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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In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
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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.
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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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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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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 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.
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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.
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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
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Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
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Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.
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Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
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The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
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The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.
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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
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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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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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The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.
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The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.
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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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Truth is a seed hidden in the days until watered by what life brings us.
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