Quote

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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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Life
Quality
Interiors
World
Whether
Trees
Water
Stones
Experience
Animals
Reality
Physical
Everything
Tree
Iceberg
Really
Animal
Ineffable
Way
Stars
Interior

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
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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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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
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Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.
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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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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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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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Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak.
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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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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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Truth is a seed hidden in the days until watered by what life brings us.
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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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The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas.
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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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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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To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
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I would rather be fooled than not believe.
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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)
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If I dare to hear you I will feel you like the sun And grow in your direction.
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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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