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Later, when time, grief, therapy, and love helped me make a kind of peace, the anguish and obsession became a wistful, nostalgic gratitude.
Life is richer when it is simple. A walk, buttered toast, a child’s soccer game. You’re afforded the opportunity to stop doing and can instead just be here. Wow. Yet you don’t have to be near death or have the depth of Thomas Merton to love and seek it.
Contemplation is the opposite. It’s being a human being, implicit in the job description, what my very old friends have loved most at the end.
The reason to draw close to death when we’re younger is to practice finding and living in the soul. This grows our muscles for living. In the absence of the illusion of power and majesty, we see that the soul was right here all along, everywhere, and consequently we can once again feel charmed by the world.
baseball
fall in love at sixty-two. Sixty-two!
The petals go from those tough, muscular baby belly buttons, to big and strong, to fragile, to papery, and then to nourishment—invisible, beneficent, here.
This chapter was particularly moving and enlightening
The thoughts on gratitude and death in particular- gratitude for what made you a better person - I think this has been my problem with these gratitude lists all along-=they are based on what the author calls transactional gratitude- thanking for some thing-=
The second related piece is the discussion of being at the bedside - which I still blank out of my mind- I didn’t know what to do- say-=work on physical comfort but particularly at the end we characterized it as he was already gone. But he wasn’t - he was somewhere between - and I didn’t know how to be there
Your inside person does not have an age.
Your inside person, your soul, the innermost baby in the nesting doll of you, is close by when you despair about your neck, your failing vision and drive, but your inside person
also knows that with myopia, cluelessness, and tiredness comes grace.
The lower powers—greed, hatred, addiction, ignorance—are easy to connect with and describe, but a higher power is not easily defined. It
can’t be controlled, manipulated, or appropriated. It opens us and heals us and brings us together and turns hearts of stone into human hearts. Anytime you are experiencing love, you are experiencing
So perhaps that is why I feel so angry- I don’t feel loved
the God we are talking about.
“Dogs are dogs. Friends are friends. I don’t believe in a higher power. It’s infantilizing.”
You never get over certain losses, but the anguish part eventually ends, and it all just sucks for a while.
Get out of yourself and become a person for others, while simultaneously practicing radical self-care: maybe have a bite to eat, check in with the sky twice, buy some cute socks, take a nap.
To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.
The love of our dogs and cats is the closest most of us will come to knowing the direct love of God on this side of eternity.
begin by encouraging people to play, and share, and enjoy. I encourage them to pay attention to their experiences with nature and their connections with others, to anything that gives them direction, a second wind, a bit more energy, a connection.
The overarching story is how we go from tribal gods to the Beloved, the growth and evolution from animal sacrifice to the United Nations. It is the story of noticing power when we pay attention to the sun, or the wind, or the mountain. There’s power here that is not a vague and abstract thing. There’s power in oil, in water, in silence, and in bread. There is great power in music, which brings us energy and connects us
with our own beating hearts, and to others, and reveals the sublime—in the crashing of waves, in drumming, and in the silence between notes.
I encourage seekers to practice trust. Maybe your family was not as well adjusted as you hoped, and trust does not come easily to you. Is there something I can trust and belong to, or is it just me and my AK-47?
Play is also part of developing trust. Play opens the heart and gives
delight and focus, like an abacus did when...
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Kelly said to me once: “Play is play. Play doesn’t have to be or lead to anything else but fun.” But what about the bigger things it can give you—the open heart, the happy exhaustion, the present moment, something beyond you, which is people to play with? It’s the peace of concentration, it’s a welcome—“I’m so glad you’re here!” Play is learning how to wait, ho...
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It’s very simple and it brings us deeply into the Now, and just for a while, maybe for the rest of the day, you don’t hav...
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God is often in solitude and quiet, through the still, small voice—in the breeze, not the thunder. But isolation is different from solitude, and Kelly started drinking again.
This is so relevant and perhaps that is the difference between people who are doing well in this quarantine and those who are not-
One of us remembers and reminds the rest of us that when it is really dark you can see the stars.
We believe grace is stronger than evil and sin. We believe love is stronger than hate, that the divine is bigger than all huge egos simmered together in a bloviation stew, and this makes us laugh. And laughter is hope. We believe and hope
that we will get through these terr...
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I called her to the bitter end, dreading it some days. Like the rest of us, I am a mixed grill of beauty and self-centeredness, pettiness and magnanimity, judgment and humility. On a bad day, I’m pushing old ladies on the Titanic out of the way to get to the lifeboats.
(They’re old, they’re going to die.)
It’s more that if we are lucky, we experience moments of love as a gift between people, and between people and the divine.
A whiff may have to be enough sometimes. The universe seems to know we are always alone; we get pushed out at birth, into the cold and the too loud and the too bright, and this provides us with the incentive and the chance to discover connection, warmth, solace—ourselves, in other words.
I wish good things lasted forever. That would work best for me. But God is a lot more subtle than I am comfortable with. Saint John wrote that God is Love, that anytime you experience kindness and generosity, hope, patience and caring, you are in the presence of God. Anytime you
express these, you are drawing something I would call God into the world. That is how ordinary and accessible God is—meals, TV, visits, laughter, and especially friendship, which made Kelly share with us the things that finally made her feel safe, there in the room upstairs.
It is okay to fear death. Many people who don’t can be a little too pleased with themselves. But for our purposes here, let’s say that most people overuse things like food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, work, and
porn to avoid what they don’t want to feel—and mostly what we don’t want to feel is fear.
Secretly overeating serves the same purpose as dieting: to numb bad feelings, although then, of course, it causes shame and regret.
The weight we lose almost always finds its way back home, and it invariably brings friends. This, I think, has to do with childhood injuries to our sense of value, with anxiety, and with the inability of our poor parents to nurture consistently, and dieting cannot heal this.
So what wouldn’t melt? Well, this brings us full circle, to just trying to do a little better, today. That is the secret of life.
The only nourishment that can give a body and soul the feelings we crave is profound self-love and union with that scared part of ourselves.
Horribly, but as is always the case, only kindness, forgiveness, and love can save us.
Love is something alive, living, personal, and true, the creating and nourishing power within life. It is patient, free to all, and it is medicine and food. This may look like rubbing lotion into your jiggly thighs, patting your stomach as if it is a relative you
love: “Why, hello there, Auntie.” Love looks like the laying on of hands. The opposite of love is the bathroom scale.
If you are not okay with yourself at 185 pounds, you may not be okay at 150, or even 135. The self-respect and peace of mind you long for is not in
your weight. It’s within you. I resent that more than I can say. But it’s true.
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.
The family is the crucible in which these strange entities called identities are formed, who we are and aren’t but agreed to be.
I was given the role of perfect child at an early age, with disappointment arising from my extreme sensitivity, migraines, and nappy hair. The role of problem child had already
