Understanding the Way of Story as a sacred pattern and a living event. Story can reveal a spiritual path and or the way to healing. Stories become the foundation of health, peacebuilding and vision. Learning...

For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.

It’s the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim

If it comes out black, its Darwin’s and if it comes out white its Ray’s.” This is how things were done in the trailer park.

Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.

I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in...

I learned that being a mother takes a lot of energy.

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well,...

They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

I’m ready for the day when Mom loves me too much to keep me, and for every other person who will someday see that I’m not worth holding on to.

I stood in the library admiring the huge book collection. There was something inherently calming about being surrounded by books, even their smell and texture was comforting.

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.

it’s not about what to think,it’s about how to think.

For the longest time I was so sick I didn’t have the strength or inclination to read, but looking at my books stacked up on the bedside table was comforting, like having old friends sitting...

I’ve had cancer twice and if I had to pick one fate for you, cancer or fertility problems-I’d pick cancer.

If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don’t want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his...

Remove yourself from this, go someplace new, and everything will be better.” Two years into our Florida stint, my mother pulled a geographic as radical as the move from Rochester. The new plan was to...

Baby, you’ve got to roll with the punches.

I do not NEED a man. That was an impossible thought when I married John thirty years ago. It was unimaginable even seven years ago. I finally understand why lasting love has eluded me: the...

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

Free love, man, Free Love! Which, by the way, was the single greatest concept a young man has ever heard. About three years late, women got wise an my frustration returned to normal levels.

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.

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.

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.

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.