Mark Nepo: So we all know that meteors they become brighter and brighter till there’s nothing left but light. And what struck me is that this is a, a wonderful metaphor for the journey of a spirit in a body on earth through a lifetime, that over a lifetime, while our outer casing flakes off, we get brighter and brighter
Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Mark Nepo. I like to describe him as a poet philosopher. He is a beloved teacher and storyteller and friend to me and to many. Mark Nepo has published North of 25 books. I’m not gonna give you an exact number because whenever you listen to this, he’ll probably have published another book and then another book, including the number one New York Times bestseller, the Book of Awakening.
Sounds true, has had the honor of creating quite a lot of beautiful work with Mark, both in written form and in audio form, and I’ve had the honor of having him on Insights at the Edge several times in the past. We’ve had conversations about becoming the poem, holding nothing back, how writing is listening.
With your heart and taking notes. Today, our conversation will be about his latest book on aging. It’s called The Fifth Season, creativity in the Second Half of Life. Mark, welcome.
Mark Nepo: Oh, it’s great to be with you again. Thank you so much.
Tami Simon: To begin here, tell us a little bit about this title. You’re so good at titles. You have this way of finding a phrase that just sort of beams
Mark Nepo: Oh.
Tami Simon: That’s the way I felt when I first heard the title. The fifth season. Where
Mark Nepo: Oh,
Tami Simon: come from?
Mark Nepo: well, thank you. So the fifth season, and actually the title came years ago before I even had any sense of this book, but I did, you know, I, it’s like a Geiger counter. I, I go, whoa, I know that that’s for something. And I saved it and. It, it really comes from Chinese lore. So in Chinese lore, the fifth season is that time of year, like late August, uh, early September when there’s that just that bare beautiful kind of golden glow and everything seems just essential.
And very quickly Chinese sages appropriated that, explored it and said, well, that, that helps to describe the fifth season of life. The transformative integrative season of life, when after all we’ve been through, we start to kind of integrate and, and put together where, where, where have we been? What does this mean?
What have we learned? What have we taken on and taken off and put down? And, and, and so it’s that bare essential integrative passage and. It’s also what I love about it is they talk about this transformative time as the heavenly pivot. The heavenly pivot when we start to inhabit the way I take it, heaven on earth, not by going anywhere, but by being more fully here.
Tami Simon: I wanna talk to you for a moment about this notion of the end of summer being an analog for the. Last chapter, if you will, of our lives. Because I think when I first started thinking about it, I thought, well, my association would be, it’s more like we go into winter and we lose all our leaves and we wither and it’s dark and barren and then we die before we get to have another spring. And I was like, I really like this end of summer metaphor better.
Mark Nepo: Well, I think,
Tami Simon: are about that.
Mark Nepo: well, I think what, what it opens up is that, you know, the disintegration of winter, it, I think is more after we’re gone and what this opens up is that this, this heavenly pivot, because of course fall is when everything turns brilliant. Everything turns, you know, always remarkably brilliant.
And, and so, you know, like early on, as you know, in the book, it a, a metaphor and, and you know, as we’ve talked before, I discover things along the way that help me. Uh, and so the early metaphor that I came upon and then these things is be, become my teacher. And so this metaphor that was really guiding the book, the Exploration of Aging, was the metaphor of a meteor.
So we all know that meteors very few reached the earth, that most of them, uh, flake off as they enter the atmosphere and, uh, through friction. And they become brighter and brighter till there’s nothing left but light. And what struck me is that this is a, a wonderful metaphor for the journey of a spirit in a body on earth through a lifetime, that over a lifetime, while our outer casing flakes off, we get brighter and brighter until at death there’s nothing left but light.
Now no one likes the flaking off. You know, as you know, I’m, I’m doing really well, but over the last year and a half, I went through some chronic back pain and had major back surgery. And so that was a flaking off for me. You know, I didn’t say, oh yeah, let me do two. No, that was no fun. Uh, but I have to say, I, I am brighter on the other side of it.
Tami Simon: What through that experience, which I know was. Horrifically challenging. I mean, I know because you and I talked and you had to cancel some things and you were bedridden before the surgery happened, and I mean, I know it was a really big ordeal. What made you brighter as a result?
Mark Nepo: What made me brighter was a, you know, I thought that I, uh. I was centered and I am that I move pretty, you know, not hurried and I do, but I was really forced to be still. I was really forced to slow down to enter time, not just move through it. And so like a, a simple example, during that time, um, there was a period of time where I could not lift the coffee pot and I couldn’t lift the mug.
And, and, uh, even when I could, I couldn’t do them at the same time. Well, now that I’m pain free. I kind, I kind of like lifting them one at a time. It’s actually, I’m more here when I lift them one at a time. So while, you know, human beings tend to grow by two ways, willfully shedding and being broken open.
And if you don’t wanna willfully shed, don’t worry, you’ll be broken open. And it’s usually a combination of both. And I feel like I have willfully shed for much of my adult life and these passages, uh, that are painful and difficult. Again, not deifying pain, but, but this is what I, uh, which also really affects our aging is the paradox of limitation.
Limitation always brings with it. Um, loss grief, and that has its own learnings. Of course not. And, and it always opens us up to new ways of being and feeling, you know, the, uh, the more I can’t grip, the more I can let go. You know, the more that I have to stop, the more I can see. You know, and there’s a, a host of, of examples throughout history, especially in the arts where, uh, and again, it’s not to make, oh, every, everything that that is painful is really okay.
No, it hurts. It’s not okay. And it opens us up in a new way. And I think part of, part of, I, I, I’ve been learning that. The, the CH challenge of aging is asking us to learn new skills, new skills that, that are pronounced as we age, but they’re actually useful. However, wherever you are in life’s journey, just as when we’re ill, they pronounce in relief skills that we need, but they’re.
They’re useful wherever you are. You know, I, I, I had, when I did the audio book for the fifth season, I, uh, had a wonder, wonderful sound producer, uh, from McMillan, a young woman. She’s 30 and halfway through, you know, I, I said, gee, Gina, what, how is all this sitting with you? You know? And she said, oh, this is, no, it’s speaking to me, not just for my parents how to relate to my, and she wisely said, you know.
You are always aging, whether it’s from 20 to 40 or 40 to 60 or 60 to 80 or on. And so I think that’s, that’s really true. These skills that come forward, um, are useful at any point in life.
Tami Simon: And I wanna talk more about these specific skills that you’re referring to. One you’ve already mentioned, and I wanna make sure I really know what you mean by it. You said entering. So you pointed to slowing down potentially doing thing at a time, but what do you mean by this phrase, entering time.
Mark Nepo: Yeah, so in the same way that, you know, like. And, and in the world of meditation, and you know this so well, that stopping the noise is not the same thing as entering silence and slowing down is not the same thing as entering time. So what I mean by that is we are always, and especially in our modern world, the speed of our age, we, we skim through life.
And then we don’t feel connected to life. So then we move faster. And what we really need to do is stop. And so I know good example when I’m working here in my study, you know, when I am entering time, I am in the timeless. These are the moments when whatever we’re doing, we could be gardening, whatever we’re doing.
But when all of a sudden we go, whoa, wait a minute. Two hours went by. It felt like a minute. What happened? That’s because we’re in time. That’s because we are, you know, uh, in what I would call the eternal moment that informs everything. And we trip into it often, and we find it in the smallest details.
This is why William Blake said you could find eternity in a grain of sand. Now, I didn’t know William Blake. I wish I did. But you know, what it says to me is, um, you hold any particular thing. And you give your full heart’s attention to it, and it is a seam to the whole universe.
Tami Simon: So here you are and you’re bedridden with back pain. did you learn more about entering time in that condition?
Mark Nepo: Well, and this speaks to, uh, also to chronic pain. So how, what I learned was, and I, and I actually learned this before the back at, at other. Difficult periods in my life, but it was reinforced. We need to let beauty in while we’re suffering because beauty is part of the medicine. So, you know, for example, we, we have, and this actually was at an earlier time when I was incapacitated, but it, it speaks to the same thing that, um.
I was really going through some, a difficult, uh, gastro thing and, um, which,
Tami Simon: we’re talking about aging and we’ve gotten to the difficult gastro thing in the first 15 minutes. Mark.
Mark Nepo: and, um. And so this happened may, you know, maybe 10 years ago, but during this time when I was slowly healing, we have Baltimore Oreos that come just once a year, only a few days, and there they were at the window, and just as they were there at the window, I got this terrible pain in my gut.
And there you have it. You know, we always. I have this choice, whether it’s acute or minor, is I still, I didn’t wanna miss the Oreos, but I couldn’t ignore the pain in my gut. I, so I needed to let beauty in while I was suffering, not beauty as a distraction, beauty as medicine. So. I think I wrote about this years ago in the Book of Awakening, though I didn’t realize the full import of it back then.
But, you know, you’re walking on a hike, someone’s, you know, you told me, go up this to the top of this mountain, you’re gonna get the most amazing view. So I’m up, I’m walking up and I’m almost up to the top and I, I, I stubbed my toe on this boulder. I mean, like, where I think I’ve broken my toe. Well, all of a sudden.
Forget the miracle of the day. Forget the summit. In that initial moment, all of life is the pain in my toe, and after a while it starts to throb. It’s not as painful, but it’s pretty painful. And you know what? I’m still like 15 yards from the summit. And the view, the miracles return and the view is there and now.
I’ve got a limp up to see the view, not just ’cause it’s pretty, but because the wholeness is restorative, the vastness is restorative. And so this brings us to one of the, uh, the skills that I feel challenged in aging. And that is, we all know that the outer flaking off the outer limitations, uh. You know, they will take over, they will be in the foreground at the same time that that’s happening.
We are over a lifetime deepening and expanding, and we need to allow for both, not, not to turn from one to the other, not to reframe, but we need to allow both so they can inform each other and right size each other so that. Y Yeah. I need to limp up to the top of the mountain now. And, and we are, uh, arrogantly entitled in the modern world to think that we will never have any kind of discomfort or trip or, you know, uh, there’s a Greek poet, George Ferris wonderful poet.
He died in the sixties. And, uh, he has this wonderful line that he says, um, you know, uh, like a bird, like a bird with a broken wing that flies on the wind for years. I sleep, but my heart is awake. And what, what I love about that is. He said no. You know, a lot of birds break their wing and they fly. That’s actually part of flying.
We think, oh, broken wing, that’s it. Forget it. You can only fly if you’re perfect, if you’re well. And, and so I think that we’re challenged to let in as as much as we can while dealing. With the limitations and the bumps in the road and the things that happen to us so that we can stay in conversation with the vastness.
Tami Simon: Bing, Bing, bing, bing, bing. I think it’s time for a poem. Mark on, uh, page one 14. You share As I age, I.
Mark Nepo: Sure, I’d love to read this. As I age, little things fall away. As big things become more clear. I can no longer open jars or carry two grocery bags at once, but I can perch like an eagle on the edge of the vastness in any given moment. I now walk into the kitchen and forget what I was after, but I can recite Baos instruction to Ki Kaku in 1689 and join their conversation.
I now stop near the top of the hill because my hips burn, but can see directly into the soul of anyone who has been loved or broken open, and I can waken the night with a sudden fear of death. But can quiet that fear with the ancient chorus humming in the wind. It’s as if my body is a nest and my soul is a bird who has waited a lifetime for the moment.
It can fly away. I.
Tami Simon: I wanna make sure that I understand how you understand the heavenly pivot, and especially for that person right now who’s listening, who for whatever reason feels more stuck in a. Dark or painful view of their situation,
Mark Nepo: Mm.
Tami Simon: maybe they can feel a little light coming in, but still it’s not a pivot.
Mark Nepo: Yes.
Tami Simon: a pivot.
What do you mean by that?
Mark Nepo: So what I mean by that is, and, and this is what all the traditions speak about as the journey of, of transformation, of individuation, of becoming whole, is when we, we stop running from here to there and we live from in to out. When we start to realize, well, there are many things to do. There’s nothing to do, and while there’s many places to go, there’s nowhere to go.
And the so the shift, the center of gravity in our life shifts. And for me, that’s speaks to the heavenly pivot as I experience it. You know, um, I’ll give you an example. Um, just in my own teaching, you know, I, I don’t want to, as I get older, I don’t want to teach less. It’s so good for me and I do wanna travel less, you know, and, and so, you know, I’m getting to do these wonderful things.
Last year, I, I did a retreat, uh. A week long retreat on a small barge cruise in Belgium. What a ma, what a wonderful thing to do. And it was a great experience. Well, I wa I was over there and, and people invited me to tea after that. Well, since you’re over here, could you, you’d want to come and teach with us in London?
Well, you know, 10 years ago I would’ve said, oh, that’s wonderful. Let me figure that. I, I probably can do that. And I said, you know, I’m I thanks, but I, I don’t think so at this time. Not because it wouldn’t be wonderful, but because my hi, my heavenly pivot said Why? To me it’s not about gauging or weighing the opportunity, my soul and my heavenly pivot after my back surgery, even though I’m well said, why isn’t Belgium enough?
Why is it, why can’t I give my whole being? Yes, there are more places to go, but why isn’t this wonderful enough? Why can’t I be a hundred percent here on this river with these people drifting through Belgium and if I’m called to go to London another time? Okay, so, so I think that the heavenly pivot is.
Fi and interestingly, humbly, again, you know, I think these things, I look back and you know, we live forward and we map backward. So the Book of Awakening, the subtitle is Having the life you want by being present to the life you have for, I had no idea that would be a theme of my entire life. And that my whole life, the heavenly pivot is, okay, I saw that 30 years ago and now I’m living into it.
Now I’m living into it. I’m inhabiting it. And that is how we enter time and not move through time. So back to your question about someone who’s feeling in pain and and suffering, and we’re always. Have some level of friction for being in the world. And I have found that that vastness, that this heavenly pivot, that this inhabiting where we are, helps me through that discomfort, gives me something larger than myself to hold it, to cushion it, to right size it, and um.
And so in my experience with chronic pain for about a, you know, 10 months, and my God, you know, my heart now goes out to people. I was blessed, lucky, whatever to, uh, that the surgery worked, that, you know, I found a way out of the chronic pain right now. Um, but oh my God, my heart goes out to people who, who don’t have a way out.
You know, I mean, that was part of the pain, that’s part of the emotional pain during those 10 months was what if this never changes? How am I gonna live like this? And I think what I learned about chronic pain in those months was even within pain, that never goes away. Like, like waves at sea. There are quests and swells.
And so we have to start to discern. I had to start to discern, oh, today’s a good day because it’s. Only like a four, not a nine. I can, I can breathe a little deeper. Okay. Okay. I’ll take that. And, you know, and then I, I realized, you know, Hippocrates, who wrote the Hippocratic Oath, you know, he said Pleasure is the absence of pain.
Oh man. He was ahead of his time. Yeah. Even for a moment. So how do we start to, you know, again, what we’re required to do, even with chronic pain, is enter time so we can see the wavelengths of our chronic pain. So we, we can make those discernments and we can ride the, the, the, the spaciousness, even if it’s brief, uh, before it gets intense again and again.
Isn’t this what we need to learn how to do? In quote, the normal wave lengths of life. And so, um, I think that we we’re challenged again and again to realize that we’re not victims, but initiates, we’re not victims of life. We’re initiated. Into life again and again.
Tami Simon: I wanna ask you, mark, about the dedication that starts the fifth season, I noticed, you know, I read through the whole book and still dedication and the very first part of it. Stayed with me as something I gotta ask Mark about this. And you write for those who have broken through to joy and then you continue.
But that’s the part that I’m really interested in. You continue, who let others drink from it as they carry on through their pain, may we find each other. I thought to myself, you know, I love. Meeting people who have broken through to joy. And in my own experience, it is not like a natural thing to me.
Nobody would say, oh, Tammy, she’s such a joyful person. I’ve I’ve, I have. Found these moments. And even once, uh, uh, uh, someone who was doing an astrological reading and I was asking her about my chart, whatever you think about astrology and it, she was explaining to me why joy is not. She’s like, oh, look at Julie.
Look at how her, she plays a role in your chart. Just call her my wife. Just call her Julie Joy. Listen to her, stay with her. And you know this, this has helped, but I’m sharing all of this at this moment to say that breaking through to Joy is something I wanna know more about.
Mark Nepo: Yeah. And I think, I think that, and this is just, you know, I, I, I think it goes all the way back to my cancer journey, which was, uh, such a. Uh, imprinting and shaping lens for me on life that, uh, because I think that we are, you, you, everyone is born and everyone will get the chance to be dropped into the depth of life.
And it’s not just through suffering. It can be through wonder, through joy, through, you know, beauty, through being loved unconditionally for the first time. But, but something will open us and that’s when the real spiritual journey begins. When our deeper relationships begin and how, how we enter that. And so the, by virtue of so we’re always.
Challenge to both survive and thrive. And if we don’t pursue an inner life, not have things figured out, but if we don’t pursue an inner life, give credence to an inner life that surviving will become God. And then fear will become its disciple and self-interest will become its warrior. And, um, but. If we survive without thriving, what’s the point?
And so the whole, we do have to survive. You know, if you and I were having this conversation while crossing the highway, we could get hit by a truck. No, we gotta pay attention out here. However, you know, we have, if we don’t pay attention in here, it’s all for not, and, and so the breaking through to joys, I think that, that we.
Are inevitably cracked of the shell. That experience covers us with. And so this a developmental, recurring process of experience covers us and deep true living breaks the cover ache. And each time that happens, we get closer and closer to the heavenly pivot. And so we can get stuck in the covering or in the breaking.
Um, and so I think the, the, and, and so what, what’s happened for me is my understanding of joy has deepened and shifted over the years. I don’t think of joy as woo-hoo. You know, we’re always happy, you know, um, I’ve come to think of joy as the. Uh, let me use this metaphor. So the ocean and the surface of the ocean, the first couple of feet is always disturbed by weather, and that’s the part of us that meets the world.
You could say that’s our psychology. You know, that’s where our mind and our daily, we interact with the weather of experience and it’s always disturbed. And if we stay only up there, we get bounced around all the time. But the depth, because we look at this hop as waves, but you know what the, if you really look, they’re all, it’s all one water.
Like you can’t tell where the wave stops in the deep begins. That is the ocean of being, and I’ve come to understand joy. As the depth of being that holds all the waves, the depth of being that holds all the turbulence. You know, we’re mistaught that well, peace is at the end of trouble. No, there is no end of trouble.
Peace is the depth of being that holds all trouble. That’s why entering time, that’s why breaking through to that depth. It allows us to be peaceful even when we’re agitated. You know, that was another thing about that was so interesting to me During this chronic pain, I was agitated on the surface. Oh man.
But I was calm in my depth. I was centered. I was, and it was actually a little like confusing because I needed. I needed medication for pain. I also needed medication for anxiety. And I really resisted it at first because when I consulted inside, I’m, I’m not anxious, I’m centered. Well, I, I don’t understand, but I was way turbulent on the surface until I could understand the relationship.
Oh yeah, no, I do need help on the surface and I’ll take all the help I can get and, um. So I think this breaking through to joy is how do we live from our kinship with all things.
Tami Simon: Now Mark, I have to ask you a question ’cause I can imagine someone listening and that’s my job to ask you the questions here in this conversation as well. But. I imagine someone listening say, wait a second. I think Mark just shared to me that he went through a very anxious time in his life and that he took anti-anxiety medication.
But I think of him as Mr. Book of Awakening, the guy who kind of has it together. He’s the philosopher I turn to, to feel calm and make the heavenly pivot what’s going on right now.
Mark Nepo: No. No. Well, first off, it’s an illusion to think that I or anyone is void. I only know what I know because of my human experience. I know what it is to calm because I’ve been anxious. I know what it is to be centered because I’ve been off center. I know what it is to be whole because I’ve been shattered, you know, and this is, uh, a, a misnomer, which leads to, you know, the illusion of the guru.
And this is why I always say, you know what, I, I have no answers. I share what I share are examples, not instructions. And we’re here to discover, uh, to compare notes on what it is to be alive. And we all start with, I don’t know. And, um, and so, no, you know, and this is where I believe, and this is also important in aging, uh, I have come to believe.
Through my own life experience, that being thorough, being authentic, meeting whatever comes our way in accepting our humanness, makes us a clear conduit for spirit and the wholeness of life, which connects us with everything which gives us resources. Which, you know, helps us when I can be thoroughly myself, I can trip into all I don’t know and be informed through that thoroughness and there’s no bypassing it.
Wisdom is not a shortcut, it’s a resource. And, uh. And no amount of wisdom. You know, we can have this conversation and together we can, uh, go into great places and I’ll get off and I’ll go out and try to shovel and the snow, which is frigid cold now, and I’ll trip and I’ll fall in the snow and I’ll forget everything we talked about and get anxious and have to learn it all over again.
And isn’t that wonderful? What else would we do? What else would we do?
Tami Simon: what I’m thinking you mean by this word, thorough, is to include everything.
Mark Nepo: Every,
Tami Simon: what you mean?
Mark Nepo: yes,
Tami Simon: in our experience.
Mark Nepo: You know, Ilka, the great poet. Ilka, had this wonderful line, and I’ve known his work my whole life, but I only discovered this all few years ago. He said, let everything happen. Beauty and terror, no one feeling is final. Keep going, keep going. And, you know, feelings are the radar for spirit.
We are so afraid of their intensity that we shy away from them. But if we’re open-hearted, you know, um, they flow, uh, more softly and we can get stuck in an individual feeling. But feelings point us. To the greater laws of spirit in a way that’s embodied. And so we need to be open to all the feelings and not deny them and not hide our humanity.
And, you know, and that’s the thing. I mean, you know, I can, uh, understand something and share it, and I still have to work to live it. So it’s not a contradiction at all that, that I experience anxiety or fear. Of course, I will always experience these things. I’m human.
Tami Simon: in preparing for this conversation.
Mark Nepo: I.
Tami Simon: Mark, I thought of my mom’s aging process. She lived to 93, and just to be very brief here, I thought of one scene. I remember with her when she was sharing with me how she lost seven friends in
Mark Nepo: Hmm.
Tami Simon: and through death, and how there was. A tremendous heaviness in her, and dare I say, a grief was always there in her until she died.
Mark Nepo: Yeah.
Tami Simon: it, it didn’t move through it stuck in her. I wonder if you can talk about that because in the fifth season write about loss. a chapter on loss, you start it with a quote from Schopenhauer. Mostly it is loss that teaches us about the worth of things. thought somehow in thinking about, uh, this image of my mom, she was feeling the worth, but was. To a point where it buried her. She
Mark Nepo: Yeah,
Tami Simon: buried by the grief of this development.
Mark Nepo: and it’s, it’s so grief is so, so hard and such a harsh teacher and you know, there’s no. Again, nobody knows how to do this, so there’s no judgment on what it does to anyone or how we deal with it. And we just try to learn from each other. And I know that, I think grief changes everything. I don’t, I don’t think we get over grief.
We get under it. We are changed by it. And you know, I have a. A dear, dear friend who helped me through my cancer journey 40 years ago and we’re still dear friends, he lives in Florida, Paul, and four years ago he lost his wife to a sudden massive heart attack and just devastated, and we’ve been. On this, you know, of course I wanted to be there for him, and I am, and it’s brought us even closer.
And so I’ve been on journey with his grief, and, and this ties in with joy as well, you know, that, that, you know, uh, life will never be the same. It’ll never be the same. And I think we are forced to reimagine the world. So the, the image here is if you take a drop of iodine and you put it in a glass of water, it colors the whole glass and loss at this level, colors all of life.
It brings a new tint to everything. And one of the questions that Paul asked me in his grief was, after a year and a half was, will I ever know joy again?
And of course I don’t know, but we talked about this and, and how I think yes, but it’s not gonna be the same. Joy is now a different, it’s the tint that gives a different color to all of life and everything gets re. Evolved, imagined, transformed, and I think, um, and we’re never quite the same. And yeah, I, I, you know, I feel for what must have been so hard for your mom and, um, and how do we help each other through these passages?
And, and again, I don’t think we get. Like breaking through to joy isn’t ridding ourselves of difficulty. It’s like the waves. It’s in the same water, but we’re going deeper. We’re going deeper. And you know, there’s a great, this is a powerful image about grief and peace that comes from Oscar Wilde. And Oscar Wilde wrote this prose poem.
Like a hundred years before we even had the term prose poem called the Artist in 1894. And I, I can’t recite it exactly, but I, it’s imprinted on my heart and it goes like this. It’s about an artist, a sculptor who sculpts out of bronze and he wants to fashion a, a, a bronze piece that will represent the piece that abides in every moment.
There’s only one problem. There’s no more bronze in the world. So he thinks about it and he, and he remembers, gee, you know, he actually made a bronze statue when his dearest best friend died, and it’s on his gravestone. And that statue is the sorrow that endures forever. And as soon as he thinks about his friend, he’s, he’s where your mother, he’s where my friend Paul, he’s like, oh, he’s just gutted.
And he goes to the grave site and he weeps and he recounts the entire life of their friendship. And then he takes the sorrow that endures forever back to his foundry, and he melts the sorrow that endures forever. And out of it fashions the peace that abides in every moment.
And if that’s not profound enough, we are the bronze. There can be no peace that abides in every moment unless it’s fashioned out of the sorrow that endures forever. And sometimes we can do it and sometimes we can’t. And they’re right. That’s not there. But by the grace of God or a hiccup of the universe, you know, your mother could have done it and I could have been her.
Tami Simon: You know what I think’s interesting here, mark, and I’m curious to hear what your reflection is on it is as we’re talking about fifth season, the end of summer, the heavenly pivot, this potential to touch the glorious light. Of the meteor enduring and getting brighter and brighter through timeless time.
I keep wanting to talk about all these heavy topics, chronic pain loss, et cetera, and I noticed that as we do. I feel myself getting brighter and happier by talking about all of these really difficult things. There’s some, somehow they’re being included and I don’t think this is some kind of like gifts of aging, Skippy Yippy conversation. And so I notice I feel brighter because we’re talking about these really difficult things and I wonder, I wonder if you have anything to say
Mark Nepo: Yes, absolutely. And I think that this is, this is key about the entire life of expression. It is by facing what life brings us. By sharing it honestly together, that we can experience all of it. You know, one of the, the greatest teacher for me in the last 15 years and continues to be, is that all things are true.
All things aren’t fair. All things aren’t just, but all things are true. And the heart, you know, our mind is a great tool, but it wants to. Go back and forth. It wants to choose, prioritize, sort, problem solve, but the heart, it has the gift of absorbing and integrating. The heart says, let it all in. Let it all in.
Let me hold it with you to let’s hold it together until it releases a deeper logic of the spirit, the difficult. And the joyous are one, you know, light and dark actually are two sides of existence. And you know, I felt this in my cancer journey all those years ago. I didn’t, I didn’t have a near death, you know, where you’re like crossed over and come back.
But I was close enough and in my close enough, I really glimpsed that life and death. Were indistinguishable,
you know, that we, in order to try to navigate it, deal with it, be with it. We kind of separate the, but when, when near the edge, they, they seemed, uh, they were elements of one existence. And so I do think that, you know. By facing, uh, whatever it is there. And this goes with chronic pain too. This, there, there are spaces in the difficulty if we enter time, if we’re, if we are wholehearted, hold nothing back, give our all.
You know, I still, one of my practices still when I’m feeling difficulty or pain or anxious, um, because I can be centered and anxious at the same time, I can be sad and happy at the same time. I can be confused and clear at the same time, and I need to allow those parts of my humanity to speak to each other.
Not run from one to the other. So one of my practices when I’m in difficulty is to try to stop and give my full heart’s attention to the nearest piece of life before me until it becomes my teacher. It, it could be a fly on the wall.
Tami Simon: Now, mark, you said I can be confused and clear at the same time. I was kind of with you with the happy or sad. I thought I, and sad at, I was like, I know what that is. And then I thought, huh, I usually don’t make a statement like confused and clear at the same time. I think of them as as opposites. What’s that like for you?
Now I know you’re gonna gimme the ocean metaphor. Don’t gimme a metaphor. Tell me what it feels like inside when you’re both confused and clear.
Mark Nepo: Well, what it feels like is that my deeper self is clear. My deeper self never forgets that there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do I, and the self that is drawn into the world does forget. And so I might be struggling with a conflict with a decision. Do I do this? It doesn’t feel clean, do I? Not? What will it say about my reputation if I pull out of this because it doesn’t feel integral?
Am I being integral? Okay, so I’m confused about what to do to be true to myself, but all the while. My true self isn’t troubled by any of it. My true self is waiting for me to settle. My true self is waiting for me. Are you done now? Why don’t you come and sit and then it’ll be clear what to do, you know?
And so there’s a, there’s a wonderful, uh, there’s a Chinese sage ton. In the, the third century, and well, from all, from what we know, he was a real curmudgeon and legend has it. Laura has it, that he had just one answer. His students would come to him with all these questions, he’d listen, and he’d go, not two, one, go away.
Not two, one, go away.
Tami Simon: Okay, well, don’t, well don’t tell me to go away, but I do wanna ask you more about, we’ll go away soon, but not yet. Li life and death as being. Indistinguishable. ’cause you said, you know, I, I never had a near death experience per se, where I, you know, went through the tunnel and
Mark Nepo: Yeah.
Tami Simon: the, met my ancestors or anything.
But you, you were enough on the brink of dying that you could see this indistinguishable ness between life and death. Don’t
Mark Nepo: Yeah.
Tami Simon: me to go away. And I thought, uh, I don’t, I don’t know if I get that. Really. I don’t
Mark Nepo: Well. Oh, let me try to, I try to speak to it a little bit more there. This indivisible oneness of life, of being, of spirit, of inner and outer, you know, of the visible and the non-visible. It’s all really one and. You know, death is really death to the part, not the whole, and of course when it’s me, I’m the part that’s dying.
That’s a big deal. But it’s not the death of everything.
So just like, you know, we think of. Darkness is dark. When, when actually, um, darkness is just where we can’t yet see.
So we call it dark and death is where we can’t, where we won’t be able to go. But it’s all one life. It’s all one world. It’s all one eternal. Moment and we are the parts that come and go. So I think that what, uh, I never like to use the word enlightenment ’cause it implies some kind of a rival state. But when we are fully present, when we have these moments of oneness, when we have the moments of relationship, you know, um, that.
Are transformative. We trip into that oneness. So, you know, quick an example of which centers around where I learned deeply. My father was dying and was in the hospital. He had a stroke. And there I was. All of a sudden, I, I didn’t live nearby and I came and I was alone with him. Gave everybody else the family time to go away and restore whatever.
He wasn’t in a private room. It was chaos. There was TVs trays smacking and I’m feeding him applesauce with a spoon and all of a sudden, all of life and death was in that moment, everything. I, my whole being was in, uh, suddenly wanting this spoon not to hit his teeth, and him, uh, reaching for the spoon. And I gave my entire being to that.
And because I was that thorough, that holding nothing back, I was surprised though I was crying and it was bittersweet. I tripped into a moment of wonder. I was suddenly in the moment of every adult child who ever fed a dying parent, and I wasn’t alone.
And, and that’s the kind of eternal moment that we trip into. And again, that’s where it was all indistinguishable.
Tami Simon: When you talked about pouring your whole self into the moment, it reminded me of this thing I wanted to ask you about. There’s a line in the fifth season where you write, to be swift of heart is all I’ve ever wanted. And I thought, what does that mean to be swift of?
Mark Nepo: Well, for me what it means is it doesn’t mean to move fast. It means to, to. Be, uh, without hesitation to be fully committed from in to out, from the heart to the hands. That’s what it means. It means to be of one living motion.
Tami Simon: And with that, I wanna say to you, mark. I love you
Mark Nepo: Uh.
Tami Simon: and I think this is my favorite of all of the insight at the edge conversations we’ve had. I’ve been talking to Mark Nepo about his latest book. It’s called The Fifth Season, creativity in The Second Half of Life, and I wonder if we can end, you guessed it with a poem, it’s a poem that from the fifth season on page 1 55, you ask about aging.
Mark Nepo: Oh, thank you and I love you too. You ask about aging. Everything in nature erodes gracefully. The tree leans and cracks the mountain rounds for decades. In the wind, the banks of the river bend to where the river wants to go, but we so afraid of not being here. We fear the slightest change. My elbow is sore.
Your heart is slowing down. And just yesterday an old friend flew away like a bird with a broken wing. Still. For all I have learned, for all I am learning, I don’t want to go though like the tree on the ridge that has grown sideways toward the daily twist of light. I see no greater destiny or simplicity.
Then to be stripped of all pretense and want until all that’s left is a branch of being waiting for its wind
Tami Simon: Mark Nepo. Thank you very, very much. Many blessings.
Mark Nepo: Oh.
Tami Simon: Thanks everyone for being with us. Thank you.
