When Death Comes Like the Hungry Bear In Autumn
I am writing this beside my mom’s bed. She is dying and her breath grows quieter and quieter. Her face is like a child’s, soft and without a wrinkle. I was with her just last week and, four days after I left, her brain stopped knowing how to instruct her body to swallow. My sister […]
Continue readingWhat to do when life is pushing you to grow
I’ve been bubbling lately with an intensity unusual even for me. I’ve had a hard time sleeping. I often feel uneasy, like I’ve forgotten something important, but I have no idea what. I’ve journaled about this twitchy feeling and meditated with it; greeting my thoughts and feelings as we do at the Oasis. Yet why […]
Continue readingLife Wants You to Begin Again
If there is one thing I hear constantly from the creatives and writers I work with at my recommit to your art, recenter in your heart Oasis, on retreat, or in my writer’s mastermind, it’s the lament of what didn’t happen. The cry of “I didn’t make my page count” or “My best friend’s mother […]
Continue readingMaybe Failure is Just Another Word for Compost?
You may or may not know this, but last April I realized I’d spent four years writing a memoir that wasn’t going to work. Ever. As hard as I had worked to shape the material and find the central insight I wanted to share with you, it just wasn’t there. What was there was a […]
Continue readingOnce Upon a Time, There was a Woman Who…
Once upon a time, there was a woman who stood on the cusp of the new year and grinned. She grinned at all her past selves stretching behind her. Where once she would have judged those selves for their choices, now she bowed to them. They had brought her to this moment. Who would she […]
Continue readingHow to take a healthy break from your creative work
I received a great question from Ann who is attending one of my retreats next year: “How do you make sure that a ‘nice break’ from writing (for example, over the upcoming holidays) doesn’t become a block to writing? As in, how do you prepare yourself ahead of time? Do you ponder it much during […]
Continue readingWhat I learned from losing my dog
My fourteen-year-old dog Luna died last week. She had been in failing health for two years and it was clear over the weekend she was suffering and it was time to let her go. Bob and I cuddled her that last morning and fed her bits of cheese and told her how much we loved […]
Continue readingInspiration Love Note
The holidays are upon us with all their wonder and hustle, with sparkle and poignancy, and with the possibility for wonderful connections and for the sting of loneliness and missing those we have loved. It seemed a good time to offer you an oasis of inspiration and connection to the vast creative goodness we can […]
Continue readingHow to Be Yourself
A reader recently asked me to write about “how to be yourself.” Oh, I thought, yes. I love that phrase, packed with so much promise, unfolding, and mystery. And packed with so much pain as we mostly live in a world that shoves and bullies us to be different than we are or judges us […]
Continue readingOf course it’s scary to share your voice
I’m just back from teaching a writing retreat where 20 women worked so hard and so bravely to calm their minds and open their hearts and bring their voices forth. It is stunning what we are capable of when we give space, time and permission to our desires. We stopped focusing on word count (do […]
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