Mark Nepo's Blog, page 13

Feeling the Oar

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

My new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, is just being 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 spend a great deal of time in planes, on my way to and from. In this poem, I tripped into a moment of seeing myself as the grown son of a man I am more like than I realized.

 

Feeling the Oar

I was in the air, frustrated

that fog had delayed us. Now,

I would miss my flight to Dallas

where I was on my way to speak

about obstacles as teachers.

I was feeling pissed off

when I noticed my left hand

on the seat—it was my father’s

hand—the large knuckles, the

pronounced veins, the bark-like

wrinkles at the base of my thumb.

It was his hand as I had seen it

countless times: guiding a piece of

wood through a band saw or tapping

on an open book as he would

try to understand.

I opened and closed it like

someone waking from a long sleep.

It is the hand I write with. And it

is weathered, an immigrant hand,

rough from crossing many seas.

Had it not been for the fog and the

delay, I wouldn’t have noticed.

I touched it with my other hand;

trying to know my father,

trying to feel the oar,

trying to remember the sea.

A Question to Walk With: Is one of your parents or relatives someone you feel most like? If so, who is that person and what traits of theirs do you find coming alive in you?

About Joy

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

My new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, is just being 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.

Here is a reflection that explores what I’ve learned over the years about the nature of joy and what kind of teacher it is.

 

ABOUT JOY

Often, what keeps us from joy is the menacing assumption that life is happening other than where we are. So we are always leaving, running from or running to. All the while, joy rises like summer wind, waiting for us to grow in the open, large as willows it can sing through. Yet failing to grow in the open, we can be worn to it. Though working with what we’re given till it wears us through seems to be the grace we resist. Like everyone, I’ve spent so much of my life fearing pain that I’ve seldom felt things all the way through. And falling through more than working through, I’ve learned that if we can stay true to our experience and to each other, and face the spirit that experience and love carry, we will eventually be reduced to joy. Like cliffs worn to their beauty by the pounding of the sea, if we can hold each other up, all that will be left will be wonder and joy.

A Question to Walk With: Describe your earliest moment of joy and how it came upon you. And what is your relationship to joy now?

Taking Turns

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

Though we do our best to stay strong and keep going, it’s often the moments we’re forced to stop that introduce us to the aspects of life that matter. This reflection comes from a moment of caring for our dog, Mira.

Taking Turns

Our dear dog Mira has an eye infection and so each day for a week, three times a day, we take turns, calling her to the kitchen where she sits against the cabinet as we hold a warm compress to her sore eye. Today, it’s my turn. The sun is just rising and I’m on my knees, holding her head, as she looks up at me with her other eye. This is what ailments do: they bring us to our knees where we can hold each other’s head and finally, in the quiet before the day begins, we can look into each other’s one good eye, close enough to hear each other breathing. Now I feel compassion rise in me like a very light bird lifting to flutter in my throat. I think it wants to fly in the world, I want it to, but it hovers there, keeping everything connected, as if fluttering in our throats is its home.

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe the last time some ailment caused you to pause and look in the eye of another. What did you learn from this?

At Stadium and Drake

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

Once in a while, we are stopped in our race through the days, like driftwood near the bank of a river, caught for a second in the mud before being swept along. In those moments, we get a rare view of the non-stop world we are a part of. This poem came from such a moment.

At Stadium and Drake

I was waiting to make a left, to get

out of traffic. She was across from me,

in a red hatchback, waiting to enter. The

cars whizzed by like hornets. Our eyes met

briefly and the whole journey was suddenly

evident: always going somewhere, always

unsure how to get there, waiting for the

chance to join, to lead, to follow, relieved

to make our way, till we miss our exit and

wonder, “Where to now?” The speed of the

traffic made our cars shimmy. We caught

each other’s eye again, missing our chance.

She shrugged. I laughed. The moment of

pause had opened a different dimension

that made us impervious to the pull of the

hive, at least for a while. Then, in a flash,

she was sucked into the whir. Someone

behind me began honking. I couldn’t

move. I wanted out. Once home, I had

a glass of water on the deck, where the

peony, weighed down with all its beauty,

was drinking from the birdbath. I thought,

“Oh, teach me how to be this still.”

 

 

A Question to Walk With: Begin to tell the story of a recent struggle between keeping up with the race you find yourself in and your effort to widen an unexpected moment of stillness.

 

 

Where Paths Meet

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

When we can be wholehearted, we welcome everything. Then, the journey is to see how everything goes together and works together, no longer choosing one way over another. This video clip from an interview with Sounds True took place in Colorado during a week of recording my box set of teaching conversations, Staying Awake: The Ordinary Art.

 

WHERE PATHS MEET

 

A Question to Walk With: Recount a time when you discovered that some way other than your own had value and how you incorporated this new tool into your life.

 

 

 

Lessening Our Pain

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

Every life, in every age, has had to find its way: discovering a foundation, a self from which to meet others and the world, only to open beyond the confines of a single self, so we can receive meaning from everything that is not us. In this journey, we learn how to lessen our pain by accepting life and our part in it. This poem works at understanding such acceptance.

 

LESSENING OUR PAIN

When the flower finally opens,

it accepts everything that comes

from the sky. When the heart

finally opens, it accepts every-

thing about existence. Still, you

can’t let go unless you’ve held

something dear and you can’t

be selfless unless you’ve worked

to find your self. We all try to

kill what hurts us, when the only

thing that will lessen our pain is

to face what hurts us. The river of

who we are runs through every

country. It ignores all borders.

Our call is to follow that river.

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe a situation in which you pushed away what you needed to face. If you’ve faced this situation since, recount the difference between pushing this situation away and facing it. If you haven’t yet faced this situation, how can you step toward it?

Without Pause

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

The lives of great artists often hold deep lessons for the rest of us. This useful understanding comes from the work and life of the great composer Beethoven.

Without Pause

It seems that being deaf, Beethoven could hear the music of the Universe, unheard by the rest of us. The String Quartet No. 14 in C♯ minor, Opus 131, played without pause, seems to gather the slow and steady rise of the sun, mixing it with the unyielding turn of the Earth around the fire in its center. He somehow weaves the discord of all the roots on Earth gripping further in the ground with the harmony of the winds that swirl through the mountains and over the oceans. Within this is the slight pumping of the hearts of all the creatures stunned to be here. Listening to a performance of this quartet, Franz Schubert, a contemporary of Beethoven, remarked, “After this, what is left for us to write?”

 

Completed in 1826, Opus 131 was considered groundbreaking, offering seven emotionally rising movements instead of the traditional four. Beethoven’s compositions for string quartet rush players into dynamic and intimate relationship through their commitment to the music, the way we can only know the wisdom of experience through actual relationship, learning how to play the music of life together.

 

This is the inspiring lesson of Beethoven’s Opus 131: it mirrors the non-stop demand of life to have us make music of what we’re given, not knowing what will happen. Inevitably, having to play seven movements without pause, the instruments will go out of tune. With no time to re-tune their strings, musicians have to adjust and improvise within the structure of the music. In this piece, Beethoven insists on allowing both the harmony and discord of life to be present. He challenges musicians to see the movements through, even out of tune.

 

Likewise, we are challenged every day to say yes to the movements of life, to see it all through, without pause, staying in relationship to the music of life and each other, adjusting as we go, not knowing what will happen. Yet even out of tune, this messy and magnificent practice, so essentially human, will let us hear—briefly—the music of the Universe being the Universe. To hear this larger music while grinding out the smaller music of our lives is what sages of all traditions have called glimpsing eternity.

 

So, though there are times to rest and times to rehearse, the blessings and resources of life rush into the flawed and raw openings that come when we keep playing without pause, reaching for ways to find the unknown harmonies between us. For all his brilliance of composition, Beethoven’s strength of heart confirms that a moment of meeting life completely is more rewarding than an ounce of perfection. It’s inspiring and helpful to realize that saying yes when we feel depleted and out of tune wakes the sleeping genie of our soul who smiles to say, when looking at our trouble, “I’ve been waiting for this. You have everything you need.”

 

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a time when you had to meet life without pause. In what way were you stretched out of tune? How did you adjust? Did adjusting reveal any unknown qualities to you?

A Good Minute: Staying Awake

We sometimes approach spiritual practice with a sense—conscious or otherwise—that it will allow us to transcend our lives. Perhaps we hope that by becoming awakened we will have the power to become detached from our experiences of pain, grief, or heartbreak. Poet and author Mark Nepo views awakening as something that is rooted in the full experience of each moment of our lives, whether that moment is joyous or suffering—an ongoing process that allows us to grow in ways we never imagined. In this video clip, he explores what he means by “staying awake,” and why he calls it “the ordinary art.”

Watch “A Good Minute” here.

See Mark Nepo live in August 2013. Visit WakeUpFestival.com for more information.

Splitting the Wood

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

It’s a paradox that sometimes what we break lets the light in and sometimes where we’re broken lets the light within us out. We’re still responsible for the breaking we do. Part of our job is to endure the pain of breaking and being broken in order to receive whatever light can come through. I’m not sure how this works, but have experienced both. This poem enters the paradox.

Splitting the Wood

When learning something we tend

to speak incessantly. But as what needs

to be learned enters the heart like rain

swelling roots, there is a press that takes

the place of words and once living with

that, it’s hard to say where truth begins,

where pains give way to joy.

 

I want to be content with what breaks,

so I can see through the break

to all that waits within.

 

I want to live like the aikido master

who slips by destruction in a

ribbon of dance.

 

It was years ago. I saw the barn door

shattered by a horse made frantic by

its blinders. But when everyone left,

the sun shone through the splinters,

filling the whole barn with jeweled

light. This is how we learn.

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe a time when some experience of breaking let more light in. Discuss both the responsibility of doing the breaking, if that was the case, or the pain of being broken open. Speak to how the light that came in affected you.

On the Edge of God’s Shimmer

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

We are here to love the light out of each other. It’s not something we can plan or build, only ready ourselves for. My wife Susan is one who sees the light in my darkness. This is what relationship that endures can do. This reflection explores such grace.

On the Edge of God’s Shimmer

Lives unlike mine, you save me.

I would grow so tired were it not for you.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

 

I must confess that cancer ruined me for small talk. I seem drawn only to the core and bark of things. When younger, it came through like fire and scared off others. But with the years, it has thinned into light and others come. I am not alone in this. It’s how we learn to love each other. Our fires don’t lessen, but refine and transform over time into a light we can’t resist. I’ve grown in the light of so many. All of us suns that don’t know we’re shining.

 

Especially you. I am in awe of your heart and don’t know why God has granted me this special grace to live with you. For what you love comes to life, including me. My heart has been turned inside out sweetly, as when the moment of loving and being loved bursts open with all its surprises, coating the world with a strange and beautiful honey. I feel it as I write this.

 

As the fire we carry dies down, the light we’re left with spills over our darknesses. We stand in awe, on the edge of God’s shimmer in the smallest crack, till all that’s left is what’s essential. I feel the delicate web, certain that we knew this in the beginning.

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe someone who loves the light out of you. How does this happen and what does it feel like? If you haven’t, tell them of the power and gift of their love.