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

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.

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

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.

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.

Read 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.