Exactly What I Needed to Hear

Natalie Goldberg cuts through the crazy and the neurotic and gets right to the heart of the matter, just what I needed reminding of today:

[when writing about a writer experiencing a time of frustration]: he sits, late at night, outside the college gates in perfect piece, surrendering himself for the moment to where he is, knowing nothing is good or bad, just alive. To begin writing from our pain eventually engenders compassion for our small and groping lives. Out of this broken state there comes a tenderness for the cement below our feet, the dried grass cracking in a terrible wind. We can touch the things around us we once thought ugly and see their special detail, the peeling paint and gray of shadows as they are--simply what they are: not bad, just part of the life around us--and love this life because it is ours and in the moment there is nothing better.

-Writing Down the Bones, 107