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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.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Practice
Given
Nature
Become
Lets
Everything
Intimate
Life
Beyond
Accepting
Present

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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 real & lasting practice for each of us is to remove what obstructs us so we can be who we are.
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If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
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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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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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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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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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The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
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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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We need experience to release what matters.
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To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
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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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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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In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
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The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
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The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.
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Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
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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.
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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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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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