Quote

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.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Experience
Presence
Love
Instruments
Like
Two
Eternal
Burns
Earth
Listening
Listened
Find
Turn
Wood
Every
Fire
Holding
Believe
Powerful
Woods
Always
Turns
Held
Time

More quotes by 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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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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If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.
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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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I was a very driven person, wanting to help and to do good, hopefully to write and teach in a meaningful way - wanting to make change. And I discovered humbly that life was changing me.
Mark Nepo
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If we devote ourselves to the life at hand, the rest will follow. For life, it seems, reveals itself through those willing to live. Anything else, no matter how beautiful, is just advertising.
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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul's energy as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.
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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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We are love. But in an everyday setting we have to make choices. We have limits. We can love everyone and we can't love everyone.
Mark Nepo
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I would want to affirm how rare and magnificent and messy it is to be alive, how there is really nothing between us and life, though so many things get in the way, and how our heart is the strongest muscle and resource we have.
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.
Mark Nepo
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I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling.
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When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
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Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
Mark Nepo
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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
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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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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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
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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
Mark Nepo