I'm obsessive. That's the word for me. I obsess - perhaps to the point where it's moderately dysfunctional. I tend to put a book through about 100 revisions. If anything, that's an understatement. If there's another author out there who does this sor...
If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God w...
Before I had studied Chan for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I h...
I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you fe...
If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growin...
A dream is an idea involving a sense of possibilities rather than probabilities, of potential rather than limits. A dream is the wellspring of passion, giving us direction and pointing us to lofty heights. It is an expression of optimism, hope and va...
When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculati...
Madge: I don't know why I keep shouting at them. The Doctor: Because every time you see them happy you remember how sad they're going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later. ...
Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wa...
I was so sure I wanted to be a novelist. I would spend hours and hours every day writing. Little stories about nothing in particular. I recall one about someone with an illness. But my dedication wasn't really healthy, and it reached the point where ...
History teacher Bob Alston's "expertise late not in his sweeping knowledge of the topic but in his ability to pick after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a roadmap to guide his new learning. He was an expert at cultiva...
In wishing to know ourselves fully, we must forget our quest for gain and seek only completion. At a certain point in our development, we no longer even seek to become Mystic, Magister, Sorcerer, or Witch: we seek only our own perfection in the whole...
She bent and placed a single daisy upon the grave. A simple white daisy. The plainest of flowers, perhaps the purest, Elspeth thought. It had cost next to nothing at all, and perhaps that was the point. She wasn’t being cheap. She was being symboli...
My gut knotted as I wrote from the point of view of characters whose lives were rooted in bigotry and intolerance. But there were also narrators who made my heart soar. Disabling my censor, allowing each character to speak his or her mind, I have, in...
I am mean; I'm nasty at times. I don't feel like talking to people at times. When I am in a bad mood and have had a really awful day, don't come in my face because I am not tolerant and I am not a goddess; I can't handle it after a point. I am going ...
To call someone a navel gazer on the mainland is to say that they're narcissistic, self-absorbed in their introspective pursuits. This perspective, I realize, might be the very reason I've come to think of a spiritual life as some sort of luxury. I'm...
That was a moment where something clarified about shame for me: it’s not just something negative but some kind of arrow, it’s pointing at something, some confusing blend of fear and desire. There was liberation in that, thinking of shame as somet...
A ray of sunshine, I bring to the world my passion of guiding others to their point of power by first loving themselves from the inside out. I Am on a never ending journey of self discovery and that has earned me a PHd in life experience I share with...
To me, imagination is about breaking down the walls of a reality of multiple interpretations, and truly opening up your mind to assemble one clear interpretation. Once you have tasted imagination, reality will no longer be enough for you. The line be...
I didn't know the value of creation until I did it. Once I tasted imagination, I knew that I was trapped. I knew that I could never look back. At this point in my life, reality simply isn't enough for me. Dreams simply aren't enough for me. I need so...
There's always this point in pregnancy when all of sudden you realize that there is this person inside of you, and somehow you are going to have to get them out. First you worry about getting pregnant, then staying pregnant, then dealing with the sid...
