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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 23ff97e | Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God. Close your eyes and breathe your way beneath your troubles, the way a diver slips to that depth of stillness that is always waiting be.. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 52d6842 | Given to air alone, the cuts of this world burn. But when we dare to enter what is deep, the bruises we carry soften and glow. In truth, the more we accept our limitations and surrender to the depths below our woundedness, the more the vastness holds us up. There is no way to know this but to dive. | Mark Nepo | ||
| ca8a63b | For only while telling the truth does the truth lighten us. When we stop, it turns massive. I left some of my bags on that corner of Green Street somewhere below the equator. Now I carry less and try to dance on my crutches. For only while loving do the pains of feeling lighten. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 9bfad4e | 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 | ||
| 597fe85 | The Art of Facing Things What people have forgotten is what every salmon knows. --ROBERT CLARK | Mark Nepo | ||
| aa02423 | Having an honest friend--one before whom you can dump all your heart's pockets and still feel that you are worth something--is a form of wealth that will buy you nothing but will give you everything. And mysteriously and rightly, to find such a friend, we must be such a friend. | Mark Nepo | ||
| f2387d1 | If we could see ourselves from far enough away, we would seem like a colony of insects running into things repeatedly: thousands of little determined beings butting into obstacles, shaking our little heads and bodies, and running into things again. | Mark Nepo | ||
| c909703 | 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. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 9a443b0 | No matter how dark, the hand always knows the way to the mouth. | Mark Nepo | ||
| c9843da | 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. | Mark Nepo | ||
| cabdad5 | 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. | Mark Nepo | ||
| faa0117 | 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. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 684cec0 | 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. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 9a41a9a | E]ven through our limitations, we evolve rather than fail, the way a caterpillar becomes a chrysalis becomes a butterfly, and the succession of life's trials is precisely the unfolding we need to find our bliss and rightful place in the order of things. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 266e798 | There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning. --Mark Nepo | Lisa Condie | ||
| 16c4a6e | Of course, there will always be times that we need to find our very precise way. But more often than not, our image of a destination is only a starting point that we cling to needlessly. When we can free up our sense of needing to arrive in a certain place, we lessen the weight of being lost. And once beneath arriving and beneath our fear of failing to arrive, the real journey begins. | Mark Nepo | ||
| addb95f | I listened carefully as he described his little girl's first steps. He encouraged her to keep her eyes on him, and only when she didn't, did she stumble. Only when she lost her focus, when she became too conscious of the steps she was taking, did she fall. | Mark Nepo | ||
| c8d6d5c | It makes me wonder now, in middle age, if being spontaneous and kind and curious are all parts of our natural ability to swim. | life-energy inspiration life | Mark Nepo | |
| d35c3eb | how to feel the pain of living without denying it and without letting that pain define us. Ultimately, no matter the burden we are given--apartheid, cancer, abuse, depression, addiction--once whittled to the bone, we are faced with a never-ending choice: to become the wound or to heal. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 0627554 | And further, the thing put to rest--whether it be a loved one, a dream, or a false way of seeing--becomes the fertilizer for the life about to form. As the well-used thing joins with the earth, the old love fertilizes the new; the broken dream fertilizes the dream yet conceived; the painful way of being that strapped us to the world fertilizes the freer inner stance about to unfold. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 10c078b | that the best chance to be whole is to love whatever gets in the way, until it ceases to be an obstacle. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 4c36a61 | Thus, we are often stymied and confused because we forget that--beneath our sorting of everything into good and bad, right and wrong, success and failure--all the choices still hold the truth and strength of life, no matter what we prefer. To be certain, sharing a common beat does not mean that everything is the same, for things are infinite in how they differ. And faced with the richness of life, we can't value everything the same. But whe.. | Mark Nepo | ||
| cbcf6b6 | 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. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 6c16c7a | 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, | Mark Nepo | ||
| 0e1162b | Mark Nepo, one of my favorite spiritual writers. | Melinda Gates | ||
| f48f09f | 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. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 976e73f | Our purpose is that which we most passionately are when we pay attention to our deepest selves. - Carol Hegedus, as cited in | Mark Nepo | ||
| 9184353 | life becomes a living of who we are until that form of self can no longer hold us, and, like Taaora in his shell, we must break the forms that contain us in order to birth our way into the next self. This is how we shed our many ways of seeing the world, not that any are false, but that each serves its purpose for a time until we grow and they no longer serve us. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 80c8751 | Since speed and confidence are the traits of success we are taught to strive with, it takes added courage to welcome time and humility into our lives. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 5bb685d | We cannot eliminate hunger, but we can feed each other. We cannot eliminate loneliness, but we can hold each other. We cannot eliminate pain, but we can live a life of compassion. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 420bd69 | We're drawn to live in the world until the fire within meets the fire without. We're drawn to move through all the invisible barriers to find what we love, to love what we love, and to save what we love. The inevitable journey of being spirit on Earth is to love things dearly enough that in time we become a nameless part of what we love. Until we're left with the noble effort to voice and affirm what we touch and know when closest to life, .. | love | Mark Nepo | |
| a4414ee | The famous British child psychologist D. W. Winnicott called these aspects of personality our True Self and False Self. It is the True Self that lets us know what is authentic and what has become artificial, while the False Self is a diplomat of distrust, enforcing a lifestyle of guardedness, secrecy, and complaint. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 67bbebc | James Hollis correctly observes, "Wisdom is always humbling, never inflationary. . . . The realistic thinking of midlife has as its necessary goal the righting of a balance, the restoration of a person to a humble but dignified relationship to the universe." | KathleenA. Brehony | ||
| 84600f2 | En el mundo moderno se considera mas grave matar a un tigre que a tus padres. Los tigres tienen abogados. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 525d205 | Uno no viene a un sitio lleno de pollos venenosos si no esta seguro de que los vehiculos responderan. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 62a89e4 | Managers should be hassle absorbers, not hassle creators. | David H. Maister | ||
| d83a712 | La curiosite, disait-elle, est la forme la plus pure de l'insoumission. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| b5bf266 | Mais la magie vient du pouvoir du bien, de cette force qui nous dit que nous n'avons pas besoin de nous soumettre aux limites et restrictions que nous impose M. destin, comme l'appelle Nabokov. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| f570538 | These are my memories of Norman: red earth and fireflies, singing and demonstrating on the Oval, reading Melville, Poe, Lenin and Mao Tse Tung, reading Ovid and Shakespeare on warm spring mornings with a favorite professor, of conservative political leaning, and accompanying another in the afternoons, singing revolutionary songs. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 22aa496 | We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 5aafb4b | Almost every day, my students would recount such stories. We laughed over them, and later felt angry and sad, although we repeated them endlessly at parties and over cups of coffee, in breadlines, in taxis. It was as if the sheer act of recounting these stories gave us some control over them; the deprecating tone we used, our gestures, even our hysterical laughter seemed to reduce their hold over our lives. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 40ba294 | Later, we all wondered how it was that our concern was not so much for our lives or for the fact that five armed strangers were using our house for a shooting match with a neighbor who was also armed and hiding somewhere in our garden. We, like all normal Iranian citizens, were guilty and had something to hide: we were worried about our satellite dish. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| f8471aa | Whoever fights monsters," Nietzsche had said, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 44fb6b3 | Some of my girls are more radical than I am in their resentment of men. All of them want to be independent. They think they cannot find men equal to them. They think they have grown and matured, but men in their lives have not, they have not bothered to think. | Azar Nafisi |