More Together Than Alone: A Conversation With Mark Nepo
Head and heart are often in a tug of war inside of me. Especially right now. You too? So is fear and love. So is knowledge and wisdom. And so is aloneness and togetherness.
My heart, when I am living from it fully, is filled with birdsong, spring flowers, love, deep sorrow, righteous outrage, and unrequited longing. Inside heart-space is a nondual richness of all things that anchor me to meaning and community and from which my wisest decisions are made. And, truth be told, I inhabit this heart space twenty percent of my day. Still a victory from just a few years ago.
Today, as the world has slowed to a halt and everyone is advised to remain in their homes, the radical shift in what I see out there on city streets has spread me inside in many directions. I am cast about by my nerves, my hopes, my fears, and my faith. More than anything, I can observe, more concretely the faulty lense I knew was there but is now so visible it is like the dust on the bookshelves I cannot unsee once the full light hits them. This new awareness teaches me to quiet my chattering mind and return to my heart over and over again.
My heart is beaming with possibility for massive spiritual and communal awakening and it asks my ego to sit this one out, and go deeper.
Remaining full-hearted takes great care, I have learned. In fact, great GREAT care. To not get swayed by my own neuroses or the world’s neuroses require me to pace myself and ask with heart ‘what is my deepest intention right now?’ For that question always leads me back to the resilience of love rather than hatred and fear.
What I have learned most is self-care is not for soothing, comfort, and avoiding. Self-care is for remaining in my heart and facing.
Last week, I had a 40-minute conversation with Mark Nepo. Mark, for me, lives longer in these spaces of full-heartedness - where wisdom, knowledge, poetry, and longing collide. He is a prolific writer and people with large platforms like Oprah Winfrey (wisely I might ad) have invited him to share his heart with the world. My favorite thing about Mark is his poetry, humility, and equality in how he writes. He invites in the wisdom of indigenous cultures white colonizing history has devalued. He roots spiritual teachings in history so we have a context that prevents feel-good spiritual bypassing.
The conversation Mark and I had for the Sidewalk Talk Podcast did not record. I was sad, at first, but then oddly grateful. There were a couple sweet moments of our dialogue where “audience” dropped away and our conversation was private. Mark advised me about my first book and how to write it. He talked to me about pacing myself and living my pace, not the world’s pace.
My hope is we get another chance to come together but for now, what I want to invite us all to do over this time of “staying inside” is to go buy and read Mark’s book, More Together Than Alone. For every single listener at Sidewalk Talk and any other connection project, take this time to immerse yourself in what it means to be in community, for real. Even if you can’t get out of doors, you can get the book digitally. This book is a life work and took Mark longer to write than any of his other books. He covers history, politics, gun violence, love, hope and most of all, community. But more than anything it offers us something for this moment in time.
As we are immersed in avoiding a spreading contagion, called Covid19, what contagion we really need to heal from is how we, as Mark says, make anyone different an enemy.
How a lack of empathy and hearing one another’s lived stories leads us to consume each other, like shoes to wear and throw away when we are done with them. It is not time for one power to demand we follow a specific set of rules for how to be a person so we might live together. It is time for us to listen so deeply to our differences that we create a way to live together that honors who we all are. Bottom-up, rather than top-down community.
And it is happening. As I see Italian neighborhoods singing on their balconies, doctors and nurses working overtime, musicians offering free concerts, workplaces honoring workers in new ways, and even how we organize here at Sidewalk Talk, perhaps some of this will stick.
Perhaps our contagion of othering and usury will be replaced by heart, empathy, community, and inclusion.
That is my hope anyway. For now, I will start with me and cultivating this awareness here, with me first.
I would love to hear your favorite quotes from More Together Than Alone in the comments or what you hope will be a lasting positive impact from this time of global inwardness.
May we have health.
May we know our hearts.
May we know others’ hearts.
May we create a society that honors all hearts living together.
