Listening To The Voice Inside

The Exquisite Risk
by Mark Nepo

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The next time, I was more drawn to listen than forced. It was a few years later on my father's sailboat, which was the oasis of my youth. It was a thirty-foot ketch that he'd built. Once out to sea, I remember being pulled forward by the water till the family noises faded. I found myself sitting in the bow of the boat, legs over the side, staring into the endless waves parting around us. I didn't have the words or concepts for it, but it felt like God's voice murmuring in the waves. This was my first experience of solitude.

At a very early age, both the earth and the sea opened me to something deep inside that has carried me ever since. It was years before I had names for any of this, and after years of study in many spiritual traditions, I believe it is the simple, mysterious pulse of what is sacred.

In these small childhood experiences of listening, I discovered a spiritual law: that we are both forced and drawn by everything larger than us to hear what is essential. Repeatedly, we are given chance after chance to stop and listen to all that is fundamental. When forced to our knees, we are offered the chance to hear the warmth in all that holds us up. When drawn into the rhythms of vastness that surround us, we are offered the chance to hear the waves of God's voice, of which we are one, if we can leave the noise of others behind.

When we can listen deeply, we are strengthened to feel that everything around us lives within us and that everything within us lives as part of the world. When we experience both the circumference and center of the circle of life at once, we are then in the larger Self, the Universal Self, as Carl Jung describes it.

Imagine a nineteen-year-old in the chaos of war, running through mud and explosions, seeing others fall around him. Imagine him slipping into a ditch, a small pocket of stillness that seems out of reach, for the moment, from all the destruction. And in that small empty space between the mud and his frightened mouth, he is forced to listen to his breath. In that small cloud emitting from his lungs, he is forced to hear the breath of everything that ever lived. The conflicts change and the ditches change, but sometimes listening to that small breath is all we have. And sometimes it opens up everything.

This falling down and emptying ourselves of noise so that we can hear the sacred pulse of things is at the heart of all the meditation practices invoked throughout the ages. Sooner or later, if we want to feel what it is to be alive in a Universe that is alive, we will have to empty ourselves, open our hearts, and listen. This emptying and opening and listening is the practice that allows us to hear that voice of God (whatever name you give to it) that resides in each of us. By listening with all of who we are, we are briefly illuminated, like stained glass; letting everything move through us in those privileged and enlightened moments.

But how do we listen? It is so simple and so hard. So obvious to begin and so elusive to maintain. In this lies the vitality of deep listening. To keep beginning. Over and over. To keep emptying and opening. And simply to keep listening. For to listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

Over the years, I have been opened to a deeper listening when called to sit with the dying. In the sacred air between us, I have heard the weight of things fall away, have seen ancient hands that held me as a boy search for something that has always been near, have wondered what hundred-year-old eyes see with their last look.

I remember my grandmother at ninety-four staring into some holy place I couldn't see. It was the moment after I'd left. I had turned back for one more taste of her. She didn't know I was there, and I saw her as devoutly amazed as any reluctant prophet. Somewhere between the bedpan and her dirty window, eternity was singing. I'll never forget her face.

It seems that those pared down to only what is essential peer into the one untranslatable place, the sweet place that no one can speak of. And when waking on the edge of life or death, when pressed to be fully here, we peer into a truth that changes everything. Then, if still here, we come back with our hearts seared anew by that seeing. If blessed, we come back to live in days that say so sweetly that everything, even dust, is beautifully ordinary and irreplaceable.

We can't seek out such wakefulness. In truth, it happens to us. But we can ready ourselves for such privileged moments. We can, if present enough, listen to each day the way we would listen to those who are dying. We can keep beginning, keep emptying, keep breathing ourselves open.

Copyright © 2005 by Mark Nepo. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Mark Nepo is a program officer and poet in residence at the Fetzer Institute and a teacher of poetry and spirituality, as well as a frequent guest speaker at seminars and workshops around the country. Nepo's The Book of Awakening was a Books for a Better Life Award finalist and was cited by Spirituality and Health magazine as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2000.