“Find your own voice.” “Make each character sympathetic yet unique, with no stereotypes.” “Give the main character a meaningful arc, someone the reader can root for.” These imperatives appear, over and over, in courses for writers. I’m noticing that our atmosphere of complex cultural chaos – in the news, online, among friends and family, and […]
Timeless Willy-Nilly
January 11, 2024 by
Missing, as I do now, the familiar comfort of resting in the recent “story” of Solstice – a sense of self-location in the vastness of space, a real reason for less, then more, daylight – or the “story” of the Gregorian calendar, which claimed to finish an old tale, to begin a new one – […]
New Nonlinear Narratives
July 29, 2023 by
After a revelation – about why I was so enchanted by an author’s work – I stumbled upon a technique for story-generation and voice discovery. The jolt came when I realized that her discontinuous, multi-format structure was resonating with the way time and reality feel to me now (erratic), my attention being whipsawed by climate […]
Another “Before Times”
April 29, 2023 by
Explosive accelerations in the development and dispersal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software are destabilizing millennia of human experience, practice, and shared reality, right now. Thousands of hyperbolic articles and videos careen through the web every hour, signaling dangers to civilization – structural, biological, economic, intellectual, educational. Dangers reach all the way into unreliable authorship and […]
Floating in Solutions
December 18, 2022 by
I’m writing to you at midnight on a moonless night, from inside the warmth of an ink-black pool, a mountainside hot spring in the high desert. Oceans of stars glitter overhead in the clear sweet air. The only sounds are a soft breeze soughing through the trees, unseen critters skittering through pine needles. This is […]
Infinitesimal Star Stuff
July 16, 2022 by
Allowing the first Webb Telescope images to sink deep can be perilous. Trap doors can open and drop the soul-mind into a bottomless spiral of unknowing. I found this exhilarating and, at the same time, annihilating – in a good way. To get this effect, one way is through an analogy: the galaxies pictured above […]
Chiaroscuro Time
March 19, 2022 by
Equinox sensitizes me to light-dark contrasts. ‘Chiaroscuro’ (clarus: light + obscurus: dark), art’s intense shadowing (Caravaggio, Rembrandt), surfaces from deep memory while looking at stark contrasts in my email in-box: terrifying news and dire philosophies alternating with shiny announcements from a hopeful world, sprinkled with techniques for dealing with the terrifying news. Simultaneously, I’ve felt […]
Welcome to Reconception
December 26, 2021 by
I sense an invitation going out – from those of us who’ve been doing inner work for decades, to people new to deep discovery and adaptation. New concerns for themselves, for their loved ones, and for the world at large are prompting more intense reflections in all sectors of society. In stretching to connect with […]
Life as Speculative Fiction
August 14, 2021 by
From deep inside the world of fiction writing, I see classic elements of screenplays and novels playing out in our public life. Every day brings disruptive incidents to start new plots. We face increasingly large obstacles with higher and higher risks and cascading disasters. Conflict erupts everywhere, and point-of-view characters (each of us) keep going […]
Syncopated Spring
April 1, 2021 by
These times feel like a familiar beautiful tune struggling to play – but with missing pieces, interruptions. Turns out that’s what ‘syncopated’ means: all chopped up, leaving gaps (syn – together, plus kop – cut). This sense of something missing came to mean fainting, a loss of consciousness (syncope). The word drifted into language too, […]
Gold Threads in the Dark
December 21, 2020 by
Feeling creative is, for some of us, a life-support function – especially in recent times. It’s easiest for those who have shelter and food, while holding awareness of those who don’t. For hundreds of millions, just thinking up and acting on the next step toward survival — if survival is still possible — are supremely […]
Inner Q&A for Chaotic Times
May 29, 2020 by
Once again, decades of inner work – as a writer and meditator – are taking on new form. Both activities stimulate and respond to major shifts in perception, to create coherent new narratives. It was no surprise, then, to realize that a technique I’ve been using for years – a quasi-meditative centering exercise for making […]
A Different Spring
March 19, 2020 by
Never have so many plummeted, all at once, into existential dread. When I look back at this Equinox (8:50 PT tonight), I’ll be reminded of the millions caught in a pandemic – and all the lockdowns and financial craziness. I’m having flashbacks – from literary memory – of what it was like for people […]
Polyphasic New Year
January 1, 2019 by
Polyphasic: a favorite new word (new for me, a couple of months ago). It’s a quick way to say complicated things about multiple layers of reality (many phases of existence) – in an individual or in a whole culture. It came up when I was listening for what to say at the beginning of a […]
Midwinter Dreamscape
December 21, 2018 by
Through a dark time tunnel, morning and evening like midnight, I treasure this season of inwardness, enfolded in soft wraps against the chill. Warmth and stillness billow into the forefront of luxuries. What I can share here are ways to feel the warmth and stillness any time, ways that have emerged from a convergence of […]
Repurposing Inner Work
July 1, 2018 by
As chaos mounts in the perceptible world, I’ve been listening for new ideas about what to offer here. To my surprise, I’ve noticed that some earlier techniques can be dusted off and repurposed, used in new ways, in the new environment. I’ll offer links to them here, with possibilities for working with them in times […]
Generating Quality Time
March 21, 2018 by
Poignant synchronicities unfolded as I drafted a post about qualities of time, to celebrate the Equilux (March 16 in my latitude/longitude) and the Equinox (9:15 a.m. PDT on March 20 everywhere). Two days before the day of equal light and dark, my web connections filled with affectionate remembrances on the passing of Stephen Hawking, most […]
Contrapuntal Equinox Experiment
September 21, 2017 by
Public life these days is so filled with stories that intend to grip the audience – wildly countervailing narrative and dramatic “melodies” all playing at the same time – that it can be a strain to hear one’s own profound song. My sense is that becoming a deliberate singer/songwriter of life, a benevolent master storyteller, […]
Schrodinger’s Eclipse
August 17, 2017 by
In this moment, before it has happened, my personal involvement with the August 21 eclipse is hovering in maybe-space. Will I feel again the shimmering magnetic atmosphere of long-ago experiences, see the dappling on the ground? Will I swim in air made of silver ripples? Will there be a storm that outshadows the shadow? Will […]
dot dot dot dot pause dot dot
June 18, 2017 by
This (the dot sequence) means Hi. In code. A wave across the waters. I’ve waited in silence for something pithy and meaningful to say, something that wouldn’t get too tangled up in the outer chaos of our time. I’ve been inspired by hi-signs coming through electronic channels I’ve let stay open – photos of Nature […]
The Light inside the Cave
May 1, 2017 by
I became (again?) a cave painter one recent morning, hyper-aware of wanting to inscribe something from deep inside, something from far beyond that would echo through and far beyond me. I was in a new space, in every way: the first spring in a new residence, with a writing chair facing east. In the first […]
An Expression of Pink Trees
March 19, 2017 by
I missed it. At least the camera missed it. By the time I realized I wanted to capture the glorious explosion of flowers haloing out from a stand of neighborhood trees, two days had passed and the flowers were turning gray. That was weeks ago, and now it’s a strange mercy: to keep from feeling […]
Self Portraits
January 18, 2017 by
In this month of inspiration to bring new visions into outer expression, first I mused on what would feel good to be done with, to clear the field, and in that creative spaciousness got reminded of an enlightenment from long ago. I decided to invoke it in the current moment, not just marvel at it in […]
Equilux
September 22, 2016 by
An exotic and beautiful new word is reason enough to write about. Equilux. It’s the day of the year when light and dark are equal (not Equinox). I felt like celebrating Equinox and looked it up – only to be astounded at how much I’d forgotten or never known. The celestial mechanics literally disoriented me […]
The Learning Birds of Summer
August 10, 2016 by
They’re old enough to be out and about, trying to function in the world for the first time. A young jay, with gray fuzz sticking out from wings that were still pale blue, its head a tufted gray ball, struggled to balance on a low branch in the shrubbery. Its short brilliant-blue tail feathers bobbed […]
Degrees of Intimacy … in Words
June 3, 2016 by
Fiction-writing is a different beast – thrilling to engage after so much practice in resolving everything into concepts, expressing them, and inviting an audience to ponder and, ideally, agree. I’ve been experimenting with live readings of fictional vignettes to a group of extremely varied listeners. The group was facilitated by long-time fiction fans who expected […]
Significance
March 8, 2016 by
After being tossed an opportunity to list the most significant events of my life, I watched the parades of memory march by – different parades on three different passes of the question. My notion of what ‘significant’ means began to crumble. The first pass included the usual suspects: outer events that changed the course of […]
Seasonal Elixirs
January 1, 2016 by
‘Tis the season of Re-vision. Bold Re-view and Re-solution. There’s a comfortable way to parse this out, one that strikes me as touching all our potentials without trapping us into false promises. Public rituals like January 1 can spark private occasions for dropping inward and letting things float in timelessness, unhooked from the calendar’s demands: at […]
Black Light
December 13, 2015 by
I’m in a new phase with deep winter: I now feel the ink-cold blackness at breakfast, the shutting down of the world in late afternoon. For days I’ve pondered the people whose pain comes from encroaching darkness, enough to make them stare into banks of artificial light – or take mood-shifting drugs – to keep […]
The Enneagram: Editorial Enthusiasm
November 1, 2015 by
I was so moved by an editorial project last spring, I posted an entry about the transformative power of stories. The book I edited in that project has now arrived from England, and I’m experiencing a new set of subtle awakenings after seeing it. I’d known the publishers were going to say something nice about […]
Exper…
September 18, 2015 by
I got a sweet little shock when I looked up the etymology of experience and experiment, wondering how they could feel so different while being nearly the same word. Their shared history is adding rich new sensations of fearlessness to daily existence (even to the past and the future, as well as the Now). First, the two exper words: ‘Experience’ […]
A Perfect Score of 42
July 12, 2015 by
I found a new way to relax, even feel more creative and awake, when hearing the word ‘perfect’. My mind started chewing on it after two encounters with someone steeped in fashion philosophies: In the first, he announced that painful difficulties reflected the perfection of the moment; in the second, he said he wasn’t perfect. […]
Storied Synchronicity
April 30, 2015 by
After an editorial project that enchanted me day and night for a month, I’ve spent days getting back to myself with yoga, deep-tissue massage, and exotic literature to whisk me into other inner worlds. This morning, noticing my mind had again wafted back into the project – one that altered my deep interior and will nourish me […]
All Seasons, All the Time
March 16, 2015 by
One small white rose glowed in the sunlight, floating in a dark-green sea. I was mesmerized. This could not be. Yet there it bloomed, staring at me, laughing. This went on for days – no other flowers in the vast hedge, just this one, living its full cycle before the others even began. I wondered […]
The Complexity of Now
January 1, 2015 by
It’s January 1: a spirit horse of imagination charging across a clear field. Its tracks are changing the field. Its tracks reflect the infinite factors that went into hooves touching snowflakes in this instant. And you, right now, looking at this picture, are laying tracks, altering the subtle field with each thought and feeling about […]
Resolution Means Flow
December 28, 2014 by
Fierce determination, popular while January 1 approaches, feels opposite to going with the flow. Yet they can be the same, considered in a certain light. Traditions of beginning again personally on January 1, when the outer calendar begins again, offer rituals for backward reflection and forward vision. If the ritual is superficial – a Procrustean chopping and […]
Midwinter Relativity
December 16, 2014 by
In a vast field of frozen dark-gray slate, a luminous pearlescence blooms above a slow horizon in the southern sky, this silent dawn near solstice. Moments of enchantment pass before the mind remembers: this is the sun, rising in the south. The wakening mind expands: the sun is not rising – this is […]
Quadraphonic Choices
October 30, 2014 by
I just discovered new depths to a technique I learned thirty years ago: creating a four-square grid to hold all the elements of a difficult decision. I’m writing about it here, in case I ever want to recommend it again – now with some updated spin. Back then, it was about intellectual, emotional, and social […]
Sea Legs and Inner Ears
September 14, 2014 by
Waltzing back and forth between the right-brain’s flowing cosmos and the left-brain’s key-tapping to make words, not yet being fully immersed in an all-senses state, I feel a dizziness that brings a memory to the surface, one that resonates across the decades: We’d been on a long sailing trip, eating and sleeping on board, as […]
Rosebud
March 23, 2014 by
The world blurred. Fuzzy pale-green clouds billowed around a tiny sharp object, close-up: a fierce-feeling hyper-tight bulb shape of darker green, poised on a branch. Unmoving, I felt the wave of its power wash out into the air, into me. Slow joy started responding –apprehensive and a little agog at the task looming in this […]
Approaching Solstice
December 17, 2013 by
I’m marveling at gaps in consciousness, thanks to the Milky Way. I saw a picture of it on the web, and I froze. Something said Wait: What’s so strange about this picture? I stared at it, listening. I collected other pictures of it. Still entranced, I researched other cultures’ names for it, other mythologies. Dimly, […]
Speculative Magical Links
September 1, 2013 by
Unusual worlds are opening. I’ve been journeying along one of my less-traveled paths, returning to a lifelong love of fantastical stories. Clues to my own emerging voice pop out of page and screen. This post’s trip report has links to a few favorites, some notes on writing and consciousness, and a little peach-flavored magic realism. The […]
Voice II
June 8, 2013 by
“If I write that, people will think it’s me.” This quote from Amy Tan, in her spirited TED talk about writing fiction, has been singing to me for days. It struck the place in me that’s so focused on integrity that the idea of representing something that’s not-me, when my name is on it, felt dangerous, […]
Merit in the Marketplace
May 6, 2013 by
A phenomenal new wordal popped out of the dictionary this morning: the mer root within merit. Turns out it started as sale value, leading to the Latin meretrix (prostitute) and the English meretricious (attractive in a vulgar way). This surprise led to contemplation of merit badges, merit scholars, meritocracies, certificates of merit, earning merit in religious […]
Alchemical Storytellers
April 23, 2013 by
Just finished redesigning a house. A bank account. A host of motives. Woke up this morning knowing my novella’s main character’s circumstances were all wrong for the plot, mismatched for the themes. Switched it around in a great rush. Then rested, wondering where those first images had come from, why they’d felt right before, even […]
Voice, Format, Audience
April 2, 2013 by
Mercy. Another writing career. The inner machinery of expression – the place I go to inside, to feel words form – is changing again. It’s being altered by the convergence of two worlds from opposite extremes: (1) inside-out: shaping ever-subtler inner experience into outer form, and (2) outside-in: practicing the audience-driven formats of screenplays and […]
Re-Oriented Spring
March 19, 2013 by
Rebirth freshens the air, now from a different perspective. My mind’s eye sees Earth tilting, northern hemisphere more warmed and brightened by a fireball, itself hurtling through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour in a giant galaxy – a spiral of light among millions. Scoping in closer, I feel, simultaneously, the entry […]
Mythic Reconception
January 1, 2013 by
My laughter at the cartoon turned heads in the store: a solar system with a red arrow pointing toward Earth saying “You Are Here … If That Helps Any.” The “here” lasts only for a sub-instant, since we are spinning at unimaginable speeds through unrepeatable space. Locating “You” in a chaotic universe (in ancient myths, a […]
A Kaleidoscope of Women
November 11, 2012 by
Visions of “the feminine” started shape-changing for me this summer, watching Beasts of the Southern Wild. Startling imagery, elaborate mythology, a rich resonant soundtrack, poetic and vivid dialogue – and the unimaginable performance of its tiny girl hero-star – coalesced. Ancient self-images, affections, terrors, and enthusiasms got remembered and rearranged, transformed, even though the movie’s surfaces […]
Seven-Story Forgiveness
August 17, 2012 by
Every word, every thought, changes along the vibrational scale of consciousness, so that its meaning is different depending on the speaker’s intent and the listener’s awareness – creating the sound of different notes and tones with a single word. I wrote about this earlier in relation to ‘gratitude’: in the lowest vibrations, ‘gratitude’ feels like helpless […]
The Animation in Receiving Art
April 26, 2012 by
Such second-hand creative raptures in recent days. I feel blessed. Sometimes, opening the heart to another’s art is as marvelous as the inspiration to express. Yesterday, I got dazzled by a psychologically intriguing Juliette Binoche film called Certified Copy. Following Ms. Binoche’s character and her paramour through their reality-shifting interactions is a levitational experience. This morning, I […]
The Weird Self-Help of Sadness
April 15, 2012 by
I’ve been remembering how freeing, how life-enhancing it is, to allow deep sadness to rise and move – becoming fully, even bodily, aware of its origins and meanings – and then to notice it slipping into nothingness, once it’s been bathed in the light of consciousness. In radio stories leading up to today’s Titanic centennial, […]
Three Liberating Choices
April 4, 2012 by
A favorite mind-shift, from long ago, recently popped to mind: a three-way option presented by Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now. He posed the choices, in a conflict, as Accept the situation, Work to change it, or Separate from it – instead of the “normal insanity” of down-spiraling in non-stop objections. I got a […]
Bliss, Fulfillment, Happiness, Passion
March 13, 2012 by
Fun to wonder if the apparent convergence of blogs and videos about “find your passion” (links provided below) has been statistically true – or is just a mirror of my own focus. Multiple notes and links led to discussions of this staple of the “consciousness movement” in a compressed time span. Impatient with so many […]
Flicker and Peep
February 29, 2012 by
These are the words – flicker and peep – for the play of light and shadow, for the sound of sound, in the felt senses. Waking early, in the cold and dark, I notice flames dancing and crackling in the fireplace now. Outside, coyotes yip-whoop in starlight. Time collapses between aboriginal and modern. The resonance […]
You Do the Math (or Not)
February 28, 2012 by
Getting the giggles about the collision between two emails this morning: one, from webwizard Seth Godin, saying that what we do, in life / business / culture is not math (simple on/off duality), and the other, from a long-ago meditation teacher, pointing out that we live too much from the wrong-headed math of surface interpretation. When […]
Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Flow?
February 7, 2012 by
Awoke to a vibration of wistfulness: glad for the relaxed pleasure in encountering everything with soft regard, and glad to feel only a faint rippling awareness of multiple kinds of violence in the world – sprung from obvious conflicts of identities, motives, and boundaries in the news. It was inspiring to notice the ripples without […]
The Ever-Morphing Novella (=Life)
January 25, 2012 by
Why do I expect to revise my novella after it’s been published? (I hear this is possible with e-books.) It’s already rewritten itself at least four times since it was conceived last summer. The same could be said of me, still experiencing alterations of perception, inspiration, intent, and relationship with life-as-a-work-of-art. Transformation practitioners know about […]
Adaptation: Not Always Second-Hand
January 15, 2012 by
Once again, a word-origin is revealing a hidden coherence: ap, which becomes apt, adapt, aptitude, adept and inept. It’s about fittedness, fastening two phenomena, one or both of them in motion. Like dancing: the fittedness being between the music and the body, or between two or more bodies, in spontaneous or rehearsed choreography (on a […]
Creativity’s Hidden Gateways
January 12, 2012 by
Several new emails in the past 24 hours have touted creativity programs and ideas. One of this morning’s emails feels like a goad. It was about setting up the day to be about one’s own creativity, versus checking the incoming mail and web feeds to see what others are doing. Fashionability (attention to what others are doing), can […]
Accept What?
August 12, 2011 by
“Accept what is” – a buzz-phrase floating through the awakening ethos of the transformation culture – carries wildly different meanings, depending on speaker and listener. In its most liberated, liberating, creative sense, it translates as “allow one’s inner vantage point to center in, and perceive/experience everything through the lens of, an awareness so expansive that […]
First Wordals
August 11, 2011 by
Wordals – as word-portals – evolved in my writing practice as mind-unlocking gateways into higher/deeper states of awareness. Unlocking the traps of words frees the mind into a more vast experience of being alive. All around us now is talk of potential new universal languages, decryption of recently discovered ancient languages, possibly extraterrestrial symbolic and […]
The Nature of Writing and Editing
August 11, 2011 by
A velvety pastel lotus blooms, eventually, from a seed case. Bees, in a scouting party for a new home, do a waggle dance to signal their choice of locations. In my universe, this is speech, writing in water and air. In this way of feeling, cave paintings of Lascaux feel newly alive, ancient gematria more shimmering, pictograms […]
The Opening
August 10, 2011 by
Hilariously, I “open” this website – all about being original, alive, and aware, in the moment – with one of the oldest conventions of public speakers, from elementary school onward: the etymology of the title. Turns out it works pretty well. “Open” is from upo, meaning under, up from under, or over, which aren’t contradictory at […]