Koan: 
     1. From the Japanese, literally "matter for public thought." 
     2. An anecdote or riddle used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to                       provoke  enlightenment. 

Reflections on a Writing Life:

• Imaginative writing takes us into the knowable unknown if we're lucky. At its best it's a practice of the self revealing itself to the self as other. I reread my words and wonder: Where did you come from? Whose are you? How? And there is no answer but the mystery of the self revealing itself to the self as the knowable unknown. So I sit: bewildered, grateful, in love.

• The task of excavation, disinterment of the sacred mythology of the lost self.

• Hold out the white noise to get the work done. Or wither and die amongst the pointless details, ceaseless dinning of the machine. 

• Cease considering success in the eyes of the world. To have been faithful will be the only measure of success.

• Desire to find out, pursue with fire.

• Work to discover the single gesture, the original thought, the voice of no other and of every other.
  
  

• Submit to low ebb when it comes. In its hollow dark patiently await your return, nothing and no one in sight.

• Yes, postpone pleasure in the interest of the grand scheme--to love someone, to explore despair. The heart has many rooms. Only never forsake the will to joy. Ask yourself: how will I recognize the taste of that place if I have only fasted along the way?​

 

• Transcendence through acceptance. Let the coincidence of discoveries become the intention of practice.

 

• To tell a story is to slide along a cresting wave-an explosion of emotional energy, nimble movement, the revelatory instant, epiphanies of green light, cat-balance. It's muscular, dynamic, precise. The novel is a planned dive into the sedimentary heart, its dark caverns and lost wrecks. You better move deliberately at those depths. Carry tanked air on your back, be aware of the food chain, painful pressure erupting at the ears. The murky light can get lost. Rise like a stranger to the forgotten world. Decompress to avoid the bends.

 

• Some writers seem to have powers of empathy and imagination so powerful they are able to bridge the gap in their experience and write truly about things they've never known. The writing itself becomes the empathetic experience. Stephen Crane was relieved to discover at war that his descriptions of it in Red Badge were entirely accurate. Many felt it impossible that the author of The Scarlet Letter could be a man. The sacred prescription “write what you know” casts a wider net. Be other, too. 

 

• Intensity of feeling and precision of utterance. Let them fall in love, become inseparable.

 

• Without writing I am reduced to shadowy half-light, the play of ghosts in mirrors, shifting sands in an opaque sea. Writing means I am.

 

• Commit to the intensely focused pursuit of exactly that thing you were made for. Seize authentic ownership of the whole wide country of yourself.

 

• The meanings don't get told, they emerge back-loaded through the subconscious. Intensity of focus is required, a special kind of letting go. Train. Train. Grow eggs large enough to let you walk out onto the swaying tightrope above the rock-spiked falls without a harness, just the wind and the sky and naked desire. 

 

• Shed skins, leaving each behind, a dry rustle in the dirt. You were not made for time. This restless life in words is nothing but a series of transformations leading to the last and greatest of them all in which we are translated into the (m)other tongue. 

 

• Elegy and triumph, the two waves are one..

 

• Losing the body’s strength is inevitable, and permissible so long as the heart grows. In place of weakness cultivate balance, courage, fire in the mind.

 

• Explore. Not only cites and the wilds of earth. Pilgrim to the inner worlds, its high plateaus and undersea canyons, the stars and planets of interior space, the darkness of you in between.

 

• Recognize the new world embedded in failure every time.

 

• How will you recognize yourself behind the mask you've come to believe is your original face?

 

• Mind wider, heart deeper--more free, they cry, more free.

 

• Transformations require immolation. Ancient peoples ritualized the process. To deny the correlation, to evade the sufferings that lead to wisdom is to accept poverty, an existence for which we were never intended. Burn to evolve.

 

• Wild nature is meditative. In its most violent movements there's presence. Be still, listen. This is what we've lost, we humans in our noise. 

 

• Early my root set in grief, so my fruits when they came were suffused with those beginnings in the dusky underground.

 

• I desire above all to live at the red center of the beating earth. In an age of technological gadgetry, I am seeking out a kinship with trees.  

 

• A writing life labors with whatever gifts it has to make a picture of the searing beauty and utter loneliness of the world.


• Drop everything and the mind clears, the heart opens, shy words appear from hiding, showing a face.

 

• The sea goes on singing forever through the burnished horn of its heart.

 

• Stories come home when they’re good and ripe and ready. You can always smell the dirt and brine on their skins, hear them laughing as they arrive.

 

• The Catholic eats her Christ at the altar of the eucharistic world. The Quaker speaks Truth from the priesthood of the inner light. The Buddha Breathes under the lotus branch at the center of the world. Please, all three.