Quote

Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Anything
Fishes
Mean
Mouths
Like
Surface
Air
Meet
Courage
Awe
Doesn
Breaking
Around
Fish

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling.
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For listening to the stories of others ... is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name.
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If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.
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Living is the original art. As a young man I wanted to be a poet and I learned along the way that I already was a poet.
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What will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands? Tomorrow you could die, but today you are precious and rare and awake. Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.
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All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
Mark Nepo
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The pain of life is pure salt no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of thingsstop being a glass. Become a lake.
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Listening reminds me how precious it is to be here at all. And so, listening is the first step to peace, both inner peace and the compassion that connects people.
Mark Nepo
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When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.
Mark Nepo
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Perhaps the hardest thing I've learned, and still struggle with, is that I don't have to be finished in order to be whole.
Mark Nepo
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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
Mark Nepo
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…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)
Mark Nepo
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Before we can count we are taught to be grateful for what others do. As we are broken open by our experience, we begin to be grateful for what is, and if we live long enough and deep enough and authentically enough, gratitude becomes a way of life.
Mark Nepo
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To listen also means to stay in relationship, the central challenge of our time, and this requires us to constantly minimize whatever stands between us and life.
Mark Nepo
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The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
Mark Nepo
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I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
Mark Nepo
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Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
Mark Nepo
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The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.
Mark Nepo
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I've learned that loving your self requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world - our own self worth.
Mark Nepo
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The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.
Mark Nepo