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Mark Nepo

Mark Nepo: We Are They

July 18, 2018 By Mark Nepo Filed Under: Park Slope Reading Tagged With: mark nepo

I was waiting in front of my hotel to be shuttled to the airport, when the early sun revealed a block-long line of homeless souls waiting for food. The light illuminated our closeness, our interchangeable fate, and our kinship. Just then, the Ethiopian bellman, who insisted on loading my bags, began telling me about his three-year-old son who was imitating everything he saw his parents do. The early light spilled on our faces as this elegant man, in his adopted culture’s uniform, said, “We’re careful now what we say and do. He watches and copies everything.” 

I looked to the weary waiting in line and realized that we all must be careful of what we say and do. For the gifts and cruelty of one culture are watched and copied into the next, one kindness and harshness at a time. The human experiment depends on what we model and what we imitate from generation to generation. So how do we model care? How do we imitate integrity? How do we acknowledge our kinship? How do we learn to animate our gifts so we can feed each other? Every society begins anew while extending the lineage of community throughout the ages.

A recent issue of Time magazine reported that if all the uprooted individuals… around the world were to form their own country, they would make up the world’s 29th most populous nation, as big as South Korea.

What keeps us from caring for each other? What keeps us from pretending that the world’s twenty-ninth largest population doesn’t exist? Is it our fear that we could so easily be them? Is it our fear that if we give to them, we’ll drown in their despair? Is it our fear that if we give to those in need, we won’t have enough for ourselves and our families? These questions have stirred and thwarted communities and civilizations throughout history. And each generation, each nation, each neighborhood and family, gets to wrestle with these questions freshly. Including us.

It seems the need to reanimate a true sense of community is more important than ever. Under all our differences, our capacity to behold, hold, and repair what we have in common is part of a lineage that goes back to prehistoric clans that survived the elements by caring for each other. We need to recover and extend that lineage of care. I hope this book is a contribution to the reawakening of our common humanity and our common capacity.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, six years after World War II, after the defeat of Hitler and fascism, six years after the Holocaust, in which some of my family perished. As a child, I was frightened by images of the atomic bomb’s obliteration of Hiroshima. In grade school, we practiced hiding under our desks, as if that would keep us from being incinerated. I came of age in the sixties, part of a hopeful generation who questioned the war in Vietnam. I later saw the Berlin Wall come down, and, in time, witnessed the first African-American president sworn in on the steps of a White House built by slaves. During my lifetime, there has been a slow, steady awakening of community that has upheld America as the land of the free. Through all this, I have grown to understand that, different as we are in what we believe, there is no they. We are they. 

And so, I try to stay true to what I know while listening to the opposite views of others. Listening this way, I’ve come to see that the underpinnings of our current divisions as a nation fall below politics, below Democrat or Republican. More and more citizens are losing themselves in a world built on fear and hate, where tolerance for difference is tissue paper thin, and their understanding of security is based on striking out against others. 

As I witness the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and unprocessed anger that is being unleashed, I fear that our isolation and self-interest, as a government and a people, have poked and stirred the darker angels of our nature. Now, we are forced to take our turn in facing the ever-present challenge: to give in to fear or to empower each other to be brave enough to love, brave enough to discover and accept that we are each other.

For no matter where we come from, no matter how we got here, we all yearn to be seen, heard, and respected. I believe that, under all our fear and brutal trespass, we are innately kind and of the same humanity. Under what divides us, we all long to belong and to be understood. We are they, despite the terrible violence that surfaces between us. And all our gifts are needed to stitch and weave the tapestry of freedom.

From the history of our interactions, we can try to understand what we’ve learned as a human family. Often, we only look to confirm what we already know, but when we can acknowledge what is true or broken, we can engage others, soul to soul. We can put down our arrogance and admit that we’re on the same journey. Then our questions about life create connections. No matter what anyone tells you, we don’t ask questions for answers, but for the relationships they open between us. And when we can admit to all that we don’t know, we begin the weave of community, by keeping what matters visible a little while longer.

But today, I am afraid that the noise of hate is drowning out the resilience of love. I fear that we are tripping into a dark age. And like the medieval monks who kept literacy alive during the Dark Ages in Europe, we are challenged to commit to a life of care and to keep the literacy of the heart alive. 

Now, all the things we have in common, all the endeavors of respect that we treasure, all the ways that we find strength in our kindness—all our efforts of heart—matter now more than ever. We are at a basic crossroads between deepening the decency that comes from caring for each other and spreading the contagion of making anyone who is different into an enemy. And, as history has shown through crusades, genocides, and world wars, if we don’t recognize ourselves in each other, we will consume each other.

We must remain open and steadfast in the face of fear and violence. We must never make a principle of the pains and losses that darken our hearts. And we must keep voicing the truth of human decency, no matter the brutalities that try to quiet us. Without this commitment to truth and to caring for others, we will become heartless and lost. 

Most of all, we must pick each other up when we are heavy with despair. For the sun doesn’t stop shining because some of us are blind. Nor will the grace of democracy vanish because some of us are afraid to be in the world and react violently out of that fear. 

Still, we are they. And the timeless choice between love and fear, as individuals and as a nation, is not a choice of policy. It is the choice of decency that keeps us human. In the face of the disturbances stirred up by fear, I implore you to be kind and truthful, to be a lantern in the dark, and to call out prejudice wherever you see it. In addition to whatever ways each of us is called to gather, participate, legislate, or protest, I implore you to never stop watering the seeds of human decency.

I implore you to stay devoted to the proposition that, when filled with love, we can work as angels here on Earth, using our caring hands as wings. 

*  *  *

Excerpted from Mark Nepo’s new book, More Together Than Alone: Discovering the Power and Spirit of Community in Our Lives and in Our World (Atria Book, July 2018).

As a companion to the book, readers are invited to explore an online community guide so you can gather with others to share your own stories of community and strengthen your ties with others. The guide is available online or as a download. 

Video for More Together Than Alone

 

Filed Under: Park Slope Reading Tagged With: mark nepo

IN THE AFTERMATH OF CHARLOTTESVILLE: WHERE TO NOW?

August 19, 2017 By Mark Nepo Filed Under: Community Tagged With: fascism, Holocaust, moral failure, Neo-Nazi

Like so many, I’ve been deeply troubled by the events of Charlottesville and Trump’s response. I wrote this piece to help myself make sense of where we find ourselves. I share this with all of you and invite you to share it with others. Always, we must remember and affirm that we are more together than alone.

 

IN THE AFTERMATH OF CHARLOTTESVILLE: WHERE TO NOW?

In the wake of white supremacists marching violently through Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12th, in the aftermath of Nazis stalking a synagogue with automatic weapons here in 21st century America, and after the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer who was killed by a rabid, young white nationalist speeding his car into a crowd, Donald Trump equivocated to the point of tacitly sanctioning Fascism in America. This collapsed the political floor. We are now below politics and nothing less than the lifeline of decency is at stake.

At such a time, we sorely need a leader who can hold the dissonance of many voices. We need a moral atlas to hold fast to the foundation of our democracy as it is buffeted by this storm. Yet, on August 15th, our current president stood in public before his gilded tower, sadly revealing an ugliness, all too familiar in the lineage of dictators. The illusion that justice is still possible at the very center of our current administration has been ripped away.

In the outrage that followed Trump’s churlish and condescending overturning of the table of moral law, a profound insight came from CNN analyst David Gergen, a former advisor to four presidents, who said, “Before he can address the hatred in the country, Trump needs to deal with the hatred in his own heart.”

This has always been at the core of the human struggle, going back to the enervated Assyrian King Gilgamesh who, 7000 years ago, waged a brutal war against the god of nature “rather than face the undiscovered country in himself.” This points up the challenge of courage that faces each of us most urgently—How to face the undiscovered country in ourselves so as not be overridden by fear and thrown into violence.

After hearing Trump condone neo-Nazi hate groups, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said that, “The moral failure is now complete.” So how to proceed? The very next day, Historian Jon Meacham quoted St. Augustine in defining a nation as a gathering of citizens united by the common good of the things they love. Meacham then called for us, as a nation in trouble, to define what we love and work toward rebuilding a common good with our love. I think this has lasting and immediate value. What do we love and how does that love ensure a common good that we can rely on? How do we pursue this sense of community while restoring moral order and standing up to those who would tear everything down? These are the spiritual challenges that are immediately before us, which call out more deeply than left or right.

As a third-generation American Jew who lost family in the Holocaust, I am both frightened by what is happening and resilient in my devotion to the common center of all traditions. In spite of all that is happening and because of all that is happening, I stand firmly in my belief in the strength of human kindness to overcome the destructive effects of fear and violence. The things we hold dear and the bonds we try to uphold and repair are more meaningful than ever.

We must reclaim our humanity and reawaken our sense of moral law and not succumb to becoming like those who have lost touch with what makes them human. We must remember and affirm that we are more together than alone. This evokes a deeper, more eternal sense of national debt, which is what we owe to all who made this democracy possible and to those not yet born who we will pass it on to.

 

 

 

—Mark Nepo, August 16, 2017

MarkNepo.com

Filed Under: Community Tagged With: fascism, Holocaust, moral failure, Neo-Nazi

The One Life We’re Given

January 23, 2017 By Mark Nepo Filed Under: Books Tagged With: aliveness, grace, heart, journal, life-force, meditate, open heart, wisdom

No matter where we think we’re going, the journey of every life is to find its home in the moment where everything touches everything else.

When we can feel what is ours to feel, and inhabit our own particular moment—of love or suffering, of beauty or pain, of peace or agitation—that depth of feeling allows us to live once for all time. To live once for all time means that the depth of our one life, once opened, is filled with the stream of life from every direction. To live once for all time means that try as we do to add to the one life we’re given in our attempt to run from death, the incarnation of being human forces us to open the one life we’re given, so we might be immersed in the well of all life for the brief time we’re here. One life lived wholeheartedly and without disguise is more than enough. Nothing could be more precious or out of our control. Though we can try.

As a jazz musician spends years learning the intricacies of his instrument, never knowing when the goddess of music will sweep his practiced hands along, we master many paths, never knowing when we will be swept into the presence of beauty. As a shortstop fields thousands of grounders until his hands are blistered, all to be ready for the unpredictable bounce that will happen under the lights, we meditate, study, and field thousands of questions until our mind is blistered, all to be ready for the unpredictable bounce of circumstance that will bring us closer to life. In just this way, the heart learns the scales of love, never knowing when the work will be turned into song.

This journey to inhabit the one life we’re given is archetypal. Everyone who’s ever lived has had to go through it, though no two souls ever go through it exactly the same way. Yet we all experience common passages. As we start out, we’re preoccupied with finding our way, with discovering who we are, with defining ourselves by contrast with everything around us. We try to set ourselves apart by creating something out of nothing, by out-reaching or out-racing others. But sooner or later, obstacles throw us off course and the first versions of our life plans, always dear and precious, are broken. Then we’re sent into a passage of not-knowing, unsure where to go and what to do. Less certain, we’re challenged to inquire into a larger view of life that includes us but is not defined by us.

At this point, we’re ready to discover who we are a second time. With nowhere to go but here, with nothing to do but open the one life we’re given, a journey begins in which we experience life rather than dreaming that we can escape it. We start to invest who we are and all our care into where we are and slowly become one with everything we encounter. By now, there’s been enough suffering that we can feel our kinship with others and the depth of our care is closer to the surface.

In time, the heart works its way into the presence of grace by showing up completely, no matter the circumstance. We learn that meeting life with an open heart is how we can feel where everything is joined. Our call then is to let the soul out and the world in. Where soul and world touch, we spark alive. When our soul expresses itself in the world, our aliveness shows, and we begin to do our part in sustaining a Universe that keeps unfolding.

When the soul expresses itself, we experience enlivened arcs of grace in which we feel the force of life that runs through everything. Anything that moves us to carry our soul out into the world is a catalyst of grace. In this way, love, friendship, creativity, pain, and loss are agents of grace, as are surprise, beauty, grief, and wonder. And while experience wears us down to what’s essential so the soul can stop being encased, it also takes daily effort to let our soul out and an open heart to let the world in, so we can spark ourselves alive and finally be of use. Like it or not, we’re opened by the hard, sweet journey of being human, until we’re sparked and worn into a gateway for life-force.

_________________________________________________________

One life lived wholeheartedly and without disguise is more than enough.

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Seeds to Water

  • In your journal, describe a time when you defined yourself by contrast with everything around you. How did you set yourself apart? At the time, how did defining yourself this way help you? How did setting yourself apart from others hurt you?
  • In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time when you were asked to discover who you are a second time. What have you learned about your own nature? How is this second self different from the first version of yourself? Do you feel that you’re arriving at a foundational sense of who you are? If so, what does the foundation of you look like?

Excerpted from The One Life We’re Given: Finding the Wisdom that Waits in your Heart

By Mark Nepo and published by Atria Books

MarkNepo.com

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: aliveness, grace, heart, journal, life-force, meditate, open heart, wisdom

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