My Commonplace Book

Clyde Kilby said, "I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are, but simply be glad that they are…"

N.T. Wright believes beauty matters. I believe that taking creation and new creation seriously is the way to understand and revitalize aesthetic awareness and perhaps even…

Charles Spurgeon had no patience for people who were too spiritual to enjoy nature. He urged Christians to delight in the created world since God himself delights in it.

Sarah Clarkson said, “Material matters because it reflects the originating glory of its Creator and housed the flesh of God himself in the incarnation.”

William Carlos Williams said, “Green is a solace, a promise of peace.”

Lesslie Newbigin said, "The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashes…"

“Anxiousness — a difficult disease. The patient thinks he has something like a thorn, something pricking him in his viscera…”

Barry E. Wolfe said, “No one who has ever been tormented by prolonged bouts of anxiety doubts its power to paralyze action, promote flight, eviscerate pleasure, and skew thinking toward the catastrophic…”

In her final collection of essays, Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.

William Stafford said, “I believe that the so-called ‘writing block’ is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance….One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing….”

Donald M. Murray counseled writers to write a first draft from memory without consulting their notes. “Put your notes aside and write the first draft from memory. Follow the instinctive flow of the story so that you make unexpected connections as well as expected ones…”

According to Donald M. Murray, “Effective stories have one dominant message. You may have to write a first draft to discover the message, but there should be a single meaning that has priority over all the other meanings in the story…”

Donald M. Murray advised would-be writers to maintain a continuous dialogue with themselves about their work by keeping a notebook.

Anna Kodé said, “Phones, with their ability to transport you to other worlds, want to convince you that the one you’re stuck in doesn’t have anything worth paying attention to. But through my journaling, I realized something…”

David Taylor said, “Poetry is a native language of God and of the people of God. It is a mother tongue of the Word Incarnate on whose lips the psalmist’s words came naturally…”

In The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry wrote, “His vision, with the finality of some physical change, has turned inward. More and more now the world as it is seems to him an apparition or a cloud that drifts, opening and closing, upon the clear, remembered lights and colors of the world as it was…”

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy wrote, “Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child has known this better than he…”