Recognize the possibility of the divine in any given moment.

Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers.

The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion - it's an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they're going to.

Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.

All there is to do, right at this very moment, is to breathe in, breathe out, and kiss the joy as it flies.

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail - not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime.

Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.