Nepo Quotes & Sayings

We are all made up of yearning and light, searching for a way out, afraid we will be shut in or cut off or repelled back into the ground from which we are reaching. 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. As — Mark Nepo

Being human, we struggle constantly to stay with the miracle of what is and not to fall constantly into the black hole of what is not. This is an ancient challenge. As the Sufi poet Ghalib said centuries ago, Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise; hearing what is not can drive you mad. — Mark Nepo

We tend to make the thing in the way the way. — Mark Nepo

I was raised Jewish by atheistic-agnostic parents. During this journey, I had people from all walks and all faiths try to help. A Jewish priest who I was friends with wanted to lay hands on me - I didn't ask questions about how - I just said when and where and how often do you want to do it? I didn't argue. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

Grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are. — Mark Nepo

We are the stage and all the players. — Mark Nepo

No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts. — Mark Nepo

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

Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery. — Mark Nepo

There is a great choice that awaits us every day: whether we go around carving holes in others because we have been so painfully carved ourselves, or whether we let spirit play its song through our tender experience, enabling us to listen, as well, to the miraculous music coming through others. — Mark Nepo

COMING OUT While there is much to do we are not here to do. Under the want to problem-solve is the need to being-solve. Often, with full being the problem goes away. The seed being-solves its darkness by blossoming. The heart being-solves its loneliness by loving whatever it meets. The tea being-solves the water by becoming tea. — Mark Nepo

The humility of wonder opens everything. — Mark Nepo

I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air. — Mark Nepo

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

Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred. — Mark Nepo

Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak. — Mark Nepo

Living is the original art. As a young man I wanted to be a poet and I learned along the way that I already was a poet. — Mark Nepo

Try as we will, we cannot escape the making of mistakes. But fortunately, the ever humbling cycle of growing strong roots comes from eating what grows from our own shit, from digesting and processing our own humanity. Like the buffalo, we are nourished by what sprouts from our own broken trail. What we trample and leave behind fertilizes what will feed us. No one is exempt. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

The Pain of Becoming For the flower, it is fully open at each step of its blossoming. We do ourselves a great disservice by judging where we are in comparison to some final destination. This is one of the pains of aspiring to become something: the stage of development we are in is always seen against the imagined landscape of what we are striving for. So where we are - though closer all the time - is never quite enough. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

What is most healing about bearing witness to things exactly as they are, including my own part in my pain, is that when the voice of the pain fits the pain, there is no room for distortion or illusion. In this way, truth becomes a clean bandage that heals, keeping dirt out of the wound. To voice things as they are is the nearest medicine. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

being articulate is not a facility of language but a fidelity to vision. And so we are all articulate when finding the courage to say what we see. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

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

Where love is deep much can be accomplished. - SHINICHI SUZUKI — Mark Nepo

In the way that I experience life, the physical world is really just the tip of the iceberg of reality. Whether it's trees or stones or water or animals or stars, everything has an ineffable interior quality. — Mark Nepo

In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones. - PABLO NERUDA — Mark Nepo

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

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

One of the most challenging ways is to slow down enough to relax our heart and feel what is nearest. It could be the sun reflecting off of broken glass in an alley. It could be the shine on a crow. It could be snow on a lamp post. — Mark Nepo

The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one. — Mark Nepo

Just opening quietly for moments everyday can create a path by which life can reach us, the way rain carves a little stream in the earth by which the smallest flowers are watered. — Mark Nepo

We are broken open, or we willfully shed. — Mark Nepo

In this way, I've learned that loving yourself requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world - our own self-worth. — Mark Nepo

Let the miracles, even the ones we don't want or see, unfold. — Mark Nepo

Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens. — Mark Nepo

Once waking into the realization that eternity is waiting in every moment, I discovered that wealth is time, not money. — Mark Nepo

It takes six million grains of pollen to seed one peony, and salmon need a lifetime of swimming to find their way home, so we mustn't be alarmed or discouraged when it takes us years to find love or years to understand our calling in life. Everything in nature is given some form of resilience by which it can rehearse finding its way, so that, when it does, it is practiced and ready to seize its moment. This includes us. When things don't work out - when loves unexpectedly end or careers stop unfolding - it can be painful and sad, but refusing this larger picture keeps us from finding our resilience. — Mark Nepo

If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from. — Mark Nepo

What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed. — Mark Nepo

The practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous, and challenging art forms on Earth. — Mark Nepo

We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance and effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way. — Mark Nepo

Each of us carries some wisdom waiting to be discovered at the center of our experience. Everything we meet, if faced and held, reveals a part of that wisdom. — Mark Nepo

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

We travel so far only to land where we are. We imagine other lives, only to meet who we are. We seek out love in special ways, only to find everyone is special. Humbly, we can't avoid this journey ... — Mark Nepo

What was amazing was that their small delicate hands were touching, their monkey fingers leaning into each other. It was clear that it was this small sustained touch that allowed them to sleep. As long as they were touching, they could let go. I envied their trust and simplicity. There was none of the human pretense at independence. They clearly needed each other to experience peace. One stirred but didn't wake, and the other, in sleep, kept their fingers touching. How deeply rewarding the life of touch. — Mark Nepo

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

I had over twenty years ago damaged the cilia in my ears. This has taught me many things. One thing I learned, paradoxically, is that there is much to be heard in silence. — Mark Nepo

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

Breathe like a fallen leaf and think of nothing. Just breathe and let your heart and mind be carried, however briefly, by the spirit you can't quite see. — Mark Nepo

We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life. — Mark Nepo

Accepting what we're given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life. — Mark Nepo

To listen also means to stay in relationship, the central challenge of our time, and this requires us to constantly minimize whatever stands between us and life. — Mark Nepo

There is no tomorrow, only a string of todays. Still, — Mark Nepo

The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly. — Mark Nepo

In truth, always needing to stay immediate by removing what is no longer real is the working inner definition of sacrifice
giving up with reverence and compassion what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred. — Mark Nepo

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

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

Though the Earth is touched by everything alive, it never stops turning around the fire at its center, and though we are touched by the stories of strangers and the far-off songs of birds lost in wind, we find our way by following the spirit's voice at our center. Too much is lost in waiting for someone else to tell us that what moves us is real. — Mark Nepo

Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond. — Mark Nepo

I had tried so hard to please that I never realized no one was watching. — Mark Nepo

Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment - growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking - the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

We are born with only one obligation - to be completely who we are. — Mark Nepo

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

There's no need to seek the truth-just put a stop to your opinions!
-SENG-TS'AN — Mark Nepo

The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again. — Mark Nepo

Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace. — Mark Nepo

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

Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature. — Mark Nepo

At the heart of each spiritual tradition is the question of how to be in the world without losing what matters, and whether living an awakened life is of any use if we don't bring what matters to bear on the world. — Mark Nepo

Within Young Leaves Wrapped within young leaves: the sound of water. - SOSEKI This delicate observation by this Japanese poet is filled with the quiet hope that embedded in our nature, even as we begin, is our gift already unfolded. Embedded in the seed is the blossom. Embedded in the womb is the child fully grown. Embedded in the impulse to care is the peace of love realized. Embedded in the edge of risk and fear is the authenticity that makes life worth living. — Mark Nepo

Living is a conversation with no end, a dance with no steps, a song with no words, a reason too big for any mind. — Mark Nepo

When the sweet ache of being alive, lodged between who you are and who you will be, is awakened, befriend this moment. It will guide you. Its sweetness is what holds you. Its ache is what moves you on. — Mark Nepo

Now, I want only to give away all that I'm blessed to know and disappear in the stream. — Mark Nepo

The Art of Facing Things What people have forgotten is what every salmon knows. - ROBERT CLARK — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

Misery If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective. — Mark Nepo

The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes. — Mark Nepo

This is the ongoing purpose of full attention: to find a thousand ways to be pierced into wholeness. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

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

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? — Mark Nepo

When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

Fearful people do not want to sit with broken people because they don't want to be slowed down - don't want to look at what is broken in themselves...

When we dare to hold those forced to the ground, dare to hold them close, the truth of holding and listening sings & we are carried into the wisdom of broken bones and how things heal.

There are the quiet braves we all need: the courage to wait & 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. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not. — Mark Nepo

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. — Mark Nepo

Whatever our path, whatever the color or grain of our days, whatever riddles we must solve to stay alive, the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep. — Mark Nepo

But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us. — Mark Nepo