The sky of mind: vast like space
Buddhist meditators practice experiencing the mind as a vast, clear sky, through which thoughts, feeings, and all other experiences pass like clouds, appearing and then vanishing in an open space of awareness that’s not limited to the inside of the head. (Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield describes this practice here.)
Kandinsky’s painting Sky Blue combines that image of the mind as vast open sky with an experience I’ve had when writing at a very deep level. Part of the conceptual work for my books about homeless women and about sacrifice was simply discovering what they were actually about. I came across incidents, articles, and books, and generated images from my imagination, that I knew were important, but I didn’t know why, or what exactly they meant. And normal-type thinking about them didn’t help. Read more
Where does inspiration come from?
The subject of my first book—homeless women, or more broadly, the role that unattached women living at the margins of society play in relation to the rest of us—came as sort of a surprise. This wasn’t a topic I would have deliberately chosen. And not until after I finished writing the book did I really understood what it’s about.
It began with a chance remark by an elegant woman I knew, comparing herself to a shopping bag lady—one of the homeless who then lived on the streets of New York City, carrying their possessions in bags. The thing was, no one ever looked less like a shopping bag lady than this woman. That contradiction started me thinking: where could this self-image of hers have come from? Read more
Giving up Henry James
As a young writer I aspired to write sentences like Henry James: long and beautifully elaborated, spinning out subtle, complicated perceptions. At the time I was trying to write fiction and attended classes taught by Marguerite Young (most famously, author of the novel Miss Mackintosh, My Darling), who gave us a terrific exercise:
- Write a sentence at least a page long. You can use semicolons, dashes, whatever punctuation you want, but it has to be grammatical and it has to keep going.
This exercise had amazing effects. The effort to continue the sentence forced you to push your ideas way beyond what you had originally conceived. People developed wild, intense elaborations of character and action. And through the rhythms that occurred within their sentences, they discovered their own original voice.
What Marguerite didn’t teach, though, was discipline (Miss Mackintosh is over a thousand pages long). Read more