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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.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Listen
Common
Must
Heart
Life
Cries
World
Access
Cry
Resources

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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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.
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.
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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.
Mark Nepo
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I would want to affirm how rare and magnificent and messy it is to be alive, how there is really nothing between us and life, though so many things get in the way, and how our heart is the strongest muscle and resource we have.
Mark Nepo
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Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.
Mark Nepo
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Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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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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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I would rather be fooled than not believe.
Mark Nepo
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When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.
Mark Nepo
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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.
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