Quote

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.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Path
Respond
Often
Meeting
Given
Gods
Two
Meetings
Need
Determine
Different
Serve
Needs
Embrace
Work
Meet
Determines

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.
Mark Nepo
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…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)
Mark Nepo
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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
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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.
Mark Nepo
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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
Mark Nepo
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Truth is a seed hidden in the days until watered by what life brings us.
Mark Nepo
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What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
Mark Nepo
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We need experience to release what matters.
Mark Nepo
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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.
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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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.
Mark Nepo
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Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone.
Mark Nepo
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The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.
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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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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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.
Mark Nepo
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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
Mark Nepo
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Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.
Mark Nepo
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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
Mark Nepo