Quote

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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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Change
Way
Hardened
Heat
Shape
Shapes
Beginning
Break
Possible

More quotes by 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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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.
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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No amount of thinking can stop thinking.
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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Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.
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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Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
Mark Nepo
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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
Mark Nepo
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Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
Mark Nepo
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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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Truth is a seed hidden in the days until watered by what life brings us.
Mark Nepo