Mark Nepo Quotes

The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.

Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.

The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.

Truth is a seed hidden in the days until watered by what life brings us.

Where love is deep much can be accomplished. - SHINICHI SUZUKI

Often we find it easier to think our way around things rather than to feel our way through them:

Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak.

The Art of Facing Things What people have forgotten is what every salmon knows. - ROBERT CLARK

Keeping a commitment to listening has led me to my own growth, beyond any imagined dreams I may have had throughout the years.

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.

In loving ourselves, we love the world.

I laugh when I think of how many hours I have spent in my life weaving storylines that never came true until, like weeds, they covered my heart.

I would rather be fooled than not believe.

To love by admitting our connection to everything is how we stay well.

Each soul on earth is complete unto itself.

Joy in what we do is not an added feature; it is a sign of deep health.

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.

We are born with only one obligation - to be completely who we are.

In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.

The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.

A love astounds us or a pain consumes us and we forget that we glow on our own.

When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.

We are broken open, or we willfully shed.

If I dare to hear you
I will feel you like the sun
And grow in your direction.

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.

Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.

When we need it most, it is nearly impossible to see ourselves with compassion from the slit of a narrowed mind all tensed for battle.

... I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky. (p.275)

The humility of wonder opens everything.

Tragedy stays alive by feeling what's been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results.

The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.

No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts.

Misery If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective.

This is the ongoing purpose of full attention: to find a thousand ways to be pierced into wholeness.

Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.

Perhaps the hardest thing I've learned, and still struggle with, is that I don't have to be finished in order to be whole.

It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real.

Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. - SENG-TS'AN

If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.

In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones. - PABLO NERUDA

Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.

If you had a sad childhood, so what? You can dance with only one leg and see the snowflake falling with only one eye. - ROBERT BLY

The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.

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

I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.

Robert calmly, like an Oriental sage himself, treated the situation as if it were a koan, a riddle to be entered until its very assumptions shifted.

The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.

What we reach for may be different, but what makes us reach is the same.

We need to give up what no longer works and find new ways of being that keeps us close to what matters.

A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it

We're quietly aching for something to celebrate

Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.

The humanitarian Carol Hegedus reminds us, Our purpose is that which we most passionately are when we pay attention to our deepest selves.

Now, I want only to give away all that I'm blessed to know and disappear in the stream.

The only response to adversity or misunderstanding is to be more completely who we are - to share ourselves more.

The real & lasting practice for each of us is to remove what obstructs us so we can be who we are ...

We tend to make the thing in the way the way.

I tried so hard to please that I never realized no one is watching.

Pursue the obstacle
It will set you free

The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.

Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.

The practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous, and challenging art forms on Earth.

To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.

We are the stage and all the players.

The point of experience is not to escape life but to live it.

We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given.

... there are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.

Grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are.

Can we listen to each other the way veins listen to blood?

When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own.

There is no getting around the fundamental fact that we need to interact with everything in order to manifest the wholeness we are born with.

My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.

There's no need to seek the truth-just put a stop to your opinions!
-SENG-TS'AN

The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.

Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.

Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.

Let the miracles, even the ones we don't want or see, unfold.

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.

If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.

Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.

Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.

The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.

When wiggling through a hole
the world looks different than
when scrubbed clean by the wiggle
and looking back.

There is no tomorrow, only a string of todays. Still,

I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.

I am more than I have shown you and more than you are willing to see. Let's work our love and know each other more fully.

I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

quiet pain that comes from not honoring what we know to be true, even if all we know to be true are the questions we are asking.

The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again.

No amount of thinking can stop thinking.

What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.

being articulate is not a facility of language but a fidelity to vision. And so we are all articulate when finding the courage to say what we see.

Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.

The simplest and bravest way to counter the plight of disheartenment is to move toward what is precious.

The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.

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

Have the # life you want by being fully present to the life you have.

All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.

Even if one glimpses God, there are cuts and splinters and burns along the way.