Mark Nepo | Dare Boldly

I sit in the still darkness of early morning. The silence holds me tenderly in its velvety weightlessness.

Hold onto nothing, it seems to whisper. Allow everything in.

I breathe out and let everything go. Everything rushes in.

I breathe in and hold onto nothing. Everything rushes out.

You are the ocean, the velvety silence whispers. You are the sky. The moon and stardust. You are the everything of nothing but Love. There is no need to run or hide or jump up and down for attention. There is no need to yearn or hammer your fists against the universe and sink down into a puddle of weeping sorrow. No need to search for answers or meaning. There is only this nothingness of everything you are when you hold onto nothing and let everything in.

I breathe. In. Again.

Deep. Deep into my belly.

I feel. Deep. Deep in my belly the everything of nothing I hold onto.

I breathe. Out. Again.

Deep. Deep from my belly.

I feel. Deep into the space around me, deep into the darkness of this still silent morning the nothingness of everything I let go of.

And I know without knowing. I feel without feeling. Deep. Deep within my being. Deep in the presence of this moment, that this is the nothing and the everything of all I am. All I can be. All I need. All I want and desire. All of everything I let go of. All of everything I let in.

This is the everything of nothing but what remains when I hold onto nothing.

Breathing deep, I sat in the still darkness of morning.

And that’s where Love found me.

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“My Morning Read”

This morning, as part of my commitment to read a poem every morning, I read Mark Nepo’s, Where is God

And this is what appeared.

I am sitting on the ‘floor chair’, my back cushioned by pillows, my knees tucked up towards my chest. I am sitting and listening and feeling my way into stillness.

Oh, not the ‘if I stay absolutely still no one will notice me and I won’t feel afraid of being seen’ kind of stillness that captures me sometimes like a deer standing in the woods every sense hyper-alert just before the moment of fleeing.

No, this is the stillness of deep listening. This is the stillness of being awake and dreaming, awake and aware. Awake and present. This is the stillness of life deeply stirring my soul.

Mark Nepo, whose course The Book of Awakening I am attending, has just shared a poem about sweeping the leaves away to reveal the path.

It is what we do, continually in life, he shares. The path becomes covered with leaves and we must sweep it clear to see where we are going.

“The path is the way and the way is Love,” the voice inside my heart whispers.

I have known this path. I have felt it. Breathed into it. Lived it.

And I have forgotten. Forgotten it is there. Forgotten the way. Forgotten Love.

To believe I will never forget again is to forget I am human.

It is the way. We humans are capricious, forgetful beings.

We know Love is the answer and still we hate.

We know the path to truth encompasses all, and still we push away the inconvenient truths that would block our path to finding the one truth we can live with.

We know there is no one answer to every question and still we search for the one answer that will make sense of the questions we keep asking.

We know. And still we do what we know will not do.

We know. And still we forget that all that we know is nothing compared to the mysteries waiting to unfold when we step on the path beyond our knowing.

We know so much and in that truth is the paradox of our lives. We know so little.

Perhaps though, in all our knowing and unknowing there is one truth we do not know is true because in its knowing, we will have to give up our fear of who we are.

We are all magnificent.

We are born magnificent. Created in and of and around and under and because of our magnificence. We are born this way and then, we forget.

We forget our magnificence and spend our lives trying to remember, or not.

It is our way and the path is our way to remember. And when we take every step in Love, our magnificence shimmers in the light of our awakening to the truth.

I sat on the floor and soaked in the words, the feelings, the emotions, the senses of all who sat in the circle with me and felt my soul stirring to the deep truth my heart was hearing.

There is no escaping our human journey and in that journey, there is no escaping the truth — we are all magnificent.

Namaste.

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Everyday A Poem is posted: Today’s poem is — Dreaming Myself Awake