Mark Nepo: Inside of the Miracle
OMTIMES: You have been through a great deal in your life, and yet you speak of joy without denying the hardships. How are you able to hold both?
MARK NEPO: What I’ve endured is the journey that everyone endures in different circumstances and with different names. Sooner or later, we’re asked to be honest with our fears and hopes; to render, through our experience, the irreducible mystery of life in which we all swim. After all this way, I know that I am weak and strong, stubborn and determined, afraid and brave, giving and demanding, resilient and stalled, confused and clear—sometimes all at once. I know now that going on without denying any aspect of the human drama is what strength is all about. We are carved by life into instruments that will release our song, if we can hold each up to the carving. But it’s all for the release of our song while we are here. Joy is the transformation of our suffering, not the escape of all we have to face. How we preserve what matters and how we create medicine out of our suffering can help us heal and approach wholeness.
OMTIMES: Throughout the book, you speak about the challenges and gifts of true relationship. Can you give us a sense of what this holds for you?
MARK NEPO: One of the great paradoxes of being alive is that each of us is born complete and yet we need contact with life in order to be whole. Whether conscious of it or not, we are all engaged in this search for other life, so we might join with the rest of life and be complete. Our longing to join and come alive is our birthright. This is similar to pollination. We complete the world when, opening ourselves against great odds, we inadvertently seed each other’s essence somewhere else in the world to grow. This is the purpose of true relationship: to enliven what is dormant within each other. Once enlivened, it is our responsibility to keep what’s dormant conscious and to integrate the fibers of hard-earned experience into the fabric of a living spirit. The gift of true relationship is that we awaken and complete each other.
