Quotes from Mark Nepo

I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

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

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.

Just as a vine or shrub—no matter how often it is cut back—will keep growing to the light, the human heart—no matter how often it is cut—can reassert its impulse to love.

Our crucial task when in pain or despair is not to let the sour feelings spill into everything, so that we stain our sense of the world. Yet we must also take care not to so contain our feelings that they fester and infect our sense of ourselves. Somewhere between these two extremes waits the life of healthy expression, not personalizing everything and not painting the world with our troubles.

Perhaps one of the hardest remedies to accept for our pain of becoming is that wherever we are in our path—no matter how flawed or incomplete—is a blossoming unto itself.

The gift of patience opens when our body, heart, and mind slow enough to move in unison.

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.

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

Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows. —NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ

In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible. —BUDDHA

Ubuntu—I am because you are, you are because I am…. —A DEEP AFRICAN WAY OF BEING

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.

the work of prayer, when we feel least like praying, is neither to inflate or deflate the world or ourselves, but to restore our connection to the powerful currents of life.

If you had a sad childhood, so what? You can dance with only one leg and see the snowflake falling with only one eye. —ROBERT BLY

So, if you can, give up the want of another and be who you are, and more often than not, love will come at the precise moment you are simply loving yourself.

Can we listen to each other the way veins listen to blood?

Yet beneath all the talk of tragedy and grace, I have come to believe that we are destined to be opened by the living of our days, and whether we like it or not, whether we choose to participate or not, we will, in time, every one of us, wear the deeper part of who we are as a new skin.

Because we must meet the outer world with our inner world or existence will crush us. It is a spiritual law, as real as gravity. If we don't assume our space as living beings, the rest of life will fill us completely the way water fills a hole.

there are countless stories of people whose lives truly find their meaning after events force them to give up careers that they have been devoted to.

We are the stage and all the players.

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.

It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur. And it is by honoring how life comes through us that we get the most out of living, not by keeping ourselves out of the way. The goal is to mix our hands in the earth, not to stay clean.

And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk to bloom. —ANAÏS NIN