Writing as a Sacred Path

“Writers who don’t publish are just muttering to themselves.” I can’t tell you when I first heard those words—or ones like them—or who sa...

Writing Plateaus I have an odd hobby. I study Chinese characters. I once studied a lot of Mandarin (the most widely spoken of the Chinese...

“Imagine the writing process as a heart pumping blood,” writes Alice W. Flaherty in The Midnight Disease. Flaherty is a physician and autho...

Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck calls them “concepts”: mental images of the way we think things should be. Another word for them is “should...

Concepts and “Shoulds” “To fulfill our concepts we’ll ruin families, nations, anything,” writes Charlotte Joko Beck  in Everyday Zen. “A...