Understanding Arts & Literature

Arts and literature explore what it feels like to be human. Through stories, images, music, and language, they give form to experience, revealing patterns of emotion and perception that are often difficult to see directly—but that, once seen, feel simultaneously personal and universal.

What Defines Arts & Literature?

Arts and literature are ways of attending to experience and expressing it in forms others can appreciate. A novel, poem, painting, or piece of music doesn’t just describe the world—it shapes how we notice it. These works can slow perception, sharpen attention, and make familiar experiences feel vivid.

Rather than offering explanations or instructions, art often works indirectly. It invites you to inhabit another perspective, and to recognize aspects of experience that usually pass unnoticed. In this way, art complements meditation: both are practices of deliberate attention.

Conceptual Pillars of Arts & Literature

Invitation

Rather than explaining or instructing, art works indirectly. Through image, rhythm, tone, and suggestion, it asks you to enter an experience where meaning is discovered, not delivered.

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The Heart of Pilgrimage

Care

Small choices matter. A shift in word, line, or image can change the meaning of an entire work. Careful attention—to language, form, and detail—allows meaning to emerge with precision  and depth.

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Care

Openness

Art doesn’t typically point to a single conclusion. It leaves space for ambiguity, reflection, and interpretation, allowing different meanings to arise over time and across contexts.

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Vocabularies of Being

Key Teachers of Arts & Literature

David Whyte

Poet and author David Whyte has a degree in marine zoology, worked as a naturalist guide, and led anthropological expeditions across the Andes, Amazon, and Himalayas. This wealth of experience informs his poetry, lectures, workshops, and views on creativity.

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Consolations II Consolations Contemplative Action The Boundaries of Self Identity and Conversation Distance and Arrival

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Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is an author, essayist, and columnist whose work has explored the Cuban Revolution, Islamic mysticism, the art of stillness, and more. He is a travel writer who adopts the perspective of an outsider.

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The Pilgrim's Way Silence and Pilgrimage

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Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is a celebrated poet whose work explores social justice and the ties between the human world and natural world. She has been a practitioner of Soto Zen for fifty years, having received lay-ordination from the San Francisco Zen Center in 1979.

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Vocabularies of Being

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Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg is a painter and author who has practiced Zen for more than 40 years. Her work centers on writing and other means of creative expression as tools for mindfulness, framing them as a practice. Natalie is best known for her book, Writing Down the Bones, which employs Zen philosophy to help writers shift their attitude toward writing.

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Writing as Practice

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Tom Lutz

Tom Lutz is a writer, literary critic, and founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His writing explores experiences of getting lost, shifting perspectives, shedding assumptions, and embracing the unknown.

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The Cloud of Unknowing

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