned me into an investigator, wanting to know more. Perhaps they will have the same effect on you.
Missed Alpine Review so this is truly welcome
LJ I can’t tell you how happy I am to receive these Tickets. We met at Do Lectures in Aus where upon I fell in love with Alpine Review. Keep going. M