Author Archive for Mark Nepo
Human Migration
They say we began before we could
speak, that whether running from some
woolly mammoth or squinting to see into
the sun, we stood erect and began to search.
They say this was a million years ago. Some-
where in Africa, as the long wind with a
thousand scents swept through the high
grass. What they don’t say is that it’s all
been one nameless soul using many lives
in one endless search. It’s been forty thou-
sand generations, skin upon skin carrying
the one soul as far as each could. Following
the call of animals into the interior. Then
drawn into the desert by sand and wind. Then
one of us believed it was north, another west,
another east. And so we split and each was less
for giving up that Oneness. And so we died and
were born; thinking we were beginning our own
search for gold, for love, for meaning, for silence.
But this is how the one soul keeps us going, by
imbuing each of its skins with a guise of special-
ness along the way. So Europe and Asia and
Australia were settled. Like ant hills built
around a hope for buried sugar. And the one
soul kept us moving. By now the movement
alone gave it peace. And closer to our own
time, only forty generations back, the quiet
ones began a slow journey from Japan across
the Bering Straits and down North America.
At each clearing some settled while the restless
kept on. Down the Pacific to South America
where the child of a child met the child of
a child who’d come the other way from
Europe through the New World down the
Atlantic to this small town along the coast
of Chile. And sensing something ancient
and unfinished in each other, they married
and had a child who, once old enough to
walk, stared into the sun and began
to search.
Life Around the Fire
My neighbor and I wave to each other through the trees; though we don’t even know each other’s name. After a snowstorm, we worm our way out. I admit it’s comforting to see another in the open, leaning on his shovel, his breath clouding as he looks again to the sky. There’s something primal in knowing that we each have a fire we huddle around. I love clearing the path to our door and leaving the light on. Of course, if my fire should go out, would he let me in? And for how long? This has been the human dilemma. We struggle with it every time we look away from the homeless. Different cultures have different ways of holding the question. The tribal leader in Africa has no word for orphan. And the Connecticut Puritan trains his daughter in etiquette and social registry. This is still different from the Holocaust survivor who leaves the door open for an angel he’s never seen while guarding against every noise. I lean on my shovel in the snow and my neighbor waves back. For which I am glad. And today, I don’t feel the need to know his name or story. Yet isn’t it in the steps between our friendly wave and our life around the fire that the work of real community waits?
On the far side of this question is the moment Elie Wiesel recalls of the death march he and thousands were forced to make in the ice and snow of the eastern European night; forced to run barefoot for hours toward Buchenwald. In anticipation of the Allied forces, the SS butted and pistol-whipped the emaciated herd on and on. If anyone slowed or stopped, they were trampled. If someone fell, they were shot. In the midst of this inexplicable hell, a poor soul near him stumbled to the hard ground and others nearby fell on top of him. But why? Because they knew he would be killed? Because without thinking they hoped that the SS wouldn’t know which of them to shoot? Because some in their exhaustion were ready to surrender their broken lives to keep the dark bullet from ending his life? There was too much going on and they just beat them all back up; shouting at them to keep on running.
Of all the harrowing, poignant and unspeakable things Wiesel witnessed as a fifteen year old, this small anonymous moment of community is what has stayed with me. I imagine it at the oddest times; while driving home from work, while walking the dog in snow. It won’t let go of me. I think because it is a painful koan that holds the essence of community. Kind and brave as it is brutal, this moment is a testament to the lengths we’ll go to care for each other; if left or pushed to our true nature. In such pain, in such desperate circumstances, in a frame of mind beaten and starved into numbness, what made these men literally throw their sorry lives into a pile of compassion? This is real knowledge we need to understand. For isn’t it also in the space between us and the fallen that the strength of true community waits?
From waving through the trees to sharing food around our fire to throwing our lives down to protect the fallen, the experiment continues.
The Sublime Disturbance
As the wind makes a different song
through the same tree as its branches
break, God makes finer and finer music
through the wearing down of our will.
Being Here
Transcending down into
the ground of things is akin
to sweeping the leaves that cover
a path. There will always be more
leaves. And the heart of the journey,
the heart of our own awakening, is
to discover for ourselves that the
leaves are not the ground, and that
sweeping them aside will reveal a
path, and finally, that to fully live,
we must take the path and
continually sweep it.
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 what it meets.
The tea being-solves the water
by becoming tea.
Small Light and Timeless Light
Everything is lighted. In the beginning, this is clear. In nature, we tip our face to the sun and our small light is renewed by the timeless light. Often, as we enter the realm of others, our small light serves as a lantern softening and illuminating everyone we look at; especially the dark ones who are blocked from their own light. Of course, we take turns being blocked and dark or open and lighted. This is the power of kindness, to return us to the light we carry. Yet sometimes along the way, no one knows exactly when or how, we can forget our own light and substitute the ones we illuminate as keepers of the light. Often without notice, we can stop opening our face to everything timeless; desperate to stay within our lover’s gaze. Now the inversion has taken place and we have entrusted our light to those who are dark and blocked, who more than evil just don’t know for the moment what to do with light. Why this happens to some of us and not others is a distraction; just as the origin of thirst is never quenching. The slip from opening our face to the light to chasing a dark one we think is holding the light is common. I have done it often in my life. And I have also been dark, unable to find my light. What’s most important is the honest touch that breaks the trance. And the risk to drop all thought, to close our want, and simply tip our face again in the light.
I Shout Their Names
I’m at an age where those I’ve known
for years are dying. Some go quick, like
snow on a warm day. Some more slowly;
as if every week is a tide that takes them
farther and farther away.
To lose someone you know is to be
seized by an invisible hand that pulls
a clump of earth from your heart.
Only after months is it possible to
realize—there is more room to feel.
Now I see your faces in the knots of
trees and chase leaves because I some-
how think they hold things you
meant to say. Now I cry at garlic
bread because you loved its smell.
Perhaps this is your gift to us:
to take up space so far in that
when you go, you empty us out.
And in our grief, we look for you
everywhere till against our will
we rediscover the world.
Outlasting the Storm
The island of self I return to
is washed of all edges, completely
smooth, as if all the loss and struggle
never happened. When a stranger asks
how I came to be here, I have no way
to light the stories of being saved from
myself into a fire that can warm us. No
way to paint the joy of being here across
the sky. I only know that no island is
separate below. Only an island in what
it shows the world. So lay with me in
the sand we’ve given up, that we might
drink what spills from the moon.
Company of Light
I have lost my way, but have found the small fire
which can never go out, though we are terrified it will.
When I first came, I passed you by. I passed the sap oozing from the maple as I passed the truth seeping from the quiet ones. Now birds out of view cry and I know they speak for spirits long gone from the earth. Now when strangers bump and ask, I hesitate, not holding back, but unsure which way to climb into their lives. I keep searching through the things of the world for one to carve into some form of hope—the kind that pulls us closer to the living. When I first came, I couldn’t make things out. But now, as the eyes dull down out here, it’s less a loss and more a turning inward to the canyons of soul where one glimpse of God sears the ego like a cataract. And we put down our complaints and finally be.
Mark’s Weekly Reflection
The Givers
Once the doctors broke their huddle,
her uncle leaned in, “What would you like?”
The little girl beamed, “A white piano!”
It took him three weeks but he had
one waiting in her room. She played
it every day like the medicine it was.
And the guitar player stopping for water
on his way through Virginia, hearing the
gas station owner on the phone, “I got no
choice. I gotta put ’em down.” The young
man keeps telling everyone, “I don’t know
why, but I had to take them.” Now the
old dog and three pups live in his car.
And the old nurse who dreams of her
grandma sitting in the backseat on long
trips warming her hands. And this one,
in awe of her sister who after ten years of
meditating gave it up to care for orphans.
Not ’cause she was done with it, but ’cause
what she found there was now everywhere.
And the speech therapist who when sad
opens the memory of her grandfather like
a thin napkin holding a pressed flower. A
country doctor, he took chickens instead of
money. She was thirteen when he died. A
week after the funeral, her father and uncle
were going through his things. In a burst of
anger, her uncle dumped his books in the
field by the burning barrel and dragged the
bookcase home. It began to rain and the
books, like broken doves, softened and
enlarged. She took the older ones and
keeps them close. She opens them
when it rains and he talks to her.
And how about the son of a heroin addict
who serves soup in a shelter? Since the givers
seldom know what they give, it’s the pour of
the ladle that ties us together. Now you tell
me of your old aunt who lives on an island
off the coast. Going blind, she’s tying ropes
from house to tree to water bucket;
feeling her way through all that
is familiar and strangely liking it.