My work in this world is to create sanctuary for story—safe spaces for people to release the deepest truths they’ve learned and most powerful tales they’ve lived and imagined, so that they and others can heal.
To me, sanctuary:
- is a place where I can experience the relief that leads to liberating release, and it goes beyond place.
- is a feeling, an experience of both ahhh and yahoo!
- is a story in which I can find or heal or love myself.
- makes equal room for the sacred and the silly.
- is a person with whom I feel safe, who creates safe space where I can relax into the fullness of me, trust what I know to be true, what I need to say, and who I know myself to be.
- invites the tears and the laughter, the pain and the hopes, the mammoth dreams and the little annoyances. Sanctuary says, bring it all on. All of you.
- is somewhere I can take my bra or shoes off, be in my comfy pants, cry or laugh until my face turns red and splotchy, eat as many salt and vinegar potato chips as I want, get as ridiculous as I can be without fear of judgment.
- welcomes the wild in me and reminds me to honor creative, natural cycles.
- swells with wonder.
I know sanctuary so well and value it so much because I also know what it feels like to hunger for refuge. At the heart of my work is my child self, knowing she was a natural born priestess and being told, by culture and authority and institution that that wasn’t possible.
At the heart of my work is me saying to others: who you know you are, most deeply and beautifully, and powerfully? It is possible.
At the heart of my work is an honoring of voice, of each of us taking our places on the page or the stage, or fundamentally, in the world. Not everyone needs to write a book, but everyone has and needs stories. I want people to feel liberated to share their stories, in whatever ways feel best to them.
I love to sit at a table and write with someone, whether we’re at the same table or tables in different parts of the world, smiling at each other through the magic of technology. Wherever we both are, I love to witness another human open up and find the gems that they hoped were there, to be actually there. To allow for that wow. To remind someone of her or his inherent generativity, that is, capability to create. To encourage that creature to continue and grow and play.
At the heart of my work is me, saved again and again by stories. Knowing them to be not just a diversion, but a medicine, a way to heal our broken hearts and broken world, to help us rediscover what we thought we’d lost, to be fully alive.
My work in this world is to create sanctuary for stories, because they have created sanctuary for me.
I promise
- to make way for wonder,
- to walk my talk, to be as committed as I invite other brave writers to be in honoring the creative cycle and wherever they are in it,
- to say what I am called to say, write what I am called to write,
- to offer tenderness to new words and dreams, rather than smashing them on sight because they’re just too whatever,
- to not run myself ragged,
- to cultivate balance,
- to listen to the wisdom my gut and my heart as much as I honor the wisdom of my head,
- to let reading and writing be acts of pleasure, to be fun, delightful, and playful,
- to be reverent and irreverent as needed.
- to take and make creative time and space for myself, to protect and honor it,
- to be and offer sanctuary for myself and others and the stories we all need to thrive.
