Redefined is hosted by me, Zainab Salbi, and brought to you by FindCenter, a search engine for your soul. Part library, part temple, FindCenter presents a world of wisdom, organized. Check it out today at www.findcenter.com and please subscribe to redefined for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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What’s most important about life? What is the essence of life? Is it what we do, how much we earn, how many social media followers we have? Or is it, do we live our lives in kindness to ourselves and to others? Do we live our lives in love to ourselves and to others? In nearly losing my life, I was confronted with these questions and it led me to the conversations that make up Redefined, about how we draw our inner maps and the pursuit of meaningful personal change.

My guest this time is poet, bestselling author, and spiritual teacher, Mark Nepo. Mark is known for his New York Times bestseller, The Book of Awakening. But beyond that, many of his twenty-two books—including some of my favorites, The Book of the Soul and Seven Thousand Ways to Listen—have received many awards and praises from Oprah Winfrey and others. As a matter of fact, Mark is part of their Super Soul 100, a group whom Oprah says is using their gifts and voices to help elevate humanity. On this episode, Mark shares his reflections on some of his most transformative moments that have impacted his writings, creativity, and ability to access his heart’s wisdom. He says it is the unexpected utterance of the soul that helps us be who we are. In this soulful conversation, we explore the impact of our childhood on our decisions in love and marriage, what it means to follow our calling, how we may view success in different ways, and how to heal ourselves from past pain. Join me in this inspiring and reflective conversation.

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You just emerge into a new decade of your life in your seventies. You just recently turned seventy, I believe.

Yes.

And I’m curious to start with, if you have to distill all that you have learned about life in this moment of your life, what would you say as the most important thing about life we all have to pay attention to?

Well, let me start by saying, and I think the most important thing is living from and through our heart. Nothing else matters. The heart is for me the strongest muscle and most mystical guidance we have. And I think that along the way, what I would say is how to best enter that . . . Every person is given the opportunity to be dropped into the depth of life. And for you and me, it was something life-threatening—it often is something that’s jarring, but it could be wonder and beauty and being unconditionally loved. It could be a very subtle moment of grace. It doesn’t have to be something life-threatening, but it is always something life-altering. And so I think one of the big things I’ve learned is that one of the constant menacing assumptions of the outer world is this misguided assumption that life is other than where we are.

One of my greatest lessons at this point in my life is that there is no there. There’s only here. There’s only here. I mean, certainly in the outer world, we travel to arrive at different points or places, but once we meet authentically, we always enter the same eternal moment. And one of the blessings . . . I’m just going to be starting next week traveling again. But you know, I’ve been blessed as you to travel and be with people and guide in circles and different things. And so one of the great kind of humble ironies is that I get to travel all over and wherever I go, when I get there, I simply affirm for everyone that there’s nowhere to go. And I’m happy to do it. It’s an honor to do it. And then, as you say, I think one of the things and how this relates to the pandemic is that I so recognize what you share about how everything is different and irrevocably so, and once the pandemic started, what came to me emotionally was I kept being drawn back to that moment for me, where I was—almost thirty-five years ago now, because some people may not know, but in my thirties, I had a rare form of lymphoma where I almost died, and it appeared as a tumor growing in my skull bone to the size of a grapefruit.

And so I remember going into a doctor, being first diagnosed with cancer, and of course being terrified and disoriented and believing he had the wrong folder. It couldn’t be me. But then when I left that appointment, the door that I had come through to keep that appointment was gone. There was no way back to life before that moment, which is what you’ve shared. And I think that what the pandemic did was in a very rare way, do that for all of humanity. The old world is gone. Things may look familiar. There may be silhouettes of life before. The old world is gone, and the only way forward is through kindness and through the heart and through meeting each other, holding nothing back.

You make me think in so many . . . about so many different things. And for me, during the pandemic, as well as during my illness, for me, it coincided at the same time, which actually was a blessing because I had just finished my treatment when we were all ordered to stay at home. And so that was a blessing in disguise that it allowed me to truly slow down. And the slowing down, as you mentioned, just made me aware that the beauty is there and is in the ordinary of the moments. I could see some light landing on chair and it’s just like art. It’s like, “Whoa, it’s so beautiful.” And then I have friends though, who were like so attached, so attached to what they’re missing out, what they’re missing of the travels and of the explorations and all of that.

And I feel like we always have that choice between spending that time on what we were before or spending the time on what we can be. And I come from people, Mark, I come from a people who are constantly attached to where we came from. I’m from the Middle East. As you know, I’m an Iraqi and an Arab and a Muslim, and Muslims constantly, at least in my upbringing, because there was a golden era a few hundred years ago when Muslims were into science and art and poetry and all of that, and that golden era has long gone and we are in a very, very dark era right now, as it pertains to that culture and that religion particularly. So it was a very frustrating—it’s always frustrating experience to go back home because people are constantly talking about that golden era. It was hundreds of years ago, right? I’m not talking about the darkness that we are in right now. I’m not talking about what we can go forward to. So it’s sort of you, made me think about both the larger political, as well as the personal: we have that choice of going back or going forward.

And this also raises what I feel is one of the deepest purposes of all art, and that is to marry what is with what can be. We do have, we have this in all of us, whether it’s culturally or personally to, “Oh, let me, oh, I pine for perfection or this dream or that or to aspire.” And there’s nothing wrong with aspiring, of course, to be our better selves or we go the other way and we get so rooted in the grit of what is that we become pragmatic and pessimistic. And of course, life is always both. And I think the real value of authenticity and all the different art forms is to marry what is with what can be. I need to see what is, and also see in it our better selves and what’s possible.

And so this kind of brings up another thing I’ve learned through the years, for me, that we are all too attached to our goals and ambitions and dreams. There’s nothing wrong with wanting things or dreaming or working toward things. But as soon as we want something, and I learned this, I don’t know, or if it’s just a part of our humanity that goes through this in a developmental way, that as soon as I would have a dream or an aspiration, well then all of a sudden it became like a god to me. I had to work toward it, no matter what. It was inflexible. And what I’ve learned is that we need those things to hold loosely because they’re the kindling for the fire of aliveness that burns in our heart. We work towards something because we can’t yet see where it might lead us to.

Let me share this is a little story, a little parable that captures that. So there’s a cyclist, like a Tour de France cyclist. And he’s training very hard. He’s training very hard. And he has all the state-of-the-art equipment and he shaves all the hair on his body so there’s no resistance. And the day of the race comes and they’re off. And the first leg of the race is miles in the country. And after a few miles, as he crests a hill, he’s gliding very fast down—briefly, he’s so far ahead that you can’t see the other racers. And just as he comes to the bottom of the hill, out of nowhere, a great blue heron with its wings spread swoops over his handlebars. He’s stunned, and he literally stops and straddles his bike because the heron opened something he was chasing and sure enough, the other racers are catching up and he’s straddling his bike.

And now we move to years later. And once in a while, if you catch him staring into the woods behind where he lives, once in a while, if you ask him, “What cost you the race?” Once in a while, he’ll say, “I didn’t lose the race. I left it. I didn’t lose the race. I left it.” And you know, someone could listen to us and say, “Oh, that’s very poetic. But he did lose the race. He didn’t win.” But I hold it differently because I think the power of this little story is he trained to meet the heron that changed his life. And if you told him he was training to meet a heron, he wouldn’t have trained. So we train for our goals. We hold them loosely so that we train for what we can see so that the grace that we can’t see, we can come to.

That’s so beautiful. It’s really beautiful. So have the ambition but be open, always to be open to what can come because you never know what it takes you in a different direction. There’s a saying in the Quran that sometimes you hate things happening to you, but they’re ultimately for your best. And it can be annoying saying, but I actually really came to appreciate it. And in the process of my own life and the lives of people that I worked with, you know I worked in conflict areas for more than two decades in my life. And I have learned to trust frankly everything about life. My most unfortunate circumstances have ultimately led to my fortune. It’s so odd to say, but in my life, betrayals and abandonment and displacement and all of that, things that I was so angry at God and at people have ultimately led to my fortunes, to a path that I am living in and to me, to who I am today, for which I am very grateful for.

Well, and that’s such a profound understanding of the heart and I too, so I would say that working for what I want has often led, has been an apprenticeship for working with what I’m given and that’s where my gifts have shown themselves in working for what I’ve given. I’d love to, could I share a recent poem about that?

Please do, yeah.

And I couldn’t have written this, like you were saying, before all of this. This poem is called “Praying I Will Find.”

I used to have so many plans, good plans,

grand plans. In the beginning, I would be

annoyed by the calamities I’d meet along

the way that would keep me from my plans.

I used to pride myself on how I could get

back on track so quickly. But the more I

loved and the more I suffered, the more

my plans were interrupted by those in

need.

Eventually, the call of life, unexpected

and unrehearsed, made swiss cheese of

my plans.

Now, like an emperor undressed by time,

I wander the days naked of plans, praying

that I will find love to give and suffering

to heal before the sun goes down.

Wow, wow. Do you think you could have written that poem when you were a young man?

No, no, no, not at all. Because I think, so this is another thing about authenticity and art and poetry, that art and poetry . . . Poetry is not about the manipulation of language or saying something beautifully. It’s the unexpected utterance of the soul that helps us be who we are. And in spite of all the things in the world, which I love—technology, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s wonderful. Look at we’re able to be together today like this—but things that matter still take time, because that is a poem that comes out of an utterance, a perception of my life over time. It’s not about organizing words so that they seem pretty.

Yeah. Yeah. But even the awareness, it’s coming out of my curiosity of your own personal spiritual journey and how early did it start? I know surviving cancer and the ordeal of going through cancer was a big epiphany, as you said, but how early did it start before that?

Yeah, so I think when I look back, I think even as a child, I had, as you say, when we’re present enough, the miracle of life presents itself. And I think even as a child, the world always spoke to me in metaphor. I didn’t even know what metaphor was, but when I look back, if I saw as a kid wind through the trees, it’s as if it was saying, “What do we like? What is this like? Look, look, pay attention.” And then as I moved along in life, I think that when I was a teenager in high school, the first woman I fell in love with, it didn’t last of course, and it broke my heart and being heartbroken, I began to write.

And when I started to heal, I realized that I wasn’t talking to myself. I had begun through my heartache, a conversation with life. And that more than the words on the page, each of us need to stay in that conversation. We have to stay in that conversation with life, always looking and asking, as you say, who am I now? What matters? What is there between us? What do I need to do? What kind of bridge can I be?

Well, I want to quote you one of your poem, which I’m very curious about, which is about your parents. And it starts with, “I was raised like our backyard, only tended with a sigh when I began to grow wild. I was raised like our backyard, only tended with a sigh when I began to grow wild.” How was that? What does that mean? And how was your childhood? And I’m really curious about the pain that you describe in that poem, but your own journey of how to reconcile with that pain with your parents.

Yeah. So my parents are now gone, both of them about six years or seven years now. And it’s interesting that I think I have more insight into them and can see them more clearly now that they’re gone, because in a strange way, now that they’re gone, it’s quieter. And I can see.

So I think that my parents were children of immigrants, Jewish immigrants, grew up in the Great Depression in New York City. Our family were descendant of the Holocaust. We had family members in the Holocaust. So they were very trained in survival and very literal and very pragmatic and very intelligent, they were voracious readers. And of course, now I can see, they get a mystical of poet for a son. We never really spoke the same language. My father was a great creative force, he was a master woodworker, who loved the sea. And so I watched him for years as a child, as a boy, create endless things out of wood, just masterful. He taught pattern making at Brooklyn Tech High School in New York City.

And so while we never talked about creativity and while my medium is different, I learned a lot from him. Interesting one example, since he’s gone, that I realized all these years later is, he had a big workbench in his basement, where grew up, which is a small suburban urban home on Long Island. And he had five or six vises and there was always a project in mid-creation in every one of them, they were never empty. And so he would sand one thing and then he’d glue another and then he’d chisel a little and he never talked about it. But I realized after he is gone all these years later, that’s how I work on books. I’ve always worked on more than one book at the same time and they cross pollinate until one says, “No, now we must work on this until completion.” So I’m always . . . [dog whines] That’s my dog.

Beautiful.

[to dog] Be quiet, please. So that was one thing, but in terms of growing up with them, I remember a very turning point where I came home as a freshman in college and I knew I was a poet, even though I hadn’t written, I had written very little, I knew I was a poet. And with excitement, I shared that. And of course, I was the first in my family to go to college. So they were beside themselves, “How are you going to make a living?” And I remember being eighteen and out of some intuition, I blurted out, “I’m going to live a making.” And I didn’t . . . and it took me years to discover what that meant. And they were very frustrated. My father wanted me to be an architect and my mother wanted me to be a lawyer. And I came home and said, “I’m a poet.”

Must be really scary for many parents, including now.

Yeah. Yeah. And so there was always . . . And then there’s another thing that I would say that I’ve learned recently and we all have within us, every human being, just like we have X and Y chromosomes in our DNA, we have a deep yearning in us to see. And we also deep yearning in us not to look. And we have to figure out which is good for us and how to have a balance. When we don’t look at what we need to look at, we fuel our fear. When we overlook at something and we’ve already looked at, we fuel our worry and doubt, that’s what Hamlet is all about. Hamlet is this amazing story that Shakespeare tells of a gifted, sensitive young man who every time he tries to face what he knows in his heart, he overanalyzes it. And he pulls the threads until his resolve and his will and his feeling, he can’t find it.

So I’ve realized that for me, I need to look. That’s essential to my being alive. And I think for my parents, they discovered their experience and their generation and where they came from was, don’t draw attention, don’t look, because that’s dangerous. And so I would come home excited, “Look at what I found.” And they would be, “You don’t look at those things. What are you doing? That’s not safe.” We never used those words, but I always felt, of course, as a young man, well, “I’m not doing a good enough, I need to share more.” And this is where they would see me as wild and want to prune me. And what all that does as anybody knows is it just made me share less and less with them.

Well, they did something more than that, Mark, that really stayed with me. So you graciously invited me to one of your workshops in New York a few years ago, which I will go back to it because I wrote a piece of poem that I would love to share with you. But before we go there, you mention in that workshop that while you were having cancer, in your most painful hours, they did not show up, and you kept on waiting for them and they did not show up. And I tell you my heart just melted, crunch, all of it. I was like, “How do you deal with that pain?” And how did you reconcile with that pain?

I was at a point in my journey where I had had my first chemo treatment in New York City. So I was living upstate, but I had come to Columbia Presbyterian for a treatment and it was horribly botched and I was getting very sick, repeatedly, and when I reached out to them, I think they were frightened and they didn’t come, they didn’t show up. And of course that was very hurtful and disorienting, but more than the pain was that there is this moment, whether it’s with parents or loved ones or friends, where if we don’t show up, something is cut between us. And so once that cut something between us, and beyond—we could talk about it and I could even feel that hurt now and get upset—but beneath that, we started to live in different directions because when we go through these passages that we’re exploring, that’s the perennial choice between love and fear.

There are those who show up and say, “Wow, I’ve never been here. What you’re going through scares me, but I’m here.” And then we grow and then we discover a language of truth between us, but for those who can’t come along or don’t, we start to drift into different parts of the spiritual ocean. And we literally start to speak different languages. And that started to happen between me and them. And so while for a long time I was hurt, after a while I felt like, I can’t just send birthday cards. I can’t pretend that this wasn’t cut between us.

And I started to devote myself to the earned family of souls that we journey with and discover along the way. And they became my family. And often there are some times where people will say to me, after reading what I’ve written about my parents, they’re my parents, how could I write like that? How could I talk? And I always say, “If I had experienced different things, I’d have different things to report.” But I think the key thing for me, for all of us, is we often in our pain may project and make our pain a map of the world, because that happened to me, with my parents. And I believe they loved me, but I don’t think they knew really very well how to love, but I haven’t made that my map of the world.

That’s just what happened to me. And I can marvel and I do marvel when I’m blessed to teach in these workshops and retreats that I do, and very often there’s an adult, parent, child who will come, a mother and a daughter, or a mother and a grown son, or father and son who will go. And to watch them be like we are together, I’m just in awe because that was not my experience, but I’m in awe. I don’t believe it’s not possible. So this is the other lesson from my almost dying is that to be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.

I have my own story with my own parents. I came to America in an arranged marriage and they left soon after, and I did not see them for nine years. And the marriage was very abusive and I was very angry at them, because I felt betrayed. And for me, the way I came to seeing the unbroken, to quote you, was much more a reconciliation moment between me and my mother, and eventually me and my father. To understand their story. And the truth is multidimensional, and once I understood their story and could see it from their lens—the pain stayed the pain, but I was able to loosen it up and over time it got loosen and loosen and loosen until it dissipated.

Yeah. Yeah.

But that, hearing you, I feel like I was lucky in being able to have that conversation, that healing conversation with them over time. And what I’m hearing you, is that you had to find that in yourself. And if I am to summarize, then we have a choice when we are hurt, what I’m hearing is that we have a choice to make that the story of our life, or to see the beautiful stories that emerge, to reconcile it within ourselves and find the solutions so we can get out of that pain or to embark on these conversations so we can get out of the pain, but there has to be some route where we need to get out of the pain. So the pain does not define us.

Yeah. And I thank you for sharing that about you and your parents. And with my father toward the end of his life, we were able to have some moments together. My mother, and I never found that moment. So I was able to spend some time with him toward the end of his life. And I remember having a few moments where I felt like we had the conversation of a lifetime in these moments. One was, he was in the hospital and he was not speaking at that time. He had had a stroke and after all these years and I remember it was a very busy—you know how that can be and he wasn’t in a private room and there was TVs blaring, and nurses coming in and out and people all around—but all of a sudden he took my hand and very forcefully gripped it and was just looking at me with a level of consciousness that was not his normal level of consciousness. And I felt with certainty that he was peering into eternity. And after all the things he knew because of what I went through, that I had seen what he was looking at. And I held his hand and it probably lasted a minute and a half or two minutes. And all I said was, “I know, Dad. I know.” And then it’s like, his eyes returned to normal consciousness.

And just like you’re saying, people have said, “Oh, wouldn’t you have loved to have reconciled with him sooner?” And well, that’s really not even a question because this is what my particular life, how it unfolded, and I would not trade that minute and a half for anything which happened. We were estranged for seventeen years. And I could spend a lot of time imagining what would’ve a life been like if I had seen him regularly and we didn’t have these golfs or chasms, but this is the . . . And that’s what authenticity—authenticity is not getting lost in what would’ve been or what could be, but loving and being devoted to the intimacy of what is. This is what I was given. This is not what I would wish on someone else, and at the same time, I knew his absence, and I saw in this timeless time, without words, ironically, we had the conversation of a lifetime.

Beautiful. It’s bringing in me also to trust life, to trust life. Don’t compare your experience to other people’s experience. To trust life and to trust that it has meaning in everything. You’re taking me somewhere very differently in Kenya, another world, but I know this amazing man, Kennedy Odede, which I really love him and respect him. And he grew up very, very, very poor. Violence in the slums of Nairobi, right? A very harsh reality. Hungry. He grew up hungry. And he was telling me, one day he was sitting under a tree and he says, “God, why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this to me?” And he hears a voice in his heart, “So you may understand what it means to go through these feelings, and one day you’ll do something about them.”

Right? And this beautiful Kennedy became a pioneering, innovative leader who mobilized his community, built one of the best programs I’ve ever, ever seen in my life. Better than my work, and I’m proud of my work as a humanitarian. And the reason you’re bringing him to this moment for me is because there’s a trust of every moment and every life’s experience and every awareness, and not comparing the timeliness of it, or what do we do with it? Or rather, when is it coming, and am I going to be . . . Is to trust it, not compare it, not judge it, and know, know, if handled with love and trust in yourself and authenticity, it’ll lead us—

And that’s so profound because I believe that trust, literally, the word literally goes back to it means “follow your heart.” And this doesn’t mean what we’re talking about, for me—it doesn’t mean that we deny or reframe the difficulty of that trust. It hurts. It’s painful. It’s real. And this is where I feel also that I have learned to be grateful that there’s a lesson in everything I go through. And I also know by now that when I’m in something difficult, I am not readily grateful for it while I’m in it.

Of course not. [laughs]

No, no. But this is the seed of what I would say is functional faith, not faith in a dogma or a principle, or a religious call. It’s the fact that while I can’t feel gratitude right now, faith is, I know I will be grateful. I will be, once I am through that moment and its lesson unfolds for me. This leads me . . . Can I share another poem?

Oh, please do, yeah.

Well, this is a poem of mine called, “Where Is God?”

Oh.

It’s as if what is unbreakable—

the very pulse of life—waits for

everything else to be torn away,

and then in the bareness that

only suffering and silence and

great love can expose, it dares

to speak through us and to us.

It seems to say, if you want to last,

hold on to nothing. And if you want

to know love, let in everything.

If you want to feel the presence

of everything, well, stop counting the

things that break along the way.

Woo. I feel like I have to take a complete inhale and a complete exhale. You know the call for prayer? Have you ever heard the call for prayer in one of your travels, in Turkey or in different countries, places?

No.

Oh, it’s beautiful. So if you ever go to the Middle East, there is five times the call for prayer. And if you don’t know it, people think that the skies are singing because it’s like the minaret and it’s just like it’s saying, “God is great, God is great. God is merciful, God is merciful.” But the point is, you get used to the call for prayer. You’re like, “Yeah, whatever.” You’re just moving on in your life. It’s just like, you pass by a beautiful flower and you get used to it. And you’re like, “Whatever. Another flower today.” And I feel like what the moments of pausing allows us, right? It’s if we always stop I feel like it’s God saying, “Hello, I’m here!” [laughs] “I’m here! Pay attention, please!” And it’s sort of here. Here means is everywhere, every moment, every breath, every flower, every everything. And we are passing on in our life so fast. And it’s just like, it’s all here, here.

Well, and I think that that’s another way that I understand the gift of my almost dying and being blessed to still be here is the miracle was—as much as my being here is miracle—is that I was given the lens of the miraculous to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, which for all of us, and this is what all the traditions, all the meditation practices try to open this, but it’s this holding nothing back in our heart that when I can slow down and be present enough, like that moment of light you mentioned earlier, everything shows that it’s holy and miraculous. And being human, I can’t stay there. There’s nothing wrong. It’s not that I’m making mistakes. But this journey of being you, being a spirit in a body and time on earth, is one of being one with that miracle.

And then I stub my toe or the garbage spills, or I realize a check bounced and I don’t have enough money in the bank or whatever it might be. And so part I feel like the very human, spiritual practice is always a practice of return. What is in our personal toolboxes—and this is a lot of how I spend my time when I’m with folks in guiding or teaching—is trying to introduce people to their own gifts and wisdom. So what is it that we each carry in our toolbox so that when life pushes us away we can lean back in? When I’m, because of circumstance, halfhearted or going too fast, how do I slow down and become wholehearted again?

Beautiful. And on that, hesitation and worry, because I am not a poet and yet—

Oh, no. Please share. Please do.

And yet when you invited me to the workshop, this came in the middle of the workshop for me. It was in the middle of . . . Actually, I don’t know if it was in one of the exercises you gave us, or it just came and I wrote it really fast. And I was in a very tumultuous relationship at the time. And I want to read it for you, because I have questions around . . . Not around analyzing the poem as much as about relationships and how you came to understand relationships. And the poem goes, “An imperfect woman, I am. Can you be with my contradictions? Full of love, I am. Can you expand with my expansions? Emotions comes and goes, up and high, low and below. Do you see them in your emotions? Meet me. How I wish you would meet me standing in your length in the fullness of your story. See my story, or how I wish you would see me. Can we meet in all of our stories? Can we? Can we kiss not the sweet kisses of love, not the bitter kisses of anger. Can we kiss the kiss of perfection and imperfection? The kiss that is. The kiss that tells the messy stories of all, all our emotions.”

Oh, that’s beautiful. Thank you. That’s beautiful.

Well, thank you. That means a lot, but what did you come to understand about relationships? Because this was a convoluted one, a very tumultuous one. I have to say when I sent him that poem, he rewrote it for me, he retyped it and he says, “I’m quoting a poet that I like,” and he gave me the exact answer, which was beautiful. But you talk about relationships in your life, marriage that had fallen apart, and in your marriage and beautiful. What did you learn about love and relationships? You talked about the one in your parents, but I’m now talking about much more on the personal side.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes. Well, one of the things I’ve learned . . . And my wife, Susan and I—Susan’s a potter. She’s younger than I am. She’s eighteen years younger than I am and she’s an old soul, and I’ve learned a lot from her. And I think that we’ve been together twenty . . . I should know, twenty-six, seven years. And I think some of the things I’ve learned, because I don’t think I was a whole person, individuated in the other relationships that I was in. This is my third marriage. So in my first marriage, very young, I think I married an echo of my mother. A very kind of dark . . . My metaphor for my mother. And I know that things shaped her. She was a very bright, precocious woman in an age where women were not given very . . . hardly any notice or opportunity. But my image for her was, in relationship, what I learned from her that mistakenly, I thought love was a fire that I needed to douse. And there was never enough water because there was never an end to her fire.

And so that’s how I entered relationships, very willing to, I can put that fire out. I can do more. And so I think that I married a version of my mother the first time. And then I think, humbly, in my second marriage, which was much longer, the other image, positive image, was my grandmother, my father’s mother. She was more like a mother to me. And she was a very strong matriarch. And of course, as a grandchild, I knew the best of her, but I think my father experienced a very dominant, low kind, like a benevolent, but for a matriarch. And I think unconsciously when I married the second time, I married my grandmother. So I don’t think until I almost died from cancer, that I fully inhabited my full feminine and masculine sides.

I don’t think I ever . . . So in a way those early marriages, early in my life, I co-created a symbiotic relationship where unconsciously we were asking each other to be half of one person. And so when I almost died and was still blessed to be here and woke up, not through wisdom, just from the fire of transformation, more whole than I had ever been, the arrangement we had created unconsciously with my second wife didn’t work. I needed to be all those parts myself. So when I met Susan, that was the first time I entered a relationship as a whole person. And one of the things that I learned and I did learn from her was . . . And this I want to tell if we have time, a brief story here that’s so powerful about this. Not from me, but from something that Yeats wrote. That we have in our Western world, especially this romantic notion that when we love someone, we’re going to be all things to each other. And what I’ve learned from Susan is no, we’re not. We can’t.

And I started to write about this in a way, in a theme that I call “The 10,000 Hands.” And the image here is that the heart has 10,000 hands in its desire. I’ve only got two. And if I insist on trying to . . . So for instance, if we’re sitting in a home and there’s seven or eight of us, I can try to bring all of you tea. And even meaning well, I’ll probably spill it and hurt one of you. So that’s trying to force the 10,000 hands into the two. But, the other way is what we’ve been talking about. If I can bring all of that infinite care of the heart into these two hands to concentrate on lifting the one cup of tea and bring it to you, then we enter the holy. And so where does relationships . . . So Yeats, in a small poem called “The Mermaid,” which you could Google, but I can tell it to you. I can’t recite it. He does this profound thing. He says, a mermaid falls in love with a boy, a young man. They fall in love. And of course he lives on land, he can visit the sea. She lives in the sea, she can visit the land. So she’s so excited to have a soulmate, someone she can share her depths with. She wants to show him where she lives. And so they go down under the water. And the line in the middle of the poem is, “In cruel happiness, she gives him this passionate long kiss and he drowns.”

So it’s a sad story, but what it opens is, Where’s the relationship? It’s on the shore, it’s on the shore. And it’s actually dangerous to romanticize and say, “Oh, now that you love me, come and see where I live that nobody else lives, so I can share that with you.” It makes the responsibility, “No, I need to bring up to the shore the things I want to share and visit you in your depth so that each of us, everyone, paradoxically has a depth that gives us life, but that no one . . . If I force you to go there, you could actually drown. And so somewhere in the middle of our long marriage, maybe year eight, nine, or ten, and I’m blessed to be prolific because I write about what I don’t know. And I don’t know a lot. And I was eager to share something with Susan. And she kindly looked at me and said, “Of course I’m interested, but you have to choose. Do you want me to be your partner or your reader?”

And without missing a beat, I said, “Of course my partner.” And then when I learned this distinction from Yeats, no, it would be dangerous to insist that she go. Just like I couldn’t go in the depths where she creates her pottery. I can visit, I can listen, I can share. But the nest of the relationship is what we devotedly bring between us.

That is the best advice I’ve ever heard about the relationship. Really. It’s in the shore. I love it. I love it. In the shore. I want to go to success because you had a unique experience with success. As we started, I think a lot of parents would still worry about their kid who comes from college and say, “I’m going to be a poet.” It’s like, “How are you going to eat, honey?” But you succeeded. And the success though, did not come like this [snaps]. I’m fascinated how The Book of Awareness, you put it out there. It did well. And then ten years later, ten years later, Oprah sees it, loves it, puts it on her show. And then it’s of course a different experience and millions of copies sell, which helped all of us. What’s your advice, given your experience with the ups and the downs of the journey of success?

Yeah, I humbly . . . Yeah. I am so grateful for all of this. You know as I know you, your experience too. Oprah is so genuine and so generous. And yes, her blessing that book changed everything, just all over. But what I learned from almost dying is that success is not climbing up a mountain to the top. It’s horizontal. We are all the same six inches from heaven in the gutter. And what success has done, it has allowed me, like raindrops that enter and ripple. It’s allowed me to be in more circles with more people and in more genuine moments. And that is a wealth beyond anything I could imagine.

So my advice or my encouragement to anyone, in any art form, is to stay true to what calls your soul and your heart. And early on, like anyone, when I wasn’t known at all, we struggle with not being heard. So not to give too much credence to that. To stay true and wondering, am I opening my heart into a canyon? There’s nobody calling back. And then I was blessed to have in a dramatic way this . . . I was within the spiritual poetry world. There was some success, but certainly Oprah went to a whole nother level around the world.

And so, on that side, I feel like the journey is not to pay too much attention to that. Because the truth is, and I’m so grateful for it. And not being heard and being heard—neither have anything to do with the real work. And so the image is the encouragement is to keep working. Not being heard is like, imagine you’re walking in a really strong wind. You firmly plant your feet and you lean forward. Well, all of a sudden, being heard, the wind is at your back. But you know what? It’s the same thing. You just lean back and you keep planting your feet firm.

It’s beautiful.

And you keep moving forward.

It’s beautiful. It reminds me of a Rumi poem, which I think what you’re also sharing is like “The garden is luscious and beautiful and full of flowers.” And I’m paraphrasing. “If you come, it’s so beautiful. If you do not come, it is still beautiful.”

It’s still.

I would say apply it to everything in life. You’re making me think. I’ve always thought about my inner peace. But now you’re making me think that life as is, is beautiful. And be in that garden. If it has moments of success in career, it’s still beautiful. If it doesn’t have that moment of whatever you define or whoever defines, it’s still beautiful. Stay in that garden.

And the connections are still . . . This is where the 10,000 hands. It’s like the connections, the true connections with others is what matters, with source and other. This is where in our modern world, we have turned everything into a product. So this is the last kind of encouragement I would offer in this regard about this. And often unconsciously, but a child in the playground spins in recess and it looks elegant. And a teacher says, “You know, you should become a dancer.” Or another child is singing, and “Oh, you should become a singer.”

Well, then somehow the seed is set. Until someone recognizes me as a dancer or a singer, I’m not. And so the encouragement is to stay a verb, don’t become a noun.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Mark, I have few last rapid questions for you.

Sure.

As we near the end of our time. And I’ll start with poetry. Are there verses of poetry that you keep going back to, you’re in a way dependent on going to them?

Oh yes. Yes. All the time. I think one of the ones that I go back to comes from the Middle Ages, a female mystic, Mechthild. And she said that “A bird does not fall from the sky and a fish does not drown in water. Each creature must find their god-given element.”

I love that. Perfect. Perfection. And I love always and discovering female mystics. It’s one of my excited things to do in life, to discover that. So thank you for sharing about her. Books that are really important in your life?

Oh, absolutely. So I think one book that was so important to me was of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. And also Carl Jung’s inner autobiography, which was called Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.

I read that. Wow, I cried throughout it. I loved it.

That was so powerful to me. I think one of the things that I go back to is that Jung—which helped me when I was a young man, feeling confused. even though I knew I was a poet, feeling disoriented in the vastness of the inner world—where he talked about poets and artists as the lightning rod of the unconscious. And when I read that, I felt like it somehow made sense of my exploration.

Beautiful, beautiful. A piece of music, a song you often go back to?

Oh yes. Keith Jarrett’s “Hourglass,” the second part.

Gorgeous, gorgeous. And last but not least, a movie. Is there a movie that you always go and watch between now and then?

Yeah. There’s actually a movie that my wife and I watch every year, It’s a Wonderful Life, with Jimmy Stewart. And it seems very kind of simplistic on the surface, but love very much the resilience in it. And another one that I love, which has been remade recently, is West Side Story. And I think Camelot. Camelot, the original movie that came out in the sixties, I think that was one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater. I was like twelve or something. And I think it taught me about love and relationship because at the heart of that archetypal triangle between . . . and I’m sure people who are listening are familiar, but King Arthur and Guinevere as his queen, and Lancelot.

So Lancelot comes along and Guinevere and Lancelot fall in love. And Arthur, there’s this scene in the very middle of it, that he has this soliloquy where he just says from his depths of his heart, brokenhearted, “If there were a man on Earth that I would love as my brother, it would be Lancelot. And if there were a woman that I would devote myself to more than anyone on Earth, it would be Guinevere. I love both of them so much. And yet, how can I not be both hurt and happy that they have found each other?”

And I remember being thirteen, not even knowing anything about love yet, being so touched at the authenticity and wholeness of that expression of heart.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And finally, the one question I have for you, which is, in my sickness and when I was struggling to get my health back and get a sense of life and what is life, I kept on asking myself, who am I? Who am I? If I ask you that, who are you? Or if you ask yourself, who am I? What is your answer for that?

Well, my answer and I go back to something that happened to me during my experience of almost dying. And that was, I was coming out of surgery, having a rib removed from my back. And waking up . . . I mean, I was born premature. I even woke up early coming out of surgery. And in between worlds and for a long moment, I was awake below my name. I was below all names. And I felt this sense of spirit, this sense of spirit, the way water fills a glass. And certainly then I’m back in my life. And my name is Mark. And I respond to that. But who I am is below the container of my identity. Who I am, it’s like it can make the glass that holds that water shine, but that’s not who I am.

[closing piano music]

That was Mark Nepo. To learn more about his work and his upcoming workshops and book, please visit www.marknepo.com. And follow him on Instagram @Mark_Nepo. For full transcripts of this episode, please visit www.findcenter.com. Do remember to subscribe to this podcast, it is for free and your comments are truly welcomed. You can follow us on Instagram @find_center. Or follow me, @ZainabSalbi.

Redefined is produced by me, Zainab Salbi along with Rob Corso, Casey Khan, and Howie Khan at FreeTime Media. Our music is by John Palmer. Special thanks to Eileen Duhné, Neal Goldman, Caroline Pincus, and Sherra Johnson. See you next week when we’ll be joined by my friend, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Alice Walker.