Mark Nepo Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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.

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

In life as in water, when we curl up or flail we sink. When we spread and go still, we are carried by the largest sea of all: the sea of grace that flows steadily beneath the turmoil of events. And just as fish can't see the ocean they live in, we can't quite see the spirit that sustains us.

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

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.

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

For though we stubbornly cling, believing in our moment of hunger that there is no other possibility of love, we only have to let go of what we want so badly and our life will unfold. For love is everywhere.

Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.

The world needs awakened souls the way a body needs healthy cells.

The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of thingsstop being a glass. Become a lake.

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

Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are

It seems that the ancient Medicine Men understood that listening to another's story somehow gives us the strength of example to carry on, as well as showing us aspects of ourselves we can't easily see. For listening to the stories of others - not to their precautions or personal commandments - 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.

What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Walk long enough and we all trade places.

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