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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

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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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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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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.
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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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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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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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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.
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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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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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A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it
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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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We travel so far only to land where we are. We imagine other lives, only to meet who we are. We seek out love in special ways, only to find everyone is special. Humbly, we can't avoid this journey.
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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
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When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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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
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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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When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.
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I would rather be fooled than not believe.
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