Author Archive for Mark Nepo
Three Covenants
Our love needs to be bigger than our insanity.
—Henk Brandt
There are three covenants that keep us engaged in the work of love. To begin with, when we see something true and beautiful in someone, it is not the work of love to change them or force their growth in our direction. It is the work of love to create conditions by which what is true and beautiful in all we behold can grow and blossom, bringing forth its deepest nature. At the same time, the work of love depends on giving others, especially young people, a sense of safety in the world, nurturing their confidence to lean into life and the unknown—not away from these eternal resources. Still, being human, we constantly slip from integrating our experience to being consumed by our experience. We move, almost daily, from having our fear, pain, and worry live in us to living within our fear, pain, and worry. So the third covenant of love is to keep each other company when we’re drowning in our experience and awash in our feelings, until it all can right-size, until our experience and feelings can once again live in us. These covenants exercise the muscle of compassion we call the heart.
—excerpt from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, October 2012
After Danse Russe*
A hundred years ago, a composer
wrote music about a puppet who
comes alive when his strings are
cut. Then a poet who delivered
babies wrote a poem stirred by
the same thing; confessing to his
grotesque loneliness, to his tangle
of strings in the middle of the day.
And I confess to my own blunt
meanderings like a bear without
food in a glass forest. Forget being
original. If cut free, we are drawn
to the Origins where the arrhythmia
of being awake and alive at the same
time forces the heart to stop ever so
briefly when we realize we are all
alone and yet never alone. All of
us puppets dreaming of no strings.
*William Carlos Williams wrote his poem Danse Russe (French for Russian Dance) in 1917. The poem centers on a puppet who comes alive once his strings are cut and Williams’ poem speaks to his own coming alive in a moment of solitude. It is interesting that the ballet Petrushka was debuted in 1911 by The Ballets Russes (French for The Russian Ballets); the legendary, itinerant ballet company directed by Sergei Diaghilev between 1909 and 1929. The original music for Petrushka was composed by Igor Stravinsky. Petrushka is a traditional Russian story of a puppet who comes to life.
My Favorite Glass
You broke my favorite glass.
Now you feel bad. It was my
favorite because I touched it
so many times. I looked at its
pieces you so carefully gathered.
I think it was tired and wanted
to go. I held the largest shard
and it glittered. I held it to my
ear and it said, “I am now free.”
What makes things special is
who brings them and what
they carry. You are special.
Our dog is special. The wind
through the tops of the trees
before dawn which you were
amazed by before you broke
the glass is special. So don’t
feel bad. Just feel.
The Truth of Experience
Imagine a river of fire
and you are a piece of wood
in which someone has hidden
a jewel and no matter how you
try, you are destined to burn your
way to the falls where just when
you feel certain you are to die, the
weight of the wood has burned off
and only the jewel floats over the
edge and lightly the pool cleanses
what has been hidden for so long.
Beyond the fall the deep is just
what’s been waiting under the fire
and the jewel is just what’s been
waiting under the wood
and the air praises what
has never been seen.
Keeping What Is True Before Us
Faith is not an insurance, but a constant effort, a constant listening to the eternal voice.
—Abraham Heschel
I needed to have blood drawn for my annual physical and even though it’s been twenty years since I’ve been spit out from the mouth of the whale of cancer, it’s never very far. I kept telling myself that was then, this is now. But in the early morning waiting room, I could feel my breath speed up, higher in my chest, and below any conscious remembering, the many waiting room walls began to appear, dark friends who say they miss me.
Once in the little lab room, a young woman wrote my name on a small vial, asked me to make a fist, and as she poked the needle in my vein, I looked away; swallowing my whole journey which wants to rise through these little needle pricks any chance it can get.
It was over, for another year. I didn’t realize it but I had been holding my breath, way inside. As I opened the door back into the world, I exhaled from underneath my heart and suddenly began to cry; not heavily but the way our gutters overflow in spring when the ice thaws all at once.
I was surprised. After twenty years, I thought the alarm of all that suffering and almost dying would be knit more quietly in my skin. How come it keeps bursting forth when I least expect it? I’ve been told it’s a form of post-traumatic stress; a problem that can be addressed. As I drove to work, I made a vow to tend to this in the coming year.
The next day I was up early, before dawn, eager for my morning swim. On the way, at a light, it began to snow very lightly and the voice of the singer in the radio seemed, for an instant, to be falling like the snow on the windshield. It made start to cry again in that overflowing way. It’s been a week since the little pin prick in my arm and I keep crying at simple things—the late cloud parting for the moon, the footprint of a small deer, even the fast food wrapper on the sidewalk. With each small cry, it feels less a release and more like an irrepressible, unfiltered tenderness at being fully here. The more of these moments I experience, the less a problem it seems. For isn’t this what I’ve been after: to be this close to life, to be pricked below the surface of things? Now it seems the damn needle is a gift! Now I wonder: isn’t anything that keeps us this close to life a gift? Now I want to learn the art of puncturing whatever grows in the way in order to feel that moment where everything touches everything else. I’m coming to see that keeping what is true before us reminds us that there was never a better time than now.
—Excerpted from Mark’s new book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, October 2012
Loose Like Silk
The other night at dinner
Eileen tells us that her great
aunt would play piano for silent
movies. Something in this won’t
let me go. Perhaps it’s the image
of someone playing music in the
dark while we watch others like
us meet life in silence. It makes
me think of a caveman drumming
a stone with a stick while his brother
draws his bow but fails to shoot be-
cause he loses himself in the bison
grazing. Perhaps the playing of
images in the dark and the play-
ing of music while we watch is all
to keep us from shooting. I think
the brother who loses himself and
Eileen’s aunt playing Brahms in the
dark are of the same tribe. Last night
we went next door for a glass of wine
with Stacy and Anders and their blind
collie Kai broke my heart open a little
further. He noses gently about every-
thing and watching him find his way
about the yard in the late sun feels
like you and me when we put down
our masks. Only when we rush do
we bump and break things. Kai’s
soft, wide eyes search in their dark-
ness for the shelf of late light and
finding something, he rests his head
in the open air, in the warm hand
of eternity, feeling safe in a light
he can’t see.
The Art of Encouragement: How to Encourage Yourself & Others
There is an art to imparting strength and confidence, to inspiring and heartening what is already within us. In many ways, to encourage is to help the heart unfold. And each time we do so, another aspect of our true self unfolds. Very often, the art of encouragement is needed to counter some sort of fear, which blocks us from what we already know. Fear makes courage forget itself. Encouragement reminds us of what we’re capable of.
In the modern classic The Wizard of Oz, the lion is afraid of everything and is sorely in need of courage – not to be heroic, but simply to make it through the days. So he joins Dorothy, the tin man, and the scarecrow – all off to see the wizard. In particular, the lion hopes the wizard can magically give him some courage. En route, he is tested in unexpected ways, and, though afraid, he manages to cope quite bravely.
Beneath the Chatter
Archie loves Betty, but Betty loves Petra
and Danny wants whatever the person next
to him has. And the poor want to be rich
and the rich want to live forever. And Henry
fears Miguel and Miguel who has done nothing
fears the white police. And Jorge tries to explain
to his son what a border is, why this handful of
dirt is different than the dirt across the river.
Yet in the dark soil we finger when no one is
looking, we’re silent as trees; inching through
the earth while growing toward the light.
Mother at 85
We haven’t spoken in years.
My father says her memory is
shrinking. After five minutes
she’s unsure what conversation
she’s parachuted into. She can’t
remember what she went down
the mayonnaise aisle for. It softens
me and I wonder: what crumbles
first, the hard times or the soft?
Has she lost her version of why
I left? Of when she slapped me
in the eye? Of her darkly whis-
pering, “I wish I could hurt
you more.”
Tonight I visit her in dream,
watching without her knowing.
This time I see through
my version of things.
As she’s going, I want to
see her more clearly. The only
time I might get close to her
is when she no longer
remembers who I am.
Listening to Others
Still enough and we break surface
like small fish wanting to eat light.
In that moment, we’re up in the air,
eyes wide, our mouths open, our
bodies shining from the deep.
Sometimes we even touch before
going back down. When in the
deep, we long for the breach,
when in the air, we dread the
fall. But this is life: the leap for
light, startled to find each other,
the plunge back down, the leap
for light, startled to find each
other… Listen… We are coming.
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