Life’s labyrinth: Honoring your accomplishments

It is the time between late spring and early summer. A male cardinal crunches on sunflower seeds at the feeder, the leaves on the tall trees along the creek behind my house are bright green, and purple martins dip and sway high in the sky that is the blue color of my Irish grandmother’s eyes.

All of life—nature, animals, weather, plants and people—have their cycles and their seasons. When we learn to embrace this instead of fighting it, denying it, or running from it, then we can learn to live in balance and beauty.

Here we are at the end of the academic calendar—and this is a great time to learn how to go to the center of the labyrinth, find wisdom, and come back out again.

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10 Habits of highly productive writers

1) They reject the notion of “writer’s block” the way others shun gluten. Some people are truly unable to tolerate that vilified protein, but many more leap after a culprit to explain their dyspepsia or inability to refrain from carby deliciosity. Maybe cutting out a big food group makes it easier to stick to a diet than being careful about portion sizes of crusty bread and pasta puttanesca. Certainly there’s a comfort in diagnosis, relief in the idea that suffering can be linked to a thing that others also get. Likewise, it’s a lot easier to say that the muse has gone AWOL than to admit that writing is hard and requires discipline and sacrifice.

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What motivates you to write?

What is the one thing you need when you sit down to write? I don’t mean the obvious pen and paper or computer, but that one other thing that you always have when you write? Maybe it’s a tall-soy-caramel-macchiato and a corner booth at the local coffee shop. Maybe it’s a stack of papers with all of your research, or an expanding file folder packed full, yet obsessively organized, with research material. Maybe it’s not even a physical thing or place. Maybe it’s nothing more than a seed of an idea or a spark of inspiration.

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