Mark Nepo: The Power and the Spirit of Community
JUSTINE TOMS: I’m speaking with Mark Nepo, the author of More Together than Alone – Discovering the Power and Spirit of Community in our Lives and in our World. His website is marknepo.com.
Mark Nepo, I would like to go back to an original thought that you had in which you talk about the original instruction of Humans is one of kinship and relationship. I would love for you to talk about that, and to talk about some of the examples of how we know that, like our heart selves’ example.
MARK NEPO: This has been an age-old through the history of Humans in the realm of philosophy, trying to understand what it is to be on this journey. There has been this unsolvable argument and, again, as I mentioned before the break, I’m not really interested in argument, but there is unsolvable argument about we are hard-wired for connection and relationship, and another that says no, we’re worse than animals and we need separation and everyone’s out for themselves. That’s why we need laws and strict rules to keep us from devouring each other. Just like why that’s an unsolvable argument, well it’s like we blink how many times a day? So, is the world all light interrupted by moments of dark, or is the world all dark interrupted by moments of light? It’s kind of a useless question.
Yes, it has been discovered that if you take two living heart cells from two different people and you put them in a Petri dish, and you go and have lunch, and then you come back, and in a certain amount of time they will actually discover and start beating to a third, common beat. The Physicist, Irvin Lazlo, did similar experiments with people meditating. He would take two strangers and put them in a room and have them meditate while they were measuring their brainwaves. After a while, just like those cells in the Petri dish, their brainwaves would start to move in signature with a third, common wave. Then, even more, what he did, he removed one person and brought a stranger in who was just told to start meditating without any introduction and, in time, that strange third person started to be in the third, common beat that the other two had arrived at. Those are just some ways that we are hard-wired for connection.
Then, if we go more to our sense of what that means for us as human beings, there was a Chinese Philosopher, Mencius or Mengzi who lived about two hundred years after Confucius, and he was in the Confucian tradition. He had a beautiful metaphor for this. He said the way water allows its true nature will always flow downhill and join other water, human beings will be kind. Human beings allowed their true nature, will always flow to each other and join and he said that water can be manipulated to go sideways, even uphill behind dams and through pipes. Just like that, human beings can be manipulated, or manipulate themselves depending on their pain and wounds and upbringing to go against their true nature. Allowed our true nature, we will always flow to each other and be kind, and I think this leads to a small poem of mine about how we’re inextricably linked, and it goes like this:
“The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give, has exactly what we need to be hidden in their trouble.”
JUSTINE TOMS: Mark Nepo, that’s so beautifully written and so beautifully said. Poetry goes into the heart of the matter, I believe, and you are a beautiful poet. When you talk about how as human beings we are allowed to let our true nature shine forth, I’m reminded of something that happened to you. We’re going back to Spain again, to Barcelona, some years ago at the Parliament of World Religions, where you ended up in a place where you didn’t speak the language. That story really says a lot, I believe. Can you share it with us, please?
MARK NEPO: This was back in 2004-2005, and I was attending the Parliament of World Religions, a gathering of probably 8,000 people from all over the world. I was part of a group. There were many, many Dialogues and Conversations, and we were convening one. The two languages for the Parliament were settled on English and Spanish, and so we had about 50 people who were coming to our Dialogue, and we had a translator who was going to be there for us, and the translator got sick. So, there we were, four English-speaking people in a room full of people speaking Spanish, and we just sat there for a while. What was amazing is that without words getting in the way, we started to communicate. We started to understand each other’s gestures and expressions and, while we didn’t know what we were saying for a while, we could feel our connection. We could feel each other. We could tell if someone was expressing sadness, though we didn’t know the details or the way, and then we could feel compassion for that or when someone was surprised or wonder or laughter. That was an interesting lesson for me that yes, we need a common language to understand each other in depth, but it reminds me of Martin Buber, the great Jewish Philosopher. He said that the world is incomprehensible, but it is embraceable. Then, what happened is that a young man stood in, a University student who could see that we didn’t have a translator and he was exquisite in both languages and he began to serve for us in that regard.
This ties in with our larger conversation. One of the stories about whether we understand each other or not is the legendary story which I retell in this book of the Tower of Babel. It holds very important ongoing lessons for us today, as it does in every age. So, the Tower of Babel, if there was one, and there might have been, would have been in the land of Uric which is now where Iraq is. The original intent for the Tower, it was a time when there was only one human tribe before humanity had migrated across the globe. The elders of that tribe said let’s build a tower taller than anything we have so far so that when people lose their way they simply have to look to the sky and they can find their way home.
Now that sounds like a wonderful, noble thing to do, and so they began. It took so long to build this tower that it went beyond one generation. So, now you have sons and grandsons, and they were now buildings someone else’s dream. They were no longer connected to the dream, so as they started to work they were distanced from it, and they got more overwhelmed by the task because they had no love for the task. There’s a good chance we’re going to value the brick over the worker and, once we do that, we lose the ability to understand each other.
JUSTINE TOMS: Mark Nepo – is that when you’re talking about going out in the world, each of us is offered in any moment the opportunity to practice, even in the smallest gesture, caring kindness. Whether it’s standing in line at our grocery store, or whether we’re driving on the highway and allowing someone to move in ahead of us to change lanes, or whatever it is, we’re offered that opportunity every day in all sorts of moments.
MARK NEPO: This is why it matters so much to go back to the time we’re living in. I’m not sure we are entering a dark age because of what we talked about earlier, but if we are entering a difficult period in the swell and crest of humanity, let’s look at another difficult time. That was the Dark Ages in Europe. It’s interesting that we’re taught in school that the Dark Ages were the Middle Ages, and yet in the rest of the world it was an enlightened time. That’s when everything was happening in Cordoba, Spain, as well. In Europe, for those 200 plus years, there’s only 10% of the European population was literate. That means that 10% of the people kept literacy alive for over 200 years. So, if we are entering a dark time or a difficult period, it is incumbent on us to keep the literacy of the heart alive. That means we need to stay visible and wholehearted and why every conversation and every gesture matter. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and feel that this has been going on for centuries and it’s our turn, so what difference can I make?
Well, I offer that humanity is a global body and every soul is a cell in that body, and every conversation and gesture and kindness and compassion and listening that we do, might be the one healthy soul that keeps humanity healthy and not ill and we don’t know which gesture it’s going to be.
JUSTINE TOMS: When you talk about the thresholds to the relationship, and you use the metaphor like logs on a fire, I’m thinking “Oh, logs on a fire.” That means that in that life of questioning and that life of holding one another we must allow ourselves to be vulnerable, and allow ourselves to disappear into the questioning, into the relationship. Do you have any comments on that?
MARK NEPO: Well, yes. One of the age-old things and I think this affirms personally and in a community sense, one of the questions has always been what the best self-protection is? Hiding who you are, or being who you are? Again, there are people on both sides of that question. I believe in the lineage that says “No, being who you are is the best self-protection,” and that means by owning and feeling and admitting to our humanity, we are strengthening our humanity. Lao Tzu in the Tao said “Look, the things that don’t last in the world are the things that are hard and brittle. The things that are soft and flowing like a river, they absorb everything. Nothing breaks them”. So, being vulnerable, and the word vulnerable comes from the Latin of wholeness, which means carrying a wound gracefully. I think we know that any physical wound needs air and light to heal. If it stays closed, it will get infected; so, too, the heart. Carrying a wound with grace means carrying it openly. The secret to being vulnerable, the resource, is by being open and fully transparent with our humanity we let the grace and light of everything we’re not in that can heal us and not have us be infected with our own wound; which brings us back to we’re more together than alone, come to teach me.
Continue to page 3 of the Interview with Mark Nepo
