Mark Nepo - The Book of Awakening (2000)

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In truth, our aliveness depends on our ability to sustain wonder:
to lengthen the moments we are truly uncovered, to be still and quiet
till all the elements of the earth and all the secrets of the oceans
stir the aspects of life waiting within us.

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

Mark Nepo
If we devote ourselves to the life at hand, the rest will follow. For life, it seems, reveals itself through those willing to live. Anything else, no matter how beautiful, is just advertising.

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

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

Mark Nepo
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.

Mark Nepo
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.

Mark Nepo
Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.

Mark Nepo
We think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.

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
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
What we reach for may be different, but what makes us reach is the same.

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

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

Mark Nepo
In life as in water, when we curl up or flail we sink. When we spread and go still, we are carried by the largest sea of all: the sea of grace that flows steadily beneath the turmoil of events. And just as fish can't see the ocean they live in, we can't quite see the spirit that sustains us.

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

Mark Nepo
The extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary.

Mark Nepo
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.

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
Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are

Mark Nepo
If I dare to hear you I will feel you like the sun And grow in your direction.

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
To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.

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
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.

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

Mark Nepo
Who's to say the effort to be real isn't the beginning of wings?

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

Mark Nepo
Tragedy stays alive by feeling what's been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results.

Mark Nepo