Those who live by compassion are often canonized. Those who live by justice are often crucified. –John Dominic Crossan, Scripture Scholar, USA Don’t mourn. Organize. –Mother Jones, labor activist, USA The madness of violence must…
I shared the following earlier today with my friend Rob Trousdale, who lives at the Duluth Catholic Worker. These Katagiri Roshi passages are from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within… “Why…
Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft 30 September 2000 It’s clear to me today, anyway, that my Holy Contour of Life book will be a structure like Natalie’s: short, compressed, easy…
Think about it: Even with all our sophisticated technologies and modes of communication, who feels as though there is enough time? And yet, we need time, as community activist Grace Lee Boggs has said, to…
I once asked Mayuko and Minami (both in my fall 8 a.m. MWF Humanities class) if they had heard of Sei Shōnagon (清少納言). Of course they had! They had read her years ago in school. …
Mary told me she spent a Sunday rereading the notebook she kept in Social Justice class 4.5 years ago. She was rejuvenated to start writing more, so I sent her these topics, after consulting Natalie Goldberg’s…
1. Natalie Goldberg: I also place on the altar a photo of Allen Ginsberg in a yellow wood frame, sitting in a white shirt, cross-legged, his face captured in an uncanny smile. He is our…
If you stay in relation to writing (rather than zoning out for six years) and you connect with writing friends, read, listen deeply, you will write what you want but most likely never the way…
Author of many books, most famously The Color Purple, Alice Walker is one of the most renowned writers who came of age during the 1960s in this country. Now in her early seventies, she continues to produce…
I have taught over 100 courses since 2001, and I assigned Writing down the Bones in almost all of them. I never tire of hearing the students read aloud her chapters, which contain lines like the following……