Quote

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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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Stories
Listening
Remember
Listen
Soothed
Enough
Name
Fever
Kind
Break
Remembering
Names
Common
Closely
Water
Isolation
Others
Breaks

More quotes by 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.
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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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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
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The pain of life is pure salt no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of thingsstop being a glass. Become a lake.
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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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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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Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
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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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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.
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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 keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)
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Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.
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When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
Mark Nepo
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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.
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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.
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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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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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I would rather be fooled than not believe.
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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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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.
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