mark nepo
Love Like Water By Poet Mark Nepo
Water in its clear softness fills whatever hole it finds. It is not skeptical or 
distrusting. It does not say this gully is too deep or that field is too open. Like water, the miracle of love is that it covers whatever it touches, making the touched thing grow while leaving no trace of its touch. True, the faces of shores and the arms of cliffs are worn to the bone. But this is beyond the water's doing. This is the progress of life, of which water is but an element.
Most things break instead of transform because they resist.
The quiet miracle of love is that without our interference, it, like water accepts whatever is tossed or dropped or placed into it, embracing it completely.
Of course, we are human and are easily hurt. But we waste so much of life's energy by delivering who and what shall be worthy of our love when the deepest elemental sense, these choices are not in our province, anymore than rain can choose what it shall fall upon.
Certainly, we need to make decisions: Who will I spend time with? Who will I learn from? But beneath all that, the element of love doesn't stop being elemental. It does not stop covering everything before it. And over a lifetime, the pain of withholding this great and quiet force is more damaging than anything. For love, like water, can be dammed, but toward what end?
In truth, the more we let love flow through, the more we have to love. This is the inner glow that sages and saints of all ages seem to share: the wash of their love over everything before them; not just people, but birds and rocks and flowers and air.
Beneath the many choices we have to make, love, like water, flows back into the world through us. It is the one great secret available to all. Yet somewhere the misperception has been enshrined that to withhold love will stop hurt.
In truth, it is the other way around. As water soaks scars, love soothes our wounds. If open to, love will accept the angrily thrown stone, and our small tears will lose some of their burn in the great ocean of tears, and the arrow released to the bottom of the river will lose its point.
-Mark Nepo - from The Book of Awakening
Endgame by Author Mark Nepo - Dancing Our Way Through Challenge
Now there's nothing left
but to keep dancing...
I don't know if it is human nature or the way of life on Earth, but we seldom become all of who we are until forced to it.
Some say that something in us rises to the occasion, that there is, as Hemingway called it, "grace under pressure" that comes forth in most of us when challenged. Others say this talk of grace is merely a way to rationalize hard times and painful experience, a way to put a good face on tragedy.
Yet beneath all the talk of tragedy and grace, I have come to believe that we are destined to be opened by the living of our days, and whether we like it or not, whether we choose to participate or not, we will in time, everyone of us, wear the deeper part of who we are as new skin.
Either by erosion from without or by shedding from within-and often both- we are forced to live more authentically. And once the crisis that opened us passes, the real choice then becomes: Will we continue such authentic living?
It is no secret that cancer in its acuteness pierced me into open living, and I've been working ever since to sanctify that open living without crisis as its trigger.
But can this be done without crisis pushing us off the ledge? That's the question now, years from the leap--how to keep leaping from a desire to be real, so as not to be shoved by an ever-lurking crisis.
Perhaps the greatest moment of shedding and breaking for me came as I was being wheeled to rib surgery. I found myself numbly afraid, spinning from the Demerol shot, watching the hospital ceiling roll on by, and I found myself repeating over and over the following words as I waited on my stretcher:
"Death pushed me to the edge. Nowhere to back off. And to the shame of my fears, I danced with abandon in his face. I never danced as free. And Death backed off, the way dark backs off a sudden burst of flame. Now there's nothing left, but to keep dancing. It is the way I would have chosen had I been born three times as brave."
We are often called further into experience than we'd like to go, but it is this extra leap that lands us in the vibrant center of what it means to be alive.
Excercise:
- Sit quietly with a trusted loved one and a time of adversity you have endured in the past and what it opened in you. What did you discover about yourself?
- Now that particular adversity is behind you, how has your inner view life changed?
- Discuss what it is like for you to sustain these new inner ways.
- By Mike Nepo, from The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to The Life You Have