Archive for March, 2011
Waiting
April is almost here, but the weather in southern Oregon continues cold and wet. Snow rings the Rogue Valley, and all of us are waiting, waiting, waiting for spring’s sweet exit visas.
Meanwhile, I practice waiting, or rather, I make a practice out of that which has been forced on me. I am tired of winter, weary of the cold, and fed up with the lingering head cold I can’t seem to shake.
Still, I’m happy to be breathing, happy to wake up and simply be. I make effort to get warm. The effort is for inner and outer warmth. So I medicated my cold as much as I could and braved the ordeal of air travel to go to St. Louis last week to honor a dearly departed friend and mentor, George Hitchcock. George would have loved the irony of the Midwest weather. I walked outside on my first day into 35 degrees. The next day reached 80. The third day went back to 35, and the fourth day zoomed to 80 once more. Dress in layers, indeed! Our poor bodies had no idea what to make of it.
Meditation helped. Meditation always helps. I can feel the waiting rise up in me; I can see the waiting flit by. I can hear it’s chatter, I can smell it (like dry grass on a hot summer day), and I can feel its weighty embrace. At last, at some point, I settle into it, the waiting, and it just is. I just am. It’s not spectacular. There are no fireworks. There’s just a moment of awareness, a jolt of being wide awake.
Just Keep Working
The leaves are inside out.
A storm is coming. Who first
noticed this? And what is a storm?
A disturbed state in the atmosphere.
Like the dark cloud I sometimes carry
in my head. And why inside out? Is
there something in us that wants so
badly to be drawn out that it dreams
of the storm? There’s a small bird
with a yellow stripe across its face
found on the east coast of Australia.
They say the stripe is there because
of all the nectar it eats. It comes out
in the aftermath of storms before the
flowers fold back into themselves.
Isn’t this what we do for each other?
Eat sweetness from each other’s
wounds. I want to be a
yellow-faced honeyeater.
Picking Cotton, Washing Windows
On my way to the St. Louis airport yesterday, I rode the hotel van alone with the shuttle driver. I suppose we were both in a conversational mood because I found myself asking him about where he was born (“little town, about a hundred miles away), how long he’d lived in St. Louis (since 1960), and I listened as he told me about picking cotton as a boy.
He was good at it, just took to it, he said. He could do 300 pounds a day while other good pickers might make 180 to 210 pounds a day. He talked about picking cotton like a ceramist talking about clay, or a painter her palette. He talked so vividly I could see him as a boy out in the field, picking three rows at once, scorning the knee pads that were provided for pickers if they wanted them, picking so efficiently he was soon way out front. I learned the difference between picking clean cotton and dirty cotton (he picked dirty, meaning some weeds and stems went into the bag, and that way he picked faster), that his boss always had a line you could go up to but not cross when picking dirty cotton. I learned that you wanted to know where the pick-up truck was. You didn’t want to be on the wrong end of the field with a full 85-pound bag of cotton. You needed to be mindful picking cotton.
“Of course,” he said, “machinery’s replaced all that now.” He sounded almost wistful. As if answering my silent question he said, “I liked it, being outside, picking. I made 50 cents per hundred pounds. That was good money then, especially for a kid.”
Walking through the airport, I was still thinking of him, of all he’d said about work he’d once enjoyed, and I paused for to admire a window washer waving his sponge and squee-gee over the huge windows.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found washing windows without leaving streaks next to impossible. I’ve been drilled in all of the conventional wisdom and have tried to put it to work, but I’ve never been satisfied with my results. Yet, here was this guy whipping through windows with effortless grace. First he’d apply the sponge, lightly but thoroughly, then spread the soapy mixture all over, then wipe it all away with perfect squee-gee strokes that resembled the shape of butterfly wings.
I was fascinated. I walked over and told him how good he was. He seemed pleased, so I asked how he did it—that squee-gee stroke.
“Practice,” he said. “It’s all in the wrist.”
I suspect it’s also all in the outlook, too. He looked confident, relaxed, peaceful. How often do you look that way when you’re working? I wonder the same about myself. Over the next few days, perhaps you can keep tabs on yourself, and tune in to others around you. What does work done well look like? Share your revelations in your journal. Who knows? You may even discover a bridge there to a poem you need or want to write.
Taiji
It is ancient but not old.
The Taoist master Chuang Tzu
first spoke of it in the 3rd century
BC as the Great Ridgepole that holds
the Unseeable Tent of the Universe
open. Around which we dance. Trying
to leave it. Always coming back. Within
a hundred years it was known as Tai Chi.
In the Tang Dynasty an unknown poet
spoke of life as swinging on the Great
Ridgepole. Hundreds of years later, a
Spanish poet said that meeting another
in mid-swing is the wonder of love. After
living through monsoons, a Hindu master
said that we move until we tire into stillness.
Then we are still till we grow impatient to
move. One blossoms into the other. In
that blossoming we become wakeful.
In such moments we are the bubbles
carried by water, the blue within the heart
of every flame, the aliveness sleeping inside
every ache. It is ancient but not old. Meet
me at the Ridgepole. We can take our
turn swinging around eternity.
Mothers are goddesses of the universal dance, aren’t they? As we first stir into being, we’re imprinted with rhythms and beats that emanate from the energy cores of mothers, so that by the time we emerge from the womb we’re already dancers whether we know it or not.
We dance like the blades of grass that weave and sway in the breeze. We’re tugged and pulled and reshaped by gravity, by the moon, and as we age we dance to the mysterious energy influences of moods. We create dances in our work movements and in all the relationships we form. We learn new steps every day, even more if we’re awake, if we’re paying attention. Even the trees and mountains are dancing, always dancing. The world, itself improbably dancing gorgeously in the vastness of space, hosts a pageant of dancing! Here is a passage from the poem Four for Sir John Davies by Theodore Roethke:
I take this cadence from a man named Yeats:
I take it and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain.
Yes, I was dancing mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.
May dancing bless you in all that you dream about and do!
Mark’s new audio books are now available!
The Book of Awakening is available at:
Finding Inner Courage is available at:
Soul Series archive now available
Mark Nepo’s conversations with Oprah on her “Soul Series” radio show are now archived online. Listen to clips of Mark and Oprah’s inspiring conversation here.
Relentless Hunger
As soon as we covet what someone else is or has,
that desire prevents us from seeing what we have.
—Paul Bowler
I was at a conference, and in the basement of the enormous hotel was a casino. Having only been once or twice, I was curious. As I entered the windowless room, I was stopped right away by the sight of a woman working two slot machines at once. I learned that she had been there all day, never leaving for fear that the moment she would leave, the jackpot would flood from the mouth of the machine and she would miss it. This painful scene struck me as a metaphor for that part of us that always looks for life other than where we are. Whether our search is for wealth or love or success in the eyes of others, the underlying sense that life is not where we are, but always just out of reach, cripples us. It enervates our will to live by siphoning our best efforts into entanglements that are difficult to escape.
I think our current problem with obesity is a painful form of gambling, which presupposes that if we take enough in, the right one will relieve us of our relentless hunger. The painful truth is that so many of us keep eating things that are ultimately unfulfilling, and so we never satisfy our hungers. Carl Jung described alcoholism as an attempt to quench a spiritual thirst with the wrong drink. Similarly, our obsession with eating seems an attempt to feel full by ingesting the wrong foods. What we really need is to empty ourselves in order feel at all.
I recently went through my own bout with eating. Over a period of four years, I became overweight without realizing it. My knees began to hurt. My energy became heavy. I began to feel like I was moving underwater. With my wife Susan’s help, I’ve managed to lose thirty-five pounds, and, more than feeling physically renewed and so much lighter, I feel clear again—as if waking from a subtle form of amnesia. Now I have regained the distinction between cravings and hunger, which I didn’t know I’d lost. Now I have immense compassion for anyone trying to break the cycle of relentless hunger. For no one sets out to eat too much or drink too much or spend too much. No one aims to lose themselves.
It is as true as it is old: Feed the inner hunger and the outer hunger will dissipate. Ignore the inner hunger and nothing in the world will satisfy you. So many things get in the way, not because life is out to trap us, but because the journey through it all is how a spirit awakens in a body on earth. And we are challenged to dig for a deeper response. When you catch yourself being blind and hurtful, look for more light. When you find yourself darkened by pain, wait until you can see. When life seems to flood you, put down your mask. When feeling cut off and depressed, look for work that is whole. And when feeling you will die if a particular hunger is not fed, let that part of you die. Get out of your own way.
Brain Questioning
If, as Freud said, the mind is a poetry-making organ, then therein lies the answer to the question you may ask your brain: “Old friend, what is it you would have me do?”
Do you remember the times in your life when you’ve posed this question? How often has this answer come back to you?
The mind is a wagon, always rolling and rocking uncertainly to some Other place one can’t see clearly from the vantage point of the seat—the body. But the mind is also a home, your home, your sacred place. When you nurture that place, its air is sweet and warm, like the embrace of someone you love dearly. Its light is the buttery glow of magic hour, its breath is the exhalation of Buddha and Jesus, Mohammed and Brighid, Ghandi and Mother Teresa, the entire world.
What your mind would have you do is see, touch, breathe, taste, speak, and be poetry. Imagine the beneficial life you want and set out to make it so with a lightness in your step and compassion and love in your heart. You are the myth maker, the storyteller, the healer. You are the chair with an ear, the friend who willingly reads another’s heart. You are the new paradigm, everyone in the world together, serving each other.
Equal
“A few bright, unpredictable years,”
I read. That’s our portion,
Whether rich or poor, naked
In the media glare
Or one of the countless Unknowns,
We’re all together, identical
In the dust, in impartial air.
No earth says here, this clump is softer.
No wind offers a sweeter current because,
Well, because you’re just you. You and I
Are meaningless, sisters and brothers.
Isn’t it joyful, equals,
As we all go together?
The Gift and the Hole
We are each born with a gift and a hole, and given a life to be in conversation with them, to have one fill the other. It doesn’t matter where the hole is in your life or what the gift is, it is always the journey of a life on earth to discover how they meet and complete each other within your time on earth. We waste so much time trying to hide the hole, feel ashamed of the hole, eliminate the hole, feel victimized because we have a hole, or feel that we are entitled not to have any holes, and so are diverted from our soul’s journey. This diversion gives rise to the blame game and keeps us from inhabiting the depths opened by the hole that can only be illumined by the light of our gift.
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