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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Opens
Whatever
Important

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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.
Mark Nepo
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Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
Mark Nepo
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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
Mark Nepo
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To journey without being changed, is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journeying is to be a pilgrim.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
Mark Nepo
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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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.
Mark Nepo
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Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
Mark Nepo
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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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What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
Mark Nepo
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The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.
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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas.
Mark Nepo
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Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live.
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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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.
Mark Nepo
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Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
Mark Nepo
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If I dare to hear you I will feel you like the sun And grow in your direction.
Mark Nepo