Last week I was sitting in Taipei airport minding my own business, waiting for a flight. Then I looked up, seeing across from me a large box rooted to the floor. Half-dazed with a traveler’s zombie like stare, I focused on the words inscribed: Escape Chute. (There was also Chinese on it, which I couldn’t read. Any… Read More The Escape Chute of the Present Moment
Confinement. A place of limitations, being held back, a lack of freedom. Yet the places of confinement in our lives often yield the greatest creativity. That’s why some of the classics in literature and history have been written in prison. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letters from a Birmingham Jail, or Nelson Mandela writing a diary and letters… Read More The Confinement that Leads to Writing
I first read this book by the very gifted Annie Dillard in 2003. I had read several of her books at that point, like Holy the Firm, The Living, and her most famous one, Pilgrim of Tinker Creek. But this one on the art of writing deeply challenged me, partly because it was a season in my life when the… Read More The Writing Life
One of the Seven Wonders of the Christian world is in Xian, China, the starting point and terminus of the original Silk Road. It is the Nestorian Stele, a 10 foot stone tablet carved in 781 A.D. to commemorate the 150 year history up to that point of the work of the Church of the… Read More The Nestorian Stele of 781 A.D. T’ang China: Our Story in Their Story
This is my first post in 2018, so of course it has resolutions in it. A few weeks ago I wrote on a quote I saw in the Writers Lounge at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. (See Write because you have to) The Oriental was a frequent stopping point for authors and other public figures in… Read More Resolutions for a New Year
One of the greatest pains in life is the isolation caused by personal or family struggles that we feel can’t be shared. It is just too shameful, too jarring perhaps from the personal narrative we have carefully constructed and maintained. Then something happens, and the whole edifice begins to collapse, sometimes slowly but often rapidly… Read More Mental Illness and the Courage to be Real
As some of you know, I recently published my first book. In the past 13 years, I had published nine articles, three chapters in books and finished a PhD thesis. But not a full book, until October. I have wanted to be an author since I was 10 years old, when I wrote detective stories… Read More Write because you have to
Sometimes a phrase or quote just jumps out at me. Last week hunting around our local library, it happened. I saw a book (photo included) by Paul Loeb, titled The Impossible Will Take a Little While. It comes from a song lyric by Billie Holiday, that reads The difficult I’ll do right now. The impossible will take a little… Read More “The Impossible Will Take a Little While.”
Yesterday here in the US was Thanksgiving holiday, a day to gather with family and friends. Along with my family, I’m grateful this year for those that stand with the “heroes” in their lives. Those that are faithful daily to the tasks that enable them to serve others, often not in the public eye. The… Read More Thankful for the people around the “Heroes”
A few months ago in Singapore, one of my favorite places in the world for a bunch of reasons, I came across a wall in a hotel with these two quotes on writing. They are really also about living. The first is by Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding generation in the United States and… Read More ‘Write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.’
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