The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.
Kathleen NorrisI am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.
Kathleen NorrisPoets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.
Kathleen NorrisWe shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.
Kathleen Norris