My beloved cousin Gordy, who looks like Don Quixote and has lived with us the last two months with an endstage illness, was told by his doctor that she needed him to do a colonoscopy. Now, if you are a slightly less young person like myself, you have experienced the exhilaration of this process. It is unlike any other aspect of life, unless perhaps if you have caught dysentery while simultaneously in prolapse. If you don’t know about the process, look it up. It is not pretty.

     I told the doctor that there was virtually no chance that Gordy and I could successfully complete the prep, what with Gordy’s compromised mobility and cognition, but she talked me into trying. The three of us have a strong connection, because while our need is great, so is her heart.. We trust that we are all doing our best to give him a good life.

     “Doing my best” was not a value in our family. “Doing great” was. As I wrote in Operating Instructions, I was 35 with an infant when someone told me that a B+ was a really good grade.

So after a day of Gordy drinking clear fluids as prescribed, we moved onto the gallon of prep salts.

       I am going to leave the next few hours to your imagination except to say that it was uniquely miserable. He was the Little Match Girl. I was Lucy Ricardo as a labor and delivery doula.          

     We both did the best we could for three hours. We took it one glass of vile, lemony salts at a time. He just trusted me. I would say that it went poorly, in terms of production and operational values. But they say that when all else fails, follow instructions, and so we pressed on

      At 8:00, I said to Gordy, who was all but whimpering at that point, “Let’s stop for now. You’re amazing. This is barbaric. And we have to start in again at 3 this morning.”

      He drank some apple juice and we watched an episode of Survivor and called it a night.

      We got up and started again at 3:00, and the next two hours made the night before look like the good old days. We got through another torturous quart or so. With three glasses to go, I said,  “You’re done. You were amazing. It was either enough, or not.”

      I got us each a blanket and we slept on the couch together for two hours.

      We are both praying people, and we prayed that we had done a good enough job for the doctor to see whatever her prying eyes needed to. We left for the hospital, totally connected by the ordeal and the hope that our working together would do the trick, like half of America feels now.

     This is going to sound a tiny bit judgmental, but that morning’s nurse was stupid, mean, and awful. After she had Gordy lie down, and hadplugged an IV port and a lot of lines into him, she barked, “Don’t fall. If you break your hip, I don’t think you could make a comeback.”

     We gaped at her. Gordy said, “Okay.”

     She bustled about, ignoring us except to wire Gordy’s body, and then said again, “Don’t fall and break your hip.”

     Gordy and I gazed at each other with the smallest smiles.

     “Okay,” he said again. I waggled my finger sternly.

     I wanted to shout, “What is WRONG with you?” This is also what I would ask our special friends in the government, like Schmeven Schmiller. What is wrong with you? Do you honestly think it is okay to behave like this?

      All I could do in the face of this was to stay connected to the innocent, to Gordy. I rolled my eyes, shook my finger.

     When the nurse was done, and headed towards the door, she turned and, God is my witness, told him again not to fall and break his hip, and he agreed not to.  He is the sweetest guy, while my thinking became more Medieval—not quite heads on stakes, but along the lines that the old ways were the best ways.

     When the doctor, our favorite person in America, came in to help Gordy go off to surgery, I said we had really done the best we could. I sounded like dear old Nancy Reagan, when she would see journalists badgering Ronald for answers to Iran Contra or whatever the latest debacle was, and she’d mouth to him, “We’re doing the best we can,” which he would then repeat.

     She met me in the waiting room half an hour later to report it had gone perfectly, and there were no polyps, no cancer. I heaved a sigh. She put her arms around me.”You guys are heroes.”

      Next week, on the Tuesday after Labor Day, I will push back my sleeves and plug in to the midterms. But until then, I am going to assume that the messy, hard work of saving the country’s life will work, keep replaying the trust in Gordy’s eyes and that the umbilical love of friends keeps saving me, and the doctor’s arms, along with something less visible, holding me.

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https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2026/08/25/anne-lamott-by-grace-yaconelli/

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     It turns out there was no system, at least not one that held up consistently, because life is life. They also forgot to mention this one tiny detail. There you are, doing your best and being a good guy, but then life decides to wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or gets sand in a very special place, and wham.

     Someone is targeted with a grim diagnosis, possibly even a  beautiful young person, when there are so, so many more available candidates from whom to choose, people who are destroying all that is good. (Don’t tell God I said this.) Of course, on other days, life gets a good night’s sleep, or a massage, and people you love get a break, where the news they were waiting for could have been awful. Instead, it was just a benign cyst, or the fan belt.

     I repeat: Life is life. Who knew?

     A couple of months ago, a cherished cousin who lives alone got the news that he was facing a pretty awful future. So my husband and I did what most regular old humans would do. We said, “Hey; come live with us. We have room. And I guess you can bring the dog,”

     People have done many things like this for me over the vast decades. This is part of our human makeup, our capacity for redeeming love. This rarely looks like carpets of kaleidoscopic poppies blooming alongside green meadows, although this would work for me. I like systems and order, but no, it looks like motley old us. This generosity is our superpower. (My husband says our superpower is our adaptability. Maybe it is the combo platter.)

     Now we have a sick and suddenly-old man—my age—with mild dementia in our living room, every day, watching the National Geographic channel or baseball. We adore Gordy, and his dog is much better behaved than ours, which doesn’t mean much, so it is both easily doable, and hard.

    A blessing of old age is that you have figured out that it is a privilege to serve, to help others, and that it will probably help you at least as much as it does the other person. All truth is paradox, which again does not entirely work for nervous cases like me.

      On the toughest day of this year so far, last Thursday, I got an urgent, early morning call from Gordy’s doctor, and shortly afterwards we found ourselves lost in the bustling hospital complex where he is being treated. I was carrying a large bottle of the sickening syrup Gordy has to swallow four times a day, which I couldn’t open. A security guard asked if we needed help. “Oh boy, do we,” I said. He locked arms with Gordy, and walked him slowly down two halls to the right elevator.

    Before we got in, I handed him the big brown bottle and explained that I couldn’t get it open. “Maybe I’m not that smart, but I’m very strong,” he assured me, and we laughed for the first time that day He twisted the cap off. People made room for us, and the guard Godblessed us when he got off on the floor before ours. In that cramped elevator, the whole day opened.

     My husband taught a weeklong retreat in Costa Rica last summer, and I went along as arm candy. There was a woman there, also named Annie, 40 years old, fabulous, beautiful and super smart, who was near the end of her life. On the last night of the retreat, my husband and I hosted a dance party, with an exhilarating mix of mostly classic rock that my husband had put together. I asked Annie to dance and we did, and then I tried to pull her remarkable mother Lucy into our orbit. Lucy protested, “Ain’t gonna happen, only song I’ll dance to is ‘Love Shack’,” And then, three songs later, that old B-52’s song came on.

       I stepped aside. She and Annie danced together shyly at first, the tribal two step, but by the end the Octopus Hop, those eight arms and legs flying.

     I captured it all on film for them. Did this make up for much when Annie passed two months later? I can’t answer that for you.

      The same rules apply whether you are trying to help a sick friend or our country or the earth. As above, so below. You show up. You take the next right action and the insight follows, not vice versa. The insight is that caring and giving are what fill us up. The insight is that the greatest blessing is to be able to be a blessing for others. The insight is the title of that beautiful Raymond Carver story, “A Small Good Thing.” Help a little. Suck it up and let others help you. Be blessed.

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     In the natural, visible world, it all looks hopeless to my tiny princess self..

     Small things are disappointing—I can tell we are on the cusp of mealy peaches, it being mid-August.

     Miserable things abound—the weather forecast predicts weeks and weeks of heat still to come. This is so wrong. I am not exactly wedded to being beaten down on by the sun. Whoever is in charge of such things should cut off all sweltering days on Labor Day—“All right, everyone, you’ve had your little fun. Now go inside and pick put a cute sweater.” But no. The devil is sitting in the shade these days.      

     Sorrowful things: We have a slo-mo human tragedy unfolding in my family, like you may very well, too, because, not to repeat myself, but the world is too sad by half. You get old and it feels like there is a sniper in the trees some days. Respecting their privacy, I’ll just say a relative is staying with us while he receives brilliant medical care.

     And five alarm fire things: 82 days till the midterms, which our catering cart stowaway is working to skew or cancel, and everyone is busy elsewhere with last ditch vacations and school starting up. I want to rouse everyone into action, like Jason Robards out on the New York City street at dawn, in “A Thousand Clowns”, urging his neighbors to come out for calisthenics. But we are worn out by the heat, and busy. Simultaneously we note that life is so time-consuming, and not much seems to be happening.

     So why do I feel breezes of hope? Go figure. It’s not Julie Andrews running on the hillside in The Sound of Music. Mine looks more like a creaky person getting down on the floor and going into child’s pose, the folded position in yoga where you stretch and curl back into a restful origami shape, almost a fetus. A huge, ploppy fetus, head bent to the ground, resting.

      Don’t get me wrong: I don’t yoga, although I have certainly meant to for the last ten years, but I do rest in the Child’s Pose at the gym, after I dutifully do my two saggy, trembly planks. Looking at me from outside, you might think I am bowing down or surrendering, but the opposite is true. I am protecting  myself, finding a moment’s refuge, thinking small, and gearing up.

     Small hope means that I not go crazy with the craziness around me, that I keep centered, ish, enjoy what I'm given. I recognize the madness out there, take deep breaths and try not let it strangle me.

Complaining aside for the moment, I have hope that the summer is right on schedule. Even though it is the only season I could do without,  the earth can’t. It needs the pollination, all those decomposing dead plants and flowers getting recycled into the soil for the next generation. The horrible insects are spreading pollen, burrowing, loosening the hard earth, recycling, feeding all the guys we actually like—birds, butterflies, bees.

      I watch my family and closest friends take care of our ailing person just down the hall, and this fills me with the peace that passes all understanding. I experience utter amazement at our species’s capacity for tenderness, resilience, and generosity. My husband and I forgot to make a dinner plan last night, and then out of the blue—if you believe in out of the blue—a friend texted that she was headed over with low-sodium green chile stew and cornbread for our person. A sick person cannot possibly polish off a soup pot of stew, so we all sacrificially pitched in and helped. Our person ate two bowls, patted his stomach.

     Love is sovereign here.

     I have hope in God, in Goodness, in Good Orderly Direction, in Grace Over Drama, in Gus, the Great Universal Spirit, and in the ACLU. I send them money to fight Trump’s efforts to mess with the elections. This action gives me hope, as do his polls, worst of any president since Richard Nixon’s in the days before he resigned. Overcome by the vapors, and his own inflated reputation and intellectual limitations, he has the soul of a trapped rat, tiny pink eyes alternately flickering with evil, and closed dreamily in slumber at the Resolute Desk.

     A lot of us are in child’s pose these days, waiting for the quiet blessings of autumn, but people who do not take time off from fighting the good fights are engaged, are focused on the right things — local elections, state elections, congressional elections, door to door canvassing where they can meet independents. The Resistance is alive and kicking, with some obvious problems—divisions, fundings, etc. When my son was ten and we were driving to my weekly teaching gig, he asked why my students even wanted to write. I said it was because we all have a creative spirit buried in there past the to-do lists and bad self self-esteem, and it wants expression. I told him that writing can help us make sense of ourselves, help us understand the human heart, and life.

     “Oh, I already know all about life,” he responded. “Pretty good; some problems.”

     In child’s pose, you kneel, and sit back onto your heels. Then you fold yourself over your thighs. Your head rests on the floor, so that it is lower than you heart, which is how it should always be. Your arms lay on the floor at your side, and you rest until you’re ready to rise.

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Annie and I had sold our book, Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. Well, our agent had sold it. A couple of weeks later, in the blissful early days between signing the contract (easy) and completing the manuscript (hard), I was strolling down the street with hardly a care. Our dead-end block is lined with sycamore trees that form a 30-foot-high bough over the narrow asphalt, so it’s a pretty nice place to set to thinking. And pow! A thought made it all the way into my brain.

“These so-called rules are algorithms. Maybe the book is also an app.” That’s two thoughts. I praised my septuagenarian brain.

The last time I programmed anything it was 1981 and I needed to get a 5 ¼-inch VisiCalc floppy disc to talk to my Radio Shack computer, which thought in Basic. I remember a command called Poke, which did just that and got snatches of new code inserted into long lines of old code.

I set up a Zoom with an LA couple I know who create augmented reality art works. They bit, and agreed to build a prototype. In a few months we had a good-looking interface, some proof-of-concept success in getting a handful of rules to interact properly, and a great marketing video.

The idea is that you paste a writing passage of your own into the app on your phone or tablet, and it returns a mark-up with suggestions for changes. It doesn’t rewrite or even offer new wording, just points out the weak areas for you to work on, and tells you the rule so you can relearn it or refer back to the book. [If you’re bored of the story, you can try out the link here:]

CLICK TO TRY THE APP

This was midyear 2025, and with dismay I watched AI race through puberty and careen into adolescence. What need for an app if anyone could train AI to do the same thing? Having spent all the money I had budgeted, I prepared to bail out.

But just in case, I asked my friend Jon in San Diego whether he might take a look. An expert programmer working a corporate management job, Jon happened to be developing an AI program to take over his own job.

Before continuing, let’s be clear on the boundaries I believe in for working with AI.

1. If you are not a writer and don’t expect to ever become one, go ahead and use AI to write as you wish. You are not my concern.

2. If you care about writing, don’t let AI take over the task. Make your own sentences, and make them better yourself. Writers puzzle out sentences; in doing so they find meaning. If AI solves the puzzle for you, why write?

3. If you are pretty sure of your grammar but know that you’re no expert, go ahead and let Grammarly or the like copyedit a final version. If Grammarly is finding more than one mistake a page, take a break to study syntax or spelling or whatever’s your problem.

4. If you’ve already written a first draft, with a structure and a theme and characters and events in place, it’s OK to ask AI to write an editor’s note for you. It’ll be a humdinger. AI is great for suggestions from 10,000 feet. You’ll eventually have a human book editor, but in the meantime AI can be a great support.

5. And finally, Rule 2 again. If you care about writing, don’t let AI take over the task. Make your own sentences, and make them better.

Let’s now get back to Jon, who unexpectedly is laid off from his nine-to-five job before he can get his bot to take it over. Jon now had time on his hands, and enough of a cushion to dive into my app for a while. My LA friends retired from the project. I told Jon that if he wanted to, he could work on it, but if he didn’t, I was happy to shut it down: “It’s your call. I can’t pay you, and I can’t vouch for the app’s potential. You’re the AI expert. The risk is all yours now.”

As Jon tinkered with the app, he realized that the algorithms only looked simple, as if anyone could get AI to quickly code them. As it turns out, human language is not particularly logical; this is the core of what Noam Chomsky discovered in the late 1950s, changing the study of linguistics forever. Some of our app’s algorithms would require multiple AI platforms and weeks and months of training the AI platforms to reduce false positives and negatives. The degree of difficulty in getting the app to work was convincing Jon that it had a future.

Jon, by the way, had readily agreed to my requirement that the app remain pedagogically sound. It would reinforce the rules, but wouldn’t rewrite. Our first idea for a marketing slogan was, “It’s a teacher, not a cheater.” The Good Writing app would offer real-time reinforcement of good writing habits, even to the point that teachers using the Good Writing book in class could support the app’s use. I didn’t have to explain the boundaries to Jon. His wife is a writer, and he knew what was good for the marriage. “My friends are nice people who hate all writing apps,” she said with her arms crossed. “You better not piss them off.”

Sooner than I expected, Jon had a beta version of the app out to a number of volunteer writers for testing. The feedback was more than encouraging. People were using it. Some leaned into it, feeding it multiple writing projects and learning along the way.

“I love that it gooses the writer to do better without providing exact suggestions,” beta tester Tracey T. wrote to Jon. “This is AI at its best – assisting without taking away the writer’s voice.”

It’s always kind of amazing to an author that people actually read the book and dumbfounding when they praise it. Double that surprise for an app that seemed obsolete before it was launched. I remain slightly flabbergasted that it’s actually out there. Hey, it was a stray thought of mine on a walk in the neighborhood, a small notion.

Today is the launch of the complete version. If you click below, you’ll get a free trial of a lite version. And if you already own a copy of Good Writing the book, you can retrieve two months free of the full app capabilities. Don’t thank me. I get a little credit for having the original idea, but Jon gets much more credit for believing in it and persisting until this day arrived.

REALLY, CLICK HERE FOR THE APP

goodwriting.app

     But August, ugh. No one is in place who can help me. Most of New York publishing has ground to a standstill. What if I suddenly have a great idea for a book, which I actually do—The Grown Child: An Owner’s Manual, with lots of tips and hacks to avoid them getting all cranky when you accidentally  share your always excellent advice.

     All the young people are still strutting around in teeny clothes that would hang on my cat, and of course one can’t help but notice one’s own condition. My husband said thoughtfully the other day, “The problem with older bodies is that everything hurts, and they don’t look very good.” In August, the young do their vigorous show-offy things, and, one imagines, think contemptuous thoughts about us, ie me—“Hey, Granny Clampett, 3/4 sleeves in 90 degree weather?”

      And August is now when kids go back to school. This is just so wrong. Everyone knows that school starts the Tuesday after Labor Day, It says so in the bible. Somewhere, possibly in Ecclesiastes, right after “To everything there is a season, turn turn turn.” (3:1-8.)

     You’d think the good news would be that being in school would decrease the exhibitionism, and maybe it does, but just barely—the girls at my grandson’s high school could be auditioning for Victoria’s Secrets ads, if they were not already too old at 16 and 17.

      That is all the superficial stuff. Beneath, one onion skin layer down, is the truth that life is too sad by half. Some of the people I have loved for decades are going through the most tragic times of loss, and all we can do is show up, sit with them, try to keep our mouths shut unless they ask is something, and maybe bring them some food. (But not casseroles, unless you are Presbyterian.) Is life even more heartbreaking these last few months this than usual? It has been, in my little galaxy, for a few of the people I love most.

     I constantly think of filing a brief with the Complaints Department—How on earth could this terrible loss or diagnosis happen to a person of such beauty and decency, when there are so many great candidates for punishment?

     I am not going to name names, not even the obvious one, in his infinite stupidity and evil. Nope, nope, nope, lips are sealed. Instead, I am going to mention an action we might all think about taking in the doldrums of August, in preparation for the midterms..

     Send off whatever you can afford, even ten dollars, to groups who are helping to safeguard the coming elections. Here are the three that the New York Times suggests, all of them nonpartisan:

• The Election Official Legal Defense Network pairs election officials with pro bono attorneys who can advise them on how to respond to threats and lawsuits, which have increased in recent years.

• The Campaign Legal Center, founded in 2002 by a Republican lawyer who served as chairman of the Federal Election Commission, works to ensure that election rules remain fair.

• The Carter Center, founded in 1982 by Jimmy Carter.

The paradoxical solution to feeling pinched is to give a little more. This is just about my deepest belief, that we think we are starving for what we’re not getting, but we’re actually starving for what we’re not giving. Skip two Starbucks coffees, and give the money to the guy at the intersection, even if you have tiny opinions on his hygiene or gumption. He is your brother. Every single religious tradition says so—well, except for fundamentalist Christianity.

     I have to repeat something I saw once on a sticker in a newsroom, alongside a photo of Koko the gorilla: “Stay calm, and share your bananas.” In India, you routinely see starving people sitting on the road, splitting bananas in half and giving them to the impoverished person sitting next to them. In the current terrors of America, it’s tempting to hoard our bananas, but then they go bad. Give some away. Giving will fill you and open your heart. Right after the Labor Day verses in Ecclesiastes, it says, “Cast thy bread upon the water, for though shalt find it after many days.” Be generous. Trust the future.

     When we are afraid, casting and trust and acts of goodness are radical acts. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Courage is just doing it all any way. Snacks and coffee help. We got this.

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So who brung you? Right now, in these Trumpelstiltskin days?

For me, it was some plainspoken, decent women who brung me to the dance:, I celebrated forty years clean and sober last week, the great miracle that led to everything beautiful and of value in my life. I mean that: Everything. I lucked into the gift of desperation, an acronym for God that I now share with newcomers. The sober women with whom I’ve danced for forty years now told me that the God I didn’t believe in was the same God they didn’t believe in. Instead, they believed in a higher power that might be called grace over drama, groups of drunks, good orderly direction, the great out-doors. They predicted that if I didn’t drink one day at a time, and didn’t die, I would end up a great old dame who had survived incredible losses and disappointments, but was filled with daily gratitude and amazement. And voila, c’est moi, still a little funky around the edges but transformed into a person of service.

That was one graceful dance partner.

Yes, things are all in decline hereabouts—memory, balance, vision, hearing,  stamina, and let’s not even mention the knees—but not in heart and soul. Plus, not to brag, but I bet I can beat you at pickleball. I went from July of 1986, when my alcoholic insides were laced with electrical hopelessness and fear, to July of 2026, when I periodically have a different kind of dark and radioactive anxiety, but thank God I am sober, and I turn to them what brung me.

What brung me to my spiritual and political beliefs were Martin Luther King and Gandhi and good old Jesus, who spoke of peace and crazy, reckless love, of one human family, of one overarching truth—that goodness and justice were bigger than any bleak shit the White House could throw at you.

Molly brung me to a fiercer commitment to political activism, to an almost spiritual passion for democracy and justice and loyalty to We the People. I find it very hard, without Molly alive, to survive these days with all my f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s, as Salinger’s Esme put it. But Molly is around in my memory, heart, in her books and in the breathtaking light she cast. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness  has not overcome it. It sure feels like it has some days, and then I remember Molly’s words: “Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government, is on the high road to permanent glory.”

God, she could make me laugh, and laughter fills me with bubbly hope. We are not only surviving, we are fighting back peacefully, and overcoming, not just in the polls, but in our activism and fundraising. The sheer number of people dropping everything else to donate and work on campaigns of good people running for House and Senate seats is beyond inspiring. That’s what Molly would be watching.

I watch Trump’s decompensatiom—his growing insanity in the wake a terrible economy, the ICE killings, the catastrophic and unpopular war in Iran—and I remember the end of the story of Rumpelstiltskin, another tale of cruelty, hubris and greed. The newly-crowned queen turns to the good people of her town for help—she has to figure out the impossible, Rumpelstiltskin’s name, or lose her firstborn. And someone comes up with it! They hear him sing it in a bizarre, crazy narcissistic dance deep in the woods. One wonders if it included small fist bumps in front of his body. Someone was there, paying attention, and heard the answer. When Rumpelstiltskin realizes he’s been had, he flies into a rage. In one version of the tale, he stamps his foot so hard that it gets stuck in the ground, and in his rageful efforts to break free, he tears himself in two.

Let me ask you this: Who brung you? Who gave you faith in yourself and life and the human spirit? Was it a teacher, a friend, a writer, a movie, an experience of trust or service or compassion? Remember them, and breathe. We need you on the dance floor.

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    Remember Oobleck, the sticky green slime that Dr. Seuss’s mad king coats over his kingdom, trapping everyone in slime and ruining all of life? That’s what Trump and his malefactors have done, and we are the ones who will clean it up, starting with the midterms—dry it out, and sweep it up.

    Oobleck gummed up all the instruments, but we are going to scour and restore them. The Fourth honors the wooden fife that soldiers heard over the din of battle, the bugle, the drums. We celebrate through Clarence Clemons’ solos, Bonnie Raitt on slide guitar, Hubert Laws’ flute on Crying Song, and, it goes without saying, Ringo. Lean in and listen.

    We remember great loud noises of rising up— Molly Ivins’ last column in which she wrote, "We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action... Raise Hell. . . . We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'" Rise up.

    We remember loud, life-giving, divine laughter. If you feel depressed on the Fourth about the ongoing destructions of everything beautiful and American, think of the Honorable Judge Box-Of-Wine Pirro, standing at the Reflecting Pool, sternly planning the charges she will bring against the vandals who made 350 foot long slashes in the bottom. Think of the caulking that is oozing from the columns of Trump’s Arch of Triumph at the Great American State Fair. Think of the crowds at that glorious fair, boisterous patriotic mobs of ten and eleven people. Or think back to the Boaty McBoatface military parade he held for himself in 2025, and roar with laughter at them.

    We remember the Titans, the ACLU, the Sabbath, and we keep it holy.

    We remember fabulous firework displays from our early years but some of us nervous cases have been avoiding a repetition for decades. We remember pretending to like firecrackers and poppers so the boys would think we were cool, but now we hate all the explosions in our neighborhoods that freak out our animals, and we can be a tiny bit judgy of those who set them off. Little kids and I love sparklers, though, love creating light in the darkness. Rumi said, “If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light.”  Be the light.

    I remember a riddle from decades years ago—as my dad would say, from before Milton Berle: Why aren’t there any knock-knock jokes about America? Because freedom rings. This is a true story: twenty-five ago, during Bush-Cheney, Molly Ivins and I were the speakers at a retreat for Code Pink, the anti-war people. We gave a number of talks, one of which was about how it is our flag, too. And I got a hundred progressive, peacenik women to sing America the Beautiful along with Molly and me:  O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. For purple mountains majesty, above the fruited plain. It was wild and unpredictable. Practice what Wendell Berry wrote,  “Every day do something that won’t compute.”

    Happy birthday, gal, sweet land of liberty. 250 years! Now you can wear your big-girl pants. We celebrate your unfathomable beauty, your Constitution, your Jeffersonian ideals, and your people. It’s your big day. Make a wish, blow out the candles, and show us what you’ve got.

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But what Bob Dylan called the  idiot wind shows no signs of dying down. And—this will sound harsher than I mean—Stephen Miller is a one-man plague of frogs. Some days the wind from the White House feels like it will blow away everything good and beautiful and legal, while sucking in obscene amounts of cash. Ka-Ching.

Yet maybe this torrential wind holds some answers and hope for us, gobsmacked though we may be as passengers in a bus driven by a convicted sexual abuser and freelance traitor.

We all have memories of events that the wind seemed to ruin, making a mockery of our best efforts to dazzle and manage. But maybe at some point we noticed the fancy napkins flying about like paper airplanes, and just had to shake our heads at the whole ridiculousness of even trying, another performance of the theatre of the absurd everywhere  you looked, and maybe a tiny oblique Mona Lisa smile crossed your lips. And that, my friends, can be a miracle.

A wind moves things around. Seeds would not get scattered without wind’s blowhard ways: There would be so much less beauty and surprise. And exploration—Kon-Tiki, Magellan. The wind gives us fresh air. The wind is the breath of the universe.

We’ve come through such harsh and bitter winds before and we will again, if we stick together and don’t give up. It is tempting to stay inside until it passes, but we need you. You, me, we the people. I love something Frederick Buechner wrote, “Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you."

We need you to raise a little money for the ACLU, to rally the troops for the next No Kings rally. We need you to send off anything you can manage to election integrity foundations and the National Immigration Rights Organization and Journalists Without Borders. We need you to pick up littler in your town and to help get food to the poor. These actions will make you happier and more hopeful than you would have thought possible.

We need voices raised in laughter so quislings in the White House will hear us. Nothing makes narcissists crazier than to be mocked. The Reflecting Pool is my main source of happiness these days, all those magical stingray shapes of American Flag Blue floating to the carpet of green algae on the surface, because someone ingeniously cut a 350 foot slit in it.

As the winds blow around us, we have got to help each other stay focused. Not obsessed, but paying attention. It connects us to spirit and humanity and reality. There is a lot of hopeful stuff going on in America’s reality these days—the polls, the courts, the rising disgust towards John Roberts’ Dred Scott court. Oh, and the collapse of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base, almost as fun as the Reflecting Pool. Those big babies!  Such fairweather fanatics. A few tiny snafus of his part—economic collapse, skyrocking inflation, pointless foreign wars, surrender to the Iranians—and boo hoo, the sycophants peel away.

Yes, the howl and bluster throw us off balance and prick our skin, and some days we can’t remember what to do. So, we ask around. The whole system works because we are not all nuts on the same day. My Jesuit friend Tom Weston always repeats, when I call him on terrible days, “We do what’s possible.” That means practical, simple, and kind. Those actions will save us. Decency is a windbreaker.

You don't mind the wind quite so much when you’re old, or at least you resist it less. Zen thinking is old age: Wow, we have a lot of wind today. You know that it all just comes know. Sigh: It all just comes. Secret of life. When  you're younger, you would like reality to be better than it is, but you learn to more-or-less accept whatever's coming.It takes so much less energy, and it leads to a little gratitude.

Look at flowers the next time you’re in an idiot wind. Of course, look at flowers as many times a day as you can, but even tossed about in the wind, flowers are saying, We’re air, we're breath, we're light, we float, even though we have roots. When the wind dies down—and, note to self, the wind always dies down—the flowers bow to each other.

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Now he’s copying me again by going out and selling seats in writing retreats, something I did for decades before I met him. I don’t teach much anymore because travel has all the delight of a dental chair for me. Neal claims he enjoys airports and airplanes still, which makes me wonder whether I married a serious person.

But as a good tradwife, which I’m trying to be, I’ll support him in his cockamamie ventures, especially the ones that get him out from underfoot. Neal is leading a five-day retreat in Montana in September, a few miles from Yellowstone, when the tourists are gone and the animals are starting their migrations—bison, elk, moose and even the occasional wolf, moving downhill everywhere you turn.

Seriously, folks, Neal is a master teacher at the two things he’ll be focusing on: taming the inner critic and improving sentences. For nearly ten years now I’ve watched his students light up and gape at his unusual techniques, and return again and again.

If you’re interested, here’s the link: shapesoftruth.com/montana-retreat

I would dare to ask whether simple cloth coat holiness has gotten lost in the current fever dream, and whether we can be fully immersed in this no matter what nightmare we are going through together. Maybe broken isn’t the end of the world. Maybe broken is a portal.

Let’s start with what we mean by “holy.”

The word derives from whole, uninjured, healthy, complete. I am not always feeling whole these days. Rather, I am often rattled, sad, mad, existentially tired, and crunchy. I would love a nice burning bush about now—but the holy doesn’t come only from the divine, as I understand it. It’s woven through life.

The holy is not a spectacle, the Rockettes on stage at the Taj Mahal backed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It is more often felt in small graces, blessings, mitzvahs, although you do have to be paying attention to catch the momentousness of the moment. That’s the rub. It is around us, above us, below us, and inside us all the time. It’s here, but often I am not.

My path is to make altars around the house: feathers to remind us of flight, weightlessness, grace; something from the beach that has been tossed and churned, brought to beauty by turbulence. They function as cognitive centering devices, taking my mind off the disaster of it all, about which I can do almost nothing today, except to share myself with the poor and suffering. Goofy altars make my heart lighter, and this is the gateway drug to generosity.

Maybe our definition of holy and whole have to change. The early morning is holy. Holy is the warmth of the grocer or grandchild, or a bowl of homegrown tomatoes from the neighbor who once reported you on Nextdoor. I’m whole, -ish, older, slower, with a few dings.

I light candles. Candles remind us how much light remains in the darkness—seriously, it is everywhere if you remind yourself to look around. Warmth, illumination, and in the ho,y days, life anew. The triumph of light over darkness, as in the Persian tradition of Yalda: gathering with loved ones by candlelight and firelight, reading poetry and telling stories—and the inevitable sacrament of overeating special foods—to celebrate the longest night of the year. These are the darkness days, the darkness nights of the soul. Rumi said, “If everything around seems dark, look again…You may be the light.”

It’s hard now, as life so often is. Suffering is part of the beauty of the human drama. (I hate that.) To find what is scared—kindness and the inviolable—amid the loss, restores us.

All of these rituals offer connection with the larger, truer world, with the ancient, with timelessness and the luminous now. They offer benevolent distraction, refocus. They enliven.

E

Yes, everything feels ruined some days, in the big picture and at the dining room table. So if broken is what we done got, where do we begin the repairs?

One possible solution is how the ancient Japanese repaired broken pottery with gold along the mended spots. You dishonor things if you won’t admit they are broken. You value them by repairing them. The gold edging adds to the broken things’ beauty. You adorn the cracks so now they really show. (And as Leonard Cohen reminds us, that’s how the light gets in.)

The world is broken. What is the gold?

On the visible level, the gold is appreciation that comes from paying attention with gratitude to what is left: We praise the big things, the gifts of life, love, nature. We are blown away by people’s courage, neighbors protecting neighbors. But don’t forget nice windows, your books, the curated strew of stuff that hooks us into memories and people. I raise my eyes not only to the mountains and stars but to my living room beams, to the view outside the windows. I savor the fresh air when I open them; it’s the breath of the house. Breath! Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe. This is all I need to remember most of the time.

Left to my own devices, I am steeped in dread. But I am not left to my own devices. I have you, and all my moral heroes, who all pretty much say the same thing: keep the faith, love like crazy, take care of each other. Wavy Gravy adds, “Dare to struggle, dare to grin.”

Life wants to keep reminding us of its sacred self, but we have to open our eyes and hearts. Yes, it all looks like hell some days, and how can we possibly restore what the locusts have eaten, but God, what a sunset. And I so appreciate the roof over my head, and maybe most of all, indoor plumbing. There is an exuberant patch of poppies and weeds outside my window. The poppies are lanterns: light over darkness, good over evil. Light your lantern with self-love. Shine.

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David and I met years ago through a mutual friend. The first time we spoke was on the phone and we talked about God for half an hour. He mentioned that he had some facial deformity, and I thought, well, whatever, and we talked some more. Then he came to my church, and it turns out he has the most severe facial deformities I’ve ever seen.

He was born with an extensive and benign tumor on the bottom left quadrant of his face, which surgeons tried to remove when he was very young. In the process, they removed his lower lip, and then gave him such extensive radiation that the lower part of his face stopped growing, and he was covered with plum-colored burns.

He is 55 now, with silvery hair and bright blue eyes.

Last week I saw him in performance at a local community center at a benefit for the refugees in Kosovo. He was wearing a dress shirt in plum purple, which exemplifies the kind of tender and jaunty bravery with which I have come to associate him. He stepped out onstage before a hundred grown-ups and a dozen children, and stood smiling while people got a good look. Then he suggested we ask him, in a conversational tone and in unison, “David, what happened to your face?” When we did, he explained about the tumor, the surgery and all those radiation burns.

He told of wanting to form a gang of the coolest disfigured people in the world, like the Phantom, the Beast from “Beauty and the Beast,” Freddie Krueger and Michael Jackson. They’d go places as a group — bowling, perhaps, or to one of the make-over counters at the next Macy’s White Flower Day Sale.

“People assume I had an awful childhood,” he continued. “But I didn’t. I was loved and esteemed by my parents. My face may be unique, but my experiences aren’t. I believe they are universal.”

Wouldn’t you think that having that thing on his face totally messed with his adolescent sex life? Of course it did, he said. And he was a little fat too, a chubby little disfigured guy. But these things were not nearly as detrimental as having been raised Catholic; having been, as he put it, an incense survivor.

Telling his stories through a crazy mouth, a jumble of teeth, only one lip and a too-large tongue, David’s voice did not sound garbled but strangely like a brogue; like that of a Scottish person who just had a shot of Novocain.

“We with facial deformities are children of the dark,” he said. “Our shadow is on the outside.And we can see in the dark: We can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society and even to God.

“All those years, I kept my bad stories in the dark, but not anymore. Now I am stepping out into the light. And this face has turned out to be an elaborately disguised gift from God.”

He spoke of the hidden scary scarred parts inside us all, the soul disfigurement, the fear deep inside that we’re unacceptable; and while he spoke, his hands moved fluidly in expressions that his face can’t make. His hands are beautiful, fair, light as air, light as a ballet dancer’s.

He told of his first game of spin-the-bottle, when the girl who was chosen to kiss him recoiled in horror, and he said to her, debonairly, “You know you want me.” Then he admits sheepishly that he didn’t actually say that for 20 years, but that in soul-time, it’s never too late. He told of loving a teenage girl named Carol, of how it took months to ask her out, but that when he did, she accepted. They went to the movies and then afterwards sat on a couch on his front porch, and he kept trying to put his arm around her but couldn’t quite, so they talked and talked and talked. He wanted to kiss her but was too shy to ask; he was afraid it was like asking her to kiss a monster, and finally she said, “I need to walk on home now,” and he said, “Carol, I want to kiss you,” and she said, “David? I thought you’d never ask.”

That was a moment of true grace, and from this experience, he built a church inside of himself. There is no physical church but his own life: Both his performances and his work teaching people to tell their stories, their marvelous, screwed-up and often hilarious resurrection stories. Voila: a church.

“We in the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity do not believe in miracles,” he said. “But we do believe that you have to stay alert, because good things happen. When God opens the door, you’ve got to put your foot in it.

“Look, 80 percent sincerity is about as good as it’s going to get. So is 80 percent compassion. Eighty percent celibacy. So 20 percent of the time, you just get to be yourself.”

God, it’s such subversive material, so contrary to everything society leads us to believe — that if you look good, you’ll be happy, and have it all together, and then you’ll be successful and nothing will go wrong and you won’t have to die, and the rot can’t get in.

In the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity, you definitely don’t have to look good, but you are supposed to meditate. Following David’s instructions, you sit quietly with your eyes closed and follow your breath in and out of your body, gently watching your mind. Your mantra should go like this: “Why am I doing this? This is such a waste! I have so much to do! My butt itches …” And if you stick to it, he promised, from time to time calmness and peace of mind will intrude. After some practice with this basic meditation, you will be able to graduate to panic meditations, and then sex fantasy meditations. And meditations on what you will do when you win the Lotto.

When David insists you are fine exactly the way you are, you find yourself almost believing him. When he talks about unconditional love, he gives you a new lease on life, because the way he explains it you may for the first time believe that even you could taste of this. Because, as he explains it, in the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity, everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but has a shelf life of about eight to 10 seconds. So instead of beating yourself up because you only feel it fleetingly, you savor those moments when it appears. “So we might say to our beloved, ‘Honey, I’ve been having these feelings of unconditional love for you for the last eight to 10 seconds.’ Or, ‘Darling? I’ll love you till the very end of dinner.'”

He is married to a beautiful woman named Marlena. After listening to his lovely words, his magic, this doesn’t seem at all strange. There he is, standing in front of a crowd, and everyone can see that just about the worst thing physically that could happen to a person has happened to him. Yet he’s enjoying himself immensely, talking about 10 seconds of grace he felt here, 10 seconds he felt there, how it filled him and how he makes those moments last a little longer. It can fill him because he fixed the hole in his boat. Everyone watching gets happy because he’s secretly giving instruction on how this could happen for them, too, this militant self-acceptance. He lost the great big outward thing, the good-looking packaging, and still the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brilliant mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue eyes, those beautiful ballet hands.

The children, mostly sitting in the front rows, get him right away. Maybe they don’t have so many other overlays yet, of armor and prejudice, so Spirit can reach out and grab them faster. Maybe it’s partly that they’re sitting so close, but whatever the reason, they gaze up at him like he’s a rock star. “I look different to you now, right?” he asked them when he was done, and they nodded, especially the teenagers. To be in adolescence is, for most of us, to be facially deformed. He makes you want to build a fort with him under the table with blankets, because it looks like such fun when he does it. He builds a fort with blankets and then lets you lift them up and peek in, at him and at you. You laugh with recognition, with relief that your baggage and flaws are not vile, unmentionable. It’s like soul aerobics.

“I’ve been forced to find my inner beauty,” he said in closing. “Doing that gave me a deep faith in myself. Eighty percent of the time. And that faith has been a window so I can see the beauty in you, too. The light in your eyes. Your warmth. So thank you.”

Thunderous clapping begins, and he bows shyly, ducking his head and then looking up, beaming at us all. He holds his palms up as if about to give a benediction. His hands catch the light like those of the youngest child here.

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The whole system works because we are not all nuts on the same day.

Some mornings you wake up and even though there may be fog or clouds, you remember that the dome of sky is always blue, and the clouds will blow away. When friends call or text that it is all hopeless and the country cannot bounce back from the destruction, and that nothing is fair, you’re able to reach into your hobo’s brindle of hope and good cheer.

You tell them that yeah, they may be right, but your dad used to say that fair is where the pony rides are, so maybe we just put that aside for now. You remind them to lower the bar of expectations, which are premeditated resentments. You tell them you love them, that we are all in this together, and that they might consider taking the next right action: a small check to the ACLU or to my fiancé Sherrod Brown (don’t tell Neal.) What about a short walk through the neighborhood, picking up litter and waving to people. It’s early summer, and the gardens and bushes are still filled with flowers? What about taking milk and Oreos to the food pantry?

If they don’t metaphorically slam down the phone, they may have lightened up and laughed a little with you, and that is a sign of resurrection.

Other mornings you wake up in a fever dream, of the war and Trump’s arch getting built and too many papers on the desk plus phone calls and emails to return, the Confederacy rising and the terrible traffic plus late last night you consulted Web MD and it diagnosed the new ache as almost certainly being cancer.

So some days you get to be there for people who are suffering, mostly by listening and making gentle sounds of commiseration, and other days you remember that your mind truly is a bad neighborhood  that you should not go into alone, and amazingly, you reach out.

(Perhaps now is a good time to repeat the story I always told my Sunday School kids, of the terrified girl who can’t fall asleep in the dark, whose mother keeps coming in crankily to say that God is right there in the room with her. After three of her mother’s pep talks, the young girl finally responds, “I need someone with skin on.” This is what we all need sometimes, evidence of goodness that has skin and socks on. )

Every sober alcoholic I know, including my tiny princess self, has a hard time with the mixed grille. Of course we are happy and grateful when things are good, when our work is going well and our families are doing okay and we stop to notice the expansiveness of the summer day into the evening, and into the diamond lights of the sky. (Yay.) And old age and sobriety have given us tools to survive and help when times are tough. But it is when good and bad are swirling together, which is (let’s face it) a lot of the time, that people like me are apt to become big whiny babies.

This is what it is like for me these days. I cannot bear what has happened to our country, and yet the warm air of early summer feels like a gentle warm stroke on my arm. It is going to get hideous hot soon because of the climate emergency, but today the weather is saying, This is a ideal climate for you. Rest into it; dig it, baby girl.

But tomorrow, I protest, it’s going to rain right when I was going to go for a walk with my favorite nun, who marches in No Kings rallies with me. Sigh:  you can't raise your fist at the sky and say shine upon me, Dude—but not too hot, please. Right? Being a grown up means you handle not getting your way with at least a token amount of grace.

Even the frogs are finished. They’ve gone quiet. Their mating and breeding season is over. They are all lying in bed having cigarettes. No more croaky frog serenades. The birds have stepped in, though, and gotten extra loud. There was one strident bird singing at the top of its lungs last night when I went to check out the moon with my grandson, and when I went to let the dog out to pee early this morning, I’d swear that same bird was still going at it, an antidote to all the bad noise, changing the sky.

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Meanwhile, I was working with writers who were suffering from low self-esteem, performance anxiety and writer’s block, often without yet having put a single word to paper. I’d written a book on everything I knew about writing called Bird by Bird more than 20 years earlier. Basically, it came down to two suggestions: First, write really short passages or memories and string them together. Second, let yourself write a bad first draft, because this is how 95% of the writers we all love get their work done.

Pooling our experiences, Neal and I just released a book called Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. This hybrid of our long literary careers is for anyone writing anything, whether a novel or what Neal was doing when I first met him — memoirs. I think of memoirs as a gateway drug to novels and screenplays, the perfect training ground.

On our second date, Neal showed me a list of writing hacks, a tip sheet of rules he had compiled over the decades since he worked as a journalist. I started passing this list out to all my writing students: Trust your voice. Take out the clichés. Try not to use the word “actually” — and many more.

A couple of years ago, Neal began to turn his list into Good Writing, with a short essay on each rule and examples of how he or a famous writer used it. In a few cases, he even quoted my work, but I think this was just so that I would be nicer to him and not complain so often about his horrible sneezes.

Neal’s first rule in this book of 36 rules was, “Use strong verbs.” He cites “walk” as a typical weak verb. Not only does a more vivid verb punch up the sentence, it can also get rid of the need for an explanatory adverb. “Raced” doesn’t require “quickly”, and “meander” doesn’t require “aimlessly.”

When I give Neal my work to edit, which is whenever I write anything for publication, he circles the adverbs, and if you read between the lines, he is disappointed in me. I worry he may be reconsidering the marriage (likewise when I break his cranky little rules about using clichés or the word “very”).

After reading the draft of his book, I asked whether I could add my two cents to every essay, and he said sure, but that “add my two cents” was a cliché. (Men!)

For example: after his explanation and examples for “Use strong verbs,” I wrote, “A verb describes what the subject of your sentence is doing: ‘The dog ate our Thanksgiving turkey.’ (This really happened 10 years ago.) But Bodhi did not ‘eat’ the turkey. He devoured, gobbled, wolfed down and inhaled our Thanksgiving turkey. Bad dog.”

This is how Neal created memoirs for his clients, using rules we integrated into our new book as guides for writing memoirs, and, in fact, anything, even business memos. He’d begin with a tape recorder, though now everyone uses a cell phone to record.

He reinforced what I knew to be true in my own writing, that the art of the interview is about asking open questions that inspire deep-dive answers. I would overhear him asking his clients to drill down into anecdotes about their childhoods with questions like: “Who was your favorite teacher in elementary school? What did you watch on TV? (You only had fourchannels?) Tell me about the farm, San Francisco after the war, the pool or pond where you learned how to swim.”

I’ve been asking drill-down questions since I wrote my first novel, Hard Laughter, nearly 50 years ago, interviewing family, friends and experts for detailed descriptions, impressions and facts. Memoirs that chronicle the ordinary stuff of life, memories of youth and recent years are magical and chilling and compelling to readers.

I repeat: four TV channels?

After transcribing the tapes (speech-to-text apps are now accurate and often free), it’s time to organize the manuscript, usually chronologically, then edit it and finally arrive at a bad first draft. Victory!

As you begin your second draft, editing can turn into a game, like searching for shells at the beach. Read your work sentence by sentence and seek out flabby verbs. Take out all the lines you think make you sound so erudite. Neal writes in Rule 7, “If it sounds literary, it isn’t.” Above all, as Rule 14 advises, “Take out the boring stuff.”

Find a time when you can sit down for an hour most days, undisturbed. Commit to this. As I tell my writing students, no one cares if you write or not, so you’d better. Stop not writing: It’s going to break your heart if you’ve always wanted to write a memoir or novel but never got around to it.

Establish the habit of writing by creating a long list of every early memory you have, starting with your first holidays, extended family, kindergarten, elementary school and then move onward.

Now, write up these memories for us or speak them into a recording device. Later, you can go through and take out extraneous words and the boring stuff. You can seize upon each verb and decide whether there might be a stronger one. Strike out the excess adverbs and adjectives as if they are tsetse flies. But trust me: Simply start writing down your history and the rest will flow.

It’s about time. Quit putting it off. Make that list of all your brightest, strangest, sweetest, silliest, heartfelt and altogether most memorable times of your life. Then write or tell us one. Then write or tell another. Think of each memory as a pearl on a necklace. Your pearls. Your necklace.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/786813/good-writing-by-neal-allen-and-anne-lamott/

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Saturday, May 30, 11-2 Pacific. Registration: https://a-writing-room.myflodesk.com/saturday-writing

I am honored and surprised that you asked me to speak today.

This must be a magical day for you. I wouldn't know. I accidentally forgot to graduate from college. I meant to, 30 years ago, but things got away from me. I did graduate from high school, though -- do I get a partial credit for that? Although, unfortunately, my father had forgotten to pay the book bill, so at the graduation ceremony, when I opened the case to see my diploma, it was empty. Except for a ransom note that said, see Mrs. Foley, the bookkeeper, if you ever want to see your diploma alive again.

I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons -- to learn -- but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons -- to become a writer. Those of you who have read my work know that instead, I accidentally became a Kelly girl for a while. Then, In a dazzling career move, I got hired as a clerk typist in the Nuclear Quality Assurance Department at Bechtel, where I worked typing and sorting triplicate forms. I hate to complain, but it was not very stimulating work. But it paid the bills, so I could write my stories every night when I got home. I worked at Bechtel for six months -- but I had nothing to do with the current administration's shameless war profiteering. I just sorted triplicate forms. You've got to believe me.

It was a terrible job, at which I did a terrible job, but it paid $600 a month, which was enough to pay my rent and bills. This is the real fly in the ointment if you are crazy enough to want to be an artist -- you have to give up your dreams of swimming pools and fish forks, and take any old job. At 20, I got hired at a magazine as an assistant editor, and I think that was the last real job I've ever had.

I bet I'm beginning to make your parents really nervous -- here I am sort of bragging about being a dropout, and unemployable, and secretly making a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what they want is for you to do well in your field, make them look good, and maybe also make a tiny fortune.

But that is not your problem. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

At some point I finally started getting published, and experiencing a meager knock-kneed standing in the literary world, and I started to get almost everything that many of you graduates are hoping for -- except for the money.

i got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled -- all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you -- stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame. The culture says these things will save you, as long as you also manage to keep your weight down. But the culture lies.

Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams -- what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred -- I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then 15 years later, I even started to make real money.

I'd been wanting to be a successful author my whole life. But when I finally did it, I was like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing all her life -- metal, wrapped up in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake. Fake doesn't feed anything. Only spirit feeds spirit, in the same way only your own blood type can sustain you. It had nothing that could slake the lifelong thirst I had for a little immediacy, and connection.

So from the pinnacle of my wise old years, I want to tell you that what you're looking for is already inside you. You've heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it or apply for it. The best job in the world can't give it to you. Neither can success, or fame, or financial security -- besides which, there ain't no such thing. J.D. Rockefeller was asked, "How much money is enough?" and he said, "Just a little bit more."

So it can be confusing -- most of your parents want you to do well, to be successful. They want you to be happy -- or at least happy-ish. And they want you to be nicer to them; just a little nicer -- is that so much to ask?

They want you to love, and be loved, and to find peace, and to laugh and find meaningful work. But they also -- some of them -- a few of them -- not yours -- yours are fine -- they also want you to chase the bunny for a while. To get ahead, sock some away, and then find a balance between the greyhound bunny-chase, and savoring your life.

But the thing is that you don't know if you're going to live long enough to slow down, relax, and have fun, and discover the truth of your spiritual identity. You may not be destined to live a long life; you may not have 60 more years to discover and claim your own deepest truth -- like Breaker Morant said, you have to live every day as if it's your last, because one of these days, you're bound to be right.

So I thought it might help if I just went ahead and told you what I think is the truth of your spiritual identity...

Actually, I don't have a clue.

I do know you are not what you look like, or how much you weigh, or how you did in school, and whether you get to start a job next Monday or not. Spirit isn't what you do, it's ... well, again, I don't actually know. They probably taught this junior year at Goucher. But I know that you feel it best when you're not doing much -- when you're in nature, when you've very quiet, or, paradoxically, listening to music.

I know you can feel it and hear it in the music you love, in the bass line, in the harmonies, in the silence between notes; in Chopin and Eminem, Emmylou Harris, Bach, whoever. You can close your eyes and feel the divine spark, concentrated in you, like a little Dr. Seuss firefly. It flickers with aliveness and relief, like an American in a foreign country who suddenly hears someone speaking in English. In the Christian tradition, they say that the soul rejoices in hearing what it already knows. And so you pay attention when that Dr. Seuss creature inside you sits up and says, "Yo!"

We can see spirit made visible in people being kind to each other, especially when it's a really busy person, taking care of a needy annoying person. Or even if it's terribly important you, stopping to take care of pitiful, pathetic you. In fact, that's often when we see spirit most brightly.

It's magic to see spirit largely because it's so rare. Mostly you see the masks and the holograms that the culture presents as real. You see how you're doing in the world's eyes, or your family's, or -- worst of all -- yours, or in the eyes of people who are doing better than you -- much better than you -- or worse. But you are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love, and, while it is increasingly hard to believe during this presidency, you are free. You're here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill -- and we're all terminally ill on this bus -- all that will matter is memories of beauty, that people loved you, and you loved them, and that you tried to help the poor and innocent.

So how do we feed and nourish our spirit, and the spirit of others?

First, find a path, and a little light to see by. Every single spiritual tradition says the same three things: 1) Live in the now, as often as you can, a breath here, a moment there. 2) You reap exactly what you sow. 3) You must take care of the poor, or you are so doomed that we can't help you.

You don't have to go overseas. There are people right here who are poor in spirit; worried, depressed, dancing as fast as they can, whose kids are sick, or whose retirement savings are gone. There is great loneliness among us, life-threatening loneliness. People have given up on peace, on equality. They've even given up on the Democratic Party, which I haven't, not by a long shot. You do what you can, what good people have always done: You bring thirsty people water; you share your food, you try to help the homeless find shelter, you stand up for the underdog.

Anything that can help you get your sense of humor back feeds the spirit, too. Laughter is carbonated holiness. Find people who laugh gently at themselves, who remind you gently to lighten up.

Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down. Some of you start jobs Monday; some of you desperately wish you did -- some of your parents are asthmatic with anxiety that you don't. They shared this with me before the ceremony began.

But again, this is not your problem. If your family is hell-bent on you making a name for yourself in the field of, say, molecular cell biology, then maybe when you're giving them a final tour of campus, you can show them to the admissions office. I doubt very seriously that they could even get into U.C. Berkeley -- I talked to a professor who said there is not a chance he could get in these days.

So I would recommend that you all just take a long deep breath, and stop. Just be where your butts are, and breathe. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is trying to shame you into hopping right back up onto the rat exercise wheel.

Rest, but pay attention. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is stealing your freedom, your personal and civil liberties, and then smirking about it. I'm not going to name names. Just send money to the ACLU whenever you can.

In general, slow down if you can. Better yet, lie down.

In my 20s I devised a school of relaxation that has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the ensuing years -- it was called Prone Yoga. You just lie around as much as possible. You could read, listen to music, you could space out, or sleep. But you had to be lying down. Maintaining the prone.

You've graduated. You have nothing left to prove, and besides, it's a fool's game. If you agree to play, you've already lost. It's Charlie Brown and Lucy, with the football. If you keep getting back on the field, they win. There are so many great things to do right now. Write. Sing. Rest. Eat cherries. Register voters. And -- oh my God -- I nearly forgot the most important thing: refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really thin. Promise me you'll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you've just eaten. The pants may be lying! There is way too much lying and scolding going on politically right now without your pants getting in on the act, too.

So bless you. You've done an amazing thing. And you are loved; you are capable of lives of great joy and meaning. It's what you are made of. And it's what you're for. So take care of yourselves; take care of each other. We thank you in advance for the incredible work that lies ahead for you. And God bless you good.

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This is for those of you who may feel a kind of sheet metal loneliness on Sunday, who had an awful mother, or a mother who recently died, or wanted to but didn't get to have kids, or had kids who ended up breaking your hearts. If you love the day, and have or had a great mom and happy highly successful kids, maybe skip it:

I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother’s Day. I didn’t want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some obligatory annual display of gratitude. Perhaps Mother’s Day will come to mean something to me as I grow even dottier in my dotage, and I will find myself bitter and distressed when Sam dutifully ignores the holiday. Then he will feel ambushed by my expectations, and he will retaliate by putting me away even sooner than he was planning to — which, come to think of it, would be even more reason for me to resist Mother’s Day.

But Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.

The illusion is that mothers are automatically more fulfilled and complete. But the craziest, grimmest people this Sunday will be many mothers themselves, stuck herding their own mothers and weeping or sullen children and husbands’ mothers into seats at restaurants. These mothers do not want a box of chocolate. They may have announced for a month that they are trying not to eat sugar. Oh well, eat up.

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or lost children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even the turn-off-your-cellphone announcer is going to open by saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!”

You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose. Or an ER.

It should go without saying that I also hate Valentine’s Day, even those years when I’ve had a boyfriend or some random husband.

Mothering perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. Meanwhile, we know that many of the most evil people in the country are politicians who have weaponized parenthood.

Don’t get me wrong: There were a million times I could have literally died of love for my son, and I’ve felt stoned on his rich, desperate love for me. I felt it yesterday when I was in despair. But I bristle at the whispered lie that you can know this level of love and self-sacrifice only if you are a parent. What a crock! We talk about “loving one’s child” as if a child were a mystical unicorn. A majority of American parents secretly feel that if you have not had and raised a child, your capacity for love is somehow diminished. They secretly believe that non-parents cannot possibly know what it is to love unconditionally, to be selfless, to put yourself at risk for the gravest loss. But in my experience, it’s parents who are prone to exhibit terrible self-satisfaction and selfishness, who can raise children as adjuncts, like rooms added on in a remodel. Often their children’s value and achievements in the world are reflected glory, necessary for these parents’ self-esteem, and sometimes, for the family’s survival. This is how children’s souls are destroyed.

But my main gripe about Mother’s Day is that it feels incomplete and imprecise. The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them, including aunties and brothers; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat. I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, who unconsciously raised me to self-destruct; and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, including my mom, even after their passing.

The point is, have a beautiful, wonderful Mother’s Day if it is a holiday that brings you joy, but just be conscious that for many, many people, it isn’t. Proceed according. Deal?

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      The other half of the time, I feel a desperate relief that someone is reminding me how appropriate it is that I feel completely discombobulated and hopeless, and yet that there is hope. Yesterday morning I woke to an absolutely unremarkable sky. Not a cloud in sight, gray but with some weak suggestion of brightness to the right where the sun could be sensed. I might have sensed a mere hint of gold, of warmth, but way too subtle for me in my current condition.

      As usual in the morning, I turned to Scripture. Rebecca Solnit reminds me, “People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.” And Mary Oliver: "Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.” Jesus (paraphrased): “Don’t be a jerk, and help take care of my sheep.” (cf Jefferson Airplane.)

      So here’s the thing: Right now, circumstances have shaken up the snow globe, and for nervous cases such as myself, it is hard to get my bearings. Even before this godawful and illegal war, there were the billionaires cavalierly running and ruining things, a far right Supreme Court, Epstein, etc. not to mention our own mixed-grilled lives— struggling family members, climate change, the slow-mo decline of aging, and then? Ring ring ring: Our beloved old friends getting godawful diagnoses and dying. I ask you: Life just gets so much lifier than I was prepared for.

     Some mornings after reading the most recent news of corruption, evil and treason at the highest levels of power, I’m reminded of Joseph Goldstein, the Buddhist writer, who once said, “Another day? Didn’t we just have one yesterday?”

     It can be unfathomably weird and hard these days. How do we see a way forward through the swirling white particles of fake snow? How do we not give up and let them ruin and steal everything that is beautiful about America?

      Well, here’s the thing: What has always worked before will work again. We stick together. We feed the poor. We take to the streets, loudly and peacefully, like Molly Ivins said, banging pots and pans and shouting, “This must end.” We keep the faith in We the People, in the Constitution, in the basic goodness and courage of people.

     I have seen alchemy many, many times in my 72 years here: against all odds, lead transformed to gold. Sober drunks like me are Exhibit A.

     My Jesuit friend Tom Weston always tells me, when I am at my most frantic and doomed, “We do what is possible, what is practical, simple and  kind.” You all have got the kind part down: We wave to people, we return phone calls and library books, pick up litter, flirt with very old people in the express line even though they have brought coupons. You give some money or food or clothing to the poor, drop dollar bills into paper cups, you show up and listen to people who are hurting, while refraining from offering your incredibly annoying advice.

     The game of life is rough, and a lot of people are playing hurt. We listen. We get them water.

     The practical part is to help protect the midterms by supporting the integrity and possibly even the existence of the midterms. You give anything you can afford to the ACLU, and to the nonpartisan Election Official Legal Defense Network. If you are struggling with higher food and gas prices because of the illegal Iran war, have a garage sale and donate what you make that day. Doing this will make you happier that you could have imagine possible, what with the appropriate terror and grief so many of us are feeling these days. I promise: You’ll feel as enlivened and hopeful as you did at the last No King’s Rally. If you don’t, I will gladly refund your misery.

     The practical/spiritual part, in the loosest meaning of the word “spiritual” is to fill up on nature, on her staggering, showoffy beauty   and her schoolmarm lessons: let her blow your mind with awe and the interconnectedness of all things. Remember that root systems share their oxygen, water, and nutrients with trees who may not be doing so well. We are in this together and we are connected. There is still so much magic in the world, let alone those the strange sidelong paths that Reverend Solnit describes. No matter how tempting it is to check out, stop hitting the snooze button. Keep looking up and around: Guess what? The sun did rise yesterday, not blindingly so, but as a plain old ordinary yellow sun, as life and possibility.

    So here’s the thing: A golden portent of light means that that’s where the sun will come up. Stay alert, and let your good heart stay open. I know I sound like a broken record, but here’s the thing: I think we’ve got this.

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