If change were easy it would be called a candy bar. Change can be terrifying. Walk around your house with your eyes closed for fifteen minutes. Suddenly this safe space is so dangerous! Now walk around your life with no idea who you really are if you aren’t the spouse and job and friends that make you sick. You may feel like you are dying, and that’s because you are, or at least the bound, half-alive part of you is.

Because to truly love someone, I think, also involves the luxury of hate, of fury, of anger, of disappointment, of honesty.

I think writer’s block is an energetic thing that indicates a really good story is banging at the door. 

Why do you write?

If there is money, and there is, for people to adopt children torn without consent from their parents, there is money to fund search and reunion.

When people read you things they pulled from the well of themselves, you have swum in the waters of the holy, and nothing is ever the same.

I have been doing more Write or Die sessions lately and I am noticing a theme. It’s like the people I work with all hold a firefly in their fisted hand, and they are unwilling to let the light shine.

What if part of being born from and into trauma is the opportunity to leap from one track, one life, to another? One of our choosing?

I’ve been trying to get my heart to open. It’s like trying to get a walnut out of a shell that is slammed shut.

Our bodyminds want to keep us safe. Our bodyminds also want us to relax. Deepak Chopra makes zillions of dollars off this paradox. We are babies in a world that tells us we are about to die, and in reaction we keep scratching our own itches with lit matches. 

When an animal has a wound, it goes off by itself so it can feel safe. The dictionary definition of licking your wounds reads “If you say that someone is licking their wounds, you mean that they are recovering after being defeated or made to feel ashamed or unhappy.”

Dear Universe, there are so many people in the world who would like to feel better heard, better loved. There are so many people who carry a story like a jagged rock inside their guts or heart, a weight they feel unable to push into the light. Children who lost their mothers or families often have even more jagged stories inside of them, and these stories hum or talk or shout inside the body and cause all sorts of mayhem. How can you focus on 2+2=4 when you have an untold story in your heart?