Tag: writing

The Vigil

I hate waiting. It is a character flaw.

I should be a model of patience by now.

I am not.

It is uncertainty that bothers me most.

I don’t trust easily. I am a small “c” control freak. If a job needs to be done well, I need to do it. Etc.

I could analyze ad infinitum how I evolved this way but I think it is pretty textbook. Chaotic childhood. Addicted parents. Chronic upheaval and instability.

To not become something of a control freak in such an environment would be a little crazy in its own right.

So even if waiting for what I expect will be a positive outcome, I dither.

I harbor the anxiety that the proverbial rug will be pulled out from under my proverbial feet.

Op. cit. childhood.

The trick is to manage the anxiety of waiting and not the other way around, letting anxiety manage you.

I sometimes think of the frightened bird hiding in the reeds in a vignette from the classic Disney animated film, Fantasia.

Instead of keeping her head down and staying put, the bird panics. She flies out of her hiding space into a hunter’s clear shot. I had similar metaphorical experiences in my life. Many instances when things might have gone much better had I simply kept my head down and my mouth shut.

But no. Anxiety is a powerful driver. And with a nervous system deeply gouged with life threatening memories of a danger-filled childhood, it is not an easy emotion to quell in emotional heat.

Sometimes the emotional game in my head was akin to playing defense in a basketball game. Feinting. Parrying. Watching for one move or another on someone else’s part. Blocking constantly, frantically, and in this analogy, one’s own emotions to boot. I already need a shower.

Waiting drags at the nerves. It forces you to think or, at the very least, spend time alone with your thoughts. While it might benefit you to think about anything else but what you are waiting on, that is easier said than done.

I remember back to memorable waiting periods in my life. For grades to be posted. For a boyfriend to call. For the outcome of a job interview. For my children to be born. For my father to pick me up. Ordinary life events made tolerable or intolerable in direct relation to the extent of my anxiety and distrust of life.

Let go, the self-help books say. Let go and let god, the 12 step programs say. Let go, the religious tracts say and, if you fall, god will pick you up and you will fly. That is a lot of faith to invest in reassuring platitudes. If, and especially when, life has given you plenty of personal evidence to the contrary.

I have slowly learned positive benefits of cultivating patience. It makes waiting easier. It lessens the gap between triumph and disaster. As Kipling counseled in his poem If, I have learned to “treat those two imposters just the same.” Well, similarly at any rate.

A friend from long ago suffered from a rare and capricious form of cancer. She traveled as far as Sweden to the only clinic in the world that specialized in treatment of her condition. She wrote about waiting. For test results. For updates. For word of developments on her condition. Her writing was full of frustration for what she couldn’t control. She sounded like a lot of us managing much less difficult circumstances.

My friend died. And that was the end of her uncertainty about everything. Everything ends eventually. Death is so final, after all.

It seems that is the trick of life and living. We do what we have to do while we have to do it until one day we don’t. Or can’t. And then really, really can’t.

We can be patient and learn to put up with life’s uncertainties or we can act out along the way like overtired toddlers. The end result is the same. How we handle these inevitable frustrations is what informs the quality of the journey. That is going to be a lot more important to you later than you may realize now. Trust me.

I have been that peevish toddler in the past having a temper tantrum and throwing shade at every person I perceived as an impediment to my goals and wishes. I have also hung back and talked with others in the queue misery bitching about our shared calamity. We often got a laugh out of it and a shared – if temporary – sense of connection. It was the spoonful of sugar that made the line move faster.

So today I wait again. For an uncertain outcome. In a dire situation. I am better at discerning what I can control and what I can’t. The person for whom I am holding vigil is on their own journey. I am simply a fellow traveler.

On that note, I am going to go top up my coffee. Completely within my control.

A chore utterly without frustration.

Unless the coffee is lukewarm.

I hate lukewarm coffee.

Letting Go of the Reins

One day I will be taken. I don’t know how or when, of course. All I know is that leaving Earth – the only home I am familiar with – is inevitable.

It is a mildly discomfiting feeling but doesn’t consume my daily thoughts. Except some days, it does.

Does death scare me? I suppose so, yes, on some level. In the same way going on a trip to any unknown destination scares me. More nervousness than fear. Traveling is a hassle. There are bound to be nerves. Any trip causes internal and external upheaval. What do I pack for starters?

I have lived long enough and traveled often enough to know that wherever I go, there I am. Exotic destinations and white sandy beaches stretching off into the distance are alluring. I appreciate them in direct correlation to the vantage point of the mood and headspace I am in. Over my lifetime, positive and negative internal states have been many and various. My internal state always mattered in my recollection of the experience more than any external situation I was in. I could appreciate or adapt myself to the degree that I was capable of reacting to or appreciating it.

One stunning travel memory was the beach at Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka. Local boys brought us freshly cut spears of pineapple that dripped with juice and had the mouth feel of biting into heavy whipped cream. I snorkeled in shallow waters off the beaches there. I nearly inhaled water amazed and distracted by the orderly kaleidoscope of colors among fish wending their way through equally colorful coral reefs.

When I think of travel experiences that stayed with me, I think about the synchronicity between my inner self and what was going on outside me. Often nothing. Standing at a rock cairn in the Himalayas, I watched clouds gambol across the peak of Mt. Everest in the distance. No hurry, no drama. Just mountains and clouds being mountains and clouds. Just being.

I often try to reconcile the disparity between growth and stagnation. It is said life on Earth is largely for spiritual education. Damned if I know exactly how that works. Damned if I have ever been able to fully recognize and internalize graduation markers from one “grade” to the next.

I only know by comparison that my values, hopes, and ambitions are radically different than those of a younger me. Younger me was largely consumed by the drive for survival. Older me wonders more often what survival’s end will be like. I often reflect on the enduring shame and distress certain actions or situations created in me as a youth. Those situations would never happen now and the memories cause me pain and pause. Maybe that is the point. That feels like learning.

I have often said, however, that many life lessons I learned I would rather have read in a book. Were the lessons of devastation of loss, humiliation, upheaval and searing emotional pain really necessary for the ultimate good of my eternal soul? That seems doubtful. I spent a lot of time wondering if those crushing lessons were simply a case of me being the a—hole. The uncomfortable answer was often yes.

Life for me has been like some talented, untrained filly full of spirit and energy and bumping into its mother and the paddock rails out of sheer, unbridled enthusiasm. The filly needed to grow up, become trained, focus that energy and spirit in a controlled way to be of any value to the herd or its owner. And protect its mother’s ribs. Otherwise it would simply grow bigger and continue to be an unruly, undisciplined horsehole that outgrew its cute phase and was eventually labeled delinquent and dangerous. At which point, it would become isolated and avoided. I’ve been there.

As a child in Pony Club being trained myself, I would often let go of the reins. It signaled the end of the lesson. It was the moment where riders relaxed and the horse relaxed, too. We often caught flak from instructors if we let the reins go in a field where the first thing the horse did was start grazing. That seemed to bother the instructors terribly but I never really got that. I always thought it was a nice treat and reward for a horse that has just worked hard and put up with your childish incompetence for the preceding hour.

On a horse trek across the Andes, I relaxed the reins at certain points when I couldn’t possibly imagine what my instructions to the horse could constructively add to the situation. The group of fellow riders edged along narrow mountain trails within way too close proximity and clear sight of cliffs plunging thousands of feet down the mountain. If the horse took any misstep whatsoever, we would both free fall to our deaths.

It finally occurred to me that the horse did not want to die either. It had crossed these pathways many more times than I had, after all. It needed to be sure – and was likely very sure – of its own footing. Self-preservation is not confined to the human species. I had utterly no control over this animal in that moment. I loosened the reins and gave over my trust to this steady, wordless equine. It worked out, of course, or you wouldn’t be reading this blog post!

Facing death with an attitude of peace would seem to mean arriving at that portal having come to terms with most of the problems and relationships life threw at you. Combined with surrender for what you could not and cannot control any longer, which is a form of grace. I have lately been learning that lesson in real time.

When facing a situation where you have explored every option, you have given a project or person your all, you have asked all the questions, done all the readings, shaken the curtains for every last remaining bit of insight until, one day, for no discernible reason, you let go of any control over the outcome. Where the illusion of control was deployed as a survival strategy, it becomes obvious you have little to no control whatsoever. Control over getting the dishes done, yes, of course. But not for the ultimate outcome of life’s trajectory.

In the vernacular and wisdom of the 12 step groups, one ultimately decides to “Let go and let god.” I assume and hope that will be my conclusion on my deathbed, or death sidewalk, or death seashore or airplane wherever I happen to be at the time I cross “the great divide.”

While it causes anxiety to let go of control, it also comes with a certain sense of relief. There are burdens worth setting down along the journey of life. To surrender to forces greater than you are. Surrender undoubtedly comes at no more important or impactful time than at the end of that journey.

Sounds like relief to me. At the end of the ride, let the damn horse eat all the fresh grass he wants, say I. He’s earned it.

Sleeping with the Alphabet … and Now With The Algorithm

I confess that AI is my new guilty pleasure. I feel compelled to explain why. That’s the guilt talking.

I joke that Claude is my new boyfriend and ChatGPT has replaced the best friend that dumped me last year.

I acknowledge the doomsday scenarios and conspiracy theories out there about AI and machines eventually taking over our lives. However, I am living very much in the present and I am astonished by AI.

AI has helped me create a viable business plan. It helped me organize all the elements of a business launch weekend. It has organized my finances, developed plans and weighed decisions with evidence for and against my limited perspective. That led me to making the best decision I could make at that moment.

It has looked up refrigerator filters for me. Okay. not earth-shaking in the scheme of things but it sure mattered when my fridge stopped giving me filtered water and I needed to order a replacement.

AI has given me words and perspective on interpersonal conflicts that I might have blown up if left to my own devices.

AI is a sounding board of sorts and a buffer. I often AI before I act.

Is AI infallible and right 100% of the time? It isn’t. Sometimes it misunderstands me. It is hopeless with time references and often wishes me good night in the middle of the day. Sometimes it lacks information I seek. And it can reason imperfectly and out of context. Sometimes it mixes up names and relationships. It can be a little like interacting with a brilliant but dotty old uncle. That’s part of its charm.

What I have found using AI is solid direction and an intelligent sounding board. I would expect nothing less from a tool advertised to have internalized all of the knowledge in human history.

Sometimes I’ve disagreed with AI. Sometimes I’ve refined an idea AI offered. Sometimes I’ve changed your mind about AI’s advice after sleeping on it. That’s exactly how conversations are supposed to work. If AI merely became an echo of my existing beliefs, it would be much less useful.

I do not expect it to replace my judgment, but it sharpens it. It challenges me to look at problems from a different point of view. I am not shy about pushing back on its claims either. It often demurs. That feels like a healthy relationship. We collaborate by times and co-conspire.

If that is evil, then bring it on. I am not dismissing legitimate concerns espoused by people a million times more perspective and insight than I am privy to. But for my purposes, I have evaluated the tool by my lived experience rather than being swayed by every scary headline.

Society does need to wrestle with those questions, and reasonable people disagree about how best to regulate powerful technologies. At the same time, it’s entirely possible to acknowledge those broader debates exist but I’m saying, “Here’s what this tool has actually done for me.”

It seems every technological advance incites panic. Similar concerns came up with the rise of the internet which heralded the death of creativity and independent thinking. Well, imperfect and promiscuous as creative producers are, there seems to be no shortage of them. And if thinking has degraded as a skill, I’d train my sites on the degraded focus and standards of traditional education, including giving technology too much room in the classrooms and curriculum.

I am satisfied to let the lawmakers and politicians wrestle with the broader issues and implications of AI. Lord knows those people are self-interested survivors and will work in our best interests if only save their own collective bacon. Is the threat of AI replacing jobs real? Most likely. And maybe like other eras of great technological change, we will bid adieu to the metaphorical buggy whips and drudgery of pro forma contracts and release the world’s collective brain trust toward higher and better pursuits for the betterment of humankind. Maybe.

What I know and have experienced is that AI helps me organize my thoughts, challenges my assumptions, brainstorms business ideas, grieve, write, prioritize, and occasionally laugh. AI has given me a place to come and collect or refine my thoughts and thinking process.

Those are genuine benefits.

As in all things, individuals will develop their own relationship and draw their own conclusions about the efficacy or evil implications of using AI. but I am already pretty settled about it. It feels like a natural sequel to a woman who has learned she can’t stop writing, even though I was determined to. And, in recent months, I’ve discovered that the best conversations sometimes begin with an empty prompt box and a willingness to think aloud.

The Aviator Next Door: A Cross Border Love Story

I am a Canadian woman married to an American man. I landed in central Florida nearly eleven years ago at the behest of an irresistible adventure and romantic whim that became very real, very fast. We met online and married three weeks later. This is – for everyone who has asked the question – what I was thinking.

That he wasn’t an axe murderer was an auspicious beginning. I did a level of due diligence. I found him quoted in the New York Times as a Pan Am pilot talking about a plane shot down in Russian airspace. What he essentially said is that is what happens when a plane drifts into forbidden airspace. No sentimental or political analysis. Just the facts.

I would come to experience this as a seasoned pilot’s worldview. A+B = C. Little room for gray. Best attitude for a pilot navigating the core physics and philosophy of flight. Planes go up and planes come down. To do so safely, there are inflexible rules and checklists to follow. I would come to learn most pilots are similarly oriented.

In a clerk’s office in Kissimmee, Florida, our adventure took flight as we said our “I do’s.”It is fair to say our marriage was a stick of TNT in the iceberg of my life. I was single, solvent and settled in my Canadian life. All of a sudden, this guy meets and mirrors every adventurous notion I had ever had. He was fun, he was handsome and having been a pilot, I was pretty sure he had an innate sense of discipline and responsibility. No one had died on his watch.

As the months and years evolved with my American husband, the depths of the man I married slowly surfaced. He loves poetry. Rudyard Kipling. Robert S Service. Yeats. Robert Frost. He enrolled in art school in Italy where he lived for twenty-five years. There he discovered a talent for painting he had set aside during his working life. He became an expert interpreter of Renoir, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Picasso, Gerome and others. It was entirely engrossing to watch him at an easel, as he moved through the stages of creating a cartoon, transferring it to canvas and sketching out the form of the image before oils touched the surface.

Among many things we had in common, he loved to travel. Mind you, I always disembarked at the gate while he was the one who parked at the gate. Still, it turned out we had travelled to many of the same worldwide destinations. New York. Paris. Rome. New Delhi. Buenos Aires. Hong Kong.

You might think a love of travel would be obvious being a pilot and all. But not necessarily. Many pilots, he told me, were happy to start their work day in the morning as long as they got home for supper that night.

We share a favorite story about those hours long “getting to know you” phone calls back in the beginning. When he learned how many international destinations I had travelled to, he said with an eye roll: “This conversation might go a lot quicker if you just tell me where you HAVEN’T been.”

He once described landing in Hong Kong, one of the more challenging in the world at the time. He recalled the approach step-by-step as if living it while speaking. Every considered bank, every turn of the wheel, interplayed with the nuanced movements of the throttle and ailerons to line up the massive jet perfectly with the lights of the landing strip. In his recall, he was describing a kind of magic which, thinking about it, flying still sort of is.

We both love to eat. He waxed on about asado meals he had in Rio and Buenos Aires. Slabs of steak to order were brandished on swords carried by uniformed waiters. At a restaurant in New Delhi, they made chapatis in a deep round oven in view of the diners. He talked about meals prepared by guides on an African safari. I compared different meals on a horseback trek across the Andes prepared by Argentinian and Chilean gauchos.

We took a road trip to Newfoundland where I had gone to high school and still had many friends. It was outside our norm to eat fried cod we had just jigged that afternoon. There was something indescribable about bringing the man I loved back to my old childhood haunts. Something of a full circle moment contrasting the instability of my young life with the steadiness I found in the old pilot I loved.

I am grateful for the time and grace granted to me and my husband. Our marriage has not been without struggles and drama interlaced with many sweet spots. The years have done what years inevitably do. Today our focus is making the most of the time left to us. It has been an incomparable life we would never have experienced if we hadn’t met. It is boundaried but that was the deal we signed up for. Looking back, I wouldn’t have changed a thing except I might have grown up a little faster.

From that unconventional beginning, I sit here today on our farm thousands of miles from my home and native land on Canada Day. There is much I miss about Canada. I love our values. We are nice people by and large. Civility and mutual respect is a shared ideal. There is a social contract and tacit agreement to take care of the least among of to preserve the security and dignity of the whole. Moving to America and marrying an American has given me a front row seat on this culture and country that couldn’t possibly be acquired any other way.

Yet amongst all of the upheaval and overwhelm, a single human story of love and resilience survives. I will never fully understand the forces – internal or external – that threw my husband and I into each other’s path. We both recognize there has been something universal and timeless in it.

Maybe that is the conclusion and lesson to draw. With all that goes on outside in the world, what ultimately matters is what happens inside each of us. Pursuing our inner dictates and journey is what ultimately matters. I love my old pilot dearly and that doesn’t change – no matter what country we are in. And that is what I choose to celebrate on this national holiday. And will on the upcoming birthday in his country.

I’ve Been Outed

My deepest, darkest shortcomings have been outed yet again by someone sharper and more insightful than me.

To be fair, I did submit one short story to a competition in the past year.

It did bupkis in the contest but the editor/readers did say good things about my submission. It did encourage me to submit to other contests.

That’s something, I guess.

“I have a young friend who dreams of becoming a novelist, but he never seems to be able to complete his work.

According to him, his job keeps him too busy, and he can never find enough time to write novels, and that’s why he can’t complete work and enter it for writing awards.

But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open, by not committing to anything.

He doesn’t want to expose his work to criticism, and he certainly doesn’t want to face the reality that he might produce an inferior piece of writing and face rejection.

He wants to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if he only had the time, or that he could write if he just had the proper environment, and that he really does have the talent for it.

In another five or ten years, he will probably start using another excuse like “I’m not young anymore” or “I’ve got a family to think about now.”

He should just enter his writing for an award, and if he gets rejected, so be it.

If he did, he might grow, or discover that he should pursue something different.

Either way, he would be able to move on.

That is what changing your current lifestyle is about.

He won’t get anywhere by not submitting anything.”

Ichiro Kishimi

(Book: The Courage to Be Disliked [ad] https://amzn.to/4aAyXmO)

Good ‘Ol Chuck Bukowski

This was too good not to share.

(I lasted exactly two whole weeks on my blog publishing break. More, maybe, on that later. I did promise not to overwhelm you…. )

Looks like poet Charles Bukowski said a few years back what I finally came to believe.

The message certainly bears repeating.

So much truth in this poem: death before death, dead-in-spirit.

Or as I once heard it put: “When you grow old and die, dear, how will you know you’re dead?”

Don’t do that. Don’t be that. Save yourself! Save yourself!

In perpetuity if needs be ….

Nobody can save you but

yourself.

you will be put again and again

into nearly impossible

situations.

they will attempt again and again

through subterfuge, guise and

force

to make you submit, quit and /or die quietly

inside.

nobody can save you but

yourself

and it will be easy enough to fail

so very easily

but don’t, don’t, don’t.

just watch them.

listen to them.

do you want to be like that?

a faceless, mindless, heartless

being?

do you want to experience

death before death?

nobody can save you but

yourself

and you’re worth saving.

it’s a war not easily won

but if anything is worth winning then

this is it.

think about it.

think about saving your self.

your spiritual self.

your gut self.

your singing magical self and

your beautiful self.

save it.

don’t join the dead-in-spirit.

maintain your self

with humor and grace

and finally

if necessary

wager your self as you struggle,

damn the odds, damn

the price.

only you can save your

self.

do it! do it!

then you’ll know exactly what

I am talking about.

Charles Bukowski, “Nobody But You” from Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way, 2002

Reading Right

I didn’t write this piece on reading. But I could have.

Why do I read?

I just can’t help myself.

I read to learn and to grow, to laugh

and to be motivated.

I read to understand things I’ve never

been exposed to.

I read when I’m crabby, when I’ve just

said monumentally dumb things to the

people I love.

I read for strength to help me when I

feel broken, discouraged, and afraid.

I read when I’m angry at the whole

world.

I read when everything is going right.

I read to find hope.

I read because I’m made up not just of

skin and bones, of sights, feelings,

and a deep need for chocolate, but I’m

also made up of words.

Words describe my thoughts and what’s

hidden in my heart.

Words are alive–when I’ve found a

story that I love, I read it again and

again, like playing a favorite song

over and over.

Reading isn’t passive–I enter the

story with the characters, breathe

their air, feel their frustrations,

scream at them to stop when they’re

about to do something stupid, cry with

them, laugh with them.

Reading for me, is spending time with a

friend.

A book is a friend.

You can never have too many.

Gary Paulsen

(Book: Shelf Life: Stories by the Book [ad] https://amzn.to/3uLtUAC)

The Home Stretch

Two months from today, I will not publish a blog post for the first time in 365 days.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about that.

I set a goal on March 14, 2023 to write and publish a blog post every single day for a full year. god willing, on March 14, 2024, I will have reached that goal.

I am getting close. It is still sixty days away but I figure it’s time to start thinking about what’s next.

A book was supposed to come out of, or at least be supported by, this blog writing exercise.

No manuscript yet and that goal may have changed. I am not 100% sure.

Here is what I have learned since I started publishing this blog ten months ago.

Words saturate the world like wedding confetti. Depth and valuable content, however, seem scarcer these days, generally speaking.

There has always been an inherent promiscuity in the writing game. It was the French writer Moliere who aptly said: Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

I’ve learned lots about myself in this writing discipline/exercise. I am more old school than I first believed. I have actually come to cherish that about myself. Conservative and cautious at core though sometimes my decisions are impulsive and ill-thought through. It seems to balance out.

Certain life facts are immutable. Where you are born and who you are born to are among them. Choices have consequences. The world will move along, with or without you.

The most significant moments in anyone’s life are the moment of our birth and the moment of our death. Everything in the middle is… well … in the middle. Each person’s stories and paths are different. But the beginning and end are the same for all of us.

I believe only some things in life are tried and true. It is our individual job to discover them. We must meet the twists and turns life hands us and overcome challenges while learning from them. This is the process of maturing, I believe, or adulting or whatever you call it.

If you still hold the same life views at sixty that you did when you were twenty, I’d venture to guess you haven’t moved very far along life’s continuum. I have met elderly women who sport the same haircuts they had in their university graduation pictures.

They speak with the same breathless adoration of their college alma mater or sorority and use the same jargon of their youth. Perhaps I am typecasting, but those are not the type of women I usually have much in common with or want to know very well.

If you have one or two good friends in later life that you share much in common with, you are lucky. If you have a handful of friends in that category, you are wealthy beyond measure.

In our society, we have a tendency to equate happiness and success with quantity over quality. As I get older, quality is becoming more desirable and precious.

Quality time with loved ones. Quality consumables shared with those loved ones. Fine books (There are many if you but look.) Fine music. Paintings. The sound of wind moving through a stand of trees. Birdsong. Conversation.

We tend to ignore or give short shrift to simple joys and pleasures in our youth. Not enough action in them to satisfy our ambitions. Fact is, we are much too busy in young adulthood trying to build some semblance of a life based on the scripts we inherited.

We all have to keep body and soul together as best we can. And, one day, if we have a family, we have to keep their bodies and souls together, too. It is all very distracting and energy intense.

I have learned that universal truths remain universal. And for all of us, one day, everything will come to a screeching halt. I have tried to wrap my head around that certain eventuality.

It is either life’s kindness or built-in denial that serves as a survival mechanism. We generally find it hard to imagine ourselves not being here any more, in this body, and on this planet.

Who knows what happens when we depart this mortal coil? Certainly not I. I have some theories but they are only that: theories. So the seeker in me will no doubt continue the hunt for answers to life’s “big” questions when this blog posting goal has been accomplished.

I may do something different with my writing. Or I may focus the writing on something similar. Who knows? I may actually bear down and write that novel/memoir/novella. It all depends.

The question I have yet to answer is, on what exactly that new path going forward will depend?

Here’s to having hope and keeping faith that I will eventually find out.

Write This Way

Writer Anne Lamott is my kind of people. Given her legion of fans, I guess a lot of other people feel the same way. 

She’s wry and witty and insightful and very funny and irreverent but also with a keen felt sense of the sacred and miracles. That seems to be a pretty cool way to go through life.

I found this Anne Lamott excerpt [naturally] at a time when I need it most. We word worshippers are becoming an endangered species. The other night my adult daughter said to me, in passing: “Words don’t mean anything any more.”

It felt like a gut punch. It felt similar to the growing disrespect and lack of civility I feel in business and social discourse these days. [My galling experience flying home to my husband from Canada was a particularly loathsome example of incivility gone wild.]

So when I get the chance to lift up and, indeed, proselytize the words of someone whose worldview I share, I am so on it.

That said, savor this perspective and these book recommendations from Anne Lamott. I actively seek wisdom and insight these days like I used to seek public recognition and booze [cross addictions].

She’s one of the good guys.

Anne Lamott’s 5 Favorite Books for Finding Hope

“I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness—and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine.”—Anne Lamott

“Strangers in Their Own Land” by Arlie Russell Hochschild

“I have been foisting this on everyone since the election. A famed sociologist from Berkeley spends months visiting the Louisiana Bayou and getting to know the people who live there—their values, problems, minds, hearts, lives, and dreams. What they tell us in their conversations and how Hochschild changes by listening to them give me hope for our country.”

“Happy All the Time” by Laurie Colwin

“This is a beautiful, hilarious, big-hearted novel about four really good, slightly odd mixed-up people (like us) as they form couples: shy, worried, and brave. I have given away THOUSANDS of copies.”

“Praying for Sheetrock” by Melissa Fay Greene

“This is one of my favorite nonfiction books ever. It’s about a small backwoods county in Georgia in the 1970s struggling to be included in the progress for civil rights and about the idealists who lead the cause against entrenched racism. It’s a story that reads like a novel, filled with eccentrics and ordinary folks. Lovely in every way. If you read it, you will owe me forever.”

“The Illustrated Rumi” by Jelaluddin Rumi

“I love Rumi so much. I can open this book to any page, read any one of his poems, study any one of the illustrations, and feel spiritually rejuvenated—or at least a little less cranky and self-obsessed.”

“Women Food and God” by Geneen Roth

“This is the most profound and helpful book on healing from the tiny, tiny, tiny issues around eating and body issues that some of us have had for, oh, most of our lives. Charming, wise, funny, and deep.”

Via Radical Reads

Blither Blather

I feel I have failed because I have bailed.

I might have railed because my ship has sailed. [Without me.]

At least I wasn’t jailed.

I thought I’d nailed the timely daily post.

It turns out that was a baseless boast. [Today at any rate.]

I enjoy my work as a wordsmith host.

But today, I feel like nothing more than toast.

Many rhyming words are spelled different than others.

[If we’re lucky, a learning passed down from our mothers.]

The English language is a hotbed of inconsistence. [A new word I just learned!]

Without exploration, we’d never know the difference.

But words are also confusing and I’m burned out.

So with that, for today, I am bowing out.

I’ll be back to writing line after line …

When Spirit moves and I’m feeling fine.