While reading this chapter, the main idea that I took away from Hirshfield was that as writers, we need to go beyond who we are and our experiences in order to write. "To speak, and to write, is to assert who we are, what we think. The necessary other side is to surrender these things -- to stand humbled and stunned and silent before the wild and inexplicable beauties and mysteries of being." Hirshfield meant it in a sense that as writers, we are always going to be humbled by something, whether it be critics or life in general and that sometimes, freeing ourselves from the opinion of others, is what is going to help us enter that threshold. This sentence especially inspired me as a writer and as a creative because I always wrote through personal experience because it's easy to draw emotion from that. It made me realize that I should be writing holistically instead, not just through my own eyes.