If poetry and the arts do anything, they fortify your inner life, your inwardness. Seamus Heaney I embrace my inwardness. The parts of me that are soft and round and full. The parts of me that hold tightly and sweetly and kindly. The parts of me t...

A shared space, of love and care, above all for the stranger. Michael D. Higgins Why is it particularly important to love and care for the stranger? (Shouldn't we start by loving and caring for friends and family?) Let me start by saying an ethos ...

Sentences become presents. Presents passed over back walls, outside the front gates, on the streets. Dorothy Nelson I am thinking about narrative gratitude. I am thinking about the deep gratitude I feel for words and story and connection and belon...

And so on that day in August, in my seventy-eight year, I sat down to begin the memoir which I swore I would never write. Edna O'Brien I wrote a memoir many moons ago. Part exercise in proving I could do it. Part exercise in the practice of writin...