Quote

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
Firsts
Birds
Human
Sign
Humans
Keeps
First
Bird
Heart
Singing
Way
Song
Keep
Wakefulness
Light
Destination

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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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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.
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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
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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 life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
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Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.
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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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When the sweet ache of being alive, lodged between who you are and who you will be, is awakened, befriend this moment. It will guide you. Its sweetness is what holds you. Its ache is what moves you on.
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Joy in what we do is not an added feature it is a sign of deep health.
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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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I would rather be fooled than not believe.
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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 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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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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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
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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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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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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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