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

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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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.
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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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We need experience to release what matters.
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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
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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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Try as we do to resist what we're given, this is the only doorway to truth. We waste too much time and energy denying or fighting where we find ourselves.
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Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.
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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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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.
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I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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