What would you write if you weren’t afraid? Set a timer for ten minutes. Don’t worry. No one’s going to read a word. You can shred it. You can burn it. You can keep it. It’s entirely up to you. Ready, set, go! Begin.

one of my favorites was shared with me by the poet Marie Howe: “Whenever I can’t do the practice, I’ll get a composition book, and I’ll write three pages a day, but I write it with my nondominant hand, so it’s a big scrawl,” she said. “Or I’ll write, ‘I don’t want to write about …’” and then just write into that—so there’s a release in it.”

THIS IS YOUR PROMPT: What food evokes a transporting moment of time and place? Taste the moment and write down everything you can remember.

My modus operandi became this: to trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it’s not what you had planned, even if it’s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear brings you exactly what you need. In my journal I wrote: It is possible to alter the course of my becoming.

What is the moment—the place, the person, the activity—that has moved you to forget the time, to lose yourself, and to return to what can feel like forgotten depths (or heights)? And how can you begin to get back there, as early as tomorrow?

As Anaïs Nin wrote, “When we go deeply into the personal, we go beyond the personal. We achieve something that is collective.”

Fifty years on, I see a journal very differently. Every morning I walk to my desk and step into what feels like a cabin in the woods. Sometimes words come out of me that I can share with others; often memories or intuitions arise that may be useful only to me. But the process of sitting alone in a quiet space and hearing what lies on the far side

THIS IS YOUR PROMPT: Pick five items from the list below. popcorn * lettuce * iceberg * cotton candy * puffs * sugar cubes * dandelions * buttercups * pallbearer * clothesline * National Geographic * fire ants * watermelon * sunflowers * ticket stub * campfire * satellite * fish scales * baby powder * quilt * brooch * barrette * tin can * bingo *

Mothering a critically ill child with disabilities is the most wild gift. It’s a life of surprises, delights, and never-ending interruptions, and that’s just before breakfast.