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Maybe what we say to each other is not so important after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best we can be.
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Anne Lamott |
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When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.
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Anne Lamott |
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In early sobriety I heard that if you have an idea after ten p.m., it is probably not a good idea--and this was before e-mail.
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sobriety
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Anne Lamott |
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39fb94b
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Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant for you to hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean you want to vacation together.
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Anne Lamott |
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The way I see things, God loves you the same whether you're being elegant or not. It feels much better when you are, but even when you can't fake it, God still listens to your prayers. Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, 'Well isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff.
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Anne Lamott |
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During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved--which, if we are to believe Jesus or Gandhi, specifically means to see everyone on earth as family.
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Anne Lamott |
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We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we'd pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears. In the aftermath of loss, we do what we've alw..
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Anne Lamott |
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I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place...
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Anne Lamott |
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I carry a secret sense of accomplishment around with me, like a radium pack implanted near my heart that now leaches a quiet sense of relief through my system.
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Anne Lamott |
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There is ecstasy in paying attention... Anyone who wants to can be surprised by the beauty or pain of the natural world, of the human mind and heart, and can try to capture just that - the details, the nuance, what is. If you start to look around, you will start to see.
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Anne Lamott |
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1497616
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Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all. Do you want this, or do you want to be right? Well, can I get back to you on that? I
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Anne Lamott |
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e2b0b2b
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I saw a button pin once that said: "I'm not tense. I'm just very, very alert."
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Anne Lamott |
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You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn't quite where you were heading.
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Anne Lamott |
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The hard silence between frustrated people always feels cluttered. But holy silence is spacious and inviting. You can drink it down. We offer it to ourselves when we work, rest, meditate, bike, read. When we hike by ourselves, we hear a silence still pristine with crunching leaves and birdsong. Silence can be a system of peace, which is mercy, easily offered to a friend needing quiet, harder when the person is one's own annoying self.
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Anne Lamott |
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42e36ac
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When you can step back at moments like these and see what is happening, when you watch people you love under fire or evaporating, you realize that the secret of life is patch patch patch. Thread your needle, make a knot, find one place on the other piece of torn cloth where you can make one stitch that will hold. And do it again. And again. And again.
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Anne Lamott |
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Usually with life, you start wherever you are, and you flail around for a while--
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Anne Lamott |
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The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. / I awoke and saw that life was service. / I acted and behold, service was joy."
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Anne Lamott |
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476d660
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I recognize the divinity in you, but actually more like, I recognize our each-otherness, instantly
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Anne Lamott |
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This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.
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Anne Lamott |
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b1f16f0
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Does sunset sometimes look like the sun is coming up? Do you know what a faithful love is like? You're crying; you say you've burned yourself. But can you think of anyone who's not hazy with smoke? --Rumi
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Anne Lamott |
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d8a7fe0
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Growing up is not going nearly as efficiently as I had hoped.
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Anne Lamott |
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Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life ...
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Anne Lamott |
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That's what's so touching about weddings: Two people fall in love, and decide to see if their love might stand up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to help the whole shebang hang together.
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marriage
love
weddings
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Anne Lamott |
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Believing in George Bush was so ludicrous that believing in God almost seems rational.
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Anne Lamott |
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Maybe, I thought, after a few months of sobriety, you could successfully smoke marijuana again, or maybe every anniversary you got to have one glass of a perfectly chilled California Chardonnay.
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Anne Lamott |
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but at the same time, they got a miracle. It wasn't the kind that comes on a Macy's Thanksgiving Day float. And it wasn't the one that they wanted, where God would reach down from the sky and touch their girl with a magic wand and restore her to perfect health. Maybe that will still happen-who knows? I wouldn't put anything past God, because he or she is one crafty mother. Still, they did get a miracle, one of those dusty little red-wagon m..
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Anne Lamott |
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I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.
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Anne Lamott |
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Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.
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Anne Lamott |
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To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another's suffering where that person can see us. To be honest, that sucks. It's the worst, even if you are the mother of God.
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Anne Lamott |
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Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable sh..
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Anne Lamott |
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70e942a
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Say it's true: It is what it is. We're social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.
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Anne Lamott |
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b1b54fe
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Pope Francis says the name of God is mercy. Our name was mercy, too, until we put it away to become more productive, more admired and less vulnerable. We tend to forget it's still there.
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Anne Lamott |
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While it is hard to fathom who we are and how we are to live when public chaos shatters our routine, the slow-motion pain of each private death and cataclysm we endure is harder. Each slams us off our feet, yet we have agreed to pretend to be fine again at some point, ideally as soon as possible, so as not to seem self-indulgent or embarrass anybody. Then people can get on with their lives.
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Anne Lamott |
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Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.
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Anne Lamott |
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Jesus was soft on crime. He'd never have been elected anything.
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Anne Lamott |
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And we've read scary books and watched scary movies and TV shows together. He's met monsters, ghouls, and demons on the page and on the screen. There's nothing like watching Anaconda with your best friend or lying in bed next to your mother reading Roald Dahl, because that way you get to explore dark stuff safely. You get to laugh with it, to step out on the vampire's dance floor and take him for a spin, and then step back into your life. W..
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scary
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Anne Lamott |
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6c7e45f
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I heard an old man speak once, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. He said that he'd finally figured out a few years ago that his profound sense of control, in the world and over his life, is another addiction and a total illusion. He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the back seat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearl..
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Anne Lamott |
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Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength.
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Anne Lamott |
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You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.
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Anne Lamott |
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But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?
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Anne Lamott |
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Domestic pain can be searing, and it is usually what does us in. It's almost indigestible: death, divorce, old age, drugs; brain-damaged children, violence, senility, unfaithfulness. Good luck with figuring it out. It unfolds, and you experience it, and it is so horrible and endless that you could almost give up a dozen times. But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what yo..
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Anne Lamott |
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There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixing this setup here. It seems broken and ruined at times, but it isn't: it's simply the nature of human life.
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Anne Lamott |
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What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. When I am well, I know not to mess with mess right away; I try to let silence and time work their magic. [p. 100]
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Anne Lamott |
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640ca47
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Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.
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Anne Lamott |