The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.
I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.
If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. Th...
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.
You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories;...
We learn from pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can't find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God...
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.
Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Mid...
That's what's so touching about weddings: Two people fall in love, and decide to see if their love might stand up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to help th...
Look back on your life and find something small that made a big difference.
If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.
My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up...
Life is not a submarine.
In early sobriety I heard that if you have an idea after ten p.m., it is probably not a good idea—and this was before e-mail.