|
4c2b210
|
During congregational silences, in meditation rooms or halls, in prison cells and meeting rooms, in silent confession at church, all these screwed-up people like us, with tangled lives and minds, find their hearts opening through quiet focus. In unfolding, we are enfolded, and there is a melding of spirits, a melding of times, eternal, yesterday morning, the now, the ancient, even as we meet beneath a digital clock on the wall, flipping its..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
9e7405d
|
Those plates would be filled with love, pride, and connection. That care is what we have longed for our whole lives, and what we create when we are kinder to our bodies and our hungry souls.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
fa36d78
|
I read them a poem by Phillip Lopate that someone once sent me, that goes: We who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting, as a group, to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift. Your analyst is in on it, plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband; and we have pledged to disap..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
9f25e5f
|
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding space,' to quote the late, great Zora Neale Hurston. It
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
dcfdd8e
|
Other days, though, my writing is like a person to me--the person who, after all these years, still makes sense to me.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
08d4eb4
|
thinking about A. J. Muste, who during the Vietnam War stood in front of the White House night after night with a candle. One rainy night, a reporter asked him, "Mr. Muste, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?" "Oh," Muste replied, "I don't do it to change the country, I do it so the country won't change me." --
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
f85bb7d
|
what good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with platitudes; doing this with them is just about the most gracious gift we have to offer. We give up what we think should be doing, or think need to get done, to keep them company. We help them to bear being in time and space during unbearable ..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
b8b9ebc
|
My brothers and I were not encouraged to search for God, the obvious source of solace, but we three kids were led to the world of books, which to us was just as good. We found in books the divine plop, the joy of settling down deeply into something, worlds and realities greater than our own troubled minds.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
d9d8f3f
|
Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
7ccf11a
|
what good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with platitudes; doing this with them is just about the most gracious gift we have to offer. We give up what we think we should be doing, or think we need to get done, to keep them company.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
9a6ab76
|
When we try to see a damaged person as one of God's regular old customers, instead of a lost cause, it takes the pressure off everybody. We can then loosen our death grip on the person, which usually results in progress for everyone, also known in certain circles as grace.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
9d50b85
|
I had to learn new skills. One was to no longer pretend not to see what was going on. ... I was going to learn to trust that what I saw was really happening. ... I had to learn to be present without paying quite so much attention to my poor old overamped mind, because this was the source of most of my unhappiness. ... The second radical choice I made was to notice and then express the fact that I was filled with rage and grief.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
9513cc6
|
The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
3c79dae
|
If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
2d9ccab
|
She was always cheerful--until she turned eighty and started going blind. She had a great deal of religious faith, and everyone assumed that she would adjust and find meaning in her loss--meaning and then acceptance and then joy--and we all wanted this because, let's face it, it's so inspiring and such a relief when people find a way to bear the unbearable, when you can organize things in such a way that a tiny miracle appears to have taken..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
17185c6
|
Sometimes - oh, just once in a blue moon-I resist being receptive to God's generosity, because I'm busy with a project and trying to manipulate Him or Her into helping me with it, or with getting my toys fixed or any major discomfort to pass. But God is not a banker or a bean counter. God gives us even more, which is so subversive. God just gives, to us, to you and me. I mean, look at us! Yikes. God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us ..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
bd46b22
|
They ask that we pray for their families, and for kinder leaders, and for the homeless, and people with AIDS, and people in other countries in crises of starvation or war.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
921311e
|
Most of us figure out by a certain age - some of us later than others - that life unspools in cycles, some lovely, some painful, but in no predictable order. So you could have lovely, painful, and painful again, which I think we all agree is not at all fair. You don't have to like it, and you are always welcome to file a brief with the Complaints Department. But if you've been around for a while, you know that much of the time, if you are p..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
523e6f2
|
But I try to make sure they understand that writing, and even getting good at it, and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived. My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of content..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
0cee102
|
good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
4d16c95
|
Honey,"..."you'll never draw another calm breath as long as you live. That blissful amniotic unconcerned state of people without children is a thing of the past."
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
8cb06ef
|
Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won't do any of those things; you'll never get in that way.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
ebf72af
|
Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
8a04e62
|
When you love something like reading - or drawing or music or nature - it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It's an alchemical blend of affinity and focus that takes us to a place within that feels as close as we ever get to "home." It's like pulling into our own train station after a long trip - joy, relief, a ..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
9b4ee49
|
Someone who'd spent $30,000 at a diet hospital told me the secret: Eat less, exercise more. Oh, and here's $5,000 worth of cutting edge advice: drink more water.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
c3c6e14
|
The neck is where it all shows. Like the thighs of the head.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
f97877e
|
Kill the pain. I don't smoke or drink anymore. I'm too worried to gamble, too guilty to shoplift, and I've always hated clothes shopping. So what choices did that leave? I could go on a strict new diet or conversely, I could stuff myself to the rafters with fat, sugar and carcinogens. Ding! Ding! We have a winner.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
8fbf354
|
I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
923813c
|
While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
309eaa5
|
When I had been writing food reviews for a number of years, there were so many restaurants and individual dishes in my brainpan that when people asked for a recommendation, I couldn't think of a single restaurant where I'd ever actually eaten. But if the person could narrow it down to, say, Indian, I might remember one lavish Indian palace, where my date had asked the waiter for the Rudyard Kipling sampler and later for the holy-cow tartare..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
e489fb0
|
Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren't there. I walk along defending myself to people, or exchanging repartee with them, or rationalizing my behavior, or seducing them with gossip, or pretending I'm on their TV talk show or whatever. I speed or run an aging yellow light or don't come to a full stop, and one nanosecond later am explaining to imaginary cops exactly why I had to do ..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
26d8be4
|
Outside the classroom, you don't get to sit next to your readers and explain little things you left out, or fill in details that would have made the action more interesting or believable. The material has got to work on its own, and the dream must be vivid and continuous. Think of your nightly dreams, how smoothly one scene slides into another, how you don't roll your closed eyes and say, "Wait just a minute--I've never shot drugs with Rosa..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
3c6613d
|
There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness, a sign that God is implicit in all of creation. Or maybe you are not predisposed to see the world sacramentally, to see everything as an outward and visible sign of inward, invisible grace. This does not mean that you are worthless Philistine scum. Anyone who wants to can be surprised by ..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
649a430
|
I was raised in a culture that promotes this competitiveness, this insatiability, this fantasy of needing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and then, in the next breath, shames you for any feelings of longing or envy or fear that it will always be someone else's turn. I was only doing what I had been groomed to do.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
0d215e6
|
Then I look into my students' faces, and they look solemnly back at me. "So does our writing matter, again?" they ask. Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoya..
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
73d74c2
|
It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools--friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty--and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they're enough.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |
|
80658c7
|
He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.
|
|
|
Anne Lamott |