Archive for August, 2011
Second Sight
My father’s developing cataracts at 87.
The doctor gave him drops. Now he
swears he doesn’t need glasses. It’s a
second sight that people his age get.
It doesn’t last too long. I want to ask,
“What will you look at with your one
fresh eye?” If only seeing this way would
let him know me. At night, I dream of
something clear and potent to burn the
film I carry. Today, a scuffle between a
homeless man and a clerk at the drug-
store and I sit in my car thinking, “Is it
our wounds—like the one that grips
me now—that hold our lies open
till our weeping lets us see?
As Far As the Heart Can See—available in audio
You can now buy the audio for As Far As the Heart Can See instead of or in addition to the print book!
On Amazon Amazon or Barnes and Noble
An excerpt will be available here on Monday!
Video: Developing the presence to respond to your circumstances
As we develop the bandwidth and interconnectivity of our Whole IQ, we find greater presence in meeting our life circumstances from a place of deeper self-care, honesty, and integrity. Michele talks about how our presence is contingent on living in an energy that is honest and best serves ourselves and our world each day.
For Instance
I started writing because life took my breath away. It was how when stunned by beauty I tried to stay stunned. How when touched I tried to keep the touch alive. The miracle of sun on water, for instance, when dwelled upon, begins to say, you see, this is what love can do to pain. The old woman sifting tea through a large wood-framed screen, who learned this from her mother; she sifting tea in the light morning wind without a word; her very presence begins to say, you see, this is how the heart broken into compassion sifts what is true, so it can be steamed into something warm that heals… I still long to be stunned. I still long to be touched. And as my eyes grow slow to focus and my hearing falls into a wash, I am losing the distinction between people and nature, between cityscapes and landscapes, between silence and music. And wonderfully, in a startling return to miracle, they are all at heart one, as they have always been. The other day George and I cut up on old cherry tree and sawed one of the logs in half. It was filled with ants who had been feasting on the knot. They scurried into the grass. Funny how we like to burrow into the knots. After surrendering its knots, the log was empty. It was then we noticed a line of inner grain that looked just like a feather; as if some ancient bird had been turned into wood long before we were born. This is our plight on earth: to be stunned, to be touched, to eat our way through the knots till we are light as a feather.
The Game
As fans flit about and land,
it’s the empty field that awes me.
Going through the tunnel, the history
of every game ever played hovers like the
memory of lightning in a canyon, a force
no one can make appear or keep from
fading. And the great ones know that
they only borrow a much-needed grace,
if they’re lucky. All the work, all the
running and swinging, all the seasons
of dirt and leather, so that one inning
in May or September, when they leap
for a liner, the legends might lift their
glove higher, when they swing for the
fences, the wind of sluggers long gone
might rush their arms through the zone
to help them catch up to that devastating
heater. But now, with pitchers stretching
and veterans getting taped, the ground crew
is liming the batter’s box, spraying the infield,
and sweeping the mound. Clean bases are
being spiked at the corners and the lines
are drawn which ordinary humans will
cross for a few hours with the possibility
of being immortal, which will evaporate as
soon as they reach home or step off the field.
The great ones know it’s not they who
are great, but the lift of the field.
Mark Nepo is a contributor to The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy
The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy
The full list of contributors includes:
•Maya Angelou, who writes the foreword
•Bono and Nicholas Kristof writing on giving and social action
•Ellen DeGeneres, Stanley Crouch, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writing on equality
•Julia Roberts and Diane von Furstenberg writing on culture and style
•Toni Morrison and Elie Wiesel writing on books
•Maria Shriver and Gloria Steinem writing on women’s issues
•Dr. Phil McGraw, Mark Nepo, and Marianne Williamson writing on spirit and personal growth
•Bob Greene and Dr. Mehmet Oz writing on health and wellness
•John Travolta and Phil Donahue contributing tributes to Ms. Winfrey
Two from Katarinaslav
They may never have heard the other’s name.
Ten years apart, the older combing her pigtails
out, the younger just learning how to braid them.
Maybe the younger saw the older laughing in the hay.
But both, as innocents, steamed their way to America
where there were more people than cows and more
streets than fields; where everyone spoke in strange,
quick clips. Both dreaming in their brick tenements
of the goat’s milk they were given just before dawn.
Both wondering where their goats were. Both missing
the quiet blue. How they learned about pavement and
phones. How they married. How they rolled English in
their mouths like little stones. How they never knew
that the other had children. How their children had
children who had no accent. All the while, the goats
sleeping in the back of their Russian dreams. And how
you, grandchild of the younger, should make your way
to Albany University, to sit in a class with me, grand-
child of the older. Even then, we never knew. And how
twenty years later, we should re-find each other. Until
a hundred years from that village, in a moment of
missing my grandma so, I speak of Katarinaslav, and
you are stopped. And oceans from the warm goat’s
milk their fathers pressed to their sleepy lips, you tell
me that your grandmother also had strong hands and
a powerful heart. That she also spent her last days in a
Brooklyn hospital. Could they have landed in the same
brick village near the end? Perhaps they had the same
nurse dab water on their swollen lips, which they
thought was warm milk. Perhaps they are now re-
lieved of the journey. And speak Russian and shake
their heads at how our love has finally brought them
together in a soft mirror of that Russian plain. It
took a hundred years but perhaps they sip goat’s
milk on the other side. Perhaps they eat
sponge cake in heaven.
Michele McHall video: Working Together Can Be More Like Jazz!
In this clip, Michele talks about how her work with teams and groups in awakening their Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences, or Whole IQ, leads to greater creativity and collaboration.
The Finitudes
It’s taken almost sixty years but I’ve stopped
figuring out what people want. Now I’m working
on not being afraid of not giving people what they
want. I’m trying to absorb light which from a person
feels like truth. Trying to let light pass through which
when it happens feels like love. Then I stumble on
Heidegger’s notion of dwelling with care in the being
that underlies everything. Feel myself saying yes. Only
to discover he supported Hitler and enforced Aryan
law as Rector of the University of Freiburg. A telegram
to Hitler. And three Sieg Heils at the end of his inaugural
address. Now my not being shaped by what people want
seems trivial. Or is it the DNA of conscience? Hannah
Arendt, his student and lover, was a Jew. She testified
on his behalf after the war. How are we to hold such
contradictions? Somewhere seeds are breaking ground
and somewhere flesh is burning. This is hard enough
to take in. Yet how does this happen in the same
person without their soul exploding? We’ve all been
taught to take what we need and leave the rest. Why
not drink from Heidegger’s being and push the rest
of his plate away? But the pushed-away parts evolve
too. I’m trying to absorb what we’ve done to each
other throughout history, trying to eat all of what
I see and scrub one thing back to the beginning.
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