Mark Nepo: The Endless Practice of Becoming
OM TIMES: You talk about the courage not to waste our gifts. What does this mean and how to do we do this?
MARK NEPO: What does it mean to have a gift? For the lamp, the light it was shaped to carry is its gift. Without a light, a lamp has no purpose. For a person, we are shaped by experience to reveal the light we carry. For a person, how that light comes through us is our gift. We could say that for every hand, the heart it was shaped to carry is its gift. And a life cut off from the work of its heart has no purpose. Our call in the midst of our days is to discover the gift that connects our heart and our hands, to discover the light that fills the lamp of the life we are given. Once discovered, our work is to never let the light of our gift go out. While I offer many stories and examples throughout the book, how we do this is a very personal practice we each must discover as we go.
OM TIMES: You connect resilience with saying yes to life. Can you talk more about this?
MARK NEPO: In the face of this gritty, mysterious, and ever-changing dynamic we call being alive, it’s nothing short of heroic that we are asked to choose life and living, again and again. Not just to put a good face on things while we’re here, but because saying yes to life is how the worm inches its way through earth. It’s how salmon leap their way upstream. It’s how flowers grow out of stone. Ultimately, resilience resides in saying yes to who we are and giving our attention to whatever is before us. We are continually challenged to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we’re given. This is our journey on earth. As a way of being, saying yes is the ongoing dance of intimacy between our own nature and the nature of life. Saying yes is how Spirit keeps moving through us into the world.
