The Book Of Awakening:
Having The Life You Want By Being Present To The Life You Have

— Mark Nepo

This is a remarkable book.  It is deceptively simple – daily quotes, reflections and practices – and quietly powerful.  A year spent reading an entry each day is a rich investment in your life.  When you come to the end of the book, you won’t have all the answers, but you will have taken yourself on a wonderful journey.  After that? Why, begin again! You’ll find new awakenings the second, third and forth time around.

Below are the entries for August 21st and 22nd: “Teachers are Everywhere” and “Beneath Arriving.”  They are good companions for each other and fit with the spirit of this website. And to be honest, “Beneath Arriving”  is based on one of my own comments which Mark wonderfully expanded. I couldn’t resist including it.  Thanks Mark!

Teachers are Everywhere

Teachers arise from somewhere within me that is beyond me, the way the dark soil that is not the root holds the root and feeds the flower.

So often we think of ourselves as free-standing and in charge, because we have the simple blessing of being able to go where we want. But we are as rooted as shrubs and trees and flowers, in an unseeable soil that is everywhere. It’s just that our roots move.

Certainly, we make our own decisions, dozens every day, but we are nourished in those decisions by the very ground we walk, by the quiet teachers we encounter everywhere. Yet, in our pride and confusion, in our self-centeredness and fear, we often miss the teachers and feel burdened and alone.

In trying to hear those quiet teachers, I am reminded of the great poet Stanley Kunitz who, as a young man struggling darkly with how to proceed with his life, heard geese cross a night sky and somehow he knew what he had to do. Or how a man I know was slowly extinguishing himself, sorely depressed, when, finally exhausted of his endless considerations, he heard small birds in snow in unexpected song. He realized he was a musician who needed to find and learn the instrument he was supposed to play.

From the logic of being free-standing and in charge, experiences of this sort seem crazy-making and untrustworthy. But the soil of life in which we grow speaks a different language than we are taught in school. In actuality, truth and love and the spirit of eternity are rarely foreseeable, and clarity of being seldom comes through words.

In my brief time on earth, I have felt the light of ageless spirit fill me unexpectedly when I thought I would die, and, as water pumps its way up a slim root making that plant leaf out toward the light, I have found myself, against all fear and will, flushed with possibility in the direction of dreams I had hardly imagined.

Whether through birds in snow, or geese honking in the dark, or through the brilliant wet leaf that hits your face the moment you are questioning your worth, the quiet teachers are everywhere. When we think we are in charge, their lessons dissolve as accidents or coincidence. But when brave enough to listen, the glass that breaks across the room is offering us direction that can only be heard in the roots of how we feel and think.

* Breathe evenly and accept that there is no way to prepare for unexpected teachings other than to keep your heart and mind quiet and receptive.

* Breathe deeply and slowly, knowing that as the body must be stretched to do exercise, the heart and mind must be stretched to stay open to the spirit of life.

* Breathe fully and steadily, stretching the passageways of your heart and mind, accepting that you are a flower yet to open.

Beneath Arriving

I’m only lost if I’m going someplace in particular.
— Megan Scribner

A friend was traveling around Europe, training from city to city. Despite her plans, her interest drew her in different directions and a path unfolded that she couldn’t have foreseen. Each point of discovery led to the next, as if some logic out of view were guiding her. During this phase of her journey, though she often wasn’t sure where she was, she never felt lost. It was when she needed to arrive at a certain station at a certain time, that she felt she was off course, astray, and at the fringe of where she was supposed to be.

All this led her to realize that the more narrow her intentions on any one day, the more she felt behind, late, and lost. In contrast, the wider her net of designs, the more often she felt a sense of discovery. Regardless of where she had to be, it seemed that the more open to possibility and change she was, the more she felt like every moment she came upon was holding a treasure she was supposed to find.

Of course, there will always be times that we need to find our very precise way. But more often than not, our image of a destination is only a starting point that we cling to needlessly. When we can free up our sense of needing to arrive in a certain place, we lessen the weight of being lost. And once beneath arriving and beneath our fear of failing to arrive, the real journey begins.

* This is a walking meditation. Choose somewhere nearby you’d like to walk to—a bench in a park, a coffee shop downtown, or a schoolyard not too far away.

* Choose a simple route and begin your walk.

* As your walk unfolds, be open to what catches your interest—a bird song, a ripple of light, or maybe the sound of children playing. Follow that interest.

* Practice letting go of your plan and discovering the path of interest that waits beneath your plan.