Mark Nepo

Now, and Then, and Every Catastrophic Now and Then in Between…

May 27, 2022 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Tree as River of Time,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I don’t know much about self-identified “poet, teacher, and storyteller” Mark Nepo — not more than I gathered on a quick run through Wikipedia and his Web site a few minutes ago. So I can’t say, y’know, that I can recommend much let alone everything he’s written. But a week ago, whiskey river offered up a one-paragraph sample; in the event, I didn’t see it until two days ago: the day of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The sample, and the prescient coincidence of its whiskey river posting vis-a-vis the headlines and developing story, quite shook me. So I sought out the entire piece from which the whiskey river excerpt came. You can read it here (originally published in the magazine in 2013, re-run at the site in 2016).

For now, though, here is the paragraph cited by the river, and the equally striking one which precedes it:

Each of us must make our peace with suffering and especially unnecessary suffering, which doesn’t mean our resignation to a violent world. For the fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence. As our heart breaks with compassion, it strengthens itself and all of humanity. Can I prove this? No. Am I certain of it? Yes. We are still here. Immediately, someone says, “Barely.” But we are still here: more alive than dead, more vulnerable than callous, more kind than cruel — though we each carry the lot of it.
That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.

(Mark Nepo [source])

(Aside: as I said, I myself know little about Mark Nepo. But this isn’t his first appearance at RAMH, all of them on Fridays, unsurprisingly. Maybe I should dive a little deeper.)

The day before the shooting, whiskey river added the following, which feels like something of a postscript to Nepo’s piece:

Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses, wives, mates — take back your mind and your body and begin to engage with the fact that you are alive, you are going to die, nobody knows what being alive is and nobody knows what dying is. You’re involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder. There is no mundane dimension, really. If you have the eyes to see it, it’s all transcendental.

(Terence McKenna [source, apparently])

When the news is so appalling that it seems everyone is talking about it — especially online — what else, really, can be said? I don’t feel equipped to inspire people to action, one way or the other. I have no “power” — not even readership, really. It’s fun to fantasize myself in the role of a latter-day knight-errant, roaming the Internet and rallying people — Americans — to a cause…

But there are so many causes to rally them to.

One thing I’ve noticed — from my position on the left of the spectrum — is that we become outraged over causes in seriatim, one at a time. We’re outrage generalists: we freak out about guns, and then there’s a climate disaster on one coast or another, and then there’s a heinous law passed in State A (and copycat laws in States B, C, D, and E), and then… Personally, I think we suffer from then-exhaustion. It never stops. And when it seems momentarily to have backed off, for relief we turn to the media (news and social) for fresh, if less consequential, subjects of outrage: celebrity scandals, foreign wars, music and other artistic works which are, in truth, no worse than not my taste, of course the egos of the super-rich and -famous.

I wish it were possible for us to organize ourselves along more specialized lines, without trying to fix it ALL. It can’t ALL be fixed at once, and it can’t ALL be fixed by parceling out our outrage, pointlessly, in bursts which last only as long as the current news cycle. But if we could just group ourselves, y’know? Cluster, with others of like mind, around the one cause we feel most motivated to act on and competent to contribute to, actively and not passively. Sure, there would be drift, if for no other reason than to prevent burnout on the ramparts. But a little drift out and back would be healthy, renewing our own spirits and reigniting our own passions (as well as those of the new, temporary group)…

Wish-fulfillment, no doubt. But ask the bees and the ants, ask— oh, hell, I don’t know; ask the members of any other damned social species except humans. They’ll tell you. Just look at them. They don’t all work on solving every single problem facing the group. They don’t work in series, either. (Picturing the discussion: “Okay gang, now let’s all run over here and tackle this mess!” “But what about the mess we’re already tackling? It’s still a mess—” “Don’t worry! We’ll get back to it!” Etc. Ridiculous.) They work in parallel. The drones do this. The workers do that. The hunters do one thing, and the nurturers the other.

Could we?

All of a Piece, a Piece of All

April 1, 2016 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Broken promises Project 365(3),” by Keith Williamson (user “elwillo”) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

All good things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems — all these are mainly disguises. One thing is always walking among us in fancy-dress, in the grey cloak of a church or the green cloak of a meadow.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

Where Is God?

It’s as if what is unbreakable—
the very pulse of life—waits for
everything else to be torn away,
and then in the bareness that
only silence and suffering and
great love can expose, it dares
to speak through us and to us.

It seems to say, if you want to last,
hold on to nothing. If you want
to know love, let in everything.
If you want to feel the presence
of everything, stop counting the
things that break along the way.

(Mark Nepo [source])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

People Like Us
for James Wright

There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can’t remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and people
Who love God but can’t remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It’s
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely , and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

Japanese Shape

The way it forces you to look
watching your step
so as not to turn your ankle
on a rock
or step into water nearby

The way it turns the torso
this way and that
view after view
spaces between spaces
and spaces between

The way it slows you down
step after step
no skipping between
there is no short cut
to the edge of this garden

The way it swirls the vision
into brown and black
and green and light with
sound in the air until
only a blanket remains

The way it stops the mind.

(Harry Palmer [no alternative source located])

[Read more…]

Mountains of Love, Switchbacks of Choice

December 11, 2015 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “COFFEE Storyboard,” by user perezvictor on Flickr. Says the photographer (among other things), “This is a story about a man and a woman whose relationship ends. All the events occur in the time of having a coffee.”]

From whiskey river:

Not Anyone Who Says

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable—
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

What We Miss

Who says it’s so easy to save a life? In the middle of an interview for
the job you might get you see the cat from the window of the seven-
teenth floor just as he’s crossing the street against traffic, just as
you’re answering a question about your worst character flaw and lying
that you are too careful. What if you keep seeing the cat at every
moment you are unable to save him? Failure is more like this than like
duels and marathons. Everything can be saved, and bad timing pre-
vents it. Every minute, you are answering the question and looking
out the window of the church to see your one great love blinded by
the glare, crossing the street, alone.

(Sarah Manguso [source])

…and:

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed, and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. In this way, our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world, but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold, and the car handle feels wet, and the kiss good-bye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.

(Mark Nepo [source])

[Read more…]

The Immediate, The Real

March 7, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

From whiskey river:

We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe.

Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day — the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening?

It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we’re miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn’t seasoned just the way we like.

When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.

In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.

(Mark Nepo [source])

…and:

Place to Be

Days the weather sits
in the endless sky,
the clouds drifting by

The winter’s snow,
summer’s heat,
same street.

Nothing changes
but the faces, the people,
all the things they do

’spite of heaven and hell
or city hall —
Nothing’s wiser than a moment.

No one’s chance
is simply changed by wishing,
right or wrong.

What you do is how you get along.
What you did is all it ever means.

(Robert Creeley [source])

[Read more…]