Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, f...
Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice.
Even mushrooms respond to light—I suppose they blink their mushroomy little eyes, like the rest of us.
Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's tr...
At the same time, the truth is that we are beloved, even in our current condition, by someone; we have loved and been loved. We have also known the abyss of love lost to death or rejection, and that i...
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressin...
It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.
You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. Th...
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice d...
We do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise.
May be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not emplo...
If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go runni...
Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.
Clarity of vision—especially
You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.
You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.
You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn’t quite where you were heading. The light you see when people are in the tunnel of deep trouble is dom...
You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and finally, grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination. Every