Mark Nepo: The Endless Practice of Becoming
OM TIMES: You refer to faith as a trust in the nature of the Universe more than in a set of beliefs. How can we access this kind of faith?
MARK NEPO: When learning to swim, it’s natural enough to resist our initial sinking in the water. We seem to be going down. And the more we struggle at the surface, the stronger the pull seems, wanting to take us under. But when we can relax into the water, we settle a few inches into the miracle of buoyancy. Amazingly, the unseen depths hold us up. This moment reveals the essence of faith. Forget all the definitions and debates. It’s as simple and difficult as swimming in the ocean of experience and learning how to trust the unseen depths to hold us up. We don’t have to name that depth or send messages to it or pray in the dark to it. We simply have to surrender enough to feel its buoyancy. Yet these are the most difficult two inches to travel on earth. All the spiritual traditions offer us ways to practice this kind of surrender and deep attention to being alive.
OM TIMES: What do you hope readers will take with them from THE ENDLESS PRACTICE?
MARK NEPO Every single being has an amazing, unfathomable gift that only meeting life head-on and heart-on will reveal. And we can’t fully know our gift alone. We need each other to discover the gift, to believe in the gift. And then, to learn how to use it. The challenge for each of us is not to discount our gift because of the indifference of others, and not to abdicate our gift because of the various weights we’re forced to carry. My hope is that readers will better know their own true nature and the depth of their own resources by being in conversation with this book and the inner terrain it opens, including how to restore our trust in life, when suffering makes us lose our way; how to begin the work of saying yes to life, so it can enliven us; and how to make our inwardness a resource and not a refuge.
