​

Hello friends,

I started this newsletter at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, and named it Keep Breathing. The name was partially in reference to this new, frightening illness, but also harkened back to everything I’d taught and practiced for years:

To pause and take a conscious breath is to be present with what is.

To pause and take a conscious breath is to open to possibility.

There is life in a single breath. And there is magic. We breathe with the trees and the plants. We breathe with the stars. We breathe with every other living thing.

We breathe.

We create music with our breath. As a young poet, reading aloud in the cafés of Los Angeles and San Francisco, I learned to mark meter and use commas to indicate breath. I do the same now, writing fiction and other prose...

My editors are amused, because my commas look like rogue markings on the page, not always following standard grammatical rules. But those commas telegraph something important: This thought pauses here, and then moves on. That character inhales here, then springs to action.

And so my writing becomes a living thing, filled with the power of breath.

I, and my art form, continue to breathe and be inspired.

In-spir-ation. To breathe into.

In-spir-ation. To be breathed into by a divine source.

Breath. The start of magic. The origin of art. The beginning of so much of life on earth.

What are you breathing into being?

Best wishes - Thorn

Need a break? How about a visit with corgi sleuths Klaus and Marsha?

​

​

​