Little by Little by Mark Nepo

(posted with permission www.marknepo.com/)

Life constantly asks us to meet fear with love. Not an easy thing to do. Recently, I spent the whole day talking about love with people I love and, little by little, we let each other peek into the caverns we live in and try to climb out of. And it became clear that experience always seems to lead us to the rim of how we know the world and ourselves and each other. At that rim, we sometimes shy back down into what is familiar, but sometimes we are led to break our sense of things and, like crabs crossing dunes, we find our way to the sea where all boundaries blur.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with things that are familiar. We all long to make the things of this world sacred and intimate. But when something intimate-a way of thinking, a way of feeling, a way being or loving-stops being a membrane to life and becomes a cataract to the heart's eye, then the familiar keeps us from the pulse of life. We all ride this tension of building a home for ourselves, while trying to climb out of ourselves. And it seems quite natural that loss and suffering and question and surprise all rush us to our edge.

Whether we make it to the sea of each other or shy back below the rim of what is familiar often hinges on whether we follow love or fear. It seems that those who risk living beyond what rims them discover that love is the fifth element that will usher us beyond ourselves. Strangely, beautifully, the attempt to be with each other and to truly behold each other is, at once, familiar and new, shattering and healing, painful and all-embracing.

So what would I offer to anyone who would listen? Not in the way you might listen to a teacher, but more as you would stop and listen to an old tree creak about its years of standing in the wind. If you should listen that way, I would whisper that each step in being alive-in dreaming, in suffering, in awakening-takes us out of our image of ourselves and tosses us into the very stuff out of which all selves are made. When we can let those moments reach us, aliveness and woundedness become indistinguishable and trepidation drops into wonder.