I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider..

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to b….

I'm very disciplined, but the one thing that I have addictive behavior about is the Internet..

Courage is more important than confidence.

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed b….

I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to….

All there is to do, right at this very moment, is to breathe in, breathe out, and kiss the joy as it flies..

It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward..

At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twent….

Our teachers are everywhere. Our teachers are right in front of us, and take so many forms. All we need to do is to open our eyes, to be open to and ….

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp..

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I'd barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runner….

My son is now fourteen, and from the moment he was born, I understood that forevermore my heart would be walking around outside my body..

I don't know why this is, but I really believe that things don't happen when we're trying to will them into being. They don't happen when we're wait….

We don't choose what's going to wake us up..

Those memories that are engraved within me become teaching tools, ways of connecting with others, of creating an empathic bridge, of reaching out a h….

Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same..

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it..

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, aler….

Our pain is a part of who we authentically are..

If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life..