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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

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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.
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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.
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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
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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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Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
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I would rather be fooled than not believe.
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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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In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
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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 resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.
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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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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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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
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When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
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I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
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Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone.
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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.
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