Ah, now could you tell me about the art? Tell me, and anybody that's interested in looking at it, it's on your website, isn't it? There's quite a few paintings and illustrations that are up there.

How did this come about? Well, it started when I was very, very young. I just loved to draw. It was very simple and unselfconscious. And I would lose myself for hours in drawing when I was growing up. There was nothing formal about it. I have almost no formal training. It was just a place where I found flow. I found eternity, a loss of time and real joy and pleasure in the world of imagination. It started really with drawing superheroes and elves and robots and things like that. It was really world building in some way. As I got a little bit older, I was building characters in a world, in a couple of different worlds consistently. And then what I discovered over time, which was so fascinating and still is very mysterious to me, is there are artists who begin with a concept and then they try to manifest that concept. I almost never do that. When I'm illustrating a story, I'll start with a story but most of the time i'm letting my hand express the wisdom that my hand has that my mind doesn't have and i'll create something and then afterwards i'll look at it and i'll sort of ponder and say what are you trying to tell me and i'll discover things that it's trying to tell me. And often those things are messages that I need to learn. And I couldn't learn any other way. Wow. What's it like for you and your writing? Is it a similar kind of thing?

Yeah. And I've been painting a lot longer than I've been writing. You do the ink drawings in the

books I've seen.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know what? And funny, they're charcoal. They're just little charcoal sketches. Usually I do all the drawings for a book in one session in a day or an afternoon, and then it's gone again. And I'll do one quick idea, like you see where the hand is leading me, and then go from there. I lived in a tent for four years, just listening really. And when I was in the tent, it never really occurred to me to write much. I didn't really even have a journal, but I drew and I drew and I drew and I drew and I watched weather patterns moving across this valley. And I was excited by the exhilaration in the change of the seasons and the movement of animals and I always thought if I ever did write I'd somehow want to aspire to that kind of nutrition that kind of wildness in it however I think there are some things in life that I was born with but the ability to write was not necessarily one of them. So I think the thing that keeps me writing is the fact that it is always clear as a writer where you can get better. And so I had a very significant teacher in my life. Of course, very integrated into your life and very consciously is Elie Wiesel and that whole work. I'd love to talk about it. But I also was lucky enough to be in the presence of the poet Robert Bly and James Hillman and Coleman Barks and all sorts of enormous figures. And always as an artist, the rub in that kind of being kind of wired up to that kind of voltage is quite where you find, you know, your own wingspan within it without having to do the typical boring punk rock move of killing all your inspirations that's a cheap shot it's a cheap shot and it's easy yeah it's too easy and so I think in my own work that I that I think the role of a teacher is not always quite the same thing as the role of the artist. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I'm in a stage in my own life through... One of the blessings of lockdown was that I was temporarily retired from too much public work. What I really do regard actually as civic duty. If I'm invited to do something, I have to have a pretty serious reason not to do it. Because spiritually, unfashionable as that word is, I feel it's an imperative to get out there and bear witness to the few talents that I actually have. the artistic side of me, which is hermetic, surly, can't stand people, can't stand being anything required of me, has suddenly, like this has happened to millions of people, has had this very unexpected mid-career moment of mass introversion. And now, as I see the wheels turning of industry and the fact that actually I'm going to be out there again, I realise, I don't know about you, I barely raised my voice for about a year. And when I'm in public, I don't usually work with microphones, so I just speak loudly. And all of the adrenaline that's going to require, the pacing up and down, the thinking on your feet, the stand and deliver. Right now, I have no idea if I'll be able to pull it off again. I'm curious about the being that emerges from this, and I won't place myself under any kind of pressure to replicate

where I was before. if there's more of that kind of hermetic wildness that you can bring to public engagement now in a way that maybe people will be a little more open to, and maybe it doesn't matter if they are or not. It's just the next step in evolution.

Yeah. I think, like you, I'm sure, I've been asked many times about, does COVID and lockdown constitute an initiatory event? Is it an initiatory event, having led Wilderness Rites of Passage for a long time? And the answer, of course, is yes and no. The yesness of it is that it has involved terrific loss of life. And as soon as anything like that is happening and an abrupt change of social behavior, it's initiatory in tone. But unfortunately, what defines an initiation or what defines, but the hopeful response is it at its end is what you would call quote unquote successful. In other words, a rite of passage has the word passage in it. It's leading somewhere. It's not arbitrary. And I'm not sure yet quite what the consequence of this thing is, other than I presume people will come out of it with radically different propositions. As Wendell Berry always says, a big question is not usually solved by a big answer. That's that oral tradition thing. It's these little threads. And for me, that's part of what's happening now is people want me to make a big

answer. And I don't want to. Yeah. There's also a difference between an answer and a response. Yes, yes, please say more about that. Well, an answer is, as Professor Wiesel used to say often, an answer is an end. It's the end of the sentence or it's the end of the conversation. Maybe it's perceived as the end of a question, but a response keeps everything open. There are certain questions that we can never answer, you know, in his life and in many of our lives in some ways at a remove, the question of why the Holocaust happened or why did God allow it to happen or how could human beings do terrible things in general to other human beings is a question that if anyone tries to answer, it's really almost offensive. You know, and there were people who said the Holocaust happened because X, Y, or Z, you know, because there were rabbis who said the Jewish community wasn't religious enough. That's incredibly offensive, not just to humans, but to any idea of God or divine justice or anything, right? There's nothing that can excuse the murder of 1 million children, nothing. So an answer is offensive, but a response might be, because it happened, we have to make sure it never happens again to anyone. And that's our response to the Holocaust. It's not an answer. The question is still there. The question is equally profound and disturbing and urgent and unresolved, but we have a way to go forward. And I think when you talk about initiation, the other thing that I think of is the role of elders, the role of people who have been through an initiation before. And that relates to the move that you were talking about of not killing your teachers, right? Not rebelling in that way, that punk rock way you said, but instead navigating reverence and gratitude for what you can receive and also finding your own voice. And as a society, I worry about that. I worry about coming out of the tunnel or the passage of COVID and realizing that we're really back where we started because we didn't do the work or we didn't listen to the voices of our elders. I'm not sure how to capture that voice now. I think about that a lot. It's part of why I study old traditions and old stories and old texts every day. But I wonder how to project that outward so that people have access to that old stuff without any of the trappings or the baggage of shoulds or oughts or guilt or expectations, but just the blessing of being in the presence of old, old stories of ancient things, of an ancient understanding of the world that looks so different from our modern technical and technocratic understanding of the world. And I'm yearning for that.

Yeah. You know, one thing that we learn from mythology all over the world is that mythological time is not the same thing as that human 4-4 frantic tempo. There's a spaciousness to it. So as I, I'm sure you've got phrases now where you think, oh God, I'm repeating this for the 900th time, you know, chant along. But one of the things I have said ad infinitum is that many of the stories I think we need now have arrived somewhere between the last 2,000 to 5,000 years ago. But it doesn't mean that they haven't been auditioning perfectly for this moment. And we are so caught up in the mantra and the polemics of 2021. We are so against the notion of gagging on the doctrine that Campbell talked about, of dealing with roughage. But the world is nothing but roughage. It's filled with beauty, but the passport for our times is, a lot of it is paradox and uncertainty. And I'm perpetually asked, you know, could you create a story for now as if sort of, you know, one man hunched over a laptop is going to do that? I can't possibly do that because what you'd be left with is a kind of cut and paste, a cut and paste story that at its best felt like a rather feeble Hollywood movie. But these older stories, you know, the Sumerian, the Greek, Jewish traditions, they don't shy away. You know, my counsel for everyone at the moment is don't shy away from the weird. Teach the weird. Move into the weird. Don't be afraid of danger. You just can't be. Because we've seen what, you know, in the tradition of my family, we've seen what white, fat American Jesus looks like. It's not good. It's not good. Go back to the troubled burning wheel that that actually comes from. And you're into another territory. So what have you done with your time over the last year? I know you're a dad and, you know, family man. I'm

a dad to young adults. So that's been a lot of my time and focus is learning new ways of being a parent and the humbling that happens in the presence of teenage and young adult children who are blossoming and really becoming themselves in so many beautiful ways, in some ways that are challenging, really learning how to navigate that with more grace and more lightness. And in general, you know, I do a pilgrimage every year. This year we couldn't go because of COVID, but I do a pilgrimage to the gravesite of a great Hasidic master and storyteller, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who's buried in the Ukraine. And many people come for this pilgrimage from around the world. It's a profoundly transformative experience every time. I've been there, I think, 21 times, and each time is completely different and completely new and radical. And it's not usually bells and whistles, like direct revelations and claims about things I can put into words. It's more subtle than that. But every once in a while, there's something that arises to the level of consciousness, something articulated. And so one time I was sitting there for hours, which is part of what you do when you're there, praying, meditating, writing in a journal, thinking, studying a text, and then praying from the text, turning something you learn into a prayer. This is a practice in that tradition. When you read a story that you really love, that really hits you, turn it into a prayer or turn it into a poem of yearning, somehow to integrate it, internalize it more deeply. So I was sitting there for hours and I was dozing off at a certain point. And I heard a voice in my head that said, it was clearly a voice that had laughter in it. It said, it was something like, can you be intense and also light? Now you have to understand that this tradition, many of the followers of this particular master are very intense because there's a real awareness of mortality. There's a kind of holy and humble ambition to grow as a person and to overcome the things I need to overcome in myself and to evolve into the person I need to be. That's serious business. But I really felt like the reminder to have humor was really so important, such an important learning for me. I've been very serious since I was a kid. So with all the imagination stuff and the drawing and everything, which was, you know, life-saving, I also always came back to some awareness of like, what's this all for? You know, what are we all here for? And that's a, that's a very helpful thing in many ways, but it's also pretty serious and heavy. So that's what this period has been about for me in many ways, is leaning into that lightness. But then also, it's been a period of taking the teachings, particularly of Elie Wiesel, and the teachings that he held dear and figuring out ways of sharing them. So I just created a project this year during COVID with several other people to really inspire and empower and nurture the next generation of moral leadership and moral, not moralizing, not ideological, and leadership, not necessarily formal leadership, but really getting into the business of what I think of as the mechanics of moral transformation. That's one of those phrases that I use a lot, the mechanics of moral transformation. It's easy to talk about. It's hard to do. What's the real work? What happens to a person when they hear a story that changes their nervous system a little bit? What happens there? How do we cultivate our capacity for compassion and kindness and justice and courage? Compassion and courage especially have been on my mind in this period. How do we develop our compassion and our courage and put our courage in the service of our compassion to stand up and do the right thing without being self-righteous? How do we maintain our passion and our humility? How do we have moral ferocity about the world and also reflection and self-interrogation? These are the kinds of things I've been working on with a group of people. When

you get into the terrain of, you know, words like ethics and morality, and for me, it gets into sort of simpler language sometimes of, you know, I need to know how to behave. I need to know how to behave. And that move from a dream into a vision, that's just occurring to me now, the move from a dreaming into a visioning, and suddenly you're into something, you know, you can't build. I'm a big fan of longing. I've been looking at one of your pieces of art, The Knights of the Broken Heart, Breslov. I'm definitely in that. That's where I live. And on the other hand, you can't build your whole life entirely on longing. That's a little bit like Odysseus trying to get home. It's the song of the sirens, the music of the spears, what in Irish myth they call the music of what is. And it is so powerful. You'll suddenly, you know, you forget how to eat. You forget how to move out into the world that's right in front of you forget to feed your cat in my or my concern at this particular second but I'm going around in circles a little bit but it's it's something to do and it's something you were very kind actually I know that you read smoke hole the book that I've coming out and there was something in there in about around behavior in the way that you wrote the few words about it. I suppose what I wanted to ask is for someone so already well settled within a very specific tradition, with an extraordinary teacher and a tangible relationship to him and to that work, you're clearly open to wider stories. You know, you've discovered my stuff and others. What's all that about? I want

to go back for a second to something you said about yearning and longing. Yeah. Because I live there too. And your first question was about something about the Hasidic imagination and path. I think one of the most important things I've gotten from that, and that was not how I grew up, by the way. I grew up very traditionally Jewish, you know, observant and religious and all of that with some complexity in my family, but I didn't discover the Hasidic part, which was the revolutionary movement from 200 years ago until I was 18, 19, 20, and on. And that became the real kind of lens through which I experience all of the other stuff in my tradition. And the most important thing I think I've learned is that yearning is really important, and longing is really important, and it's countercultural, and it's uncomfortable. It's really uncomfortable to allow yourself to yearn and long and have your heart break. It's really necessary. And the extent to which you have joy is the extent to which you can maintain that yearning space. So the cultivation of joy, which is very central to Hasidic teachings, there's a lot of dancing, there's a lot of mystical dancing, there's a lot of singing, wordless melodies. Elie Wiesel told me he always had one of those melodies in his mind. So if you see a video of him talking to the United Nations or something, he probably had a Hasidic melody somewhere in his mind while he was doing that. It gave him a lot of strength. And joy is a really important emphasis in that tradition. But it's not just so that you can be happy and jump up and down, so that you can then do the hard work of heartbreak without moving into despair territory. I think about that a lot right now. I think about it today in looking at the news and what's my responsibility to joy as a vessel, as a container for the heartbreak. The openness, you know, I think is related to heartbreak. I think that when I'm armored up, one of my favorite images from the Bible is when young David goes to fight Goliath. And we all have the image of David and Goliath, but right before the actual encounter, the actual battle, there's, I think, an even more important moment when King Saul gives David Saul's armor, the king's armor. And it's a mark of incredible respect and gratitude because this kid is volunteering to fight a giant who everyone else is freaked out about it and scared of. But David takes off that armor because it doesn't fit him. And he goes to encounter the giant without any armor. And I've drawn and painted that image for years over and over again in different ways, because it captures a lot of this question for me of, am I willing to take off the armor? And what helps me to do that? And what's the right pace to take off armor? And where is it actually appropriate and safe to do so? And where do I need some armor to maintain my sanity or wellbeing or safety? And where do I keep the armor a little bit too long? And where am I still wearing armor from years ago that I don't need anymore? And where are we as a society armored up? And where are the places where we can be vulnerable and tender and soft and where's our how can we imagine a politics of tenderness that allows our heartbreak to meet one another's heartbreaks and have a different kind of conversation so for me the the closeness not the openness to other cultures and other stories, but the closed-mindedness is really kind of a departure from traditional Judaism. Like you look at the rabbis from every generation, they were incredibly involved and open with the world. There's an idea that everything in the world is an expression of the divine. That's really the fundamental, if there's like a one-liner, an elevator speech about Judaism, it's monotheism. That doesn't just mean there's one God and the other gods are wrong. It means there's only one God and everything is part of that oneness. And our job is to identify that oneness and navigate the multiplicity and the oneness in a kind of dance. So why would we ever be closed? We can be critical and, you know, discerning. I think discernment is important because there are forces out there that are not healthy. There are forces that are, you know, that are drilling for oil right now that are not healthy. And there are people who are abusing other people right now. It's not healthy. We have to fight those things. But at the same time, we have to hold some consciousness that it's all part of one story. So to me, the place where that closed mindedness comes up is when we're really armored up. And when we allow ourselves to open our hearts, we don't have to be afraid of other stories and other traditions. They're beautiful and they're wonderful. And I've learned more about my own tradition from reading Rumi than I have from reading my own tradition, because there's a kind of echoing or a kind of reflection that happens in that dialogue that's so helpful. I've had roadblocks in my own Jewish spiritual journey that nothing helped me get around other than something from another tradition. In one case, it was Rumi.