Holy First Person Singular, Batman!
Call me a spiritually obsessed literary geek, but the little spiritual wisdom I can claim I’ve gleaned from grammar.
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Creativity
Repaint! Repent! Revise!
You’ve got to deconstruct the old to make room for the new, whether it’s a hallway or a soul. Or, in the case of writers, a rough draft. Or, in the case of climate change, old energy dependencies. Or, in the case of a broken democracy, old complacencies.
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The Gifts of Being Curious
Isn’t curiosity marvelous? Something sparks your interest, and you’re off—questioning, learning, exploring, pondering. Say you meet someone new, share a bit about yourself, and they’re genuinely curious; suddenly you’re deep in conversation, sharing details about yourself or your work that you rarely otherwise disclose, and you begin to wonder whether this person might become a
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Freedom in Constriction
The spiritual path requires letting go of what doesn’t give us life and giving ourselves wholly to what does. From the outside this can look dire, but from the inside the story’s quite different.
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How does creation happen?
The story itself—the emergent life inside the inspiration—is a dynamic participant in the creative process.
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Developing the Inner Witness
Just as language can never fully represent me on the page, I, in all my thinking, breathing, creating glory, can never fully represent my ultimate Self. And so I let the little me go.
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The Journal: The Writer’s Compost
The journal is a writer’s compost bin. It’s tucked out back, behind the fence or along the alley where the smell won’t waft into the kitchen and the fruit flies won’t irritate the gardeners. You add to it daily, or at least whenever you’ve got a heaping bucket of scraps (read: baggage) to unload.
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Writing as Listening
Writing, I suspect, is one way we can inhabit that liminal space right before prayer becomes prayer.
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Mystic or Bust
Forget belief. Believing isn’t the point. Nor is following a prescribed set of rules or performing a set of rituals. The point is experience, opening ourselves to transformation, to awe, to becoming agents of change, to loving.
Revising in a Tumultuous World
Revision is basically re-vising, or seeing again. The word closest to revision in English is respect. When we look a second time, then a third, fourth, and fifth, we come to know and love the complexity of what we see. There are many facets to any subject, and revision asks of us the forbearance, humility, and creativity to seek out as many facets as possible.
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