More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
just trying to do a little better, today. That is the secret of life.
The world is too hard as it is without letting tight pants have an opinion on how you are doing, and make it clear that they are disappointed in you.
If the earth is forgiveness school, family is your postdoctoral fellowship.
Decades later I fought my way back to my birthright of ordinary, mixed-up, gorgeous, sometimes lost human.
Contrary to my upbringing, the bigger, more real, and friendlier the world inside me becomes, the safer I feel in the outside world. As above, so below; as inside, so before us.
I’ve learned that almost more than anything, stories hold us together.
Stories teach us what is important about life, why we are here and how it is best to behave, and that inside us we have access to treasure, in memories and observations, in imagination.
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.
Hope changes as you get a little older, from the hope that this or that happens, to hope in life, old friends, laughter, art, goodness, helpers.
No matter how beautiful our views are of trees and birds and children, there are such scary pronouncements from Washington or our doctors that we can’t help hearing the descending tones, of age, global warming, the ticking of the nuclear clock, the heartbeats of the 7.6 billion other people around us. This stuff is scary and it’s very real. Yet hope is real, too.
The human mind, for all its bad press and worse ideas, is as awe-inspiring as Yosemite, as stars.
Life is way wilder than I am comfortable with, way farther out, as we used to say, more magnificent, more deserving of awe and, I would add, more benevolent—well-meaning, kindly. Waves and particles, redwoods, poetry, this world of wonders and suffering, great crowds of helpers and humanitarians, here we are alive right now, together.
John Lennon said, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end,” and as this has always been true before, we can hope it will be again.
