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
Practice and inspiration
The notion of practice is a funny combination of the mundane and the transcendent. Disciplined meditation practice leads over time to a level of skill that supports the development of wisdom, or insight into what Buddhists call emptiness, the interconnectedness of everything. And long practice of the pragmatic necessities of making a living turns out to be a foundation for writing that goes beyond mundane.
All these years, I thought I was just slogging through various writing jobs, some really interesting and some pretty boring. Turns out it was like physical exercise. Read more
Craft versus inspiration
Lately I realized that 20 years of making a living as a writer have taught me a lot. People ask me for advice; then they take it. And I usually have a very clear idea of what to tell them.
It took a while to get used to thinking of myself as a hard-headed marketer and negotiator. My ambition was to write literary nonfiction, like my books about homeless women and about women and sacrifice. Each was based on a central image that I used as a method of analysis.
Those books got considerable praise (and one got two awards), but didn’t go far toward supporting me. So I had to operate on both sides of the divide between skill and inspiration: Read more