Mark Nepo
To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.Collection: Love
The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.Collection: Light
To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.Collection: Changed
What will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands? Tomorrow you could die, but today you are precious and rare and awake. Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.Collection: Grateful
No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts.Collection: Heart
We think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.Collection: Thinking
Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color.... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Sweet
The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.Collection: Keys
To journey without being changed, is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journeying is to be a pilgrim.Collection: Journey
There are many ways that we grow, but there are two major ways: We shed what no longer works, or we're broken open. If we're unwilling to shed, then we will be broken open. Through shedding, we are worn down, just as nature is eroded to its beauty. I think that through suffering, human beings are eroded to our beauty.Collection: Thinking
My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Grief
I've learned that loving your self 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.Collection: Believe
Like roots finding water, we always wind up moving towards what sustains us.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Hurt
We are born with only one obligation - to be completely who we are.Collection: Who We Are
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.Collection: Rain
Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we've spun, the tasks we've assumed, the problems we have to solve. They'll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.Collection: Life
The broken door lets in the light. The broken heart lets in the world.Collection: Heart
Through the opened heart, the world comes rushing in, the way oceans fill the smallest hole along the shore. It is the quietest sort of miracle: by simply being who we are, the world will come to fill us, to cleanse us, to baptize us, again and again.Collection: Ocean
When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.Collection: World
…there are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.Collection: Everything Happens For A Reason
Everything in life opens and closes, sheds and renews. We are no different. Listening in its endless forms is the way we stay open, the way we stay in relationship, the way we refresh who we are and what we're doing here.Collection: Listening
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.Collection: Heart
A love astounds us or a pain consumes us and we forget that we glow on our own.Collection: Pain
We're quietly aching for something to celebrateCollection: Celebrate
If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.Collection: Mountain
Listening reminds me how precious it is to be here at all. And so, listening is the first step to peace, both inner peace and the compassion that connects people.Collection: Compassion
The practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous, and challenging art forms on Earth.Collection: Art
I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Mean
By our very nature, we are a human paradox. We are a human being. The being is infinite and the human is very finite. We walk around like lightening in a bottle.Collection: Bottles
Keeping a commitment to listening has led me to my own growth, beyond any imagined dreams I may have had throughout the years.Collection: Dream
When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.Collection: Wiggling
I was a very driven person, wanting to help and to do good, hopefully to write and teach in a meaningful way - wanting to make change. And I discovered humbly that life was changing me.Collection: Meaningful
The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again.Collection: Freshness
What we reach for may be different, but what makes us reach is the same.Collection: Different
Who's to say the effort to be real isn't the beginning of wings?Collection: Real
I didn't know the language of my own wisdom. I wanted to be loved and after all the various relationships I went through, I finally realized I am love. I carry love.Collection: Language
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.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Stars
I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.Collection: Writing
The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.Collection: Journey
I would rather be fooled than not believe.Collection: Believe
The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.Collection: Shapes
If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.Collection: Heart
Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.Collection: Love Is
The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.Collection: Life Is