Mark Nepo's Blog, page 20

The Ocean of Being

If I don’t try to behold the Universe,

to see how the Universe holds me,

I will be a pinball in the game of life:

ever-reacting, trying to ring bells

and not fall into holes.

 

What if I’m a bird in an ever-growing

forest? Or a wave in a bottomless ocean?

Or a root in a soil that I can’t see?

 

If the soul is a window—

How to keep the window clean?

How to open the window?

How to go outside and

still be inside?

Three Covenants

Our love needs to be bigger than our insanity.

—Henk Brandt

There are three covenants that keep us engaged in the work of love. To begin with, when we see something true and beautiful in someone, it is not the work of love to change them or force their growth in our direction. It is the work of love to create conditions by which what is true and beautiful in all we behold can grow and blossom, bringing forth its deepest nature. At the same time, the work of love depends on giving others, especially young people, a sense of safety in the world, nurturing their confidence to lean into life and the unknown—not away from these eternal resources. Still, being human, we constantly slip from integrating our experience to being consumed by our experience. We move, almost daily, from having our fear, pain, and worry live in us to living within our fear, pain, and worry. So the third covenant of love is to keep each other company when we’re drowning in our experience and awash in our feelings, until it all can right-size, until our experience and feelings can once again live in us. These covenants exercise the muscle of compassion we call the heart.

—excerpt from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, October 2012

After Danse Russe*

A hundred years ago, a composer

wrote music about a puppet who

comes alive when his strings are

cut. Then a poet who delivered

babies wrote a poem stirred by

the same thing; confessing to his

grotesque loneliness, to his tangle

of strings in the middle of the day.

And I confess to my own blunt

meanderings like a bear without

food in a glass forest. Forget being

original. If cut free, we are drawn

to the Origins where the arrhythmia

of being awake and alive at the same

time forces the heart to stop ever so

briefly when we realize we are all

alone and yet never alone. All of

us puppets dreaming of no strings.

 

*William Carlos Williams wrote his poem Danse Russe (French for Russian Dance) in 1917. The poem centers on a puppet who comes alive once his strings are cut and Williams’ poem speaks to his own coming alive in a moment of solitude. It is interesting that the ballet Petrushka was debuted in 1911 by The Ballets Russes (French for The Russian Ballets); the legendary, itinerant ballet company directed by Sergei Diaghilev between 1909 and 1929. The original music for Petrushka was composed by Igor Stravinsky. Petrushka is a traditional Russian story of a puppet who comes to life.

My Favorite Glass

You broke my favorite glass.

Now you feel bad. It was my

favorite because I touched it

so many times. I looked at its

pieces you so carefully gathered.

I think it was tired and wanted

to go. I held the largest shard

and it glittered. I held it to my

ear and it said, “I am now free.”

What makes things special is

who brings them and what

they carry. You are special.

Our dog is special. The wind

through the tops of the trees

before dawn which you were

amazed by before you broke

the glass is special. So don’t

feel bad. Just feel.

The Truth of Experience

Imagine a river of fire

and you are a piece of wood

in which someone has hidden

a jewel and no matter how you

try, you are destined to burn your

way to the falls where just when

you feel certain you are to die, the

weight of the wood has burned off

and only the jewel floats over the

edge and lightly the pool cleanses

what has been hidden for so long.

Beyond the fall the deep is just

what’s been waiting under the fire

and the jewel is just what’s been

waiting under the wood

and the air praises what

has never been seen.

Reverie

We often leave the power of reverie to the poets, painters, musicians, and to those “creative types.” Reverie is by definition a state of daydreaming or spending time with pleasurable thoughts. In our busy lives, making time for reverie may seem like a luxury or a waste of productive time; it may also bring up the fear that nothing will happen and we will feel a vast emptiness inside. However in making space for reverie, you often hear and see things that you might miss when you are rushing through life.

Tuning into reverie might be seeing the majesty of nature, celebrating the joy in your heart’s desire, feeling connected to someone you love, expressing yourself with abandon, or offering your hopes to the world. Reverie might also be found in the simplicity of silence. Through a state of reverie, we catalyze an interconnectedness that allows our imaginations to expand and for the dream body to meet consensus reality. In this space, we are less separate and filled with gratitude for the beauty in our essence.

Spend a day allowing yourself to create something new, experience an adventure, be moved by something you see or hear, express, pursue, breathe into what you love, and more than anything give yourself the gift of pleasure. After giving yourself the freedom to let go of all your worries, “shoulds,” and judgments of yourself and others, notice what you’ve made space for. Allow yourself to listen at an even deeper way for the truth and ask yourself, what do I revere?

Make a vow to spend more time listening to the music of reverie and you will create a concerto of your inspiration.

Keeping What Is True Before Us

Faith is not an insurance, but a constant effort, a constant listening to the eternal voice.

—Abraham Heschel

I needed to have blood drawn for my annual physical and even though it’s been twenty years since I’ve been spit out from the mouth of the whale of cancer, it’s never very far. I kept telling myself that was then, this is now. But in the early morning waiting room, I could feel my breath speed up, higher in my chest, and below any conscious remembering, the many waiting room walls began to appear, dark friends who say they miss me.

Once in the little lab room, a young woman wrote my name on a small vial, asked me to make a fist, and as she poked the needle in my vein, I looked away; swallowing my whole journey which wants to rise through these little needle pricks any chance it can get.

It was over, for another year. I didn’t realize it but I had been holding my breath, way inside. As I opened the door back into the world, I exhaled from underneath my heart and suddenly began to cry; not heavily but the way our gutters overflow in spring when the ice thaws all at once.

I was surprised. After twenty years, I thought the alarm of all that suffering and almost dying would be knit more quietly in my skin. How come it keeps bursting forth when I least expect it? I’ve been told it’s a form of post-traumatic stress; a problem that can be addressed. As I drove to work, I made a vow to tend to this in the coming year.

The next day I was up early, before dawn, eager for my morning swim. On the way, at a light, it began to snow very lightly and the voice of the singer in the radio seemed, for an instant, to be falling like the snow on the windshield. It made start to cry again in that overflowing way. It’s been a week since the little pin prick in my arm and I keep crying at simple things—the late cloud parting for the moon, the footprint of a small deer, even the fast food wrapper on the sidewalk. With each small cry, it feels less a release and more like an irrepressible, unfiltered tenderness at being fully here. The more of these moments I experience, the less a problem it seems. For isn’t this what I’ve been after: to be this close to life, to be pricked below the surface of things? Now it seems the damn needle is a gift! Now I wonder: isn’t anything that keeps us this close to life a gift? Now I want to learn the art of puncturing whatever grows in the way in order to feel that moment where everything touches everything else. I’m coming to see that keeping what is true before us reminds us that there was never a better time than now.

—Excerpted from Mark’s new book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, October 2012

The Art of Putting Things Together

Words of wisdom from Mark Nepo.

Mark talks about “Holding Nothing Back,” the subject of his new CD set with Sounds True

Loose Like Silk

The other night at dinner

Eileen tells us that her great

aunt would play piano for silent

movies. Something in this won't

let me go. Perhaps it's the image

of someone playing music in the

dark while we watch others like

us meet life in silence. It makes

me think of a caveman drumming

a stone with a stick while his brother

draws his bow but fails to shoot be-

cause he loses himself in the bison

grazing. Perhaps the playing of

images in the dark and the play-

ing of music while we watch is all

to keep us from shooting. I think

the brother who loses himself and

Eileen's aunt playing Brahms in the

dark are of the same tribe. Last night

we went next door for a glass of wine

with Stacy and Anders and their blind

collie Kai broke my heart open a little

further. He noses gently about every-

thing and watching him find his way

about the yard in the late sun feels

like you and me when we put down

our masks. Only when we rush do

we bump and break things. Kai's

soft, wide eyes search in their dark-

ness for the shelf of late light and

finding something, he rests his head

in the open air, in the warm hand

of eternity, feeling safe in a light

he can't see.