Welcome to our collection of quotes by Mark Nepo. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Mark Nepo
Mark Nepo (born February 23, 1951, in Brooklyn, New York), is a poet and spiritual adviser who has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over 30 years. Nepo is best known for his New York Times #1 bestseller, The Book of Awakening. He has published 12 books and recorded six audio projects. A cancer survivor, Nepo writes and teaches about the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationship.
Nepo has a doctorate in English. He taught for 18 years at the State University of New York in Albany, New York. He then moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. In his 30s he was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, a struggle which helped to form his philosophy of experiencing life fully while staying in relationship to an unknowable future.
In 2010 Oprah Winfrey chose Nepo's The Book of Awakening as one of her Ultimate Favorite Things for her farewell season, launching it to the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Nepo has appeared several times with Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday program on OWN TV, and was named to Oprah's SuperSoul100 list of visionaries and influential leaders. He was also interviewed by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America. Oprah has also written about Nepo twice in her O! magazine column, "What I Know for Sure" (most recently in April 2011). His recent book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen (2012) won the Books for A Better Life Award.
There are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.
Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.
To love by admitting our connection to everything is how we stay well.
It makes me wonder now, in middle age, if being spontaneous and kind and curious are all parts of our natural ability to swim.
I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
Mysteriously, as elusive as it is, this moment -- where the eye is what it sees, where the heart is what it feels -- this moment shows us that what is real is sacred.
I would rather be fooled than not believe.
We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance and effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way.
There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.
To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource.
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.
I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling.
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.
Everything in life opens and closes, sheds and renews. We are no different. Listening in its endless forms is the way we stay open, the way we stay in relationship, the way we refresh who we are and what we're doing here.
All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
Who's to say the effort to be real isn't the beginning of wings?
In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
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.
A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it.
No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts.
The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again.
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.
The fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence.
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.
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.
What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.
My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.
When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
As the seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way.
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.
Through the opened heart, the world comes rushing in, the way oceans fill the smallest hole along the shore. It is the quietest sort of miracle: by simply being who we are, the world will come to fill us, to cleanse us, to baptize us, again and again.
Even if one glimpses God, there are cuts and splinters and burns along the way.
Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.
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.
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.
I didn't know the language of my own wisdom. I wanted to be loved and after all the various relationships I went through, I finally realized I am love. I carry love.
At the heart of each spiritual tradition is the question of how to be in the world without losing what matters, and whether living an awakened life is of any use if we don't bring what matters to bear on the world.
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.
When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
there are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.
The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.
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.
Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
The simplest and bravest way to counter the plight of disheartenment is to move toward what is precious.
In daily terms, the work of listening is to be constantly worn free of our preconceptions and preferences so that nothing stands in the way of our direct experience of life.
Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind.
In a world where the great technologies enable us to record, replay, cut and paste, zoom in, and delete, listening is the crucial commitment to keep the heart touchable.
When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.
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.
Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.
This is the ongoing purpose of full attention: to find a thousand ways to be pierced into wholeness.
The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.
Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are.
One of the most challenging ways is to slow down enough to relax our heart and feel what is nearest. It could be the sun reflecting off of broken glass in an alley. It could be the shine on a crow. It could be snow on a lamp post.
Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.
Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.
In truth, our aliveness depends on our ability to sustain wonder:
to lengthen the moments we are truly uncovered, to be still and quiet
till all the elements of the earth and all the secrets of the oceans
stir the aspects of life waiting within us.
Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.
Before we can count we are taught to be grateful for what others do. As we are broken open by our experience, we begin to be grateful for what is, and if we live long enough and deep enough and authentically enough, gratitude becomes a way of life.
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.
The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.
I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky. (p.275).
Meditation, in all its forms and traditions, is an invitation to listen, to open, to quietly enlist the courage to be touched and formed by life.
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.
Time and again, we're asked to discover, through love and suffering, that we are at heart the same.