“And in the end / the love you take / is equal to the love / you make.”
- the Beatles
Welcome back to the Wisdom Workshop with me, Sean Waters. This week, the first installment of Galaxy Gems: a newsletter with the second-most wisdom-per-words on the web. (James Clear’s “3-2-1 Thursdays” holds the #1 spot).
Below, (1) prose-polished mustard seeds that might move mountains, (2) highlights from Steve Almond’s Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow, (3) April invitations to gather, and (4) an opportunity to write with us for the next seven weeks, at a distance, for the low-low-price of a paid subscription. Let’s go!
From Me and People I Love
Writing isn’t producing content. It’s cultivating presence.
People don’t just read what you write.
They also, somehow, feel what you feel.
There’s freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.
— Natalie Goldberg, from Writing Down the Bones
Zari’s special method:
Notice if you’re thinking about the future.
Acknowledge with love, bring attention back to the present moment.
Notice if you’re thinking about the past.
Acknowledge with love, bring attention back to the present moment.
I’ll just carry a couple of pieces of the rainbow.
The rainbow takes a lot of pressure to do it.
— our three-year old daughter this week
Why does presence matter?
It puts us in the fulcrum: how we engage, how we want to be.
It’s a way of making decisions, a way of being in the world.
h/t to
who writesMy friend who is a Buddhist once said after coming out of a meditation retreat, “The colors were so much more vibrant afterward.” Her meditation teacher said, “When you are present, the world is truly alive.”
— Natalie Goldberg, from Writing Down the Bones
Did you gather any gems this week? Please share them!
from Steve Almond
To focus on the inner life today—to read books, to imagine with no ulterior agenda, to reflect on painful or confusing experiences — is to defy the clamoring edicts of our age, the buy messages, the endless pleas for followers and likes.
Writers have to find a different way of being in the world. The making of literature is the manner by which we come to understand our inner lives, by which we travel in difficult truth towards elusive mercy, and thereby reaffirm the bonds of human kindness.
I still think of love as a fuzzy word. But as a storyteller, I’ve come to see love in more precise terms, as an act of sustained attention implying eventual mercy. There is nothing more disheartening to me than a story in which the writer expresses contempt for his characters. It’s the one posture I can’t abide, because it amounts to a conscious rejection of art, whose first and final mission is the transmission of love.
April Gatherings for Music and Wisdom
🎵 Friday and Saturday April 18th and 19th, Fort Collins, CO: get your tickets to FoCoMX 2025! 17th year of the festival; we’ve played every year. I perform Friday night, the 18th, with a full band 5:30 - 6:15 pm at the Colorado Room. 🎉 New music coming on Spotify / Apple.
🧿 Good Friday April 18th, 2pm-3:15pm MST: Online Contemplative Community hosted by Ruth Kaur, Bhante Chandananda, and me. We’ll contemplate the inter-faith wisdom of love as expressed in the Beatitudes. Register for the Zoom link.
Thank you for being here and now, until next time,
Write with Presence (Week 1 of 7)
Our three springtime groups are off to an incredible start (we added a small group and welcomed a new facilitator to our growing team!) Our next good life session starts June 25th. Add your name to the waitlist for priority seating.
🚌 If you want to get on the SyllaBUS without joining a small group, I’m going to share our weekly writing invitations here, behind the paywall. Thanks for your support. The world needs you, as you are, in your own words.
Overview of Week 1: on PRESENCE. This week, you’ll begin your daily writing habit! Go for a seven day streak, and remember, any writing counts, especially when you’re starting. We begin our writing journey by getting some familiarity with our first tools: the timed-exercise, mindful free-writing, and the creative contract. Drawing from Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron, we will write about the biggest questions of the course: What’s alive right now? What is a good life? And what does that good life look like on the daily? On the weekly? In writing, you’ll explore: how might this seven-week container facilitate your becoming?
Writing invitations, in brief:
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