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
Water
Isolation
Others
Breaks
Stories
Listening
Remember
Listen
Enough
Name
Soothed
Kind
Break
Fever
Names
Remembering
Common
Closely

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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.
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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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I've learned that loving your self requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world - our own self worth.
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What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
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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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The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
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When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living 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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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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I would want to affirm how rare and magnificent and messy it is to be alive, how there is really nothing between us and life, though so many things get in the way, and how our heart is the strongest muscle and resource we have.
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The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.
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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
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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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To listen also means to stay in relationship, the central challenge of our time, and this requires us to constantly minimize whatever stands between us and life.
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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.
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Mysteriously, as elusive as it is, this moment--where the eye is what it sees, where the heart is what it feels--this moment shows us that what is real is sacred
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