Mark Nepo - The One Life Were Given: Finding the Wisdom That Waits in Your Heart

ALSO BY MARK NEPO

NONFICTION

More Together Than Alone

Things That Join the Sea and the Sky

The Endless Practice

Seven Thousand Ways to Listen

Finding Inner Courage

Unlearning Back to God

The Exquisite Risk

The Book of Awakening

FICTION

As Far as the Heart Can See

POETRY

The Way Under the Way

Inside the Miracle

Reduced to Joy

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

More Togther Than Alone

Flames that Light the Heart (video course)

The One Life Were Given

Inside the Miracle (expanded, 2015)

Reduced to Joy

The Endless Practice

Seven Thousand Ways to Listen

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 (1996)

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Copyright 2016 by Mark Nepo

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First Atria Books hardcover edition July 2016

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Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe

Jacket design by Pete Garceau

Jacket photos Gary Alvis/iStockphoto

Author photograph by Brian Bankston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nepo, Mark, author.

Title: The one life were given : finding the wisdom that waits in your heart / Mark Nepo.

Description: New York, NY : Atria Books, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015051375 | ISBN 9781501116322 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501116339 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Spiritual life. | Conduct of life.

Classification: LCC BL624.N453 2016 | DDC 204/.4dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015051375

ISBN 978-1-5011-1632-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-1634-6 (ebook)

For Eleanor McHenry (19352015) and Joel Elkes (19132015).

Both were heroic and humble spirits who stayed loving and gentle, no matter what life gave them.

When all I wanted was to sing,

I was accorded the honor of living.

R AINER M ARIA R ILKE

The highest reward for a persons toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.

J OHN R USKIN

Before practicing the art of immortality,

first practice the art of humanity.

L U Y EN

M y dear father, Morris Nepo, died three years ago at the age of ninety-three. He was at his strongest and happiest when working with wood, when building things. In his basement workshop, no one could suppress his love of life and his insatiable creativity. I learned a great deal from him, though I can see now that there were many times he didnt know he was teaching and I didnt know I was learning. Mostly, he taught me by example that were called to make good use of the one life were given. He taught me that giving our all can lead to moments of fulfillment and grace. And those moments of full living can sustain us.

When just a boy, I watched my father chisel boards with care and precision. He kept his chisels sharp. Hed always say, Dont stop in mid-stroke or the board will splinter. Once you start, keep pushing all the way through. Hed lean over the board and his hands and the chisel would become one. A thin shaving of wood would peel away, as if hed loved the board into giving it up. Hed pick up the light shaving from the floor and rub it between his fingers. Then hed rub the grain his effort had revealed and smile. In that moment, he seemed content, at peace. When I read Plato years later, with all his squawk about absolute forms, I knew thats where my father went. For the moment, he seemed complete. Hed rub the smooth board one more time and drop the shaving. I loved to watch the feather of wood float to the basement floor. Looking back, Im certain this was a moment in which he felt thoroughly immersed.

The wood shaving floating to the floor was an expression of effort turning into grace. Years later, I would feel a similar sense of completion when building things myself, and when arriving at intimacy in my relationships, after honest, loving work. Revealing the inner grain and watching the shaving float between us make us complete. Working the grain is how we love and labor, and no matter what we build or create, the shaving we chisel is the insight that lightens our load.

There were six vises stationed along my fathers workbench. Each held a project in a different phase of development. The vises were never empty. One might hold a strip of pine that he was bending. Another might hold a layer of walnut that he was gluing to a layer of mahogany. A third might hold a table leg that he was sanding. Hed work on one, then move to another and circle back, one informing the other. I realized only recently that this is how I work on books. I explore several books at once, pursuing one, then moving to another, letting my interest and their vitality cross-pollinate. I gather images and stories and metaphors, keeping them in folders, as I weave and work on many levels at the same time.

My father also had a bin where he kept wood fragments that he might use in future projects. When he died, my brother and I looked for him in that bin. There must have been five hundred scraps of all sizes and shapes. Now I understand where my fragment folders come from. I see the underside of a cloud, or light shimmering off a broken piece of glass, or hear someone in a caf say something profound. I save these rough gems to work with later, when I discover where they go.

With his immersion in what he loved, my father showed me that throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into what were given brings us alive. Craftsman that he was, he left deep messages in all that he touched, some of which have only reached me now. I wish I could show him my workbench. I wish we could hammer the hot metal of our creations side by side, watching the forged shapes harden beneath their glow.

Yet work as we do to carve and shape, we are carved and shaped as we go. No one can escape the way experience forms us. Twenty-nine years ago, I was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma that shaped me forever. After a gauntlet of tests and biopsies, the tumor growing in my skull bone vanished. It was a miracle. Ten months later, a sister tumor began to show on a rib in my back. I fell into despair. I feared I had wasted the miracle, had not honored my second chance. Now I was afraid I would die. The rib and its adjacent muscles had to be removed. And within weeks of that surgery, I underwent four months of aggressive chemotherapy, which almost killed me.