Meeting the Muse after Midlife is out now on Amazon or at your bookshop! 

How to Celebrate a Birthday with 72 Delights

Birthdays are a funny thing. When I was six, a birthday expanded my world. It meant more adventures, a later bedtime, and an allowance. But at sixty, my birthday felt less promising. The end horizon on life felt so much closer. How do we celebrate that? With style, I say, or, everyone in their own special way. The first […]

Let these quotes about the creative process inspire yours

While I know that reading about creativity isn’t the same as making something (and reading about writing isn’t the same as writing), I love reading quotes by fellow creatives when I can’t have my fingers in paint, my hands in the soil, or my wrists on the keyboard. Spending time in creative processes has brought […]

The one tool you need most when you want to create

We’re all creative—and can express our creative spark in endless ways. Yet when it comes to expressing ourselves we’re often handicapped by old myths and messages, like: If a good friend shared one of these messages, you’d tell them not to believe it. But when you hear one of these thoughts pounding inside your skull, […]

The Gift of the Ordinary

Grief knocked again—or, more accurately, knocked me off my feet and left me wailing. You’d think after writing about grief, I’d know to anticipate such a thing—or find an easier way through the aftermath of my sister’s death. But no, Grief was as tough as ever. And then, just as I regained my balance, my […]

Letting the tulips sing

[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”] [et_pb_row admin_label=”row”] [et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”] Can flowers sing? No way to prove this but recently they sang to me. Finding new colors I recently returned from visiting a friend who’s dying of cancer. In leaving, my heart filled with achingly beautiful sounds and the rich melancholy of grieving. Did grief have a color? […]

To practice receiving

A dear friend living in the shadows of cancer, With death on the horizon, Sat with me and said, “Throughout my life, I never learned to receive… Now I may have to.” My mother spent her final two years on her back In hospice care. It was almost as if, After a life of doing […]

Tiny beautiful acts—a 100-day creative challenge

[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”] [et_pb_row admin_label=”row”] [et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”] Could devoting yourself to tiny acts of beauty, gratitude, or creation for 100 days change your life? It did for Suleika Jaouad, a writer who, in her early twenties, invented a 100-day project to help her deal with her leukemia treatments. In her book Between Two Kingdoms: A […]

Six questions to expand the creative you

Does your creative spirit ever feel tamped down or just-around-the-corner-but-out-of-reach? When that happens to me, I have two approaches to rediscovering my groove. The first is to get into action and start making—anything. I may not feel “creative” but I have to remind myself that creative is a label or an adjective and “to create” […]

We Don’t Need to Know Before We Go

One of the cool things about artists is that they often start their pieces (and I’m defining artist in the broadest possible way) before they know where they are going. Not all artists perhaps, but the ones I want to emulate—poets, writers, painters, and sand castle-at-the-water’s-edge makers. They may have an intention, a direction but […]

Finding magic in my pencil

There are many ways to get to know someone, even someone we haven’t met, and this week I’ve been playing with one that has proved particularly meaningful to me.  I draw faces. We live, or at least I do, in a world of judgments, mental constructs, expectations, and prejudices that influence how we see people around […]

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