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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.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
People
Inner
Step
Compassion
Listening
Steps
Peace
Connects
Firsts
Reminds
First
Precious

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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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 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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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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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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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
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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 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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Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.
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The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.
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My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so.
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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
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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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Accepting what we're given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.
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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
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The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
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We need experience to release what matters.
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It has always amazed and humbled me to how the risk to bloom can seem so insurmountable beforehand and so inevitably freeing once the threshold of suffering is crossed.
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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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