Quote

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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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Challenges
Central
Whatever
Stands
Means
Requires
Also
Constantly
Mean
Challenge
Time
Listen
Life
Stay
Relationship
Minimize

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The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
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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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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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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.
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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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For listening to the stories of others ... is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name.
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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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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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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.
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We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.
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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
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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.
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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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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
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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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All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
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