A beginning doesn’t always happen first. Sometimes it’s a response. Sometimes its what comes next. What follows after. An exertion of forces interacting, equal and opposed. An action or reaction, when something gets pushed or moved. Sometimes it’s an opening in the thick of an unfolding. A moment in the …
I’m a lot of different things, but mostly bad at all of them. A minimalist, with an addiction to buying books. A kind of Buddhist, or at least Buddh-ish, struggling with acceptance, mindfulness, and letting go. I’m a writer that’s rarely been published and almost never paid. Sometimes I wonder …
When there’s nothing, nothing there, nothing to say, nothing said, nothing to hear, nothing to find, when nothing appears, and nothing arrives; Writing is about learning to pay attention”, Anne Lamott says, and trying “to communicate what is going on.” Even, when you don’t know, even when you’re empty, even …
Rob Bell says that “Love wins.” But , Amy Winehouse says that “Love is a losing game“, and that feels right to me. Love necessitates a loss; a losing of a kind. A loss of self. A loss of ego. A loss of hubris. A loss of pride. The things …
To be a writer, to be an artist, is to shepherd a glimmer of something we have not fully seen. To coax something we only faintly understand. To be coaxed by it in return. And to give it as a gift to someone we have never met. To be a writer, to be …
Any response I can feign is stifled. Stretching with a creak, I pull at the question until it tightens, with nothing in my sights. “The heart is an arrow”, Leigh Bardugo says. It is elegant and precise when given direction. It is goodness, and beauty, and truth. A foot upon …
Leigh Bardugo says that “every man is a safe, a vault of secrets and longings.” But, I think we’re even more complicated than that. We are a horizonless hallway of locked doors. A procession of secret armories, storerooms, and depositories. A vast collection of oddities and curiosities, hidden truths and …
“The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom…If you have any sense, you will ask someone with more experience than you to help you decide what the answer means, but even then the choice is yours.” – Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in …
I’ve become so attached to the idea of creative success, to artistic professionalization, to a career in the written word, that I’ve begun to believe my life is only half-formed without it. That I am incomplete until it’s achieved. As if a paycheck garnered from these thoughtful scribblings is the …
Everywhere we turn we are told by a soulless calculation what to read, what to watch, what to consume, what to be interested in, what to think. We are awash in what Colin Wright describes as “endless torrents of overt status-seeking, cold selling, and frenzied attempts to claim more of …
