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Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.
I have just always found it extremely hard to be here, on this side of eternity, because of, well, other people; and death.
And we’re rarely all alone. People come and go in our lives, surround us with their best selves, take us to the beach, to a bookstore, out for ice cream. So little bits of life and grace, time, habits, duties, a phone call, more time, all filter in to the seed under the concrete. And that seed pushes up through, no matter what, because this is how life is constructed—to live.
We can change. People say we can’t, but we do when the stakes or the pain is high enough. And when we do, life can change. It offers more of itself when we agree to give up our busyness.
All truth is paradox. Everything true in the world has innate contradictions.
Paradox means you have to be able to keep two wildly different ideas in
your head at the same time.
The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart said that if the soul could have known God without the world, God never would have created the world.
Most parables are paradoxical in that they don’t go the ways you think they will. Jesus is messing with people’s minds, paradoxically out of love, so they dig deeper into truth, where they may find themselves, and love, which is the kingdom.
Entering into paradox, and thus mystery, can be just as overwhelming. But this is also where new beginnings and hope emerge, side by side with the dark and scrambled.
I didn’t feel like talking, but in a crazy subconscious martial arts move, God or Holy Spirit or Coyote Trickster intervened and I found myself inviting him along to Home Depot, where I had some errands to do. Home Depot, where they fix things and make things right. He came along, and he began to make things right by listening, finding in himself the willingness to look at his own stuff, and change, at my house, with my son.
When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right.
When we detach or are detached by tragedy or choice from the tendrils of identity, unexpected elements feed us. There is weird food in the flow, like the wiggly bits that birds watch for in tidal channels. Protein and greens are obvious food, but so is buoyancy, when we don’t feel as mired in the silt of despair.
You can’t buy, achieve, or date serenity.
If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.
Nor did I know about grace, that it meets you exactly where you are, at your most pathetic and hopeless, and it loads you into its
wheelbarrow and then tips you out somewhere else in ever so slightly better shape.
I try not to compare my insides to their outsides, because this makes me much worse than I already am, and if I get to know them, they turn out to have plenty of irritability and shadow of their own.
Joy is portable. Joy is a habit, and these days, it can be a radical act. Buffy Sainte-Marie said, “Keep your nose to the joy trail.” So for now let’s define joy as a slightly giddy appreciation, an inquisitive stirring, as when you see the first crocuses, the earliest struggling, stunted emergence of color in late winter, cream or gold against the tans and browns.
she and some of the old-timers secretly pray upon waking, “Whatever,” and pray before falling asleep, “Oh, well.” The lesson here is that there is no fix. There is, however, forgiveness. To forgive yourselves and others constantly is necessary. Not only is everyone screwed up, but everyone screws up.
I loathe certain public individuals with great wriggling discomfort, and it steadies me.
And I’m going out on a limb here, but almost everyone hates the spokespeople for the NRA.
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. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate—as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.
Awareness means showing up, availing oneself of the world, so there is the chance that empathy will step up to bat, even in this lifetime. If we work hard and are lucky, we may come to see everyone as precious, struggling souls. God is better at this than I am.
Having ruled out surrender as the solution to my self-righteous agitation, I decided to at least make hate a nice cup of tea. I sat with it and listened to it. I saw that I was not in charge of correcting it. But to my credit, I didn’t run. I was raised to believe that politeness covered a multitude of sins, so I sat there pleasantly, got it a little more tea, then eventually handed it its hat and thanked it for coming. Then I got on with the work I can actually accomplish: Picking up litter. Sending donations to organizations that make the world more fair and kind. (I’ll never give up on
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paying attention is ninety percent of writing.)
But one bad page a day becomes a book.
Memory, research, early-morning visions, and imagination. I tell little kids mostly about the last one, that there is a movie screen in their minds called the imagination, which they can see if they close their eyes. Writing means you scribble down what you can see on the screen and all around you. Close your eyes, or open them and look around, at one another’s faces, look out the window at that shameless diva, nature. Wild, right?
Stories are when something happened that you didn’t expect, that lead to some deep internal change in yourself or the main character. Tell it.
I tell the kids: Stories are flashlights. You shine a light in one place—an attic floor, a canyon wall, or a memory—and then you describe it the best you can. Maybe you need to find a photo of it in a book, or maybe it is right there in your memory, on the screen behind your eyes.
Second, the more time you spend in the presence of death, the less you fear it. Your life will be greatly enhanced by spending time with dying people, even though you’ve been taught to avoid doing so.
At some point you experience that a body is just the shell of a person, a cocoon that’s been outgrown. Hospice showed us how to wash his body; twelve years later, my best friend’s body; and each friend after that. This is the sacrament, because our people are still so precious, and when you learn this, you experience it as privilege.
Dearest, if you could just gently tend to the body of a dead person, wash them with a warm soapy cloth, rub oil into their skin, dress them in their favorite clothes—don’t forget socks!—and see the love and honor in this, it would greatly diminish your fears.
Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.
Silence is medicine.
When we talk about goodness, an animating intelligence in the universe and in our hearts or a pervasive positive unity or presence, we are not talking about an old bearded guy in the sky, Parvati, or a Jewish Palestinian baby. We are talking about a higher power, a power that might be called Not Me, a kindness, a patience, a hope, which is everywhere, even in our annoying, self-centered, fraudulent selves.
The divine is so eccentric.
the loving woman upstairs, which is another good name for God.
identity is a posture that we steal and assemble as a protective coating, but it’s also a ski mask, camouflage and protection from the cold.
This is a come-as-you-are party. Who they were in utero, in kindergarten, in high school, in bed last night, was the very best they could be at the time; was in fact the only way they could be at the time.
