Finding Acceptance in Surprising Places
What if the new life we look for (in publication, in success) might also be found elsewhere?
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Spiritual Growth
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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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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God as Being, Being as God
A few years ago, I set off on a journey to the heart of Christian contemplation, both in practice and with studies. I began doing Centering Prayer, a form of meditation rooted in monasticism and the teachings of the mystics, and reading works from the mystical margins of Christian tradition—St. John of the Cross, Meister
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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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Original Sin—Original Blessing—Blessedly Sinful & Original
We’re all Japanese kintsugi, broken pottery mended with gold, made more beautiful by its repair. These days I trust myself to do my best, but when I screw up, I’m grateful for the ways failure transforms me.
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Play with Me!
Without carving space between and within our necessary activities to engage the world spontaneously, for its own sake, there’s no life-spark. Play is how we come spiritually alive.