Other guidelines that save me “time and money”:
a. I must write down the lines that come to me as I lie in my warm bed in the cold dark.
b. I am allowed to use my most-recent favorite words and images in my writing. There’s a reason I was attracted to them. Collect them in my book.
c. All those YouTube videos by Alan Watts, the literary research on Maya Angelou, the overheard phrases and quotes from Facebook can guide me too. Anything meaningful has a prioritized place amongst all the other junk that never penetrated.
d. Insomnia is just found writing time.

And finally, I find that these are some of my Rules of Adulthood that use creativity and curiosity to help me live my favorite life.

1. Look up all words that you don’t know. Otherwise you will never learn that “apophatic” is close to “mysticism”, and “mysticism” is the explanatory word you’ve been looking for all your life to describe your spirituality. (Mysticism–system of belief which focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or the conditioned role-playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer man.) To name is to know it.

2. Don’t ever give up, but especially don’t give up when you are at the point of “close but no cigar”. I’ve found that finding things at the thrift store that are close to your perfect find only mean that the ultimate score is just around the corner. If you are looking for the perfect word, or phrase, don’t disregard the ancillary thoughts that come to you. Persistence pays off.

4. Silence is my fertile earth that all good thoughts spring from.