Rainer Maria Rilke on Trusting in Nature, Loving Small Things & Living Questions

In the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, …even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they […]

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Happy Birthday, Frida Kahlo—Arte, Amor, Dolor: Pain & the Healing Power of Art

“Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing,” said Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who was born on this day in 1907. In honour of her 110th birthday (though Frida preferred to state her birth year as 1910 — the start of the Mexican […]

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Ursula K. Le Guin on Where We Get Our Ideas From

It’s a big question—where do writers get their ideas, where do artists get their visions, where do musicians get their music? It’s bound to have a big answer. Or a whole lot of them. One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought up his tunes, and he said, “The air is […]

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Madeleine L’Engle on the 3 Most Important Things for Writers

“I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think […]

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Anais Nin on June Miller—& a Rare Radio Interview

“Words and certain languages and certain rhythms belong to certain personalities — the writing takes on the color of the certain personality that I describe.” ~ Anaïs Nin Listen to a rare interview with Anaïs Nin Frank Roberts of KPFK radio interviews Anaïs Nin, following the publication of the first volume of her eponymous diary in 1966. […]

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Julia Cameron on Why We Should Write

“We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of […]

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Mark Strand on Being in Creative Flow

“[When] you’re right in the work, you lose your sense of time… You’re completely enraptured, You’re completely caught up in what you’re doing, and you’re sort of swayed by the possibilities you see in this work. If that becomes too powerful, then you get up, because the excitement is too great. You can’t continue to […]

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Happy Birthday Nina Simone [& a Brief Blog Hiatus]

Happy birthday, Miss Simone. Though unrelated to the exquisite Miss Simone’s birthday… You may have noticed that things have been a little too quiet in this portal of late, a little too light on posts and short on prose. I had hoped to be sharing something of value for you now, something edifying, inspiring, healing too, and a […]

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