Whether you're keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it's the same thing. What's important is you're having a relationship with your mind.

This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

That daydreaming seemed important at the time, but when I asked my teacher Katagiri Roshi about it, he said, "Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work." But as for discipline, I don't even use that word. I think more about passion or love. What I've really learned is the way the mind moves, and how the mind works. Rather than discipline, I know how to seduce my mind.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Read books. They are good for us.

Shut up and write. Don't talk about writing, just physically do it.