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.
I have actually come to believe that a person being herself is beautiful – that contentment and acceptance and freedom are beautiful.
Some characters in fiction and our families exist as levers, to turn everything upside down and thereby knock out of the park some of our old presumptions, pretensions, convictions, and illusions of safety. These people, both in fiction and at the holiday table, tend to be annoying and on the margins.
Forget letting go and letting God. It was time for brooding, stewing, victimized self-righteousness, and thoughts of revenge. Now you’re talking.
Besides, those few people who aren’t a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.
We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky.
Every day we’re in the grip of the impossible conundrum: the truth that it’s over in a blink, and we may be near the end, and that we have to live as if it’s going to be okay, no matter what.
We cannot arrange lasting safety or happiness for our most beloved people. They have to find their own ways, their own answers.
Hospice is the Calvary, Hospice means death is not going to be nearly as bad as you think.
Play is also part of developing trust. Play opens the heart and gives delight and focus, like an abacus did when we were young.
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As roses, up from ground. Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled. It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open.
You can’t logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.
As the mystics would have us believe, “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.
Deep is so un-American now, even radical. We live too often like water skeeters on the surface of the pond, dropping down for a quick bite of insect or e-mail. Deep is the realm of soul.
There is still something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem so inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change us and deepen us.
It turns out that welcome is solidarity. We’re glad you’re here, and we’re with you. This whole project called you being alive, you finding joy? Well, we’re in on that.
Contrary to my upbringing, the bigger, more real, and friendlier the world inside me becomes, the safer I feel in the outside world.
Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way.
We think that if our values aren’t the correct ones, we would have other ones, which would then be the correct ones.
Do we play anymore, step away from tasks, duties, and habits with curiosity? Tread carefully: if you are not vigilant, this may lead to wonder, which is joy, which every fear in you knows will lead to job failure and lost revenue.
Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.