obstacles

On my recent trip to Japan, I visited Fushimi Inari Taisha, the primary Shinto shrine for worship of Inari Okami (one of the principal Shinto deities). I’ll write about that experience in more detail in the weeks to come, but today I’m riffing on the theme in a different way. On days like that, it seems we’ll never clear the bottom, or reach the rarefied air that other successful writers seem to enjoy. Even after publication, sometimes the writing path seems insurmountably steep, and the obstacles we thought we left behind us…well, they keep cropping up in unexpected places. There’s no view out from