Mark Nepo's Blog, page 9

Turn Around

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

It was in a dream in my sixtieth year that I realized that for all my efforts to protect my inwardness from a brutal world, my inwardness is the source of my strength and resilience.

Turn Around

I’ve spent too much time

protecting my spirit from the

world, close but with my back

to it. Now, when I’m too old to

remember what I was afraid of,

my spirit rises behind me like

early light to move the dark

along. Its warmth turns me

around.

Facing my soul, its aliveness

is unending. It can take the

shape of anything. I can drink

from it like a lake. Its waves can

rise and turn into birds. Stars

drop into it and I can drink

their light. Bowing to it, it

mirrors the face below my

face.

I’ve had it backwards. My

soul protects me, the way the

sun without moving causes

every thing to grow.

A Question to Walk With: What is the nature of your conversation with your soul?

In the Interior

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

This poem speaks to a lifelong journey with my oldest friend Robert. We have known each other for close to thirty years.

 

In the Interior

When you let me in your life,

all the way in, we took this walk

that turned into a hike that I didn’t

know we were on, until it got late, and

you said, “Let’s camp here and go on

in the morning.” That night I sensed

we were in the interior and knew it

was a privilege. The next day, birds

seemed to fly closer and streams

closed behind us and branches

dropped their needles to soften our

way. It was then I realized, the path

was part of you. When we got to the

ridge, the one you listen to eternity

from, we both started to cry. And to

think, one day we were strangers.

A Question to Walk With: Journal the story of the history of a friend, someone you have travelled to the interior with. After a week, tell this story to another friend.

For My Brother

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

During my father’s slow avalanche to death, my brother was a tireless advocate on his behalf, a bodhisattva in the way he cleared debris and made things easier for everyone around him. I was in a plane over the Pacific Ocean when I finally wrote this poem for him.

For My Brother

You were there when I had cancer

and now you’ve carried Dad through

the rickety bridge of his bones to what-

ever time is left. And somehow you are

tending the argument that is our mother

like a kettle without a handle.

For all your gifts, your care is the well

that has no bottom and, though hoisting

it up bucket by bucket turns you inside

out, that you know no other way

makes you my hero.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a time when you gave more than you thought you had to give; how that felt and how doing so changed you.

The Murmur of Life

That our heart can receive and hold anything and that we feel that the intensity of living is too much to bear is a paradox we can only live into. Under what is both unbearable and endlessly uplifting is the murmur of life.

 

The Murmur of Life

I hear this murmur wherever I turn: when sweeping the grains of coffee from the counter, when picking up the stray bottle in the parking lot, wondering about the one who drank it, when watching a frightened child being squeezed in the back of a crowd erupting into violence. I feel the liminal glow that lifts things further into life; the way wind blows pollen down the field when no one is looking. I feel the breeze of light that lifts a bruised, tired head after the weight of great pain. I feel the thing in life that won’t let us stop growing, no matter how difficult the circumstance. A bluebird needs a small, enclosed house propped in the open where it can nest and give birth, the way the heart is our enclosed house propped in the open, to which our soul brings twigs. It’s the scratching of the twigs in our heart that seems unbearable, as we wait for something blue and light within us to be born.

By its very nature, the heart is destined to be smaller than what it needs to fill it. For the human heart is a powerful incubator. And we are left with the agitation of always feeling more than we can digest, make sense of, or handle. It seems the heart needs to heat up, so what it’s incubating can pop out of us with its hungry beak reaching for the sky. Our most precious moments of aliveness arise when the heart is brimming with more than it can contain. Our job is to be a trustworthy birdhouse for the hatching of mystery. This is how life awakens the soul.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a time when your heart felt more than it could contain, a time you couldn’t quite make sense of, and try to describe what was incubated in your heart during that time.

Out of the Way

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

Kindness and suffering are wordless teachers, ready to bend us and soften us until we accept that we are here; that, try as we will, we can’t build our way out of existence or dream our way out of being human. Once opened in this way, we come to realize that the only way out is to love being here.

Out of the Way

Kindness bends us, the way

the strike of a bell bends the

smallest leaves.

 

Suffering softens us, the way the

beak of a dark bird pokes the water

of the heart, leaving a ripple

that shimmers through us.

 

Kindness and suffering will bring us

to a clearness that everyone knows as

home, once what is unnecessary is

loved or pained out of the way.

 

A Question to Walk With: Describe one way you have been bent by kindness and one way you have been softened by suffering. How have these experiences shaped you?

Meeting Life with Courage, with Mark Nepo

Meeting Life with Courage, with Mark Nepo from Sounds True on Vimeo.

Our Hands

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

The word authentic comes from the Greek authentes. It means “bearing the mark of the hands.” This original meaning tells us that to be authentic mean being hands-on. It’s through our hands and through the life of touch and honest engagement that we learn and grow.

Our Hands

Sometimes, with no warning, we suffer

an earthquake and have to remake the

earth beneath us. Someone we love may

leave or die or think us cruel when we are

kind. Sometimes the tools we need break

or are stolen or simply stop working and

we have to invent some more. Sometimes

it feels like we can’t get through. That the

phone won’t get reception. And the com-

puter gets all jammed And sometimes what

gets through is partial and misunderstood.

It is then we are forced to go barefoot and

re-find our hands. Sometimes we are asked

to drift away from the crowd in order

to be found by what we love.

 

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of one thing you learned by using your hands.

 

The Dilation of What Seems Ordinary

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

To dilate means to widen or open more fully and the purpose of experience, both through ease and pain, is to widen and open us more fully. The normal way we meet the world is full of bumps and bruises and noise that scratches up the heart. And yet, if we can endure and lean in, we are widened and opened to a depth that weaves the tissue of the Universe together.

The Dilation of What Seems Ordinary

Just now, it happened again. My defenses were down, my memory machine asleep, my dream machine tired, and so the mystery—which is always beaming in all directions—made it through. And the moment of clarity it releases is always like a return from amnesia. So this is what it means to be a person, how could I forget: To be alive, to look out from these small canyons called eyes, to receive light from the sun off the water and feel it shimmer on the common water that fills my heart. To listen to the silence waiting under our stories, long enough that all the vanished words said over time simmer up in a scent that, for a second, makes me feel journeys that are not mine. Till I surface before you with a stumbled sense of happiness. Not because I’m any closer to what I want, or even know what I want. But because in the flood of all that is living, I am electrified—the way a muscle dreams under the skin of lifting whatever needs to be lifted.

 

A Question to Walk With: What does it mean to you, to be a person? Ask this question of someone you’d like to know better.

Heartwood

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

An old friend died several years ago. At the time I wrote this poem. I don’t know why but I still can’t delete his phone number from my contact list. Oh, to do so would seem so final, but I also still feel in contact with him.

 

Heartwood

My friend has died and the grass is

growing as I watch the logs dry and

crack in the garage. Yesterday, I saw a

lone worm leave the heartwood as if

waiting till it was safe. I wonder what

lone secret left Steve’s heart after he

died before the medics arrived. Is it

hiding in his closet or in our grief?

Is this the relentless, resilient way,

that what survives moves from one

carrier to the next? There are buds

on the maple though it is October.

Even wet concrete seems beautiful.

If I knew the question, I’d ask it

of everyone.

A Question to Walk With: What is the one question you would want to ask of everyone? During the next week, ask this question of one trusted friend.

 

 

To Cultivate Wonder

Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.

Wonder is one of the arts of reverence. It is always very close to the surface, just behind the eye, below the tongue, in between the beats of a waiting heart. It’s a subtle resource that requires our welcome to show its full strength.

To Cultivate Wonder

As a teacher, parent, partner, friend, even as a stranger meeting other strangers, our noble charge when meeting another is to cultivate wonder.

We have only a few seconds to love the wonder out in the open or those we meet will swallow it. Seconds to warm the wonder into the air where it will merge with the living Universe it comes from to reveal the kinship of things. Seconds to let this timeless resource come into our knowing so it can save us from the brutality of surface living.

If, out of insecurity or pride or an effort to achieve prominence, we assert our own authority, the wonder will go into hiding like a wounded animal. The living authority of being that resides in all of us needs to be affirmed, not asserted. Only safety, honesty, and welcome—the servants of encouragement—can create a hothouse for the soul. And then in a flash of Spirit, the wonder, like a common, irreplaceable flower, will make blossoms of us all.

A Question to Walk With: When are you most open to wonder? In what environment does wonder grow out of you?