Into every life crap will fall. Most of us do as well as possible, and some of it works okay, and we try to release that which doesn’t and which is never going to.
You may have gotten into the habit of doubting that voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential you get that back.
I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, “A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost,” while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.
So I pray for people who are hurting, that they be filled with air and light. Air and light heal; they somehow get into those dark, musty places, like spiritual antibiotics. We don’t have to figure out how this all works – “Figure it out” is not a good slogan. It’s enough to know it does.
Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town – still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done.
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.
Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.
Mercy means that we no longer constantly judge everybody’s large and tiny failures, foolish hearts, dubious convictions, and inevitable bad behavior. We will never do this perfectly, but how do we do it better?
No one has expressed it better than a great novelist I heard once on a talk show who said something like “You want to know the price I pay for being a writer? Okay, I’ll tell you. I travel by plane a great deal. And I’m usually seated next to some huge businessman who works on files or his laptop computer for a while, and then notices me and asks me what I do. And I say I’m a writer. Then there’s always a terrible silence. Then he says eagerly, ‘Have you written anything I might have heard of?
More than any other sentence I have ever come across, I love Ram Dass’s line that when all is said and done, we are all just walking each other home.
I learned that opening myself to my own love and to life’s tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads.
I kept my expectations low, which is one of the secrets of life.
And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright, orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will step of the shadows like Boo Radley and make you catch your breath or take a step backward. They’re often so rich, these unbidden thoughts, and so clear that they feel indelible. But I say write them all down anyway.
In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.
A sober friend from Texas said once that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much.
My parents, teachers, and the culture I grew up in showed me a drawer in which to stuff my merciful nature, because mercy made me look vulnerable and foolish, and it made me less productive.
Every one of us sometimes needs a tour guide to remind us how big and deep life is meant to be.
Until recently I barely even knew the signs of welcome, like the way a person plopped down across from me and sighed deeply while looking at me with relief: a shy look on someone’s face that gave me time to breathe and settle in. I didn’t know that wounds and scars were what we find welcoming, because they are like ours. Trappings and charm wear off, I’ve learned. The book of welcome says, Let people see you.
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. I can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes, like a deer at the salt.
The Dalai Lama said that “religion is like going out to dinner with friends. Everyone may order something different, but everyone can still sit at the same table.