Mark Nepo Quotes - Page 2

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

When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.

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

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

Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind.

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

…there are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.

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

For being human, we remember and forget. We stray and return, fall down and get up, and cling and let go, again and again. But it is this straying and returning that makes life interesting, this clinging and letting go - damned as it is - that exercises the heart.

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.

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

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

My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.

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

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.

The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.

When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul's energy; as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.

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.

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.

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

We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.

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.

Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.