Traveling with Anne

Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

“Here are the best two prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me,’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, ‘Whatever,’ and then for the evening, ‘Oh, well,’ but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.”

“Don’t forget, God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this.”

“God: I wish you could have some permanence, a guarantee or two, the unconditional love we all long for. ‘It would be such skin off your nose?’ I demand of God. I never get an answer. But in the meantime I have learned that most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of people.”

“’I guess it’s like discovering you’re on the shelf of a pawnshop, dusty and forgotten and maybe not worth very much. But Jesus comes in and tells the pawnbroker, “I’ll take her place on the shelf. Let her go outside again.’”

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
and there is only the dance. ~ T.S. Eliot

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” ~ Eugene O’Neill

The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe. ~ Joanna Macy

“There are picture of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition. But I like that, when who we are shows. Everything is usually so masked or perfumed or disguised in the world, and it’s so touching when you get to see something real and human. I think that’s why most of us stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull – because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much. And that gives us license to try on that radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-acceptance; we’re allowed to escape from underneath one of the fatwas.”

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move. Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
~ Rumi