Rob Tourtelot
@rtourtelot
Rob Tourtelot
The success of Morning Pages hinges on our doing them as close to awakening as we can.
Julia Cameron • The Miracle of Morning Pages: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Most Important Artist's Way Tool: A Special from Tarcher/Penguin
from the great Hanif Kureishi —
"One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else's childhood."
"One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else's childhood."
Junot Díaz on Substack
Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we don’t have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, “You have to do better than that, and now that I’ve denied you your trick, your first-ord
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?
Dan Heath • Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
The lesson here, which you can actually apply to anything that happens in meditation, is: Just say "Hmmm." There's a scene in The Big Sleep where Humphrey Bogart, as the detective Philip Marlowe, is considering a clue. Tugging at his earlobe, he says, "Hmmm." When Lauren Bacall asks him, "What does 'Hmmm'
mean?," Bogey
... See moreDean Sluyter • Natural Meditation
I started to meditate in a different way. I let go of the idea of what meditation was supposed to be. So I would sit down and let my experience simply be, in a very deep way. I started to let go of trying to control my experience. That became the beginning of discovering for myself what True Meditation is. From that point on, that shift - moving fr... See more
The one practice I kept was writing. It made the cut because I can’t deny how many good things in my life have come as a result of my putting words out into the world. It also felt like a respite: one area where I wasn’t skeptical of my identity. I’m at my most courageous on the page because interrogating my feelings with words feels justified and
... See moreMolly Mielke • (self) concept
. I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. "Find peace in your memories," I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, "This is what you will never again have."
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie • Notes on Grief
So we stumbled through our loving, difficult readings and tiny speeches; then the button was pushed, and as the coffin advanced solemnly into the furnace, dysfunctional squawks came like a shower of arrows out of the sound system. The tape kept trying to play and its clicks and grindings were amplified very efficiently into the overhead speakers. T
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