Anne Lamott lifts my spirits... makes me cry, makes me laugh...

Reading Anne Lamott makes me miss my friend Amy.  And Vickey, and Anne, and the PPL Pals...  All those women who I wished lived next door.  Confidants, old friends, linked by books, reading, library conferences where we stayed up until 4 talking, and reunion conversations around a kitchen table.

My copy of Anne's "Small Victories" is filled with dog-eared pages...starting on page 66.

"Getting found almost always means being lost for a while."

It strikes me that Anne called to those moments in our lives when we struggle with life as it should not be, or sadness, or loss...  Moments in our lives that when we survive we don't want to look back... but move on.  Daybreak always calls us to move on...

Page 114
"People like to say, 'Forgiveness begins with forgiving yourself. Well, that's nice.  Thank you for sharing.  It does and it doesn't.  To think you know is proof that you don't. But forgiveness sure doesn't begin with reason.  The rational insists that it is right, that we are right.  It is about attacking and defending, which which means there can be no peace.  ...  The choice is whether ou want to stay stuck in being right but not being free or admit you're pretty lost and possibly available for a long deep breath, which is as big as the universe, stirs the air around, maybe opens a window.'

Wow.

page 138.  Check out Andrew Goldsworthy.  http://goldsworthy.ca.gla.ac.uk


On the loss of her beloved dog...
"She was like the floating garlands the artist Andrew Goldsworthy makes, yellow and red and still green leaves, connected with thorns, floating away in the current.  I remember how they swirled and floated back in toward the shore, got cornered in eddys, and floated free again.  You know all along that they will dispense once they've gone out of your vision, but they will never be gone entirely, because we saw them.  They illustrate the way water is like the wind, because the leaves are doing what streamers do.  So the garlands are a kind of translation of this material; autumn elevates, transposed to water, still flutter."

page 153
"That is when [Pastor] Veronica urged us to be still.  And when I did, I found out once again how flexible and wily the human spirit is.  It will sneak out from behind the bushes like a cartoon cat and ambush you if you are not careful, trick you into giving up a teaspoon of resentment, get you to take one step back from the frozen ground..."

page 199  "we turn to love like sunflowers..."

page 257
"Walking back to my car, I thought about the seasonal showers in the desert, how potholes in the rocks fill up with rain.  When you look afterward, there are already frogs in the water and brine shrimp reproducing, like commas doing the macarena, and it seems, but only seems, that you went from parched to overflow in the blink of an eye."

page 264
"In all that warmth and soft light we were like flecks in olive oil, or dust mites in a beam of sun, swirling and dipping and lifting and distributing ourselves over that huge space, the particles becoming one community.  How rarely do we get to float."

I never want to forget these writings of Anne...