Mark Nepo's Blog, page 19

Rethinking Time

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.

Everyone in life must face and move through time. Feeling how precious life is, we tend to squeeze as much as we can out of the moment. Often, this only makes us more anxious and moves us further from life. This poem came from my own efforts to slow down and relate to time differently.

You can’t hoard moments like coins.

You can only bathe in them.

You can’t trim hours like wood or glass.

You can only enter them.

You can’t add days like a drop of God

to every drink.

You can only immerse yourself

in the river we can’t resist.

Begrudge time and it will turn its back

on you like a dead secret.

But bathe, kiss, enter, bow. Immerse

yourself in the time you have and time

will carry you softly and clearly

through the eye of its needle

into all that is.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a moment of timelessness you came upon and what that felt like. What conditions were present that led you to such timelessness?

Flight Status

Find these entries weekly on Huffington Post’s GPS for the Soul.

I travel fairly often and find myself reflecting on different aspects of life against the backdrop of airports, taxis, and baggage carousels. This poem came while traveling to Chicago. I wrote it for a friend who was in the middle of a life crisis. It speaks to the paradox of our travel over a lifetime: working to establish ourselves and our identity when, over time, life wears us down to only what matters.

 

We pack, we go, we shimmy

through a few tight places,

tell a few stories, and land.

We unpack. Each time

we pack a little less.

 

We cover ourselves

in brief histories, another

kind of baggage, and shimmy

through circumstances that

make us drop things

along the way.

 

We lose our story.

We find another.

We change our name.

We pack even less.

 

And so, on this day,

when you have lost your way,

I want to congratulate you

and give you something

of mine, before I lose it

or it’s broken in the dark.

 

A small something you can

hold onto as you are worn

to who you were born to be.

 

Our names change.

Our histories fall away.

Our stories tell themselves.

 

What’s left is what matters.

It’s where this has been going.

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe some baggage you are carrying that once seemed important, which is now weighing you down. Tell its history to a friend and decide whether it’s worth keeping with you.

Quieting the Thieves

We all struggle with making lists and being plagued by them, with getting somewhere and being here, with doing and being. It’s like rowing in a lake, all that effort to simply glide in the quiet. And after a while, we need to row some more. I arrived in this moment in the middle of a busy day.

Today I am sad or so I thought. But more I am tired of keeping up with all that doesn’t matter. I’m sipping coffee, listening to rain. I like watching the leaves hang in long weather. I like to close my eyes and feel the rain quiet the earth. I welcome that quieting. I like to have my habits of going here and there interrupted. I was caught in the rain when coming here. The cool blotches sink in all over. The many lists I carry in my shirt are wet. I take them out to dry and all the tasks have blurred. At last. Unreadable. Forgettable. We carry these lists near our heart and finger them like worry beads. It doesn’t matter what is on them. They are the thieves and it is the insidious virtue to have everything in order before we live that is the greatest thief. I feel the rain drip down my neck. I think I’m becoming unfinished.

A Question to Walk With: What is your relationship with lists? How are they helpful? How do they limit your freedom?

Years from It All

I think we loved so blindly,

every one of us meaning

to explore the other’s face

but knocking over

everything

in the way.

Now each of us,

building dark images of

what we think happened.

I heard a song today

that played when we

were young.

It made me ache

to have you all near

just for a long minute

in which none of us

could speak.

Keeping the Song Alive

The base of all Hebrew prayer is to listen for the Oneness. As Rabbi Alan Lew says, “There’s a deeper speech that doesn’t come from where normal speech comes from.” So how do we hear this deeper speech of Oneness? Well, we can gather many views of something true, not relying on any one; and, if stilled enough, we can join our small breath with the one breath of the Universe; and, if patient enough, we can track what lives just below the surface till it connects us to the living Source.

If blessed, enduring and living our lives in the open can wear us down to the bare speech of Oneness. In everyday terms, ordinary spirits—like the great salmon that return from the sea—can break surface with traces of Oneness. Like the minion of Jewish men in San Francisco who prayed together every day for much of their lives. After thirty years, several had strokes that impaired their speech. Yet when together—and only when together—they could still sing the prayers imprinted in their hearts. Just what enabled these men, after losing their speech, to keep singing in each other’s presence? And what does this say about the source of song and the sense of community that keeps the song alive? What kind of medicine is this whose serum is love and whose needle is time?

 

—excerpt from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen,

forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, October 2012

Along the Flyway

Entering a field, our dog lowers

her head and sniffs around for the

longest time. Suddenly, she looks

up and starts running wildly in all

directions, just for the joy of running,

not after anything, just stretch, leap,

turn, and pant. I think she’s trying

to tell me something. For days I feel

I’ve done nothing but sniff around.

Except I feel guilty doing all this

sniffing. I used to wonder why

someone would hold a bird rather

than try to fly. But I finally under-

stand that holding is the way we

fly through all this loving and

suffering which is our sky.

Where We Meet

Two weeks before his daughter died

they went to the movies. She wanted

to see a love story; he, a thriller. They

slouched in different theaters alone. It’s

been the one regret holding all his grief.

And just when he couldn’t imagine crying

anymore, when the night was feeling like a

clear wall he couldn’t move through, she

held his face in a dream and there they

were: sitting in the dark watching the

same movie, only this time it was their

story and he put his arm around her

and woke holding his pillow.

 

Twenty years after her aunt died—the

one who saw her before she saw herself,

the one she could confide in and only be

loved more—after all those years, it was a

hug from a friend. He held her gently then

squeezed her for that extra second, in that

familiar way. It was that hug that called her

aunt from so far away. That night, Aunt Kate

sat in the corner of her dream. Her mother

was there too. She brought the old sisters to-

gether and all three hugged gently, tightly,

holding for that extra second. A measure

of completeness relaxed their hearts.

When they paused to breathe, Aunt

Kate was gone.

 

And just one month after Nur died,

she appeared to me, her broken body

held together by light. She took my

hands and wanted me to come with

her. My heart began to rip. It wasn’t

my time. As she let me go, her hands

turned to pools in which I washed

my face and I was returned.

 

And there’s your Uncle Billy who died

in ’86. He kisses your forehead while

you sleep and in the seconds of that

kiss, the tangle of life loosens and the

web of life strengthens and you wake

assuming your full stature.

 

What is going on here? Is it now or

then? Are we remembering? Are they

visiting? Are they dead or still alive? We

make too much of putting things in this

basket or that. It’s enough to know

that love arcs its lightning through

any rim we put on the world.

Afterward

You were so sick that

afterward on that first

nice day, I meant to say,

“I can’t bear to lose you,”

but what spilled out was,

“Why do you have to

go to that tonight?”

 

You dug in. I tried to

explain. Like two cats fall-

ing off the kitchen table, we

scrapped and hissed and sput-

tered the whole way home.

 

You stared out the window

and I wanted to say that

sometimes to be here at all

feels so barely tethered to

storms beyond our control,

that what matters most

seems piled on a raft

between us; untied and

drifting slowly out of reach.

 

Later, I dozed on the couch

and you kissed the scar on my

head, and we fell through our

sorries like butterflies chasing

a sudden patch of light.

Pathways

I don’t know why I was born

with this belief in something

deeper and larger than we can

see. But it’s always called. Even as

a boy, I knew that trees and light

and sky all point to some timeless

center out of view. I have spent my

life listening to that center and filter-

ing it through my heart. This listening

and filtering is the music of my soul,

of all souls. After sixty years, I’ve run

out of ways to name this. Even now,

my heart won’t stand still. In a mo-

ment of seeing, it takes the shape of

my eye. In a moment of speaking, the

shape of my tongue. In a moment of

silence, it slips back into the lake of

center. When you kiss me, it takes

the shape of your lip. When our dog

sleeps with us, it takes the shape of

her curl. When the hummingbird

feeds her baby, it takes the shape

of her beak carefully dropping

food into our throats.

Mark’s view from Cortes Island at Hollyhock this morning....

Mark’s view from Cortes Island at Hollyhock this morning. Wishing him and his participants a wonderful and fulfilling weekend on the topic of Staying Awake.