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

More quotes by 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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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
Mark Nepo
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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.
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 devote ourselves to the life at hand, the rest will follow. For life, it seems, reveals itself through those willing to live. Anything else, no matter how beautiful, is just advertising.
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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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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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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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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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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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Listening reminds me how precious it is to be here at all. And so, listening is the first step to peace, both inner peace and the compassion that connects people.
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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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.
Mark Nepo
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The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.
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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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