Enormous cumulus clouds float above the plateau in the shape of turtles. Always turtles. The are moving so slowly, almost imperceptibly, makes me dizzy. The ground is stable, but the sky is in motion....
A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.
Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move...
Wilderness is not a place of privilege, but rather a place of probity, where the evolutionary processes of life are free to continue.
Wilderness is not a place of isolation but contemplation. Refuge. Refugees.....Wilderness is a knife that cuts through pretense and exposes fear. Even in remote country, you cannot escape your mind.
What was it like when your mother passed away? I asked Mimi. I was twenty-eight years old. I had just given birth to John when I found out Mother had died from a stomach ulcer. A sudden infection. She...
We borrow. We steal. We purchase what we need and buy what we don't. We acquire things, people, places, all in the process of losing ourselves. Busyness is the religion of distraction. I cannot talk t...
The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room fo...
Suffering shows us what we are attached to—perhaps the umbilical cord between Mother and me has never been cut. Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does.
Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision. Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together
Reading has not only changed my life but saved it. the right picked at the right time—especially the one that scares us, threatens to undermine all we have been told, the one that contains forbidden t...
Our species is committing suicide- that is a choice -and in the process, we are causing others pain.
Mimi talked about Mother, how at fifty, women wonder what they have done with their lives. What do they believe? What is of value? What should they do with the new freedom that is theirs now that thei...
It is winter. Ravens are standing on a pile of bones -- black typeface on white paper picking an idea clean. It’s what I do each time I sit down to write. What else are we to do with our obsessions? D...
It is not possible to satisfy women, a friend said. We are disturbed if we have children too young. Disturbed if we have then later. Disturbed if we don't have children at all.
I wish I was at p[peace now, but the desert has become my heartbreak. Perhaps that is the nature of deserts- to break us open, wear us down to bedrock.
I think about , who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer I believe it is our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to...
I believe that spiritual resistance -- the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede, that our capacity to face the harsh measures of a life,...
I believe every woman should own at least one pair of red shoes.
Humility is born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage with a world beyond ourselves. The very presence of...