Mark Nepo's Blog, page 32

The Heart of It

And there, in the half-light,

the one song beneath our names

kept the last note in the air longer

and the night opened and without

a word, we loved each other…

Consider the nature of a flute as a metaphor for how experience carves its holes in us, all for the chance to have the breath of life pass through us and make music in the world. Each being on earth is worn to such a flute, and each of us releases our unique song of spirit through the holes carved by our experience through the years.

Since stumbling on this notion, I haven't been able to stop thinking about flutes, even dreaming about them. And just today, I woke with an image of prehistoric beings carving holes in bones, trying to release their music. It sent me searching for the beginning of flutes. To my amazement, I found that three carved bones are among the oldest known musical instruments: a flute dated 37,000 years ago, made from the long curved tusk of a Russian mammoth, found in the Swabian Alb in Germany, a plateau rising toward the higher mountains of the Black Forest; a seven-hole flute, dated 36,000 years ago, made from a swan's bone, found in the Geissenklosterle Cave in Germany; and another dated about 50,000 years ago, made from the bone of a juvenile cave bear, found in Slovenia.

Given the rigors of their existence, what made these prehistoric beings devote so much time and energy to carving holes in animal bones? What made them first dream that breathing through the carved out bones would release music? It hardly seems practical or useful. Yet that they did, that these ancient instruments have been found, affirms that, even then, there was more to life than gathering sticks and cooking food. Even then, we had some intuitive image of how experience carves us and plays us, if we can only endure and listen.

Along the way, many of the wise have spoken to the carving of holes and the releasing of music. It was Thoreau who said, "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." Doesn't he speak to the cost of being carved open? And earlier, St. Augustine said, "We come to God by love, not by navigation." Doesn't he speak to the breath of life rising through our wounds once we can surrender? Don't these two instructions lead us to each other? Isn't the cost of experience the amount of life given up in order to go on? And isn't the way to God beyond all compass-work, in the wearing down of our will into the acceptance of love?

It seems the heart of it is to find the flute we each are hiding, carrying, being carved into. And hearing the music of life pass through our wounds and openings is how facing each other can make every stranger known. I wish I could have known the heart of that speechless pilgrim who carved the seventh hole in the bone of a swan 36,000 years ago. Somehow, I know we are the same. For experience is the best principle. Listening is the best way of knowing. Involvement is the best persuasion. Compassion is the best way of interpreting suffering. And love, the music rising from every human flute, is the best way to decipher the meaning of life.

Calves

Nothing magnifies the great wheel like calving season. Driving north on Interstate 5 the other day, enjoying the fields that overnight (it seemed) awoke wearing emerald green, I noticed a pasture bedazzled with cows, and more than cows, calves—dozens of them.

Oh, what a sight! Taut bundles of energy, not much bigger than big dogs, they leaped and tumbled, darted in diverse directions as if coaxed by invisible play guides, butted heads, and eagerly burrowed under their mothers for milk. A happy tribe, a blessed season.

But even the gray expanse of winter and the laying in are blessed. It's all in how I look at it; it's all in how I see. So, while it lasts, I'll pause for a few moments when I'm blessed by the new cows with their energy and divine eyes, and I'll be thankful for them. I'll wish them well on their journeys across the green fields of spring and early summer, the yellow fields to come.

Ever-changing, I myself am crossing an ever-changing landscape in ever-changing weather. The conditions are always surprising, even when we see them coming, when we see them changing. Perhaps surprising is too easy, though. Maybe it's wonder. Yes, that's the word. May I cultivate my capacity for wonder. May I call it up alchemically, may I nurture it spiritually, and may you do the same.

Entering the Forest

My glasses have cracked.

Ten days to repair.

Without a clear way to see,

what will come?

Will horses rush out

behind the trees?

Will I have the courage

to ride them?

My heart has cracked.

No clear way to feel the world.

How long to repair?

Or is being cracked

the repair?

Tigers chasing doves

are rushing out of me.

Left

This morning I imagined my children skipping away from me down a country lane. They were beautiful in their joy, laughing and giggling, calling out to the nervous, alert quail and the invisible but always watchful red fox.

They skipped and they laughed, and soon they were out of sight around a leafy bend. I was far behind, walking slowly, smiling, then tearing up and feeling irrationally lost and afraid. What if they disappear? Suppose I never make the bend up ahead. How long before they'd realize I was missing?

I looked up at the sun through fluttering cloud-veils, felt the breeze come and go on my face and bare arms, connected in some alchemical way with the hidden, the observant, and the long gone.

Everything I felt and saw was like that. I balanced my fear by filling my ears with the hum of bees in the blackberry thicket. It's pointless to grieve because joy is fleeting. So is grief if we breathe, if we open our ears and eyes and mouths, and the intricate sensors in the tips of our fingers. Always in motion, everything passes, circles in ever widening arcs through the stars.

I will come to the bend or I will not. The children will return, not as they were in the moment I started this, or they will vanish, surprising even themselves as they go. There will be a moment, for each of them, wondering where I am, but swept up, they'll keep moving, moving, just as I am, here awhile, always in and out, then long out of sight.

Fire in the Temple

Sokuhi (1616-1671) was a Buddhist monk and an accomplished poet and calligrapher. Together with Mokuan (1611-1684) and their teacher Yuan (1592-1673), the three were known in Japan as the "Three Brushes of Ōbaku" (Ōbaku no Sanpitsu). In 1650 at the age of 34, Sokuhi was badly burned while fighting a forest fire near the temple and nearly died from asphyxiation. In the midst of the fire, he was suddenly enlightened. He lived for twenty-one more years.

There I was, unsure if the fire was supposed to

fill the temple the way life fills a body. Though

we were frantic, swatting robes at the base of large

flames, I was stopped by the beauty of the yellow

heat embracing everything. It made me think

of my father's funeral pyre. How I miss him.

Where did the fire take him? In the heart's

long look back, I wanted to run into the

flames and go after him. There's something

in us that wants to join the flame. It was then

master Yuan stood before me, flames every-

where, the forest crackling, the empty temple

waiting, master Yuan calm as the lake before

dawn. He spoke softly, "Now you have to

choose Sokuhi." A burning limb fell behind

us. He stepped closer, "Will you bring in there

out here? Or keep watching from the rim?"

His robe caught aflame and I cried out, knock-

ing him to the ground, smothering him with

my robe like a large bird flapping in the dirt.

Though his back was burned, he stared into

the small fire I'd been guarding inside for

years. Something in the truth of his love

brought me into the world. I began to weep.

The flames had moved past us closer to the

temple. I ran through them to get more water

and the smoke of centuries made my eyes burn

and the veil between worlds made my legs heavy.

I couldn't breathe. And as I grew light-headed

in the midst of flames taller than the temple,

I began to sing some song that rose from my

small fire so eager to join the fire around us.

I didn't understand what was happening. But

the harder it was to breathe, the more I under-

stood my breath. The harder it was to keep my

eyes open, the more I understood the moment

of true seeing. The last thing I saw was the

temple waiting for the flames. When I came

to, the earth had been cleared and the temple

seemed less a refuge and more an oasis. I have

tried for years to speak of this, to point to this.

But words fail. And so, the sweep of brush on

paper, like flame on earth. My life began that

day between the fire and the temple.

Waiting

April is almost here, but the weather in southern Oregon continues cold and wet. Snow rings the Rogue Valley, and all of us are waiting, waiting, waiting for spring's sweet exit visas.

Meanwhile, I practice waiting, or rather, I make a practice out of that which has been forced on me. I am tired of winter, weary of the cold, and fed up with the lingering head cold I can't seem to shake.

Still, I'm happy to be breathing, happy to wake up and simply be. I make effort to get warm. The effort is for inner and outer warmth. So I medicated my cold as much as I could and braved the ordeal of air travel to go to St. Louis last week to honor a dearly departed friend and mentor, George Hitchcock. George would have loved the irony of the Midwest weather. I walked outside on my first day into 35 degrees. The next day reached 80. The third day went back to 35, and the fourth day zoomed to 80 once more. Dress in layers, indeed! Our poor bodies had no idea what to make of it.

Meditation helped. Meditation always helps. I can feel the waiting rise up in me; I can see the waiting flit by. I can hear it's chatter, I can smell it (like dry grass on a hot summer day), and I can feel its weighty embrace. At last, at some point, I settle into it, the waiting, and it just is. I just am. It's not spectacular. There are no fireworks. There's just a moment of awareness, a jolt of being wide awake.

Just Keep Working

The leaves are inside out.

A storm is coming. Who first

noticed this? And what is a storm?

A disturbed state in the atmosphere.

Like the dark cloud I sometimes carry

in my head. And why inside out? Is

there something in us that wants so

badly to be drawn out that it dreams

of the storm? There's a small bird

with a yellow stripe across its face

found on the east coast of Australia.

They say the stripe is there because

of all the nectar it eats. It comes out

in the aftermath of storms before the

flowers fold back into themselves.

Isn't this what we do for each other?

Eat sweetness from each other's

wounds. I want to be a

yellow-faced honeyeater.

Picking Cotton, Washing Windows

On my way to the St. Louis airport yesterday, I rode the hotel van alone with the shuttle driver. I suppose we were both in a conversational mood because I found myself asking him about where he was born ("little town, about a hundred miles away), how long he'd lived in St. Louis (since 1960), and I listened as he told me about picking cotton as a boy.

He was good at it, just took to it, he said. He could do 300 pounds a day while other good pickers might make 180 to 210 pounds a day. He talked about picking cotton like a ceramist talking about clay, or a painter her palette. He talked so vividly I could see him as a boy out in the field, picking three rows at once, scorning the knee pads that were provided for pickers if they wanted them, picking so efficiently he was soon way out front. I learned the difference between picking clean cotton and dirty cotton (he picked dirty, meaning some weeds and stems went into the bag, and that way he picked faster), that his boss always had a line you could go up to but not cross when picking dirty cotton. I learned that you wanted to know where the pick-up truck was. You didn't want to be on the wrong end of the field with a full 85-pound bag of cotton. You needed to be mindful picking cotton.

"Of course," he said, "machinery's replaced all that now." He sounded almost wistful. As if answering my silent question he said, "I liked it, being outside, picking. I made 50 cents per hundred pounds. That was good money then, especially for a kid."

Walking through the airport, I was still thinking of him, of all he'd said about work he'd once enjoyed, and I paused for to admire a window washer waving his sponge and squee-gee over the huge windows.

I don't know about you, but I've always found washing windows without leaving streaks next to impossible. I've been drilled in all of the conventional wisdom and have tried to put it to work, but I've never been satisfied with my results. Yet, here was this guy whipping through windows with effortless grace. First he'd apply the sponge, lightly but thoroughly, then spread the soapy mixture all over, then wipe it all away with perfect squee-gee strokes that resembled the shape of butterfly wings.

I was fascinated. I walked over and told him how good he was. He seemed pleased, so I asked how he did it—that squee-gee stroke.

"Practice," he said. "It's all in the wrist."

I suspect it's also all in the outlook, too. He looked confident, relaxed, peaceful. How often do you look that way when you're working? I wonder the same about myself. Over the next few days, perhaps you can keep tabs on yourself, and tune in to others around you. What does work done well look like? Share your revelations in your journal. Who knows? You may even discover a bridge there to a poem you need or want to write.

Taiji

It is ancient but not old.

The Taoist master Chuang Tzu

first spoke of it in the 3rd century

BC as the Great Ridgepole that holds

the Unseeable Tent of the Universe

open. Around which we dance. Trying

to leave it. Always coming back. Within

a hundred years it was known as Tai Chi.

In the Tang Dynasty an unknown poet

spoke of life as swinging on the Great

Ridgepole. Hundreds of years later, a

Spanish poet said that meeting another

in mid-swing is the wonder of love. After

living through monsoons, a Hindu master

said that we move until we tire into stillness.

Then we are still till we grow impatient to

move. One blossoms into the other. In

that blossoming we become wakeful.

In such moments we are the bubbles

carried by water, the blue within the heart

of every flame, the aliveness sleeping inside

every ache. It is ancient but not old. Meet

me at the Ridgepole. We can take our

turn swinging around eternity.

Mothers are goddesses of the universal dance, aren't they...

Mothers are goddesses of the universal dance, aren't they? As we first stir into being, we're imprinted with rhythms and beats that emanate from the energy cores of mothers, so that by the time we emerge from the womb we're already dancers whether we know it or not.

We dance like the blades of grass that weave and sway in the breeze. We're tugged and pulled and reshaped by gravity, by the moon, and as we age we dance to the mysterious energy influences of moods. We create dances in our work movements and in all the relationships we form. We learn new steps every day, even more if we're awake, if we're paying attention. Even the trees and mountains are dancing, always dancing. The world, itself improbably dancing gorgeously in the vastness of space, hosts a pageant of dancing! Here is a passage from the poem Four for Sir John Davies by Theodore Roethke:



I take this cadence from a man named Yeats:

I take it and I give it back again:

For other tunes and other wanton beats

Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain.

Yes, I was dancing mad, and how

That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

May dancing bless you in all that you dream about and do!