Reading Archives (Author)
The Practice Before The Practice
Mark Nepo
From the moment we open our eyes, we are meaning-seeking creatures, looking for what matters though we carry what matters deep within us. And more than the hard-earned understandings we arrive at, mor...
The Exquisite Risk
Mark Nepo
At any moment, if quiet enough and open enough, we can drop into the fabric of existence in which everything, even pain, has its vivid signature of energy that we call, at different times, truth or be...
The Work Of Love Is To Love
Mark Nepo
My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or bee...
Living In The Freshest Chamber Of The Heart
Mark Nepo
Our ability to find something to love, and to love again for the first time depends greatly on how we resolve and integrate where we've been before. A great model for us exists in the chambered na...
Be Alight with Who We Are
Mark Nepo
There is always purpose in being, but not always being in purpose. How easily we get caught up in defining who we are in relation to those around us. I remember walking home from school in fourth g...
Love Like Water
Mark Nepo
Water in its clear softness fills whatever hole it finds. It is not skeptical or distrusting. It does not say this gully is too deep or that field is too open. Like water, the miracle of love is that ...
Honoring the Gill Inside You
Mark Nepo
A simple fish nosing its way along the bottom is in itself a profound teacher, and like the deepest teachers, it doesn't even know it is teaching. Yet in its tiny, efficient gill lives the mystery...
To Separate and Unify
Mark Nepo
The destruction or healing of the world hinges on which way this thought unfolds. Whether we pull things apart or put things together makes all the difference. Indeed, human history has unfolded with ...
The Energy of Being Real
Mark Nepo
"Mana" is a term originally used in a Polynesian and Melanesian cultures to describe an extraordinary power or force residing in a person or an object, a sort of spiritual electricity that charges any...
Outlasting the Fog
Mark Nepo
We all have these moments when the rose loses it color for some reason, or the music no longer stirs us, or the sweet, gentle soul across from us no longer seems to soften our heart. To move in and...
Waterfall of Words
Mark Nepo
There was a time in my life during my years in college when I was so talkative that the waterfall of words kept others at a safe distance. Of course, in time, this cascade pushed others away. But wha...
Wisdom in Blinking
Mark Nepo
We blink a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day the world goes dark. A thousand times a day we wake. We can't escape this opening and closing. It's a reflex we can't control. Even as you read...
The Unwatched Space
Mark Nepo
I tried so hard to please that I never realized no one is watching. I imagined, like everyone else at school, that my parents were sitting just out of view like those quiet doctors behind clean mi...
To Witness and To Hold
Mark Nepo
We have been battered by modern times into obsessive problem solvers, but as life pares us down into only what is essential, it becomes clear that the deepest sufferings of heart and spirit cannot...
The Rabbit And The Garden
Mark Nepo
In the movie Phenomenon, John Travolta's character has done everything he can think of to keep this pesky rabbit out of his garden. He's even put in fencing that goes three feet underground, and sti...