Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post. This reflection comes from a conversation with a gifted photographer I met. His story helped confirm for me that we live a life in every breath. In truth, each heart-breath is an atom of life-force being born one more time. We as human beings have the incredible burden of sensitivity, but the incomparable reward of being awakened over and over again. At a gathering in San Francisco, I met Marco, a... Read more
Listening is a personal pilgrimage that takes time and a willingness to lean into life. With each trouble that stalls us and each wonder that lifts us, we’re asked to put down our conclusions and feel and think anew. Unpredictable as life itself, the practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous and challenging art forms on earth. Each of us is by turns a novice and a master—until the next difficulty or joy undoes us. In truth,... Read more
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post. I believe we are all connected at the deepest and most elemental level and that experience and circumstance manipulate us away from our better selves. This poem speaks of that place. My soul tells me, we were all broken from the same name- less heart, and every living thing wakes with a piece of that original heart aching its way into blossom. This is why we know each other below our strangeness,... Read more
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post. Every generation lives between the world it inherits and its own possibility. Every one of us is asked to make sense of the terrible atrocities humans have perpetrated alongside the most amazing acts of compassion and creativity. How do we live in a world with such extreme histories? This story comes from meeting someone frightened by this question. She was coming of age. The eyes beneath her eyes were beginning to... Read more
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post. When I was younger, I tried very hard to get rid of difficult feelings, including an inexplicable sadness that would come over me from time to time. But I’ve learned that the full range of human experience is more important than happiness, because it opens a depth that can make joy possible. I’ve learned over time that the sadness and ache I encounter is actually the sweet ache of being alive. It... Read more
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post. We tend to be preoccupied with difficulty and happiness, driven by experience from one to the other. But what life has keeps teaching me is that difficulty and peace are always happening at the same time, and that a primary challenge of being human is let both in. Our job it seems is to hold both at once. The reward is the experience of Oneness. This poem speaks to this. And... Read more
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post. This week’s poem is also about rest, the deeper sense of what we rest in. The way a cup rests in a saucer, how does each soul find the point of rest it fits in? How do we discover the sense of safety and faith in life that allows each of us to find our way with more peace than fear? The things that happen to us are trying to... Read more
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post. I love photography because it opens us to windows of other times, other lives. A good photograph gives us a glimpse of life we’d never know, while showing us the one life we all share. On a recent trip to New York City, I chanced upon this old photo that opened me to this poem about rest. It was a black and white photo, from 1927, in Paris, a young woman... Read more
Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post. Being human is a gritty mystery. We are the most gentle, resilient creatures on Earth. Through our humanness, things that don’t seem to go together show their underlying connection. This poem is a weave of ordinary events that opened a telling moment for me. As the fog lifted, we sat on the couch, our dog sleeping between us, her fur with that familiar smell. Our hands met in the tuft of... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In