February 23, 2016 • 44 mins
This week we talk to Mark Nepo about the mysteries of life
Mark Nepo is a poet, philosopher and cancer survivor who has taught in the fields of poetry, health, and spirituality for forty years. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, he has published numerous books and audio projects. Mark has appeared with Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday program on OWN TV, and has also been interviewed by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America.
His book The Book of Awakening is considered a modern spiritual classic. His latest book is called Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness
Our Sponsor this Week is Spirituality and Health Magazine. Click here for your free trial issue and special offer.
In This Interview Mark Nepo and I Discuss...
The One You Feed parable
Thinking of things as life affirming or life draining versus good and bad
How none of us really understands the mystery of life
How controlling and counting cuts off our access to the present moment
Resisting inflating or deflating ourselves
The real meaning of humility
How only the heart can synthesize our experience
The role and definition of paradox
Substituting what is familiar for what is true
The critical role of dialog and relation in a spiritual practice
For more show notes visit our website
Mark Nepo is a poet, philosopher and cancer survivor who has taught in the fields of poetry, health, and spirituality for forty years. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, he has published numerous books and audio projects. Mark has appeared with Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday program on OWN TV, and has also been interviewed by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America.
His book The Book of Awakening is considered a modern spiritual classic. His latest book is called Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness
Our Sponsor this Week is Spirituality and Health Magazine. Click here for your free trial issue and special offer.
In This Interview Mark Nepo and I Discuss...
The One You Feed parable
Thinking of things as life affirming or life draining versus good and bad
How none of us really understands the mystery of life
How controlling and counting cuts off our access to the present moment
Resisting inflating or deflating ourselves
The real meaning of humility
How only the heart can synthesize our experience
The role and definition of paradox
Substituting what is familiar for what is true
The critical role of dialog and relation in a spiritual practice
For more show notes visit our website
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The terrible knowledge is that we can be erased in
a second. And I don't say that to scare anyone.
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
(00:23):
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
(00:44):
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m
(01:11):
Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Mark Nepo, a poet, philosopher, and cancer survivor who has
taught in the fields of poetry, health, and spirituality for
forty years. A New York Times Number one best selling author,
he has published numerous books and audio projects. Mark has
appeared with Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday program
on Own TV, and has also been interviewed by Robin
(01:34):
Roberts on Good Morning America. And here's the interview with
Mark Nepo. Hi, Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you.
It's great to be with you. It's a real pleasure
to have you on. I have seen your books on
shelves for years. The Book of Awakening I read years
ago and I really liked and I really enjoyed your
latest book, Inside the Miracle. So I'm looking forward to
(01:56):
getting into that book in more detail. But we'll start
we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's
talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are
two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
(02:19):
the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life, and in
the work that you do, as well as anyways that
you like to feed the good wolf in your own life.
(02:39):
Sure well, thank you all. I love I love that parable,
I know it. I know it well, and as i'd
like to reflect on it. Um, I'd like to move
away from good and bad. You know, I find in
my not not to a place of relativism where we
say there is no good or bad, but but in
terms of how we move through life. I'd like to
(03:01):
reflect on this, uh, in terms of things that are
life affirming and things that are life draining. Because often
I find when we're told we're good or we're bad,
or we're up or we're down, or we're true or
we're false, or you know, all of these directional judgments,
they're just not specific enough to be helpful. You know,
(03:23):
if you tell me I'm bad, I feel bad, but
I don't really understand what that means in a way
that's going to help me change. And likewise, if you
tell me I'm good, well, I feel relieved for a minute,
but I also don't really know what that means in
terms of what to what to reinforce. So for me,
(03:45):
I feel like we are made up just like X
and Y chromosomes. We begin with I think, everything we
need inside us, and as we engage in the life
of experience, we move constantly between life affirming energies and
life draining energies. And the life draining energies make us
(04:10):
look for only things that will confirm what we already know,
look for things that will only give us the illusion
that we're in control, you know, and they will feed
fear and violence and hate and sameness. But when we
pursue our aliveness, which I think is what the soul
(04:31):
wants us to do, When we pursue our aliveness, which
changes for every individual throughout their life, then we come
alive and we inhabit our gifts, and so we're all
which one do we feed? Do we do we feed
what's life affirming? Or do we feed what's life draining?
(04:53):
That makes a lot of sense. One of the things
in your book that you talk about a little bit
you were just talking about can troll, And in the
latest book you say that our personal suffering is often
intensified by our want to control life and failing to
be in control. While believing in control makes us feel
accountable for all that breaks along the way, and so
(05:15):
there is guilt, but where guilt is secreted by a
controlling mind, compassion emanates from an accepting heart. Yeah, you know,
and I think, you know, we're just all comparing notes.
Nobody really has a clue about this great history of
life and and that's the wonderful things. And we can
admit we don't know anything, then we can really begin
a true journey or inquiry together. So you know, let
(05:38):
me first say I don't have any answers, um, But
all I can do is speak from my own experience.
And you know, all of these things, even what we
talked about in terms of life draining and life affirming energies,
I have, you know, pursued both. I have fallen trying
to control things, and um, it's part of being human.
(05:58):
But where we go with it, what we do with it?
And when we fall down do we get up? And
so you know, I think that I learned through my
my journey and my cancer journey many years ago, we
really have very little control over life. We which doesn't
mean oh therefore there's nothing to do. I should acquiesce
(06:19):
and just live like a rock. You know, there's a
difference between participating and engaging in life and trying to
control events and people and the thoughts and feelings of
those around us. And when we do try to control things,
which is impossible, we we wind up becoming more and
(06:44):
more anxious and irritated, and we wind up resenting the
life around us that won't stay controlled. So you know,
there's a uh, it's not in this book, but I
have a small, little, very very short story in my
book of stories as far as the heart can see.
It's called Cane and Able. I can't recite it, but
I can tell you exactly the essence of it. And
(07:05):
the essence is that, you know, two brothers. They find
themselves with one small berry in their weaker hand, and
the one the one brother looks at it and he
and it's so small compared to everything he's worked for
and wanted and dreamed of that it makes him bitter.
(07:26):
But the other brother looks at the small berry and
he says, oh my god, I think I think all
my work has led me to this small berry. I
think the whole world is inside that one little berry.
And so he and you can also this is another
version of of which one will you feed? Now we
(07:46):
both we all have these voices in us. We have
the voice that looks at at whatever we're given and goes,
is that it? After all I've done, after all I've worked?
Is that all I get? And that that makes us it?
Or that makes us want to, you know, file a
grievance with God somewhere. But but the other is we
(08:08):
wake up like I did after my cancer journey, and
I go, oh my god, it was all here right
all along. It's in this little berry. Let me eat
this berry that has everything. Oh my god, how amazing
is that? And I think everybody has this ongoing conversation
between these two voices. And one other thing I have
learned along the way is that as soon as we
(08:30):
we stop and we all do two compare or account
our experience compared to our dream of what we're working toward,
or compared to others, or compared to those in history.
As soon as we compare or count, we lose our
access to everything that matters because you can't be present
(08:56):
and compare or count. Yeah, that's something we talked about
on the show A lot. Is this idea of you know,
how how painful comparison can be. I think it was
maybe Teddy Roosevelt who said that, um, you know, comparison
is the thief of joy. Oh that's beautiful. Yeah, that's
a wonderful expression. What I've noticed about is when you're
(09:17):
what's're in the comparing mind, you can always look and
be like, well, I've got more than that person, but
I've got less. You know, wherever you are in the scale,
you can always look up or down. And my experience
of that is always that it neither of those points.
Am I Connecting? This leads Eric to another kind of
ongoing challenge that's part of the human journey, and that
is that everyone alive goes through repeated challenges about inflating
(09:42):
ourselves or deflating ourselves. And the practice I think, or
at least what I aspire to is whenever I'm going
one way or the other, is to really try to
just assume my full stature. Not not larger than I
am and not small older than I am, and uh,
(10:03):
you know, I was, I'm sixty four. But and in
each decade I have a different form of exercise. But
when I was in my fort I jogged, and uh,
I was jogging one day in the summer. I was
living in Albany, New York at the time. And I was,
you know, tired, about three miles in and it had
was sweating, and I had panting, and my hands were
on my knees, and it had rained the night before,
(10:24):
and I was looking in a puddle, and all of
a sudden, I saw this full grown man in the
puddle and it was me. And and I realized, you know,
I had been a little boy running around in a
big man's body for years, and all of a sudden
I saw myself, just briefly, accurately, and it it was
(10:44):
one of those moments that changed changed me, that changed
me to assume my accurate, full stature, not to be
anybody else, and not to be inflated or deflated. There's
that spiritual idea of humility, which is often I think
interpreted as being you know, oh I'm nothing, I'm nothing,
(11:06):
whereas you know, the way I the best way I've
always heard humility defined is an accurate reading of of
really who we are, what we're good at, what we're
not good at. I mean, just a very accurate picture
of who we are. Is is humility versus a um
sort of a a false sort of condescension towards ourselves. Yeah,
and when we when we can be accurate about ourselves,
(11:31):
where we're open to life around us, we're more open
to life around us. Because when we're bigger than we are,
then we're like the Wizard of Oz, we're really trying
to keep puffing it up. And when we're smaller than
we are, then we're doing that comparing thing, and we're
always trying to knock everything else down because we feel
(11:51):
so small, and neither neither allows us to truly relate
to life and to those around us. Yeah. One of
my favorite lines of yours is you say, if peace
comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a
loss of perspective. Yeah. Yeah, you know I think this,
(12:15):
Uh that also really came to me through my own suffering,
because I think that I learned while I was going
through my cancer journey that to be broken is no
reason to see all things is broken and that and again,
it's like we're talking here, it's not about it's not
(12:36):
about you know, when when we're in pain and when
we're in fear, it's natural and human to want well, Okay,
the whole world is painful. I'm broken, Therefore everything everything
is terrible. Um. The world's chaotic and broken and um.
And when I'm in pain, then everything is painful or
I'm afraid therefore the whole world. It's understandable to do that.
(12:58):
But that is both things are true. And you know
when I when I was you know, broken and sick
and and you know, close to dying and afraid, I
had you know, I had a moment where that was
all true, and that was overwhelming, and the light outside
(13:20):
of my home that day was still beautiful, and somewhere,
not very far away, though I don't know where, somebody
was making love, and somewhere else, not very far away,
a child was being born, and somewhere else someone was
helping somebody. And and so you know, both things are true.
(13:42):
And while when we're suffering, we need the company of
those who know what it's like to suffer. When I'm suffering,
I need I need everything that's not suffering to heal.
When I'm broken, I need everything that's solid to heal.
And so being in the moment, which we talk a
(14:03):
lot about in our age, and I think rightfully so,
but we tend sometimes to make a cartoon out of it.
Being in the moment isn't just oh well, I can
forget about responsibility or the past, or the future or
others and just live with abandon and enjoy it. Now,
being in the moment means being in my moment to
(14:25):
the depth of my experience where it starts to touch
on all experience, and being in the moment of life
that is happening everywhere at the same time, beyond my
individual journey, and allowing those things to merge. You know,
it's interesting that we're taught as we grow up. We're
(14:49):
all taught to discern things, to sort, to prioritize, and
then choose. And this is a very great skill, uh,
that the mind has that helps us navigate the surface world.
It helps me put gas in the car and choose
cottage cheese over milk, and you know, choose a cough
(15:11):
syrup and not the poison, the end poison it's next
to it um. And that's all necessary. But but I think, uh,
you know, that kind of mental acuity is not a
code to live by. It's a skill to help us live.
And what experience has taught me is that the longer
(15:32):
I go and the deeper I feel, things both wonderful
and difficult the more I feel like like experience asks
us to let everything in, to absorb it and let
it integrate, to let it synthesize. And the mind can't
do that. Only the heart, I believe, can do that.
(15:54):
And that when we can hold the truth of all things,
then and it releases a logic of the heart. And
this is where we get into the realm of paradox. Yes,
one of the guardians of truth. Paradox has been a
(16:14):
great teacher for me. And and one of the ways
that I understand paradox is that, you know, we can
describe paradox as any moment where more than one thing
is true at the same time. And so if we
can withstand that seeming tension of opposites, we we start
to to be instructed in a deeper way, a deeper
(16:39):
way of things being like the fact that I could be,
you know, struggling and sick with cancer, and a mile away,
you know, somebody is being born, you know, and one
is you know, not more valuable than the other or
or competing with the There they inform each other. Breast
(17:23):
of the interview with Mark Nepo in the latest book,
you have a line that speaks very much to what
we were just talking about that I had pulled out,
And it says, the sighted finn only implies the wonder
of the great fish pumping below, and the sighted star
only implies the oceans of light flooding the universe beyond
(17:43):
the range of our eyes. In just this way, everything
worth knowing is cloaked in paradox, because everything substantial defies
being revealed in its totality. Thank you, Thank you, And
I think that you know. So in that way, we're
always I think the physical world, the tangible world, is
(18:04):
like the tip of the iceberg. It's a manifestation of
the invisible energies of life, whatever you want to call them.
And you know, the mystical call it, you know, the
glow and shimmer of spirit, and you know, physicists call
it the wave theory that's in between particles. But whatever
(18:24):
whatever we call it, there's more than just the surface world.
It points to the invisible. And so one of the
things I think that we're asked to do in being
human and incoming alive, is to maintain our relationship with
with all that is unseen and unknown, to stay in
(18:46):
conversation with what we don't know. It's a huge uh
point of contention in in our modern global world because
we live in an age where there is fundamentalism worldwide.
Nobody has a uh kind of a monopoly on fundamentalism.
Not right. You know, we have domestic fundamentalism and and
(19:08):
every culture has its orthodoxy and fundamentalism. But I also believe,
and I write about this in The Endless Practice, but um,
we we've developed a personal fundamentalism where you know, we
become so accustomed to what's familiar that we we think
(19:30):
of that as truth, and actually that insight is not mine.
That's Robert Keegan's from Who's the psychologist from Harvard Developmental Psychologist,
which I love is he talks about egocentrism as when
we we substitute what is familiar as true because it's familiar,
(19:50):
we believe it's true. And now only things that are
familiar to us will we allow in. And then we
the fear that anything that's not familiar is dangerous, and
therefore we start having racism and prejudice and violence. And
as opposed to you know, Plato said that we're all
(20:11):
born whole w h o eli, but we need each
other to be complete and and in the Jewish tradition
that wholeness that we're born with is spoken about as
as the indwelling presence of God that's only manifest when
we are in relationship with each other, or with life,
(20:35):
or in conversation with our soul. So there's a huge
emphasis in the Jewish tradition on relationship and dialogue and
conversation because that's how you know, which assumes that we're not.
I don't talk to you to confirm my our sameness.
(20:58):
I talk to you so that I can learn from
you what I don't know, and you for me what
you don't know, and together were we are made more whole.
So those have always been fundamental, you know, different kind
of starting points in the in the human journey. At
any point in history you can find you can find
(21:18):
there really are two lineages. Yeah, and I think that
modern culture has a definite sense of to not have
the answer is something that we're very afraid of. Yeah.
And and actually, you know, I think that we've been
miseducated that that we should even look for answers. I
view a question now at this point in my life
as a doorway that I would like to open and
(21:39):
go through with someone not for an answer so that
we can live something together. Yeah, there's that great old
quote from Rocca about learning to love the questions and
then some day you might be able to live your
way into the answers. Yeah, that's a beautiful, beautiful statement.
So your latest book is called Inside the Miracle, Enduring Offering,
(22:00):
Approaching Wholeness, and it's a series of writings from a
lot of different times in your life, but the the
original some of the original parts of the book were
from when you had cancer, I believe, back in the
late eighties. So a lot of the book is focused
on if I had to if I had to summarize,
(22:20):
A big part of it is that it's precisely these
challenging experiences, these difficult experiences that we go through that
turn us into who we are, that that's the path
to wisdom. Very often, what I've done with this book,
which I'm very grateful uh to my publisher, sounds true
for the chance to do this is I've taken work
(22:43):
over thirty years, starting with my cancer journey and and
moving through you know, all the different ways that my
perceiving has changed and other struggles and losses to try
to glean the lessons and the the inquiry, and so
to put that together after all this time was a
real gift to be able to explore that. And I'm
(23:05):
not like deifying suffering, you know, um uh, it's it's
not about that. It's more about it's like you wouldn't
dispute gravity, you know, like it just is. And you know,
suffering and difficulty and obstacles, as well as surprise and
wonder and the overwhelming impetus of love. All of these
(23:28):
things they're equivalent to what friction and erosion are in nature.
So in the natural world, things are eroded to their beauty.
You know, we save up money and we go on
vacation to look at the Grand Canyon, or to go
to the edge of uh one of the continents and
(23:51):
look at cliffs that have been pounded for thousands of
years by the sea. And so the human equivalent to
that is great love and great suffering, great surprise, and
great obstacle. And it seems like the order of the universe.
However you want to deem that, whether you talk believe
(24:11):
in God or Ackman or dharma or quantum physics or
everything or nothing, whatever it is, it seems like the
universe has been designed to be just the human journey,
the life journey, not just human is difficult enough that
we need each other to hold each other up to
(24:31):
that erosion and wearing down. And I think that ensures
the journey of love. And you know, in the same
way that a piece of coal can be pressurized into
a diamond, so to we And so this is just
kind of a spiritual physics that I don't know that
I would have seen had I not been pressurized myself
(24:54):
and eroded and broken open. And so I think that, um,
I'm more My work is focused on has always been
focused on, and I think all the traditions are focused on.
So what do we do once once we're opened? You know,
and that becomes part of that becomes a big part
of the spiritual journey. We will be opened, there's no
(25:17):
question about it. Just the same way that there's gravity,
or that rain will fall to the ground, or that
you know, erosion will wear mountains away, we will be
broken open. And how we hold each other up and
support each other. And what we do with what's opened
is when the soul starts to show itself in the world.
And you know, this is the thing that Tibetan tradition,
(25:40):
a spiritual warrior not a military warrior. A spiritual warrior
is one who is committed to a life of transformation,
not knowing what that is will look like. But a
spiritual warrior always has a crack in their heart, because
that's how the mysteries get in. And so you know,
(26:00):
we are cracked open. And and when that happens, what
the The The light that is in us comes out, and
the light of the world comes in. And now now
for the first time, we can't distinguish what's the world
and what's me. And now we are more one, and
(26:23):
our compassion begins to be released. There's a beautiful line
in the new book where this gets back to what
you're talking about. A minute or so ago, was about this,
the need for others and how how we come together.
And there's a line in the book where you're describing
the great care that your friend and your wife gave
(26:43):
to you during the particular difficult time during your cancer,
and you say that we made it through, and I'll
never forget what they have taught that reaching in and
touching the spot that hurts, if done with selfless love,
can release the pain. The way a dark branch can
be gently shook to free it of all those steely crows. Yeah, yeah,
(27:08):
you know. I mean I think we underestimate the power
of of love and of presence, you know. For all
the things that we can do. You know, I can
if you, if I if we were together and you
were to fall over or trip, and I can help
you up, and I can get you a band aid,
and I can get you a glass of water. But
(27:29):
for the things that can't be seen, the things that
we have to deal with inside our presence, are bearing witness,
are holding, are listening. Has always been great, great medicine,
great medicine, and we often underestimate that or forget it,
(27:52):
forget that that it even matters. In the book, you
talk about something that you received is the word all
(28:16):
use from having cancer, And you talk about something called
the terrible knowledge. Well, and the terrible knowledge, And I
know that there's an essay that I wrote about that.
Um and the terrible knowledge is this paradox of the
fragility of life, of how miraculous and amazing and precious
and unrepeatable every moment is that all of eternity is
(28:40):
in every moment, in this moment, between us right now,
and the terrible knowledge is that we can be erased
in a second. And I don't say that to scare anyone.
It's always been this flickering, this shimmering paradox that life
(29:02):
is precious, and life by itself is indestructible, but those
of us, all the forms blessed to carry life, are
not indestructible, and so it makes life all the more precious.
And depending on what side of that terrible knowledge we
(29:23):
land is whether we are in h the most graceful
state or or the most fearful state. And so there's
no solving the terrible knowledge. There is only our journey,
just just the way a dolphin will will break surface
and go under and break surface and go under like
(29:44):
a whale, you know, and we will as well. However,
I tend to think that when we break surfaces, when
we're prey to the fear and the delicacies of things
and the fragility of things, and when we're we're when
we're in the depth, is when we're carried by the
(30:05):
indestructible nature of life. And I think that you know
we have there are throughout history. You know this, This
is an ongoing unstoppable cycle, I believe. So it's not
about staying in any one place. It's about how do
we live and hold and be a part of this
ongoing miracle and indestructible and slash for fragility of life.
(30:33):
And so those who get caught or stuck if we
you know, in the destructive side, the the fragile, impermanent,
fearful side, well you know, then those are the people
who are pessimistic and neolistic. And life is full of
chaos and random and and all there is is fear.
(30:54):
And those who are who try to be stuck on
on the other side to transcend all of that, you know,
life is a panacea. It's beautiful. If they could just
get out of this icky stuff on the ground, well,
it's it's I think it's always both and and you know,
(31:15):
the the impermanence of life grounds us from from running
away from everything that's here, and the miraculous light of
the indestructible nature of life lifts us from the impermanence.
(31:40):
And we and have so are I think, you know,
I think part of our spiritual practice, whatever that looks
like for anybody individually, I think it has some form
of how how do we allow both in? How do
we allow both? And how do we how do we
live with both? And it is a terrible knowledge in
that you know, when we fall down, it can be
(32:03):
terrifying and terrible, but when we're standing strong, it's full
of awe. It's full of awe. And I think the
the the value of impermanence within one you know, we
we we tend from the Buddhist perspective of the impermanence.
We always immediately think, oh, that means we're gonna die,
and we all will. But but impermanence within a life
(32:27):
means that whatever we're going through, including all the difficulties,
that's not permanent. Either it won't last. It doesn't make
it easier, but it won't last. Depending on the state
you're in, impermanence is either good or bad news, but
it's always true, that's right. One of the things on
(32:48):
the show that um I talked about a lot is
how do you balance ambition and striving with being right
where you are in life? So you're somebody who has
you know, you have written an enormous number of books,
books of poetry, books of nonfiction, so you're clearly um
(33:09):
you know you have some degree of ambition is probably
not the right word, but creative drive call it what
you will. And yet you've also said things and this
conversation confirms a lot of it, like that we think
that accomplishing things will complete us, when it's this experiencing
life that will. So how do those things balance out
in yourself? Yeah? Well they they thank you. It's a
(33:32):
wonderful question. And you know they don't balance out, they
because I don't. I don't have any ambition. And I'll
tell you how this all. I was very driven before
my cancer journey in my thirties. I was a driven artist.
And um, through no wisdom on my part. It wasn't
like I almost died and said, oh well I'm going
(33:52):
to give that up. Um, you know, I just woke
up on the other side and I was living from
my heart and not my head. And I also had
lost my drive. And this was very disorienting at the time.
I mean, it really was troubling. And you know, it
was enough that I almost died and I was still
here and now I was I was here and I
(34:14):
felt like I had lost my gift, I had lost
my creativity and I was very wandering for almost, you know,
eight months or so or nine months, when I slowly
came to understand that I was now freed of the
drive and I was drawn to things. And the image
(34:35):
that helps helps me understand that was it was like
a river. You know. A strong river makes a lot
of noise because the banks are holding it, and so
it roars down through the kind of the gully of
the banks and the river bed. But when that river
reaches the sea, and all rivers reached the sea, that
(34:56):
current doesn't disappear. It goes deeper and continues to run strong.
But because it's deeper, it doesn't make any noise, and
it joins with all the other water. And that's what
going through cancer and almost dying and still being here
did to me, against my will, without my knowledge, you know.
(35:18):
And and so then when I started to understand I
was drawn to things, I was actually freer, and there
was so much more joy in creating. And so things
started to shift because I wasn't I was no longer
creating to produce something. I was creating to stay in
(35:40):
conversation with life, and the trail of that conversation started
to become my teacher. So while of course these writings
have have parts of me, They have a lot of me.
But I wouldn't say that I create them out of nothing.
(36:01):
I would say that I retrieved them, and I give
of myself, and myself is in the mix, just like
silt on the bottom of a river gets taken along
by the river. But then what what comes becomes my teacher.
So you know, if I the key to my being
(36:22):
prolific has not been ambition. It's been that I've learned
how to get out of the way and that I've
learned how to uh to write about what I need
to learn. I don't write about what I know. And
the truth is, I don't know if many authors will
admit that. I think that's true for everybody. I write
(36:45):
about what I need to learn, and then I become
it becomes my teacher. If I only wrote about what
I understood, I would have written very little. So you know,
I wrote a book about awakening, the Book of Awakening,
because I needed to be more awake. And I wrote
a book called The Exquisite Risk because I needed to
be able to learn how to take more risks. I
wrote a book about courage because whether people you know
(37:08):
thought I was courageous in in facing what I had
to deal with. That doesn't matter. I had reached the
end of what what was courage for me, And in
order to continue to grow, I needed to learn more
about how do I be more courageous? So are and
listening the book on listening. So, you know, I think
(37:28):
that one of the inescapable gifts, hard gifts of almost
dying what has been that. You know, I look forward
to things. I planned things, you know, I look forward
to our call, but my dreaming is always returned to
now it's always my work as always Now there's nowhere
to go, there is no ambition. I'm not going anywhere.
(37:51):
There's nothing uh to achieve, you know. And so in
this way, you know, we've been taught eternity as you
stack up years forever like on some imaginary ladder. Actually,
eternity to me is more like it's it's all of
life that is released in the center of every moment
(38:15):
when we can be fully here. So it's more like
a drop of water that ripples clearly in all directions.
And you know, I write and express and and and
blessed to be in teaching circles because that conversation is
when I feel most alive. So let me say one
(38:37):
other thing about this, because it's a very important subject.
So let's talk about ambition and goals and dreams. I
think that we have to have them, And this is
where I don't think were we need to choose between
becoming or being. I think that, you know, we have
to have them in order to engage ourselves in life.
(38:57):
But we hold on to our dreams and our goals
the ambitions too tightly as if that's where we're going.
I think they're kindling for the fire of aliveness. Dreams
and goals and ambitions are what the heart and the
soul use to bring us alive. And it's the aliveness
(39:19):
that matters. So you know, we work toward dreams, and
a lot of times our dreams don't come true. But
you know, as long as we give our full heart
and all of our work and effort, which I believe
in to to whatever we think we're working on, our
dreams may not come true. But by being so devoted,
(39:41):
we may come true. That's a beautiful way to phrase that.
Do you have any regular spiritual practices that you engage
in that help you to stay more alive? Just to
stay in tune with these things that we're talking about. Yeah,
you know, I mean I've practiced a lot of different things, um,
you know, from meditation to prayer to you know, all
(40:05):
kinds of of things and and at this point in
my life, and they're all wonderful. So it's like whatever
works for for anybody, Okay. You know, it could be gardening,
it could be a formal spiritual practice, and it could
be being an auto mechanic on weekends. You know, it
doesn't really matter what it is. But what I at
this point in my life, I'm really committed to an
(40:27):
integrated practice. So I try to have my days. You know,
I purposely interrupt my days. I begin by working, and
then I'll take our dog for a walk, and I'll
work some more, and then I'll purposely go out and
do errands to to break up the day. And so
I try to really have things be integrated throughout throughout
(40:48):
the day. And and and I'll tell you why. And
it's um And I wrote about this in another book,
but you know it comes from the why of Beethoven,
and Beethoven among many things. But Beethoven, one of his
amazing innovations is he he created it's opus one thirty one.
(41:10):
It's a it's a concier a string uh concerto for
a quartet and and at that time quartet concertos string
corcertos um they only had four movements and he wrote
this one with seven. And the musicians at the time
(41:31):
we're all kind of like, you know, they were like,
what what is he thinking? And they were also like
challenged to see if they could play it, you know.
And one of the other things he did in this
was that, you know, in music, there are rest stops,
there are pauses where there is no beat, and it
just you know, that beat is filled with silence, there's arrest. Well,
(41:51):
not only did he make this with seven movements, but
he made the entire thing without any rest stops. There
were no pauses. Now, professional string classical you know, musicians
who play string instruments, they are gifted enough and practiced
enough that they use those pauses to retune their instruments,
because you can't play more than one movement if you're lucky,
(42:15):
without your strings going out of tune even slightly. So
Beethoven was saying to the musicians, and it was and
it was a comment on life, you know, you can practice,
you can do all of this, but yeah, you're gonna
have to tune as you go. It's not going to
be perfect music, and you're not going to be able
to get a rest stop, and you're gonna have to
(42:37):
tune as you go. And and certainly we do have
rest stops and we can pause, but there are times
in life, you know, we talk here and then we'll
get off and you'll go into your life tomorrow and
I'll go into mind. And when life happens, we're gonna
have to tune as we go. It may sound out
of tune, and it doesn't matter because we're not here.
(42:59):
We're not here or to do it perfectly. We're here
to do it thoroughly. Yeah, I love that story. That's
a great way to think about engaging in life. Well,
I think that is a great place to wrap up
the interview. I have really enjoyed talking with you. I
(43:19):
really enjoy your writing a lot. You're you're a great writer.
There's a lot of poetry. Even in the pros it's
very poetic. And then of course you write a lot
of poems. So we will have links in the show
notes to certainly your latest book as well. As many
of your other works. But again, Mark, thank you so
much for taking the time. It's been a pleasure to
talk with you. Thank you Eric. It's great to be
(43:41):
a part of your good work too. Okay, we'll take
care all right, Bye bye m You can learn more
(44:02):
about this podcast and Mark NEPO at one you feed
dot net slash nepo. That's n e p O. Thanks
The terrible knowledge is that we can be erased in
a second. And I don't say that to scare anyone.
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
(00:23):
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
(00:44):
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m
(01:11):
Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Mark Nepo, a poet, philosopher, and cancer survivor who has
taught in the fields of poetry, health, and spirituality for
forty years. A New York Times Number one best selling author,
he has published numerous books and audio projects. Mark has
appeared with Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday program
on Own TV, and has also been interviewed by Robin
(01:34):
Roberts on Good Morning America. And here's the interview with
Mark Nepo. Hi, Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you.
It's great to be with you. It's a real pleasure
to have you on. I have seen your books on
shelves for years. The Book of Awakening I read years
ago and I really liked and I really enjoyed your
latest book, Inside the Miracle. So I'm looking forward to
(01:56):
getting into that book in more detail. But we'll start
we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's
talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are
two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
(02:19):
the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life, and in
the work that you do, as well as anyways that
you like to feed the good wolf in your own life.
(02:39):
Sure well, thank you all. I love I love that parable,
I know it. I know it well, and as i'd
like to reflect on it. Um, I'd like to move
away from good and bad. You know, I find in
my not not to a place of relativism where we
say there is no good or bad, but but in
terms of how we move through life. I'd like to
(03:01):
reflect on this, uh, in terms of things that are
life affirming and things that are life draining. Because often
I find when we're told we're good or we're bad,
or we're up or we're down, or we're true or
we're false, or you know, all of these directional judgments,
they're just not specific enough to be helpful. You know,
(03:23):
if you tell me I'm bad, I feel bad, but
I don't really understand what that means in a way
that's going to help me change. And likewise, if you
tell me I'm good, well, I feel relieved for a minute,
but I also don't really know what that means in
terms of what to what to reinforce. So for me,
(03:45):
I feel like we are made up just like X
and Y chromosomes. We begin with I think, everything we
need inside us, and as we engage in the life
of experience, we move constantly between life affirming energies and
life draining energies. And the life draining energies make us
(04:10):
look for only things that will confirm what we already know,
look for things that will only give us the illusion
that we're in control, you know, and they will feed
fear and violence and hate and sameness. But when we
pursue our aliveness, which I think is what the soul
(04:31):
wants us to do, When we pursue our aliveness, which
changes for every individual throughout their life, then we come
alive and we inhabit our gifts, and so we're all
which one do we feed? Do we do we feed
what's life affirming? Or do we feed what's life draining?
(04:53):
That makes a lot of sense. One of the things
in your book that you talk about a little bit
you were just talking about can troll, And in the
latest book you say that our personal suffering is often
intensified by our want to control life and failing to
be in control. While believing in control makes us feel
accountable for all that breaks along the way, and so
(05:15):
there is guilt, but where guilt is secreted by a
controlling mind, compassion emanates from an accepting heart. Yeah, you know,
and I think, you know, we're just all comparing notes.
Nobody really has a clue about this great history of
life and and that's the wonderful things. And we can
admit we don't know anything, then we can really begin
a true journey or inquiry together. So you know, let
(05:38):
me first say I don't have any answers, um, But
all I can do is speak from my own experience.
And you know, all of these things, even what we
talked about in terms of life draining and life affirming energies,
I have, you know, pursued both. I have fallen trying
to control things, and um, it's part of being human.
(05:58):
But where we go with it, what we do with it?
And when we fall down do we get up? And
so you know, I think that I learned through my
my journey and my cancer journey many years ago, we
really have very little control over life. We which doesn't
mean oh therefore there's nothing to do. I should acquiesce
(06:19):
and just live like a rock. You know, there's a
difference between participating and engaging in life and trying to
control events and people and the thoughts and feelings of
those around us. And when we do try to control things,
which is impossible, we we wind up becoming more and
(06:44):
more anxious and irritated, and we wind up resenting the
life around us that won't stay controlled. So you know,
there's a uh, it's not in this book, but I
have a small, little, very very short story in my
book of stories as far as the heart can see.
It's called Cane and Able. I can't recite it, but
I can tell you exactly the essence of it. And
(07:05):
the essence is that, you know, two brothers. They find
themselves with one small berry in their weaker hand, and
the one the one brother looks at it and he
and it's so small compared to everything he's worked for
and wanted and dreamed of that it makes him bitter.
(07:26):
But the other brother looks at the small berry and
he says, oh my god, I think I think all
my work has led me to this small berry. I
think the whole world is inside that one little berry.
And so he and you can also this is another
version of of which one will you feed? Now we
(07:46):
both we all have these voices in us. We have
the voice that looks at at whatever we're given and goes,
is that it? After all I've done, after all I've worked?
Is that all I get? And that that makes us it?
Or that makes us want to, you know, file a
grievance with God somewhere. But but the other is we
(08:08):
wake up like I did after my cancer journey, and
I go, oh my god, it was all here right
all along. It's in this little berry. Let me eat
this berry that has everything. Oh my god, how amazing
is that? And I think everybody has this ongoing conversation
between these two voices. And one other thing I have
learned along the way is that as soon as we
(08:30):
we stop and we all do two compare or account
our experience compared to our dream of what we're working toward,
or compared to others, or compared to those in history.
As soon as we compare or count, we lose our
access to everything that matters because you can't be present
(08:56):
and compare or count. Yeah, that's something we talked about
on the show A lot. Is this idea of you know,
how how painful comparison can be. I think it was
maybe Teddy Roosevelt who said that, um, you know, comparison
is the thief of joy. Oh that's beautiful. Yeah, that's
a wonderful expression. What I've noticed about is when you're
(09:17):
what's're in the comparing mind, you can always look and
be like, well, I've got more than that person, but
I've got less. You know, wherever you are in the scale,
you can always look up or down. And my experience
of that is always that it neither of those points.
Am I Connecting? This leads Eric to another kind of
ongoing challenge that's part of the human journey, and that
is that everyone alive goes through repeated challenges about inflating
(09:42):
ourselves or deflating ourselves. And the practice I think, or
at least what I aspire to is whenever I'm going
one way or the other, is to really try to
just assume my full stature. Not not larger than I
am and not small older than I am, and uh,
(10:03):
you know, I was, I'm sixty four. But and in
each decade I have a different form of exercise. But
when I was in my fort I jogged, and uh,
I was jogging one day in the summer. I was
living in Albany, New York at the time. And I was,
you know, tired, about three miles in and it had
was sweating, and I had panting, and my hands were
on my knees, and it had rained the night before,
(10:24):
and I was looking in a puddle, and all of
a sudden, I saw this full grown man in the
puddle and it was me. And and I realized, you know,
I had been a little boy running around in a
big man's body for years, and all of a sudden
I saw myself, just briefly, accurately, and it it was
(10:44):
one of those moments that changed changed me, that changed
me to assume my accurate, full stature, not to be
anybody else, and not to be inflated or deflated. There's
that spiritual idea of humility, which is often I think
interpreted as being you know, oh I'm nothing, I'm nothing,
(11:06):
whereas you know, the way I the best way I've
always heard humility defined is an accurate reading of of
really who we are, what we're good at, what we're
not good at. I mean, just a very accurate picture
of who we are. Is is humility versus a um
sort of a a false sort of condescension towards ourselves. Yeah,
and when we when we can be accurate about ourselves,
(11:31):
where we're open to life around us, we're more open
to life around us. Because when we're bigger than we are,
then we're like the Wizard of Oz, we're really trying
to keep puffing it up. And when we're smaller than
we are, then we're doing that comparing thing, and we're
always trying to knock everything else down because we feel
(11:51):
so small, and neither neither allows us to truly relate
to life and to those around us. Yeah. One of
my favorite lines of yours is you say, if peace
comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a
loss of perspective. Yeah. Yeah, you know I think this,
(12:15):
Uh that also really came to me through my own suffering,
because I think that I learned while I was going
through my cancer journey that to be broken is no
reason to see all things is broken and that and again,
it's like we're talking here, it's not about it's not
(12:36):
about you know, when when we're in pain and when
we're in fear, it's natural and human to want well, Okay,
the whole world is painful. I'm broken, Therefore everything everything
is terrible. Um. The world's chaotic and broken and um.
And when I'm in pain, then everything is painful or
I'm afraid therefore the whole world. It's understandable to do that.
(12:58):
But that is both things are true. And you know
when I when I was you know, broken and sick
and and you know, close to dying and afraid, I
had you know, I had a moment where that was
all true, and that was overwhelming, and the light outside
(13:20):
of my home that day was still beautiful, and somewhere,
not very far away, though I don't know where, somebody
was making love, and somewhere else, not very far away,
a child was being born, and somewhere else someone was
helping somebody. And and so you know, both things are true.
(13:42):
And while when we're suffering, we need the company of
those who know what it's like to suffer. When I'm suffering,
I need I need everything that's not suffering to heal.
When I'm broken, I need everything that's solid to heal.
And so being in the moment, which we talk a
(14:03):
lot about in our age, and I think rightfully so,
but we tend sometimes to make a cartoon out of it.
Being in the moment isn't just oh well, I can
forget about responsibility or the past, or the future or
others and just live with abandon and enjoy it. Now,
being in the moment means being in my moment to
(14:25):
the depth of my experience where it starts to touch
on all experience, and being in the moment of life
that is happening everywhere at the same time, beyond my
individual journey, and allowing those things to merge. You know,
it's interesting that we're taught as we grow up. We're
(14:49):
all taught to discern things, to sort, to prioritize, and
then choose. And this is a very great skill, uh,
that the mind has that helps us navigate the surface world.
It helps me put gas in the car and choose
cottage cheese over milk, and you know, choose a cough
(15:11):
syrup and not the poison, the end poison it's next
to it um. And that's all necessary. But but I think, uh,
you know, that kind of mental acuity is not a
code to live by. It's a skill to help us live.
And what experience has taught me is that the longer
(15:32):
I go and the deeper I feel, things both wonderful
and difficult the more I feel like like experience asks
us to let everything in, to absorb it and let
it integrate, to let it synthesize. And the mind can't
do that. Only the heart, I believe, can do that.
(15:54):
And that when we can hold the truth of all things,
then and it releases a logic of the heart. And
this is where we get into the realm of paradox. Yes,
one of the guardians of truth. Paradox has been a
(16:14):
great teacher for me. And and one of the ways
that I understand paradox is that, you know, we can
describe paradox as any moment where more than one thing
is true at the same time. And so if we
can withstand that seeming tension of opposites, we we start
to to be instructed in a deeper way, a deeper
(16:39):
way of things being like the fact that I could be,
you know, struggling and sick with cancer, and a mile away,
you know, somebody is being born, you know, and one
is you know, not more valuable than the other or
or competing with the There they inform each other. Breast
(17:23):
of the interview with Mark Nepo in the latest book,
you have a line that speaks very much to what
we were just talking about that I had pulled out,
And it says, the sighted finn only implies the wonder
of the great fish pumping below, and the sighted star
only implies the oceans of light flooding the universe beyond
(17:43):
the range of our eyes. In just this way, everything
worth knowing is cloaked in paradox, because everything substantial defies
being revealed in its totality. Thank you, Thank you, And
I think that you know. So in that way, we're
always I think the physical world, the tangible world, is
(18:04):
like the tip of the iceberg. It's a manifestation of
the invisible energies of life, whatever you want to call them.
And you know, the mystical call it, you know, the
glow and shimmer of spirit, and you know, physicists call
it the wave theory that's in between particles. But whatever
(18:24):
whatever we call it, there's more than just the surface world.
It points to the invisible. And so one of the
things I think that we're asked to do in being
human and incoming alive, is to maintain our relationship with
with all that is unseen and unknown, to stay in
(18:46):
conversation with what we don't know. It's a huge uh
point of contention in in our modern global world because
we live in an age where there is fundamentalism worldwide.
Nobody has a uh kind of a monopoly on fundamentalism.
Not right. You know, we have domestic fundamentalism and and
(19:08):
every culture has its orthodoxy and fundamentalism. But I also believe,
and I write about this in The Endless Practice, but um,
we we've developed a personal fundamentalism where you know, we
become so accustomed to what's familiar that we we think
(19:30):
of that as truth, and actually that insight is not mine.
That's Robert Keegan's from Who's the psychologist from Harvard Developmental Psychologist,
which I love is he talks about egocentrism as when
we we substitute what is familiar as true because it's familiar,
(19:50):
we believe it's true. And now only things that are
familiar to us will we allow in. And then we
the fear that anything that's not familiar is dangerous, and
therefore we start having racism and prejudice and violence. And
as opposed to you know, Plato said that we're all
(20:11):
born whole w h o eli, but we need each
other to be complete and and in the Jewish tradition
that wholeness that we're born with is spoken about as
as the indwelling presence of God that's only manifest when
we are in relationship with each other, or with life,
(20:35):
or in conversation with our soul. So there's a huge
emphasis in the Jewish tradition on relationship and dialogue and
conversation because that's how you know, which assumes that we're not.
I don't talk to you to confirm my our sameness.
(20:58):
I talk to you so that I can learn from
you what I don't know, and you for me what
you don't know, and together were we are made more whole.
So those have always been fundamental, you know, different kind
of starting points in the in the human journey. At
any point in history you can find you can find
(21:18):
there really are two lineages. Yeah, and I think that
modern culture has a definite sense of to not have
the answer is something that we're very afraid of. Yeah.
And and actually, you know, I think that we've been
miseducated that that we should even look for answers. I
view a question now at this point in my life
as a doorway that I would like to open and
(21:39):
go through with someone not for an answer so that
we can live something together. Yeah, there's that great old
quote from Rocca about learning to love the questions and
then some day you might be able to live your
way into the answers. Yeah, that's a beautiful, beautiful statement.
So your latest book is called Inside the Miracle, Enduring Offering,
(22:00):
Approaching Wholeness, and it's a series of writings from a
lot of different times in your life, but the the
original some of the original parts of the book were
from when you had cancer, I believe, back in the
late eighties. So a lot of the book is focused
on if I had to if I had to summarize,
(22:20):
A big part of it is that it's precisely these
challenging experiences, these difficult experiences that we go through that
turn us into who we are, that that's the path
to wisdom. Very often, what I've done with this book,
which I'm very grateful uh to my publisher, sounds true
for the chance to do this is I've taken work
(22:43):
over thirty years, starting with my cancer journey and and
moving through you know, all the different ways that my
perceiving has changed and other struggles and losses to try
to glean the lessons and the the inquiry, and so
to put that together after all this time was a
real gift to be able to explore that. And I'm
(23:05):
not like deifying suffering, you know, um uh, it's it's
not about that. It's more about it's like you wouldn't
dispute gravity, you know, like it just is. And you know,
suffering and difficulty and obstacles, as well as surprise and
wonder and the overwhelming impetus of love. All of these
(23:28):
things they're equivalent to what friction and erosion are in nature.
So in the natural world, things are eroded to their beauty.
You know, we save up money and we go on
vacation to look at the Grand Canyon, or to go
to the edge of uh one of the continents and
(23:51):
look at cliffs that have been pounded for thousands of
years by the sea. And so the human equivalent to
that is great love and great suffering, great surprise, and
great obstacle. And it seems like the order of the universe.
However you want to deem that, whether you talk believe
(24:11):
in God or Ackman or dharma or quantum physics or
everything or nothing, whatever it is, it seems like the
universe has been designed to be just the human journey,
the life journey, not just human is difficult enough that
we need each other to hold each other up to
(24:31):
that erosion and wearing down. And I think that ensures
the journey of love. And you know, in the same
way that a piece of coal can be pressurized into
a diamond, so to we And so this is just
kind of a spiritual physics that I don't know that
I would have seen had I not been pressurized myself
(24:54):
and eroded and broken open. And so I think that, um,
I'm more My work is focused on has always been
focused on, and I think all the traditions are focused on.
So what do we do once once we're opened? You know,
and that becomes part of that becomes a big part
of the spiritual journey. We will be opened, there's no
(25:17):
question about it. Just the same way that there's gravity,
or that rain will fall to the ground, or that
you know, erosion will wear mountains away, we will be
broken open. And how we hold each other up and
support each other. And what we do with what's opened
is when the soul starts to show itself in the world.
And you know, this is the thing that Tibetan tradition,
(25:40):
a spiritual warrior not a military warrior. A spiritual warrior
is one who is committed to a life of transformation,
not knowing what that is will look like. But a
spiritual warrior always has a crack in their heart, because
that's how the mysteries get in. And so you know,
(26:00):
we are cracked open. And and when that happens, what
the The The light that is in us comes out, and
the light of the world comes in. And now now
for the first time, we can't distinguish what's the world
and what's me. And now we are more one, and
(26:23):
our compassion begins to be released. There's a beautiful line
in the new book where this gets back to what
you're talking about. A minute or so ago, was about this,
the need for others and how how we come together.
And there's a line in the book where you're describing
the great care that your friend and your wife gave
(26:43):
to you during the particular difficult time during your cancer,
and you say that we made it through, and I'll
never forget what they have taught that reaching in and
touching the spot that hurts, if done with selfless love,
can release the pain. The way a dark branch can
be gently shook to free it of all those steely crows. Yeah, yeah,
(27:08):
you know. I mean I think we underestimate the power
of of love and of presence, you know. For all
the things that we can do. You know, I can
if you, if I if we were together and you
were to fall over or trip, and I can help
you up, and I can get you a band aid,
and I can get you a glass of water. But
(27:29):
for the things that can't be seen, the things that
we have to deal with inside our presence, are bearing witness,
are holding, are listening. Has always been great, great medicine,
great medicine, and we often underestimate that or forget it,
(27:52):
forget that that it even matters. In the book, you
talk about something that you received is the word all
(28:16):
use from having cancer, And you talk about something called
the terrible knowledge. Well, and the terrible knowledge, And I
know that there's an essay that I wrote about that.
Um and the terrible knowledge is this paradox of the
fragility of life, of how miraculous and amazing and precious
and unrepeatable every moment is that all of eternity is
(28:40):
in every moment, in this moment, between us right now,
and the terrible knowledge is that we can be erased
in a second. And I don't say that to scare anyone.
It's always been this flickering, this shimmering paradox that life
(29:02):
is precious, and life by itself is indestructible, but those
of us, all the forms blessed to carry life, are
not indestructible, and so it makes life all the more precious.
And depending on what side of that terrible knowledge we
(29:23):
land is whether we are in h the most graceful
state or or the most fearful state. And so there's
no solving the terrible knowledge. There is only our journey,
just just the way a dolphin will will break surface
and go under and break surface and go under like
(29:44):
a whale, you know, and we will as well. However,
I tend to think that when we break surfaces, when
we're prey to the fear and the delicacies of things
and the fragility of things, and when we're we're when
we're in the depth, is when we're carried by the
(30:05):
indestructible nature of life. And I think that you know
we have there are throughout history. You know this, This
is an ongoing unstoppable cycle, I believe. So it's not
about staying in any one place. It's about how do
we live and hold and be a part of this
ongoing miracle and indestructible and slash for fragility of life.
(30:33):
And so those who get caught or stuck if we
you know, in the destructive side, the the fragile, impermanent,
fearful side, well you know, then those are the people
who are pessimistic and neolistic. And life is full of
chaos and random and and all there is is fear.
(30:54):
And those who are who try to be stuck on
on the other side to transcend all of that, you know,
life is a panacea. It's beautiful. If they could just
get out of this icky stuff on the ground, well,
it's it's I think it's always both and and you know,
(31:15):
the the impermanence of life grounds us from from running
away from everything that's here, and the miraculous light of
the indestructible nature of life lifts us from the impermanence.
(31:40):
And we and have so are I think, you know,
I think part of our spiritual practice, whatever that looks
like for anybody individually, I think it has some form
of how how do we allow both in? How do
we allow both? And how do we how do we
live with both? And it is a terrible knowledge in
that you know, when we fall down, it can be
(32:03):
terrifying and terrible, but when we're standing strong, it's full
of awe. It's full of awe. And I think the
the the value of impermanence within one you know, we
we we tend from the Buddhist perspective of the impermanence.
We always immediately think, oh, that means we're gonna die,
and we all will. But but impermanence within a life
(32:27):
means that whatever we're going through, including all the difficulties,
that's not permanent. Either it won't last. It doesn't make
it easier, but it won't last. Depending on the state
you're in, impermanence is either good or bad news, but
it's always true, that's right. One of the things on
(32:48):
the show that um I talked about a lot is
how do you balance ambition and striving with being right
where you are in life? So you're somebody who has
you know, you have written an enormous number of books,
books of poetry, books of nonfiction, so you're clearly um
(33:09):
you know you have some degree of ambition is probably
not the right word, but creative drive call it what
you will. And yet you've also said things and this
conversation confirms a lot of it, like that we think
that accomplishing things will complete us, when it's this experiencing
life that will. So how do those things balance out
in yourself? Yeah? Well they they thank you. It's a
(33:32):
wonderful question. And you know they don't balance out, they
because I don't. I don't have any ambition. And I'll
tell you how this all. I was very driven before
my cancer journey in my thirties. I was a driven artist.
And um, through no wisdom on my part. It wasn't
like I almost died and said, oh well I'm going
(33:52):
to give that up. Um, you know, I just woke
up on the other side and I was living from
my heart and not my head. And I also had
lost my drive. And this was very disorienting at the time.
I mean, it really was troubling. And you know, it
was enough that I almost died and I was still
here and now I was I was here and I
(34:14):
felt like I had lost my gift, I had lost
my creativity and I was very wandering for almost, you know,
eight months or so or nine months, when I slowly
came to understand that I was now freed of the
drive and I was drawn to things. And the image
(34:35):
that helps helps me understand that was it was like
a river. You know. A strong river makes a lot
of noise because the banks are holding it, and so
it roars down through the kind of the gully of
the banks and the river bed. But when that river
reaches the sea, and all rivers reached the sea, that
(34:56):
current doesn't disappear. It goes deeper and continues to run strong.
But because it's deeper, it doesn't make any noise, and
it joins with all the other water. And that's what
going through cancer and almost dying and still being here
did to me, against my will, without my knowledge, you know.
(35:18):
And and so then when I started to understand I
was drawn to things, I was actually freer, and there
was so much more joy in creating. And so things
started to shift because I wasn't I was no longer
creating to produce something. I was creating to stay in
(35:40):
conversation with life, and the trail of that conversation started
to become my teacher. So while of course these writings
have have parts of me, They have a lot of me.
But I wouldn't say that I create them out of nothing.
(36:01):
I would say that I retrieved them, and I give
of myself, and myself is in the mix, just like
silt on the bottom of a river gets taken along
by the river. But then what what comes becomes my teacher.
So you know, if I the key to my being
(36:22):
prolific has not been ambition. It's been that I've learned
how to get out of the way and that I've
learned how to uh to write about what I need
to learn. I don't write about what I know. And
the truth is, I don't know if many authors will
admit that. I think that's true for everybody. I write
(36:45):
about what I need to learn, and then I become
it becomes my teacher. If I only wrote about what
I understood, I would have written very little. So you know,
I wrote a book about awakening, the Book of Awakening,
because I needed to be more awake. And I wrote
a book called The Exquisite Risk because I needed to
be able to learn how to take more risks. I
wrote a book about courage because whether people you know
(37:08):
thought I was courageous in in facing what I had
to deal with. That doesn't matter. I had reached the
end of what what was courage for me, And in
order to continue to grow, I needed to learn more
about how do I be more courageous? So are and
listening the book on listening. So, you know, I think
(37:28):
that one of the inescapable gifts, hard gifts of almost
dying what has been that. You know, I look forward
to things. I planned things, you know, I look forward
to our call, but my dreaming is always returned to
now it's always my work as always Now there's nowhere
to go, there is no ambition. I'm not going anywhere.
(37:51):
There's nothing uh to achieve, you know. And so in
this way, you know, we've been taught eternity as you
stack up years forever like on some imaginary ladder. Actually,
eternity to me is more like it's it's all of
life that is released in the center of every moment
(38:15):
when we can be fully here. So it's more like
a drop of water that ripples clearly in all directions.
And you know, I write and express and and and
blessed to be in teaching circles because that conversation is
when I feel most alive. So let me say one
(38:37):
other thing about this, because it's a very important subject.
So let's talk about ambition and goals and dreams. I
think that we have to have them, And this is
where I don't think were we need to choose between
becoming or being. I think that, you know, we have
to have them in order to engage ourselves in life.
(38:57):
But we hold on to our dreams and our goals
the ambitions too tightly as if that's where we're going.
I think they're kindling for the fire of aliveness. Dreams
and goals and ambitions are what the heart and the
soul use to bring us alive. And it's the aliveness
(39:19):
that matters. So you know, we work toward dreams, and
a lot of times our dreams don't come true. But
you know, as long as we give our full heart
and all of our work and effort, which I believe
in to to whatever we think we're working on, our
dreams may not come true. But by being so devoted,
(39:41):
we may come true. That's a beautiful way to phrase that.
Do you have any regular spiritual practices that you engage
in that help you to stay more alive? Just to
stay in tune with these things that we're talking about. Yeah,
you know, I mean I've practiced a lot of different things, um,
you know, from meditation to prayer to you know, all
(40:05):
kinds of of things and and at this point in
my life, and they're all wonderful. So it's like whatever
works for for anybody, Okay. You know, it could be gardening,
it could be a formal spiritual practice, and it could
be being an auto mechanic on weekends. You know, it
doesn't really matter what it is. But what I at
this point in my life, I'm really committed to an
(40:27):
integrated practice. So I try to have my days. You know,
I purposely interrupt my days. I begin by working, and
then I'll take our dog for a walk, and I'll
work some more, and then I'll purposely go out and
do errands to to break up the day. And so
I try to really have things be integrated throughout throughout
(40:48):
the day. And and and I'll tell you why. And
it's um And I wrote about this in another book,
but you know it comes from the why of Beethoven,
and Beethoven among many things. But Beethoven, one of his
amazing innovations is he he created it's opus one thirty one.
(41:10):
It's a it's a concier a string uh concerto for
a quartet and and at that time quartet concertos string
corcertos um they only had four movements and he wrote
this one with seven. And the musicians at the time
(41:31):
we're all kind of like, you know, they were like,
what what is he thinking? And they were also like
challenged to see if they could play it, you know.
And one of the other things he did in this
was that, you know, in music, there are rest stops,
there are pauses where there is no beat, and it
just you know, that beat is filled with silence, there's arrest. Well,
(41:51):
not only did he make this with seven movements, but
he made the entire thing without any rest stops. There
were no pauses. Now, professional string classical you know, musicians
who play string instruments, they are gifted enough and practiced
enough that they use those pauses to retune their instruments,
because you can't play more than one movement if you're lucky,
(42:15):
without your strings going out of tune even slightly. So
Beethoven was saying to the musicians, and it was and
it was a comment on life, you know, you can practice,
you can do all of this, but yeah, you're gonna
have to tune as you go. It's not going to
be perfect music, and you're not going to be able
to get a rest stop, and you're gonna have to
(42:37):
tune as you go. And and certainly we do have
rest stops and we can pause, but there are times
in life, you know, we talk here and then we'll
get off and you'll go into your life tomorrow and
I'll go into mind. And when life happens, we're gonna
have to tune as we go. It may sound out
of tune, and it doesn't matter because we're not here.
(42:59):
We're not here or to do it perfectly. We're here
to do it thoroughly. Yeah, I love that story. That's
a great way to think about engaging in life. Well,
I think that is a great place to wrap up
the interview. I have really enjoyed talking with you. I
(43:19):
really enjoy your writing a lot. You're you're a great writer.
There's a lot of poetry. Even in the pros it's
very poetic. And then of course you write a lot
of poems. So we will have links in the show
notes to certainly your latest book as well. As many
of your other works. But again, Mark, thank you so
much for taking the time. It's been a pleasure to
talk with you. Thank you Eric. It's great to be
(43:41):
a part of your good work too. Okay, we'll take
care all right, Bye bye m You can learn more
(44:02):
about this podcast and Mark NEPO at one you feed
dot net slash nepo. That's n e p O. Thanks
Host
Eric Zimmer
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