Mark Nepo's Blog, page 12

For Joel at 94

Read Mark’s 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 wrote this poem a few years ago to honor a friend and mentor of mine, Dr. Joel Elkes, who will be 100 years old this November. He is one of the most wholehearted people I know.

FOR JOEL AT 94

They say that miners in South America

strap small lamps around their chest, that

this works better than the light coming

from the center of your head.

They say the head can be fooled,

but the heart can’t turn without

the body. This makes me think of you

digging your way through your long life,

lighting everything with your heart.

It’s a good way to live. And when we

sit at the end of the day, our hearts

illumine the day and we see each other

in its radiance. I can tell, it reminds you

of many circles you’ve been a part of.

It’s a good way to measure time.

To make our way on Earth

by the light coming from our heart—

This is what you’ve taught us.

Is it any wonder that what you

touch, including us, glows.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of an elder you admire and why. If they are still alive, tell them of the impact they have had one you. Either way, tell their story to someone else to keep the character of their spirit alive.

Between the City and the Sea

Read Mark’s 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.

We are constantly reminded how everything is connected. From time to time, the oddest thing will open me to this mystical fact. When former President Ford died, I was drawn into sensing what else was happening around the world at the very same moment.

BETWEEN THE CITY AND THE SEA

An old president died just hours after a young

man from Idaho was shot in his sleep in Iraq, and

now in the Sundarban east of the Himalayas, a tiger

licks the eyes of its newborn yet to see, and further east

in Vietnam, a young woman who has worked very hard

to learn how to read is reciting a sutra from Buddha,

in awe how presence moves through words across

the centuries. At the same time, an unwed mother

in Chicago thinks about stealing a blanket as

winter stiffens, and moments after this, a

manta ray in Ecuador wakes because of the

sun’s heat on its back and its sweep over coral

startles the moray back into its nook, and as the

old president’s body cools, a sergeant finds the

boy from Idaho. And just now, in Chile, a

tired couple re-see each other and make love

in the afternoon while clouds come in from the

Pacific. And just now, you stir, the dog stretches,

and far away, two stars collide, a new world forms,

and somewhere between the city and the sea, a child

is born with an untempered capacity to love. In time,

he or she will want to love us all. Remember their

face, though you have never seen it. Speak their

name, though you have never heard it. Mistake

everyone for them. Love everything in the way.

A Question to Walk With: Sit quietly, when you can, and start with where you, and slowly allow your heart to sense what else might be unfolding at the same moment everywhere else on Earth. How does allowing the presence of life in, in this way, affect you?

Discernment

Read Mark’s 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 mind is such a gift that, unless met and directed by the heart, it will take over the show and run our lives. Then, no matter how well intended, our serious focus can narrow the things we’re looking at to a smallness that betrays their true nature. It’s always our job to meet life where it is, not to break life down so it can enter our small room. This poem explores the difference.

 

Discernment

The trouble with the mind

is that it sees like a bird

but walks like a man.

 

And things at the surface

move fast, needing to be

gathered. While things

at center move slow,

needing to be

perceived.

 

What I mean is

if you want to see the

many birds, you can

gather them in a cage

and wonder why

they won’t fly.

 

Or you can go to

the wetlands, birding

in silence before

the sun comes up.

 

It’s the same

with the things

we love or think.

 

We can frame them

in pretty cages or follow

them into the wild meadow

till they stun us with the

spread of their magnificent

wings.

 

A Question to Walk With: Are you looking at something in life in too narrow a way? How can you expand the way you are relating to this?

 

Way of the Dolphin

Read Mark’s 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.

It was years ago that I learned that our job as spirits in bodies is to let our spirit rise from within to meet and inhabit the world, every chance we get. It was walking along the Battery in Charleston that this all came back to me, so very clearly, while sighting a dolphin.

WAY OF THE DOLPHIN

Standing in the harbor, these slick

wonders slip their fins in and out

of early sun. I close my eyes and re-

member being wheeled into surgery

all those years ago; believing my job

was to meet my surgeon at the sur-

face, so the rib he had to remove

would slip out, like a dolphin of

bone, as soon as he would cut me.

I’ve learned that everything that

matters goes the way of the dolphin:

drifting most of the time out of

view, breaking surface when

we least expect it.

And our job—in finding God, in

being God; in finding truth, in

being truth; in finding love, in

being love—is to meet the world

at the surface where Spirit slips

out through every cut.

A Question to Walk With: Describe one way in which you are being asked to let your spirit meet the world.

One More Time

Read Mark’s 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.

We are such willful creatures. Carried by our stubbornness, we can begin to think that we are the originators of all our experience. Often, the purpose of experience is to humble us into remembering that we are, at best, interdependent creatures, learning to inhabit the myriad forces of life that carry us. From this place of awe, a different kind of resilience shows itself, as an undying passion for life. This poem praises such humble passion.

ONE MORE TIME

When willful, we think

that truth moves from

our head to our heart

to our hands.

But bent by life,

it becomes clear that

love moves the other way:

from our hands to our

heart to our head.

Ask the burn survivor

with no hands who dreams

of chopping peppers and

onions on a spring day.

Or the eighty-year-old jazz

man who loses his hands

in a fog. He can feel them

but no longer entice them

to their magic.

Or the thousand-year-old

Buddha with no arms

whose empty eyes will

not stop bowing to the

unseeable center.

Truth flows from us,

or so we think, only

to be thrown back

as a surf of love.

Ask the aging painter

with a brush taped to his

crippled hand—wanting,

needing to praise it all

one more time.

A Question to Walk With: Describe someone in your life that you admire who has this kind of deep passion that comes from their connection to life. If they are alive, go to them, and ask them about both their connection to life and their passion.

Staying Close

Read Mark’s 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.

Once we are blessed to have a sense of what it means to be fully awake and alive, we are challenged to return there, when we stray. And we will all stray, because we’re human and this is what humans do. Often, the smallest moment will catch our heart’s eye, like a small angel calling us to return to what matters. How? By simply lingering long enough to have the moment enter us. This poem speaks to moments that have opened me.

 

STAYING CLOSE

Putting

a child on a horse.

 

Hanging

silk to dry.

 

Watching

snow fill the crack

in a bridge.

 

Waiting

in the shadow of a bird.

 

Touching

the shoulder of the moon.

 

Wetting

the lips of one

who has given up.

 

Letting

the stone

in your heart crumble.

 

Placing

a flower over a blade.

 

Sitting

in a boat till

there is no ripple.

 

A Question to Walk With: Discuss this notion of small moments returning us to what matters with a friend. Have each of you tell the story of such a moment and how it has impacted you.

 

What Others Have Touched

Read Mark’s 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.

We live in an age that is obsessed with the new; so much that we have been called the disposable society. While it’s often easier to throw something out rather than repair it, we lose our depth of relationship to the things we touch. We lose the human history of objects and tools and the presence they accumulate for moving through many lives. This poem helped me recover a deeper sense of how presence passes itself through all that we touch.

WHAT OTHERS HAVE TOUCHED

When his grandson was born, he

began collecting antique toys—a torn

doll, a wooden rabbit, a cloth bear.

He loves to see his little one touch

what others have touched.

When told it had to go, she refused

to cut the old apple tree, though its roots

are buckling the driveway. She doesn’t need

the apples. It’s the deer. Every fall she shakes

the upper branches from a ladder. She loves

the small thuds to the ground. She loves

early coffee as they soft-hoof and nibble.

When Jess and Laura were small, I

bought earrings in Florence. I’m saving

them till they turn sixteen. I love think-

ing of the earrings waiting in my closet

for them to grow.

When in Amsterdam, he thought

the museums would grab him, but it

was a sloppy Newfoundland wading

in a reflecting pool; splashing patches

of water filled with sun, then trying

to bite the splashes. He loves to think

of the soul’s journey this way.

When Grandma made potato pancakes

on her small stove, it smelled like burnt

French toast. I’d sit on a stool in the corner

and she’d mat one on some napkins, blow

on it, and give it to me. She’s been gone

twenty years. But I love how she

cooks them for me in my dreams.

A Question to Walk With: Describe one object that has come into your possession that has a history. Describe this history and how it touches you. Describe one object of yours you’d like to pass into the hands of others and why.

Where Is God?

Read Mark’s 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.

Since the beginning of time, we as human beings have always called out for a higher power or larger force to rescue us when we’re in pain or trouble. During my cancer journey, I was forced into this conversation more than once. After many years, this poem has surfaced as the few words I’ve been able to retrieve that speak to this.

WHERE IS GOD?

It’s as if what is unbreakable—

the very pulse of life—waits for

everything else to be torn away,

and then in the bareness that

only silence and suffering and

great love can expose, it dares

to speak through us and to us.

It seems to say, if you want to last,

hold on to nothing. If you want

to know love, let in everything.

If you want to feel the presence

of everything, stop counting the

things that break along the way.

A Question to Walk With: Whatever your spiritual background or interest, how would you begin to answer this timeless question: Where is God?

Poetry reading and conversation about Reduced to Joy

Three Faces

Read Mark’s 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.

 

Each of us is made up of eternal forces—part masculine, part feminine, part animal. Often, our creativity and our proximity to our aliveness depends on how well we know these forces as they visit us and live in us. This poem tries to explore my own relationships with these inner forces of life.

 

Three Faces

I have carried three faces

across my life, though from within,

it’s clear, they have carried me:

 

a woman who can stare through

the leaves of any tree, who names the

tree by the birds who sing in it

 

a man who works hard at

clearing paths in order to stop

where the path ends, and listen

 

and a small child with the heart

of a horse, eager to sniff out any

thing alive and run to it.

 

Together, they have led who I

thought I was through openings

wide enough for only

what is essential.

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe the way your masculine energy, feminine energy, and animal energy show up in you. What is each trying to teach you?