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When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.

Mark Nepo

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Mark Nepo
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 23
Poet
Brooklyn
New York
Comes
Defines
Honestly
Deny
Grows
Face
Faces

More quotes by Mark Nepo

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Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
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When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
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When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
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Living is the original art. As a young man I wanted to be a poet and I learned along the way that I already was a poet.
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The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.
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As nature erodes the earth into magnificent forms, life through endless experience opens us further and further to the essence of what matters. Each time I've been opened further, the way I experience life and receive things has changed.
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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.
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Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
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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.
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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.
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Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.
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If we devote ourselves to the life at hand, the rest will follow. For life, it seems, reveals itself through those willing to live. Anything else, no matter how beautiful, is just advertising.
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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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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 sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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For listening to the stories of others ... is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name.
Mark Nepo
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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.
Mark Nepo
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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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If I dare to hear you I will feel you like the sun And grow in your direction.
Mark Nepo