Quotes from Mark Nepo

The eye can see what we have in common or focus on what keeps us apart. And the heart can feel what joins us with everything or replay its many cuts. And the tongue can praise the wind or warn against the storm, can praise the sea or dread the flood.

When we cease to surface our most sensitive skin simply to avoid conflict with others, we remove ourselves from all that is true. When we maintain ways we've already discarded just to placate the ignorance of those we love, we lose our access to what is eternal.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, Or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, But because it never forgot what it could do. —NAOMI SHIHAB NYE I was recently in San Francisco

To move from controlling to trusting life is like exhausting ourselves by trying to put our arms around a river until we realize we have to enter the river and let the current take us.

So long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth. —GOETHE

dialogue with this feeling and ask why it will not go; just what does it need in order to leave?

The pain was necessary to know the truth, but we don't have to keep the pain alive to keep the truth alive.

Despite all consequence, there is an inevitable honoring of what is true, and at this deep level of inner voice, it is not a summoning of will, but a following of true knowing.

Despite all consequence, there is an inevitable honoring of what is true, and at this deep level of inner voice, it is not a summoning of will, but a following of true knowing. My own life is a trail of such following. Time and again, I have heard deep callings that felt inevitable and which I could have ignored, but only at great risk of something essential perishing.

The reward for being sensitive is that we're held by the Universe, the way the ocean in its buoyancy holds up a raft.

No matter how dark, the hand always knows the way to the mouth.

We cannot hold on to things and enter. We must put down what we carry, open the door, and then take up only what we need to bring inside.

I discovered that living is the original art.

Truly, the most we can ask of others is for their guidance and comfort on the way—without imposition, design, or thought of reward. This is the hospitality of relationship: for family to help us manifest who we are in the world, for friends to bring us to thresholds of realness, for loved ones to encourage us to cross barriers of our own making into moments of full aliveness.

This is why finding what we love, though it may take years, is building a life of passion. For what makes you come alive can keep you alive, whether you are paid well for it or not. And beyond the fashion of the job market, a life of passion makes us a healthy cell in the body of the world.

It took me some time to withstand his judgment and his pity, but I looked at him across the night and kept breathing deeply through the break in my heart. In daily ways, we are judged, discounted, and even pitied for glories that only we can affirm. In the end, life is too magnificent and difficult for us to give away our elemental place in the journey.

feelings and times long gone come and live again, or basic truths hard to keep in view return.

a living symbol that can call into my moment of sadness a deeper sense of plenitude and generosity that is always there, but not always accessible.

The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail…. Whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.

To know God without being God-like is like trying to swim without entering water. —OREST BEDRIJ

Just as a life is made of days, so are days made of moments. A life well lived is firmly planted in the sweet soil of moments. Mark Nepo is a gardener in this soil; he plants seeds of grace that grow only in the soil of loving attention and mindful time. We receive the deepest blessings of life when we fall in love with such moments—and Mark shows us how to fall in love deeply and with abandon.

This is enough to begin: To know, before all the names and histories drape who we are, that we want to be held and left alone, again and again; held and left alone until the dance of it is how we survive and grow, like spring into winter into spring again.

It doesn't have to be pretty or smart, just honest and true. For many a dance starts with a trip, and many a song finds its opening through a cough.

These are quiet braveries we all need: The courage to wait and watch with all of who we are. The courage to admit that we are not alone. The courage to hold each other to the ear of our heart. And the courage to care for things that are broken.