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To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Softly
Lean
Willingness
Listen
Changed
Hear

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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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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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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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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Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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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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I was a very driven person, wanting to help and to do good, hopefully to write and teach in a meaningful way - wanting to make change. And I discovered humbly that life was changing me.
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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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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
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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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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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Perhaps the hardest thing I've learned, and still struggle with, is that I don't have to be finished in order to be whole.
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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
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Before we can count we are taught to be grateful for what others do. As we are broken open by our experience, we begin to be grateful for what is, and if we live long enough and deep enough and authentically enough, gratitude becomes a way of life.
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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
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The real & lasting practice for each of us is to remove what obstructs us so we can be who 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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