Entries by Bethany

“The healing magic is attention….”

A conversation this morning about fear and what to do with it, and then this quote in my afternoon reading: “The pain is in the aversion. The healing magic is attention. Properly attended to, pain can answer our most crucial questions, even those we did not consciously frame. The only way out of our suffering […]

Quotable

“It is learning to discipline ourselves to stay with a question long enough to determine what insight it has for us that is important. Otherwise we will simply know what everyone else knows about it. As Goethe puts it, ‘All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart knows more.’” -Joan Chittister

PNWA

My manuscript did not win in the PNWA historical fiction category, but this morning I’m feeling pretty good about the entire experience . I was a finalist! I heard some inspiring speakers, including Greg Bear and Deb Caletti. I met Margie Lawson, a psychologist, writer, and writing instructor I had never even heard of. She […]

Madeleine L’Engle

“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 […]