I’d gone outside to cry beside my favorite cottonwood tree, the way I do when I don’t know how to carry it all.

The grief wasn’t loud or dramatic—it was just heavy. Thick. A sense that the world was unraveling and I had nothing left to offer.

After a while, I walked back inside, opened my notebook, and let my grief speak. No punctuation, no plan—just truth on the page.

When the going gets tough, the tough get…writing?

Well, maybe not all the tough ones. But some of us—the old souls, the sensitive ones, the weary warriors, and spiritual seekers—some of us write because it’s how we survive.

It’s how we breathe.

For me, there are days when the heartbreak is unbearable. Days when I lean on everything I know: breathwork, prayer, QiGong, watering my petunias, talking to trees—and writing.

Writing, for a long time now, has been a lifesaving practice. I shared an essay called “The Words That Pulled Me Back to Life“ because that’s what happened: I wrote my way out of despair. Not with eloquence or answers, but with raw, real honesty.

That’s the kind of writing I want to share. And today, I want to share a few prompts that have carried me—and countless others—through the darkest places.

One of them came from a writing workshop decades ago:

What matters now?

That simple question has grounded me more times than I can count. After my mother died, it was the first thing I wrote. When life feels overwhelming, it’s often the only thing that brings me back to center.

Another prompt that has become essential to my practice:

What does my soul want me to know?

It’s a powerful shift. When I remember to ask this question—and actually sit down to write what comes—it’s like being handed a compass in the fog.

Not every answer is immediate. Not every writing session feels profound. But when we show up to the page with sincerity, something always moves. Something opens.

And that movement—that remembering—is sacred.

Because when we write from the place in us that still knows the way, even if it’s buried beneath sorrow or fear or numbness, we begin to come home to ourselves.

We don’t need to write perfectly. We don’t need to know where it’s going.

We just need to begin.

A question.
A breath.
A willingness to listen.

And then, word by word, something opens.
Something moves.
Something sacred remembers its way back through us.

Let the page be your witness.
Let your voice become your prayer.
Even now—especially now—it matters.

~