One thing is something that Barbara Johnson wrote decades ago, that we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. And boy, have the last few years seemed more and more like a Good Friday world. So much of the new book Dusk Night Dawn began as a response to our political devastation, coupled with the UN Climate papers, which terrified every parent , auntie and uncle I know. I kept assuring people that, yes, turning things around would be hard, but that we are good at hard. We stopped smallpox, and fascism, we came up with anti-retrovirals, we’ve seen our closest friends through unsurvivable loss.
And this message definitely seemed to resonate for people....until the apocalyptic fires broke out. Remember when all of Australia was on fire? Doesn’t that seem like a decade ago? And then my own precious state aflame, because apparently we had not raked our forests effectively enough.
So the question became the eventual subtitle of the new book: On Revival and Courage. Where do we even start to get our hope and faith in life back, when it has been at its lifiest for so long? What would renewal even look like?
Renewal might look like when somehow you get your sense of humor back. Laughter is not only carbonated holiness, but as Trevor Noah said recently, when you laugh with someone, you know you share something. I love that so much. Renewal might mean spring approaching. Renewal means Hope returns.
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is the plainest message in life, that we come from ashes and return to ashes, but wow—what an amazing new moon. And pay attention, because tiny shoots of green grass are breaking through the concrete.
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is the plainest message in life, that we come from ashes and return to ashes, but wow—what an amazing new moon. And pay attention, because tiny shoots of green grass are breaking through the concrete.
This has been the great teaching for me during Covid College—that so much has been taken away from us, yet so much not only still works, but has the capacity to blow us away with its loveliness, with how deeply touching it can all be. So in Lent and Passover and Covid, we stop. In the dark night of the soul, we get stopped in our tracks. We may fall into an abyss that we have been trying to outrun since we were little children. I’ve written entire books about how destructive this is, the American way of staying one step ahead of having to stop. Just trick out the abyss, so it's a little bit nicer! (We used to be able to head to Ikea for a more festive throw rug, although during quarantine, we learned to order things that would arrive overnight.)
And paradoxically, as we’ve had to stop, we’ve seized upon the immediacy and preciousness of our short time here. We haven’t been able to have meals with those we love most, to snuggle with our faces buried in their warm necks, and this had broken our hearts. But as Carly Simon sang, there is more room in a broken heart. We gave and received love in new ways—on the living Advent calendars of Zoom gatherings, or making the universal sign of hugging someone in masks six feet away. (My Sunday School kids know that Bavarian pretzels began as an Easter present to children from monks at the local monastery, who looped and crossed the pretzel dough to resemble a hug.)
The preciousness of our days here! Yes, I binged on TV for most of a year, which is maybe not the Ram Dassiest be-here-now thing to do. (And if you don’t tell anyone, I’ll share that I’ve now watched every episode of Selling Sunset and Below Deck. And—thank you Jesus—I still have two seasons of Below Deck Med to see me through.) But still, I loved everyone the best I could every day. I went for a walk, rain or shine. (well, drizzle or shine.) I practiced radical self care. I gave thanks. I practiced my prone yoga, which I developed in my early 20’s, which simply involved lying down a lot, maintaining the prone.
I lived by a story I’ve told you dozens of times, about a day when my best friend Pammy was dying. We went shopping, she in a wig and a wheelchair. I was going out that night with the latest fixer-upper boyfriend (Read Dusk Night Dawn to hear about the literal miracle of finally finding a healthy, brilliant, kind man, whom I married three days after I started getting Medicare.) I was trying on a tighter, shorter dress than I was used to, and said to her, “Do you think this makes my hips look big?” and she said to me, gently, “Annie, you don't have that kind of time.”
So where do we start? Paradoxically, we start by stopping—and we done got stopped good by Covid, right? So we notice how entirely we are still here, now. When we do not remember how to proceed, we go Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe. We do the sacraments of ploppage, and putter. We take care of the poor. We notice the first daffodils in bloom, such sweet sight gags, with those huge schnozzes. We breathe and begin to shake off some of the grim shit life has been throwing at us, we push back our sleeves, look up and around, and begin anew. Deal? You in?
via {anne lamott}
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