★★★☆☆ | Essays, Memoir | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I loved Lamott’s Bird by Bird memoir on the writing craft. The writing here was good, but forced. Too many similes, too many quotes from others. Great life advice: be kind to yourself & others, all we need is love, etc., but it felt repetitive to me. Her advice on sobriety and community is heartfelt and immensely quotable.
Highlights
Eighty percent of everything that is true and beautiful can be experienced on any ten-minute walk.
Hermann Hesse wrote, “Whoever has learned to listen to the trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
People seemed to want to help me get sober, which was not what I wanted. I wanted to learn to stop after six or seven nightly social drinks. I wanted to wake up without hangovers. I wanted to be a person of integrity. I wanted all that, and a nice cool drink.
Getting and staying sober was the hardest work I’d ever done. I was scared and ashamed, defeated and defiant. Yet what those people gave me, and continue to give me decades later, remains the great gift and miracle of my life.
Life is such a mystery that you have to wonder if God drinks a little.
The easiest way to get present is to sing, because you can’t move to the next note until you’ve finished the one you’re singing.
Community is a body of people crying for one another, working together for a common cause, enjoying and overlooking (or grimly tolerating) each other’s foibles; it’s a rough and beautiful quilt sewn of patches that don’t seem to go together at all, and then do.
Nobody in isolation becomes who they were designed to be.
Frederick Buechner wrote: “You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.”
In the recovery community we say, “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it’s connection.”
Eighty percent of any meeting or gathering might be stupid and beneath you, but the other twenty percent will save you: it will open up your brain and expand your life and give you connection, a place in the family of man. And this is salvation.
All good books are books of ourselves.
“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” —Eugene O’Neill
We are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
If you practice enduring people’s bewildering love for you, it will change you molecularly: it loosens you, gooses you, warms you. Bearing the beams of love can dislodge ancient sachets of joy, pain, shame, and pride trapped inside you, and make you smell strange and funny, like soup.
Carl Sagan said, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”
I heard someone once say that grief is love that is homeless, but in long stretches of grief, people have brought me their bravest selves, willing to help bear my sadness and feel like shit with me. That is true love.
Some of our kids didn’t make it. But then, impossibly, their parents endured, more or less. Month after month, they sat before unchanging windows of gray, crying and crying. Their picture window was spattered by a pointillism of pain, a steady percussive drone, and it never ceased until one day it was a slightly lighter gray fog. A wind tossed the palm trees’ branches below, and they were finally curious about them again because a little sun had somehow broken through. Curiosity leads to wonder and wonder is a cousin to love. Wonder is why we are here.