Curiosity restores is a state of heightened awareness. Culturally, this has been considered a child's activity. By the time we're grown, we're supposed to know enough not to get bogged down in life's miraculous detail. But the spiritual journey reactivates our sense of miracle and invites us to pause again, squatting over the sidewalk cracks, to ponder the lives of ants and stars.

The spiritual journey is what the soul is up to while we attend to daily living.

We are living in a renaissance of personal writing. People are rebalancing the impersonalization endemic to modern society with an increase in personal introspection. We have enough common psychology under our belts to know that psychology doesn't explain or heal everything and that it isn't the fulfillment of awareness, but its beginning. We are undergoing a shift in paradigms in which we are trying to develop new models for humanness and human responsibility. This is no small task. Our individual lives are placed under increasing pressure to respond adequately to both inner and outer change.

Contact with the sacred occurs in the stillness of the heart and mind. If there is any real destination to the spiritual quest, it is this point of silence, the middle of the spiral, the center of the self. ... The only map that does the spiritual traveler any good is one that leads to the center.

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.

Spiritual life is contractual. The sacred cannot dialogue with the unresponsive.

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.