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
Time
Listen
Life
Stay
Relationship
Minimize
Challenges
Central
Whatever
Stands
Means
Requires
Also
Constantly
Mean
Challenge

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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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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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…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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Listening reminds me how precious it is to be here at all. And so, listening is the first step to peace, both inner peace and the compassion that connects people.
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We travel so far only to land where we are. We imagine other lives, only to meet who we are. We seek out love in special ways, only to find everyone is special. Humbly, we can't avoid this journey.
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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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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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We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given.
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Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are
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As nature erodes the earth into magnificent forms, life through endless experience opens us further and further to the essence of what matters. Each time I've been opened further, the way I experience life and receive things has changed.
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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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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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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
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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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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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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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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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