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Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Humans
Keeps
First
Bird
Heart
Singing
Way
Song
Keep
Wakefulness
Light
Destination
Firsts
Birds
Human
Sign

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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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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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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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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.
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When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.
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The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
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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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What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
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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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When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.
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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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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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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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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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The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.
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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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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
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