writing : blog
Sometimes in the madness of our lives what we really need is a quiet space on 63 acres of rolling land in the mountains of North Carolina, a moment to look at our life’s stories, to learn from them, and to re-story ourselves. I’ll hold only one public retreat this year, from September 26-28, 2008, near Asheville, North Carolina. I…
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Man need only divert his attention from searching for the solution to external questions and pose the one, true inner question of how he should lead his life, and all the external questions will be resolved in the best possible way. – Leo Tolstoy In 2008, I will end each day by inside looking. Naikan (nye-kahn) is a Japanese word…
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Sometimes we have to retreat to move forward. The next 37days retreat is scheduled for September 28-30, 2007, and registration has just opened for it. Limited to 14 people, I hope you can be one of them. I’ll be joined by my business partner, David Robinson, in facilitating the weekend retreat. He’s magical and brings so much to the gathering….
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“So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom” -Psalms 90:12 Flinging oneself into a new year is an easier jump if the past is accounted for, the ledger closed. I’ve written some 175,000 words on 37days this year. That’s a lot of periods, semi-colons, subjective cases and semi-annual partially plural separating conjective…
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“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays -"Circles” Let’s imagine that all learning takes place in a dense, primordial forest, like the one you drive through on…
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“Money often costs too much.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson Last Tuesday, I found myself in the unusual position of being at the very top and very bottom of Maslow’s Happy Hierarchy of Needs at exactly the same time. I can’t recall ever being in two places at one time like this, not since 1986 when I was in Scranton with a…
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“Not equal to Not metaphor Nor standing for Not sign.” – Minor White Imagine Beetle Bailey’s surprise. As Aldous Huxley said, perhaps Earth is another planet’s Hell. And maybe on that other planet, gargantuan people sit down with their oil drum vats of coffee, butter their big-as-car bagels, and open their 12-foot Sunday newspapers to find human Earth lives splayed…
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“I cannot live without my life!” – Emily Brontë I fly a lot. And even so, it’s a lot less than I used to fly. Me and my Delta -Ultra -Flying -Too -Much -Not -Living -The -Life -on -the -Ground Super Platinum Card, that sad testament to life way too far above terra firma, see a lot of action in…
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“It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.” – Alec Bourne, A Doctor’s Creed Way back when I was learning my ABCs, names of state capitals, and the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at happy Hillcrest Elementary School way up there on the crest of that hill, We the People of These…
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“how like the bumble bee I am in my work or my life i see where i want to go and in my panic i forget to look for the open window” -Marybeth Fidler This week, I had an extraordinary experience with chili peppers, mints, a smoking cook, and big doors.
Patti Digh is the author of six books, including bestsellers Life is a Verb and Creative is a Verb. She travels the world teaching others about mindfulness: to live fully, love well, let go deeply, and make a difference. Patti's comments have appeared on PBS and in The New York Times, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, the London Financial Times, and many other international publications. She writes a thank you note every morning.
