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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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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.
Mark Nepo
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The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.
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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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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No amount of thinking can stop thinking.
Mark Nepo
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What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
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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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.
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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When the sweet ache of being alive, lodged between who you are and who you will be, is awakened, befriend this moment. It will guide you. Its sweetness is what holds you. Its ache is what moves you on.
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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We need experience to release what matters.
Mark Nepo
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We are love. But in an everyday setting we have to make choices. We have limits. We can love everyone and we can't love everyone.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it
Mark Nepo
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To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
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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The many ways to listen have been reaching into me for years. To enter deep listening, I've had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning. I've had to lean into all I don't understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear.
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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When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul's energy as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.
Mark Nepo