What matters more? Potential or achievement? This has been coming up for me a lot lately in my daily life and my reading. I believe most of us tend to judge ourselves based on what we have or haven’t achieved — but in the contexts that have the most daily, real-world consequences (the workplace, interpersonal […]
Creativity as a Habit
The other day, I was listening to an episode of my favorite podcast, Creative Pep Talk, about overthinking. Like most of his episodes, host Andy J. Pizza took the topic in a different and more profound direction than I was expecting: making creativity a habit, and treating it as such. There’s a whole slew of […]
Sienna
Recently I thought back over the 13 years of my marriage and realized something startling: In that time, there were only two years with no major life events. For 11 of those 13 years, we’ve gone through births, deaths, major illness, big moves, natural disasters, etc. And we’ve survived … and even grown stronger through […]
Hearing the Inner Voice
After listening to John O’Donohue’s The Inner Landscape recently, I’ve been thinking on the concept of “a world inside yourself.” Though O’Donohue’s take is richer than this — his concept is of a whole universe of being inside yourself — I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the notion of the inner voice. […]
Starting Over
I had hit a wall with writing Santa Fe Blues before my daughter went into the hospital in May. I was still writing, but it was a slow process — much slower than Paint It Red had gone. I was frustrated, but determined to finish the draft before I made any judgments about its quality. […]
Getting Outside Your Head
The power of words never ceases to amaze me. They hold the power to connect us and to create rifts. The written word can take us out of reality for a short while. The spoken word can bring us more fully into the present. Writing, for me, is thinking. It’s how I process the world […]