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Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Part
Human
Humans
Discover
Must
Challenge
Blessing
Challenges
True
Nature

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
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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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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
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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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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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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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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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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
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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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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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When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living 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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A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it
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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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Joy in what we do is not an added feature it is a sign of deep health.
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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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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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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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I've learned that loving your self requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world - our own self worth.
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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