Essays

I’m trying to open a window into my soul, to show how it feels to know that this activity of nursing my daughter is also an activity of becoming more…

I have been full of my own concerns; I haven’t listened when she said, “There is something in me that I want to get down on paper. There is something…

The books on my lap kept piling up, books for me to read to them. I imagined them in their thirties sitting at my feet as I read them Pride…

During the most intense period of physical and emotional attachment, when my daughter was an infant, writing was a means to connect to my deepest self. It was also a…

I sometimes wondered what I was doing. I was straddling two worlds: the one harried and the other calm, the one in the eye wall of a cyclone and the…

I didn’t know that choosing to make art is one of the hidden definitions of helping people. It’s not just that art can comfort the weary, heal the sick, and…

I’m shocked to find that this new/old urge to write is punishing. It is not folksy and warm. It does not smell of babies and grass stains. It’s demanding, elbowing…

Open receptivity. That’s what I’m practicing this week. Not just writing, but remembering how to let myself sink into spaciousness, unhurriedness.

Any idea that comes to me seems trivial and boring. Why can’t I come up with a single original idea? And who would want to read what I write anyway?…

I feel uneasy admitting the extent to which my own identity is wrapped up in motherhood. Yet, without my children, I would not be a writer at all.

It’s like a roving book club, this thing we’ve had going with audiobooks in the car. A new twist on the term bookmobile. Even so, the Unfortunate Events books have…