Mark Nepo's Blog, page 11

I Bow To All

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Sooner or later, just by living, we are reduced to what matters, as so many things we thought were important and irreplaceable are broken or snapped like small branches in a storm. And somehow, we stand taller with less coverings. It is then we begin to feel gratitude, even though it’s hard to be grateful for what is difficult. In this regard, all poems are expressions of truth and gratitude.

 

I Bow To All

I keep telling strangers that

to be in the presence of those

with whom you can both share

pain and celebrate just waking

is the answer to loneliness.

 

Such friendship makes the shar-

ing of pizza in a noisy pub and the

standing in silence as the old oak

creaks all one could ask for.

 

In truth, this process of being

worn to only what is raw and

essential never ends.

 

It’s as if a great bird lives inside

the stone of our days and since

no sculptor can free it, it has to

wait for the elements to wear us

down until it’s free to fly.

 

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe a part of you that seems to be in mid-birth, a wing of being half-carved, and name one experience that is chiseling you free.

Leaving

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Leaving and being left is such a painful part of life that it’s hard to make sense of its place in a living Universe. This poem is one attempt.

Leaving

How hard it is to leave or be

left. Sending someone away

because violence is near. Or

selling all you have so a child

might have a ticket to a better

life. Or those torn from each

other because the ship could

hold no more. Or inexplicably

when the love is gone. Or some

strange need has awakened after

years and one of you must try

again to be what you failed to be.

Yet what if, when all alone, we

open a letter, addressed to who

we are under everything, that says:

beyond our pain, each gasp of

parting pollinates the world with

what the heart releases when it

feels the most. This sharp honey

keeps the world from falling.

It doesn’t make it easier. I

still can’t bear to think of

losing you. But nor can the

clouds bear to lose their rain.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a time you were left and how that changed you. Describe a time when you did the leaving and how that changed you. Where do these lessons live in you?

On My Way

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I was enroute to see my father one more time, deplaning in Detroit, about to make my connection to LaGuardia, when my sister-in-law called me to tell me that he was gone. I’m stumbled about on the jet-way, finding the next gate. I wrote this poem on the way home.

On My Way

I’m on my way as the police

are pronouncing him dead.

And everything around him—

the IV, the bedpan, the doc-

umentaries he loved to watch,

the pills not yet taken—all of it

drops to the ground, like planets

without a sun. And my mother

leans on a chair in the kitchen,

her heart breaking wider than

she ever imagined. How to be

without him after sixty-seven

years. After all we’ve been

through, I will hold her when

I get there. I’ll hold her broken

heart to the sun where I can look

into the canyon opened in her, to

see what she has guarded all these

years, to see where we all come from

and where we all will go. Together,

alone. I will hold her firmly,

gently, so she doesn’t fall in.

 

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a moment when you had the privilege of looking into the canyon of another’s heart. What did you see there?

 

Freefall

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I’d like to share this poem for all of those viewers who were moved enough by it to ask me where they could find it. Unfortunately, this poem is in a book that’s now out of print, but here it is for you to share and enjoy.

 

Freefall

If you have one hour of air

and many hours to go,

you must breathe slowly.

If you have one arm’s length

and many things to care for,

you must give freely.

If you have one chance to know God

and many doubts, you must

set your heart on fire.

We are blessed.

Every day is a chance.

We have two arms

Fear wastes air.

 

Approaching Integrity

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We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance and effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way.

Approaching Integrity

We are always approaching integrity, never arriving at it. In working toward a thoroughness of character, we dream of arriving at a state of completeness where who we are and what we do are forever one. We dream of living the rest of our lives this wholly.

But recently I realized—when things weren’t going smoothly, when I was breaking small things around me—-that the beauty of life resides in the relationships we’re drawn into as we try to bridge the gap that is always there between who we are and what we do.

While we need to keep bringing who we are and what we do together, while we aspire morally to be in more and more alignment with life, making everything we encounter more whole, it’s living in between that holds the richness of being alive. If blessed, we’ll never arrive at complete integrity or life will be done with us. Rather, it’s the thoroughness of holding nothing back as we try to be integral that brings us alive.

When I can accept that I’m always enroute to integrity, my humility is awakened and my compassion deepens. This changes how I listen, how I give, how I receive. I was surprised to discover that the engagement of integrity over the achievement of integrity allows us to inhabit life through our vulnerability, rather than trying to perfect life through our imagined purity.

A Question to Walk With: Describe one difference you are experiencing between who you are and what you do. How do you regard the gap between who you are and what you do? Name one small step you can take in approaching your own integrity.

Little By Little

With life offering so much depth and diversity, it’s easy to see the world through the color and feel of any one mood or experience. Under a cloud, the whole world seems gray. Up in the night, the whole world seems dark. But little by little, we have these glimpses that life is more than any one experience will reveal. It’s how we string these glimpses together that opens the window of circumstance. And then we begin to see how the Universe is stitched together. This piece is the stringing together of a few glimpses I’ve been working with.

 

LITTLE BY LITTLE

Some days I plod like an ant so focused on the grain above my head that the next step holds all of life, and I feel in the lineage of slaves pushing the next stone up an unfinished pyramid. Then, without reason, life opens and flows with an unearned ease that I can’t describe. When it leaves, like a breeze of Spirit, I feel renewed and certain that God is in both the moment of lift and the moment of ease. In the moment before pain and after. So I’ve given up wishing for ease and running from pain. Everything on Earth moves by this inching between ease and pain. It’s how we grow. And praising both, surrendering to both, accepting both is the work of love. Little by little, the way an ameba pulses under a microscope, the soul within a human being pulses like a faint star throbbing in place. Our spirit seems to emanate as our psychology constricts. The contrast makes us glow and shimmer. It’s useless to want to bypass this journey. For it’s only by inhabiting it that we chance to know Eternity, not as some far off place reserved for saints, but as the Numinous Delta in which the very marrow of life forms and reforms. To live in this unending dynamism, between being and becoming, is the path of transformation. More than finding Heaven on Earth, we are asked to release Heaven by living here on Earth.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a recent moment of ease and a recent moment of pain. What does each open in you? If your ease and your pain are extensions of your being, hands of your being, what might you build or lift with them?

After Breakfast

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It’s no surprise that we lose sight of the things closest to us—most of all loved ones. Not that we stop loving them in the day to day, but we lose the larger context of their depth and beauty that comes from first meeting. But luckily, the tides of experience throw us about, so that we chance to re-see those we love freshly. This poem records such a moment between me and my wife Susan.

After Breakfast

Like all things that live together,

we bump into each other but some-

times, when going to the store or wait-

ing at the bank, I’m far enough away

to see you completely. Like now. I’m

in New York and you’re in Michigan,

and the way this bird swoops from an

alcove out into the light, the way no

one notices but a small child who

stops and points—it all reminds me

of the day we met. Something flew

out of you and I was stunned that

something in me flew out to meet

it. Even when we sleep, the things

we draw out of each other

circle under the moon.

A Question to Walk With: Try, if you can, to see someone you love freshly. Then open a conversation with your loved one about this rhythm of closeness and larger context, and tell them how you see them.

 

Repeatedly We Are Asked

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As human beings, we are asked to choose, more than once, if we are striving for perfection or fullness. While excellence is an admirable and useful reward for our effort in the world, our immersion of heart into whatever we are doing leads us past excellence into the experience of Oneness. This is a hard insight to open. This poem tries.

 

REPEATEDLY WE ARE ASKED

to embody or consume;

to be in kinship with everything larger

or to order and manage everything smaller.

We are asked, every day, to align or separate;

to coordinate our will with everything living

or to impose our will on everything we meet.

And not choosing is a choice. Acquiescence

is different from patience or surrender.

All this leaves us needing to know:

whether to better the song through practice

or to better ourselves through singing.

A Question to Walk With: Describe something you are practicing in your life and explore in what ways this practice is making you more skillful and in what ways your immersion of effort is making you more yourself.

The Industry of No

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

My new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, has just been published. The book contains seventy-three poems, retrieved and shaped over the last thirteen years, about the nature of working with what we’re given till it wears us through to joy. For the next few months, I’d like to share poems from the new book with you.

 

The greatest threshold to an awakened life is the courage to say yes. Not yes to being abused or mistreated, but yes to the authority of your own being which touches on the sea of all being. This quality of spirit is even more in need in a society that views saying no as some form of sophistication, as some necessary way to be more practical and less innocent. However, it is innocence that returns us to wonder. This poem explores the culture of no we live in.

 

The Industry of No

He was born in the river of yes

but looking for love wandered into

the industry of no, where the no-police

left warnings of don’t and the no-ministers

preached their morals of can’t. And soon,

he couldn’t help himself, he wanted to

try on no. So when his dog pawed his

shirt, he scolded her no, and when

two kids ran a shopping cart into his

parked car, he cuffed them no. And

when someone he liked started to come

close, he let her near but said he wasn’t

ready. Now he discovered there were

other ways to say no. When he was hired

as a no-engineer, he was sadly happy to work

alone. Steadily, he designed signs that said

stop and electronic guns that fired bullets

with a muffled no. The work of no kept

him very busy. If you called, you heard, “I

am the engineer of no and I am not here.

If you like, leave a no-message and I will

gladly send a no-reply.” He was flooded with

calls. The industry of no was so successful, it

had to hide its money from the government,

lest they say no. When he was promoted to

find other avenues of no, he rode no-planes

to no-cafes where inventors of no pleaded

for new no-funding. Soon, there were movies

that glorified no, and books that pondered

why the no-God was so insistent on no. And

seminars arose where no-scholars came vast

distances to say, “Yes, it has always been a

world of no.” And those specially invited

stroked their worried chins, whispering

to each other, “It is so. It is so,” as a no-

anthropologist traced the beginnings

of no. But they all went home and

dreamt of white geese flapping,

their wings parting

the ancient air.

 

A Question to Walk With: Begin to tell your own history with yes, the deeper yes to your own voice, spirit, sense of life.

 

Reduced to Joy

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

My new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, has just been published. The book contains seventy-three poems, retrieved and shaped over the last thirteen years, about the nature of working with what we’re given till it wears us through to joy. For the next few months, I’d like to share poems from the new book with you.

I’m coming to understand joy as the all-encompassing moment of full being that can hold all the other more fleeting feelings, like happiness, fear, confusion, worry, and anger. Though that sea of full being is always there, always carrying us, we come in and out of our awareness of it. This is the title poem from my new book, which speaks to such a moment, which is always unexpected.

 

REDUCED TO JOY

I was sipping coffee on the way to work,

the back road under a canopy of maples

turning orange. In the dip of woods, a small

doe gently leaping. I pulled over, for there

was no where else to go. She paused as if

she knew I was watching. A few orange

leaves fell around her like blessings no

one can seem to find. I sipped some

coffee, completely at peace, knowing

it wouldn’t last. But that’s alright.

We never know when we will blossom

into what we’re supposed to be. It might

be early. It might be late. It might be after

thirty years of failing at a misguided way.

Or the very first time we dare to shed

our mental skin and touch the world.

They say, if real enough, some see God

at the moment of their death. But isn’t

every fall and letting go a death? Isn’t God

waiting right now in the chill between the

small doe’s hoof and those fallen leaves?

A Question to Walk With: How would you define joy and how it presents itself, to a child?