I started writing in high school after my first love dumped me. I was devastated. Though I wasn’t a loner, I didn’t yet have any close friends. So, I started talking to myself as a way to heal. Once on the mend, I realized I wasn’t just talking to myself. I had begun a conversation with the Universe. In college, I wasn’t allowed to write creatively in the English department. This was before the burgeoning of creative writing programs. But... Read more

Bearing witness is one of the primary ways that human beings hold each other up and help each other grow. Bearing witness is also one of the primary functions of art. No matter what we long for in our imagination, we are just as obliged to affirm the truth of how we mistreat each other and how we lift each other up. Social media is becoming a modern form of bearing witness that is adding to our communal sense of... Read more

There are two beautiful notions that speak to our innate yearning to release and be released by the Divine. What I mean by the Divine is the inherent quality of Spirit that informs everything in life. One notion that speaks to the uncovering of the Divine is Michelangelo’s sense that the statue is already in the stone and that rather than create the statue, our task is to figure out a way to release it. The legendary sculptor would carve... Read more

Wherever I go, I’m blessed to climb with others into the interior we all share. And after a weekend with a group of kind souls, working to listen to each other without judgment but with care, after we’ve journeyed together honestly, we’re closer than when we came together and what that closeness opens is palpable. Often, at the end of our time, after I read a last poem, there is a silence that holds us, which is quieter and softer... Read more

Perhaps God is an infinite secret hiding in the open waiting for each of us to slow enough to receive the unseeable. By doing so, we become conduits of Spirit that continually reunify the Whole. This is how life forms begin: energy moves through particles bringing them together, but it is the openness of the particle that enables the life chain to assemble. And what is the heart but the most transparent particle of being known to humankind? As the... Read more

The opposite of rational is not irrational but intuitive. And while the mind and heart work together, my experience is that the heart absorbs and integrates more deeply than the mind. One way to think of intuition is as an aperture that opens and closes the heart like the lens of a camera, letting in life until it colors our soul. Reason is often an intermediary for a quicker, deeper, more elusive facility. Reason allows us to think like a... Read more

We don’t create to achieve or make history, no matter how we’re schooled or what we tell ourselves. We create because we have to. And the reward for creating, in any form, is that it keeps us alive. This is why we devote ourselves to art. It is our covenant with life. And like anything we devote ourselves to, we will in time become good at it. But we don’t do it to become better. We do it to become... Read more

I’ve known this world in all its splendor and breakage for a lifetime. Or has it been a moment, the blink of some cosmic eye that let’s anyone still enough see the script of history all at once. I only know that when the forces of life and I move too fast, we author violence. When we stop and open, we discover a softness at the center of all things that gives rise to a music of acceptance. Very few... Read more

As the sun never stops shining no matter the weather, our heart is an inner sun that never stops emanating from within, no matter the psychic or circumstantial weather we encounter in the world. Yet sometimes, when hurt or afraid, we mistakenly shut down as a form of protection, though this only incapacitates us more. The inner purpose of will is to keep the inner light unblocked and shining, while the outer purpose of will is to open and close... Read more

When the question arises, “Why write? Why create?” I’m drawn to ask, “Why breathe? Why climb to a place where you can see the horizon? Why look for things soft and durable to wrap around a wound? Why call into the canyon between us to see if anyone is there?” Because all these efforts help us live. Repeatedly, we’re called to engage experience as a way to manifest what we carry within us, bringing what is dormant into the world.... Read more