I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don’t want to see

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It's an act of faith. I just follow my heart.

And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.

We are aching to come together and I think it has little to do with liberal or conservative discourse. I think it has to do with increasing disconnection with what is real and soul-serving.