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signing last book, writing new book

 

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”  

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”  

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”

 

Saul Bellow

“Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.” Bodhidharma

“Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?”  Susan Gordon Lydon

"...there is a way to be sane. You can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes.

Simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process.

It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher.

And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.

That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.”  Osho

"...Most of all, talking matters; honest conversations between me and you and everyone we know. Not pretending we’re OK when we’re struggling, not shoving pastries at ‘skinny’ people in the office or gossiping about them behind their back, but genuine, honest talk. If you, or someone close to you, has disordered eating patterns, if you’re weighing yourself obsessively or exercising excessively, if you’re bingeing or purging after meals, the first thing to know is that there is nothing to be ashamed of. You’re not alone: many people – young, old, female, male, underweight and overweight and everything in between – feel the same way." 

This is an extract from my article for Stylist Magazine, out this week. You can read the full version here http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/stylist-hears-first-hand-what-it-s-like-to-live-with-mental-illness

If you don't know Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill, you need to read it pronto! Such beautiful writing, I can't recommend it highly enough. A few favourite snippets:

“The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.”

“My agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.”

“How had she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.” 

"The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)” 
 

“Life may not have a purpose, but it certainly has consequences, one of which is the accumulation of a vast, coastal shelf of uncut, 100 per-cent-pure-regret. And this will happen whether you have no kids, one kid, or a dozen.” Geoff Dyer