Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.

It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what's keeping things running right. We're bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below. With that fact in mind, people like me make up all these rules to give us the illusion that we are in charge. I need to say to myself, they're not needed, hon. Just take in the buggy pleasures. Be kind to the others, grab the fleck of riverweed, notice how beautifully your bug legs scull.

So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.

I do for myself exactly what I would do for you - make a lovely cup of tea, or a hot bath, or go buy myself a fabulous pair of socks. I believe that you take the action, and THEN the insight follows - I do loving things for me, stroke my own shoulder, put myself down for a short nap, and the insight follows: that I am a wild precious woman, a human merely being, as e e cummings put it, deserving of respect, tenderness, protection, delight, and solidarity. And that is what Home looks like for me now.

Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.