Mark Nepo

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, discuss a time when you felt sadness and beauty at the same time.

  The cloud shelf drifts toward what still seems possible and the trees throw up their arms wanting to follow and the Brazilian singer in the iPod is pleading with…

In conversation with a friend or a loved one, describe a time that your map was torn from you and how you made your way.

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe someone who has been a second self for you.

One of the great transforming passages in my life was having cancer in my mid-thirties. This experience unraveled the way I see the world and made me a student of all spiritual paths. With a steadfast belief in our aliveness, I hope what’s in this book will help you meet the transformation that waits in however you’re being forged. Knowing God is an excerpt from the book.

In silence or in crisis, we can put down the gun, bandage the wound, carry the water and share our bread. But under all that, all we can do is…

Last month, Sounds True published a new, expanded edition of Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness, which gathers twenty-eight years of my writing and teaching about suffering, healing, and wholeness, including thirty-nine new poems and prose pieces not yet published.

One of the great transforming passages in my life was having cancer in my mid-thirties. This experience unraveled the way I see the world and made me a student of all spiritual paths. With a steadfast belief in our aliveness, I hope what’s in this book will help you meet the transformation that waits in however you’re being forged. The following piece is an excerpt from the book.

One of the great transforming passages in my life was having cancer in my mid-thirties. This experience unraveled the way I see the world and made me a student of all spiritual paths. With a steadfast belief in our aliveness, I hope what’s in this book will help you meet the transformation that waits in however you’re being forged.

The challenge of poetry is that the only things worth saying are those things that are unsayable. The joy of such work is that whatever we come up with is more than enough.

During my cancer journey, I was able to see my heart on a screen during a test in which I was injected with radioactive dye, so they could trace the first pass of blood through the first chamber of my heart. It was an experience that changed my understanding of heart.

I was ready to fly home after teaching in Albuquerque, when the sudden light on the underside of a palm trip took me to another time.

We live in a global culture addicted to the noise of how things fall apart. Yet all the while, things are quietly coming together as well. It’s not about good news or bad news, but having access to whole news. This poem explores what’s below the noise.

Our ecological problems are evidence of a deeper, spiritual problem whereby we, feeling incomplete, feed off the Whole; whereby we, feeling empty, use everything up in an attempt to fill ourselves; whereby we, feeling insignificant, scar the earth in order to feel significant.

We fight it constantly, but the meaning of life waits beyond all our plans and under all our desires; waiting for us to lose our maps and crack our hard shells open so that the light within can join with the light without.

What if we are being painted by the artist of time?

The deeper the cut, the redder the blood. The deeper the experience, the richer the wisdom. It has always taken more time to reach the deep than the surface. And…

Months after my father died, I found myself in New York City, wandering through the Musuem of Modern Art, a place I love. On the third floor, in an exhibit featuring the work of Gauguin, I felt his presence strongly.

It’s been a year since we lost our beloved dog-child Mira. During this time, we have learned even more about the nature of grief and loss, and how no one is exempt from these tender journeys. This poem speaks to what I’ve learned.

The great philosopher Abraham Heschel speaks of his fear that we will lose our sense of the Whole. I think this is inevitable, though just as inevitable that will find…

So much of our aliveness depends on how open we can remain. This piece looks at how we can let in what matters.