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It has always amazed and humbled me to how the risk to bloom can seem so insurmountable beforehand and so inevitably freeing once the threshold of suffering is crossed.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Amazed
Insurmountable
Seem
Humbled
Risk
Beforehand
Suffering
Freeing
Seems
Crossed
Always
Bloom
Threshold
Inevitably

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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.
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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
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No amount of thinking can stop thinking.
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What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
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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.
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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
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We travel so far only to land where we are. We imagine other lives, only to meet who we are. We seek out love in special ways, only to find everyone is special. Humbly, we can't avoid this journey.
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Accepting what we're given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.
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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.
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We need to meet, embrace and work with what we're given. For what we want and what we're given often serve two different gods. And how we respond to their meeting determines our path.
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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
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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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The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
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