The Book of Awakening Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  The Book of Awakening

  “Mark Nepo is an astonishing poet and teacher. He generously comforts us while guiding us toward the deep, quiet river of wisdom that saturates each and every day of our lives.”

  —WAYNE MULLER, founder and president of Bread for the Journey and author of How, Then, Shall We Live? and Sabbath

  “A true treasure chest of practices, reflections, and poetry to remember the splendor, beauty, and magnitude of the human spirit.”

  —ANGELES ARRIEN, PH.D., cultural anthropologist, author of The Four-Fold Way and Signs of Life

  “Mark Nepo's work is as gentle and reliable as the tides, and he is as courageous as anyone I've known in looking deeply into the mysteries of the self.”

  —MICHAEL J. MAHONEY, professor of clinical psychology at the University of North Texas and Distinguished Adjunct Faculty at the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center; author of Human Change Processes and Constructive Psychotherapy

  “Mark Nepo is one of the finest spiritual guides of our time, and The Book of Awakening is one of the finest fruits of his spirit. His poetic gift shows through on every page, and his own courageous journey from near-death to new life breathes truth into every word he writes. This book is a gift of love. Open the gift—and open yourself to it—and you, like I, will be filled with gratitude and graced with renewal.”

  —PARKER J. PALMER, author of Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach

  ALSO BY MARK NEPO

  Non-Fiction

  As Far As the Heart Can See

  Finding Inner Courage

  Unlearning Back to God

  The Exquisite Risk

  Poetry

  Surviving Has Made Me Crazy

  Suite for the Living

  Inhabiting Wonder

  Acre of Light

  Fire Without Witness

  God, the Maker of the Bed, and the Painter

  Editor

  Deepening the American Dream

  Recordings

  Staying Awake

  Holding Nothing Back

  As Far As the Heart Can See

  The Book of Awakening

  Finding Inner Courage

  Finding Our Way in the World

  Inside the Miracle

  Content

  Introduction to the Gift Edition

  An Invitation

  Foreword

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Gratitudes

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  To Our Readers

  This gift edition first published in 2011 by Conari Press,

  an imprint of Red Wheel / Weiser, LLC

  With offices at:

  665 Third Street, Suite 400

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  www.redwheelweiser.com

  Copyright © 2000 by Mark Nepo. Introduction to gift edition © 2011 by Mark Nepo. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel / Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Originally published in 2000 by Conari Press, ISBN: 978-1-57324-117-5.

  ISBN: 978-1-57324-538-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

  Cover design: Jim Warner

  Cover photography: Image Bank, Paul Trummer, Water Lily, Austria

  Printed in the United States of America

  MAL

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Wisdom is a living stream, not an icon preserved in a museum. Only when we find the spring of wisdom in our own life can it flow to future generations.

  —THICH NHAT HANH

  INTRODUCTION TO THE GIFT EDITION

  Like most gifts, it is the passing of something meaningful between people that awakens us to our potential. Coming upon the possibility of writing this book fourteen years ago was such a gift for me. Freshly on the other side of cancer, I was gentle and raw and eager to bottle light for those suffering in darkness the way I had been. It took two years to discover these small passages and to shape them into this book. Ever since, it's been my teacher as it has made its way from reader to reader for more than a decade.

  While writing a few entries at a time, I was asked by an old friend if I could share them through email. That slowly led to a weekly sharing that went quietly for years all over the world, from London to India to South Africa. In 2000, the book began its journey in print. Almost two years ago, the book was kindly given to Oprah Winfrey as a birthday present, another appearance of gifting, and her deep connection and kind support has jettisoned the book into twenty languages and over two dozen printings.

  One of the foreign editions is in Russian, and I can't help but think of my grandmother who came to America from a small town outside of Kiev almost a century ago, who learned English slowly in Brooklyn thirty-seven years before I was born, who held my hands as a boy and said to me in broken English, “These are the oldest things you own. ” Across oceans and centuries, the mysterious cycle of giving and receiving is very humbling.

  I am often told that different passages of this book speak as if I knew exactly what a reader was going through. I confess I am not that smart. But such a convergence is a testament to the luminous fact that the soul drinks from the same lake at center. And somehow when one of us bows our head toward that lake, the center is opened for us all. This is one of the quietest gifts.

  So more than the pages that follow, it is the living center that each page points to that I continue to be amazed by. This is the timeless gift I hope you receive, the one that will free you and shape you as it passes through.

  —Mark

  September 2011

  AN INVITATION

  This book is meant to be of use, to be a companion, a soul friend. It is a book of awakenings. To write this I've had to live it. It's given me a chance to gather and share the quiet teachers I've met throughout my life. The journey of unearthing and shaping these entries has helped me bring my inner and outer life more closely together. It has helped me know and use my heart. It has made me more whole. I hope it can be such a tool for you.

  Gathering the insights for this book has been like finding bits of stone that glistened on the path. I paused to reflect on them, to learn from them, then tucked them away and continued. After two years, I'm astonished to dump my bag of broken stones to see what I've found. The bits that have glistened along the way are what make up this book.

  Essentially, they all speak about spirit and friendship, about our ongoing need to stay vital and in love with this life, no matter the hardships we encounter. From many traditions, from many experiences, from many beautiful and honest voices, the songs herein all sing of pain and wonder and the mystery of love.

  I was drawn to this form because as a poet, I was longing for a manner of expression that could be as useful as a spoon, and as a cancer survivor, daybooks have become inner food. In truth, over the last twenty-five years, the daybook has been answering a collective need and has become a spiritual sonnet of our age, a sturdy container for small doses of what matters.

  All I can ask of this work is that it comes over you the way the ocean covers a stone stuck in the open, that it surprises and refreshes, that it makes you or me glisten, and leaves us scoured as we are, just softer for the moment and more clear.
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  It is my profound hope that something in these pages will surprise and refresh you, will make you glisten, will help you live, love, and find your way to joy.

  —Mark

  FOREWORD

  by Wayne Muller, author of How Then Shall We Live

  One of the sweetest joys in my life is to hear Mark Nepo read his poetry. There is a tangible air of adventure. I am always surprised as Mark, unwrapping hidden treasure, carefully opening a simple moment, reveals the most extraordinary miracles. When he reads in public, you hear people catch their breath as they recognize something deep and true, something known but forgotten, or missed. Mark sees it, remembers it for us, and gives it back to us. In the end, there is a sense of gratitude for being awakened again to something truly precious.

  Our life is made of days. It is only in the days of our lives that we find peace, joy, and healing. There are a thousand tiny miracles that punctuate our days, and Mark Nepo is a student of the miraculous. An alchemist of the ordinary, he invites us to see, taste, touch, dance, and feel our way into the heart of life.

  Just as a life is made of days, so are days made of moments. A life well lived is firmly planted in the sweet soil of moments. Mark Nepo is a gardener in this soil; he plants seeds of grace that grow only in the soil of loving attention and mindful time. We receive the deepest blessings of life when we fall in love with such moments—and Mark shows us how to fall in love deeply and with abandon.

  Mark had cancer, and it shook him awake. His descent into illness gave birth to an astonishing mindfulness. Now, he invites us to use his eyes and heart to see and feel how awake our being alive can be. Having survived his cancer, Mark brings with him the eyes of a dying person who is grateful simply to breathe. But more than gratefulness he brings wisdom, clarity, kindness, and a passionate enthusiasm for sucking the marrow out of moments, out of the bones of time.

  If you ache to live this way, Mark is your guide.

  When Mark finished the final round of chemotherapy that helped cure his cancer, he rose early in the day, squeezed fresh orange juice, and placed the glass of juice on the table before him. Then he waited, reflecting on the promise of the day, until the sun rose over the trees outside his window. At that moment, he told me, the light from the sun pierced the juice and “diffused into orange, crystal light,” at which point Mark lifted the juice to his lips.

  Most sacraments are acts of breathtaking simplicity: a simple prayer, a sip of wine and a piece of bread, a single breath in meditation, a sprinkling of water on the forehead, an exchange of rings, a kind word, a blessing. Any of these, performed in a moment of mindfulness, may open the doors of our spiritual perception and bring nourishment and delight.

  This is a book of sacraments; it is Mark's generous gift to us, a banquet of miracles made from the stuff of days, the ordinary riches of a human life. Take your time, savor each page. Above all, be willing to be surprised. Life may already be more miraculous than you ever imagined.

  JANUARY 1

  Precious Human Birth

  Of all the things that exist, we breathe and wake and turn it into song.

  There is a Buddhist precept that asks us to be mindful of how rare it is to find ourselves in human form on Earth. It is really a beautiful view of life that offers us the chance to feel enormous appreciation for the fact that we are here as individual spirits filled with consciousness, drinking water and chopping wood.

  It asks us to look about at the ant and antelope, at the worm and the butterfly, at the dog and the castrated bull, at the hawk and the wild lonely tiger, at the hundred-year-old oak and the thousand-year-old patch of ocean. It asks us to understand that no other life form has the consciousness of being that we are privilege to. It asks us to recognize that of all the endless species of plants and animals and minerals that make up the Earth, a very small portion of life has the wakefulness of spirit that we call “being human.”

  That I can rise from some depth of awareness to express this to you and that you can receive me in this instant is part of our precious human birth. You could have been an ant. I could have been an anteater. You could have been rain. I could have been a lick of salt. But we were blessed—in this time, in this place—to be human beings, alive in rare ways we often take for granted.

  All of this to say, this precious human birth is unrepeatable. So what will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands? What will you ask and of whom?

  Tomorrow you could die and become an ant, and someone will be setting traps for you. But today you are precious and rare and awake. It ushers us into grateful living. It makes hesitation useless. Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.

  Sit outside, if possible, or near a window, and note the other life forms around you.

  Breathe slowly and think of the ant and the blade of grass and the blue jay and what these life forms can do that you can't.

  Think of the pebble and the piece of bark and the stone bench, and center your breathing on the interior things that you can do that they can't.

  Rise slowly, feeling beautifully human, and enter your day with the conscious intent of doing one thing that only humans can do.

  When the time arises, do this one thing with great reverence and gratitude.

  JANUARY 2

  All Fall Down

  Lead us from the unreal to the real.

  —HINDU INVOCATION

  It was a snowy night, and Robert was recalling the time two springs ago when he was determined to paint the family room. Up early, he was out the door, to the hardware store gathering the gallons of red, the wooden mixing sticks, the drop cloths, and the one-time brushes that always harden, no matter what you soak them in.

  He mixed the paint outside and waddled to the door with a gallon in each hand, the drop cloth under his arm, and a wide brush in his mouth. He began to chuckle in telling what happened, “I teetered there for minutes, trying to open the door, not wanting to put anything down. I was so stubborn. I had the door almost open when I lost my grip, stumbled backward, and wound up on the ground, red gallons all over me.”

  At this point, he laughed at himself, as he has done many times, and we watched the snow fall in silence. I thought of his little story the whole way home. Amazingly, we all do this, whether with groceries or paint or with the stories we feel determined to share. We do this with our love, with our sense of truth, even with our pain. It's such a simple thing, but in a moment of ego we refuse to put down what we carry in order to open the door. Time and time again, we are offered the chance to truly learn this: We cannot hold on to things and enter. We must put down what we carry, open the door, and then take up only what we need to bring inside.

  It is a basic human sequence: gather, prepare, put down, enter. But failing as we do, we always have that second chance: to learn how to fall, get up, and laugh.

  Meditate on some threshold you are having trouble crossing in your life. It might be at work, at home, in a relationship, or the doorway to greater peace.

  Breathe steadily and look to yourself to see if you are carrying too much to open the door.

  Breathe slowly and with each out-breath put the things you are carrying down.

  Breathe freely now and open the door.

  JANUARY 3

  Unlearning Back to God

  The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing; it is a long and painful return to that which has always been.

  —HELEN LUKE

  Each person is born with an unencumbered spot—free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry—an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inw
ardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.

  To know this spot of Inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this on going tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.

  When the film is worn through, we have moments of enlightenment, moments of wholeness, moments of satori, as the Zen sages term it, moments of clear living when inner meets outer, moments of full integrity of being, moments of complete Oneness. And whether the film is a veil of culture, of memory, of mental or religious training, of trauma or sophistication, the removal of that film and the restoration of that timeless spot of grace is the goal of all therapy and education.

  Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.

  Close your eyes and breathe your way beneath your troubles, the way a diver slips to that depth of stillness that is always waiting beneath the churning of the waves.

  Now, consider two things you love doing, such as running, drawing, singing, bird-watching, gardening, or reading. Meditate on what it is in each of these that makes you feel alive.