Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.
Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.
We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.
We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.
Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.
Whether you’re keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it’s the same thing. What’s important is you’re having a relationship with your mind.
Use loneliness. Its ache creates urgency to reconnect with the world. Take that aching and use it to propel you deeper into your need for expression – to speak, to say who you are.
A writer must say yes to life.
We should notice that we are already supported at every moment. There is the earth below our feet and there is the air, filling our lungs and emptying them. We should begin from this when we need support.
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that’s why we decide we’re done. It’s getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.
We are each a concert reverberating with our whole lives and reflecting and amplifying the world around us.
I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.
Katagiri Roshi says: “Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another.” Yes, but it’s better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.
It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.
Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.
You live and then you die, I thought. It’s good to have some good times.
In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write.
Be tough in the way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at peace with what is around it.
Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write.