Mark Nepo's Blog, page 8

Running the Table

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 each have these stories in our own journey that have shaped us—either positively or negatively, either as affirmations or cautions. But we seldom are aware of them or how to use them for what we face now. This poem holds such a story for me, from my youth. My father’s father was one of four sons born in Russia and living in Brooklyn. This is the gift they gave me as a boy, that I return to often.

 

Running the Table



On certain Sundays in the late fifties,

my father’s four uncles would sweep into

our home like a tornado of laughter and

take us to the local pool hall. They were

weathered immigrants from Russia—Max,

Al, Norton, and Axi. They’d sharked their

way through the Depression, running the

table, throwing money in a jar. Once Axi,

hit by a car, broke his thumb, but cursed,

played and won, before having it set. That’s

how he got his name: Axi, for accident. My

father always opened up a little more around

them. I used to wake on Sundays and hope,

the way quiet children pray in secret for

gypsies to arrive. But what I remember

most is being knee-high, not quite able to

see the table, their laughter circling like the

gods of Olympus tossing their losses into the

sea. My brother and I would run through their

legs. We couldn’t make out all that was said.

But the smell of chalk, and swift strokes scat-

tering bright balls, the thunder of resilience

that parted life’s harshness—it made me feel

happy and safe. Sometimes I’d grab one of their

legs like the tree of life itself. Now, when beat

up and sad, I find myself drifting into some

bar, looking for a cue. Then I take the years

off like a coat, chalk up and sigh; leaning

over the felt table, waiting for their

laughter to swallow the world.

 

 

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a now mythic moment in your youth that has helped to shape your understanding of resilience.

 

Coming Out

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.

 

Both being and doing are necessary, the way two hands are necessary, or two legs, or two eyes. It’s our job to discover the very personal way we use both being and doing to see, to walk, to hold and build, to care. Like the mind and the heart, I’ve found that my doing is healthier if it comes from my being. This poem explores the power of being.

 

Coming Out

While there is much to do

we are not here to do.

 

Under the want to problem-solve

is the need to being-solve.

 

Often, with full being

the problem goes away.

 

The seed being-solves its

darkness by blossoming.

 

The heart being-solves its loneliness

by loving whatever it meets.

 

The tea being-solves the water

by becoming tea.

 

 

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a time when your presence alone contributed to solving a problem.

 

The Water Takes Many Forms

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 proper role of guides and what they open us to. You’ll notice that the voice of this poem is imperative, that is, it offers instruction to the reader. I must confess that when poems appear in this voice, it is not me giving instructions to you, but more, I am receiving instructions from the voice of life and simply recording them. I am the you in the poem, too. What the poem offers is for me to learn as well.

 

The Water Takes Many Forms

 

When people are at a loss, the guide ferries them over.

When one is (awake), one ferries oneself.

—Hui-Neng

 

Listen for guides, but use their wisdom as you

would a lamp to read your own heart. If some-

one dissuades you from your heart, they are not

a guide. A guide, like a ferryman, brings you

close to the water, will even help you cross,

but it’s your own thirst that makes you cry

stop, wait—so you can drink.

 

When drinking of that water, it’s clear:

the taste of birth we long to keep alive grows

inside everything. In the sheerness of the

water once it stops moving. In the surrender

of exhaustion that loosens every grip. In the

peace within our loneliness once we stop

gnawing at what might have been.

 

When drinking of that peace, it’s clear:

doubt leads to humility, the way thirst makes

us drink. And pain drops into Oneness, the

way hunger makes us eat.

 

When finding a guide, listen, if you must, to

what they have to say, but look for the water

in their eyes and the wind that rims their

voice. Let your self be scoured back to the

beginning which is not behind us,

but about to crack open within us.

 

 

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a mentor or guide and how they have led you to your own inner guide.

Behind the Thunder

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.

There’s no escaping the turmoil of experience, no avoiding the storms that toss us about or the light that follows. It’s a paradox we all have to meet and endure.

 

Behind the Thunder

I keep looking for one more teacher,

only to find that fish learn from water

and birds learn from sky.

If you want to learn about the sea,

it helps to be at sea.

If you want to learn about compassion,

it helps to be in love.

If you want to learn about healing,

it helps to know of suffering.

The strong live in the storm

without worshipping the storm.

A Question to Walk With: Describe one thing you’ve learned about healing from your experience of suffering.

An Open Hand

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

During periods of constriction and insecurity, we can become so fearful of difference and so in need of preserving our fragile hold on things that we can fall under the spell of our own glare and retreat into a form of personal fundamentalism. This poem speaks to our need to break free.

 

An Open Hand

 

The mind is not a storeroom

with mirrors where we retreat

to convince ourselves

that we exist.

 

The mind is a livingroom with

windows and more than one chair,

so friends can come and look out

and discuss what they see.

 

Not a fortress where we frisk and

strip others of what they believe

in order to share our secrets.

 

More a porch with birdfeeders

and coffee or tea where before

hello, you have to share a story.

 

Pull the curtains! Open the

windows! Brew the coffee!

Put out a sign: Other Views

Wanted!

 

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, share a position that you are clinging to right now and seek other views, avoiding argument or debate. Simply water the ground of the situation with the water of each other’s care and see what happens.

 

Bareback

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There are times when how we operate in the world just turns upside down. This poem speaks to such a time for me.

 

 

Bareback

No question I’ve been knocked

from my invisible horse and the

one with tools in his hands keeps

prodding: Get back in the saddle.

What are you waiting for? But the

timeless one affirms: You’re not

listening. There is no more saddle.

We’ve done away with all that.

The driven one keeps looking at

his watch: You didn’t work all these

years to walk away now. But the

one who breathes like a flower

replies: We worked all these years

precisely to unfold this way.

 

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a conversation you’re currently in the middle of within yourself. Without judgment, give voice to each side and ask your friend or loved one for simply what they observe; not advice.

 

Nesting

The testing ground of love is how we help each other through suffering and loss without robbing each other of the chance to feel and grow. This poem bears witness to such a time for me.

 

Nesting

Last week, I was on a pier in Charleston.

There was a pelican, very close. I remem-

bered that pelicans make their nest by pluck-

ing feathers from their chest. The water kept

lapping and I felt illumined, for a moment.

Aware that you were home, medicating Mira.

Aware my father was on his side, unable to get

out of bed. Aware your brother, unable to choose

life, was again in jail. Aware that you are nesting

like a pelican in the middle of all this. Last night,

in the concert, as the guitars softened our worry,

I watched the light of the theatre quiet your face,

as I have for years, and thought, I know we will lose

things dear to us and it will seem impossible to go on.

And though the weight of grief we fear and master

looms like a dark god, I will be there when words

fail, to rub your feet and stir the soup, to

sweep up the slivers of pain that will come

from us. I know each thing we lose will cut

a string, but life is learning to play music

with the strings that are left. I took your

hand and closed my eyes. Aware that

the pelican so many miles away

was in flight.

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or a loved one, discuss what nesting means for each of you, how you create it, mend it, go and come from the nest of those you love.

You Asked about Poetry

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

The longer I’m blessed to be here, the more I realize (make real) the wonder that poetry is a state of being and not a craft of language.

 

YOU ASK ABOUT POETRY

You ask from an island so far away

it remains unspoiled. To walk quietly

till the miracle in everything speaks is

poetry. You want to look in your soul

and in everyday life, as you search for

stones on the beach. Four thousand

miles away, as the sun ices the snow,

I smile. After years of looking, I can

only say that searching for small

things worn by the deep is the art

of poetry. But listening to what

they say is the poem.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a time when you slowed down enough to hear the miracle in everything speak. What circumstances led to this experience and what did the miracle in everything seem to say?

Natural

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

Throughout history, there has always been a dissonant conversation between those who feel we as humans are dark creatures who need to be controlled and those who feel that we are born with and innate goodness that allowed to blossom will heal the world. Of course, it’s both. This passage is part of my own inquiry.

Natural

To say there’s a moral order to the Universe is to speak of physics as if it were nature and not our understanding of how nature works. It’s how we fool ourselves into thinking we are the architects of this journey. This is real knowledge: marching barefoot from the concentration camp, a man stumbles and others fall on top of him because they know he will be killed.

It’s our impulse to protect what falls, to bring water to the thirsty, to love what is hurting. Even today, at the food mart, a woman struggles at a pay phone and I fumble without thinking, “Here, use my cell.”

Before we learn to judge and hesitate, we break surface like whales looking for each other. It’s not moral. It’s natural. I know a vet who lost a leg. Now he rescues homeless dogs. I know a psychologist who stopped seeing clients because he was drowning in their stories. Now he’s a painter who gives portraits to the dying.

I keep asking, “What does it mean to be alive?” Each day reduces me to this question. And each breaking and joining for sixty years has been an answer that like water slips through my hands.

On the way home, I fall on the ice fiddling with my groceries. Two young boys are there in a flash: gathering what broke, cleaning what didn’t, helping me up.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a moment when you felt compelled to offer someone help or assistance without hesitating. Where do you think the impulse of kindness come from in you?

Without Knowing

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

Our first encounters with love shape us and have a lasting impact on how we meet the world. Triggered by a young couple in a café, this poem helped me look back and understand the gift we give each other as we’re just beginning to form both inwardly and outwardly.

 

Without Knowing

Lifting my second coffee to my lips,

I see a young couple near the window.

They’re falling in love. I can tell by the

way he brushes her hair aside, so he can

see her face. Before I can sip, there you

are, across from me, more than forty

years ago. I did the same thing. Parting

your auburn hair, I fell into your eyes.

It undid me, which meant I could no

longer follow the path others had set

for me. Isn’t this the purpose of love?

We only had a few years of opening

what we could in each other, before

you fell into another. You broke my

heart. It took a decade of poking at the

ashes to accept that we sent each other

on our way. Now, in my sixties, after

losing and finding what matters, enough

times to realize that the losing and find-

ing comes and goes like surf that shapes

the sand of our heart, I know I fell through

your eyes, so many years ago, into the sweet,

resilient place only opened by love, where

we get to see our own worth, unformed

like raw material. It takes years of ham-

mering and being hammered to see

what we can shape from what we’re

given. Strange to pick up this conver-

sation now. I take another sip, and

through the steam, can see the young

woman glimpse her worth briefly in her

jittery, young man. I sip and feel the gift

you were without your even knowing. I

don’t even know if you’re still alive. But

in this café, from another continent

of time, I can softly thank you.

 

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of an early love or friendship that allowed you to see your own potential.