Mark Nepo: The Life-Saving Power of Friendship
Poet and author Mark Nepo, has now written nearly 30 books, including mega-bestsellers like The Book of Awakening. In this latest book, You Don’t Have to Do It Alone, Mark explores the power of friendship to lend life both vital energy and more meaning, likening friends not to the boat, but to the oars that can help you reach the other side of the water. I’ve been thinking a lot about boys and men lately—including the ways in which they suffer under patriarchy too, sometimes in more devastating ways. I’m grateful for people like Mark who are insisting and modeling that to care is to be human—and that intimate friendships are vital for all of us who hope to lead long and meaningful lives. Women have an easier time of this, though we can all benefit from reminders. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM MARK NEPO:
You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: The Power of Friendship
Mark Nepo’s Website
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TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: So, Mark, is this your 20th book or your 21st book? 26!
MARK NEPO: my 26th book. It's beyond what I ever imagined when I started out.
ELISE: I see a filing cabinet behind you, but is there a filing cabinet in your mind where you're thinking about a concept, like friendship, and then you get to sort of a boiling over point? What is your process like to do 26 books?
MARK: Well, the process has shifted over the years and this ties in with early on, like many young artists or writers, I was taught to look for, good material, but you know in my 30s I almost died from a rare formal lymphoma and you know that changed everything. On the other side everything's miraculous and good material. It's just a question of whether my heart is open enough and I'm present enough. Certainly I have, quote, ideas or visions, but I've discovered that they're really kindling for... I don't really know what yet. Not one of the books that, and I like to say retrieved, I'm not channeling, but it's not just me. So, I feel like not one of the books I've ever been blessed to journey with is the book I started.
ELISE: Mm.
MARK: And I think in a big way, I've been prolific when I learned to get out of the way.
ELISE: Mm.
MARK: So, writing has become a lot more like listening and taking notes.
ELISE: Yeah, I relate to that. And I felt that in this book that it was it felt like an accumulation in some ways of material from your life that all coalesced into this book and it felt also like there must be things that you had and filed away for their moment. I try to do like boil the ocean books I'm going to move out of that phase in my next I have like two more boil the ocean books in me I think before I just want to be like anne lamott or you or just write without feeling like I need to scaffold all of culture.
MARK: For me, what's happened, I've discovered over time that I think the creative process is very akin to the introspective process. And I just happen to write it down, and the words are the trail of that journey. And it starts in a way with poetry for me, which is not about lines on a page. Poetry, for me, is the unexpected utterance of the soul. And so when that occurs, if I'm true to it, and this ties in with, with the whole journey of authenticity, which of course. It has to do with friendship friendship with ourselves and others and life itself. That when I'm authentic and true to what's before me, whether that's difficult or joyous or surprise or pain. If I'm true, then I'm rewarded with an insight. So, in almost all the poems that I retrieve, and it's the same thing with these chapters, if I follow that, I don't know where they're ending, it's not like, Oh, this would be a great place to end a poem or a chapter. I'm not that smart. But I discover and then what comes, it becomes my teacher.
ELISE: You said when you're true with things, with experiences or emotions, what does that mean? True.
For
MARK: Me, what that means is, and again, I don't have any answers, you know, we're just all comparing notes. What I share are examples, not instructions. And so for me, being true is holding nothing back. It's trying to be as honest as possible about what's before me and within me. It's staying in a place of question and not declaration, which obviously is a big problem in our age. You know, one of the questions I've come to love to ask folks that I work with in circle or even, you know, especially young people in my life, nevermind teaching, is what's it like to be you?
ELISE: Hmm.
MARK: What's it like to be you? And the same thing with teaching circles, I prepare all the time, but I realized , I don't need to prepare, but I prepare not because I need to know the material, but because it readies me to be completely true and present with you. So it's more like, you know, I'll do a week next week, I'm teaching at Omega which I've gone to for years and like any weekend retreat, I probably have a hundred pages of notes and I probably won't look at them very much, but I still do them, because it's more like a set list for jazz. I feel like teaching is like spiritual jazz, and so is writing, so your sense of things I do without agenda, you know, without saying, oh, this would be a good thing for this, my process has been, I'm always trying to be open, and when I'm touched by something, it could be an image, or a certain light on a bird, or it could be a piece of conversation in a cafe, it could be anything, I stay in conversation with it immediately. And then once a week or so, I use the mind to say, okay, I have these ideas, and they're like buckets. And then I say, okay, which bucket does it go in, if I have to decide today? And then when I actually spend time with them, I'm not imposing an outline. I might have an outline again as kindling, but once I'm in it, I'd look at all of those and they become their own mosaic. They tell me their organic structure.
ELISE: Hmm.
MARK: And then that becomes a chapter. So I don't really know the structure of a book till the end.
ELISE: That's amazing. But like you, I mean, I like structure because I like to set the container to dump into. I wish I had a more beautiful way of saying that, but that I need the structure in order to sort of set the...
MARK: sure.
ELISE: borders on the page. But similarly, like when I do interview prep, my process is I always read people's books. I read them closely. I take pages and pages and pages of notes. Not only because it's a way to be present with whomever I'm interviewing in advance, but it's also a gesture of respect, I think, and respect to the listener. But then I don't write questions, and I have my notes present, but I would much rather just let it unfold.
MARK: Oh sure, that makes total sense. That makes total sense.
ELISE: Yeah. And to turning to friendship, I mean, first I want to say this episode is coming out in the midst of a series that I'm doing around growing up, but I'm talking to developmental psychologists like Niobe Way, who does a lot of work with boys, and Carol Gilligan, who does a lot of work with girls. And I have an episode coming at some point. It's so special. I don't know when to run it with James Hollis. I don't know if you've ever...
MARK: oh, sure.
ELISE: And he talks about the initiation of manhood and boyhood as it's so... I cried, actually, it was so painful to hear. So I just want to start by saying, I think it's so important and powerful to hear men honoring the importance of friendship, relationship, integration, and care, because when we strip that from boys and set them out on, in this quest for individualism, it is obviously breaking their hearts and destroying them and conversely destroying all of us.
MARK: Oh, thank you. And in this I do that in our modern age, women have been way ahead of men in terms of our journey of transformation and relationship. And you know, I know that like I've mentioned in the book, you know, my men's group with these guys who have become my brothers and all of us have felt we've been seeing each other once a month for 18, 20 years now and you know, we're in each other's lives but I don't think any of us had models of the kind of men we wanted to be growing up. Certainly there were certain aspects, let's say, of my father that I learned from and admired. But mostly, there wasn't anything for me to try on.
ELISE: Yeah. And it's a crisis. And I want to talk about Robert in a minute and your friend's reaction to Robert, because I think that puts a point on it. But my father, and it's funny, I grew up in Montana, I live in California now, and I've been leaning on my parents, I've given up on this, but I'm like, why don't you want to move and be closer to us? And the reality is my father, and my mother, but my father notably has a men's group, and they've been in each other's lives for forty years. And he has these pockets of friends that he goes skiing with and rides bikes with. He's 80, but they're still going strong. They carry a defibrillator with them. You'll be pleased to know because at that age, sometimes people go into cardiac arrest. I'm not kidding. They have a portable defibrillator. But He doesn't want to leave his friends and it's funny. I never really understood. I think there was something in your book where I was like, Oh, I understand. This is like sustaining and the antidote to loneliness and more important than time with his grandkids. And I don't say that lightly, obviously he loves his grandkids, but I get it. I get it. So that, and then I thought it was so interesting the way that you write about Robert, which is beautiful. One of your friends, I don't know if that's a pseudonym...
MARK: no, that's, that's, that's Robert. He's. Yeah, I'm actually seeing him next week because he goes to Omega with me every year. So yeah, he's my oldest, oldest friend. Yeah.
ELISE: And that your friend, this woman, the reader said, you write, "She was moved by my lifelong friendship with Robert, but said, Such intimacy is unusual between men. Then she paused. It sounds like you are in love with Robert." And you say, well, I, I am, but this goes to this idea though, of like that our immediate inclination culturally, at least in the West is to be like, gay, gay. Right?
MARK: And this gets at the heart of the friendship with life itself because, yes, I'm in love with all my friends and I think we're going back to what it is to be true is what is the journey of being who I am everywhere so that I can be in love with everything and everyone I meet.
ELISE: Mm.
MARK: we love about Francis of Assisi? At some point, he loved birds. He loved air the way he could love a lover. Friendship is the, I think, honored path or threshold to intimacy with all things.
ELISE: Mm. So true. Right? Why do we deprecate it? What is that in us that suggests, like, that we can go it alone, or, I mean, even Parsifal, right? Like, I'm not great at mythology, but he goes out and does all of these quests, and then he can't enter alone, right? Isn't he sent away at the end to get...
MARK: yeah.
ELISE: a friend?
MARK: There's this myth, which has been, I think, really acutely exacerbated in the modern world and in the West. And you know, it's interesting, continents, cultures like people have personalities and they have strengths and shadows and weaknesses. And when I did my book on community more together than Alone, I really kind of discovered this. And obviously just like people, we wanna learn from the be the better angels of every culture as well as every person. But in the West, we really pioneered, especially in America, this depth of sense of self, and obviously that has a lot of wonderful things to it, but along with it has come this myth or misperception that we can be self reliant, that we don't need anybody, that's a deficiency, and everything I've ever learned in my life has been we're interdependent.
ELISE: Yes.
MARK: No one can live your life for you, but no one can do it alone, and in fact it's a modern psychological disease to think you can do it alone, and of course it's not by accident therefore that the shadow of that self, That kind of pernicious reliance on self is narcissism. That is a modern psychological disease that is rampant in America.
ELISE: Yeah.
MARK: other countries, but so rampant and, you take, like say in Africa, Africa, the sense of community and extended family is so built in. I remember visiting South Africa a decade, years ago and befriended this wonderful man so closely and we shared so much and I learned so much from him about African culture and there the strength is that communal sense. They struggle with a sense of self. So there is such a sense of extended community that as far as I can tell, there may be one, but I haven't run across, in the whole, all the different languages in Africa, there is no word for orphan.
ELISE: Wow. Wow.
MARK: There's no need for it. If a parent dies, the child is assumed in the tribal family. Isn't that incredible? I've had students who are Asian, I remember one student who became an architect by coming to this country and the pressure that she went through to leave and come to school here as if it were an utter betrayal and how she was saying how even in Chinese culture your individual name comes last.
ELISE: Yeah.
MARK: You have a clan name, then you have a family name, then you have a parent name, and then finally you're there. And we're the other way around. You know, you write all the monarchs, king Henry, right? We don't even have a last name.
ELISE: No, it's true. And this idea of highly individuated sort of cells, I mean, you think about that in the human body and that's like what can metastasize into cancer, right? In reading Niobe Way's book, which is about boys and this culture of boyness, boyhood that infects us all. But she shares these stories throughout, some from perpetrators of mass violence and their diaries and their notes. And it is loneliness, Mark. It is like the rotting core of loneliness and feeling like nobody cares and nobody's paying attention not to justify in any way the action, but we're watching it happen, the sort of metastasizing nature of our culture.
MARK: I think so strongly that violence is a desperate attempt to feel. The need to feel and to be connected doesn't go away. And it's interesting that in our culture, films are so violent, and when you step back, what are they doing? They're relentlessly, literally opening people.
ELISE: Mm.
MARK: that doesn't go away, and when we don't, when we go back to friendship and being true and opening our heart and being vulnerable, I mean, I think if we want to reduce violence in the world, one of the first things we can do is to face what is ours to face.
ELISE: Yeah, one of the beautiful metaphors, I love this. I want to take this on the road that you use in the book for friendship is, I'm going to butcher this slightly, you can correct me, but that we're the boat. It's our job to get across the pond or the lake or the stream, but our friends are the oars. Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think it gets to that idea that, yes, like, nobody can live your life for you, and nobody can be your sole structure or source of support, but friends are, I don't want to say they're tools, but they are I guess sources of strength, can help you in those moments, I guess, stay on course. Can you talk about that a little bit?
MARK: Yeah, I think friends are needed companions for the things that no one can do but us. I can't remember if it's in this book or another one, but there's this amazing. In Chinese mythology, there's a mythic bird called the chien, C H I E N, and it is a bird that has one wing and one eye, and its sole destiny is to find another chein so that together they can see and fly.
ELISE: mm, beautiful.
MARK: I'm a real student of word origins, not because I'm a word geek, but because words tend to erode over time, like stones or bark. And so I found more often than not, if I can go back to a more original definition, it's more whole and more helpful. And so one of the great words that I love: honor. The original definition of honor is to keep what is true in view.
ELISE: Wow. Beautiful.
MARK: Isn't that great? I just love that. And that is a practice of friendship. What we're talking about, more than a tool, if I'm struggling and you're my friend, you help keep what you know to be true about me in view until I can see it again.
ELISE: Mm.
MARK: And obviously friendship is so much centered on our friendship with each other, but it's also in a knitted fabric with befriending life. Not just understanding life, it's not just conceptual, because we befriend things differently than we conceive things. So how do we befriend life? How do we stay in conversation? I think three of the, if you will, in this, as we're talking about it, the oldest kind of sources or friends in the universe are presence, meaning, and relationship. How do we befriend that? What's our practice of Keeping what we know to be true about those u so that it helps us be fully here, it's not even about accomplishing things. It's about inhabiting things.
ELISE: Yeah. You write very obliquely about your family, and I know that you've written about your family in other books, but you write about how in not receiving or in only receiving conditional love, you decided in many ways to do the opposite, to be unconditional love in the world and thinking about the friendships that you've generated. And I love the way that you mourn some of them and or visit them in that way, but this sounds maybe like a pedestrian question, but how have you built intimacy or made friends? Because I think many people are lonely, siloed, and don't even know where to begin.
MARK: Well, I think one thing and again for there's no how to but for me when I look at my life, I think one, thing is that we always talk about are you an introvert or an extrovert? I think that I'm an introvert that decided a long time ago to be an introvert everywhere, and not just in my room.
ELISE: That's good.
MARK: and then in my, cancer journey, I was blessed to have people from all walks of life, formal and informal, all traditions, offer me some kind of help and love and care. And so when I was awoke on the other side and still blessed to be here, I was not, and this is 40 years later, I'm still not wise enough to know what worked and what didn't. I felt like I was called to be a student, to believe in everything, and to be a friend to everything. And it's affected all my work and my teaching and all my books, because as a student of all paths, I welcome all traditions. And all kinds of questions and feelings and stories without having to choose any, without having to make one higher or lower. In making friends, I was asked a similar question by this a woman who was, In an interview I did with a woman who was editing, a younger woman, very insightful in a journal in London, and she asked about her generation being an epidemic of loneliness, and and did I have any advice, and I don't really give advice, but what came to me in my heart was, from my cancer journey is, you don't interview ambulance drivers. You take the first one that comes along.
ELISE: Yes.
MARK: And if you're lonely, get out of the house. Don't read alone. Read in a cafe. Even if you never say hello to another person. Be where life is. And even if you have an interaction with someone and it's not pleasant, it's still an interaction with someone who's alive. We have this other perversion in our American world that, you know, the inalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence, and you know, as a social contract, it is the most remarkable in the history of the world, but it's become a distorted code to live by. Like, we're not entitled to happiness. We're not entitled to a trouble free existence, we're privileged to live the entire human experience. When we insist on sorting out and having all these prerequisites to whether we even try, we just insulate ourselves further.
ELISE: Yeah. And I can't speak for a younger generation, but I can relate to this as myself. Although I hope that I've moved past this or I work really hard to move past this of some sort of value check or as you said, like interviewing ambulance drivers to make sure that there's a perfect Venn diagram of thoughts and beliefs. And that's not a very interesting thing way to live, nor is it practical. And what's needed now more than ever is not more siloing and more sameness, a recognition like we're all here together and people you might not choose are still going to be here too. And so how do you get intimate or close rather than creating more separation?
MARK: Well, I think, you know, that some of the oldest ways are asking for stories and asking questions and one of the paradoxes is that if I can become my true self then I'm open to everything. That's not me.
ELISE: Yes.
MARK: One of the things that we struggle with in our modern world now is when fear governs us, then I or governs me then I look for what will confirm what I already know and that that's not learning I, I want everything I don't know, which is also one of the reasons I've been able to be prolific, because there's a lot I don't know.
ELISE: Yes. Yeah, and I think if you can operate from this place too, of one, believing that people are inherently good and that people make decisions based on how they understand or perceive the world and what makes sense to them, it opens up an opportunity even if there isn't an alignment to at least be present with each other. I mean, being in Montana, some of my dad's friends are very conservative. My dad is not conservative. And it used to bother me, like, well, how could you, which he thought was kind of a funny question. He's like, I really like that person. don't like their politics necessarily, his inclination was not to exclude, which is, I think, how so many of us run our lives, the politics of exclusion. And I don't know, friendship or relatedness or caring or companionship feels like some sort of antidote or definitely even a better place to try to understand each other and maybe change, well, we don't really change each other's minds, right?
MARK: Well, I think even that phrase "we change our mind," we think of it as changing our view but to actually change one's mind is transformation. I think William James, the philosopher said, many people think they're thinking when they're only rearranging their prejudices.
ELISE: Mmm.
MARK: And I have a friend who's a sculptor who said, you know, I fear my beliefs are just the thoughts I keep thinking.
ELISE: Yes.
MARK: And so to be an honest conversation, really true from a place of not knowing, we grow and support each other in becoming who we are now. And we're always changing. In the story of Moses, in the Old Testament, you know he parts the Red Sea, that's a pretty big deal, and he gets over there and leaves everybody, and then he goes up to talk to God, and the first thing he does when he sees the burning bush and feels this presence is, he says, well, who are you? And God supposedly answers, I am becoming. And as we look at that, in a way it's a koan, because on the one hand he can say, well, he's saying, that's my identity, we are, and therefore all of you, we are, the God in us is always that in us which is always growing. There's no arrival, we're constantly becoming. And the other way to read it is that God is saying, Hey, I'm not even finished yet. I'm still becoming. I'll let you know.
ELISE: Yeah. I think that's right. I think both are right.
MARK: Yeah.
ELISE: Oh, I love that story. I loved too, and then as I was thinking about it, I was like, I think this is in Mark's book, but if it isn't wasn't in your book, then it belongs in your book. But I think it was your book. It was, I think, a chapter about sort of those really terrible times that can be so isolating when you're having an experience that nobody else is having simultaneously, death, loss. And I think you were talking about someone whose best friend came to him after his son had died, and everyone was avoiding and steering clear and scared or unsure how to navigate. And this neighbor or someone he didn't know well sent him a note or dropped a note in his box that said, I would like to go on a walk with you and your son sometime.
MARK: That was a professor who lost his son and a colleague of his who, yeah, who did that and they, they became best friends from that day forward. And I think that gets to the heart of what compassion, you know, compassion literally means to be with, to become one with. And so when we have compassion, we're actually saying, you know what, I'm going to walk with you in your pain and your joy. This isn't like a spectator sport. No, I'm here. I'm in. And I write about in the book, when my wife, Susan and I lost, we don't have kids, but we have these furry little animals, these dogs that have become our dog child. And Mira, who was a previous dog that was really my wife's soulmate. And we were stunned how the deep grief we were in when we lost Mira. I mean, we knew how much we loved her, but we weren't prepared for what that opened in us. And we had a couple that we were close with who couldn't go there with us. Wouldn't. Couldn't. I think wouldn't more than couldn't. Through their own fear. And that really wound up ending our friendship because They tended to pathologize our grief rather than say, Wow, your grief scares us, but I'm here.
ELISE: Mm.
MARK: And then we could have said, well, you know, it scares us too, and that would have brought us closer.
ELISE: Hmm.
MARK: And, you know, Valerie Coeur?
ELISE: Yeah. Yeah. We're school moms together.
MARK: Oh! Oh! Well, so, you know, Valerie, in her first book, she has an insight of saying, you know, you don't have to know someone to grieve with them. You grieve with them to know them, which is old soul wisdom, and and so yeah, we weren't asking them to be perfect, we were asking them to be with us. And when they couldn't, it was more like, well, we're here when things get back to normal. And you say, what are you talking about? This is what life is. There is no normal. This is now part of who we are and if you can't go there or even, you know, be honest about it, I don't know how we can proceed.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, and in your book, you're honest to about, I don't know if you would call it the graveyard, but there's that passage of the book where you go and you're your first wife is there. And you talk about this bridge that you two can't quite reconstruct. And you write about some of your other friends or the shades of the friendships that are in that garden. Can you talk about that? Because I think we don't really honor friendship loss and loss of relationship.
MARK: I think I do call it the garden visit. Everyone, we each have a garden in our heart and everyone we love lives there, whether we can stay in relationship out here or not. And I think one of my first... yes, with my first wife, but also my very first dear friend, we were friends for almost 30 years. We met in college and over the years it became clear that, you know, he had a real rage problem and we didn't live in the same city, so it was very easy every time something would happen that was hurtful, I would say he's had a bad week things aren't going well for him. Much like how abusive Partners make excuses, but then at one point it became very clear that love me as he did, he intended to hurt me. And when I realized that I couldn't stay then befriending myself, I couldn't stay in that friendship. But that doesn't mean that I stopped loving him. I think it's been almost 30 years since we've been friends. I still know his birthday. He was a jazz musician. There's times I'm at a concert, even now, and I'll go, oh, he would have loved that. But then looking in the world, nothing's changed. So that doesn't mean I call him up and try to make it work again. That means I can honor that there's no reason that that doesn't still live in my heart, in the garden of my heart. This brings up an important notion about memory and I learned this was powerful for me when I learned this during my cancer journey, I was in a dream group but that , the real meaning of "remember" is to put the members back together, to make whole. So a lot of times we go back in time to a special time or a special moment and nostalgia is wanting to go back there, as if there's something there that we lost. And the true value of memory is to touch that moment and see where it lives or is dormant in me or you now going forward. That was one form or expression of it, not the only. And that touches on, I think what friendship helps us remember is that life is always where we are. We suffer greatly this, and it has always been, but more so in the modern world, this menacing assumption that life is other than where we are. If it's over there, if I could just get over there, even with a dream, or if I could just accomplish this dream, then. And I think one of the things that almost dying taught me was that there's no there, there's only here.
ELISE: Yeah, right? It's true. And, yeah, we spend our lives convinced that once we're there, everything here will be resolved, or better, or fixed, I do the same thing. It's very how do you, what's the antidote to that? I know you don't offer advice, but...
MARK: It's not an antidote, but this starts to look into how we befriend ourselves. So I very much believe like we've identified that, so we'd say, gee, I'd rather not do that. But you know what? You and I will because we're human. So the practice is how to recognize it when it happens, and course correct. So the being in us is infinite, but the human is so finite. So you know, every day, and everything we talk about here, so friendship with ourselves, with life, with each other, honoring what is true, keeping what is true in view. I'm committed to being wholehearted, but there are days I'm half hearted because I'm in pain, or I'm confused, or I'm afraid, or I simply forgot. And so, you know, friends help us remember what matters. Friends help us see what is true and return there. And so that, I think, is one of the challenges, is not with judgment, but with discernment. Oh, oh, today, huh, I was going over there a little too much today. Hmm, let's bring it back. Or, today I gave, you know, by opening my heart to you, I gave myself away. And tomorrow I overreacted and I cut myself off. Okay. You know, when I was a boy, my father, who was a master woodworker, and he built a sailboat when I was a boy that I spent a lot of time on, a 30 foot catch. But when I was eight or nine, he would put me on the tiller, the steering wheel of the sailboat, especially in a fog, because he must have sensed I had a real focus. And the directional compass, he'd say, I want you to go this way, you know, northwest or whatever it was. And this was a lesson that didn't show itself till decades later. I always knew that when you do that, if you've ever done that, even when you're on course, the needles never stand still, you always have to go a little to the left, a little to the right to stay on course. Well, now decades later, that's a perfect metaphor for the practice of being a spirit in a body and time on Earth, of being a good friend. It's always about a little to the left, a little to the right. Course correct. There is no arrival. Here we are. I am becoming. I am becoming. And when we accept that, we have to love the journey. We have to love the journey because that's what it is to be here.
ELISE: yeah. No, that's beautiful. And I think to calibrating friendships, I feel this way with some of my closest friends, like sometimes when we go on a walk like I need them to be the container for me to... Often it works out sort of perfectly where it's like on the way out It's they go and then on the way back I go or vice versa. Or some walks are just like I need more or they need more, but I can also think of the friendships that have waned over time when it's like I can't hold all of this for you with no reciprocity or an unwillingness to move. I'm sure you've had that experience with friends, too, where it's like, wow, we're still here, or we're back.
MARK: Yeah. And it's interesting and I'll just share with you. Just this morning I wrote a poem, or a poem came and I recorded it that speaks to some of what we're talking about. It's called The Yellow Cup. The Yellow Cup: to truly behold another slows the waterfall into a great teacher of how to let go. To truly listen, let's the urgency slip like a knife from our hand. To stay longer than is needed allows us to remember that nothing that matters can be stolen. I know this because of how you stayed and listened me back to myself.
ELISE: mm, beautiful.
MARK: Thank you.
ELISE: beautiful. I don't know if it was a therapist or who said this to me, but I feel like it's so helpful. Like, do you feel complete? Like at the end of some sort of are you complete? Do you feel complete? That sort of complete unburdening or complete return? Well, Mark, thank you for standing for friendship. It's hard, right, to be in relationship, but it's so...
MARK: it's so beautiful. Like what else would we do?
ELISE: I know. That's the thing. It's like, absent that, what's there, right?
