The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo is a year’s supply of inspirational stories and beautifully written essays that the reader can reflect on in daily doses. “Mark Nepo is a poet,” Oprah says. “He’s an author and a philosopher and has been through two different cancers. So when he writes, he writes purely from the heart.” Oprah was given The Book of Awakening as a birthday gift and says she does one lesson from the book every morning. “If... Read more
Two deer, fur thickening for winter, nibble at the pines. The taller tugs at some needles and the branch drops snow on its face. It looks old and wise. Were it that easy. Yet this is how it happens. Though the drop of wisdom on our face can take years. The smaller deer licks snow from the larger one’s ear. This is how wisdom is passed: drop of snow, lick of ear. This too can take years. Read more
Everyone keeps stopping me with their urgency. As if the secret of life was written in a corner of their mind and before they could read it, it burst aflame. The first hundred times, I rushed to do their bidding. Then one day, exhausted by my own secrets burning, I stopped running and kissed everything on fire. And yes, it scarred my lip and now I have trouble saying anything complicated, but wind no longer gets trapped in my head.... Read more
Each storm has, like a navel, a hole in its middle through which a gull can fly in silence… —Anonymous, 14th century Japan Who uttered this? What lead them to it? Were they broken in some war, left useless as a cart stripped of its wheels? Did they feel the silence while everyone fought above them? Or did they actually see a gull fly out of a storm and mirror it to life? Were they tumbling through some grief? Trying... Read more
Listen to Mark in conversation with Jennifer Louden of Teach Now. This is yet another wonderful interview, complete with Mark’s deep authenticity and profound insights. Click here to hear the interview. Read more
Nothing stands still. Not us or the Universe we wake in. Everything is shifting—breaking through, growing, blossoming, shedding, turning to mulch, and breaking through again. Our biology teachers were all misled. We can’t know the life of a frog by pinning it to a board. Anymore than we can know the life of a person by naming their psychology. We need to look for other models. Consider how birds sing at the sign of first light. By itself this is... Read more
Why do I keep putting everything away? I need to be distracted by what matters, to leave the Seferis poems open to the one about the old man and the river, to put my unfinished woodblock of the heron lifting before the waterfall on my desk, shavings and all, where I can chisel and stroke once or twice as I pass by, to set the journal I travel with by my bed, open to the secret I still haven’t figured... Read more
It is the attainment of harmony that is called heaven, and the lack of it that is termed hell… The harmony of life can be learned in the same way as the harmony of music… As with everything else in a person’s life, there comes a change in voice with every step forward in spiritual evolution. (And so) every experience in life is an initiation… Any pain or suffering is a preparation, and just as one must first tune a... Read more
The sun doesn’t stop shining because some are blind. And birds don’t stop singing because some are deaf. And the heart doesn’t stop loving because some are afraid. So what are the things you need to express to continue being who you are; the things that have nothing to do with being seen or heard? What lets the flower in the forest blossom though no one is watching? What keeps you being you? Read more
Oprah writes about Mark Nepo in her “What I Know for Sure” column in the most recent issue of the O, The Oprah Magazine (November 2010). Pick one up today! “As part of my morning ritual of mediation and prayer, I read Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have. Today’s lesson, as is often the case, was so spot-on that I have to share it. Nepo speaks of ‘my struggles as... Read more
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