Perhaps we wouldn't eat so much, or smoke, or drink so much if we were paying attention to ourselves. Perhaps we wouldn't talk so much if we were paying attention to each other. All these oral activities are trying to meet a need, and perhaps the greatest need is to be seen and heard.

My real journey had very little to do with traveling Europe, and a whole lot to do with traveling my own mind.

Millions of people are joined in the knowledge that writing brings insight and calm in the same way that prayer, meditation, or a long walk in the woods does. They have discovered that writing allows the racing mind to move at the pace of pen and paper or the pace of typing on the waiting screen - that journal writing is a spiritual practice.

When you choose to write using yourself as the source of the story, you are choosing to confront all the silences in which your story has been protectively wrapped. Your job as a writer is to respectfully, determinedly, free the story from the silences and free yourself from both.

When you’re stuck in a spiral, to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing.

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

Ritual is the way you carry the presence of the sacred. Ritual is the spark that must not go out.