Quote

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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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Art
Young
Originals
Wanted
Original
Way
Poet
Men
Along
Already
Learned
Living

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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The pain of life is pure salt no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of thingsstop being a glass. Become a lake.
Mark Nepo
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Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.
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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Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.
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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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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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
Mark Nepo
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The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
Mark Nepo
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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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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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