The Exquisite Risk: Daring To Live An Authentic Life, written by Mark Nepo, is a book that I am reading for the second time and can easily imagine picking up again and again for the rest of my life.   The book reads like one long poem: a poem that leaves me pausing as much as  reading in order to take in its beauty and richness; a poem that for me profoundly elucidates the essence of Nonviolent Communication.  I often begin my workshops with the excerpt below. 

"At any moment, if quiet enough and open enough, we can drop into the fabric of existence in which everything, even pain, has its vivid signature of energy that we call, at different times, truth or beauty or peace.

It is from this ground of being that we know and feel the unseeable web of connection between all life. It is from here that we see more clearly, below the tensions of our wants and disappointments.

The exquisite risk that St. John speaks of is twofold: the risk to still our own house so that Spirit can come through, so that we might drop into the vital nature of things, and the risk to then let that beautiful knowing inform our days.

The risk is exquisite because it holds open the veil before which is hell-on-earth and behind which is heaven-on-earth. For without knowing and feeling our connection to all life, the patterns of experience seem to make no sense.  From within that knowing connection, though, we can feel the tug and pull of everything alive.  This does not eliminate pain, but distribute its acuteness, the way a net softens the impact of a fall.  Without this feeling of connection, we bump through life blindly, startled by the suddenness of things.  With it, we can place ourselves in a landscape teeming with meaning, just waiting to be lived into.

The exquisite risk is a doorway, then, that lets us experience the extraordinary in the ordinary.  It is always near.  Truth opens it.  Love opens it.  Humility opens it.  And if stubborn, pain will intensify to open it.  Sadness can open it, if felt to its center.  Silence and time open it, if we enter them and don't just watch them.

In the same way that watching the surface of water can be mesmerizing and yet if does not reveal what waits below, the busyness and drama of the world can keep us from going below the surface of the very moments that are ours to enter.  In my life, I have known truth and beauty and peace to be ever-present companions that I often sit beside, bemoaning their absence."

-Mark Nepo.  The Exquisite Risk: Daring To Live An Authentic Life

And on, and on the exquisiteness of the writing goes, leading the patient reader into the richness of each moment.

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