Quote

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.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Keep
Listening
Many
Listen
Emptying
Years
Accepting
Lean
Way
Changed
Reaching
Hear
Enter
Ways
Opening
Learn
Beginning
Understand
Deep

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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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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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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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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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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.
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The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.
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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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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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If I dare to hear you I will feel you like the sun And grow in your direction.
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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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The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas.
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Try as we do to resist what we're given, this is the only doorway to truth. We waste too much time and energy denying or fighting where we find ourselves.
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Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live.
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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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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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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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The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
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Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
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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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