drmstream

I Dusk is falling early in the gar­den as the sun slides behind the sky­scrap­ers. As the light dims, the sound grows fuller, a deep-bellied rum­ble that echoes against the pale green Aspen leaves, the cast iron and brushed metal sculp­tures, the gran­ite gar­den walls, the slate-laid plat­forms, the plate glass win­dows, the clat­ter­ing traffic […]

I The world is so big, there is so much to com­pre­hend, that we are best start­ing with some­thing small, some­thing pre­cise — a sim­ple story, an image, an idea –and then writ­ing every­thing we can think about it, and let that writ­ing take us to places we hadn’t antic­i­pated going. II When you write, don’t […]

For each ecsta­tic instant For each ecsta­tic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quiv­er­ing ratio To the ecstasy. For each beloved hour Sharp pit­tances of years, Bit­ter con­tested far­things And cof­fers heaped with tears. –Emily Dick­in­son Sit some­day and watch the light­ning crack over a deep swamp. The flat water, seep­ing along the […]

So shake the dust And take me with you when you do For none of this has ever been for me. All that pushes and pulls And pushes and pulls It pushes for you. The sto­ries are every­where. Hat tip to reader Dale in Mel­bourne for point­ing me to this.

Expe­ri­ence presents a con­stant puz­zle: the fullest sense of expe­ri­ence is to be wholly in the world, immersed and accept­ing of the things that we encounter, sur­ren­dered to the moment. To share these moments requires tremen­dous art. You can’t force mean­ing, say to your­self that you’ll use this tech­nique or that tech­nique to mimic something […]

We have a tra­di­tion on our anniver­sary to com­mem­o­rate the occa­sion by each writ­ing an entry in a spe­cial jour­nal. Here is what T wrote. I share it because it moved me and because it offers an ele­gant metaphor for love. Here we are on our fifth anniver­sary, where tra­di­tion tells us the sym­bol for the […]

Love of beauty is Taste. The cre­ation of beauty is Art. Ralph Waldo Emer­son There’s a pur­pose to this great thing that the Inter­net has spawned beyond the cre­ation of com­merce engines, mar­ket­ing cam­paigns and wealth beyond our wildest imag­i­na­tion. The world has become too large, genius too widely dis­trib­uted, sto­ries too impor­tant and creativity […]

I want to assure you with all earnest­ness that no writ­ing is a waste of time — no cre­ative work where the feel­ings, the imag­i­na­tion, the intel­li­gence must work. With every sen­tence you write, you have learned some­thing. It has done you good. It has stretched your under­stand­ing. I know that. Even if I knew […]

A writer is some­one who spends years patiently try­ing to dis­cover the sec­ond being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writ­ing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or lit­er­ary tra­di­tion, it is a per­son who shuts him­self up in a […]

In a Dark Time In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deep­en­ing shade; I hear my echo in the echo­ing wood– A lord of nature weep­ing to a tree, I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and ser­pents of the den. What’s mad­ness but […]