Tag Archives: Experience

12 TRUTHS LEARNED FROM LIFE AND WRITING – WITH ANNE LAMOTT

If you’ve been around writing—and lifefor a while, you’ll know of Anne Lamott. Anne’s the “Shitty First Draft” gal and “Bird by Bird” guru who says more in a phrase than most writers spew in a book. Anne Lamott addresses life’s capital-letter subjects. Alcoholism. Motherhood. Cancer. Community. Alternate Lifestyles. Listening. Faith. Depression. Sobriety. Desperation. Storytelling. Work. Politics. Jesus, Christianity and God. Anne’s also laugh-out-loud funny, and she’s brutally truthful.

Anne Lamott is a Guggenheim Fellow, a U of C prof, a highly-sought lecturer, a Hall of Fame Californian and the multi-time bestseller of fiction and non-fiction alike. To quote Anne, “I write books I’d love to come upon. Ones that are honest, concerned with real lives, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, craziness – and make me laugh.”

And, there’s the progressive social activist side to Anne Lamott. She’s a polished public speaker with a viral TED Talk. With kind permission, here’s Anne’s TED video and transcript.

“My seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, “You know, this could be the best day ever.” And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice, “Nana, will you ever get sick and die?”

I think this pretty much says it for me and for most of the people I know, that we’re a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread. So I sat down a few days before my 61st birthday, and I decided to compile a list of everything I know for sure. There’s so little truth in the popular culture, and it’s good to be sure of a few things.

For instance, I am no longer 47, although this is the age I feel, and the age I like to think of myself as being. My friend Paul used to say in his late 70s that he felt like a young man with something really wrong with him.

Our true person is outside of time and space, but looking at the paperwork, I can, in fact, see that I was born in 1954. My inside self is outside of time and space. It doesn’t have an age. I’m every age I’ve ever been, and so are you, although I can’t help mentioning as an aside that it might have been helpful if I hadn’t followed the skin care rules of the ’60s, which involved getting as much sun as possible while slathered in baby oil and basking in the glow of a tinfoil reflector shield.

It was so liberating, though, to face the truth that I was no longer in the last throes of middle age, that I decided to write down every single true thing I know. People feel really doomed and overwhelmed these days, and they keep asking me what’s true. So I hope that my list of things I’m almost positive about might offer some basic operating instructions to anyone who is feeling really overwhelmed or beleaguered.

Number one: The first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it’s impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It’s been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It’s so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we’re being punked. It’s filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I don’t think it’s an ideal system.

Number two: Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — including you.

Three: There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you’re waiting for an organ. You can’t buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind. This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it. But it’s an inside job, and we can’t arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world. They have to find their own ways, their own answers. You can’t run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero’s journey. You have to release them. It’s disrespectful not to. And if it’s someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the answer, anyway.

Our help is usually not very helpful. Our help is often toxic. And help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much. Don’t get your help and goodness all over everybody.

This brings us to number four: Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. They are much more like you than you would believe, so try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are.

Also, you can’t save, fix or rescue any of them or get anyone sober. What helped me get clean and sober 30 years ago was the catastrophe of my behavior and thinking. So I asked some sober friends for help, and I turned to a higher power. One acronym for God is the “gift of desperation,” G-O-D, or as a sober friend put it, by the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.

So God might mean, in this case, “me running out of any more good ideas.”

While fixing and saving and trying to rescue is futile, radical self-care is quantum, and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere like a little fresh air. It’s a huge gift to the world. When people respond by saying, “Well, isn’t she full of herself,” just smile obliquely like Mona Lisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being full of affection for one’s goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home. It’s where world peace begins.

Number five: Chocolate with 75 percent cacao is not actually a food. Its best use is as a bait in snake traps or to balance the legs of wobbly chairs. It was never meant to be considered an edible.

Number six: Writing. Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. That’s the secret of life. That’s probably the main difference between you and them. They just do it. They do it by prearrangement with themselves. They do it as a debt of honor. They tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little.

When my older brother was in fourth grade, he had a term paper on birds due the next day, and he hadn’t started. So my dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper, pencils and brads — for those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember brads — and he said to my brother, “Just take it bird by bird, buddy. Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your own voice. And then find out about chickadees, and tell us about them in your own voice. And then geese.”

So the two most important things about writing are: bird by bird and really god-awful first drafts. If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.

You’re going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions and songs — your truth, your version of things — in your own voice. That’s really all you have to offer us, and that’s also why you were born.

Seven: Publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt, damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and evil people I’ve ever known are male writers who’ve had huge best sellers. And yet, returning to number one, that all truth is paradox, it’s also a miracle to get your work published, to get your stories read and heard. Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, that it will fill the Swiss-cheesy holes inside of you. It can’t. It won’t. But writing can. So can singing in a choir or a bluegrass band. So can painting community murals or birding or fostering old dogs that no one else will.

Number eight: Families. Families are hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and astonishing they may also be. Again, see number one.

At family gatherings where you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal –remember that in all cases, it’s a miracle that any of us, specifically, were conceived and born. Earth is forgiveness school. It begins with forgiving yourself, and then you might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.

When William Blake said that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love, he knew that your family would be an intimate part of this, even as you want to run screaming for your cute little life. But I promise you are up to it. You can do it, Cinderella, you can do it, and you will be amazed.

Nine: Food. Try to do a little better. I think you know what I mean.

Number ten: Grace. Grace is spiritual WD-40, or water wings. The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild. Go figure.

The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. To summon grace, say, “Help,” and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn’t leave you where it found you. And grace won’t look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably. But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you’ll get your sense of humor about yourself back. Laughter really is carbonated holiness. It helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember — grace always bats last.

Eleven: God just means goodness. It’s really not all that scary. It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great “Deteriorata,” “the cosmic muffin.” A good name for God is: “Not me.” Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot and look up. My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lids because they don’t look up, so they just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls. Go outside. Look up. Secret of life.

And finally: death. Number twelve. Wow and yikes. It’s so hard to bear when the few people you cannot live without die. You’ll never get over these losses, and no matter what the culture says, you’re not supposed to. We Christians like to think of death as a major change of address, but in any case, the person will live again fully in your heart if you don’t seal it off. Like Leonard Cohen said, “There are cracks in everything, and that’s how the light gets in.” And that’s how we feel our people again fully alive.

Also, the people will make you laugh out loud at the most inconvenient times, and that’s the great good news. But their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you. Grief and friends, time and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate and moisturize you and the ground on which you walk.

Do you know the first thing that God says to Moses? He says, “Take off your shoes.” Because this is holy ground, all evidence to the contrary. It’s hard to believe, but it’s the truest thing I know. When you’re a little bit older, like my tiny personal self, you realize that death is as sacred as birth. And don’t worry — get on with your life. Almost every single death is easy and gentle with the very best people surrounding you for as long as you need. You won’t be alone. They’ll help you cross over to whatever awaits us. As Ram Dass said, “When all is said and done, we’re really just all walking each other home.”

I think that’s it, but if I think of anything else, I’ll let you know. Thank you.

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Anne Lamott’s Barclay Agency Biography:

Anne Lamott writes and speaks about subjects that begin with capital letters: Alcoholism, Motherhood, Jesus.  But armed with self-effacing humor – she is laugh-out-loud funny – and ruthless honesty, Lamott converts her subjects into enchantment.  Actually, she writes about what most of us don’t like to think about.  She wrote her first novel for her father, the writer Kenneth Lamott, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer.  She has said that the book was “a present to someone I loved who was going to die.”

In all her novels, she writes about loss – loss of loved ones and loss of personal control.  She doesn’t try to sugar-coat the sadness, frustration and disappointment, but tells her stories with honesty, compassion and a pureness of voice.  As she says, “I have a lot of hope and a lot of faith and I struggle to communicate that.”  Anne Lamott does communicate her faith; in her books and in person, she lifts, comforts, and inspires, all the while keeping us laughing.

Anne Lamott is the author of seven novels, Hard LaughterRosieJoe JonesBlue ShoeAll New PeopleCrooked Little Heart, and Imperfect Birds. She has also written several bestselling books of nonfiction, including, Operating Instructions, an account of life as a single mother during her son’s first year; Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son; and the classic book on writing; Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. She has also authored several collections of autobiographical essays on faith; Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,  Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, and Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith. In addition, she has written, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential PrayersStitches; A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair,  Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace, and Hallelujah Anyway; Rediscovering Mercy. Her most recent book is Almost Everything: Notes on Hope (October 16, 2018, Riverhead Books).

Lamott has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has taught at UC Davis, as well as at writing conferences across the country. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Freida Mock has made a documentary on Lamott, entitled “Bird by Bird with Annie” (1999).  Anne Lamott has also been inducted into the California Hall of Fame.

SWEAT LODGES – A PROFOUND SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

I’ve had the honor to participate in three Carrier First Nations sweat lodge ceremonies. They were profound spiritual and cultural experiences and I’d like to share them with you.

A2Sweat lodge ceremonies have been a First Nations tradition since time immemorial and they serve all people, not just the indigenous. Sweats ceremonial clean and heal the body, both physically and mentally. They purge the mind, bring clarity, and test participant’s endurance, strength, and courage. They’re holy places where people renew deep and natural connection to the universe and the realm of spirits.

A1Though usually associated with healing, each sweat holds different purposes and each leader conducts their affairs a bit differently. One session might work out family or community problems. Another might handle addiction or other health issues. Some pass-on oral traditions through story telling.  But all ceremonies aim to purify your mind, body, spirit, heart, and mend your dis-ease – be it physical, emotional, directional, or spiritual. It’s much like a dialysis of the soul.

“Sweat lodge” essentially translates into returning to the womb and the innocence of childhood. Entering the dome-like structure and crawling its shallow, earthen pit is representative of passing the womb of Mother Earth. The lodge is dark, moist, hot, and safe. The darkness relates to human ignorance before the spiritual world and even more blindness to the physical world.

A3Extensive symbolism is practiced in sweat lodge ceremonies. It’s a place of transformation and purification through sensory deprivation, extreme heat, steam, prayers, pipes, rattles, drums, and song. Enlightenment is attained through breathing, meditating, journeying, and sharing words and song. It’s a unique and profoundly personal experience where your body is cleansed of toxins, stress is removed, and your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness are aligned.

In the purification of your spirit inside a sweat lodge, all sense of race, gender, and religion is set aside. As in the Mother’s womb and the Father’s eyes, we are all the same. We are One. Each of us has the equal ability to sit with the Creator himself.

A5The entrance to a sweat lodge faces the East and the sacred fire pit where rocks are heated in a wood fire. This has very significant spiritual value. Each new day begins in the East with the rising of Father Sun, the source of life, power, and the dawn of wisdom, while the fire heating the rocks is the undying light of the world – eternity – it’s a new spiritual beginning; a new day that’s sought in the ceremony.

Central to the sweat is the ideal of spiritual cleanliness. Many sweats start with fasting for an entire day, especially avoiding caffeine, alcohol, and other unhealthy substances. Prior to entering the lodge, participants smudge with sage, sweet-grass, or cedar smoke as a means toward ritual cleanliness.

A6Inside, participants sit in a circle around the central pit into which white-hot rocks are shoveled-in by the fire-tender. Modesty is expected, but any material objects such as jewelry, watches, or iPods are discouraged. This is a sacred place to pray, meditate, learn and heal, and that must be the focus. With the door shut and the lodge lit only by the glow of the rocks, the leader begins by pouring water from a wooden bucket onto the rocks.

A11When the steam and temperature rise so do the senses. Messages and vision from the Creator, or Infinite Intelligence if you’d like to call it that, are received through the group consciousness. One at a time, as a talking stick is passed, all inside get an opportunity to speak, to pray, and to ask for guidance and forgiveness from the Creator and the people they have hurt or who have hurt them. As they go around the circle, they tell who they are and where they are from, so the Creator, the Spirit People, and all there can acknowledge them.

A sweat is typically four sessions, called rounds or endurances, each lasting about 30 to 45 minutes. The round ends when the leader announces the opening of the door.

A8The first round is for recognition of the spirit world which resides in the black West where the sun goes down and the Creator may be asked for a “spirit guide” by some of the participants.

The second round is for recognition of courage, endurance, strength, cleanliness, and honesty, calling upon the power of the white North.

The recognition of knowledge and individual prayer symbolize the third round, praying to the direction of the daybreak star and the rising sun that we may gain wisdom and that we may follow the Red Road of the East in all our endeavors.

A13Fitting, the last round centers on the Yellow South and stands for spiritual growth and healing.

From spirit guides of  the west, from the courage, honesty, and endurance of the north, from the knowledge and wisdom obtained in the east, we continue the circle to the south from which comes all of our growth.

Respect, sincerity, humility, the ability to listen, and the need to slow down and think about what’s important in life, are the keys in growing through the sweat lodge ceremony.