Writing as Longing
How writing binds self to creation remains a mystery. I write to find out.
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Contemplation
Internet Mind
Back before the Internet, when my two sources of interruption were the mailman and the telephone, my computer functioned like a typewriter or notebook, singular in its purpose. I like to imagine that I could focus, settling down into a project, losing myself in creation and emerging hours later, but the truth is I grasped
Strange Humility
If even my agency is a gift passed along by my family genes and my upbringing and white privilege and happenstance, then any sense that that agency is mine is an illusion.
Consenting to the Cold
The most powerful, willful action springs from acceptance. In Minnesotan terms, we take the “bad” weather and make the best of it.
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Prying Open The Crack
If I never notice what’s happening, I can’t choose my response. I’m reactive. But if I first stop and observe, I can be deliberate about what’s next. I’m coming to think that inside this crack lurks the greatest arena of human freedom.
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Praying Like a Novelist
The secret to fiction is that the writer “turns from everything to one face…to find oneself face to face with everything,” as novelist Elizabeth Bowen put it.
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Writers, This Is Our Moment.
Whatever we’re given by inspiration we must augment with effort and then release to move and heal and connect and transform the wider world.
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Open My Ears That I Might Hear
Sometimes I sleep through the concert; most times I sleep through it even when I’m awake. This morning I heard. Who knows why?
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Faith and the “Poopy Growth Mindset”
Ask what I’m learning in the Living School and I’ll blather incoherently, enthusiastically, and at great length about the Christian mystical tradition, the significance of contemplation, and a complete overhaul of my faith. I was doing just that at Easter dinner a few weeks ago. My father-in-law asked, and all eleven relatives at the table
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Tunneling Through Anxiety
Anxiety is simply what it feels like to move through the birth canal, and awful as it is, it brings us to birth.
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