Mark Nepo's Blog, page 5

Being a Teacher

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

I am a life-long teacher, which means I am a life-long student. I come from a lineage of teachers. And so, I offer this small poem about this noble calling.

BEING A TEACHER

Like the moon standing full

reflecting as much of the Source

as it can so those unaccustomed

to the dark can find their way,

this is the path you have chosen,

that has chosen you.

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of one important teacher who has shaped your life and how.

From Here to Here

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I’m blessed to be part of a mens group that has been meeting for eight years. We’ve become very close. One of us, Don, describes our closeness this way, “I am living in a trust that now deeply shapes my life.” Once a year, we have a retreat together. After this year’s retreat, I felt each of them so deeply that I had to pull over on the highway and write this poem.

FROM HERE TO HERE

I’m listening to you speak of your pain

and what it’s saying to you. As my heart

aches the way a tree splits. And in the split,

I realize that an entire life—decades, a century

if blessed—all of it is a blink in the eye of the

Many-Named God who gifts us great love and

suffering, so that in the split and ache that stuns

us, we might know the full length of time and

how effort turns to grace: in the curl of a wave,

in the flap of a wing, in the first breath of a

child no one expected, in the last breath of

someone who saved us from ourselves, in the

dissolution of the clouds that mute our wonder.

And in that holy pause of heart, life starts again.

I’m listening with no way to convey how beauty-

fully ordinary we are. I just know, when bearing

witness this tenderly, everything matters. Impos-

sible as it seems, we fall like water from here

to here, giving our selves to everything

along the way.

A Question to Walk With: In what way does life stun you? Who do you share this stark beauty with?

After Mira

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It’s been a year since we lost our beloved dog-child Mira. During this time, we have learned even more about the nature of grief and loss, and how no one is exempt from these tender journeys. This poem speaks to what I’ve learned.

AFTER MIRA

One day, we think we dare to love

but find we’ve already given our heart

and have no choice but to work our fingers

in that unexpected garden. And unimaginable

things grow, through us, within us. However

long the entwining of aliveness lasts, we feel

light and blessed, like the one dragonfly

allowed to light on the one lily pad floating

on the one calm patch of lake. And in some

moment below all we’ve been taught, we

know Heaven is wherever the heart gives

itself away and waits. Then, after what seems

a lifetime and always too soon, what we love

dies or goes away and the tectonic plates on

which our life stands break and heave and

the heart we so freely gave, entangled with

the world, is ripped apart. Nothing makes

sense while in this rearranging pain. Nothing.

Nomatter what others say, nothing is of com-

fort while the heart is reforged in the furnace

no one asks for, as the fire slowly refashions

our eyes. Under it all, some infinite part of

us knows that this too, painful as it is, is the

inexplicable continuance of love: how moun-

tains crumble into valleys, how fires become

the bed of seeds yet to be sown, how lovers

are stilled into their wisdom, how that which

reaches for the stars becomes its own light.

Against our will, our heart is remade by the

angel of grief who fists the center of our life,

shaking everything dead within us from our

branches, until the heart condenses to a

diamond. Hard as this is to endure,

this too is a miracle.

A Question to Walk With: How do you experience loss? Is it impacting you now? What has the ache of loss opened in you?

Nothing Is Separate

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The great philosopher Abraham Heschel speaks of his fear that we will lose our sense of the Whole. I think this is inevitable, though just as inevitable that will find the Whole again. This poem explores this feeling.

NOTHING IS SEPARATE

All things are true. The wind through

the Spanish Moss tells me that this has

always been. I must keep my heart open

long enough for all things to mix until

the alchemy of Oneness softens my time

on Earth. If you take my hand when I’m

like this, we will know each other in a

way that will never leave us. Dipping

our face in each other’s heart, as we

would a stream we come upon deep

in the woods—this makes the tribe

strong. Enough to build something

out of nothing. Enough to love

what-is back into just what it is.

A Question to Walk With: Begin to describe your history with experiencing the strength of the Universe beyond your own. Where did you first experience this? How did you first connect or benefit from strength beyond your own?

A Few Turns of the Moon

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For all the hardships that life throws at us, I have always felt that life keeps living. Perhaps not in the same form or in a way that is recognizable. But life keeps pulsing under everything. And no matter the pain or confusion I face, something in me keeps reaching for that irrepressible pulse. This poem comes from my reaching.

 

 

A FEW TURNS OF THE MOON

From the balcony of this restaurant, I watch

a hundred lives below: burrowing and laugh-

ing and finding their way. And perhaps because

I’ve lost my father and our beloved dog in the

last year, perhaps because at sixty-three, I see

over the final hill more clearly, I also see the

hundreds on the other side, still burrowing

and laughing and finding their way. I don’t

know if this is alarming or a comfort: that

we go on the same, that the gleam pressed

out of every hardship is the jewel of existence,

here and on the other side. So I spoon my

soup and sip my wine, knowing the balcony

is the gutter and the gutter is the balcony,

that the dark waits all curled up in the light,

and the light, thank God, waits all curled up

in the dark.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a moment in which you have felt the irrepressible force of life coming through.

A New Thought

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Sometimes, as we grow, what we build starts to be confining. This poem speaks to my own experience of this.

 

A New Thought

After so many years, I was surprised

that the self I built in order to survive

was only a tent that had no roof. And

finally looking up, I learned from the

stars how to stay in place and whisper my

light. And loosening my grip, I found the

things I held, that I thought would protect,

had grown so heavy, I had to put them down.

My beliefs had rusted into a sword too dull

to cut anything. And my secrets had blossom-

ed and withered inside my little hand. So I

took the beliefs turned weapons apart, and

washed the dead secrets from my heart.

After so much work to keep things out,

it scared me to realize—there was no

opening to my tent. And so with love,

this very day, I rip a hole in my

oldest self, so I can get out and

drink of the world.

 

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe something you’ve built—a dream, a relationship, a career—that in time become too confining. How did you work with this?

Everything Sees

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Everything is alive and everything has something to offer. In the press of daily life, we often ignore these teachers, though they’re everywhere.

 

Everything Sees

 

In the parking lot, I find

one lens from a pair of glasses.

I rub it clean; wondering

what it has seen and retained

and what the person who’s

lost it is blind to without it.

 

It won’t share its secrets.

Or I can’t hear them.

It just gives me my reflection.

 

I turn it in to the young, nice

girl at the desk. She thanks me

and as I turn the corner, I hear

her toss it in the plastic lost and

found; along with the other

refugees of wisdom.

 

 

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of some unknown remnant or lost item and how it tried to speak to you.

 

Compose Yourself

Inherent in the nature of living is being disturbed and being settled and how we’re rearranged by life in between these states. And so, we’re asked to compose ourselves again and again.

 

Compose Yourself

Another practice we’re led to is the effort to compose our selves. When agitated, through pain or fear or worry, when broken into pieces, we need to find an inner way to put ourselves back together. In a culture afraid of feelings, the instruction to calm down is often used to muffle what we’re going through. But to quiet what we’re feeling is not the same thing as to settle what we’re feeling. It’s the difference between putting a pillow over someone’s head when they’re crying and letting a churned up lake settle so you can see what’s on the bottom.

To compose also has two definitions that are helpful. Compose means to form a whole by ordering or arranging the parts, as in composing music, where the arrangement of the parts creates a whole that releases its harmony. But how do we arrange the various parts within us to form a whole that will release our music? This leads us to the other definition of compose: to calm and settle your self, to calm and settle your thoughts and feelings and thereby to calm and settle your features; those distinct attributes by which you know who you are.

To compose your self means to commit to the effort to calm your agitation, enough to see and feel the wholeness of your being that is always under your agitation, the way the bottom of a lake is always there under the agitation of its waves. The mystery is that while we are broken at times on the surface, we are always whole somewhere in the depth of our being.

Consider how a lake is always both still and moving at the same time, often still in the deep and moving on the surface. We are no different. So the goal is not to eliminate the surface movement or agitation that is part of the weather of life, but to learn the art of composing our selves, calming the surface, so we can see through and reconnect to the still depth of our being.

 

A Question to Walk With: Tell one story of how different parts of you have come together over time and how this new arrangement of your self has affected you.

Admitting Who We Are

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

So much of our aliveness depends on how open we can remain. This piece looks at how we can let in what matters.

 

Admitting Who We Are

So how do we participate in the daily experiment of inhabiting Heaven on Earth? Time and again, we are invited to practice admitting who we are, in both senses of the word. Admit means to confess or acknowledge what is true about who we are, as in admitting to a crime or fault. Inwardly, though, admit is more comprehensive. It means to accept the flawed and gifted wholeness of who we are. Only through such acceptance can we access all of our capacities. Only when a painter accepts that he is stained by all the colors, can he access them all to paint with. Likewise, only when a soul accepts that it is stained by all the human moods, feelings, confusions, and gifts, can that soul access them all to paint the life that carries it.

The other definition of admit is to let in, to allow someone or some thing to enter a place, to cross a threshold. So once accepting who we are, we need to let in who we are. If we are to be fully alive, we need to accept who we are and let in who we are. And one can lead to the other. When feeling lost or cut off, when feeling shattered by the harshness of life, inhale deeply and slowly. This is the first step to admitting who you are, the first step to putting yourself back together. And admitting who you are is the first step to saying yes to life.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of someone you respect and how they admit who they are.

 

Beyond Measure

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Life waits irrepressibly under all the clouds that come and go. This happens within us as well as in the world. This poem speaks to our need to be where we are.

 

Beyond Measure

Having burned dreams to keep warm,

I think of dreams as kindling now.

Having carried loved ones as far as I

could to the other side, I make your

coffee and bring you a tissue, as if

these gestures open us to Heaven.

Because they do.

 

Having outlasted the noise in my

head and yours, I can at times hear

the breath of life between our

disappointments.

 

Meeting this way, more than halfway

through, I ask different questions. Not,

Where are you going? But, How did you

come to here? And, Have you opened the

treasure before you? And, If so, can

you teach me?

 

 

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, share a recent disappointment. And if that disappointment is a cloud within you, what waits beyond it?