Mark Nepo Quotes

I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

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

Whether through the patterns left in snow, or geese honking in the dark, or through the brilliant wet leaf that hits your face the moment you are questioning your worth, the quiet teachers are everywhere, pointing us to the unlived portion of our lives. When we think we are in charge, the lessons dissolve as accidents or coincidence. But when we're humble enough to welcome the connections, the glass that breaks across the room is offering us direction, giving us a clue to the story we are in.

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.

By our very nature, we are a human paradox. We are a human being. The being is infinite and the human is very finite. We walk around like lightening in a bottle.

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.

No amount of thinking can stop thinking.

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.

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

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.

Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to ... open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away.

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.

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

Whatever is held and listened to will show us where it lives in the world and in us.

Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Being human, we are constantly broken apart by experience. To reconcile our humanness means we are ever learning how to accept our suffering and to restore our Wholeness.

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

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

Is it possible that, with each inhalation, we take in the world and awaken our soul? And with each exhalation, do we free ourselves of the world, which inevitably entangles us? Is this how we fill up and empty a hundred times a day, always seeking the gift of the two breaths? Perhaps this is the work of being.

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

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.

To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource.

We often mistake the journey of healing as one that covers over a wound. But as wounds need air and light to knit and heal, our pain and sorrow need to be brought out into the open so we can be healed by life

The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.

I have found that life is alive and we are requested to have a friendship with it, to have a conversation with life and that conversation is restorative and healing and always nearby.

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

When we don't get what we want, there's a legitimate grieving, and then the spiritual journey truly begins, because not getting what we want breaks our self-reference; and once that is broken, we are aware that we are a part of a larger whole. It changes everything.

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

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

There is a gravity of spirit that pulls the essence of who we are into being. Our job, like all our sister creatures, is to find the abundance of air and water and light, and to unfold what is already within us.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.

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

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

Sit with a trusted loved one and take turns: Name one defining trait of who you are that distinguishes you from others. Name one defining trait of who you are that you have in common with others. Discuss how you cope with the loneliness of what makes you unique from others, and how you cope with the experience of what makes you the same as others.

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.

What is most healing about bearing witness to things exactly as they are, including my own part in my pain, is that when the voice of the pain fits the pain, there is no room for distortion or illusion. In this way, truth becomes a clean bandage that heals, keeping dirt out of the wound. To voice things as they are is the nearest medicine.

Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God. Close your eyes and breathe your way beneath your troubles, the way a diver slips to that depth of stillness that is always waiting beneath the churning of the waves. Now, consider two things you love doing, such as running, drawing, singing, bird-watching, gardening, or reading. Meditate on what it is in each of these that makes you feel alive. Hold what they have in common before you, and breathing slowly, feel the spot of grace these dear things mirror within you.

Once waking into the realization that eternity is waiting in every moment, I discovered that wealth is time, not money.

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

To move from controlling to trusting life is like exhausting ourselves by trying to put our arms around a river until we realize we have to enter the river and let the current take us.

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.
When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.
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. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.

The heart doesn't know it's expanding with compassion anymore than a hawk spreading its swings knows it's being a hawk. Nor does someone acting out of love often realize they are being kind.

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

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

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

Who's to say the effort to be real isn't the beginning of wings?

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.

Though the Earth is touched by everything alive, it never stops turning around the fire at its center, and though we are touched by the stories of strangers and the far-off songs of birds lost in wind, we find our way by following the spirit's voice at our center. Too much is lost in waiting for someone else to tell us that what moves us is real.

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

What was amazing was that their small delicate hands were touching, their monkey fingers leaning into each other. It was clear that it was this small sustained touch that allowed them to sleep. As long as they were touching, they could let go. I envied their trust and simplicity. There was none of the human pretense at independence. They clearly needed each other to experience peace. One stirred but didn't wake, and the other, in sleep, kept their fingers touching. How deeply rewarding the life of touch.

For only when we can outwait the dark will the sharpness of experience recede like a tide to reveal what has survived beneath it all. Often what seems tragic, if looked at long enough, reveals itself as part of a larger transformation.

Given to air alone, the cuts of this world burn. But when we dare to enter what is deep, the bruises we carry soften and glow. In truth, the more we accept our limitations and surrender to the depths below our woundedness, the more the vastness holds us up. There is no way to know this but to dive.

Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color ... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.

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.

These bodies are perishable, but the Dweller in these bodies is eternal. - BHAGAVAD-GITA

When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Beauty of It If all I have is Now, where will I look for Joy? Without hope for the future, without hope that things will change, with no hope of finding what's been lost, and no hope of restoring the past, with only the risk to crack open all that has hardened about me, what will I do with what I have? At first, this might seem scary or sad, but as a tired swimmer comes ashore surprised to find pearls washing through his legs, I lift my tired head again and again to find all I need is right where I am. But being human, I stray and dream of lives other than my own, and soon I am busy wanting something else, somewhere else, someone else; busy imagining something just out of reach to strive for. It leads me to say if you are unhappy or in pain, nothing will remove these surfaces. But acceptance and a strong heart will crack them like a shell, exposing a softness that has always been, exposing a soft thing waiting to take form. It glows. I think it is the one spirit we all share.

I don't personally believe in an arrived state of enlightenment. I feel that being human is a constant practice of return. We have moments of clarity, and then we're confused. We have incredibly sensitive periods of being awake, and then we're numb. Being human is a very universal and a very personal practice of learning how to return when we can't get access to what we know.

To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

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

The things that can restore us have to get in, too. This is what the wisdom of an open heart is all about. All the spiritual traditions speak of this but I love the Tibetan tradition: "A spiritual warrior always has a crack in his heart because that is how the mysteries can get in."

Being human, we struggle constantly to stay with the miracle of what is and not to fall constantly into the black hole of what is not. This is an ancient challenge. As the Sufi poet Ghalib said centuries ago, Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise; hearing what is not can drive you mad.

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

Breathe like a fallen leaf and think of nothing. Just breathe and let your heart and mind be carried, however briefly, by the spirit you can't quite see.

The broken door lets in the light. The broken heart lets in the world.

Living through enough, we all come to this understanding, though it is difficult to accept: No matter what path
we choose to honor, there will always be conflict to negotiate.
If we choose to avoid all conflict with others, we will eventually breed a poisonous conflict within ourselves. Likewise, if we manage to attend our inner lives, who we are will - sooner or later - create some discord with those who would rather have us be something else.

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.

In this way, I've learned that loving yourself 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Most sacraments are acts of breathtaking simplicity: a simple prayer, a sip of wine and a piece of bread, a single breath in meditation, a sprinkling of water on the forehead, an exchange of rings, a kind word, a blessing. Any of these, performed in a moment of mindfulness, may open the doors of our spiritual perception and bring nourishment and delight.

Within Young Leaves Wrapped within young leaves: the sound of water. - SOSEKI This delicate observation by this Japanese poet is filled with the quiet hope that embedded in our nature, even as we begin, is our gift already unfolded. Embedded in the seed is the blossom. Embedded in the womb is the child fully grown. Embedded in the impulse to care is the peace of love realized. Embedded in the edge of risk and fear is the authenticity that makes life worth living.

Likewise, every disturbance, whether resolved or not, is making space for an inner engagement. As a shovel digs up and displaces earth, in a way that must seem violent to the earth, an interior space is revealed for the digging. In just this way, when experience opens us, it often feels violent and the urge, quite naturally, is to refill that opening, to make it the way it was. But every experience excavates a depth, which reveals its wisdom once opened to air.

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.

Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment - growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking - the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world.

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 journey is to be a pilgrim.

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.

In a world that lives like a fist
mercy is not more than waking
with your hands open.