A Conversation with Poet and Philosopher Mark Nepo

JB:

Hello, Mark! You’re coming to Salt Lake City this month to speak. Please tell us what folks should expect at the events.

Mark Nepo:

I’m so happy to be able to be back in person with people in real time. It’s very exciting. 

Friday evening will be reading and conversation. I’ll be exploring the theme of the hard work of being a spirit in the world – exploring how it is that we together can be authentic and real and caring. 

Every generation struggles; we have obstacles. And then we remember who we are and what we mean to each other, and that we can’t make it alone. Both events will explore that. In the workshop on Saturday we’ll be looking at this in more detailed ways and looking at where these things fit in our lives.

I feel like my job, when we’re together like this, is to help introduce people to their own gifts and their own wisdom. It’s using all the traditions, all the timeless gifts and struggles that we face to see: where are we today, together and alone? And how do we repair all that has broken? 

Every generation faces “this is our turn” and this pandemic has caused so many difficult things. In my parents’ generation, it was World War II. Every generation has something that [prompts] “are we going to do this, or not?” 

JB:

Have you been to Salt Lake City before?

Mark Nepo: 

No. I’ve been through the airport en route to somewhere else, but no, I haven’t. So I’m looking forward to it,

JB:

I chuckled when I reread the part in The Book of Awakening where you announced to your parents that you were going to be a poet and that you were going to be “living a making.” I loved that concept. And I wondered about how different you think that might have been in your twenties if you said that in 2000 or in 2020. 

Mark Nepo:

I stumbled on the notion [of living a making] as a young man. My parents grew up in the great depression in the 1920s and things were tough. They were very focused on making sure that their children would be able to survive and were grounded in the needs of the world. And of course, they got a poet for a son.

I had that classic argument with my father, “how are you going to make a living?” And I don’t know where it came from, but I blurted out “I’m going to live a making.” And it took me years to discover what that really meant.

Then of course in my thirties, I almost died from a rare form of lymphoma. That just helped me live a making even more because I discovered, as many people do, that all that matters is to be completely here with an open heart and loving and learning from each other. Everything else is just kindling on the fire of aliveness.

It’s wonderful to dream. It’s wonderful to plan for things, It’s wonderful to work toward things. But I’ve learned that for me, working for what I want has turned out to be an apprenticeship for working with what I’m given. It’s working with what I’m given where my deepest gifts have shown themselves, because that’s where our gifts match what’s needed in the world. And so it all kind of happens – I think our plans are wonderful if we hold onto them loosely

I could never have imagined my life unfolding as it has or writing the books that I’ve written. I’ve had the wonderful chance to teach the way I do and be with people whom I so love. I started out teaching at Albany University and that was a wonderful experience. But, on the other side of my cancer journey, I needed to really be exploring life as a whole, more deeply than any one discipline. And so, I wound up moving into a way of teaching that’s more whole, where everything is related to everything else. 

Whatever the topic is – it doesn’t matter what it is – if we take a look at botany and flowers or even math or dance or biology, they all are ways into the deepest knowledge of the whole. They’re wonderful because all the details reveal what matters that’s hidden in those details.

JB:

In artistic work, I’ve always been aware of not getting too focused – I mean, focus is really important – but not getting so focused that you can’t see the periphery, because there’s gold in the periphery. Is that sort of similar?

Mark Nepo:

Absolutely. And I think that by being attentive and focused, I wind up learning and following the path that life unfolds, rather than insisting on the one that I imagined. I can look at all the people I’ve been blessed to love or be loved by, all the friends – I didn’t plan on meeting any one of them. You don’t plan love.

There’s a line in The Book of Awakening where I talk about this, that the flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes. And so by being who we are, we grow to each other, but things get in the way and fear gets in the way. 

In the Eastern sense of Taoism, the way they talk about sin is very different from the Western Judeo-Christian sense of sin. It’s translated as opaqueness, a place where you can’t see through or a place that’s blocked. When we can be authentic, honest and loving and who we are, then things go clear and we can see. So sin isn’t a mistake or a horrible thing; it’s the place where there’s something in the way that we need to take out of the way so we can see.

JB:

For your creative process, in writing both poetry and nonfiction, what part of that creative journey do you appreciate the most or feel the most connected to? Pre-planning or thinking about it? The actual writing process? Publishing the work?

Mark Nepo:

The whole journey is one devotion, but the thing that is most enlivening is the discovery. This is a good example of what we said about goals and plans – I may have ideas for something I want to explore or write, a book or something. And I’ve learned that not one of the books I’ve written is the book I started.

So the plans are just a way in and then the writing comes alive. Writing really has become listening and taking notes and following where things lead, following the heartfulness. The word trust literally means follow your heart – following that aliveness in any art form. 

I was taught when I was young to be on the lookout for good material. Well, almost dying and still being here, I discovered everything is sacred and holy, so you don’t need to look for good material. I just need to be present enough to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

JB:

I found during the last couple of years during the pandemic that my adventuring soul had to take, and maybe even craved, moments to just appreciate where I was (at home) and what was around me in my day-to-day life. Is that a start to being “present”?

Mark Nepo:

This is what all the traditions, all the meditation practices, are aimed at. Can we be still enough to receive the miracle of what is? And we’re human, so we can’t stay there all the time, but I can be present and all of a sudden feel something so special and deep. Then all of a sudden, you know, the fire alarm in the house goes off or…

JB:

…the dishwasher has to be unloaded…

Mark Nepo:

Right. But we can return. So much of the human journey is a practice of return. That’s something that I always talk about and will explore in the workshop. What is our personal practice of return? How do we come back to what is central, to what is real, to what is sacred, when the ups and downs of life knock us away from it? We all have to have a toolbox that we personalize to help us come back to what matters.

JB:

In your personal practice, do you have a ritual for meditation? 

Mark Nepo:

At this point in my life. the space that I enter to write and explore is that meditative space. When I was younger, like anyone, I would worry ”am I really going to finish anything? Is it really going to happen?” But of course, I know at this point in my life that it will. So really being in the space is what matters. And it’s not whether I write a lot of words or not. Some days I might write a lot and other days I might not do anything. 

There’s a great, wonderful story about the poet E. E. Cummings – he lived in New York city in Greenwich Village with his wife Marion. The story is that he would have breakfast and then he’d go down to his study and work for the morning, and she’d call him up for lunch. One day, she called him up for lunch, and as he came up, he had a huge smile on his face. And she said, “well, you look happy! What was your morning like?” “Oh,” he said, “oh, it was wonderful.” And she said, “well, what did you do?” He said, “well, after breakfast, I looked at this poem and I took a comma out. And just before you called me, I put it back in.”

JB:

I love that.

So what are the times when you feel most connected to the relationship of body, mind, spirit? For you personally, what emotion are you typically feeling? 

Mark Nepo:

That relationship is through connection and can, of course, carry any or all of the emotions. It can be when feeling tender and very connected to others; it can also happen when being alone in nature. But it’s the connection that makes me feel so alive, which can carry any emotion from grief to wonder. I think that’s key for all of us in our practice – for me it’s really about “how do we inhabit our humanness thoroughly?” That seems to be so crucial to being as alive as possible, and interestingly, life has been made just difficult enough that we need each other. 

JB:

I was thinking about the concept of threshold from The Book of Awakening and also a specific line in More Together Than Alone – “It’s an ongoing challenge to discern what best serves the common good: cooperation with the social order or resistance to the social order. When to cooperate and when to resist?”

I wondered about the threshold of where one’s personal needs cross into someone else’s personal needs and how that affects the relationship of the individual to the community.

Mark Nepo:

I think that at heart, we’re all the same. But we have very different ways of coming alive – you might love gardening and I might not want to get my hands dirty…

JB:

Do you like gardening?

Mark Nepo:

My wife loves gardening. I don’t. I love the beauty of the garden, but I’m not a gardener.

But we all need some personal form of expression that helps us come alive. So I think that for the most part, we discover when we’re being authentic, that what we need and want is the same – if we can honor that we are more together than alone, if we can honor that we need each other.

There’s a mythic bird in Chinese mythology called the Jian. It is a bird that has one eye and one wing and its sole purpose is to find another Jian so it can see and fly. So this paradox is that we are at once, whole unto ourselves. No one can live your life for you. No one can express what it is you need to express but you. Yet by doing that, we will discover each other and we will become more whole when we can share at that deep level. 

I would say my experience has been when people aren’t honest and loving, then our needs clash. Then what I need to be me may not be welcomed by another. But if I can honor your need – just because I don’t want to put my hands in the dirt doesn’t mean you don’t or you can’t.

This comes from the clarification of our own worth and connection to life. I find that the less centered we are, the more stubborn we are,

The more centered I am, I don’t need you to think like me, I don’t need you to see like me. In fact, I welcome something new so that we can be whole together. But if I am not centered and not secure, then I need for you to mirror what I see and say to make me feel more sure of myself.

And that’s not education. We’re suffering a great deal from this today because there are large groups in our world where people act out of fear. We all tend to look for what will confirm what we already know. That’s not education.

JB:

So with the idea of a threshold, if you think of it as being “you’re on the other side and I’m on this side,” that’s a different thing than us emerging through it collectively together. 

Mark Nepo:

There was a wonderful sociologist prominent in the sixties, Ivan Illich. Toward the end of his life, he was interviewed and he had this wonderful definition  of spiritual hospitality as helping another cross a threshold. I love that spiritual hospitality is helping another cross a threshold – not telling a person what threshold they should cross or how or what they should become or “I’d help you, but I don’t really value your threshold.” No, it’s simply helping another cross the threshold they are called to cross.

JB:

And being empathetic to their journey.

Mark Nepo:

And being a bridge for one another.

What bridge can I be for you? What bridge can you be for me? And so in that sense, when we cross a threshold, the ones that matter are the crossings that are transformative, that transform us, that have us evolve and grow and change.

JB:

I think it’s hard for a lot of people to feel, not necessarily judgment, but that they should decide what the bridge looks like for someone else. As in, we’re forcing our thoughts of what someone else’s life should be on them. But it’s their life. It’s not yours. 

Mark Nepo:

Exactly. 

I don’t have any interest in trying to tell people where they should go or what to do.

JB:

So how does this differ for your writing versus in-person teaching, where there is an exchange?

Mark Nepo:

Well actually, my writing and my teaching have become more and more connected, which is why in all of my books, I always have questions for the reader, invitations to journal or being in conversation with another or to meditate. 

That’s very much the way that I teach – to open something, a place that we can go together. The questions are the ways to personalize, because it doesn’t matter unless it’s personalized, unless you or I make it our own. We say “what does this look like in my life, in the steps that I take every day?” So I don’t write in a didactic way. I have no interest in writing to tell anyone “do this.”

The books are just trails of inquiry of how I grow. I like to say that what I share are examples, not instructions.

It has been a blessed thing and a joy to just be in authentic circles with other people. It’s really a wonderful exploration. What often happens is that because I bring what I’m learning to the circle, I will share things and open up stories and poems and metaphors and questions. Then someone will raise something that’s important to them, and I can speak to it. Often in speaking to it, I will discover things I didn’t know I knew and then I’ll take notes to explore that further on my own. There’s a rhythm between my solitude and community.