The Journey to Here

Last updated on: July 25, 2016 at 12:15 pm by Mark Nepo

The Journey to Here 2016-07-25T12:15:25-05:00 Mark Nepo

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I’m excited to share my new book, The One Life We’re Given: Finding the Wisdom that Waits in Your Heart, which was published July 19. Retrieving this book has made me a better person. I share my story and the stories of others as examples, not instructions. For everyone has to uncover the lessons of their own journey. My hope is that, through the threshold this book opens, you will deepen your conversation with life. That through your own path of obstacle and surprise, you will be opened to your gifts and become somewhat freed of all you carry. My hope is that you will begin to discover and experience the particular expression of your own nature.

I am not going anywhere; I am always on the way.
—Herman Hesse

I was in lower New York, up early, walking along the water at Battery Park. I stopped to lean over the rail and the large, green, choppy waves filled me with the strength of all that carries me. There I was, standing before the Statute of Liberty with nothing but swells of ocean filling my heart, nothing but time swelling its memory of immigrants finding their way.

I realized, at that moment, that my grandmother, who gave me faith in life, came by this very spot a hundred years ago. Her son, my father, was pollen in her heart as she rocked in the ship that crossed the Atlantic. No wonder he arrived with his love of the sea. Both are gone now and I felt them in the waves. And Liberty was still standing over them, lifting what is possible out of the water, out of us, her arm ever to the sky, saying without saying: There is only this life and its endless swells. Keep on. Don’t hide. Live as if you mean it.

We each swell with a wave that has built before us, part of a lineage whether aware of it or not. My grandmother and father were a body to which I’m a voice. If only my grandmother, who couldn’t speak English when she came to America, could see that her grandson became a poet whose work is now translated back into her original Russian tongue. Her faith in life has now returned to where she was born. Each of us rises into the next wave, only to rejoin the undeniable depth. The swell of Oneness from which our personhood rises gives me strength.

The sea that morning, with its rise and fall of all that matters, swelled in me. I lifted my head from the rail and praised the sea that my father so loved, and the depth that my grandmother carried, and the clear, timeless swell of life that keeps us going. Just then, a gull hovered in glide between the liberty to come and the journey to here: a mirror of my soul, urging me on, showing me how.

A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a loved one or friend, describe one trait or way of being that you feel you’ve inherited from someone in your lineage, and how you are keeping that alive.

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