Quotes from Anne Lamott

How are we going to get through this craziness?" I asked. There was silence for a moment. "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said.

You begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are.

I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.

In many spiritual and wisdom paths, it is written that God created us to have company and to be God's loving eyes and hands on earth. But in certain African Christian catechisms it says that God created us because He thought we would like it.

Hallelujah that in spite of it all, there is love, there is singing, nature, laughing, mercy.

We have to make ourselves available to one another, or we can't experience goodness. It's not so much us seeking God, tracking Her down with a butterfly net; it's agreeing to be found. The Old Girl reaches out to everyone and wants to include us in this beautiful, weird, sometimes anguished life. All people: go figure.

Believing isn't the hard part; waiting on God is. So I stuck with it and prayed impatiently for patience, and to stop feeling disgusted by myself, and to believe for a few moments that God, just a bit busy with other suffering in the world, actually cared about one menopausal white woman on a binge.

Whether it's Mt. Sinai, a pasture, a library, the creek down the road, a liveness, or whatever you want to call it, the song is above us, around us, within us. We transcend the incessant and wearying yammer of bullshit. Transcendence means you go from judgement, separation from life in yourself, to feeling at one-ish with the universe. We hook into something bigger than we are - truer than the self-serving stories we make up about life and ourselves.

When I asked Father Tom where we find God in this present darkness, he said that God is in creation, and to get outdoors as much as you can.

The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords.