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We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Facts
Another
Persons
Person
Everything
Anticipate
Way
Prepared
Never
Wall
Life
Fact

More quotes by 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 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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We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given.
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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.
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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.
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No amount of thinking can stop thinking.
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If I dare to hear you I will feel you like the sun And grow in your direction.
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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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When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
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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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
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A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it
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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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The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
Mark Nepo
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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
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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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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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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