Just who IS Mark Nepo?We can grow by simply listening,
the way the tree on that ridge listens
its branches to the sky,
the way blood listens
its flow to the site of a wound,
the way you listen
like a basin when my head so full of grief
can’t look you in the eye.
We can listen our way
out of anger,
if we let the heart soften
the wolf we keep inside.
We can last by listening deeply,
the way roots reach for the next inch of earth,
the way an old turtle listens all he hears
into the pattern of his shell.
~ Mark Nepo
Source: http://www.marknepo.com/index.phpFor years, I’ve been trying to explore and understand: How can we, being forgetfully human, remember we are of one human family? How can we stay awake and authentic when our wounds make us numb and hidden? How can we minimize what stands between us and our experience of life? How can we make a practice of wearing down what thickens around our mind and heart? How can this practice of staying authentic serve and draw strength from the Universal Whole while we are ever immersed and entangled in the moment of our lives?
As a cancer survivor, I have found myself like Lazarus, awake again, in the same earthly place but different. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. This wakefulness has led me to be a student of that vibrant edge where our inner life meets the world. Being a poet and philosopher, I find myself there with a particular set of tools to search with.
But we all live on this shore between the depths of being and the dangers of experience. My work has become a journal of the challenges and gifts of being a spirit in the world. And now, after dying and coming back, it’s really not about my books, but about the voice beneath my name keeping the song going. These books and the voices that inhabit them remain teachers and intimates. They’ve helped to uncover sketchy maps into the quandaries of being alive. When struggling through my illness, I was bereft at how many of the books I owned were useless. Ever since, I have been committed to finding and creating books that can help us live. It is my devout hope that the work you find here can be of use, can help.
Stephanie Doty
Simply Amazing
February 20, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
