Mark Nepo - Things That Join the Sea and the Sky: Field Notes on Living

for Rykan

who cried on the six-hundred-year-old manuscript of Dogen...

for Neruda and the coal miner

who came out of the earth and called him brother...

for Whitman

who volunteered as a Civil War medic for both sides...

for Rilke

who stared at the panther in the cage

and saw that the bars go both ways...

We could all learn from the flatfish.

They spend their days

scavenging in the mud

but their eyes

never leave Heaven.

Theyre ready for anything.

LAKE SAGARIS

CONTENTS

THE WHAT AND THE HOW

I n early March 2002, we went to the Union. Stefon Harris, the great vibes player, was sitting in with the Western Michigan Jazz Quartet. We arrived early to get a table up front, so we could see his hands. The place filled, and as they began, I felt this smile wash over my entire being. Its what I always feel when tucked inside a small club as music starts to swirl its sweet, unseeable smoke.

Stefon touched an inner chord right away. It might have been two notes an octave apart. They pierced any hesitation that had clung to me throughout the day. I was fresh again and thankful. The music opened us further as the sax player rode his first solo. Suddenly, I fell into one of those moments where life shows itself as always just beginning. We werent just watching. We werent just listening. We were part of the song of life starting all over again. It made me want to write a book about joy. I closed my eyes, and the sax player quieted his roll of notes, which the piano player picked up as if theyd handed them off. It made me laugh. It felt like the bough of a fallen tree letting go at the top of a waterfall, its branches gently going over.

Then, it struck me. Joy is the name for all the things that join the sea and the sky. In that instant, I met this book. Their jazz inspired my jazz. Its how these things work. One bird is flushed out of hiding by a sudden streak of light, and all the birds nearby are sent flapping into the open. So lets not talk about theories or concepts. I just know that joy is the what and the jazz of unscripted living is the how. What we love doesnt seem to matter. Its all a holy excuse to love the world and ourselves back together.

I started this book fifteen years ago, when I was fifty-one. What you just read is where it began. Like all books, it came alive and had ideas of its own. My initial impulse was to reach for joy, but youll see that my sense of joy has deepened: I now experience joy in the oceanic trenches of feeling. Though when struggling, like the rest of us, its hard to keep my head above water. But thats the point. Were asked to go below: to swim and drift in the deep where my breath and your breath and the breath of the Universe are one. This depth has taught me that joy is not the stillness waiting at the end of difficult feelings but the sea of Being that holds all feelings, from which the thousand moods we undergo surface like waves to engage us in the world. To my surprise, I discovered along the way that the life of feeling, when entered like a sea, holds us with the mystery of its buoyancy.

These pages are drawn from my ongoing journal of many years. And so, this thematic reader is one of my most intimate books, a travelogue of my conversation with the Universe, a mix of inner reflections, questions, and stories that have come to teach me how to be here.

I have gathered these reflections into themes were all asked to face, thresholds were all asked to cross, though no one can tell us how. At most, we can bear witness to each others journey and keep each other company. Theres one experience waiting if you should read these passages in order, the way you might follow a path to the sea. But each section stands alone as well, so you can go to each directly, depending on what youre faced with today. On the whole, these passages explore how we open and close and fall down and get up, given the storms and clearings that come our way. The conversation they evoke acknowledges lifes difficulties, while trying to uncover the pathways to resilience and peace that have always been waiting under our trouble, if we can find them.

At the end of the book, I offer an essay about the nature and gift of journaling, followed by journaling guidelines, and a hundred journal questions to work with. All to encourage you to engage in your own conversation with the Universe.

This book contains raw moments of sinking and being lifted, intimate accounts of being thrown into feeling and depth. I share how Ive been stretched into wondering about my life and the lives of others, in this ongoing push and pull in a Universe that holds us, then tosses us about, only to hold us again. Under every passage, I hope you feel the common song were each born to sing in our unique and very human way.

STOPPING THE NOISE

When there is silence, one finds the anchor of the Universe within oneself.

LAO TZU

O ften were cast about by the noise of the world and the noise in our heads. Often were mesmerized by the stunning cacophony that masks itself as excitement. And though theres much to be gained for being in the world, we cant make sense of it till we stop the noise, till we go below the noise, till we go below the habit of our own thoughts. But its impossible to be still and quiet all the time. As a whale or dolphin must break surface, only to dive back down, only to break surface again, each of us must break surface into the noise of the world, only to rest our way back into the depth of stillness, where we can know ourselves and life more deeply, until we have to break surface again. No one is ever done with this crossover between noise and stillness. Not even those committed to a contemplative life. Not even those who are blind or mute. For the noise of the mind never dies. It can only be put in perspective, quieted until we can hear the more ancient voices that give us life. At every turn, we need to stop the noise, our own and everyone elses, not to retreat from the world but to live more fully in it.

QUIETING THE THIEVES

Today I am sad, or so I thought. But more I am tired of keeping up with all that doesnt matter. Im sipping coffee, listening to rain. I like watching the leaves hang in long weather. I like to close my eyes and feel the rain quiet the earth. I welcome that quieting. I like to have my habits of going here and there interrupted. I was caught in the rain when coming here. The cool blotches sink in all over. The many lists I carry in my shirt are wet. I take them out to dry, and all the tasks have blurred. At last. Unreadable. Forgettable. We carry these lists near our heart and finger them like worry beads. It doesnt matter what is on them. They are the thieves, and it is the insidious virtue to have everything in order before we live that is the greatest thief. I feel the rain drip down my neck. I think Im becoming unfinished.

BRING ME CLOSE

When I stop, the smallest things make me weep: the afternoon light dusting our dogs face, the beads of rain darkening the head of St. Francis in the neglected garden, and my fathers stroke-laden tongue falling through the phone. The ache of being here reveals itself as the heartbeat of Eternity. I hear it in the throng of birds beaten back by wind, in the wall of silence that crumbles between old friends too stubborn to forgive, and in the swollen minds on the train trying to find their way home. The ache of being here undoes my need for fences.

SHORT WISDOM ON A LONG PLANET