Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do?

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed?

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

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

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.