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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

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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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The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
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In the way that I experience life, the physical world is really just the tip of the iceberg of reality. Whether it's trees or stones or water or animals or stars, everything has an ineffable interior quality.
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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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My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so.
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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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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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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 need experience to release what matters.
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We are love. But in an everyday setting we have to make choices. We have limits. We can love everyone and we can't love everyone.
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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 extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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What will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands? Tomorrow you could die, but today you are precious and rare and awake. Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.
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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
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The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.
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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
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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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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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When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul's energy as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.
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Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.
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