Author Archive for Three Intentions
Meeting Life with Courage, with Mark Nepo
Meeting Life with Courage, with Mark Nepo from Sounds True on Vimeo.
To Cultivate Wonder
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
Wonder is one of the arts of reverence. It is always very close to the surface, just behind the eye, below the tongue, in between the beats of a waiting heart. It’s a subtle resource that requires our welcome to show its full strength.
To Cultivate Wonder
As a teacher, parent, partner, friend, even as a stranger meeting other strangers, our noble charge when meeting another is to cultivate wonder.
We have only a few seconds to love the wonder out in the open or those we meet will swallow it. Seconds to warm the wonder into the air where it will merge with the living Universe it comes from to reveal the kinship of things. Seconds to let this timeless resource come into our knowing so it can save us from the brutality of surface living.
If, out of insecurity or pride or an effort to achieve prominence, we assert our own authority, the wonder will go into hiding like a wounded animal. The living authority of being that resides in all of us needs to be affirmed, not asserted. Only safety, honesty, and welcome—the servants of encouragement—can create a hothouse for the soul. And then in a flash of Spirit, the wonder, like a common, irreplaceable flower, will make blossoms of us all.
A Question to Walk With: When are you most open to wonder? In what environment does wonder grow out of you?
Legacy
In the days after my father died, there were many quiet moments and many stories told. It was a small thing my mother said while crying over tea that allowed me to connect these small stories of my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father. I never realized that they form a legacy I’m a part of.
Legacy
My great-grandfather was a leather
smith. He made saddles for a feudal
baron in Russia. Chased by Cossacks
into the Dnieper River, he was spared
because they didn’t want their horses
to get cold. In America, he would say,
“When in trouble, wait till you see
a way out.”
My grandfather was an out of work
printer in Brooklyn during the De-
pression. He’d bring strangers home
for dinner. When grandma would
pull him aside with “We don’t have
enough,” he’d kiss her cheek and say,
“Break whatever we have in half.
It will be enough.”
Now, my 93-year-old father bobs
inside his stroke-laden body, and
my mother shakes her head, “I don’t
know how he does it.” She stares into
the trail of their lives, “No matter what
we faced, he’d always say, ‘Give me a
minute, and I’ll figure out what to do.’”
I braid their lessons into a rope I can
use: to see a way out, to know there
will be enough, to figure out what
to do. Standing still in the river,
till we are shown how to stay
alive and give.
A Question to Walk With: Describe one story or saying that comes from your birth family or your chosen family that has shaped your understanding of life.
Midway in Our Journey
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
Part of everyone’s journey in life is to arrive at precipice or fork in the road or at the end of a path and to realize we no longer know our way. Hard as this is, this is where the inner journey begins, when all we’ve carried has served its purpose and now we must burn it for warmth and to see what’s next. This is when the soul shows itself, if we will listen. This is when we assume our full stature and make our own path.
Midway in Our Journey
Just when we’re softened by the years,
when we have enough experience to see
for ourselves, our maps are torn from us.
This can be frightening, but there’s
divine timing in the dissolution of a
stubborn mind, the way an inlet waits
on the last rock to crumble so it can
find its destiny in the sea. Losing the
way set out by others is necessary so we
can discover for ourselves what it means
to be alive. Now we can burn the clothes
others have laid out for us, not in anger
but to light our way. Now we can let the
soul spill its honey on the unleavened life
we’ve been carrying. Now we can rise.
A Question to Walk With: Describe an inheritance of mind or heart, of values or goals, that no longer works for you. Describe your history with this inheritance: how it came to you, how it worked for you and when it stopped being relevant. Describe how you are finding your way.
Somewhere
Read these weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
No matter what we’re going through, the opposite is happening somewhere else at the same time. This awareness doesn’t minimize our own experience but adds context and medicine to the truth of any given moment, the way a rip in the curtains we have drawn seems like a violation of the privacy we so wanted though it is only letting the light of the world in. This poem tries to understand this paradox.
SOMEWHERE
As something is breaking, somewhere
something is being joined. As something
is joining, somewhere something is breaking.
As something closes, something opens. As
something opens, something closes. Where
there is dark, somewhere there is light. And
where there is light, somewhere there is dark.
When things go clear, somewhere things are
thickening into confusion. And when people
are agitated, others are calm. I don’t understand
this. But as something is taken, something is given.
As something is given, something is taken. As some-
one is cruel, someone is kind. And when kindness
appears, somewhere something cruel is poised to
sting. Then someone is lost, as another is finally
at home. And some are aware of this, while others
are not. The way things break and join at once, the
way people are cruel and kind at once, the way life
constantly opens and closes, how there is light and
dark in every soul, how we’re clear and confused
just behind our heart, and lost and at home in
every breath—This is the river we’re born into,
turbulent at the surface, swift in the deep. This
is what we try to make sense of and live through,
feeling it’s all too much but needing more. So lift
your head and steady your heart, knowing, as you’re
swept along, that Experience is the face of God.
A Question to Walk With: Whatever you’re feeling in this moment, open your heart to it completely. Now open your heart completely the fact that the opposite of what you’re feeling is happening somewhere else. Try to imagine both and the feelings merge. In the next few days, try to describe this experience to a friend.
Listening Is a Personal Pilgrimage
Mark recently appeared on New Dimensions. Three Intentions is offering this opportunity to listen to “Listening is a Personal Pilgrimage” here free, or you can download it from New Dimensions onto your iPad or other device.
Program Description
Nepo describes deep listening as a very active and engaging process, a pilgrimage of sorts. It is an act of opening our hearts to whatever is before us. This is ultimately a transformative journey that is constantly unfolding and emerging. Deep listening informs our friendships, our giving and receiving, our place in the web of relationship with all life. We find our own footing when we’ve been truly seen and witnessed. Here, Nepo gives many examples of deep listening and how it can lead us to more effective lives. He shares how nature can be our teachers and describes the ocean as having “incredible power and yet, at the same time, it is so sensitive and gentle that if you stick your finger in it, it will register that ripple across the entire mass of it. It’s clear, it reflects everything that looks into it. It accepts everything that enters it without losing any of itself. It is formless and yet it doesn’t lose who or what it is. This is a great teacher for us to know we can be who we are without needing to insist on our identity.” (hosted by Justine Willis Toms)
One More Time
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
My new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, has just been published. The book contains seventy-three poems, retrieved and shaped over the last thirteen years, about the nature of working with what we’re given till it wears us through to joy. For the next few months, I’d like to share poems from the new book with you.
We are such willful creatures. Carried by our stubbornness, we can begin to think that we are the originators of all our experience. Often, the purpose of experience is to humble us into remembering that we are, at best, interdependent creatures, learning to inhabit the myriad forces of life that carry us. From this place of awe, a different kind of resilience shows itself, as an undying passion for life. This poem praises such humble passion.
ONE MORE TIME
When willful, we think
that truth moves from
our head to our heart
to our hands.
But bent by life,
it becomes clear that
love moves the other way:
from our hands to our
heart to our head.
Ask the burn survivor
with no hands who dreams
of chopping peppers and
onions on a spring day.
Or the eighty-year-old jazz
man who loses his hands
in a fog. He can feel them
but no longer entice them
to their magic.
Or the thousand-year-old
Buddha with no arms
whose empty eyes will
not stop bowing to the
unseeable center.
Truth flows from us,
or so we think, only
to be thrown back
as a surf of love.
Ask the aging painter
with a brush taped to his
crippled hand—wanting,
needing to praise it all
one more time.
A Question to Walk With: Describe someone in your life that you admire who has this kind of deep passion that comes from their connection to life. If they are alive, go to them, and ask them about both their connection to life and their passion.
Staying Close
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
My new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, has just been published. The book contains seventy-three poems, retrieved and shaped over the last thirteen years, about the nature of working with what we’re given till it wears us through to joy. For the next few months, I’d like to share poems from the new book with you.
Once we are blessed to have a sense of what it means to be fully awake and alive, we are challenged to return there, when we stray. And we will all stray, because we’re human and this is what humans do. Often, the smallest moment will catch our heart’s eye, like a small angel calling us to return to what matters. How? By simply lingering long enough to have the moment enter us. This poem speaks to moments that have opened me.
STAYING CLOSE
Putting
a child on a horse.
Hanging
silk to dry.
Watching
snow fill the crack
in a bridge.
Waiting
in the shadow of a bird.
Touching
the shoulder of the moon.
Wetting
the lips of one
who has given up.
Letting
the stone
in your heart crumble.
Placing
a flower over a blade.
Sitting
in a boat till
there is no ripple.
A Question to Walk With: Discuss this notion of small moments returning us to what matters with a friend. Have each of you tell the story of such a moment and how it has impacted you.
What Others Have Touched
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post and VividLife.
My new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, has just been published. The book contains seventy-three poems, retrieved and shaped over the last thirteen years, about the nature of working with what we’re given till it wears us through to joy. For the next few months, I’d like to share poems from the new book with you.
We live in an age that is obsessed with the new; so much that we have been called the disposable society. While it’s often easier to throw something out rather than repair it, we lose our depth of relationship to the things we touch. We lose the human history of objects and tools and the presence they accumulate for moving through many lives. This poem helped me recover a deeper sense of how presence passes itself through all that we touch.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE TOUCHED
When his grandson was born, he
began collecting antique toys—a torn
doll, a wooden rabbit, a cloth bear.
He loves to see his little one touch
what others have touched.
When told it had to go, she refused
to cut the old apple tree, though its roots
are buckling the driveway. She doesn’t need
the apples. It’s the deer. Every fall she shakes
the upper branches from a ladder. She loves
the small thuds to the ground. She loves
early coffee as they soft-hoof and nibble.
When Jess and Laura were small, I
bought earrings in Florence. I’m saving
them till they turn sixteen. I love think-
ing of the earrings waiting in my closet
for them to grow.
When in Amsterdam, he thought
the museums would grab him, but it
was a sloppy Newfoundland wading
in a reflecting pool; splashing patches
of water filled with sun, then trying
to bite the splashes. He loves to think
of the soul’s journey this way.
When Grandma made potato pancakes
on her small stove, it smelled like burnt
French toast. I’d sit on a stool in the corner
and she’d mat one on some napkins, blow
on it, and give it to me. She’s been gone
twenty years. But I love how she
cooks them for me in my dreams.
A Question to Walk With: Describe one object that has come into your possession that has a history. Describe this history and how it touches you. Describe one object of yours you’d like to pass into the hands of others and why.
