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Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama is seeking to have a relationship with language that is able to look at hunger, possibility, fury, and all things primal.
Show Notes
In conversation with Omega digital media director Cali Alpert, Pádraig Ó Tuama explores the shared sources of prayers and poetry, the multiple interpretations of language and how it changes over time, and how he likes to explore scáth —which means both shadow and shelter in Irish.
Pádraig opens up about his upbringing and its challenges, and how children are yearning to look at things of serious meaning, such as life and death. He says when he felt alone as a child, poetry created a space for him to have conversations with himself on the page.
Ultimately, where great art and writing comes from, he says, is a mystery. Don't miss Pádraig's reading of his poem, "Let the Waters Swarm with a Swarm of Human Beings."
This episode is part of Season 4 of Omega’s award-winning podcast, Dropping In. Join us for intimate conversations with some of Omega's trailblazing spiritual teachers, thought leaders, and social visionaries, to explore the many ways to awaken the best in the human spirit.
Pádraig opens up about his upbringing and its challenges, and how children are yearning to look at things of serious meaning, such as life and death. He says when he felt alone as a child, poetry created a space for him to have conversations with himself on the page.
Ultimately, where great art and writing comes from, he says, is a mystery. Don't miss Pádraig's reading of his poem, "Let the Waters Swarm with a Swarm of Human Beings."
This episode is part of Season 4 of Omega’s award-winning podcast, Dropping In. Join us for intimate conversations with some of Omega's trailblazing spiritual teachers, thought leaders, and social visionaries, to explore the many ways to awaken the best in the human spirit.
Creators & Guests
What is Dropping In (Audio)?
Join Emmy award-winning producer and Omega director of digital media Cali Alpert for Season 4, as she drops in for intimate conversations with some of Omega's trailblazing spiritual teachers, thought leaders, and social visionaries, to explore ways to awaken the best in the human spirit. New episodes will be posted weekly.
Cali Alpert:
Welcome to Dropping In, from Omega Institute, a podcast that explores the many ways to awaken the best in the human spirit. I'm Cali Alpert. Dropping in today, Pádraig Ó Tuama. Pádraig is a poet and theologian from Ireland whose work centers around themes of language, power, conflict, and religion. His poetry has received acclaim in circles of literature, psychology, politics, and theology, and has been published in the Harvard Review, Poetry Ireland and the Academy of American Poets, among others. His books include Readings from the Book of Exile, Sorry for Your Troubles, In The Shelter, and most recently Poetry Unbound. Pádraig also hosts the Poetry Unbound podcast from the On Being Project. He is a member and former leader of the Corrymeela community, Ireland's oldest reconciliation community. Pádraig, welcome. Thank you so much for dropping in today. It's so good to see you.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Thanks, Cali. It's lovely to be with you.
Cali Alpert:
So, you grew up in Cork in the southwest of Ireland, and clearly Ireland has a very grand legacy of prominent writers and poets, to the degree that people often say that Irish people have storytelling and poetry in their blood and in their DNA. Do you think that's true? Because I have heard you talk about how you believe there's lots of cultures that have inherent storytelling in them, certainly.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Of course.
Cali Alpert:
But what do you think it is that's at the core of that legacy? Do you agree with it, and what do you think's at the core of that?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Yeah. Ireland is one of the countries around the world where poetry and storytelling is really prominent. You can look to traditional culture for ways within which that was popular. The way that it's shown up in me is that when I was going to school, it was just taken for granted that you'd be learning two poems off by heart every week, one in English, one in Irish, from the age of five to 17. And so that doesn't mean that everybody loves poetry or writes it, but it does mean that when you have conversations with people about poetry, that people have opinions. I did that latest book, Poetry Unbound, was launched in Dublin a month or two ago, and the way that I did the launches for that event was to say to whoever was there, "What's a line from a poem that you call to mind?"
And in Dublin, we could have just spent the whole hour of the book launch just letting those come forward. People just kept on calling things forward and finishing off each other's lines or correcting it if somebody got it wrong. So, certainly there is a way within which Ireland is one of the cultures where that's present. Iran also, Palestine, so many places, Turkey, so many places around the world. Poland also, a very, very rich poetic culture there. So, yeah, I'm very glad to have been part of a culture and an education system, a very ordinary education system, where just going along to the local village school poetry was absolutely taken for granted. Not only for its literary benefit, but also its historical and political benefit. Because poetry in Ireland's always been, not always, but has had a long history of politics as well.
Cali Alpert:
Why do you think that is when you name those countries as examples of where it might be more deeply embedded from the get-go for people growing up in those cultures? I'm going to generalize here by saying, having grown up in the United States, in the northeast of the United States, that often for me and a lot of children, it was more of a challenge to befriend poetry than anything else. So, what do you think sets that apart?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
I'm not sure. Yeah. I suppose there's, by exposure to something, you become a lot more used to it. For instance, whenever I go to Canada and people are like, "Oh, come on, let's go skating," and they just pop on skates and skate off over some frozen lake. I'm frightened, A, I'm going to fall through the lake, and also, I don't know how to skate. But for other people they were like, "I've been doing this since I was five." It's almost like somebody saying they don't know how to ride a bike or something. So, I suppose partly it's whatever you're used to.
And that just means that even if you don't love it, you have a familiarity with it and you have a capacity to say, "Here's why I don't like it," or, "Here's why that doesn't work for me." So, there's something about that. If you only encounter poems from time to time, maybe a week every term in school, well then that means that if you have a distaste for it, well then you can avoid it most of the year. Whereas in Ireland, if you have a distaste for poetry, you probably have to hone your reasons for your distaste because you're facing it every day.
Cali Alpert:
So interesting. You've talked about and written about poetry as prayer. From what I've known and what I've learned in researching and getting to know you and your work a little bit better, those are two silos that obviously deeply define you. And I'm curious about those two things, the origins of them before they started to coalesce in you when you were a younger boy. You're one of six kids in a family. You had an eye toward the priesthood early on. How did you discover your resonance with poetry separate from what we just talked about in terms of the cultural bit of it? Was there a time when you recall your heart really singing or knowing that this was your calling, or one of your callings?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Well, I just always liked it. We were learning poems so early and learning complicated poems and learning poems written about middle-aged crises and politics and occupation and revolution. You could recite loads of those in two different languages from the age of eight. And I loved the sound of it. I always enjoyed learning things off by heart and I love the sound of the words in my mouth. So, I mean, there was a way within which I grew up in a poor family. Both my parents had left school at 13, so they were absolutely committed to all six of us getting jobs in industry, in science preferably. And while they had an appreciation for all subjects, they really were, in terms of getting a job, science and particularly physics was the only way forward. So, the idea of thinking that poetry was anything other than a deep love of mine, that never really occurred to me way into my twenties.
I just thought, "Well, it's part of my blood," but I never thought I was going to be able to do anything with it. Because an imagination of a career like that seemed like an untouchable luxury. Because I'm sure lots of people who have grown up where parents had to leave school at 13, you grow up as the children of such parents with a sense about what a job needs to mean and what an employable skill looks like. So, poetry never seemed like an employable skill. Neither does theology, to be honest with you. So, it just always was there and it never had to be anything other than a deep love. And I never had fantasies either about getting published. I just knew I had to write. And so I wrote and wrote and wrote and learned and got books about how to write and was part of some small groups of people where I was learning the steps of editing or editing yourself and writing in response to schools of poetry that I loved.
So, it always was there, but as something that was a sustenance. And it never became any question about a profession for a long time. And I'm glad for that. That was a good place. There's limitations to that. Sometimes I wish I'd done an undergrad in poetry or different things like that, but there's a way within which the benefits of it too continue to be with me. And with prayer, I think I always knew that poetry and prayer are overlapping with each other. They never were separate for me. Certainly in the Irish tradition, there's loads of prayers for all kinds of things, and loads of local prayers for all kinds of things. We were learning prayers about how to welcome your own death and how to pray for your own death. And lots of these prayers have kind of a folk religion to them. They wouldn't necessarily be endorsed by the Vatican. Not that they're saying anything that would necessarily be contradictory to formal religion, but they have a certain parochial anarchism to them that makes them seem very local.
And I loved those. There's one invoking all of these saints and angels to perch on the gables of your house as some kind of protection. I always saw Mary and Bridget like vultures on the gables of the house. And I loved the imagination of that. And there was something of that that felt wild. These are anonymous prayers. You may know where they come from or maybe not even that. They're a few hundred years old and they've evolved out of a certain tradition. So, there's something about the invocation of such poems and prayers that demonstrates the enormous overlap. For me, the direction of prayer is much less interesting. It's the source of it that is really interesting. And I think that prayer and poetry, one of their shared sources is the heart and what matters and human hunger and need. Those things really motivate and interest me when it comes to art.
Cali Alpert:
I want to go back to your reference just now about the prayers that had to do with welcoming your own death. Were those things you were exposed to as a young boy-
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Oh yeah.
Cali Alpert:
... or not until adulthood?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
No, no. As a boy, totally. Every night we had these family prayers we prayed. And there's one in English that we used to say. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I breathe forth my soul in peace with you. Amen." And then another one, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, assist me now and in my last agony." So, there's a long tradition of praying for your own death in lots of cultures around the world and lots of religions. And I love that the Irish tradition does that. And partly too, what that imparts into you is an imagination that life is going to have struggle rather than that life is going to be easy. Not that I think that therefore makes for pessimistic imaginations, but it does make for certain realistic imaginations to say, "No, death and struggle are part of this." And if the question of God means anything, it is the question of about how to be alive in the midst of those demands and unsureties and uncertainties rather than thinking that any system of prayer should guide you through those without being impacted by difficulty or demand or death.
Cali Alpert:
I love the idea of that. It opens up the door and takes away in theory the fear or preciousness around topics that are often construed as too macabre for children to talk about. Too macabre for adults to talk about, let alone kids, right?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Yeah, totally. Well, that's the wake. I mean, children are very comfortable talking about death often and have very practical questions. I spoke to a man who was involved in publishing for young people a few years ago and he was saying most of the complaints he gets are from parents of young people. Young people want in the literatures that they explore to look at questions of serious meaning, of power and of death and of the past and of friends and of breakages of friendships, and all of these things that are really vital and sometimes catastrophic and serious and magnificent and the source of great electricity in life. And often he says that it is the people who say they're protecting the children from those things when actually they seem to be protecting themselves from it, because they want to protect an imagination of childhood that seems to go against the very trends that the children that they say they're protecting would articulate for themselves, which is to say they want to recognize their world and the literature that they turn to.
Cali Alpert:
It's reminding me of just the overarching theme of people often being afraid of depth and truth. I wonder if we've gotten away from that, generally speaking. I mean, certainly artists and poets and writers, that's their mission, and plenty of other industries as well.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Anyone that enjoys sitting around a kitchen table and having a chat with their friends or people with whom they live. I mean, in a certain sense, maybe at its best, social media can be a way within which people are engaging in conversations like that. Join the conversation is a phrase that you often hear when people are appealing for folks to join in on their social media feed. And that might be so they could have stuff sold to them, but also there might be a desire to think, "Oh, we can learn something and let's have a conversation." Obviously that can be complicated and can lead down to fruitless paths. But conversation has always had that as a threat to itself. Social media isn't the thing that showed that people can enjoy fighting. People have enjoyed fighting for a long time before social media. All social media does is maybe amplify it and reveal it back to us.
I mean, I remember once being invited to the house of a man for a meal. He was a bishop, Donal, and sitting around the table was this other guy who the bishop had met because this fellow had come to fit curtains in the house. That's what he did for his work. He fitted blinds and curtains in houses. And this man Jim just loved to have conversations. He loved to talk to people. And Jim and I kept in touch for a number of years because he was such a raconteur, and I loved that. There was a way within which he wasn't trying to broadcast himself. He wasn't trying to think, "Oh, I need a career as a chat show host. I need to have a YouTube channel."
Nothing. He was just thinking, "Any opportunity I have to talk with people, fitting curtains in their house, being invited back." Just getting involved in the lives of the people who he met. He was magnificent. And I find that all walks of life, all corners of communities have people who do that. And naturally those people around that person will go, "God, it's great when they're here because they really get us into a conversation." And it might be very serious or it might be lighthearted, but nonetheless tender. And that's a great joy. People who have that disposition are a gift to their friends and family and community.
Cali Alpert:
Yeah, absolutely. And from what I've heard and experienced, it's a great gift to them to have the captive receptive people in order to engage in those kinds of conversations as well, right?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Yeah.
Cali Alpert:
Works in a very circular, reciprocal way ideally, if the conditions are right, yeah?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Yeah.
Cali Alpert:
I'd like to go back again to your coming of age, parts of which really deeply informed your work and your life. I think it was at age 12 when you knew that you were gay.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Yeah, 11 or 12.
Cali Alpert:
And obviously that put you on the path to finding your way to living openly and to reconciling the prejudice around sexual orientations and reconciling that with your religion. I know you've said that you never struggled with your sexuality, you struggled with other people's struggles with your sexuality. That was followed by the exorcisms and reparative therapies. And I'm very interested in the degree to which that process early on at that stage either fractured or fortified your relationship with yourself. The idea of being up against, as a young man, the idea of people attempting to hold you back from your own truth with you.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
I think it's certainly limited the imagination about what was possible and what was fruitful and what was loving and what was good. In a certain sense, I'm a good Catholic in that I looked to authority and I trusted authority. I don't now. I did then, to have my best interest at heart when it came to saying what was true and right and proper and good, and what was an interpretation of ancient texts also. And I was looking for the parameters within which to explore freedom, and the parameters were very, very limited. And that certainly contributed to a great sense of constraint. Yeah. There was a deep sense of constraint within that. I mean, years later, I tend to think about that within a conversation about form and poetry. So, for me, the relationship with sonnet or villanelle or pantoum or triolet, any of these things is an ongoing conversation with the question about what kind of freedom can be found within form and constraint.
So, in a certain sense, those early years were a long study about the reality of that when it came to a life and safety and systemic abuse and systemic prejudices. They were a boiler for fury and resentment and rage. It was a place within which language was trying wherever it could to explode through me. And I was, for a while anyway, trying whatever I could do to dampen that explosion. And in a certain sense, it's a recipe for a disaster of a life, and certainly I've lived with some of the consequences of that. It is also a recipe for fortitude if you're lucky enough to have some small modicums of support. I really did feel very alone for a long time. But I'm glad for the kind of private space that poetry created in me to have conversations with myself on the page, poems I'd sometimes burn afterwards because I couldn't bear the idea that anybody would find them. But releasing those onto the page was a great self writing and treating your own story as some kind of sacred text.
Cali Alpert:
Have you ever thought about how that fire in your soul to write and express yourself would perhaps be different if you hadn't had those experiences?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Yeah, I do. Yeah. I mean, I suppose it's a question we all ask, isn't it? It's a speculation about who would I be had life been different? And there was a while when I used to think that such speculations were worthless. I don't think they're worthless, and I also don't think they're worthwhile engaging in too much. I do think about it from time to time. It would've been nice to have had a life where certain things weren't such a struggle. I would like that. But then were I to have had that life, I wouldn't know what the alternative is like. I only ever know what I know, and I'm sure that's the same with all of us.
Avivah Zornberg, who's an extraordinary writer about the Hebrew Bible and about psychoanalysis and about linguistics and etymology, she looks at the story of Moses and she looks at how it is toward the end of his life that he realizes certain things for himself. And perhaps he realizes with a tinge of regret that he hadn't learned those things earlier. And I think there's such an interesting realization that that preoccupation about, "Oh, I wish I'd learned that earlier," or, "I wish I had the freedom then that I have now," that that has been present in literatures for millennia. And in that sense, I feel in good company. I'm not burdened by regret, but I do sometimes kind of flirt with it a little bit.
Cali Alpert:
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Cali Alpert:
I appreciate the idea of not perseverating about the rear view mirror and going backwards, although often it's helpful to understand how we were formed and where we came from. I'm probably more curious now with you about where you think great art and work and writing comes from. And are those experiences we're talking about a great catalyzer? Are they necessary? Are they not necessary? All the cliches about the greatest rock songs being written because of deep pain and agony and poetry being written from deep pain and agony. So, that's the bridge I was trying to build between your past and your beautiful work now.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
I suppose, well, if we knew where art came from, we would keep going there even if it hurt us. And so ultimately we don't. Certainly one of the things that we can say is that heightened experience of need can distill the need for expression and focus that out in a certain way, whether that's dance or music or community work or poetry. And then it's down to, I suppose, what's present in a culture or in a life in terms of the expressions. But yeah, I mean, I know of people who write poems of extraordinary tenderness, and yet for them it's really an experiment in language. And while I might want to go, "What's the devastation that gave rise to this," they'll go, "Look at the alliteration." And in that way, we don't know.
Yeats used to talk about the animus mundi, the soul of the world, and had this idea that there was a soul of the world that was trying to make its way out through all the artists. And he had a very spiritist way of looking at it, to think that certain symbols or certain colors or certain words or numbers were a demonstration of this soul of the world. I mean, the kind of particularity of that isn't something that appeals to me. But what I think he is getting at is that sometimes we're doing something that feels bigger than us and that the question as to why this particular piece of poetry has come through this particular poet, that that isn't always the question that will solve the mystery of the tenderness or the insight of that poem.
And then similarly, I mean, maybe people say the same thing about me. There's poems that you go, "Oh, I know that if I ever were to meet the poet who wrote this, I would really get on with them because they've written this with such perfection that I feel like I've been birthed through this poem." And then you meet them and they're ordinary or they're an asshole or they're tired or whatever, or the connection's not there, or they're distracted or they have a toothache or whatever, blah, blah blah. It can be any of these things. And you can come away thinking, "Oh, therefore the art is meaningless because there wasn't that connection." And that's unfair to the art as well. And so the question as to the relationship of the artist to the art is a perplexing one, and often it's perplexing to the artist as well.
Cali Alpert:
I love how you said that too, the idea of sourcing where art comes from. That's just such a large question and also so beautifully simplified. I haven't heard it put like that. I love that. Some of your themes among many that you write and speak about often are subjects around truth, shadow, secrets. Let's start with the shadow. Can you tell me why that topic has been so deep for you over the years? And perhaps it's not right now.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Well, partly there is a linguistic explanation to this, that the word for shadow and shelter are the same in Irish, scáth. And I loved that because in some ways of rendering those in English, shelter can seem like it's a great benefit and shadow can feel like there's something that's being erased. Now, here's the thing. On a sunny day I'm delighted to be in shadow. So, even English demonstrates a sophistication about the question about shadow and shelter. But I always was fascinated by this Irish phrase, [foreign language]. "It is in the shelter of each other that the people live," or, "It is in the shadow of each other that the people live." I've heard some people say that the verb live there can mean survive as well. There's ways within which this very simple old saying can extend in multiple directions. And deeper than any question as to whether shelter is good and shadow isn't so good is the question for me about what it means that there is more than one thing that's true at the same time.
And that's what really interests me in the question of shadow and shelter. In the question of truth, also. In the question of story and ultimately in the question of language, how is it that you can say something that demonstrates that there's more than one true thing? Often poets are looking for a phrase of elegance that has multiple immediate interpretations and where the interpretation isn't provided. So, I wrote a poem for my friend Phil years ago called Readings from the Book of Exile. And one of the parts of that poem says, "He has been moved beyond belief." And I was really pleased with that line because yeah, he had been moved beyond belief in all the ways that that could mean, about the question of moving away from belief, about the question about being moved and that it being unbelievable the level to which he had been moved, and then everything that happens in between that.
And for me, I like to explore truth and shadow and shelter through particular narratives that have multiple immediate interpretations. That sounds overly complicated, but it's not. We use those kinds of sentences all the time when we're talking about each other. To say, "Yeah, that took it out of me." Wow, took what out of me? Or, "I was beside myself with emotion." What? I was beside myself? We use those phrases when we're talking to our friend on the bus or making a new friend or talking to a therapist or on a retreat at Omega. All of these places we find ways within which the language we use is presenting itself to us in absolute particular grounded ways that have multiple interpretations immediately present. And I find that to be very interesting and I find there's great poetry present there.
Cali Alpert:
So, in your writing, is there an intentionality in that being the outcome or does it happen organically and it's not till afterwards when you're reading back your own sentiment that you recognize all the multi-facets of what you just described?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
I suppose it's a mixture. You have an ear attuned for where a particular line comes. I remember hearing somebody say, "Oh God, I was beside myself," and just thinking, "What?" I've heard that phrase my whole life, and suddenly I'm looking at it and I'm being looked back at by it. So, sometimes there is a way within which there's a bit of an attunement to the possibility that's there. So, sometimes you're pursuing it and other times you're just writing and finding out what you're writing and feeling as it's writing you back. the word poem in Greek, poiema, means a made thing and a poem is a made thing that somehow makes you back and also has the capacity to break you as it looks back at you. And I think the world has had a longstanding relationship with poems as made things for as long as we've been people.
And not just by people who call themselves poets. If there's been an amazing headline that captures a zeitgeist of joy or grief for a country or for a community, well then it'll be on everybody's lips because somehow it makes and breaks them all at once or it brings them into that emotion. A photograph can do the same thing, where somebody captures a moment of joy or bliss or sorrow or lament or defiance on the front of a newspaper and it just captures something where people feel like something in me is brought out as well as given space for lament in this. And in that way I'm attuned to looking out and listening out for those pieces of language as well as I'm aware that the poem is trying to work itself through me. And sometimes the deliberate crafting of it can get in the way of letting the poem just be groaned out of you.
Cali Alpert:
I'm always fascinated by resonance of artistic work and how some feels like it can resonate with large groups of people and readers at the same time from very different walks of life as a great reconciler, in honor of a lot of your work. Can you put your finger on what that is, and do you find it, Is there hope inside of that perhaps that that's a great equalizer in the human experience, which is something you focus so much on, that maybe the idea that when people's hearts are open and they're allowing theirself to receive one piece of work in the same way, that there's a collective experience going on that maybe can bond us? It's a big multi-layered question, but it's what's coming to me as I listen to you talk about that.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Well, it's interesting. I have thought about this. I've done public readings of work for years. Loads of poets have, and there can be all kinds of layers between that. Something that immediately you can feel the emotion erupting in the room or feel the resonance happening in the room. That can make you feel like, "Okay, that was a good poem. That did it." And somebody else who has a poem that might actually need a little bit more rereading might feel like, "Oh, therefore my poem's a failure," or, "My poem's more sophisticated because it's not immediate." There's all kinds of ways you can-
Cali Alpert:
It's over their heads.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
It's over their heads. "I'm too clever," or, "They're too stupid," or, "I'm not trying to be tabloid." I'm not interested in praising one at the expense of the other. I'm interested in thinking, "Isn't it great that there's all kinds of things that are present there, and different things you return to a different times?" So, yeah, I never know what causes resonance. Partly I think what causes resonance is expectation and hope. And for me, what happens in a room when poems are being recited is as much to do with who's in the room and what's drawn them to the room than the words that are being given. And so that does give me pause to not automatically think that because something has landed perfectly in a room that it's because of my perfect poem. Maybe it's because of the generosity of the people in the room and the way that they've brought themselves to the room. So, I think about that a lot.
Cali Alpert:
You're beyond being a recognized and revered and renowned poet and writer and storyteller. You have quite a reputation as a public speaker. I even, in full disclosure, have cried many times just listening to you talk because there's a soulfulness and a visceral experience that happens by listening to you. And I'm curious what the experience is for you, the difference between how you feel when you're writing a poem, when you're reading one of your poems, and when you're speaking extemporaneously about whatever topic of the myriad of topics you talk about. How does it feel for you, those three things?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
I try as far as possible to let each of them feel close to each other. For me, I'm interested in having a relationship with language that is able to look at need and hunger and possibility and curiosity and rage and emotion and desire and lust and fury and reclamation, that all of these things that are primal. I want, when I'm writing, when I'm editing, when I'm giving a formal talk and when I'm in conversation with friends, I want to be present to all of those things. And that it is the openness to those hungers and the openness to recognizing that they're always there anyway, that's the template by which I measure the integrity of anything that I stay in public.
Cali Alpert:
Do you feel differently when you're in each of those different actions? Does your experience differ-
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Not much.
Cali Alpert:
... between speaking, readings, writing?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
No. I mean, they can, of course. If you feel like, "Oh, that didn't land well," there's ways within in which the experience can feel bad afterwards. But in term for me, the question is always, can I walk away paying attention to what I've written or what I've said or what I've heard or how I've listened? Can I walk away feeling like I was able to be myself there? And that's the deepest question of integrity, I think.
Cali Alpert:
That's a good gauge. How aligned was I with myself in that moment or at that place or with that person?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Yeah. Do I recognize myself? Was I performing a different self? And if I was performing a different self, is that self true too? Who is that other self? None of these things have simplistic answers to them. But yeah, there's something more than, did I get applause? That is an invitation, I think. Yeah. Did I tell the truth? Did I ask the truth? Did I hold the question from a place of need? Did I deliver a talk from the point of view of the assumption that I know something that others don't? Those are questions and those are dispositions and postures that I always wanted to ask.
Cali Alpert:
So, I'd asked you before our time together today if you would come with a poem or two that might reflect where you're at now in your heart and your head. Do you want to share one?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Yeah. There's one here called Let the Waters Swarm with a Swarm of Living Beings. It's kind of my take on a convention that you find in the opening poem of the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible that talks about the creeping things that creep upon the earth. So, Let the Waters Swarm with a Swarm of Living Beings. "I've been swimming around here for a while now, and while I've never touched the ocean floor, I've tried. You notice things out here. The way the wind makes waves chop at odd angles, the way the water feels warmer at the top, the way the moon makes music when you are half dead with cold, the ways of frozen bones, the way the morning never feels the same. Once a seal bumped me, came right up to me like a sea puppy, and I swear it smiled. I was floating happy after that. I said the ocean was my home. Then the storm came, then the waves, then the lightning spiked the surface. Thunder clapped. Hungry beasts swam around me. I saw seagulls eyeing me for scraps."
Cali Alpert:
Beautiful. Thank you.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Pleasure.
Cali Alpert:
Why did you pick that one? Where are you at in relationship to that theme right now?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
I like the last line, "Hungry beasts swam around me. I saw seagulls eyeing me for scraps." I suppose there's a question about time in this. This person seems to be abandoned at sea and thinks because they had one beautiful experience, the seal comes up and smiles, that therefore they go, "Okay, I know the lay of the land now," or the lay of the water. And then things change. The storm, the lightning, the beasts. And sometimes I'm the beast and other times I'm the water and other times I'm the lightning. All these things.
Of course, in a poem like this, it isn't just the speaking voice that is the persona. The persona is all of these characters that are present in the furniture of the poem. And for me, I like the invitation of this to think about, which one am I today? Am I the sea puppy? Am I the hungry beast? Am I the seagull? Am I the water? Which one am I? I like the curiosity of that, the nature of wildness that's present in some of these characters and the nature of preservation that's present in some of the other characters, and the tension between them.
Cali Alpert:
I also felt some type of meditation inside of there with the reminder of how transitory everything is all the time.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Yeah. Yeah. There's a great line in Lord of the Rings where one of the hobbits says to a king that he's just sworn his fealty to, "As a father you shall be to me." And this king is nearing the end of his life and has developed some wisdom at cost. And so when the hobbit says, "As a father you shall be to me," the king says, "For a while." And I love that modification of that sentence, "For a while." And you get the sense that in talking, this was him looking back at various versions of himself, where as a younger person he might have said, "Yes, this is how it's always going to be." And an older part of him is saying, "Yeah, for a while." And just because it's not going to be permanent, it doesn't mean that therefore its impermanence is ineffective.
Cali Alpert:
I have goosebumps, for what that's worth. I do. So, finally, I have three questions that I like to ask everybody that joins us on Dropping In, three rapid fire questions, as they are.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Great.
Cali Alpert:
I'd like to grant you one wish for our listeners and our viewers. What would it be?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
That the British Royal Family would initiate a global truth and reconciliation or truth commission regarding the impact of empire.
Cali Alpert:
What is something you wish for yourself?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Isn't it interesting how difficult it is to say that? On the one hand, to grasp it and then the other hand to think, what will I say that I can be with? Right now, what do I wish for? I'm tired. So, probably a bit of rest.
Cali Alpert:
And finally, what's the most important offering or tip you'd like our viewers and listeners to take away from our conversation today? If one thing.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Oh, to notice.
Cali Alpert:
Thank you so much, Pádraig. It's been such a joy to talk with you today.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
My pleasure, Cali. I've loved both times I've been at Omega and I've been on this podcast too, so thank you. It's a lovely opportunity.
Cali Alpert:
Well, it's a gift anytime we can have you join us as well, so I really appreciate it. If people would like to find out more about you and your endeavors, where can they look for you?
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
So, they can listen to Poetry Unbound. That's a podcast. You'll find that wherever you podcast your podcasts. I have a website, pádraigotuama.com. I'm on Instagram with the same, just my name, Pádraig Ó Tuama. So, you can follow along there. Yeah. Have a look around.
Cali Alpert:
Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure. Really appreciate it.
Pádraig Ó Tuama:
My pleasure.
Cali Alpert:
Thanks for dropping in with Omega Institute. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps new listeners find us.
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I'm Cali Alpert, producer and host of Dropping In. Our video editor is Grannell Knox. The music and mix are by Scott Mueller. Thanks for dropping in.