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

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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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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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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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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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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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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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If I dare to hear you I will feel you like the sun And grow in your direction.
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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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Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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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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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
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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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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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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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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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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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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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