Mark Nepo Quotes - Page 5

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We are broken open, or we willfully shed.

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

Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.

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

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

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

Essentially, the life of expression is the ongoing journey of how we heal each other... for by telling our stories and listening to the stories of others, we let out who we are and find ourselves in each other, and find that we are more together than alone.

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.

Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live.

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.

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

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

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

Love and grief enable us to feel how we're all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.

No amount of thinking can stop thinking.

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.