My passion for poetry didn't start with me. It started with my dad.
He was a busy man, but poetry was where we met. He was a fantastic reader—the kind who could take you somewhere just by reading aloud—and I was an enthusiastic five-year-old ear, soaking it in. His favorite poet was Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven, Annabel Lee, A Dream Within a Dream. Deep, dark material for a five-year-old, honestly. But it wasn't really about the poems. It was about the bonding—a father and daughter finding each other in the rhythm of someone else's words.
His passion became mine. At eight years old, I entered a talent show and tried to perform Annabel Lee from memory:
"It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea, that a maiden there lived whom you may know by the name of Annabel Lee."
The microphone didn't work. I froze, and eventually ran off the stage. But the audience clapped anyway — for the attempt, for an eight-year-old brave enough to try to hold Poe's darkness in her small hands.
I still get stage fright when I read today. That hasn't gone away. What's changed is how I understand it—not as something to overcome and be rid of, but as proof that I'm still growing, still choosing bravery over retreat, every single time I step up to a microphone.
That's what writing has always been for me: not a performance without fear, but a practice of turning toward fear instead of away from it. My father gave me that first, in poems that were far too heavy for a child — and somehow, exactly right.

As a young girl, my grandmother indulged my love of poetry with a gift: The Golden Treasury of Poetry, a 1959 collection edited by Louis Untermeyer. One poem from that book stayed with me for years—William Blake's The Fly, which compares our fragile human existence to that of a small, easily-crushed insect.
I didn't write anything about it at the time. But poems like that don't leave you; they just wait for the right moment to resurface. Years later, mine did, in a poem called Saved a Spider Today.
It started as something almost silly: a spider, lost in my shower, doing "a clumsy ballet." I rescued him, set him down outside safely away from a hungry Blue Jay, and went on with my morning. But somewhere in that small act, Blake's poem came back to me—the fragility, the fear, the simple mercy of being helped along by someone bigger than your circumstances.
That's really what the poem is about. We're all just trying to exist in the best way we know how. Sometimes we lose our way—get "lost along the way," as I wrote—and the real gift is when someone lifts us up and helps us keep going.
I ended the poem with a wish I still carry for everyone I meet: I hope someone saves you someday, when you lose your way—gently, so you don't become a victim of prey.
Compassion doesn't have to be dramatic. Sometimes it's just a cup, a spider, and a moment of noticing that another creature needed help finding their way home.

For a long time, I thought peace was something you arrived at — a destination, a finish line, a feeling you'd eventually earn if you did enough right. It took me years to understand that peace doesn't work that way. The real path to peace isn't forward. It's backward, first.
It means healing the past.
For me, that meant sitting with the uncomfortable wounds I picked up as a child — the disappointments, the quiet belief that I wasn't worthy or wasn't enough. Those wounds don't transform overnight. They take years to even name, let alone release. My peace was built on that slow, unglamorous work: turning back toward the child I used to be, and finally giving her what she needed.
Two songs carried me through that trail as a young woman — the Beatles' The Long and Winding Road and John Lennon's Imagine. I listened to them over and over, not fully understanding why they moved me so deeply at the time. Looking back, I think they were naming something I couldn't yet say myself: that the road home to yourself is rarely straight, and that peace — real peace — has to be imagined into being before it can ever be lived.
Those songs crept into the cracks and crevices of who I was becoming. They became part of the foundation for what I believe, and for the work of my charity today.
Your path to peace will look different from mine. But I believe it starts in the same place: not by running from the past, but by finally turning around to face it.

My first published poem found its way into the world in 1997, in an anthology called Embedded Dreams through the National Library of Poetry. But the poem itself was older than that. I'd written it years earlier, in my late teens — and then, the way feelings and poetry so often do, it resurfaced when I needed it.
That poem was called Birds in Flight.
I didn't set out to write about fear or memory. I just wrote what was true at the time, tucked it away, and moved on with my life the way we all do. But some poems don't stay tucked away. They wait. And when they resurface, they usually have something new to teach you— not because the words changed, but because you did.
The poem closes with these lines:
"…But the soul's only victim / is the self. / It's memories and fears / and the desire to be / like a bird in flight."
I didn't fully understand what I meant by that as a teenager. I understand it now—that our own memories and fears are the only things really holding us captive, and that facing them, rather than avoiding them, is what finally lets us fly.
That poem now appears in my new memoir, decades after I first put it to paper—proof, I think, that nothing we write is ever really wasted. It's just waiting for the moment we're ready to hear it again.
That's how it started for me: not with a plan to become a poet, but with a teenager telling the truth on paper, not knowing it would still be flying—and still setting me free, thirty years later.

People sometimes ask why I named my foundation Imagine Peace instead of something softer, safer. Here's the truth: peace isn't soft. Peace is brave.
I don't think of peace as the absence of conflict. I think of it as a daily choice—to soften instead of sharpen, to listen instead of defend, to give instead of hoard. That's a warrior's work, not a passive one. It takes more courage to stay open than to shut down.
I've spent five decades writing my way toward that kind of courage. Poetry taught me that the smallest act—a line, a stanza, a single word chosen carefully—can shift something in a person who reads it. Multiply that by a lifetime, and you start to understand why I believe peace is built one person at a time, not legislated into existence overnight.
Being a peace warrior doesn't mean never feeling anger, grief, or fear. It means choosing, again and again, not to let those things have the last word. It means showing up for a stranger's cause because their suffering matters as much as your own comfort. It means writing the poem even when you're not sure anyone will read it, because the writing itself is an act of hope.
I carry that into everything—my books, the charities I honor, the children's stories I write, even the smallest interactions of an ordinary day. Every person I meet is a chance to practice peace instead of just believe in it.
That's the work. That's the warrior's path. And I'm nowhere near finished walking it.

There's a particular kind of silence that trauma teaches you to keep. I know that silence well. I carried it for decades, layered under the ordinary business of living, until my body and my mind both said: no further.
I won't pretend the unraveling was gentle. It wasn't. It came through illness, through fear, through a season so dark I had to relearn what it meant to choose to stay. But that darkness is also where the real work began—the slow, unglamorous work of listening to my own sensitivity instead of apologizing for it, of treating my body as a partner instead of an obstacle.
I used to think being deeply affected by the world was a weakness. I've come to believe it's closer to a gift—one that, once I stopped fighting it, became the very thing that let me write words other people needed to hear.
That's why I write now, and why I'll keep writing. Not because healing is finished—it isn't, and I don't think it ever fully is — but because I know what it's like to feel too sensitive for this world, and I know what it's like to find your way back to yourself anyway.
If my story gives even one person permission to stop hiding, to ask for help, or to see their own struggle as a doorway instead of a dead end, then the hardest years of my life will have been worth something larger than themselves.
You are not walking this alone. Neither was I.