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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
Lean
Willingness
Listen
Changed
Hear
Softly

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
Mark Nepo
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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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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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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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…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)
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Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
Mark Nepo
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Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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
Mark Nepo
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The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
Mark Nepo