Mark Nepo’s authentic voice has been a soul companion to many, and he has been a longtime friend of OmTimes, gracing our cover seven times to date. He also received our Life Achievement Award in 2023. With over a million copies sold, he has inspired readers and seekers all over the world with his #1 New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual teacher.” His work is widely accessible and used by many, and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Mark Nepo: The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life
He spoke with us at length about his latest book, which has just been released, The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life; a deep conversation that we offer you here.
OMTIMES: What led you to write The Fifth Season?
MARK NEPO: As the years go by, the question for each of us becomes more and more real: What does it mean to age? Despite the limitations that come as the body wears down, there are many gifts to inhabit by aging. For, in contrast to the many ways our modern world denigrates and pathologizes aging, the field that opens after decades of living is replete with vast gifts and new horizons. In truth, I have always used my own experience as a personal case study to explore the common passages we all must face. Since I’m now in my seventies, I feel compelled to explore the rhythms of aging in the second half of life. In many ways, this book is a natural inquiry for me.
OMTIMES: Please explain what you mean by the Fifth Season?
MARK NEPO: In Chinese lore, there is the fifth season, that time in late summer when the glare is gone and only the color of things as they are can reach us. It takes all the seasons to become this bare. All the turmoil to be worn of our edges. All the loss to hold on to nothing. All the seasons to wear our hands open. And so, the fifth season of late light marks what the Chinese call the Heavenly Pivot, a turning point in life, a time of integration and transformation that helps us make sense of our experience. All seasons lead to this season, all experiences to this understanding of experience. Without exception, we each must face living and dying from the inside of the one life we are given. But we can share the journey, which is the purpose of this book — to be a companion in your effort to make the Heavenly Pivot into the fifth season of your life.
OMTIMES: Early in the book, you use the metaphor of a meteor hurtling toward Earth. Can you unpack what you mean by this?
MARK NEPO: The way a meteor enters the Earth’s atmosphere is a compelling metaphor for the inevitable process of aging. Consider that the more a meteor burns up, the brighter it gets. As it enters the atmosphere, more and more of it burns away and flakes off. Until there is only light, this seems to be our journey as a spirit in a body over a lifetime. As we hurtle through the years, we are worn out of all that doesn’t matter. As experience wears us down and burns us up, we grow brighter. Until death, we are all light. And so, by its very nature, the second half of life is integrative in a way that discards all that is not essential—if we don’t resist it.
Now, none of this is easy, though it is essential, and the “flaking off” is difficult in the physical realm for each of us. I recently recovered from fusion back surgery, the whole journey taking almost a year. It was humbling and painful and, at the same time, incredibly healing and clarifying in how it has made life ever more precious.
Ultimately, if faced tenderly and truthfully, aging is, as the Jungian analyst Helen Luke describes, a journey into simplicity. This feels somewhat familiar to me because, being a poet and a cancer survivor, I have spent a lifetime looking for the simple seams of life that reveal what is essential and enduring.
To be clear, the goal in facing aging is not to beat it, or duck it, or run from it, or even to reframe it, or minimize it. The goal in facing aging is to live more fully the closer we get to death, so we can die with no feeling left unfelt, and no voice of life left unheard, and no thing in this world left unloved. Not surprisingly, this is also a good way to live.
OMTIMES: What are Reliable Truths, and how do they help us ground and hold us up as we live our lives?
MARK NEPO: Every day, we wake and put our feet on the ground and make our way. We often take for granted that the earth beneath us is steadfast and reliable. It holds us up wherever we go, regardless of the forks in the road and the choices we face. Similarly, there are reliable truths that we often take for granted, which ground us and hold us up as we live our lives.
And just as there are foundational stories that remind us of who we are, there are foundational truths that remind us of the nature of life and living. What, then, are the reliable truths that you can return to that ground you and hold you up? For me, there are several, but let me name two:
* All things are connected. From the beginning of time, each spiritual tradition has offered its own variation of the worldview that everything is connected to everything else. And each tradition offers practices that help us discover and sustain those connections as part of our practice of inner health. The foundation of all art forms holds the same premise. As a poet, the life of these connections has always appeared through the web of metaphor—our capacity to see how one thing is, in essence, like another, and how our strength comes from the Common Center that metaphor reveals.
* The kinship found in kindness. In the tangle that is the human journey, kindness is the antidote to separation and isolation. The mind can take us only so far. So, when confused or entangled or stuck in your mind, simply give to anyone and in any direction—and you will be returned to the web of all connections. I learned this quite by accident, while struggling with a decision, stymied and frustrated, when a friend called in sudden need. I dropped everything and gave it to him. To my surprise, I returned to my problem with a much clearer mind and found my way.
In real ways, our reliable truths serve as markers on the trail of life. They remind us that, no matter where the roads of experience may take us, we ultimately reside in the ground of what matters. What, then, is one reliable truth you can return to when things grow difficult and confusing?
OM TIMES: How do you describe living a creative life as we age? Is it about creative projects, writing, or painting? Or is it how we live and approach life?
MARK NEPO: Our life is a work of art. The canvas for this evolving work of art is our true self. Part of aging is reflecting on and learning from the history and evolution of our true self. How we might live a creative life is what The Fifth Season explores. This does not mean that we have to strive to create great art. More deeply, we’re asked to hold our individual lives as works of art that, inhabited fully, will bring into being. If our life is the canvas, then truth, grace, authenticity, and simplicity are the brushes we paint with and are painted with. The watercolorist and critic John Ruskin said, “The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” This kind of devotion is central to how we age.
OM TIMES: Why do you feel living a creative life is essential as we age?
MARK NEPO: Creativity never leaves us. It’s call simply keeps changing. And more than what we create, we are created and shaped by how much we give of ourselves to what we are called to. It is an inner corollary to Newton’s third law of motion that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction: For every engagement, there’s an equal and returning engagement from life. For every wholehearted leaning in, life leans back into us, bringing us more alive. Just as we need oxygen to breathe, we need the creative flow to keep our hearts alive. This is especially important as we age. To live a creative life sustains our inner health. The way a fire needs wood to burn, the soul needs care to give off its light. This, too, is essential to living a creative life. It doesn’t really matter what you care about. We must care to both survive and thrive. So, what is your practice of caring?
OM TIMES: You offer what you call “Your Profile in Aging” in the book. Please speak more about this.
MARK NEPO: Before we explore the second half of life in depth, I invite readers to become more intimate with their own journey. So they can relate to what we explore in a personal way that might be relevant and useful in how we live going forward. Toward that end, I offer a profile in aging by which one can better discern who they are and where they have been while honoring what has shaped them along the way. This profile in aging is comprised of portals of reflection to help give context and perspective to the life lived thus far, all with the aim to better inhabit the fifth season of life. And there are journal questions and conversation questions at the end of each portal. I offer entry points such as “Things You’ve Had to Put Down,” ”Things You’ve Needed to Build Again,” and “Your Autobiography as a Listener.”
QUESTION: Can you talk more about the constricting and expanding rhythms of aging that you explore?
MARK NEPO: As we age, we experience the gravity of years, which naturally causes erosion in our physicality and reach in the world. We begin to experience the constriction of limitation in different directions. This is inevitable. At the same time, the bareness of being that the years introduce us to is expansive. While outwardly, we experience limitation and constriction, inwardly, we experience a greater depth and breadth in being alive. The longer we live, the greater the surface of our soul.
And so, aging requires a different set of skills. Not to turn from the difficulties or to reframe or rationalize them. But to balance the constriction with expansion and the limitations with the grace of simplicity. We are challenged to face life in both directions and inhabit the corridor of aliveness between them. In truth, the expansion of being and the grace of simplicity help us to meet the limitations and constriction of getting older. How we might do this is central to what this book explores.
OM TIMES: You write about a shift in horizons that comes with aging. What do you mean by this?
MARK NEPO: One of the ever-present challenges of aging is to accept that many of the ways we have engaged the world—that worked for decades—no longer work. As we enter the vast continent of aging, we are called to shift the way we perceive the world and how we move through it.
A penetrating example is how, for most of our lives, we are taught to look forward, to imagine horizons, and then go after them. Yet, along the way, love and suffering make us realize that the gift of life is always where we are. Still, we work toward dreams and goals, which we set ahead of us like mental horizons, hoping for some eventual reward.
Eventually, as we age, the effort and habit of looking forward is no longer life-giving, simply because the years ahead of us keep diminishing. There is less “forward” there to work toward. We are ushered, then, into a shift of horizons, which can be disorienting. Our first reflex is to turn around and look to our past. This is the horizon of nostalgia. But nostalgia only glorifies the past, which doesn’t help us live in the present.
Inevitably, we are challenged to neither look solely forward nor solely backward, but to make our elder-horizon all encompassing; that is, to broaden and deepen the extent of our horizon in all directions so it can confirm the foundational truth of a lifetime. So the import of a lifetime can help us live more fully, more honestly, more deeply—Now!
OMTIMES: One of the most important aspects of staying healthy throughout life seems to be friendships, and staying in relationships with people as we age. In your book, You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: The Power of Friendship, you explore the deep value of connection. How has cultivating meaningful friendships enriched the ‘Fifth Season’ of your life, and what insights have those relationships offered about aging and longevity?
MARK NEPO: Thank you for bringing up my book on friendship. The central truth of that book, and, indeed, the reason I wrote it, is that friendship isn’t an accessory to a good life; it’s the foundation. For friendship augments our longevity, but not just in years added to life, but in life added to years. In laughter, in depth, in the extraordinary revealed in the ordinary, it is the threads of friendship that give this Fifth Season its warmth and its steadying weight.
The root of the word friendship means “the place of high safety.” The restorative power of friendship throughout the ages comes from reinvigorating our ability to listen, share our experience, not just our conclusions, and to take the risk to help each other. When we can devote ourselves to these timeless skills, we are returned to the place of high safety that exists between us. When we can listen beyond our self-absorption, we can find the common ground where there is no cross-purpose between us.
Throughout my life, friendships have been a safety net, a mirror, a challenge, and an ongoing celebration. But in my own journey into the fifth season, I’ve noticed something deeper: friendships aren’t just something I have, they’re something I practice. There’s a kind of deliberate tending that’s required now—showing up without an agenda, listening more intently, being more honest, and allowing myself to be seen, even in the parts that aren’t polished.
One of the most enriching discoveries of this season of life is that the friends who’ve walked with me for years, and even the new friendships I’ve engaged in, have become repositories of each other’s life story. We help each other remember who we are when we forget. They remind me of my capacity, my growth, my stumbles, and my truth. And in return, I do the same for them.
After forty years, my oldest friend, Robert, took my hand while we were having coffee, and said, “I didn’t give you one thing you didn’t already have when we met. We just warmed it open with love and truth until we blossomed into ourselves.” This is what friendship can do.
And to anyone reading this who feels distant from that kind of connection—it’s never too late to begin. That’s another truth I’ve learned: the power of friendship isn’t just in who you turn to—it’s in how you choose to connect.
OM TIMES: What is your hope for anyone engaging with this book?
MARK NEPO: I confess, very simply, that it is humbling to age and exciting to be fully here. After so many years, I feel like a man who has been turned inside out by life, and this has made me a student of the inside of everything. I think this is the journey of aging: to become a student of the inside of everything. And all along, I have worked to convey what I keep learning from the inside of everything. For what I’ve discovered, there seems to be the blessing of life. I think, as we age, we meet in this inner field of presence, where there’s very little left in the way. My hope is that the journey within these pages will help those entering the second half of life make the Heavenly Pivot into the fifth season of their life, filled with tenderness and light.
Let me leave you with two recent poems that come from my stepping into the continent of aging:
ALL IT SEEMS
At dinner on a Saturday,
the sun flooding all the
tables. So nice to come
out and be with others.
The older woman butter-
ing her husband’s bread.
The little girl running
about her table with a
balloon.
We, listening into the
long friendship of years
while sipping soup.
The one room caught
in the gloaming seems
like the antechamber
to Heaven.
Or is this Heaven, when
caught in the light, we
realize, there’s nowhere
else to go.
SUDDEN VOW
After years of see and stutter,
the words now write me.
Sometimes whipping me like
a flag. Sometimes billowing
me like a sheet.
So, if you see me standing in
the parking lot without a hat,
it’s not always cause I’ve lost
my way.
Often, it’s because the empire
of light has pulled back its
veil for one long second
And I am mustering every
inch of my soul to bow
and receive.
For information about Mark’s upcoming events, webinars, and books, visit MarkNepo.com.
For more of Mark’s writings, check out his new Substack column.
Mark is pleased to announce the publication of his 27th book, The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life.
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