Quote

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.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Guides
Befriend
Sweet
Lodged
Alive
Awakened
Moment
Ache
Moving
Sweetness
Moments
Guide
Holds
Moves

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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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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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A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it
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I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
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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.
Mark Nepo
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The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
Mark Nepo
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All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
Mark Nepo
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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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The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
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As nature erodes the earth into magnificent forms, life through endless experience opens us further and further to the essence of what matters. Each time I've been opened further, the way I experience life and receive things has changed.
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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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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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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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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
Mark Nepo
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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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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.
Mark Nepo
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Joy in what we do is not an added feature it is a sign of deep health.
Mark Nepo
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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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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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.
Mark Nepo