Mark Nepo's Blog, page 18

Listen to audio of Seven Thousand Ways to Listen

The Cry

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

Every generation lives between the world it inherits and its own possibility. Every one of us is asked to make sense of the terrible atrocities humans have perpetrated alongside the most amazing acts of compassion and creativity. How do we live in a world with such extreme histories? This story comes from meeting someone frightened by this question.

 

She was coming of age. The eyes beneath her eyes were beginning to see. It frightened her to meet what we have done to each other and the Earth. Genocide after genocide, which can only be felt in the broken stare of someone now gone who lost everything, in the gathering of bones still fuming with the stories of those they walked around in. Taking in the brutality of life was blocking her access to beauty and wonder. It was at this time that we met. She was being scoured of her innocence. But innocence is only the glare of wonder. It is not wonder itself. Wonder is how beauty still shines in the rain-soaked field after the bodies are buried. She was frightened, not sure if she wanted to be here any longer. I listened till there was no more to say. Just then an ant was carrying a crumb twice its size across the sidewalk. I didn’t mention it.

She is right to fear the brutality, but the wonder always outlasts the violence, even if we are brought to an end. There is nothing to do but live and meet it all. After a long while, I said softly, “I no longer ask why, only how.” She searched my face to see on what I based my sense of the world. I said, “We push each other to one side or the other, as if dark or light by itself will show us the way.”

Just then the ant dropped its crumb and scampered off, but another picked it up and carried on. I looked at my aging hands and confessed, “Somehow, I’m strongest when I’m soft, safest when I let in the paradox of it all, when I embrace what I don’t understand.” I think she understood. I admitted, “I’ve stopped trying to turn truth into something else.” She finally spoke, “Will I ever get rid of this fear?” I dropped my shoulders, “I don’t know. But if fear gathers like a cloud, the majesty of life is always somewhere shining.”

A Question to Walk With: How do you make sense of brutality and wonder that exist side by side and in the world?

The Moment of Poetry

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

When I was younger, I tried very hard to get rid of difficult feelings, including an inexplicable sadness that would come over me from time to time. But I’ve learned that the full range of human experience is more important than happiness, because it opens a depth that can make joy possible. I’ve learned over time that the sadness and ache I encounter is actually the sweet ache of being alive. It lets me know that I’m here and connected to everything larger than me. It’s one of my oldest friends and teachers. This poem is a tribute to that sweet ache.

 

When the sweet ache of being alive,

lodged between who you are

and who you will be,

is awakened,

befriend this moment.

It will guide you.

Its sweetness is what holds you.

Its ache is what moves you on.

 

A Question to Walk With: Begin to describe the history of your own sweet ache of being alive.

The Sway of It All

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

We tend to be preoccupied with difficulty and happiness, driven by experience from one to the other. But what life has keeps teaching me is that difficulty and peace are always happening at the same time, and that a primary challenge of being human is let both in. Our job it seems is to hold both at once. The reward is the experience of Oneness. This poem speaks to this.

 

And so I lift my face from the mud,

the mud of my past, the mud of history,

the thick and ragged bark of how we

think everyone but our own darkness

is the enemy, I lift my face like a worn

planet spinning on itself to get back

into the light, to say to no one, to

everyone—it is an honor to be alive.

 

A Question to Walk With: Is there mud in your history? Is there a gem that you’ve found in the mud? How would you tell this story to a child?

Being Carried

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

 

This week’s poem is also about rest, the deeper sense of what we rest in. The way a cup rests in a saucer, how does each soul find the point of rest it fits in? How do we discover the sense of safety and faith in life that allows each of us to find our way with more peace than fear?

 

The things that happen to us

are trying to have a conversation,

to make us stop or turn around.

 

The things that matter are waiting

for us to drop down after the first

conversation has relaxed our will.

 

Then they will shine their light

without warning like a doctor

into the back of our eyes and ask,

“How long have you avoided rest?”

 

If we answer truthfully, they will

introduce us to beauty who after

a time will make us cry and throw

our judgments into the sea.

 

A Question to Walk With: How much space do judgments take up in your mind and heart? How much space do beauty and truth take up in your mind and heart? Try putting aside a few of your judgments and see if there’s more space for beauty and truth to touch you?

Where is that Trust?

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

I love photography because it opens us to windows of other times, other lives. A good photograph gives us a glimpse of life we’d never know, while showing us the one life we all share. On a recent trip to New York City, I chanced upon this old photo that opened me to this poem about rest.

 

It was a black and white photo, from

1927, in Paris, a young woman sleeping

in a small apartment, her head half off

the pillow. Is this the only time we put

it all down? Does the soul wait for us to

close our eyes, so it can drink with every-

one who ever lived, from the waters that

clear just below existence? I love to watch

you sleep. Because in that soft opening

between worlds, the flower of your being

lets me know that everything is alright.

I’m in Bryant Park now and the light

patching through the trees flickers on

an old woman’s face, as she nods in a

broken chair. It could be you or the

young woman in Paris before we were

born. I never rest this well, but I praise

that it is possible.

 

A Question to Walk With: What is the state of your ability to rest?

 

These Human Days

Being human is a gritty mystery. We are the most gentle, resilient creatures on Earth. Through our humanness, things that don’t seem to go together show their underlying connection. This poem is a weave of ordinary events that opened a telling moment for me.

 

As the fog lifted, we sat on the couch,

our dog sleeping between us, her fur

with that familiar smell. Our hands

met in the tuft of her neck. Later,

after a very bad movie, we fell into

each other for the thousandth time.

Quiet and naked, I thought, how

seldom we are naked. No masks. No

covering. Your lips were soft. They’re

always soft. And in that softness, it’s

unclear where I end and you begin.

 

Today I’m in the dentist chair, deep

long drilling around old nerves. Five

shots to numb along the bone. As he

drills, I loft into his eyes. He’s such a

good man. The dog, your lips, his kind

eyes drilling, the fog lifting. I start to

tear. Such a privilege to feel.

 

Now I’m in the car and the rain is

coaxing the grass on the side of the

road. My jaw aches and what wants

to be said waits under that ache. The

longer this goes, the stronger and more

vulnerable I am. Like two blades

of grass splitting the sidewalk.

 

A Question to Walk With: What is your history with being vulnerable? What has being vulnerable taught you?

A Turn in the Path

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

 

Like everything living, we open and close, as we lean into life and resist it. For human beings, though, each movement—opening and closing, leaning into and resisting—has an emotional mood that colors our days. And so, our feelings are at once a great challenge and our greatest source of information about the life we are living. This recent reflection explores the swirl of choices that are always near as we make our way.

One day, against all odds, when no one is looking, when the clock won’t set or the car won’t start, we realize how rare it is to be alive. In that moment, if we don’t close too quickly, we meet the insurmountable mystery like salmon in the throat of all that water. It’s so overwhelming that sometimes we back down and make a race of things, thinking it’s easier to run alongside each other than to face what’s coming. But when blessed to fall beneath our plans, we might return to the is-ness we were born with.

Along the way, we hinge shut like salty clams when it’s the ocean coming in on us that lets us grow. But eventually, we lose our grip and, like a clam that can no longer close its shell, we’re bathed, against our will, in the brine of the deep.

So one day, while running from life—from a fear we can’t control, or a pain we can’t avoid, or a limitation we don’t want to accept—we’re stopped by the early light on the dew-heavy chrysanthemums. Though we’re late and feel a need to keep going, we stop and stare at one full drop, like a hidden jewel now freely everywhere. Though something tells us to hurry up and rejoin the race, it seems the flower-drop full of light is some kind of mirror, and there’s nowhere to go.

Let me tell you a story. I was in New York. It was spring. I was walking the edge of Central Park. I like to walk the edge of things. At a turn in the path, a mime was blowing bubbles. They were glistening and floating away. I was following one, when I saw a little girl, maybe five or six, across the path. She was following the same bubble. And just as the bubble burst, our eyes met. Surprise and wonder filled her face. She pointed at me, as if a friend were hiding in the bubble. She giggled. I pointed back and began to laugh. Her mother smiled and took her hand. I waved and watched her enter her life. I wonder now when the burst of a bubble became a sad thing, when I stopped finding friends along the way.

In Japan, kintsugi is the art of filling cracks with gold; because it’s believed that the cracks and wear of life make things more beautiful, not less. As wise as this is, I believe it’s not filling the cracks, but entering the cracks that reveals the gold. We carry what matters inside and experience waters that seed until the soul sprouts through our cracks into the world.

And one day, against all odds, when no one is looking, we drop what we’re carrying—alarmed as it falls, afraid we will lose it, pained by how much it cost. Sometimes, whatever it is—a dream we’re close to living, an injustice almost resolved, a cracked sense of worth filled with the gold of our choosing—sometimes, whatever it is breaks like an egg on the floor. And we watch the yolk of something we care for run its bright colors into everything. I don’t know how to say it or explain it, but this is the journey: not the race we make of things, or the filling of cracks with gold, but how the bright colors run into everything.

 A Question to Walk With: Are you involved in a race of some kind: toward the future, toward success, toward love, toward some achievement? How is this race shaping who you are?

The Angel of Grief

Like it or not, we are all asked to be in relationship with loss and grief. Over the years, I have discovered that grief doesn’t go away but teaches us how to discover our strength and resilience by staying with deep and inexplicable feelings over long periods of time. In truth, grief, once we move through its painful opening, reveals our more lasting connections to the Universe. This is a recent poem that tries to speak about what grief and loss have taught me.

 

Does the tree at that knot twenty

feet up feel its missing rib, the way

I feel you gone these long years? Loss

plays us like a violin, never free of its rub.

It simply lessens its intensity till only the

one closest to what was lost can hear it.

If you haven’t lost something or someone,

this will seem sad, even frightening. But

after a century of heart-time, I went to

the immortals who envy us our ability

to feel and forget. They looked at me

with their longing to be human. And

the saddest among them took my hand

and said, “I would give eternity to live with

what you’re given, and to feel what is

opened by what is taken away.”

A Question to Walk With: If loss and grief are doorways to what is eternal, describe a sense of loss or grief that is still with you and begin to tell the story of what these feelings have opened in you and how they have deepened your understanding of life.

THE ART OF PUTTING THINGS TOGETHER

In a world where things are constantly falling apart or breaking apart, health often resides in the art of putting things together. Both are happening at the same time constantly, though we understandably focus on what falls apart first, as it makes more noise and is often accompanied by pain. 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.

Mark Nepo – The Art of Putting Things Together from Sounds True on Vimeo.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of someone you admire who modeled or taught you about the art of putting things together.