He gripped the pen like a marlinspike.
– said of Jack London
The Discover What Matters™ blog by Charles Carlson fuses several traditions: Zen teachings, nature writing and cultural criticism—all of which place a heavy emphasis on truth, a no-nonsense sensibility and a love of language. Like any good voyage of discovery the blog covers a wide range of subjects affecting modern life: spirituality, ethics, family, work, relationships, language and more.
Viewing entries tagged
Zen
The Five Stages of Grief have become an almost sacred tenet of modern psychiatry. The Five Stages have helped people deal with the death of a loved one, their own death, and have led to more compassionate treatment of the terminally ill. But what if the Five Stages are incomplete? What if there is a sixth (and even seventh) stage that modern psychiatry has missed? If you're on a mobile device, click on the photo above to learn more.
The first thing I’d tell aspiring writers: don’t mess with the mystery. Don’t listen to teachers who try too hard to explain, don’t read books that give in-depth advice on sentence structure and word choice. You’ll just end up writing like everyone else. Listen to your own voice. Be a visionary. Take chances. Jump off cliffs. Land with a splat. Fail. Pick yourself up again like Wily Coyote after being flattened by the falling anvil…
Another mass shooting, another round of searching for answers. How could someone do this? Why only in America? The debate has come down to a two-sided choice: the death toll is the result of lax gun regulation. Or the real culprit isn’t guns, but mental illness. What if both sides are wrong? What if the shootings are a result of something much larger?
"Spirituality" has become a popular buzzword in our modern lexicon, as more and more people describe themselves as spiritual, but not religious. In a survey by LifeWay Christian Resources in 2010 of 1,200 18- to 29-year-olds, 72% said they're "really more spiritual than religious." It used to be that if you weren't religious, then you were an atheist, or maybe an agnostic, but a new category—spirituality—has given people a third, very viable and interesting option. So what does it mean to be spiritual?
How does our worldview change as we age? I pondered that question this week as the news broke that HarperCollins would be publishing a new book by Harper Lee, the author of *To Kill a Mockingbird.* The story interested me for several reasons: first the fact that it was such a huge story; as a writer I'm always gratified to see the general public get so passionate about books. The top trending tweets for several days had the keywords "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Harper Lee."
