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

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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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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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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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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.
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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
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If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.
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We need experience to release what matters.
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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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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 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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Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.
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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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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've learned that loving your self requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world - our own self worth.
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