Mark Nepo's Blog, page 10
February 10, 2014
Legacy
In the days after my father died, there were many quiet moments and many stories told. It was a small thing my mother said while crying over tea that allowed me to connect these small stories of my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father. I never realized that they form a legacy I’m a part of.
Legacy
My great-grandfather was a leather
smith. He made saddles for a feudal
baron in Russia. Chased by Cossacks
into the Dnieper River, he was spared
because they didn’t want their horses
to get cold. In America, he would say,
“When in trouble, wait till you see
a way out.”
My grandfather was an out of work
printer in Brooklyn during the De-
pression. He’d bring strangers home
for dinner. When grandma would
pull him aside with “We don’t have
enough,” he’d kiss her cheek and say,
“Break whatever we have in half.
It will be enough.”
Now, my 93-year-old father bobs
inside his stroke-laden body, and
my mother shakes her head, “I don’t
know how he does it.” She stares into
the trail of their lives, “No matter what
we faced, he’d always say, ‘Give me a
minute, and I’ll figure out what to do.’”
I braid their lessons into a rope I can
use: to see a way out, to know there
will be enough, to figure out what
to do. Standing still in the river,
till we are shown how to stay
alive and give.
A Question to Walk With: Describe one story or saying that comes from your birth family or your chosen family that has shaped your understanding of life.
January 28, 2014
January 27, 2014
The Moon Hears My Confession
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
I’m always humbled by the way life appears when I think I’m in control. It’s then I always feel less than, as if I’m falling short, as if I’ve let things slip out of my hands. When I remember that I’m one small part in a very complex and numinous Whole, I may feel frustrated but I feel engaged in an ongoing process of aliveness that keeps demanding my cooperation. This set of feelings led to this small poem.
The Moon Hears My Confession
My heart thunders
like a horse who knows the land
better than any rider.
Outside,
I feel less than.
Inside,
I find company.
A Question to Walk With: If you were alone on a clear night, what would you say to the moon? On a clear night, go out and be still under the stars until you feel the company of the Universe. Then go ahead and say it.
January 21, 2014
Midway in Our Journey
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
Part of everyone’s journey in life is to arrive at precipice or fork in the road or at the end of a path and to realize we no longer know our way. Hard as this is, this is where the inner journey begins, when all we’ve carried has served its purpose and now we must burn it for warmth and to see what’s next. This is when the soul shows itself, if we will listen. This is when we assume our full stature and make our own path.
Midway in Our Journey
Just when we’re softened by the years,
when we have enough experience to see
for ourselves, our maps are torn from us.
This can be frightening, but there’s
divine timing in the dissolution of a
stubborn mind, the way an inlet waits
on the last rock to crumble so it can
find its destiny in the sea. Losing the
way set out by others is necessary so we
can discover for ourselves what it means
to be alive. Now we can burn the clothes
others have laid out for us, not in anger
but to light our way. Now we can let the
soul spill its honey on the unleavened life
we’ve been carrying. Now we can rise.
A Question to Walk With: Describe an inheritance of mind or heart, of values or goals, that no longer works for you. Describe your history with this inheritance: how it came to you, how it worked for you and when it stopped being relevant. Describe how you are finding your way.
January 13, 2014
Aging
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
My father used to quip that old is always ten years out from wherever you are. I’m sixty-two and to think of how old I once thought this was! What I’m learning is that age is not the distance from the beginning of our lives but the distance at any moment from the heart of our aliveness.
Aging
What if aging is just another labor like the one that brought us into this world? What if this life with all its experience and pain and joy is just another kind of womb forming us for what we can’t yet know? What if the next life is as encompassing and incomprehensible as this one is to the unborn waiting in the womb? And what if the passage—known from this side as death and from that side as birth—is so transforming it can’t be remembered?
I don’t suppose that the life awaiting is heaven or hell or the return here in another incarnation. And I don’t suppose it can’t be those states. I can’t presume to name it at all; except to say that just as the Universe has no known limit, so too the Spiritual Wholeness that we climb through, fall through, wonder our way through, one life at a time.
A Question to Walk With: Describe your own sense of life before you and life after you.
January 6, 2014
Somewhere
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
No matter what we’re going through, the opposite is happening somewhere else at the same time. This awareness doesn’t minimize our own experience but adds context and medicine to the truth of any given moment, the way a rip in the curtains we have drawn seems like a violation of the privacy we so wanted though it is only letting the light of the world in. This poem tries to understand this paradox.
SOMEWHERE
As something is breaking, somewhere
something is being joined. As something
is joining, somewhere something is breaking.
As something closes, something opens. As
something opens, something closes. Where
there is dark, somewhere there is light. And
where there is light, somewhere there is dark.
When things go clear, somewhere things are
thickening into confusion. And when people
are agitated, others are calm. I don’t understand
this. But as something is taken, something is given.
As something is given, something is taken. As some-
one is cruel, someone is kind. And when kindness
appears, somewhere something cruel is poised to
sting. Then someone is lost, as another is finally
at home. And some are aware of this, while others
are not. The way things break and join at once, the
way people are cruel and kind at once, the way life
constantly opens and closes, how there is light and
dark in every soul, how we’re clear and confused
just behind our heart, and lost and at home in
every breath—This is the river we’re born into,
turbulent at the surface, swift in the deep. This
is what we try to make sense of and live through,
feeling it’s all too much but needing more. So lift
your head and steady your heart, knowing, as you’re
swept along, that Experience is the face of God.
A Question to Walk With: Whatever you’re feeling in this moment, open your heart to it completely. Now open your heart completely the fact that the opposite of what you’re feeling is happening somewhere else. Try to imagine both and the feelings merge. In the next few days, try to describe this experience to a friend.
Listening Is a Personal Pilgrimage
Mark recently appeared on New Dimensions. Three Intentions is offering this opportunity to listen to “Listening is a Personal Pilgrimage” here free, or you can download it from New Dimensions onto your iPad or other device.
Program Description
Nepo describes deep listening as a very active and engaging process, a pilgrimage of sorts. It is an act of opening our hearts to whatever is before us. This is ultimately a transformative journey that is constantly unfolding and emerging. Deep listening informs our friendships, our giving and receiving, our place in the web of relationship with all life. We find our own footing when we’ve been truly seen and witnessed. Here, Nepo gives many examples of deep listening and how it can lead us to more effective lives. He shares how nature can be our teachers and describes the ocean as having “incredible power and yet, at the same time, it is so sensitive and gentle that if you stick your finger in it, it will register that ripple across the entire mass of it. It’s clear, it reflects everything that looks into it. It accepts everything that enters it without losing any of itself. It is formless and yet it doesn’t lose who or what it is. This is a great teacher for us to know we can be who we are without needing to insist on our identity.” (hosted by Justine Willis Toms)
December 30, 2013
Next to a Gull
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
When in the crucible of a difficult life change, I went to be by the sea, to clear my head, to open my heart, to imagine next steps. What I found was the beauty and resilience of life waiting under my trouble and all trouble. It helped me look beneath my pain and confusion to remember that while what happens when we’re alive can be alarming and disappointing, the fact that we’re alive is all that matters. In this very moment, a gull landed a few feet away, as if to look out into the sea with me.
Next to a Gull
Robert held my head and quoted
Buddha, “Thoughts are clouds keep-
ing you from the sky of your mind.”
And today I wake before Susan
in this B&B to walk this shore
where there isn’t a cloud in the sky.
The ribbon of surf keeps rolling on
itself, keeps interrupting my want
to make sense of this.
A gull lands near me. We both listen
to the sea. The sea prefers neither of
us. It prefers to be the sea.
The sun warms us all.
It is simply the sun.
After sixty years, this is what life
has taught me: life-force is strongest
when simply living.
At the deepest, the soul is the soul
and friends are friends. There is
little else to count on.
A Question to Walk With: Name and discuss one thing in your life that you feel is foundational and that you can rely on.
December 23, 2013
Where the Snow Begins
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
During his last year, my father suffered four strokes and a heart attack. We watched him be yanked back and forth between life and death. This piece was written during this time.
Where the Snow Begins
Snapped in the slack of a crisis that sleeps and roars but doesn’t seem to end, my ninety-three year-old father now has a urinary infection from the catheter, which makes him less coherent. I’m on the phone with him daily, swimming in his lost pauses, crying afterward; letting the beauty and sadness of his life, as it unravels, wash over me, affect me, throw me beyond my self and undertow me back, smaller in this world, larger in the depth of it all. And in the seconds when I wake, floating in the sea of life before climbing onto the raft of this day, dressing in the dark as it lightens, in line waiting for my coffee, falling into the tiny silences between rings while waiting for someone in his room to answer, in these small sideways clearings, I can’t stop thinking—he has nowhere to go, no way to leave the one long procedure his life has turned into. If I could, I’d swoop like a falcon intent on finding home and pull him out of his skin, out of this prelude to his death. I’d carry him in my mouth into the sky and leave him on the softest cloud I could find, so he could curl up around the beginning and finally sleep where the snow begins.
A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of watching someone you love suffer and the ways you found to keep them company.
December 16, 2013
Things Dark and Light
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
It seems the purpose of story is to lead us back to what matters and to show us how everything is a part of something larger. And it seems the story of our individual lives keeps showing us how we all go together and come together, once we put down our stubbornness. It seems our individual story helps us work out our relationship with all things dark and light. It helps to remember that without darkness or shadow, it would be impossible to perceive depth. Without dark and light working together, we’d lose all depth perception and be lost in the flatness of the surface world. Living our story and working with dark and light helps us perceive depth. This poem tries to understand these things more deeply.
Things Dark and Light
At first dreary meant blood-stained.
And glad meant honest. An angel
was an attendant spirit. And home,
well, no one knows what home means,
which is why there are so many stories
of journey.
Truth is we create the words we need.
Like shovels or ropes, we gut out small
tools to help us to our feet and on.
Always looking for the wheel or its
equivalent to free us from the burden
of living a step at a time, when that is
the point: a step at a time.
I dreamt last night that the raven met
the dove and they realized they are one.
So now, I wonder if all things dark and
light are simply looking for each other.
A Question to Walk With: Describe one aspect of your character that is dark and what it asks of you. And describe one aspect of your character that is light and what it asks of you?
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