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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
Step
Compassion
Listening
Steps
Peace
Connects
Firsts
Reminds
First
Precious
People
Inner

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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Walk long enough and we all trade places.
Mark Nepo
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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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The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.
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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 is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
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Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
Mark Nepo
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To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
Mark Nepo
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Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
Mark Nepo
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Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
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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.
Mark Nepo
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Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
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We tend to make the thing in the way the way.
Mark Nepo
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The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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
Mark Nepo
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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
Mark Nepo