Loving Through Creation
Love felt is beautiful, but love expressed, love enacted, love made into something, is divine. This is how God is, and how God becomes.
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Beyond Hope
Immediately inside me an old battle revved up: Keep hope! screamed one voice; Be realistic! screamed the other. Hope buoys the spirits, motivates, and reminds us to stay open to possibility—all of which I wanted, for me and my mom. Reality, however, is real.
Writing as Deep Listening
Every story has a hidden life—a soul, if you will. How writers tend this soul significantly affects our work and our well-being. This tending is really active listening. It’s both willful, sprung from the self, and responsive, heeding that life-force beyond the story and its readership.
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Original Immaturity
I began to see the human journey as simply growing up. We’re born with original immaturity. Kids throw toys in the toilet. Our task is to develop into our fullest, flourishing, interconnected Self, which is the opposite of the small, grasping, individualistic self.
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Walking On Air
But this is our progression when learning an art, and (I suspect) when living life: First we’re unconscious, then we’re self-conscious, and then we’re aware of being self-conscious, which is truly agonizing. Only then can we come into consciousness and make conscious choices that shape our lives.
How To Retreat (with advice from a 7-year-old)
Once again I saw divinity in this humble, stumbling way—not by escaping my life but diving deeper into it.
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From Will to Inspiration: The Creative Spectrum
Both inspiration and willful exertion bring gifts and weaknesses; neither one is more worthy or more likely to produce art. That said, I’m convinced that an artist who inhabits an extreme on the spectrum at the stubborn exclusion of the other extreme is certain to stumble. The best art-making slides up and down the scale.
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The Interior Hearth
Highs in the negative digits. Ice so cold it squeaks when you skate on it. Gwyn pedaling the tagalong with a scarf completely covering her face. Minnesota January: Not for the fainthearted. But it’s perfect for those (like myself) who love hearth and home, who in the glory days of summer dreamt about sorting photos
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Message from the Page: “Would you please pay attention?!”
Contemplation is our central task as writers, and as human beings.
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Tikkun Olam
All these sparks are part of a much brighter and broader light, and we can gather it up from anywhere, everywhere, for the healing of the world.