Quote

Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.

Mark Nepo

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Expose
Participate
Mystery
Jobs

More quotes by Mark Nepo

Image
We need to meet, embrace and work with what we're given. For what we want and what we're given often serve two different gods. And how we respond to their meeting determines our path.
Mark Nepo
Image
We are love. But in an everyday setting we have to make choices. We have limits. We can love everyone and we can't love everyone.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
Mark Nepo
Image
Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone.
Mark Nepo
Image
If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.
Mark Nepo
Image
We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given.
Mark Nepo
Image
Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
I've learned that loving your self requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world - our own self worth.
Mark Nepo
Image
The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
Mark Nepo
Image
Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
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.
Mark Nepo
Image
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
Image
…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)
Mark Nepo
Image
Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
Mark Nepo