Once I had an opportunity to talk with Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, about the fact that I was not able to do my practice properly. I had just started the vajrayana practices and I was supposed to be visualizing. I couldn't visualize anything. I tried a...
Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to shar...
I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life... I write out of hur...
–Don’t you think the vast majority of the chaos in the world is caused by a relatively small group of disappointed men? – – –I don’t know. Could be. –The men who haven’t gotten the work they expected to get. The men who don’t get th...
An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standar...
I think there's something to the idea that the divine dwells more easily in text than in images. Text allows for more abstract thought, more of a separation between you and the physical world, more room for you and God to meet in the middle. I find i...
A real love letter is made of insight, understanding, and compassion. Otherwise it's not a love letter. A true love letter can produce a transformation in the other person, and therefore in the world. But before it produces a transformation in the ot...
All zoos, even the most enlightened, are built upon the idea both beguiling and repellent—the notion that we can seek out the wildness of the world and behold its beauty, but that we must first contain that wildness. Zoos argue that they are fighti...
The breakdown of mummies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle...For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was the reject...
This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp, but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus's birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact. Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even me...
Paul's portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar to contemporary Christians—it has since become the standard doctrine of the church—but it would have been downright bizarre to Jesus's Jewish followers. The transformation of the Nazarean int...
In the utter peace and stillness the world seemed holding its breath, a little apprehensively, drawing near to the fire to warm itself. There was none of that sense of urgeful, pushing life that robs even a calm spring day of the sense of silence; li...
You’ve never seemed to really need anyone, Clary. You’ve always been so… contained. All you’ve ever needed is your pencils and your imaginary worlds. So many times I’ve had to say things six, seven times before you’d even respond, you wer...
Susie: Hi Calvin! Aren't you excited about going to school? Look at all these great school supplies I got! I love having new notebooks and stuff! Calvin:All I've got to say is they're not making me learn any foreign languages. If English is good enou...
We wish we could have been there for you. We didn't have many role models of our own--we latched on to the foolish love of Oscar Wilde and the well-versed longing of Walt Whitman because nobody else was there to show us an untortured path. We were go...
You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse t...
Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting. In terms of teaching our children to dare greatly in the "never enough" culture, the question isn't so much "Are y...
I'm not one of those pious types who spend their whole lives hunched on prayer rugs while their eyes and hearts remain closed to the outside world. They read the Qur'an only on the surface. But I read the Qur'an in the budding flowers and migrating b...
Encouragement requires empathy and seeing the world from your spouse's perspective. We must first learn what is important to our spouse. Only then can we give encouragement. With verbal encouragement, we are trying to communicate, "I know. I care. I ...
I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give. So I renamed myself Ari. If I switched the letter, my name was Air. I thought it might be ...
The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction...
