Mark Nepo's Blog, page 6

On Retreat

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

It’s humbling how fear can rearrange our eyes. This piece describes a personal example of this.

 

On Retreat

Walking from my cabin through the frosted grass, it’s very quiet. The meetinghouse is on the hill. From the field below, I see a dog on the steps. I don’t have my glasses. It looks like a Rottweiler or a Shepherd. The old fear returns. The dog is off leash and no one’s around. I think about heading back and waiting till later. The dog looks my way. I’m not sure what to do. Its ears perk up. I keep climbing the hill; keep telling myself: that was then, this is now. I’m not the same person who was so afraid. But it comes back so easily. I climb the hill like years gone by till I come in view of—where else but—Now. As I get closer, it’s clear the beast is a small mutt. I feel relieved. Cresting the hill, I can see it’s Charlie. His old white face comes into focus and he recognizes me as I do him. He begins to wag his tail and waddle my way. I feel foolish and stoop beside Charlie, nuzzling my face in his.

 

A Question to Walk With: How is fear affecting your sight these days? Where do you think this fear in you comes from?

Nectar

Life tries to lure us into the open, the way sunlight opens a flower after a storm. This poem explores the life-force that calls to us.

Nectar

Like the nose of a bee, the heart

rubs its face in trouble and joy. So

bring all you’ve touched to bear on

this day, to pollinate what matters.

Ask everything you think might help

to lure your best self into the open. Ask

every pain that has forced you out of

hiding to cough up the gift you carry

in your heart. Until you realize that

the life you want waits inside you,

the way a flower waits inside a seed.

This is a holy space you enter in which

anything can happen. It can all change

in a day. Like today. And there are

wonderful teachers ready to help you,

to lead you, to lift you. Look to the web

of silk you just brushed from your face.

Look to the stone in your shoe that

made you trip into the web. Look to

the small cloud dispersing now be-

fore your tired eyes. Look to the

cramp in your beliefs that makes

it impossible to go on as if

nothing has changed.

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe something you thought was an obstacle, something you thought was in the way and how it turned out to be the next step in your path.

My Father’s Spirit Left His Body

This fall, Atria published my new book of spiritual inquiry, The Endless Practice: Becoming Who You Were Born to Be. It’s a journey that explores the difficult and rewarding aspects of being human, which are often inter-related, including how to restore our trust in life, when suffering makes us lose our way; how to begin the work of saying yes to life, so it can enliven us; and how to make our inwardness a resource and not a refuge. This is an excerpt from the book.

 

My Father’s Spirit Left His Body

My father’s spirit left his body when he died and joined the sea of light, no longer contained or nameable. And yet, once home, in my study, my first sense of him without a body came in the pour of morning light through the high, thick branches of the oak beside our house. Somehow the essence of my father poured through the leaves and branches that hover over my study, until like water filling a hole, that nameless sea of light filled the hole in my heart, until a sense of him flooded my one window, making me stop, feeling bathed in the part of him that had no words.

Beyond the trees and the living forms on Earth, my father remains indistinguishable from all the other particles of light, but the mystery of the heart’s unending gravity is that, as certain flowers draw certain insects to pollinate them, our grieving hearts open like those flowers to draw the particles of spirit we love to us. It’s what the Universal moves through that makes it personal; the way river over stone makes water sing.

 

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or a loved one, describe one way you’ve felt the presence of a loved one who is now gone.

The Fifth Element

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

 

THE FIFTH ELEMENT

Our job is to stay thoroughly human, not to perfect our way out of it. I admit I’ve lost years to refining myself when I’ve needed to deepen myself. I admit I’ve known the lift of the beatific ocean of Spirit and the crash of the world’s great wave. And no matter what is taken away, I try to accept everything as a blessing. I try to put down my mask and sword and keep entering life. But I confess, when I was sick, I refused the teacher and the teacher made me sicker until I could hear. This is how I was forced to learn that experience is the fifth element—insatiable and transforming as fire, clear and saturating as water, relentless and binding as earth, and necessary as air. Outliving those I love and outlasting things I’ve built is how I’ve been humbled to learn that grief is how we listen our way through loss. Opened, like a Russian nesting doll, to smaller and smaller shells I didn’t know I was carrying, I’ve been opened to the truth that obstacles are teachers and emergencies are rearrangers. Now I bless the wisdom in Rilke’s line:

The dove that remain(s) at home,

never exposed to loss…

cannot know tenderness…

A Question to Walk With: Describe one way that experience has revealed yourself to you.

The Courage Not to Waste Our Gifts

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

 

This is an excerpt from my new book, The Endless Practice: Becoming Who You Were Born to Be.

 

THE COURAGE NOT TO WASTE OUR GIFTS

No one can construct the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of your life, but you.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Every single being has an amazing, unfathomable gift that only meeting life head-on and heart-on will reveal. And we can’t fully know our gift alone. We need each other to discover the gift, to believe in the gift. And then, to learn how to use it. The challenge for each of us is not to discount our gift because of the indifference of others, and not to abdicate our gift because of the various weights we’re forced to carry.

What does it mean to have a gift? For the lamp, the light it was shaped to carry is its gift. Without a light, a lamp has no purpose. For a person, we are shaped by experience to reveal the light we carry. For a person, how that light comes through us is our gift. We could say that for every hand, the heart it was shaped to carry is its gift. And a life cut off from the work of its heart has no purpose. Our call in the midst of our days is to discover the gift that connects our heart and our hands, to discover the light that fills the lamp of the life we are given. Once discovered, our work is to never let the light of our gift go out.

The gift can come through us in any way: cleaning the snow off a neighbor’s car, clipping your dog’s nails, reading books to blind children, helping a retired couple refinance their home, devoting yourself to Beethoven’s violin concerto. As a lamp can light any patch of ground, the hand filled with heart can light anything it touches. The gift is what fills our hand. The various skills of the world are how the gifted hand moves.

Finding the ways our soul can breathe cleanly and completely is our career. Where that happens is our occupation.

A Question to Walk With: Describe your gift as you understand it. When did you first become aware of your gift? If your not, what settings or activities bring you most alive?

Jupiter and the Bee

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.



 

No matter how often we fall, the gift of wakeful effort allows us to find our way back to what is heartening and affirming, without denying the suffering we encounter. Still, the things that dishearten and drain us are always near, as near as all that is affirming. Here is one ancient story about sweetness and vengeance.

 

JUPITER AND THE BEE

Another insidious condition that drains us of all that is heartening is the murkiness of harboring resentments until they boil into vengeance. Of course, vengeance and spite are not new. Consider this ancient myth. A bee from Mount Hymettus, the queen of the hive, ascends to Olympus to present Jupiter with some honey fresh from her combs. Jupiter, delighted with the offering, promises to give whatever she would ask. She is quick to implore, “Give me, I pray thee, a sting, that if any mortal shall approach to take my honey, I may kill them.” Jupiter is sorely displeased, but can’t refuse his promise. Carefully, he answers the bee, “You shall have your request, but at the peril of your life. For if you use your sting, it shall remain in the wound you make, and then you will die from the loss of it.”

This small but potent tale offers many choices. At what point do we consider the honey we make ours and when do we accept it as a gift that comes through our labor of being? If we think the honey ours, then like the queen of the hive, we can become obsessed with hoarding it and protecting it. If we accept the honey as a gift, then we’re a carrier of a sweetness whose purpose is to be given. And what does this tale say of promises? Does Jupiter make his promise too soon? Is his trust in the queen of the hive misplaced? Though his deep cleverness reveals a truism about the cost of spite, which is more important: keeping his promise or keeping his response to the queen of the hive authentic? Different lives unfold from these choices. Not just among the gods, but in our ordinary lives.

Throughout history, the queen of the hive has taken many incarnations, both female and male. In truth, the bee from Hymettus possesses us each time we let the bottom of our hurt define the world. Then the law of spite will plague us. For whenever we let our sting remain in the wound, a part of us dies to life.

A Question to Walk With: What is your relationship to the honey, the sweetness you carry as a person, and what is your relationship to the stinger you carry?

Gentleness

Receiving depends on gentleness, which relaxes our boundaries. It lets us interact with what comes our way. It lets us lend some of our shape to what’s before us. Lending our shape in this way allows for a momentary joining, through which we can feel the aliveness that flows between things. Here is a mythic example of gentleness.

 

Gentleness

 

This is the story of a blind boy who in a dream is told that bowing will open his eyes and let him see. He tries for several days to bow and open, everywhere he goes: in the grass, in the wind, in the soft hands of his mother. None of it gives him sight. He bows his face into the holiest of books, the one his father studies. Still nothing. The dream felt so real that he’s now in despair, certain he’s misread the gift of this instruction, certain he’s lost his chance to see.

 

In his sadness, he wanders to the shore of a lake, where he wades to his waist. Depressed, he sits in the water. And as a child sinks in a bathtub, he holds his breath and drops into the lake, below the surface of things, below the noise of his blindness. He is surrounded by such softness and quiet that he begins to cry as the water from his eyes mixes with the water of the lake. In the slow, gentle wash of water meeting water, he begins to feel the bottom of the lake. He begins to feel the old fish swimming behind a rock. He can feel the oar in the middle of the lake slipping in and out of the cloud-reflected surface. He even feels a heron circling above, its shadow cooling pockets of the deep.

 

He returns to the surface and can feel the movement of air against his eyes, and the heat of the sun warming his face. From that day on, he can feel with his eyes, as long as he remembers to slip below the surface of things. And though he is blind, from that day on, he carries great vision. In time, he becomes a teacher that others seek out, and through his gentleness, others learn that whatever our blindness, the heart can sink below the noise of its memories and wounds. The sweet blind boy tells everyone who asks that the heart wakes slowly, and only our gentleness—our willingness to sink into the depth of things and wait—will let us see and make our way.

 

 

A Question to Walk With: What is your relationship to gentleness and how does it show up?

Aslan and the White Witch

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

This passage speaks to the turning points of resilience that are always near.

Aslan and the White Witch

We always have the choice to be one who affirms or one who drains. This choice is beautifully rendered in the C.S. Lewis classic, The Chronicles of Narnia. There, Aslan, the life-affirming, mystical lion, appears from time to time to restore balance and empower others. His counterpart, the life-draining White Witch of Narnia, freezes the life out of others, turning them into statues. Theirs is a classic battle; it is our battle. Ultimately, it is Aslan’s mystical breath that brings those drained of feeling back to life by thawing their numbness. Isn’t this the gift of encouragement: to thaw our numbness by breathing life into each other and ourselves? Isn’t this the blessing of the lion-hearted?

We could say that the mystical breath is the heartening influence we carry within us and that freezing the life out of things is the disheartening influence, the coldness we’re capable of when we withdraw our attention and care. When we stop listening long enough, that inattention can be numbing.

It is imperative to remember that we are both the lion and the witch. As such, we carry tremendous powers within us to affirm life or to drain it. Each time we turn away from life and deny the living, we numb some part in the world. But each time we turn toward life and accept everything that lives, we thaw some part in the world. While we can’t avoid turning away from life and at times denying the living, while we can’t escape moments of numbness, working with what we’re given is the first step to decoding the hieroglyphic of our time on Earth. Our resilience is the mystical breath that thaws us and brings us back to life.

 

A Question to Walk With: Journal about a time when you were a disheartening influence on another and what caused you to be that way. Then journal about a time when you were a heartening influence on another and what caused you to be that way.

A Dream We’re Close to Living

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

 

This passage explores a different sense of destiny.

 

A Dream We’re Close to Living

I was given an insight when young, which arrived one day in the rain as everything thirsty in me relaxed. It was an insight about destiny and how, like trees and plants, destiny is more a breaking ground of all that grows within—a manifestation of life from seed to flower—than a foretold timeline of projected desires that we create to keep us from the pain of living.

All these years later, I’m in the rain again and everything—the very buildings, the people walking with their dreams as umbrellas, the way we all want so very much to look into each other’s eyes—everything keeps sprouting from within, destined to grow into what it can. For all our creative gifts and our urge to build, we’re going nowhere, just stretching like orchids into our potential.

And though I’ve achieved a lot, when I ignore this natural sense of destiny, I find I don’t grow or mature as a soul. To be productive without growing has made me realize that all the effort to be seen and heard is draining, when it is seeing and hearing that keeps us vital. All the effort to be remembered is enervating, when it is the peace of putting the members back together that keeps us connected to everything larger than us. All the effort to run from our fear of failure and the constant push toward some fantasized future is exhausting, when our destiny is simply and profoundly to root where we are and grow toward the light.

Still, it’s hard to be here, to grow here, though the journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly. This destiny from within to without is the heart’s dialogue with what matters, the way a flower dialogues with the rain to blossom.

This is the dream we’re close to living.

 

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe your own growth to this point in your life in terms of the life of a tree or plant—from seed to flower. Speak about yourself as a seedling and what watered you. Speak about yourself as a stem breaking ground. Speak about your roots.

The Practice of Courage

From the outside, being courageous seems a monumental canyon to cross, but inside the opened depth of any situation, it begins with a single step.

 

The Practice of Courage

The practice of courage is doing small things with love. This was Mother Theresa’s anthem. We begin to dismantle what is overwhelming by beginning the journey of involvement one hand at a time, one kindness at a time, one utterance of truth at a time. From the outside, things that require courage seem impossible, but once we begin, we’re no longer on the outside. This lets us see more. This lets us feel the current of the situation we have to cross. Any small act of love shows us the next step to be taken. So it’s imperative to stop rehearsing the perfect starting point and just begin.

We can practice doing small things with love when we’re not afraid, so it will be available to us when we are afraid. You can do this by making dinner for your dog, or getting coffee for your loved one, or holding the door for an elder who’s taking way too long to cross the parking lot in the rain. The world is our practice ground.

The word authentic comes from the Greek, authentes, which means bearing the mark of the hands. Doing small things with love is how we care for each other, one hand at a time. Doing small things with love releases our courage. And each small act we’re led to leads to more. Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery. I tell myself when afraid, “To be courageous, I don’t need to become my best self, I just need to open who I already am and courage will fill me.”

 

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of one small thing you found yourself doing with love and how this changed you.