Mark Nepo - The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic Life

Table of Contents

TO MY READER

For years, Ive been trying to explore and understand: How can we, being forgetfully human, remember we are of one human family? How can we stay awake and authentic when our wounds make us numb and hidden? How can we minimize what stands between us and our experience of life? How can we make a practice of wearing down what thickens around our mind and heart? How can this practice of staying authentic serve and draw strength from the universal Whole while we are immersed and entangled in the moment of our lives?

As a cancer survivor, I have found myself like Lazarus, awake again, in the same earthly place but different. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. This wakefulness has led me to be a student of that vibrant edge where our inner life meets the world. Being a poet and philosopher, I find myself there with a particular set of tools to search with.

But we all live on this shore between the depths of being and the dangers of experience. This book has become a journal of the challenges and gifts of being a spirit in the world. It has taken three years to birth this book, and I view it as an intimate companion in exploring the intoxicating quandaries of being alive. When struggling through my illness, I was bereft at how many of the books I owned were useless. Ever since, I have been committed to finding and creating books that can help us live. It is my devout hope that this book is such a help.

We cannot change the world by a new plan, project, or idea. We cannot even change other people by our convictions, stories, advice and proposals, but we can offer a space where people are encouraged to disarm themselves, lay aside their occupations and preoccupations and listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in their own center.

HENRI NOUWEN

Work of seeing is done.
Now practice heart-work...

RILKE

PRAISE FOR THE EXQUISITE RISK

Perfect for reading at the beachor anytime you feel the urge to be surprised by the lyrical suddenness of life.

Yoga Journal

Meant to be savored like a fine meal. Nepos book is filled with poetic imagery and language, enticing the reader to linger over its delicate flavors. Filtered through his personal experience, Nepo pours wisdom from the chalice of many cultures and faiths.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

In this exquisite book, the suffering of one man speaks with the voice of wisdom and beauty to all of us.

Jacob Needleman, author of The American Soul, A Little Book on Love, and Money and the Meaning of Life

Every page of The Exquisite Risk is alive with Marks compassion, rich with his soulfulness. If you are looking for one of those rare books that offer companionship on the journey, you will find none better than this.

Parker J. Palmer, bestselling author of A Hidden Wholeness, The Courage to Teach, and Let Your Life Speak

An inspiration... The Exquisite Risk affirms that there are essentially two responses to lifea risky opening up to love and a controlling move into success and isolation. The direct reporting of Mark Nepos epiphanies moves and flows in a wonderful sequencing of revelations that deepen and fill out as we read.... An exquisite gift.

Robert Inchausti, author of The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People

OPENING THE GIFT

Before stories were recorded, what happened to the living was told and retold around fires, on cliffs, and in the shade of enormous trees. And it is said that somewhere on the edge of what was known and unknown, a man and a woman paused in their struggles to survive and faced each other. One asked the other, Is there more to this than hauling wood? The older of the two sighed, Yes... and no.

This may have been the beginning of our sense of being and our search for meaning. I imagine these two faced everything we face. For the journey is the same: how to open our pain and listen to all that matters, so we can make it through and rejoice from day to day.

Like those before us, we have the chance to wake and love, the chance to welcome the gift of surprise and befriend the Whole. For beneath the life of problem-solving waits the struggle to be real, from which no one is exempt. We each are asked to make our way through the drama of our bleeding to the stripping of our will, through the tensions of our suffering to the humility of surrender where we might learn the ordinary art of living at the pace of what is real.

So, is there more to this than hauling the wood of our history around? More than just replaying our patterns? Whether yesterday or five thousand years ago, there has always been the need to break our habits in the worldthe need to give up what no longer works.

Ultimately, there is always the need to risk being new. Yet even succeeding, to be authenticliving as close to our experience as possibleis arduous. For being human, we remember and forget. We stray and return, fall down and get up, and cling and let go, again and again. But it is this straying and returning that makes life interesting, this clinging and letting godamned as it isthat exercises the heart.

They say that, after a time, the two who paused on the edge of what was known and unknown stumbled into humility. Please, tell me, is there more to this than hauling wood? the one would ask again. And the more tired of the two replied, No, no. It is all in the hauling, all in the wood, all in how we face each other around the small fires we can build.

It was then that they rested, as we rest, when accepting the grace of our humanness. You see, weve always been on a journey, like it or not, aware of it or not, struggling to enter and embrace things as they are. And when we can accept our small part in the way of things, when we can build a small fire and gather, it opens us to joy. So join me on this journey we are already on. We can help each other hold nothing back. We can help each other live a sincere life. We can help each other wear down what gets in the way, waking close to the bone.

Come. There are teachers everywhere: in the stories around us, in the stories within us, in the life of expression that sings where we are broken, in the kinship of gratitude that keeps reminding us that we need each other as we become the earth.

MOVEMENT 1

There AreTeachersEverywhere

LISTENING TO THE VOICE INSIDE

I remember the first time I was forced to listen, not by adults or teachers, but by running as a boy in the playground so fast and free that I fell and scraped my knee. After the cut reduced to a throb, I couldnt get up. It was then that I saw my blood sprinkled in the dirt. It was then I first realized that this great thing we ran on was the earth. I had never paid attention to it. I was just a boy. I put my ear to the ground and listened. I dont know what I thought I would hear. But it was summer and the ground was warm. So I thought I heard warmth. I told my teacher, but she said you cant hear warmth. Yet some forty-five years later, I think you can. Whenever you put your ear to the earth or to your own heart, the deeper instruments play, swelling our sense of things. When lost, we simply have to remember to put our ear to the earth, or to our heart, and we will hear a warmth that guides.