Why So Many of Us Feel Like We Don't Belong | Pádraig Ó Tuama

**Pádraig Ó Tuama** (0:00)
It all begins with knowing nothing lasts forever, so you might as well start packing now. In the meantime, practice being alive. Try to stay alive. That you must accept change before you die.
But you'll die anyway, so you might as well live, and you might as well love.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a Chrysalis, a time of profound transformation, that can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.

**Chip Conley** (0:35)
Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis. This is Chip Conley. What is it about Irish poets? I have a thing for Irish poets and Persian poets.
Today, we have one of the best known Irish poets, living poets, along with David White, who recently spoke and taught at two workshops at MEA in Santa Fe. Padraig Ó Tuama is going to be teaching here this summer. And his podcast and his substack, Poetry Unbound, is phenomenal. And he has a book also with that name. His 2025 book, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other, is all about conflict and about polarities and about understanding the person sitting across from you who may have a very different point of view. And maybe that's why the Irish and the Persians are so good at poetry, because they've lived in conflict zones.
Speaking of conflict, Padraig is also someone who has had to deal with the conflict of his sexuality along with his spirituality, being a gay Catholic. And he has recently been appointed to a faculty on the Yale Divinity School. And so if you're somebody who has always been a little curious about poetry, thinking poetry helps you to see that the wonder of the world may be more valuable than the weight of the world, I think you're going to enjoy this episode. Padraig, thank you for joining us here on The Midlife Chrysalis. We are honored to have you here. We're honored to actually have you come to Santa Fe to teach this summer.

**Pádraig Ó Tuama** (2:22)
Thanks Chip, I'm looking forward to it.

**Chip Conley** (2:24)
So let's start with just Irish poets. What is it about Irish poets? I have some Irish roots from County Cork and you're from Cork yourself.
Why is it that, you know, whether David White was just teaching here a couple of weeks ago, he taught work two workshops in a row, and John O'Donoghue, his poem, For a New Beginning is the poem we read at the end of our workshops. What is it about the Irish and poetry?

**Pádraig Ó Tuama** (2:51)
Well, it's an important part of our culture, like many cultures.
Certainly growing up in Irish education system, the ordinary local schools in the village, there was poetry part of every day, really. We were learning two poems off by heart from the age of five to, two poems off by heart a week from the age of five to 17, one in English, one in Irish. But like when I meet Palestinian friends or Pakistani friends or Iranian friends or Turkish friends, they say the same thing. You know, there's lots of parts of the world where lots of parts of the world where there's a lot of interest and emphasis on poetry. And lots of the poems that we were learning in Irish, especially, were not children's poems, even though we were children. They were poems about politics, poems about occupation, poems about resistance to the British presence in Ireland. So these were poems that were of the meat of life. And some of those poems were then, poets were then summarily executed. And so we were learning about their, their murder at the hands of the occupying forces in history, and then learning their poems off by heart in Irish class. So Ireland is just one of the countries around the world where poetry is part of the lifeblood of it all.

**Chip Conley** (3:59)
In your anthology of the 44 Poems on Being with Each Other, you start with a quote from the French psychoanalyst Jacques. I can't remember his last name right now.

**Pádraig Ó Tuama** (4:14)
Jacques Lacan.

**Chip Conley** (4:15)
Jacques Lacan. Thank you. The very foundation of inter-human discourse is misunderstanding.

**Pádraig Ó Tuama** (4:21)
I love that quote.

**Chip Conley** (4:23)
So let's talk about that because especially in Ireland and how art and poetry has been one of your bridges to try to create some understanding across cultures.
In particular, I think we're either a founder or a leader of an organization that was actually trying to create better understanding and maybe better listening across cultures. Sure.

**Pádraig Ó Tuama** (4:52)
I was the leader of the Carmel community. It was founded in 1965