Mark Nepo: The Power and the Spirit of Community
Mark Nepo is a poet and spiritual adviser who has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over 30 years. The bestselling author of The Book of Awakening, he has published twenty books and recorded fourteen audio projects. In 2015, he was given a Life-Achievement Award by AgeNation. In 2016, he was named by Watkins: Mind Body Spirit as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People, and was also chosen as one of OWN’s SuperSoul 100. His latest book is More Together Than Alone.
An Interview with Mark Nepo – The Power and the Spirit of Community
Interview by Justine Toms
JUSTINE TOMS: I’m Justine Toms. I am standing in for Sandie Sedgbeer, and I’m so delighted to be with you all today, and to take over for her this brief time and to have as a guest today, Mark Nepo, who is a Poet and Philosopher and who, for over decades, has been teaching in the fields of poetry and spirituality. As a cancer survivor, Mark Nepo also remains committed to the usefulness of daily inner life, and I know that we are all interested in that. He devotes his writing and teaching to this relationship that we have with ourselves and with one another. His most recent book is called “More Together than Alone – Discovering the Power and the Spirit of Community in our Lives and in the World.” Mark Nepo, welcome to What is Going OM.
You just remind me of so many wonderful moments that we can have in our lives to contribute to the betterment of ourselves and our community, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today because in these times it seems as if we have stopped listening to others. The fear is really creeping in. It seems as if there’s an escalation of violence, so I’d love for you to talk about that; what is dominating our culture now and what are the antidotes to that. First, how do you see where we are right now, Mark?
MARK NEPO: Thank you, I feel it too, and so let me begin to explore that. Of course, I don’t have answers, but let me speak to it in the context of all this research I’ve done. I’ve worked on this book –for over 13 years and I was really drawn to and compelled just to gather stories of moments when we’ve worked well together and the lessons from that, and to affirm that lineage of care and inter-dependence and kindness which is quieter but just as strong as the fearful, discordant, separate kind of lineage. So all of that is to say, as I’ve looked at where we are today and feel where we are today. I am not just talking here in America, but globally in pockets all over the world. I started because of all this research to see that just as there are waves in the sea that swell and crash, there have been waves throughout the history of humanity; long periods when we’ve come together and long periods when we’ve pushed each other away. So, in that context, it seems –that we are on the verge or in the midst of one of these times when we push each other away. So, as we talk about that a little bit, one of the reasons I say I’m not sure yet is because in our modern world with so much instant access to everything, which is wonderful, but I think it’s how we take it in, that we don’t know how to take it in. Things are always falling apart and coming together at the same time. It’s kind of like spiritual physics, but when things fall apart, they make a lot of noise. When things come together they’re quieter, and because of all the technology, because we don’t know how to internalize and listen to each other, I think we are addicted to the noise of things falling apart, so we don’t hear.
A lot of times you’ll hear people say we need a Good News Station. Well, I think we need a Whole News Station because we don’t hear the things that are coming together. Things are falling apart, but we don’t hear or listen to the things that are coming together which are the antidotes, historically, because we’re addicted to the noise of things falling apart.
When you and I were growing up, and we turned on the TV, it would be the weather report. Now it’s storm watch, and the last I knew a storm is only one form of weather, so we are being honed for the catastrophic and for the danger and the thrill. So, given all that, let’s look a little further and, again, I don’t have the answers, but let’s try and look at what’s happening today. I think it goes back to every generation, every life, every incarnation has to go through the same journey. We go through it in detail differently, so every day and every period of our lives we’re asked to make this choice, perennial choice, between fear and love, between pushing each other away.
JUSTINE TOMS: You know that reminds me of a story you tell, Mark, that really illustrates this, and you talk about going back to caveman times. You talk about two tribes – the one tribe is the “go away” tribe, and the other tribe is the “come to teach me” tribe. Maybe that would help to illustrate the choice-point we have in our lives.
MARK NEPO: Thank you for pointing to that. As I experience the discord today, I try to think back to these rhythms and patterns. So, what was this like all those years ago, and what I imagine or reflect upon is just what you’re pointing to. Imagine the first two human beings to realize they weren’t alone, to come upon each other. So, one person in prehistoric times comes to the mouth of a cave, and they see someone in the mouth of the cave. They go “Huh, who are you?” The one in the cave points to the other and says, “You’re different, go away,” and I think that was the beginning of the “go away” tribe. Depending on the level of fear that governs us, so if fear is strong and dominant enough, then we say “Well, I can’t trust you’ll go away. So I’m going to have to put you where I can watch you, so I’ll put you in a camp, or a refugee center, or a ghetto, or a reservation”.Then when fear gets malignant and is so widespread that we can’t even trust our shadow, then we have these horrific periods of genocide where the rabid members of the “go away” tribe say, “Well, I can’t even trust you to be where I put you. I’ll have to make you go away”. However, on the other side, if we go back to that person looking in the cave who says “Oh, you’re different. Come to teach me. Thank God you’re not me. We are more together than alone. Teach me what I don’t know, and together we’ll be more than we can be separate”. Throughout history, when that has been dominant when wonder and curiosity and the leaning into what we don’t know has been dominant, then we’ve had what I’ve tried to chronicle in this book. Throughout history and across culture, moments when we’ve worked well together, in high moments of civilization. Deep moments and long moments, if you will, like the Iberian Peninsula for 700 years in Spain, centralized in Cordoba, the Capital, where Muslims and Christians and Jews didn’t just tolerate each other, they thrived together, and it resulted in common inter-marriage and trading and culturally appropriating and integrating gifts from each culture.
The catch, though, Justine, is I think we belonged to both tribes and given what I was talking about depending on the level of fear that I wake up with tomorrow, I could switch tribes, and then I need you to remind me. No, no, no – we’re part of the “come to teach me” tribe.
JUSTINE TOMS: I’m thinking that when you talk about those 700 years in Spain when these cultures came together, they were hugely creative. I mean, language and mathematics and art. It was a time of great, great flourishing and creativity.
MARK NEPO: There was a wonderful inter-relational scholar named María Rosa Menocal who wrote an amazing book about that period called “Ornament of the World.” On that book, she talks about and what I quote in my book, is that one of the things that became an ethic of those 700 years was the ability to welcome and tolerate different points of view. To seek out contradiction because people were taught to look for the third integrated view. Obviously, today, we’ve stopped listening to each other.
Somebody else I quote in the book which is contemporary, who is very helpful about this, is Robert Keegan, a Development Psychologist at Harvard. What I quote from him is that he defines Centrism, which is self-centredness, or egocentrism, or ethnocentrism, any kind of centered way of thinking. He says that’s when we mistake what is familiar as true, we stop looking for the truth because it’s near us and it’s familiar. We say that’s true, and now we look for only things that confirm what we already know, and the real danger or insidious part of this way of being, or thinking, is that anything new we then see it as false, so we come back to the “go away, you’re different”. The thing I want to point up here, too, is we might say I don’t want to do that. Well, we will, because we’re human, so the question is how we recognize it and help each other and, in self-awareness and relational awareness, so that we can course correct when we find ourselves doing that and not just reaffirming our fears and what we already know. I also think that in our more strident pockets today around the world we are stuck in this out-of-balance fear that then we try to protect ourselves by reaffirming what we already know and seeing everything different as false.
Continue to page 2 of the Interview with Mark Nepo
