Quotes from Mark Nepo

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

My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.

Often we find it easier to think our way around things rather than to feel our way through them:

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

We often move away from pain, which is helpful only before being hurt. Once in pain, it seems the only way out is through. Like someone falling off a boat, struggling to stay above the water only makes things worse. We must accept we are there and settle enough so we can be carried by the deep. The willingness to do this is the genesis of faith, the giving over to currents larger than us. Even fallen leaves float in lakes, demonstrating how surrender can hold us up.

It seems that intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.

If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?

quiet pain that comes from not honoring what we know to be true, even if all we know to be true are the questions we are asking.

What it really comes down to is the clearness of heart to stop defining who I am by those who have hurt me and to take up the risk to love myself, to validate my own existence, pain and all, from the center out.

The things that frighten us just want to be held.

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

And where is home? Is it where we begin or where we end up? Is it where we long to be or where life puts us to make good use of our gifts?

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 things…. Stop being a glass. Become a lake.

Memories are not images of loved ones returning to us. They are the spirits of loved ones visiting us.

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.

we may spend much of our time unaware and unenlightened, yet the presence of Truth and God, like a deep and ancient friend, can shape our entire lives. So the inner task becomes how do we make a lasting friendship with the Unities that are larger than us? How do we keep their light in our heart when no stars appear in sight?

To listen is to lean in softly with the willingness to be changed by what we hear.

When we heal ourselves, we heal the world. For as the body is only as healthy as its individual cells, the world is only as healthy as its individual souls.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Patience devastates us with the truth that, in essence, when we fear another, we fear ourselves; when we distrust another, we distrust ourselves; when we hurt another, we hurt ourselves; when we kill another, we kill ourselves.

integrity is an unending process of letting our inner experience and our outer experience complete each other, in spite of our very human lapses.

The human soul is to God is as the flower to the sun; it opens at its approach, and shuts when it withdraws. —BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE

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.

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.