Quote

Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Feels
Breath
Long
Breaths
Way
Telling
Imagine
Withhold
Whatever
Unthinkable
Truth
Spiritually
Matter
Compelled
Feel
Holding

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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.
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Accepting what we're given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.
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Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.
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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.
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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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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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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
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No amount of thinking can stop thinking.
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In the way that I experience life, the physical world is really just the tip of the iceberg of reality. Whether it's trees or stones or water or animals or stars, everything has an ineffable interior quality.
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I would want to affirm how rare and magnificent and messy it is to be alive, how there is really nothing between us and life, though so many things get in the way, and how our heart is the strongest muscle and resource we have.
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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
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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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Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
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To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
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Try as we do to resist what we're given, this is the only doorway to truth. We waste too much time and energy denying or fighting where we find ourselves.
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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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