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When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Keep
Right
Sorting
Life
Choosing
Spend
Wrong
Rather
Living
Energy

More quotes by 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.
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We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.
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There are many ways that we grow, but there are two major ways: We shed what no longer works, or we're broken open. If we're unwilling to shed, then we will be broken open. Through shedding, we are worn down, just as nature is eroded to its beauty. I think that through suffering, human beings are eroded to our beauty.
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Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
Mark Nepo
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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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I was a very driven person, wanting to help and to do good, hopefully to write and teach in a meaningful way - wanting to make change. And I discovered humbly that life was changing me.
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As nature erodes the earth into magnificent forms, life through endless experience opens us further and further to the essence of what matters. Each time I've been opened further, the way I experience life and receive things has changed.
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My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so.
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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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When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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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.
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Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
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All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
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Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.
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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.
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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
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