amazed by genius
Okay, forreal... update soon soon.
But for now, quotes from Anne Lamott's latest treasure, Grace (Eventually). I also realized that I never finished my quotes from her other two books, so I'll be digging up that entry and finishing that up tonight as well.
"At twenty-one, I still believed that if you could only get to see sunrise at Stonehenge, or full moon at the Taj Mahal, you would be nabbed by truth. And then you would be well, and able to relax and feel fully alive. But I actually knew a few true things: I had figured out that truth and freedom were pretty much the same. And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about."
"I knew that if you had the eyes to see, there was beauty everywhere, even when nature was barren or sloppy, and not just when God had tarted things up for the spring."
"I finally figured out that I had a choice: I could suffer a great deal, or not, or for a long time. Or I could have the combo platter: suffer, breathe, pray, play, cry, and try to help people. There was meaning in pain; it taught you how to survive with a modicum of grace when you did not get what you wanted."
"I read all afternoon in bed, peaceful as a cat. There was only me, the book, the space I was reading in; hands, and the whisper of pages, eyes, and a place to sprawl. The wrinkly flower of my heart was opening in slow motion. I felt one with everybody."
"This was the day I pecked a hole out of the cocoon and saw the sky of ingredients that would constitute my spiritual path. This was the day I knew the ingredients of the spiritual that would serve me--love, poetry, prayer, meditation, community. I knew that sex could be as sacred as taking care of the poor. I knew that no one comes holier than anyone else, that nowhere is better than anywhere else. I knew that the resurrection of the mind was possible. I knew that no matter how absurd and ironic it was, acknowledging death and the finite was what gave you life and presence. You might as well make it good. Nature, family, children, cadavers, birth, rivers in which we pee and bathe, splash and flirt and float memorial candles--in these you would find holiness."
"I felt discarded, and I needed for time to pass more quickly. I would be fine with life's contractions if they would simply pass when I am ready for them to, so I can be okay again and remember what, after all, I'm doing in labor. Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time."
"I've found that when you give up on using your mind to solve a problem--which your mind is holding on to like a dog with a chew toy--writing it down helps turn off the terrible alertness. When you're not siphoned into the black hole of worried control and playing fretful Savior, turning the problem over to God or the elves in the glove compartment harnesses something in the universe that is bigger than you, and that just might work."
"Finally I looked up, at my church. I needed the grown-up service so badly, the singing, the prayers, the silence, and especially the very low incidence of injury. Sometimes it's as still as a forest, somtimes a person speaks words of wisdom and comfort, and no one in twenty-one years has hurt me. The music moves you along, you rise and you sit and rise and sing and float, and you open your mouth and let the sound come out. No matter that you may sing poorly, and fumble around with the hymnal, and sing the wrong words, the hymn expands to make room for all the voices, even yours."
"'Maybe turning things over is not the solution to everything, but...' She shrugged Hasidically. 'You do what you can. Then you get out of the way, because you're not the one who does the work.'"
"That's me, trying to make progress at all with family, in work, relationships, self-image: scootch, scootch, stall; scootch, stall, catastrophic reversal; bog, bog, scootch. I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things; also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in silence, in the dark."
"Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos."
"I had been in such a toxic pond. But I wanted my faith to be an edifice that I could run to. Strong, clean, pure. A mighty fortress is our God? Haha. Thanks for sharing.
[talking about Matthew 6:28-9] "But that's only the minor chord. The major one follows, in his anti-anxiety discourse--which is the soul of this passage--that all striving after greater beauty and importance, and greater greatness, is foolishness. It is ultimately like trying to catch the wind. Lilies do not need to do anything to make themselves more glorious or cherished. Jesus is saying that we have much to learn from them about giving up striving."
"But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society."
"Just after I got sober, I met a wonderful couple, funny, charming intellectuals. They were spiritual in the same way I was and am, which is to say devout, with a sometimes bad attitude, a black sense of humor, and tendencies toward gossip and character assassination. We hit it off instantly."
"Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. I've had many years of recovery and therapy, years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle. I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn't mean there's less for me. In fact, I know that there isn't even a pie, that there's plenty to go around, enough food and love and air.
"But I don't believe it for a second.
"I secretly believe there's a pie. I will go to my grave brandishing a fork."
"All I wanted was to feel less engaged, less stuck: I wanted to let it go, which is so not my strong suit, any more than forgiveness is. I wanted to be a person of peace, who diminishes hurt in the world, instead of perpetuating it."
"I learned how to unhate Bush the only way people ever really learn things--by doing. It's a terrible system. If I were God, I would have provided a much easier way--an Idiot's Guide, or a spiritual ATM, or maybe some kind of compromise. But no, even the second person of the Trinity had to learn by doing, by failing, by feeling, by being amazed. God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person."
"The sun blazed down on us. I took it personally, as I do everything--I can't seem to learn how not to, or at any rate, I'm the slowest learner in the class. I used to be one of the quickest. My teachers read special texts with me in the back of our classrooms while the other kids worked their lessons. I thought of Henry Tanner's famous painting of Christ learning to read. Jesus is a boy of seven or eight, standing beside Mary, touching the words on a scroll, figuring out each word as he goes. He had to learn to read from scratch, with the alphabet, the way I did. He did not have infused knowledge: he was born not knowing anything. And hey, I was only four when I taught myself to read. Maybe Jesus struggled with reading. I'm just saying."
"I'll go to my grave convinced that you can find happiness out there, somewhere, with the right someone or good financing. If you could just get things to line up properly, you could relax, learn to experience life in all its immediacy, reconnect with who you really are, with the soul or spirit, the diving whatchacallit deep inside that sparks when it hears certain music."
"Something has gone so wrong in this country that needs to be fixed, and we care about that. Reading and books are medicine. Stories are written and told by and for people who have been broken, but who have risen up, or will rise, if attention is paid to them. Those people are you and us. Stories and truth are splints for the soul, and that makes today a sacred gathering. Now we were all saying: Pass it on."
"My mother was a handful. You can ask her best friends and her sibling: she was imperious, with no self-esteem, which is a terrible combination. She was controlling, judgmental, withholding, needy, and desperate to be loved."
"The gist of the story is that faith and grace will not look as they do in Bible stories, will not involve angels, flames, or harps. Disaster usually happens for me when everything I have counted on has stopped working, including all of my best skills, intentions, and good ideas. I overreact or shut down, then torture myself about what a fraud I am, like Kookaburra's bitter aunt Esther, in the brances of the old gum tree, pretending to sing the laughing song of the others but privately stewing."
"The best way to change the world is to change your mind, which often requires feeding yourself. It makes for biochemical peace. It's almost like a prayer: to be needy, to eat, to taste, to be filled, building up instead of tearing down. You find energy to do something you hadn't expected to do, maybe even one of the holiest things: to go outside and stand under the stars, or go for a walk in the morning, or in such hard times, both."
and a poem that was in the book:
"St Francis and the Sow"
Galway Kinnell
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths
sucking and blowing beneath them
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
But for now, quotes from Anne Lamott's latest treasure, Grace (Eventually). I also realized that I never finished my quotes from her other two books, so I'll be digging up that entry and finishing that up tonight as well.
"At twenty-one, I still believed that if you could only get to see sunrise at Stonehenge, or full moon at the Taj Mahal, you would be nabbed by truth. And then you would be well, and able to relax and feel fully alive. But I actually knew a few true things: I had figured out that truth and freedom were pretty much the same. And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about."
"I knew that if you had the eyes to see, there was beauty everywhere, even when nature was barren or sloppy, and not just when God had tarted things up for the spring."
"I finally figured out that I had a choice: I could suffer a great deal, or not, or for a long time. Or I could have the combo platter: suffer, breathe, pray, play, cry, and try to help people. There was meaning in pain; it taught you how to survive with a modicum of grace when you did not get what you wanted."
"I read all afternoon in bed, peaceful as a cat. There was only me, the book, the space I was reading in; hands, and the whisper of pages, eyes, and a place to sprawl. The wrinkly flower of my heart was opening in slow motion. I felt one with everybody."
"This was the day I pecked a hole out of the cocoon and saw the sky of ingredients that would constitute my spiritual path. This was the day I knew the ingredients of the spiritual that would serve me--love, poetry, prayer, meditation, community. I knew that sex could be as sacred as taking care of the poor. I knew that no one comes holier than anyone else, that nowhere is better than anywhere else. I knew that the resurrection of the mind was possible. I knew that no matter how absurd and ironic it was, acknowledging death and the finite was what gave you life and presence. You might as well make it good. Nature, family, children, cadavers, birth, rivers in which we pee and bathe, splash and flirt and float memorial candles--in these you would find holiness."
"I felt discarded, and I needed for time to pass more quickly. I would be fine with life's contractions if they would simply pass when I am ready for them to, so I can be okay again and remember what, after all, I'm doing in labor. Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time."
"I've found that when you give up on using your mind to solve a problem--which your mind is holding on to like a dog with a chew toy--writing it down helps turn off the terrible alertness. When you're not siphoned into the black hole of worried control and playing fretful Savior, turning the problem over to God or the elves in the glove compartment harnesses something in the universe that is bigger than you, and that just might work."
"Finally I looked up, at my church. I needed the grown-up service so badly, the singing, the prayers, the silence, and especially the very low incidence of injury. Sometimes it's as still as a forest, somtimes a person speaks words of wisdom and comfort, and no one in twenty-one years has hurt me. The music moves you along, you rise and you sit and rise and sing and float, and you open your mouth and let the sound come out. No matter that you may sing poorly, and fumble around with the hymnal, and sing the wrong words, the hymn expands to make room for all the voices, even yours."
"'Maybe turning things over is not the solution to everything, but...' She shrugged Hasidically. 'You do what you can. Then you get out of the way, because you're not the one who does the work.'"
"That's me, trying to make progress at all with family, in work, relationships, self-image: scootch, scootch, stall; scootch, stall, catastrophic reversal; bog, bog, scootch. I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things; also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in silence, in the dark."
"Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos."
"I had been in such a toxic pond. But I wanted my faith to be an edifice that I could run to. Strong, clean, pure. A mighty fortress is our God? Haha. Thanks for sharing.
[talking about Matthew 6:28-9] "But that's only the minor chord. The major one follows, in his anti-anxiety discourse--which is the soul of this passage--that all striving after greater beauty and importance, and greater greatness, is foolishness. It is ultimately like trying to catch the wind. Lilies do not need to do anything to make themselves more glorious or cherished. Jesus is saying that we have much to learn from them about giving up striving."
"But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society."
"Just after I got sober, I met a wonderful couple, funny, charming intellectuals. They were spiritual in the same way I was and am, which is to say devout, with a sometimes bad attitude, a black sense of humor, and tendencies toward gossip and character assassination. We hit it off instantly."
"Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. I've had many years of recovery and therapy, years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle. I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn't mean there's less for me. In fact, I know that there isn't even a pie, that there's plenty to go around, enough food and love and air.
"But I don't believe it for a second.
"I secretly believe there's a pie. I will go to my grave brandishing a fork."
"All I wanted was to feel less engaged, less stuck: I wanted to let it go, which is so not my strong suit, any more than forgiveness is. I wanted to be a person of peace, who diminishes hurt in the world, instead of perpetuating it."
"I learned how to unhate Bush the only way people ever really learn things--by doing. It's a terrible system. If I were God, I would have provided a much easier way--an Idiot's Guide, or a spiritual ATM, or maybe some kind of compromise. But no, even the second person of the Trinity had to learn by doing, by failing, by feeling, by being amazed. God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person."
"The sun blazed down on us. I took it personally, as I do everything--I can't seem to learn how not to, or at any rate, I'm the slowest learner in the class. I used to be one of the quickest. My teachers read special texts with me in the back of our classrooms while the other kids worked their lessons. I thought of Henry Tanner's famous painting of Christ learning to read. Jesus is a boy of seven or eight, standing beside Mary, touching the words on a scroll, figuring out each word as he goes. He had to learn to read from scratch, with the alphabet, the way I did. He did not have infused knowledge: he was born not knowing anything. And hey, I was only four when I taught myself to read. Maybe Jesus struggled with reading. I'm just saying."
"I'll go to my grave convinced that you can find happiness out there, somewhere, with the right someone or good financing. If you could just get things to line up properly, you could relax, learn to experience life in all its immediacy, reconnect with who you really are, with the soul or spirit, the diving whatchacallit deep inside that sparks when it hears certain music."
"Something has gone so wrong in this country that needs to be fixed, and we care about that. Reading and books are medicine. Stories are written and told by and for people who have been broken, but who have risen up, or will rise, if attention is paid to them. Those people are you and us. Stories and truth are splints for the soul, and that makes today a sacred gathering. Now we were all saying: Pass it on."
"My mother was a handful. You can ask her best friends and her sibling: she was imperious, with no self-esteem, which is a terrible combination. She was controlling, judgmental, withholding, needy, and desperate to be loved."
"The gist of the story is that faith and grace will not look as they do in Bible stories, will not involve angels, flames, or harps. Disaster usually happens for me when everything I have counted on has stopped working, including all of my best skills, intentions, and good ideas. I overreact or shut down, then torture myself about what a fraud I am, like Kookaburra's bitter aunt Esther, in the brances of the old gum tree, pretending to sing the laughing song of the others but privately stewing."
"The best way to change the world is to change your mind, which often requires feeding yourself. It makes for biochemical peace. It's almost like a prayer: to be needy, to eat, to taste, to be filled, building up instead of tearing down. You find energy to do something you hadn't expected to do, maybe even one of the holiest things: to go outside and stand under the stars, or go for a walk in the morning, or in such hard times, both."
and a poem that was in the book:
"St Francis and the Sow"
Galway Kinnell
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths
sucking and blowing beneath them
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.