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

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To journey without being changed, is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journeying is to be a pilgrim.
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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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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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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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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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When the sweet ache of being alive, lodged between who you are and who you will be, is awakened, befriend this moment. It will guide you. Its sweetness is what holds you. Its ache is what moves you on.
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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 real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas.
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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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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
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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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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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The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.
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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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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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All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
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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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The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.
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