Mark Nepo's Blog, page 17

Of Course You Can Come

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

The life of care and kindness often has the life of a seed. It might be planted by someone we never know or someone we learn of long after the kindness has been received. This is a story about such a kindness.

 

OF COURSE YOU CAN COME

When a friend’s brother-in-law passed away, her sister had a call while preparing for the funeral. It was a Jewish woman living 300 miles away who asked if she could attend the funeral. Her sister was taken aback, not by the request, but by the surprise of how far her husband’s life had reached. She said, “Of course you can come, but please, tell me how did you know Sam?”

The Jewish woman spoke with a tremble through a thick German-Yiddish accent, “I read in his obituary that he was one of the first three soldiers to liberate Dachau at the end of the war.” There was a pause, “I was a little girl then, weighing only 28 pounds, naked and limping. I was shot in the foot for taking some water.” There was another pause, “When those three soldiers entered the camp, we were stunned. And seeing us children, naked and starving, they took off their shirts and covered us.” They both fell into a deep silence. The Jewish woman continued, “I always wanted to thank them, but never knew who they were.” And so the little girl from Dachau drove 300 miles to stand at the dead soldier’s grave and embraced her widow.

How are we to understand a story like this? Does it tell us that acts of kindness and the gratitude they engender outlast decades and oceans and continents? Does it tell us that kindness like the song of a red bird will be answered long after the bird has died? Does it tell us that the smallest effort to restore dignity can save a soul from degradation? Yes. Yes. Yes. Like the one bead of light, after weeks of light, that causes a flower to finally open, the bead of kindness that is compelled from us, against all reservation, will open more things than we may ever know.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a kindness you learned of long after it was given.

Staying Awake (a video from Sounds True)

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

No one can be awake all the time. We sleep and wake and go back to sleep. We’re clear, then confused, then wide-eyed again. We feel safe then nervous, then at peace again. It makes being human a practice of return. 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.

Staying Awake (a video from Sounds True)

Mark Nepo – Staying Awake from Sounds True on Vimeo.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a recent time when you felt very awake to everything around you. What was the circumstance that led to this experience? How long did it last? What has stayed with you from it?

Hooked from Above

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

I used to feel inconsistent, because my moods would change. I’d want solitude, then when alone, couldn’t wait to be with others. I’d want to be still and walk slowly through the woods, but once there for a while, couldn’t wait to hear live music. It took years to realize that being dynamic beings, one mood leads to another. We need them all to stay close to our aliveness. This poem comes out of the many moods.

 

When up, I want down, when in,

I want out. When alone, I want to-

gether. When feeling the safety of

order that hard work has opened, I

want to be wild. After so many years,

I understand it’s really about neither.

Like fish with strong tails, it’s about

nosing in and out of currents. It’s the

turn where tail and current are one.

Just as the moment of breaking lands

us in the history of all breaking. As

the unexpected rejection undoes our

whole identity. It seems it shouldn’t

but here we are, losing all that is fa-

miliar with no anesthetic. But this is

how the soul progresses. Like a mythic

fish who hooked from above simply

slips out of its old skin, swimming

on in the new. I know this seems

impossible even as it happens. But

this is when the heart is its own god.

A Question to Walk With: Describe one thing you’ve learned from being alone. Describe one thing you’ve learned from being with others. What is your rhythm of solitude and community?

Returning to Where I’ve Never Been

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

It’s very human to have an understanding, to have a dream, to grasp for a moment a larger sense of things, and also very human to then get lost in the details, entangled in the problems along the way. And so, we forget what we understand, what we dream; we forget the larger sense of things. But when we are returned to the depth of life, as we always are, it feels both familiar and new. This is a poem about such a moment I fell into the last time I was in New York City.

RETURNING TO WHERE I’VE NEVER BEEN

I’m sitting in Bryant Park

and the light through the trees

has stopped my mind. At last

nowhere to go.

I was here twelve years ago.

So many stories I could tell

but as with all migration,

everything has changed

and nothing has changed.

I am older, gentler, less afraid,

stopped more easily by subtle

things, only subtle because

of our noise.

So the story is this:

I went in search of you

and found myself.

I went in search of God

and found the magic of light

waiting in everything.

And so I search for wisdom

only to fall into this life of

feelings too deep for words.

We work so hard

trying to get there

but I think this dream of want

is God’s trick, because

without burning it up

we’d never accept here.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a moment you fell into that was too deep for words? Tell its story to a friend.

Making Eyebrows in the Water

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

The world is full of small stories that carry great wisdom. This one comes from an Inuit custom between fathers and sons.

In central Alaska, there is a river that begins on the northwest slopes of the Alaska Range, and flows over 650 miles to the Bering Sea. The shores of the river are mostly thick with trees and uninhabited. These chilling waters are known as the Kuskokwim River.

John Larson, a Dateline NBC correspondent, was in Alaska covering a news story when he learned of an Inuit custom in which elders take their sons once a year to the mouth of the Kuskokwim River. Here the largest salmon return from the Bering Sea. The elders teach their sons that if you watch closely enough, you’ll see the biggest fish barely break surface, leaving an almost imperceptible wake. When the big fish break surface in this way, the Inuit say they are making eyebrows in the water. The slight break of surface is known as the wake of an unseen teacher.

When father and son alike see this wake, the harvest begins. This is a powerful metaphor for how we fish for what matters in our lives. We are always looking for the teachers that swim just below the surface, like the face of God skimming below the surface of our days.

The Inuit believe that, wherever the large salmon break surface, they leave traces of everything they’ve carried from the mountains to the sea and back. If a son can swim to the spot and drink, he will have the strength of salmon wisdom growing in his belly.

This Inuit ritual is another indigenous instruction for the great care and attention needed to see through to the essential realm of spirit that underlies everything. Though even when sighting what matters briefly, there is no guarantee that the deeper reality will surface in the same place twice. Still, it is the art of sighting the wake of an unseen teacher that begins the harvest. This way of listening below the surface of things opens a kind of education that is not really teachable, though we can bring each other to its threshold through love.

—excerpt from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen,

just published from Simon & Schuster, October 9, 2012

 

A Question to Walk With: Have you experienced an unseen teacher? If so, tell the story of coming upon this teacher and what you learned.

The Need to Be in the World

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

When I was young, the world was too much for me. I wanted to transcend my way out of here. But the years have made me root more firmly in the life of experience. I’ve come to understand that heaven reveals itself through how we love our way through our time on earth. This reflection speaks to this.

 

 

Have you searched the vastness for something you have lost?

—Robert Service

 

As astronauts spend time in space, weightlessness causes muscle atrophy. With little or no resistance required to move, their muscles and bones harden and retract. Astronauts in their thirties can return to Earth with the bone density of people in their seventies. Specific biological and chemical reactions cause this, but in our conversation with the elements, we can perceive something deeper: that yearn as we do to shed the weight of the world, we need to be in the world to realize our dreams. Just as too much gravity is oppressive and crushing, the loss of gravity doesn’t free us but causes us to atrophy and disintegrate at an accelerated rate. Paradoxically, the only way to make it through the weight of the world is to stay in the world.

 

An ancillary paradox is at work in the kinship between light and dark. We yearn so hard and long to be rid of darkness. Yet without dark, there is no shadow. And without shadow, there is no depth perception. Without any depth perception, we have no sense of direction, no sense of what is near or far. In our need to find our way, we are asked not to bypass darkness but to work with it and through it.

 

Still, it is humbling to realize that, though we need the elements of nature, we cannot survive their pure force. Ten years ago, I made my way to the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains, through Estes Park in Colorado. I’ve always been drawn to wide-open spaces and was eager to ascend, away from the human tangle. But as I made it past the tree line into the tundra, the bareness was as cold and forbidding as it was magnificent.  It made me dizzy.

 

I stopped and sat in the crook of a large rock overlooking a vast canyon. I sat there long enough to regain my balance. By this time, the glare of wonder had evaporated. Just then, a mountain jay teased its way near me, swooping higher in the mountain air, where humans can’t go. At that moment I heard the jay and mountain air and the cold stone holding me say in utter silence, Go back among the living where you belong.

 

I was shocked, but it was true. It made me realize that we are welcome to make pilgrimage up this far in the thin majesty of things. We are welcome to be humbled and cleansed, but we are meant to live lower; moving among the roots and branches; following the elusive songs of birds and the tracks of shy animals; all calling us to remember our fundamental nature.

—excerpt from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen,

just published from Simon & Schuster, October 9, 2012

 

A Question to Walk With: What has nature said to you about life? Share one lesson along the way.

To Honor

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

Once we know something, experience something, feel something, there is an understandable tendency to put it away, to bury it, to forget its importance in our lives. But integrity and aliveness have something to do with keeping what is true before us. This is the art of honoring what we learn. This reflection explores what it means to honor ourselves, each other, and God.

How do we begin then to inhabit our destiny of being here? I believe it starts with reverence and listening, with honoring every bit of life we encounter. So at the deepest level, when I say I honor you, this means that, when I become conscious or aware of you, I make a commitment to keep that truth visible from that moment forward. To honor you means that what I’ve learned about you becomes part of our geography. It means that what has become visible and true will not become invisible again.

To honor myself, then, means that, as I grow, I will not ignore or hide the parts of my soul and humanness that become more present in me and the world. To honor myself means that I make a commitment to keep the truth of who I am visible; that I will not let the truth of my being become invisible again. Or if it does, I will stay devoted to retrieving it.

To honor God means that we vow to keep all that we become aware of in view; that we will not pretend to be ignorant of things we know to be true or holy. And if we forget or get distracted or derailed, we will stay devoted to retrieving the ever-present sense of the sacred.

So at the deepest level, the most essential level, listening entails a constant effort to feel that moment where everything touches everything else; a constant effort to live below the sheer fact of things. This fundamental listening invokes a commitment to keep what is true before us, so we might be touched by the life-force in all things. Such listening opens us to the never-ending art of tuning our inner person to the mysteries that surround us. We do this through the work of honoring what we experience, through the work of keeping what is true visible. All this is the work of reverence.

—excerpt from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen,

just published from Simon & Schuster, October 9, 2012

 

A Question to Walk With: How do you honor yourself, that is, keep the truth of who you are visible?

The Two Breaths

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

This reflection comes from a conversation with a gifted photographer I met. His story helped confirm for me that we live a life in every breath. In truth, each heart-breath is an atom of life-force being born one more time. We as human beings have the incredible burden of sensitivity, but the incomparable reward of being awakened over and over again.

 

At a gathering in San Francisco, I met Marco, a careful and patient photographer from Santa Clara. When asked what surprised him during the last year, his voice began to quiver. He’d witnessed two breaths that had changed his life. His daughter’s first breath. Then his mother’s last breath. As his daughter inhaled the world, it seemed to awaken her soul on Earth. As his mother exhaled her years, it seemed to free her soul of the world. These two breaths jarred Marco to live more openly and honestly. He took these two breaths into his own daily breathing and quickly saw their common presence in everyone’s breathing. Is it possible that with each inhalation, we take in the world and awaken our soul? And with each exhalation, do we free ourselves of the world, which inevitably entangles us? Is this how we fill up and empty a hundred times a day, always seeking the gift of the two breaths? Perhaps this is the work of being.

—excerpt from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen,

just published from Simon & Schuster, October 9, 2012

 

A Question to Walk With: What is your experience of the first breath and the last breath? Where do they live in you?

How to Listen to Your Life, via Oprah.com

Listening is a personal pilgrimage that takes time and a willingness to lean into life. With each trouble that stalls us and each wonder that lifts us, we’re asked to put down our conclusions and feel and think anew. Unpredictable as life itself, the practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous and challenging art forms on earth. Each of us is by turns a novice and a master—until the next difficulty or joy undoes us.

In truth, listening is the first step to peace. When we dare to quiet our minds and all the thoughts we inherit, the differences between us move back, and the things we have in common move forward. When we dare to quiet the patterns of our past, everything starts to reveal its kinship and share its aliveness. And though we can always learn from others, listening is not a shortcut, but a way to embody the one life we’re given, a way to personalize the practice of being human.

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Below Our Strangeness

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

I believe we are all connected at the deepest and most elemental level and that experience and circumstance manipulate us away from our better selves. This poem speaks of that place.

My soul tells me, we were

all broken from the same name-

less heart, and every living thing

wakes with a piece of that original

heart aching its way into blossom.

This is why we know each other

below our strangeness, why when

we fall, we lift each other, or when

in pain, we hold each other, why

when sudden with joy, we dance

together. Life is the many pieces

of that great heart loving itself

back together.

A Question to Walk With: What is your fundamental view of human nature and life? Do you feel we are self-contained life forms, only interested in self-preservation? Or do you feel we are interconnected beings that need relationship to survive and thrive? How does your fundamental view inform the life decisions you make?