Thought of the week format by poet and writer Mark Nepo. Some annotations from the book:
Don’t you want to be alive before you die?
Eventually, all the love, suffering, and humility we go through wear away our walls of resistance until Spirit shines from within us like an inner sun. This is how Spirit is revealed on Earth—as the coverings we carry are worn away by life, the light we carry can pour into the world. This is the purpose of the human journey: to live openly and honestly until we become a source of uncovered light.
In our terror, we’re frantic to separate life from death, when each soul on Earth is a conduit between them. We do need to separate things, not to alter life, but to move through life, the way a swimmer parts the deep. Though as soon as we finish a stroke, the Whole of Life joins around us. So the goal is not to control or conquer life, but to immerse ourselves in it.
We venture out only to discover the truth we carry within.
The purpose of suffering is to exhaust us of our differences, and the purpose of love is to awaken us to how we’re at heart the same.
It’s especially difficult to hear what matters in our modern age. Given our preoccupation with efficiency and productivity, it takes a quiet courage to silence our worry and agitation when we’re always being told that we’re falling short. Being constantly minimized makes us insecure until we swarm like lost and hungry bees for any hive that might soothe our pain of being less—less than perfect, less than beautiful, less than enough, less than what everyone expects of us, inevitably less than our dreams of love and peace. To counter the speed of our age, we’re asked to open our heart wherever we are. Even though, in the press of the modern world, such softness and openness can be mistaken for being lazy, aimless, and without purpose. But sometimes we need to drift and be aimless in order to disengage from the frenzy of civilization and put down our worried agendas, so we can reconnect to the underlying reality that informs everything.
Relied on too heavily, mental and emotional neural networks, if unchecked, become ruts in the brain. As William James said, “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” And as the sculptor Karen French confides, “I’m haunted that my beliefs are just the thoughts I keep thinking.” How we break these patterns and create new ones has everything to do with what we listen to—whether we experience life directly or simply react to shadows in our own hall of experiential mirrors. Illusion stems from forcing our preferred understanding of life on all the situations we meet, as we become more interested in sameness than growing.
The appetite for more is as old as time. In ancient Greece, pleonektein, from which we get the word “pleonexia,” referred to a condition in which a person lived with an insatiable appetite for more of everything. The Christian theologian William Barclay defined pleonexia as a cursed love of having. Plato and Aristotle thought this condition to be the source of greed. This is a dangerous form of not listening that plagues the modern world. It speaks to our “fill-’er-up” society in which we think eating will keep us from the threshold of emptiness, and noise will keep us from the threshold of silence, and adventure will keep us from the threshold of being ordinary. When all the while, it’s through the thresholds of emptiness, silence, and being ordinary that the true gifts of being alive wait to be discovered.The true gifts of being alive show themselves in the simplest things that wait at every corner underneath the speed of our age.
All the spiritual traditions ask us to listen, that is, to move closer to what matters through the work of being, and to quiet the noise in our mind so we can return to an unscripted moment where the glow and pulse of life can show itself.
Because, as enough water will dilute poison, enough of life will dilute pain and fear and worry.
You can tell when someone is not where they are. Their sentences never quite finish. They seem to look through everyone they meet. Their eyes are like balloons let go of. We’ve all done this. So the challenge isn’t to criticize but to course-correct.
I vow to look at one thing at a time, like a child. I vow to listen more closely, like a person gone blind. I vow to rediscover the world in whatever gritty, precious thing is before me. And to quiet my mind, so I might feel the vastness of life flowing between us.
The mystery of deep living is that we become life itself.
Jiddu Krishnamurti (–) said: Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action.
Our refusal to be authentic, out of fear or pain, is what alienates us until we feel that life is random and that we are alone. Eventually, we’re called to meet outer with inner, to love what we do more than what we achieve, and to travel with those who are authentic, even when we’re clumsy and awkward.
JUST AS A bird can’t glide on the wind unless it’s wings are spread, being wholehearted is the only way to be lifted by the mystical web of life.
Jung discovered that the more we deny any one aspect of who we are, the more powerful and distorted its place in our life.
We make pariahs out of the homeless and the sick, because of our fear of being homeless and sick.
The extreme violence that permeates our culture rises, in great degree, from our insistence as a society on repressing our life of feeling.
As long as we refuse to accept that we are a mixture of light and darkness, of positive qualities and failings, of love and hate, of altruism and egocentricity, of maturity and immaturity, and that we are all children of the same Father, we will continue to divide the world into enemies (the “baddies”) and friends (the “goodies”). We will go on throwing up barriers around ourselves and our communities, spreading prejudice. Creating “baddies” is a form of cultural shadow by which we banish those who remind us of aspects we don’t want to look at in ourselves.
We can only see as far into the world as we can see into ourselves.
You don’t need to be without fear to be brave. —TAMI SIMON
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE way, we became obsessed with the new, preoccupied with breaking ground and never repeating ourselves. Yet the ocean reveals its power and mystery by repeating its waves around the world. Nature replenishes the Earth by repeating the cycle of the seasons. How many times do we run from those we love because we insist on finding something new, when we’re often being asked to live more deeply where we are?
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
And, I confess, when moving through time, I wonder how much is left. But entering time, there is abundance everywhere.
“Forget the hours of suffering, but not what they have taught you.”
History is a conflict between two tribes: one that hunts and one that welcomes.
It’s our fear of randomness that has us overmanage risk, while our soul shows us repeatedly how to risk finding the current that will carry us.
What is the source of the wrath that we fester and carry that enables us to trample the forest, the planet, and each other—again and again? In truth, our ecological problems are evidence of a deeper, spiritual problem whereby we keep shrinking our circle of compassion; whereby we, feeling empty, use everything up in an attempt to fill ourselves; whereby we, feeling insignificant and ephemeral, mark up the Earth in order to feel important and lasting; whereby we, feeling incomplete, break apart anything that is whole. Since the beginning of the human trek through time, we’ve tried to silence our fear of death by puffing ourselves up and by making a lot of noise. When feeling less than, we’ve tried to hoard jewels and power. When desperate to feel, we’ve propagated violence for its shock and alarm.
Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with.
It’s taken me years to understand that wisdom waits in those who suffer. And since we all suffer, we all have a wisdom that is sorely needed. We each earn a view that the rest of us need. And yet we shy away from asking those in pain, “What has your pain opened?” From asking those near death, “From this great height, what do you see of life?” From asking those on the other side of fear, “What has all that trembling revealed?”
Still, we’re overrun by urgency. Like everyone, I’ve spent too much time responding to alarms and crises, many of which—once on the scene—were not as urgent as they seemed. The truth is that unless someone is bleeding or can’t breathe, there is no urgency. For sure, the things we face are significant, and there are endless problems, and the bend of unexpected circumstance never goes away. But while much is important, very little is urgent. Understanding this is the threshold to peace. For while surviving demands a great deal from us to get from day to day, being alive asks nothing of us. Stripped of our urgency, being alive is its own reward. When in the hospital during my struggle with cancer, I lived with an underlying urgency that I couldn’t find and couldn’t let go of. In time, I realized that making every situation urgent was how I played cat and mouse with my fear of death. Finally, this constant sense of urgency exhausted me and I collapsed in the moment I was given. Then the moments I was given began to open around me. Once there, I began to drink from life. Since then, I’ve learned that when urgent, we constrict and life crashes against us. When exhausted or loved into a sense of surrender, we expand and life flows through us. Being human, we will always become urgent and constrict, and then in time surrender and expand. No one can escape this. But it helps to know that being urgent is like having a cramp in your heart or mind. It will pass.
There are two fires that we have to encounter daily. The first is the fire of life, which reduces us to joy by burning away all that is false and not essential. This is the fire of aliveness that needs to be fed, no matter where we are or what we do. This is the light of the soul that must be kept burning. The second is the fire in the world, which can burn us up, which can wound us and damage us. This is the fire of circumstance that needs to be put out. How do we know the difference between these two fires? I don’t know. I’ve been reduced to what is essential by the one and wounded by the flames of the other, more than once. Nevertheless, we need each other to know which fire to feed and which to douse, if we are to clear our confusions and establish enduring roots. Helping each other know the difference is part of the work of love.
Inevitably, we move through the first half of life gathering, only to enter the second half of life compelled to empty much of what we carry. Along the way, we gather knowledge, achieve a great deal, and save what we can. But under all our coverings, we long for the naked freedom of a star. Under all our accomplishments is a simple soul eager to build, not caring what it is we might build. And stripped of what we save and hoard, we grow immediate. This cycle continues: gather, build, grow covered by what we build, then burn away all that is not essential, so we can grow immediate, ready to build again.
To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking. Prayer involves becoming silent, and being silent, and waiting until God is heard.
We need to stay open to everything longer than is comfortable or nothing lasting will happen.
Being a cancer survivor, I can tell you that there is no bad weather. The only bad weather is no weather.
So how do you carry your one, essential self through the world? And what is the food that you carry on the way that sustains your soul’s journey?
Of course, being human, we often fear our own possibility and try to cover it or muffle it with drugs or alcohol or sex or money or the noise of worry.
We’re asked to stay authentic and to keep dreaming till our heart comes alive—to stay possible and awake till your aliveness sparks mine.
Meditation is an attempt to stop rowing and let the water of life go clear, so you can see through to the bottom of things. Let’s try this now. Put down your oars and drift. Center yourself and breathe slowly. Whatever the day holds can wait. The first oar to leave alone is your mind. Inhale and exhale deeply. The second oar to ungrip is the oar of fear and worry. Inhale and exhale slowly. Simply breathe and let the water of your life settle and calm. Let your breathing quiet the ripples. Let the water of all life settle and calm. Look through the calm, not searching for anything, just seeing what’s there.
IT’S TAKEN YEARS, but I’m beginning to understand that chasing Paradise keeps us from living here in paradise. It’s the journey and process that matter, not where we’re going or where we think we’re going.
Initially, we’re pulled into life, drawn into a thoroughness that brings us alive. But once in the thick of it, we get tangled in the details and start to map and manage life instead of living it. When encumbered this way, life seems to be other than where we are. Or so we think. Until some shock of love or suffering jars us into a state of thoroughness that brings us back alive.
In her novel The Lake and the Lost Girl, Jacquelyn Vincenta says, “[People] will get angry if you try to take their stories away … because those stories are their personal maps of the world.” And yet we’re constantly challenged to drop below our own story in order to understand and feel the Whole of Life that is always beyond our own particular map. Otherwise, we make everything conform to our biased view of life. Otherwise, we superimpose the silhouette of our wounds and slights on everyone we meet. Otherwise, we remain trapped in our own web of assumptions and conclusions and never grow. Soon, we’re prisoners of our own perception, mistaking the map for the earth it represents, mistaking our assumptions and conclusions for the unnameable reality we move through. Then we can easily dismiss anything or anyone that doesn’t fit our personal map of life.
Humbly, when chasing wealth, we’re distracted from discovering the richness inherent in our lives. When chasing love, we’re distracted from the love we trip over en route to what we think is a greater love. And when chasing fame and celebrity, we’re distracted from the nest of our own worth and miss the things around us to celebrate.
There is an insidious web of influence that keeps us from being completely where we are. This web begins at an early age, when we’re mis-educated to think that we live before a constant audience, warned that someone is always watching and judging us. We’re raised to believe that it’s a terrible thing to disappoint those who are watching, even if we can’t figure out what would please them. This blind fear of disappointing those who are ready to judge us somehow convinces us that life needs to be made more special than it is. This puts enormous pressure on us from the moment we wake to the moment we go to sleep. It hurries us toward a want for approval that is always out of reach. It took almost dying for me to realize that no one is watching.
“If you’re too convicted in your opinions or beliefs, perhaps you are a convict, imprisoned within the confines of your own understandings.”
“Slowly, slowly is the way.”
Another way to slow our journey is by putting down things we cling to. By putting down our certainty, we begin to learn from others. By putting down our desperate want for fame and greatness, we begin to experience our common journey, and this lessens our loneliness. By putting down our want to be unique, we often discover our true inheritance, which is our felt kinship with all life.
Too often, we waste time—even years—in an argument with life, rather than working with life to navigate our hardships.
The great doorway to acceptance is deep listening. Not just hearing other people, but hearing ourselves. Many of us are at a loss to speak our truth, because we’ve stopped listening to our soul.
Half the time, we’re so eager to get somewhere only because we’re uncomfortable with where we are. Much of the time, we’re trying so hard to keep the difficult things out that we stop letting in what is always present and beautiful.
Ultimately, life is not something to chase or push through but to enter and absorb. While this seems simple, it is one of the hardest truths to keep before us.
The journey is always different than we expect and much longer than we imagine.
The role of spiritual practice is basically to exhaust the seeker. If the practice does what it’s supposed to do, it exhausts our energy for seeking, and then reality has a chance to present itself.
Unrehearsed living is its own reward.
What matters is not provable, only knowable.
I’m reminded of the story of a man walking along the ocean. He sees two fish in the surf and wades out to meet them. He leans over and asks, “What’s it like to live in the ocean?” Neither fish answers and the man moves on. Once out of view, one fish turns to the other to ask, “What’s an ocean?” The closer we are to the heart of living, the harder it is to name what we’re a part of, because we are in it. This inability to name what we’re experiencing is a sign that we’re fully immersed. Once immersed in life, it’s harder to hold on to things, because that’s the nature of the deep. The further we go, the more we’re asked to trust our knowing over our knowledge.
At best, the mind is a net that, no matter how finely woven, will always have holes. But we don’t have to worry, for the heart is a sponge, waiting below the mind to absorb whatever the mind can’t grasp..
Every day … each of us is about to happen.
We draw the circle of our family too small. —MOTHER TERESA
We’re all kindred spirits who keep meeting in the middle of our wonder and our pain.
I remember that, for a long time, I found myself acclimating to not hearing, before admitting that I needed hearing aids, and slowly the dullness of a quiet world began to appear normal. Likewise, when we acclimate to the comfort of our own views and resist any form of difference, we become mind-deaf, which means that we impose our dullness of thinking on the world and consider it normal. Being mind-deaf, we think that understandings of life are only valid if they are close to our own. When we acclimate to the history of our own feelings and resist the truth of other people’s feelings, we become heart-deaf and feel that experiences of life are only valid if they mirror our own. In an age where everyone’s lives are more connected than ever, we need to move through the world with an awareness that there are many ways to get where we’re going.
[He] used to talk about the value of being able to see through two eyes—that if one of our eyes is covered, we don’t see depth. Look out from two eyes, and you see the point of convergence way out ahead where things cohere, and then everything becomes multidimensional. We need more than one perspective to glimpse the point of convergence where all perspectives meet. When we become zealous or stubborn, when we stay resistant to change, we’re seeing with one eye and lose the common center from where all views emerge and return. And yet we must try to go deep without drowning, always working toward the point of convergence.
The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity. In the beginning of any life, we’re compelled to gather and use things to help us survive and stay engaged with life. But somewhere along the way, the things gathered solidify and wall us in. Now we’re faced with surviving the wall of things that keep us from life. This has played out differently for each person, community, and culture throughout time. More deeply, surviving prosperity hinges on realizing when things no longer help us but hinder us. Surviving prosperity requires that we break through our wall of things and reattach ourselves to humanity.
OFTEN, TRUTH SPEAKS to me when I sleep. Perhaps because when tired, I finally drift below the tangle of the world, below the static of my mind, and even below the yearnings of my heart. So I’m up early some days, with an image that compels me, as if some part of the Universe brushes so close that its wind of aliveness wakes me.
Through all our hardships and entanglements, we’re in a constant cycle of expansion and contraction. We gather and inhabit a self, only to fill it to the brim. Then, with no room left to grow, we’re asked to empty that self so we can take in more of life. This progression of gathering and emptying lets us incorporate what we learn into a more elemental sense of self. This growing by emptying happens each time the soul remembers itself. Paring down and becoming elemental is a hard process to grasp, because we live in a culture that is preoccupied with an expanding sense of growth, obsessed only with getting bigger, obsessed with enlarging the self and never emptying the self, which we need to do so we can take in new knowledge. For the self doesn’t get its worth from what it contains, but from the life that moves through it, the way a tree or flag comes alive for the wind that moves through it.
When self-reliant at all cost, we become insul
ar and sorely out of balance, which only makes us expand like a balloon. Once tense and inflated, we begin to fear anything that might come near, afraid the slightest touch will puncture our world.
Underneath these tensions is a paradox that shapes us. For when burrowing in the ground, we lose sight of the earth; when planting the seed, we lose sight of the harvest; when feeding our hunger, we lose sight of the food; when building the next step, we lose sight of the dream; when looking up close, we lose sight of all that surrounds us; when focused on ourselves, we lose sight of others; and when living our very personal life, we lose sight of the beauty and power of the Spirit that runs through all souls.
Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakes – Carl Jung