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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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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Learned
Struggle
Order
Stills
Still
Whole
Hardest
Thing
Finished
Perhaps

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.
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We need to meet, embrace and work with what we're given. For what we want and what we're given often serve two different gods. And how we respond to their meeting determines our path.
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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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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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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 would rather be fooled than not believe.
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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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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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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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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Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
Mark Nepo
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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
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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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.
Mark Nepo
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The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.
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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