Mark Nepo's Blog, page 7

Being the Part, Feeling the Whole

Since we’re each a living part in a living Whole, one challenging art in being human is to live out our particular life while comprehending the Whole. One aspect of the endless practice is to feel both the depth of our feelings and, at the same time, to stand on the ground of all being which exists independent of what happens to us. Here’s a personal example.

 

Being the Part, Feeling the Whole

During the last eight months of my father’s life, he was in and out of hospitals and rehabilitation centers. I had flown in to see him again. When I arrived, he was sleeping and my brother said he was having a hard day. I sat by his side. When he woke, he didn’t know who I was. This had never happened before.

I was stunned and it felt odd and evacuating to have my father stare with enormously wide eyes, as if I were a stranger. My heart began to sink. I thought, So this is what it will feel like when he’s gone. I took his hand and tried to remind him, “Hi Dad, I’m Mark. I’m your son.” He looked at me like an old miner trapped underground. He looked at me as if to say, “Am I still here? Are you here to help me?” My heart began to tumble in this canyon between us. But it was suddenly clear that in this moment, I had to be a kind stranger.

I gave up trying to have him recognize me and sat closer, introducing myself for the first time, “Hi, I’m Mark. I’m here to help you, to keep you company. How are you today?” His stare softened and he gripped my hand, thankful for the company. Then, he looked beyond me, as if to say, “No one can get me out of this. No one.”

Later that night, he knew me again. But this was a humbling episode in which I was challenged to feel the unnerving moment that I was erased from the consciousness of the man who fathered me and to enter a reality that existed beyond my feelings, my story, or even my life. Without denying either. It was also a deeply personal moment of knowing that all things are true. This was my father, the man who held me as a boy, who cried but didn’t show up when I had cancer, who was lost to me for fifteen years, who cried in my arms when he was ninety, who didn’t know I was his son at ninety-three. All of it is true. And it’s imperative not to choose between them, but to let the many faces of my father wash into the many sides of his son’s aching heart.

What I’ve learned from these passages is that the heart not only has room for both, but that life demands that we embrace both what is particular to each of us and what exists in mysterious complexity beyond our singular life. I’ve learned that the bird must feel both its broken wing and the current of wind that lifts and twirls and carries it. This is what it means to be a bird. As a person, we must feel both the break in our heart and the current of life that lifts and twirls and carries us. This is what it means to be openhearted.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a time when you could feel, even briefly, when you could feel both your own particular experience while also feeling some larger sense of life other than your own.

Saying Yes to Life

In the face of this gritty, mysterious, and ever-changing dynamic we call being alive, it’s nothing short of heroic that we are asked to choose life and living, again and again. Not just to put a good face on things while we’re here, but because saying yes to life is how the worm inches its way through earth. It’s how salmon leap their way upstream. It’s how flowers grow out of stone. But how do we do this?

 

Saying Yes to Life

I invite you to reflect on any of these offerings and their companion questions and to discuss the space each opens with a friend:

Saying yes is how the infinite spirit we’re born with keeps moving through us into the world. How do you know the presence of your spirit?

Saying yes is the way the flower of the soul breaks through the stone of the world. How is your soul inching through the stone of the world?

Two recurring questions serve as the heart’s compass: What are we saying yes to? And what do we rely on inwardly in saying yes? In your most alive moments, what are you saying yes to and what does saying yes feel like?

Meeting the transformations that our hardships hold is a deep form of saying yes that makes every soul on Earth blossom. Describe one hardship in your life and how it’s been transformative.

Despair is often the nut in which the fruit of resilience ripens. Describe a moment of despair and how it ended. Describe a moment of resilience and how it began.

We’re constantly asked to enter the conversation that difficulty opens. Name one difficulty you have faced and describe the conversation it opened within you.

Being vulnerable makes us malleable enough to transform, find our place in the larger Universe, and feel the Oneness of things. Describe your current invitation to be vulnerable and how you’re meeting it.

In order to lead a full life, we need to open our hearts, so we can be completed by everything that is not us. Name one teacher that came from outside of you and what it taught you.

We give birth to everything we look at with love, including our own soul. Tell the story of one thing you’ve given your love to.

It’s often in the depths of love and suffering and wonder that we touch on the unnamable center. In that moment, we’re touching our core, which felt deeply enough, brings us to the core of all life. How would you describe the unnamable center of life?

The practice of being a spirit—in a body, in the world—is a practice of returning to our center where we can know the world fully. Returning to center is a form of saying yes to life. What do you do to return to your center?

It’s nothing short of heroic that we are asked to choose life and living, again and again. Tell the story of someone you admire and how that person chose life and living.

Polishing the Heart

This fall, Atria is publishing 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. For the next two months, I’ll be previewing excerpts from the book.

Working to make peace with life will give your heart new eyes that will enable you to make more wholehearted decisions about the things that live close to your soul. Here’s one tradition’s practice in approaching this.

 

Polishing the Heart

The Sufis speak of polishing the heart into a mirror, so that through our love we can reflect the heart of everything. This is one practice that in time can help us make the necessary agreement between our being and our humanness. By its very nature, living in the world creates a film over our heart, while our thoroughness of being and our gestures of love remove that film. There is no arrival in this process. The goal isn’t to stay clean or get dirty, but to stay engaged in the unending transformative cycle of life. And when we can’t summon the effort or courage to clean the film from our heart, there is always the necessary rain by which life will clean and refresh itself. In this way, the work of being and the inevitable friction of becoming are inextricably knit together.

We all film the heart and we all polish the heart. We all move between these points of wakefulness and weariness. All the while, the resources of life wait like a great sea to cleanse us. This is why we polish the heart into a mirror—to open and touch the place within us where all life lives, where all hearts feel, where all things resound through the inlet of our soul. The endless practice here is to live out a constant commitment to aliveness, to stay engaged in the ongoing journey of being filmed over, only to be scoured into a clear vessel, again and again.

A Question to Walk With: What does it mean to you to polish your heart? Where does your heart need polishing right now? What small act can you take to begin to clarify what you feel?

To Glow in All Directions

This fall, Atria is publishing 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. For the next two months, I’ll be previewing excerpts from the book.

Like the sun, the heart is constantly glowing and it is our job to keep glowing through the weather of experience.

 

To Glow in All Directions

During my days of cancer, I felt such fear from all directions, including the well-intended but negative scenarios of all the doctors preparing for what to do when this would fall off or that would stop working. The only place I could retreat to was the moment at hand. No matter how painful, that moment, paradoxically, had the calm certainty of already existing. No one could puncture it or take it away. It simply glowed. And so, without any wisdom but out of desperation, I took refuge in each glowing moment, one leading to the next. To my humble surprise, each moment was a threshold to the sanctity that waits inside any circumstance. I discovered that each moment contains an ounce of eternal perspective that doesn’t eliminate what we have to go through, but which opens us to the stream of life that is always ready to carry us. And so, when weak and close to death, I learned that what we retreat to may at first be a refuge, but what we face and see our way through becomes a resource. I learned that authentic living begins with our acceptance of what we’re given. Then the light of the soul can meet the light in the world. In those hard-earned moments, we glow in all directions. I’ve been trying to understand the truth and glow of being human ever since.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a time when you felt aglow. What led to this sense of aliveness? Where does it live in you now?

Our Journey on Earth

This fall, Atria is publishing 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. For the next two months, I’ll be previewing excerpts from the book.

 

More than the hard-earned understandings we arrive at, more than the principles or beliefs we stitch together out of our experience, how we stay in relationship to the mysterious Whole of Life is what brings us alive and keeps us alive.

 

Our Journey on Earth

To learn how to ask for what we need,

only to practice accepting what we’re

given. This is our journey on earth.

 

These are two eternal practices that bring us in alignment with the Unity of Life. At first look, they seem to contradict each other, but they are two sides of one paradox. Together, they lead us into the way of being called saying yes, through which we are returned to meeting life rather than hiding from it, to receiving truth rather than inventing it, and to joining with other life rather than pushing off of everything different from us.

 

While we don’t always get what we need, the reward for asking for what we need is that this allows us to be who we are. And the reward for accepting what we’re given is that we get to participate in the living Universe. Asking for what we need is a practice in being present and visible that lets us become intimate with our own nature. Accepting what we’re given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life. As a way of being, saying yes is the ongoing dance of intimacy between our own nature and the nature of life. Through a life of asking for what we need and accepting what we’re given, we feed the fire of our soul, which glows its brightest the moment our aliveness is ignited.

 

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a current situation in which you need to ask for what you need, as well as a current situation in which you need to accept what you are being given. What do you think each situation is asking you to learn?

One String

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

This fall, Sounds True is publishing a box set of teaching conversations based on the poems in my book Reduced to Joy. The poems are the teachers and unfold the journey from our head to our heart. For the next two months, I’m happy to be previewing poems and reflections from the box set.

For all the ways we run and work, the secret waits hiding in the open under all our busyness.

One String

I am so busy at times

trying to make it all

worthwhile, that I am

stunned at how easily the

whole of life speaks to me,

when music I’ve never heard

or a truth I never understood

plucks the one string I carry

deep within.

I only want that string pluck-

ed and yet, it stays in a place

only suffering or surrender

can open.

Still, violins in minor keys

make me swallow my fear

and herons flying into

the end of a long day

make me wish I’d led

a more peaceful life.

A Question to Walk With: What does it feel like when the one string you carry deep within is plucked and what opens you to the deeper music of life?

So Much is Carried

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

This fall, Sounds True is publishing a box set of teaching conversations based on the poems in my book Reduced to Joy. The poems are the teachers and unfold the journey from our head to our heart. For the next two months, I’m happy to be previewing poems and reflections from the box set.

 

This poem speaks to the closeness I had with my first dog, many years ago. I can still feel the details of this scene.

So Much is Carried

(for Saba)

When just a pup, I took her into winter.

While Paul photographed the heavy snow,

she, having never run free, circled wildly,

her little nose caked with white.

She slipped and broke the ice. I can still

see her puppy face underwater, looking

for a way out, her tiny paws swatting

at the thick clear deep.

With no thought, I was waist high and

wet, sweeping her into the air. She flew

a good twelve feet and landed with a thud.

She shook and started to shiver. We rubbed

her down for two hours, blowing her with

an old hair dryer. I held her in my shirt,

near my heart, the whole way home.

I’m fourteen years and seven states away

and she has died. My first dog. I close

my eyes and there she is, grown,

sniffing the air in an open field,

smelling things I couldn’t even sense.

How many times I’ve played that day

in the pond: her struggle underwater,

her drying on my chest.

How much that day has shaped my art:

always jumping in and sweeping what

has been baptized in the deep back

into the world, always holding it

near my heart. As if my life

depends on it.

A Question to Walk With: How do you experience the human sense of baptism, the unexpected ways that life immerses us into places and relationships more deeply than we imagined or are willing. Tell the story of one such unexpected immersion and how it has changed you.

Kiss Everything on Fire

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

This fall, Sounds True is publishing a box set of teaching conversations based on the poems in my book Reduced to Joy. The poems are the teachers and unfold the journey from our head to our heart. For the next two months, I’m happy to be previewing poems and reflections from the box set.

 

Everyone who ever lived has had to negotiate the source of what they know and how to withstand the undue influence of others. This poem speaks to this.

Kiss Everything on Fire

Everyone keeps stopping me with their urgency.

As if the secret of life was written in a corner

of their mind and before they could

read it, it burst aflame.

The first hundred times, I rushed to do their

bidding. Then one day, exhausted by my own

secrets burning, I stopped running and

kissed everything on fire.

And yes, it scarred my lip and now

I have trouble saying anything complicated,

but wind no longer gets trapped in my head.

I know you understand. I’ve seen you suffer

the secrets no one asked us to keep secret. I’ve

seen them burning up your mind. But today,

we can part the veils and let in whatever

it is we thought we had to keep out.

Today, urgency dies because the heart

has burned its excuses.

A Question to Walk With: Begin to describe your history with urgency, when it first appeared in your life, how it has been reinforced or lessened, and the power it holds over you today.

Ahyo-oh’-oh-ni

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

This fall, Sounds True is publishing a box set of teaching conversations based on the poems in my book Reduced to Joy. The poems are the teachers and unfold the journey from our head to our heart. For the next two months, I’m happy to be previewing poems and reflections from the box set.

 

With so many things blocking us from what matters, how do we develop a practice of return when we become confused? This poem explores the question.

Ahyo-oh’-oh-ni

—from the Diné, to bring one

into harmony with everything.

When I open my tiny self,

I can almost hear the wood

growing inside the tree

and the love growing

inside your heart.

I can’t hear it for long,

for my own creaking

takes over.

But there is this rhythm

of how things grow that

we are privy to from

time to time.

Don’t give up

because your pain

sometimes drowns

out the Source.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a current tension you are feeling between a pain or anxiety you are working with and your connection to a larger sense of things.

For Nine-Week-Old Mira

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

This fall, Sounds True is publishing a box set of teaching conversations based on the poems in my book Reduced to Joy. The poems are the teachers and unfold the journey from our head to our heart. For the next two months, I’m happy to be previewing poems and reflections from the box set.

We recently lost our beloved dog-child Mira, a yellow-lab whose eyes you could live in and whose breathing touch had become home. It’s been a hard loss. I found this poem I wrote when we first brought her home over thirteen years ago.

 

For Nine-Week-Old Mira

I know, I know. There’s bacon in the sink

and my slipper to shred. And that Shepherd

smell three houses down. But sleep, my puppy.

There will be other leaves to chase and sticks

to chew. You miss nothing when you sleep

but what it is to see you sleep: your lashes

twitting, your small eyes in dream, your

doggish yips, your belly in and out.

We watch you: pure eyes, pure run,

pure lick. Always needing to have

some part touch. Sleep, sweet puppy.

When you sleep, you stall us

into a softness we forget.

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or a loved one, tell the story of a lesson you’ve learned from an animal.