Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them . . . if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution.

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.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.

Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul.

In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

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.