It 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.
Is something a friend once told me. She said that every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. You get one, your awful Uncle Phil gets one, I get one, Tricia Nixon gets one,...
When you love something like reading - or drawing or music or nature - it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meanin...
When you are on the knife’s edge—when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse—you take in today.
When we try to see a damaged person as one of God's regular old customers, instead of a lost cause, it takes the pressure off everybody. We can then loosen our death grip on the person, which usually...
When we think we can do it all ourselves--fix, save, buy, or date a nice solution--it's hopeless. We're going to screw things up. We're going to get our tentacles wrapped around things and squirt our...
What if you wake up at sixty and realize that you forgot to wake up, and you never became the person you were born to be, and now your hair is falling out?
What if Sam's heart got broken again? As with most kids who are fourteen, it has been spackled and duct-taped and caulked back together many times as it is. [p. 258]
What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can't have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new b...
What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, Well, not very interesting, i...
We have all we need to come through. Against all odds, no matter what we’ve lost, no matter what messes we’ve made over time, no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, lig...
To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another’s suffering where that person can see us.
This one truth, that the few people you adore will die, is plenty difficult to absorb. But on top of it, someone’s brakes fail, or someone pulls the trigger or snatches the kid, or someone deeply trus...
They say we are punished not for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive.
There is almost nothing outside you that will help in any kind of lasting way,
Then I look into my students’ faces, and they look solemnly back at me.So does our writing matter, again? they ask.Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our...
The bakery, on the other hand, was a family’s understanding that a kid didn’t have to do or achieve or own anything more for the world to care, and even delight in her.
Sue had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but she finally followed Barb's advice to call me after various people at her church...
Someone who'd spent $30,000 at a diet hospital told me the secret: Eat less, exercise more. Oh, and here's $5,000 worth of cutting edge advice: drink more water.
So I pray for people who are hurting, that they be filled with air and light. Air and light heal; they somehow get into those dark, musty places, like spiritual antibiotics. We don’t have to figure ou...