In meditation, I practice releasing my grip on something I love for the sake of something I don’t yet know or trust—silence, rest, peace. I pray this exercises my capacity to welcome new loves, because I really need this ability in the real world where my attachments are so hard to relinquish. Especially when I don’t even know I’m attached.
Writers often say that if they knew how much work a book would take, they’d never have started to write. Denial sets us on a path of creativity and growth and change, and this path can then gradually open our eyes to reality in a way we can bear.
What do I see that no one else sees? Why do I see this? What is born of my personality and circumstances and gifts and shortcomings—what rises up from my unique self so strongly that all self-doubt falls aside and I can’t help but act? That’s what is mine to do.
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 …
The fact that the artistic process includes emptiness says something important, I think, about creation itself. Emptiness is part of becoming.
Thank goodness there’s an adult in Gwyn’s life eyes spark at the magnificence of mathematics.But I’m also grateful to our pastor, who sees Gwyn’s cynicism about that great bearded white guy in the sky for what it is—an early and woefully simplistic understanding of (and then rejection of) holiness. Here’s hoping we can communicate to Gwyn—to anyone, to everyone—the beautiful calculus of faith.
A spark of life or inspiration sounds through us into our creations and sounds through our creations into other living, breathing creations who are also sparks of life and sources of inspiration.
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.
The most powerful, willful action springs from acceptance. In Minnesotan terms, we take the “bad” weather and make the best of it.
One of the hardest things about creative writing, as far as I’m concerned, is the pervasive sense of getting nowhere. Sure, I might have a productive morning and crank out a few thousand words, but tomorrow I’ll cut half of them, and even if I don’t I’ll likely wait years before those words see the …