CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

We live in a turbulent time with storms everywhere, of every size and shape. And like every generation before us, we must learn the art of surviving them, so we can help each other endure. In his work, bestselling author and spiritual teacher Mark Nepo explores the art and practice of finding the strength to meet adversity by using the timeless teachings of the heart. 

In his life’s work as well as in his latest book, Surviving Storms, Mark articulates the heart’s process of renewal and connection with insight and accuracy.  

In this episode, Mark is joined by CIIS Professor and Program Chair for the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing Cindy Shearer for an empowering conversation on learning to overcome the storms of life. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on November 30th, 2022. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel.

To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Cindy Shearer: Good evening, Mark, it's so nice to see you tonight. It’s so great to have the chance.  

Mark Nepo: Oh, it's wonderful to see you, too. We should let folks know that we, many moons ago, were in graduate school together at the University of Albany, so I'm so thankful for you to host this.  

Cindy: Yeah, you know, I was just thinking about that. Actually, I was going to talk about that right in the beginning, because I think it was really a factor for me in reading the book, you know. I was thinking, as I was reading, especially because you use your cancer as a touchstone, I was thinking, well, I had a sense of this person a long time ago. First of all, it's amazing to think that anything happened 40 years ago, [Mark laughs] I mean really, aren't we both much younger than that? [Mark: I think so.] [Cindy laughs] I was thinking about my reading process, and how having a sense of you from another time, I could really imagine, you know, I was imagining you as you were using that example, and it made me think about that idea of imagination, and kind of, your hope for it when people are reading the book. In essence, as you invite us to do heart work as you so beautifully described, kind of what is the role of imagining for you? Do you feel like that's a useful tool to bring into the learning process? 

Mark: Yeah, I think so. First, I mean, I think it's interesting to note that the word imagine literally means to make real. While we think of imagination as making things up, it’s really, I think, how we engage our heart in such a way that we're a conduit between the inner world and the outer world. You know, my hope, and I'm a very heart centered, obviously, person and reader and seeker and writer. My hope with any of my books is to introduce the reader to their own gifts and their own wisdom. I have found through the years that, I'm sure this won’t surprise you, that the creative process is very much the introspective process, the only difference, I just happened to write it down.  

Cindy: I think that's such an important piece in our work in the MFA at CIIS. We really work from the perspective that writing, art making is an inquiry driven process as much as it's a production process. I really feel that a lot when I'm reading your work, is that opportunity to both become aware of something, but to also keep inquiring into it. Keep, you know, the opportunities that you offer in the book, often to like, keep learning on and on and on. 

Mark: Well, this is one of the things that I feel has been such a gift in my own inquiry, and it's the role of questions and true listening, you know, in the outer world of circumstance. Well, questions have answers, like what time were we going to meet today, and how are we going to turn all this technology on, but in the inner world of meaning, questions don't have answers. I think that we ask questions there the way that we would open a door, we'd like to walk through with someone, or we swing questions like lanterns between us to help see a little bit further in the dark.Questions, when it comes to the inner world of meaning, questions open relationships not answers. You know, a long time ago, if I'm talking to someone and they say to me, get to the point, I just stopped talking. 

Cindy: Yeah, I think that's well said. You know, when you're using the word question, it makes me think about questions are, you know, an outcome of curiosity, and I really felt that a lot when I was when I was reading your book in part I think maybe because I did have this little bit of sense of you but I think there's also the invitation in the work you know for the opportunity to be curious. For me, one of the things that kind of going back to the opening of the book again was I noticed that you use your cancer as a touchstone right away and it made me think a lot about, you know, kind of who you were at that time, and who you are now. My question was like why was that important for you, why was it important to draw from that past time as you're sort of looking, as you're standing in this present time and wanting to bring this work forward? 

Mark: Well, yeah and I think you know in the very beginning the first chapter is the old world is gone and that was the touchstone you know. I think that many people, not just myself but many people I found when the pandemic was going on. Unexpectedly I had these echoes come up from my journey, my cancer journey which was so many decades ago and this one as you know I mean the key thing was that when I was diagnosed in my early 30s. I went to a doctor one day, who told me I had cancer, and of course I was thrown upside down inside out and said you must have the wrong file, it must be someone else. But when I left that appointment, the door I had come through to keep that appointment was gone and in the old world there was no return to life before that moment. I think why that came up for me as a touchstone because I think that that's what the pandemic has done for humanity globally. The old, you know, as much as we'd like to return as much as we'd like to deny it or be angry about it or feel it's unjust. The old world is gone, and the only way forward is to love each other through listening and through the questions and the curiosity and the story so that in our turn it's our turn. The things that challenge us are different, but every generation has its turn of being here and will we choose love over fear? Will we choose curiosity over sameness? Will we retreat or lean into each other? 

Cindy: So I wonder if you had used that example in part, I mean obviously it was incredibly pivotal but also because it was something that so many could relate to, you know, it's the kind of thing that we all know is like, yeah, that really changes you and you do really in the book I think use that opening as a way to segue into much larger questions about kind of where we're at and I thought about that as well like cancer feels like a tangible storm. But the storms that we've been in for the last you know for the last three or four years, they aren't. I mean many of us are dealing with things we've never had to deal with before and so I thought it was interesting and a good approach to start with something where we could feel landed. 

Mark: Thank you and I want to say that you know so much of my writing process is discovery that you know I can't say to you that I consciously said oh let's choose something relatable that will invite the reader, you know, this is where I mean it's also not just a creative process but the introspective process is I follow a feeling, a question, a turmoil, a confusion, a wonder, a metaphor, you know anything that strings my heart, I follow. Then, if I'm authentic in that following, then I'm rewarded with an insight, or a pattern, or a larger parallel and I go oh. Oh, and then I follow and see where that goes. You know I don't plan like oh, let's do this and then it'll cause that, and it'll wind up there, I'm not that smart. But it's real, that's where we get into the heart work. That's where we get into the heart work and I remember being and this also a reference, in this cancer centered moment was in 2001 when the towers came down shortly after that, I was scheduled and I was leading a wellness retreat for cancer patients, survivors loved ones and professional healing professionals all an integrated group is in New Hampshire, and it was so fresh you know it was days after the towers went down and there was a brave amazing woman in a wheelchair who'd been through her third surgery and had a bandana around her head and she said quietly she said you know it's a terrible thing what just happened. But now we all belong to the same club and being a cancer survivor knew exactly what she meant. You know that the moments of crisis, the moments of illness, the difficult transition points only make acute. The archetypal decision points in everyone's lives. You know we like to think, Oh well, that's different, that's not me. I thank God I don't have to deal with that.  

But it's really the same journey that we're all on that's only made more acute by great love and great suffering. Everyone who suffers, and we all suffer. Everyone who suffers has a particular wisdom that the rest of us need and we take turns. You know one of my short, very short poems is a guy- and my poems as well as my books, if I'm authentic enough then what comes out becomes my teacher then I have to stay in relationship to it and so one of my small teachers is a small poem of mine that just goes like that you know that those who wake are the students, those who stay awake are the teachers. How we take turns. 

Cindy: Beautiful. I'd love to dive into that a little, maybe a little bit in relationship to some of what you say about grief, but also because I want to talk about the poetry some You know, one of the things that I was really touched by was the idea of the various ways that you invite us into an experience of both and at one point in the book you said you say, you know, the question often is the glass half empty or half full but actually it's both and I'm thinking in particular about the poem that I'm going to ask you to read called Adrift, which is about beauty and grief, can we hold them at the same time, and so maybe let's start there, maybe have you read that poem and then let's talk a little bit about it, and some of what arises from that. 

Mark: Sure, sure. So, this poem came about during a time of grief for me and my wife Susan. There was a period of about, oh, a year, 18 months where we lost, I lost both my parents and she lost her mom. I lost a mentor and dear friend, and we lost our dear little dog child Mira at the time. So, there was all this wave of grief, and it was a summer day, and I was sitting on our deck in the back of our home. Beautiful day and I just fell off the edge into all of it, you know my heart just opened up and boom and again following, I was too exhausted to choose between the beauty of the day. This well of grief I stepped into and so I just followed the truth of that mixed feeling, and this is the poem that came: Adrift. 

Everything is beautiful, and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory, forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch. As this ache makes me look for those I've lost in the next room in the next song in the laugh of the next stranger. In the center under it all. What we have that no one can take away, and all that we've lost to face each other. It is there that I'm adrift feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything. I am so sad, and everything is beautiful. 

Cindy: Thank you. I really love hearing you. I love hearing you read it and I love hearing the ways that you allow for tensions. I'm interested in what you say about writing is a discovery for you because I feel that in the book there are paragraphs where there's a statement and there's a statement that follows, and it's not an elaboration. It's an addition, or it's a way of moving on between the first statement and the second. So, I have that real sense in the writing of, that's your way of using statements as questions. It's a way of keeping us engaged in the same kind of inquiry that you're in as you're, you know, you've obviously thought about it and you're trying to name it for us but still at the same time, is the opportunity to engage it deeply for ourselves and to let it, in essence arise as questions at least that was my experience. 

Mark: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that and so let me share two things here about that you know one like with the poem. That poem is a good example you know, so we get the heart of that poem, the insight at the end that we have that no one can take away and all we've lost face each other and I'm adrift in this whole, this holiness that's punctured in and feeling it. I didn't know that when I started writing this poem that was the reward for following this. What am I doing here? It's everything sad and it's beautiful and how do I hold that? Well, you don't hold it. You let it in and then when I let it in what happens. The reward for staying with that feeling was glimpsing that insight and so that's the kind of things like with and for me the nonfiction books, you know, for me it's all poetry. You know, it's just these books are a larger canvas that's all and poetry for me is not words arranged in verse. It's the unexpected utterance of the soul. Wherever that appears and so you don't even have to write it down, I did again, I happen to write it down because that's what I do, that's how I learned and that's how it keeps growing. So, it is like you know very much when I feel something's true, and I feel like I want to explore it. It's like walking in a path in the woods and you're following the light. You're walking under a tree, and you go, oh my god, there's a clearing, which you couldn't see until you made the turn and oh, look oh I had no idea.  

So that is how I'm being and this is one of the hardest things to teach young writers and you know me too when we were in grad school together, because all of us when we begin to have any vision is oh my god like I finally can be true to it, I want to write this, I want to, you know, and then of course, we aim and we miss and we're so prematurely told that missing is failure. When it's just discovery. So, you know, the hardest thing it's like it to me. It's as if that unknown world of meaning is waiting to see if we're serious. Then when it sees we're serious enough it says okay, you have your plans you have your scheme your outline. Well now that I know you're serious. Now I'm going to show you what this is really about. That's the exciting launch that's not missing. That's because the plans are kindling for the fire of aliveness, that's waiting to take off if we're willing to be vulnerable and engage it and so that leads to what to one other thing about, you know, I mean I so respect all the genres and you know, it could be a master poet or master short story or a novelist so I respect devoting one's life to one genre.  

For me it's evolved differently. In following that pulse of what is true, I have over the years been asked to use the genres as tools in a toolbox and so my job in my books is to have them all serve hopefully one seamless narrative that’s seeking the truth. So, you know, that might mean at one point I need to be a scholar and unfold history. It might mean at one point I need to discover a myth or tell a story, or it might mean I need to suddenly move into poetry. So, I'm ready to turn at any point for whatever tool that moment of inquiry is requiring of me.  

Cindy: Yeah, I really feel that in the book, in the so many ways that you do things. I think the poetry particularly because stood out for me because of the idea of it almost felt kind of like an offering it's like okay I've told you all these things but here's a poem like I felt like you could put it in your pocket you know like okay, I said all this stuff pages but if you need something tangible just take the poem and stick it in your pocket and carry it with you! [both laugh]  

Mark: Well one of the models for that kind of writing goes back to Basho, the wonderful Japanese poet of 1600s, and Basho in addition to being, you know, really making haiku the form what it's known as. He also created a different form known as haibun, H-A-I-B-U-N, which was a travel dialogue or journal interspersed with moments of heightened perception or haiku.  

One of his you know his classic is Narrow Road to the Interior where in 1689 he asked an artist friend, hey let's walk around the perimeter of the island of Japan, which was not easy, nor was it safe. And they took a year and that is an amazing travel log of his journey, and it does it has this daily travel log and then it's punctuated at unexpected moments with a haiku here and there, you know, one of the beautiful stories from that that journey which I so love is that the, in the first month that they were on the road, they got to a place and they didn't know the way to the next town and there was a farmer, so they stopped and asked the farmer and he started to explain. Then he said you know what, just take my horse my horse knows the way. When you get to the town, hit them on the rump and he'll come home. So, they take the horse, he does lead them to the next town and just before Bosho sends him back, he ties a gift to the empty saddle and that, you know that's one of those things right centuries ago, this almost anonymous moment. They hold the seams of the universe that has always stayed with me. I think of my books as the empty gift I want to tie to the saddle and I think that you know, I invite everyone to think about what's the gift you can tie to the empty saddle before you send the horse back on its way. 

Cindy: I think that's so interesting. A few years ago, I curated an art exhibit called Art as Offering, and I was playing with the idea of art as gifts, but you someone gives you a gift for Christmas or your birthday, you kind of have to take it. [Mark laughs] But you know, art is an offering. It's just there. Right, you can take it or not and so, I'm so interested in this idea and I know from this book how interested you are in individual words, which is something I want to talk about before we, we get off this call but I think that's so interesting because the way you talk about gift there feels so like offering to me, it's you know like yeah you could pick up that gift If you want to or in a way that's what I meant about you could put it in your pocket, or you could also and this is kind of how I experienced the poetry was, you know, I was using the language of it was kind of a touchstone for me, but it's also a way to me of saying to whoever is reading. Oh, here's another way to be in this as well, like quite literally you can give it a new form. Look what I'm doing, you know, I am called to give this a new form, and that's really beautiful for me that you can be in the pros. Then you have, oh, here's another way to step into this and so again going back to the idea of imagining I wonder how it allows people to imagine, what could I do with this, what could I make of it myself. 

Mark: I think that it is involved and that's the real value to me of imagination and creativity is it reminds us that this moment has never happened, and we don't have to, while there are tons of patterns and expectations and unspoken, you know, influences everywhere. The fact is, this has never happened before and so there we can do it anyway, we're called and that's where that real root of that word imagine, to make real, we can make it real whatever we need to do to make it real. That's, you know, that's the poetry and I think one of the things I do also because I encourage people who are reading my books is to read it slowly and take your time. You know, read a chapter, live your life, read a chapter, live your life so that maybe there's a conversation between both worlds. Your life is the thread between those worlds. 

Cindy: I wanted to return to the idea of grief, a little bit because I thought you were, I thought you were speaking of something really important when you were sharing the example about 911 and I was thinking about the time gap between creating this book and when it gets published and what's happened in the world and in the pandemic and, you know, I remember quite clearly the day, a day I was out walking and listening to the news and the announcement came through that 3 million people had died in the pandemic, right, and just like trying to hold that number and so I think there was a way in which in the thick of it, you the day we had lock down here in San Francisco and always remember the Chronicle, the picture of the Chronicle of like no one on the streets like you could look into San Francisco there was literally just space in the in downtown and there's grief attached to all of that you know, fear obviously in so many ways of what was happening in that time but I think now that we're, you know, I was thinking about it today we're kind of sideways to the pandemic, it's still there, but we're not in lockdown. Not as many people are threatened every day with, you know, with such severe health issues or dying still very present. Many things have happened. January sixth has happened, significant gun violence and so I find myself thinking about, you know, your invitation to really explore the grief of our time and but I wonder for you how your sense of that is evolving kind of given, as we're stepping into this next era I'm not going to say post pandemic because it's still there I don't want to be a denier about that. 

Mark: Yeah, I do think that these larger patterns echo the individual journey, and this is the challenge from the beginning of time. Let me go back to, you know, I think, well, let me back up even more and more so that I think every person that ever lives will be given the chance to be dropped into the depth of life. Something that can be triggered by a difficult experience loss, you know grief being broken open. It also can be triggered by wonder and joy, being loved for the first time, beauty, you know, it doesn't have to be straight out suffering, but we will be given that opportunity and that's when the deeper spiritual journey begins, and I think the challenge is for all of us is once opened. It's incumbent on us to stay open, whether it's, you know, whether it's through love, or whatever it might be and this is the thing that, you know, so again to go now to go back to my cancer journey you know I was in my early 30s I hadn't been through very much anything really difficult and all of a sudden I'm thrown into this life threatening journey.  

So, you know life became very raw, very immediate. You know, there was no time for pretense, or things that I thought were requirements to live all fell away. So, on the other side of that of course, and this is archetypal, I remember this is like a bookend right so, and I especially want to share this because of our time at Albany I was, I had this twice around with the cancer and the second time around where I had a rib removed from my back, I was on my way to start a January semester. I was on my way to my first creative writing class where we were at SUNY Albany, and I had this appointment with a thoracic surgeon which I thought was going to be okay. What are we talking about here? Well, I never made it to that class. I thought I was going to leave, and we do something the next week, the next day and he said no I'm admitting you now. Well, I said what do you mean? I mean now and so I never got to meet those students. I was gone that entire semester. I didn't get back into the classroom until the following fall and, you know, just and then on the other side of all of that I mean the three years which was the heat of that journey. After I was blessed to still be here, everyone went back to work, and I'm in my living room in my bathrobe going, what happened? Who am I? And then there's the question, which relates exactly to your question.  

How do I keep the urgency of being alive and the preciousness of life there without the emergency. How do I keep things as tender and raw and truthful and vulnerable? When mere silence is at stake and this is where we are also you know yeah we're all, you know, we were all forced to stop and in fact the word Sabbath, in the Jewish tradition literally means that the one day, we do not turn one thing into another, and we were forced into a global Sabbath. We couldn't go from here to there, we couldn't scheme, we couldn't even dream. We were forced to accept the miracle of what is and so, and there's what all the traditions have always spoken about in their own ways, since the beginning of time and that's what was waiting on you know we're always challenged the things that stop us and then when we get ready to go again. Where are we going?  

One of the great paradoxes I'm blessed at this time of my life to literally go all over the world and when I get to wherever I'm going and I'm in those circles, my one job is to affirm for everyone that there's nowhere to go and it's a privilege. I'm happy to do it now of course we've all traveled on the surface world of circumstance many different, but once we ever get wherever we are, whether that's literally traveling or traveling through experience. We open the same eternal moment and how do we live there? 

Cindy: I'm really taken by your statement in the book that you know coming out of the cancer you realize there was no there, there. There was just, just here and if I can connect that to what I hear you saying is another thing that stood out for me was, you know, like, how do you come to know that at a given stage of your life separate from, you know, the, the various storms that you have to deal with but I was really touched when I was thinking about your book of that, you know, you were so young, I had things around that same age you know like my mother died when I was 30 and so I know that's a really pivotal time in life for very difficult things to happen for various reasons, you know, you're sort of an adult, but your life is still very much you know in development and so I thought a lot about that and I was thinking about that in relationship to like, maybe the bigger maybe unknown reasons why you use that time in your life and I thought a lot of people in various stages of life in various ages are going to read this book and there's all this wisdom there but you know it's like finding wisdom, it's a whole journey. It's an ongoing journey and so how do you step into the kinds of things that you're talking about? 

Mark: Well, I think, and this is one of the humbling things is that wisdom. Wisdom isn't a shortcut. It's just a resource. It doesn't matter how much you've read, what you've learned, where you studied, how many years, you know, you still wake up, trip and feel fear and face that you know, none of being human goes away. We just have more experience and more resources and so, this is a very interesting difference I think historically and in the pursuit of knowledge in the East and the West. In the West, it has often whether it's, you know, unspoken or not but often wisdom is the understanding of truth. In the East, in Indigenous traditions, wisdom is the experience of truth and so to go to this is, how do we live an embodied life?  

I believe deeply that it is through our humanity, our humanity, it is the truth. It is the tuning fork of the sacred and so it's through our humanity that we experience oneness, wholeness. What, how, what are part of what it is as a living part in a living whole and that's the conversation and so I think it starts with our being very you know Mother Teresa said courage is doing small things with love and this is where you know there is a chapter in the book about the purpose of goodness. Which brings that down to me so very quickly I think I can go there and share that a little bit, that this really triggered.  

During the pandemic, I was reading Neil deGrasse Tyson, a wonderful contemporary physicist. He had a book that came out called Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. It was a very wonderful title, it was not watered down at all, it's a very potent dense book and as I really kind of was wanting to move through that I was so struck because he shared very quickly shared his take that the tribe of physicists and their take on how the universe began, how it came down to such a tiny, tiny gesture that there was matter and antimatter was photons positive energy and hadrons were negative energy and when there was a billion and one photons, a billion hadrons just one more. The universe came into being and I kept thinking about how we are here by such a small gesture and then I was out doing errands and I think I was in line at the drugstore, but all of a sudden it hit me. This isn't the description of how the universe began. This is a description of the ongoing creation of life, and this is the purpose of goodness that to be the one gesture that outlasts all the others. So, we don't know, if you see someone fall in the parking lot of a supermarket and you go help put their groceries and help them to their car, and nobody else sees that you help that that could be the one photon that kept life going that day. We don't know whether what we do will be it or not. 

Cindy: I really liked the way in the work, that the idea of one, you talk about one kindness, one gesture in different places and it connects me to the idea because as a poet you really care about one word after another, you know things and I mean there's a lot of starting in one that that I think sort of arises in the book but you know I'm thinking about this idea of truth and being truthful and in relationship to goodness, I'm thinking about in the section where you say the phrase is something like so much depends on the courage to tell the truth and keep loving each other. Another reference to poetry, of course, because of, you know, when Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater and that idea that in one thing in one moment. You know, so much, so much depends. I mean he's giving us an image of a whole life that depends on, he's telling us, you know that a whole life depends on what's happening. 

Mark: Just like you know, biologically DNA, and all of life is encoded in DNA. Well spiritually, the entirety of life is encoded in a clear heart and when we're clear, we can see mirrored in one clear heart, the entirety of existence and possibility and those one little moments and we all we all see them, there all the time we think they appear, but they're there all the time when we slow down to the pace of what is real. Then everything glows and we're all stopped by this moment here and there in the city or in nature or by the sea and because those things are the seams of the universe, they hold all of life together.  

I just ran into one recently that I was exploring and beginning to write about and maybe you've heard of it, but it was something and I heard this, this talk and it led me to this thing it was about a moment in E.M. Forster's life. Now E.M. Forster, who was the British novelist who rode passage to India and many other things well he was a conscientious objector in World War One, wound up being sent to Egypt, because of that, where his job was to search for missing servicemen and while he was there because he was openly gay. He met a young man, a tram driver in Egypt who was the love of his life, and they didn't have very much time together and he had to go back to England and then they still corresponded, but then Muhammad Al Adele, I think his name was, he married, and then he died a few years later from tuberculosis and this is one of those seams in the universe. His widow, who knew of Muhammad, he enforced his love after he had died. She sent her wedding ring to E.M. Forster. Again, just like Basha tying the empty gift to the saddle, just like that one gesture of helping someone in the supermarket. This gesture and of course I couldn't find the name of the widow. Her gesture, I can almost hear the ring drop in the envelope before she sealed it and sent it to England. That over 100 years ago, was one of those gestures that holds all of life together. 

Cindy: Various places I want to go here and trying to figure out the best way. [Mark laughs] Because I'm thinking about this poem that you wrote called The Moment of Poetry.  

Mark: Yes. 

Cindy: Would you mind reading that?  

Mark: Oh, sure, sure. I think I know that one by heart too. Yeah, and I call it The Moment of Poetry specifically because it's not about what we think of as poetry but about those moments. The moment of poetry. When the sweet ache of being alive. Lodged between who you are and who you will be is awakened. Befriend this moment. Its sweetness is what holds you. Its ache is what moves you on.  

Cindy: It's a great response to what so much depends on. 

Mark: Well, I mean let me bring that back to the age we're living in what we're talking about because one of the things when we talk, you mentioned the insurrection and you know the times that we're in. And I think I spent a lot of time in the beginning of the book as you know, trying to look at my guess at how did we over the last couple hundred years arrive where we are in this perfect storm of isolation and fear and polarization. One of the things, you know, obviously, us being in such a bubble from reality that I think so many people through the pandemic, through social media, through the insulation of their own convictions. As Jon Kabat-Zinn wonderfully said at one point if you are too ensconced in your own beliefs, you will be a convict of your own beliefs of your own convictions and so but anyway, I think that a great many people in our time have lost their direct connection to life and that really hit me, because you know if you lose your direct connection to life, you lose your reverence for life. If you have that connection, and you have a reverence for life, it's almost impossible to do harm. And now look at the insurrection and forget the politics, I mean like many of us I saw that live on TV, and I was stunned and shocked to see this to see barbaric violence, while being so detached. At the same time people were taking pictures of themselves. As if they didn't know whether this was a video game or if this was real and it really started me thinking about, you know, this direct restoring this direct connection of life and empowering people. So, like if I put my hand in water, I don't need you to tell me if it's wet and likewise, we know what love is, we know what pain is, we know what fear is. We know what cruelty is.  

So, we can discuss and have many views of what those things mean. But we don't need anyone to tell us what it means to be alive, if we're vulnerable and honest and the reward for that is restoring that direct connection of life and so I feel it's so important especially with young people, I mean so many of these, especially in the last year or so these horrible mass shootings, these shooters are these drifting on hinged young people often white males, who, you know, I think violence at some point is a last desperate attempt to feel. I think I've come to think this is a metaphor I've come to think of, you know, these insane mass shooters as social aneurysms. We know in an aneurysm we know it biologically is when a weak cell in a body, when the body is under tremendous pressure that cell explodes, often leading to a stroke. Well, you know, we can look at these people and say they're responsible for their actions, they're crazy. But we can’t say it has nothing to do with us because why does America have so many weak cells exploding more than anywhere else? Because we have created a pressurized system. So, what we are responsible for is creating the pressurized system that's creating an epidemic of social aneurysms.  

Cindy: I think about the three archetypal questions that you pose, what can be repaired? What can be reimagined? What should be left dismantled? If I can tie that to something that comes later in the book. [Mark: Yeah, sure.] There are two things that stand out for me and I'm curious, because when I read I think about not only each chapter and what it offers and the kind of inquiry that it raises but I find myself thinking about the relationship between the chapters and so I was sitting today with the chapter “Here Abide”, the one about admiration which is about looking at the world with wonder.  

So, you know, in relationship to the example that you've just given there are a lot of questions that really are kind of fundamental for us, what do we dismantle and how do we dismantle it and what do we reimagine but how do we both abide, which is another thing. I love where you actually take us through the meanings of that word, and I love that you know how it arises from Poland. So, to be able to, you know, move on and move forward with something, while also gazing with wonder, to me it's such, it’s…yeah, that's my question, how do we do those things? We do them, we can do them separately but really it seems like the opportunities to do them relationally. 

Mark: I'm glad you brought that up. We'll talk about admiration as a practice in a minute. But this goes back to the glass being both half full and half empty. You know the wheel of life never stops turning. But we have all kinds of philosophies that come from when we stop the wheel. If we stop the wheel of life at the top. Oh, let's transcend out of here, everything's wonderful don't worry about all the bad stuff it's everything's beautiful. But if we stopped the wheel of life on the bottom turn. Then we have nihilists, then we have pragmatists who fear everything we say don't you see how life sucks. This is terrible. Why, what are you talking about? That things are wonderful, and you can admire anything. Yes, yes and yes, it's the wheel of life never stopped, it's all of those things and I think that, while the mind is a great tool and its chief gifts are to sort, prioritize, and choose. The only things that matter I can say in my life have been what I've learned from my heart, being forced or challenged to absorb and integrate. And that means letting all things in I mean if there's any teacher that's happened to me in the last 10-15 years it's the fact, or the teaching that all things are true. All things aren't fair, but all things are true, and it is by keeping my heart open that I start to understand how.  

So, a great example of this for me was the great poet Czesław Miłosz, who taught so many was born in Poland, was a teenager during the Holocaust and then came to this country and spent most of his life teaching at Berkeley as you know, won the Nobel Prize in 1980, but I consider him what I always call him is a mature romantic and why because he grew up in the midst of such horror and cruelty. So, he always, he never flinched from seeing things as they are and yet like one of those miners and coal mines in South America who have the light fixed on their forehead. You know, he just, no matter what he looked at even if he was looking at something horrible. He would shine a light on it, and he would always see both, we do that by telling the truth and the practice of admiration is seeing the miracle that waits and everything before us. When we do that, we also reflect a light shines on where those qualities that we admire are dormant in us. So, if I admire something about you, it gives me a way to see where that is waiting to come true in me. 

Cindy: Well in the willingness to do that right? I mean, there is the sort of what we're talking about culturally as where is the willingness to do what's happened to the willingness to see in the others, you know, what's happened to our own beliefs and what we're afraid of or what we're concerned about. One of the things I noticed a lot in the writing and in a lot of the examples that you give it seems like two things are really important. One is noticing, like I think in the adrift poem, it's the noticing that leads you to an insight and then there's that willingness to like notice, then allow it to become something whether that's reflection or something else. Am I on track in any way? 

Mark: Yes. Yes, absolutely and so I think that this actually comes from a different book of mine, More Together than Alone, which was an explorer exploration of moments when we've worked well together throughout history and across time and one of the things that led me to imagine was imagining all the way back to the beginning. Cave times and imagine the first when the first two people realize they weren't alone. Imagine one person coming to the mouth of a cave and there's another person they see in there they see each other go up and the person in the cave says, you're different go away. I imagine because we were talking about imagining that that was the beginning of the go away tribe and throughout history, when that fear metastasizes. 

So then, okay, I can't trust that you're going to go away. So, I need to put you where I can watch you. Then we have ghettos and reservations and detention centers and then if the fear metastasizes enough, we have these horrible periods of genocide where I can't trust that you'll stay where I put you. I'm going to make you go away and so I went back to the mouth of that cave and the other person who saw them first. I imagine that that person said, you're different. Oh, thank God come teach me and I think that was the beginning of the come teach me tribe and that when that has grown. When we realize we're more together than alone. We have these periods of enlightenment through all throughout time and of course, the catch is, we always belong to both tribes. 

Cindy: The theme you keep bringing up things are really both and there's so much of just keep returning to that. 

Mark: I can tell you that I believe deeply I am of the come teach me tribe, but we could get off this conversation and I could get scared for some reason and switch tribes and that's when we need each other to say, there's the admiration to mirror and say wait a minute, wait a minute. I think one of the words that I do love. I love the roots of words, not because I'm a word geek but because words like nature erode over time and so often, I find myself when I go back as I can to an earlier, more whole definition. There's more there that's useful, that's helpful and so one of the great words that has a great original meaning is the word honor.  

Cindy: Right. 

Mark: It means to keep what is true in view. 

Cindy: Beautiful, great word. Really.  

Mark: I think we need that more than ever, this is something we've been talking about. 

How do we keep what is true in view? How do we honor life itself by listening by noticing by questioning by loving each other through admiration, through artwork? 

Cindy: I think that for words does two things I mean, I think one of the things that's really interesting in this book and we haven't talked about it too much but the way you do connect to the other arts philosophy but particularly to history, as a way of, you know, providing context for what you're saying and it's the same with the words it's like, you know, I don't know you might be a little bit of a word geek. [both laugh] But, you know, I really feel that to that, what you're doing is honoring the word, you know, by allowing us to see it in its fullness because we carry so much assumption about what words mean and it's a way of asking us to step back. If we really hold the root. I mean that idea of radical, you know, of taking her back to the root. It's a way of being radical with language to help us to, you know, to really think about how to hold it in its fullness like you're asking us to hold the fullness of possibility and experience. 

Mark: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, one of the things that I'm, as I've gone through all of my life's work. I'm intrigued that I'm starting to look at doing a book, specifically on the origin of words.  

Cindy: Nice. That would be great. No, no word geek intended. [both laugh] We're just about on our time, but I did want to wrap up with one thing, if it's okay. [Mark: Sure.] I'm really interested in the way you talk about, first of all, I don't think we talked enough about the nature of storms we came at storms in a lot of ways so I really encourage everyone to tap into that. And very interesting the way that you talk about storms as those things that we encounter, or have to engage and things that we create, but I'm not going to go down that road because of time but I just want to note it.  

The thing that I wanted to step into for a second is right at the very end, where you talk about you, you say, I can say that if there's an undertaking at the center of this book, it is to devote yourself to the gathering of the self of self-knowledge of how your heart works. So I've been trying to nudge you like how do you do this, how do you do this and you kind of just say it there and then you also talk about writing as this process of, you know, digging the dirt from the hole, but it's really the hole, that is ultimately, you know, the thing that matters and so I just wondered if there's anything else that you wanted to say about that. Then I just wanted you to end by reading the poem Inside Everything. 

Mark: Sure. Well, I think again you know that I, I've discovered that this journey of introspection is not just the quest for self-knowledge. It's through authentic inner work. We discover the network of life force that holds the universe together, of which we're a part. You know, we can be self-centered, but that's different from when we do authentic inner work. And that’s where, you know, one drop of water contains the entire ocean and one drop of pain if met with compassion will teach us about the history of pain. One drop of love has all the love that has ever has ever been exchanged and the only way to do that is to open our heart and look inside. The only way to do that. 

So yeah, let me share this poem which has been a great teacher. Let me find where I have it here. Oh, here it is. Yeah. Yeah, inside, everything. Keep trying to hide and in time, you become a wall. Keep trying to love and in time you become love. Our journey on Earth is to stop hiding so we can become love. Everything else is a seduction and a distraction. Courage is staying true. 

Cindy: Thank you, Mark. I think we should just let that live. It's so nice to have this chance to talk with you. It's very sweet. I really appreciate it.  

Mark: Oh, me too, Cindy. Thank you so much. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
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