Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the...

The God I serve is able to save us both. To give us the winning lottery ticket so all our money problems will go away. To mend our broken hearts. To bring us close to...

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.

My story begins with a question.

Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they’re experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the...

I’d very much like to ‘conclude’ something from this experiment. Or that it should raise a question in my mind, and a commitment to get to the bottom of the matter, to investigate, to come...

I’m no expert, no natural-born talent, definitely no guru. As you’ll soon learn, only through a colossal experiment in trial and error did I reach the sexual summit. Although I own up to having worn...

Mary [Tyler Moore] was absolutely brilliant… She is a fabulous actress. She can do anything.

Normally, it takes people about 60 to 90 minutes to reach REM sleep, so they wouldn’t enter this stage during a 20 minute nap. People with narcolepsy often enter REM sleep soon after falling asleep....

A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.

Lesson learned: If a guy tells you you’re his second choice, don’t make him your first.

I applied at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard after my band broke up. I really wanted to work there because it involved the love of my life, music. It was also located on the world...

Destiny is not always preordained. Life is about making choices. Our lives are the sum of all the choices we make, the bridges we cross, and the ones we burn. Our souls cast long shadows...

…I really did “choose” to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven’t chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.

How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them?

Even wondered about the difference?Autobiography: The usually self-serving accounts of personal accomplishments by a public figure.Memoir: The usually self-serving accounts of someone whose only accomplishments are often self-pity and vindictiveness.

Their promise, my children’s possibilities, still linger in our home.

This is why being broken is so beautiful: being broken means you have cracks for love and light to shine through, gaps for the Godiverse to burrow and bloom, space to move from who you...

If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.

She had always thought the word ‘pheromones’ made it sound as though molecules were floating in the air, shaped like little fluted horns, ready to attach themselves to the nearest target. Microscopic Edison phonographs flying...

I want my heart to be the thin place. I don’t want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my...

I had lots of appointments, many places to go, and I needed a lot of rest; the art of constructively selling oneself requires much tender self-care

I needed him like I needed air to breathe.

When I was about nine, my siblings and I fell out of our moving van at an intersection. My dad didn’t notice for about five blocks. It was back before seat belts. It was also...

You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was...

It’s only natural for people to fall, but there are people who, even if they fall, jump right back up right away and run forward, and there are people who just keep sitting there, crying.

How can it be that there is such a colossal gap between what we think we know about grief and mourning and what we actually find out when it comes to us?

Everything around me affirmed there was nothing else I could do – yet everything inside me cried that I was not doing enough.

People always laugh at me when I tell them I’m scared of pencils, because they can’t fathom why anyone would fear a puncture wound or lead poisoning from a pencil, especially now that it’s impossible...

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you...

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.

From the moment I was first pregnant, and those around me insisted that treats such as cold cuts and nail polish could cut my unborn child’s potential IQ in half, I got into the habit...

Murphy’s law inverted: What can go right, will go right. (Works if you’re an optimist.)

Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that...

You don’t need to retire to a cloister or the desert for years on end to experience a true dark night; you don’t even have to be pursuing any particular “spiritual” path. Raising a challenged...

Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the...

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

All of my secrets and scars and wishes and dreams can live together in this one body without shame, without blame, and without fear. I am all loved, all accepted, and all in service to...

The road to the heart is not a long, linear path, but this turning. There is no race or competition, just me and God going deeper, carving a canyon to the soul.

Going to the seaside in winter is like seeing your partner first thing in the morning. Ugly, depressing and troubled by wind.

You can make a difference in another person’s life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone!...

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

The selection process is simple. Hubby exhausts every ploy in his psychological arsenal to filter out the liars, fakes, and undesirables. (If only every husband were so devoted . . .) Me, I try to...

Life is something that no one can teach you,You have to learn it.

Bonding through caregiving..I don’t think I’d ever realized until then that so much affection, so much heart connect, happens when we take care of someone.

You don’t live in all those places.”With the amount of time I have spent traveling in my life, one might make the argument that I do live in all those places, if only temporarily. But...

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.

Suddenly life was good, even glamorous. We were poor but didn’t know it, or maybe we did know, but we didn’t care, because my mother had stopped disappearing into her bedroom. Our apartment building was...