Even as a child, I was just the world, the universe, God, whatever name you want to give to the bigness, the vastness really spoke to me in metaphor.
When I was alone, I was in conversation.
Even as a child.
You know, if the wind was rustling through the trees, the way it would lift some branches and drop others, was speaking to me and showing me patterns.
One of the most fundamental truths in life is that at some point we will all bump up against something profoundly challenging, potentially even threatening to our very existence.
This week's guest, Mark Nepo, faced that with a cancer diagnosis that seemingly came out of nowhere, now, decades behind him, that served as a source of profound awakening.
Rather than shutting down, it moved him to start to explore what happens in life that leaves us connected.
How do we actually exist on the planet in a way that lights ourselves up and lights others up and finds us connected and elevated.
He's since written countless books, almost on poetry and philosophy.
He's got a wonderful new book out called Inside the Miracle as well.
I'm so excited to be able to sit down with Mark today and to share his journey, to share the many touch points and really just explore very often the questions that we actually don't go all that deep into in life.
I'm Jonathan Fields.
This is good life project.
I want to dance around with you a little bit.
You had a moment of reckoning, a moment of awakening, a moment of liberation, or at least the seeds were planted in 1987.
I want to start before that, though, because I want to go back in time a little bit.
You're a poet, you're a philosopher, a teacher.
Do you have a sense for where the earliest seed, obviously, you have a deep fascination with language.
Do you have a sense for when or where the earliest seeds of that were planted?
Well, so let me start before I talk about my own particular unfolding, kind of about my sense of the nature of unfolding.