Dusk, Night, Dawn: A Conversation on Love, Faith, and Politics with author Anne Lamott

grace again you and i both believe and say that grace bats last but grace meets you exactly where you are meet your country meets you meet your child exactly where they are and it doesn't leave any of us where it found us right kind of nudges us into the wheeled barrel and takes us to maybe a little bit sunnier place hey everybody it's miriam williamson and thank you so much for joining me today um i was listening to somebody talk the other day about intergenerational dialogue which is a phrase i've heard more and more of and i thought that that's a really good thing because i think of age as an interesting phenomenon sort of like a big house and every decade is like another room in the house and when you are in the room you're not any longer in the room you used to be in and you're not yet in the room that you will one day be in and all the rooms are fantastic in their own way and they are all equally important but they're they're very different and it seems to me that the older you are the more you know certain things and the younger you are the more you know certain other things so when i hear phrases like intergenerational dialogue it makes me feel happy because i feel like we're starting at a new level and that new level of course goes back to ancient times when there was greater respect for the elders and i think also perhaps greater respect for the young and um there can be a deeper sharing of information and when i say information i don't just mean data i really mean the wisdom-born of life experience i know in my own life i do feel like the second half of life is where you try to understand everything you went through in the first half of life i had read somewhere that in youth you learn in age you understand and i am sometimes surprised myself at how much of my own life is spent trying to understand some things about experiences i had years ago which i just couldn't quite understand at the time at least not on the level that i do now so this idea of aging like fine wine i think you age like fine wine if there's a process of deeper understanding um this kind of alchemy of age this kind of brew when you put it all together it feels to me sort of like building a lasagna five years spent on the cheese and five years spent on the pasta and five years spent on the sauce then it always felt to me somewhere around 40 you start putting them all together and you have a whole lasagna but the 50s are not nothing i when i turned 50 i wrote a book actually called age of miracles about the new midlife i had read um a woman named lydia bronte who said that our generation has put 15 years more onto our lifespan but it's not at the end it's in the middle so middle age becomes a a more expanded piece of life and i talk in that book age of miracles about the fact that menopause and the menopausal years are kind of like a second puberty just like with the first puberty childhood passes away and the life of the adolescents comes into being midlife is is a similar kind of transition where one whole persona your body your your your spirit your personality something passes away and something comes to take its place i know several years ago jane fonda wrote a book that i think the uh she talked a lot about chapter three and for my generation uh i'm sort of the end of the boomer years there is chapter three is a big big topic um what happens now and you can see one of the things i talked about in the age of miracles is that you can see how people age you know you can see the people who are just doing this sort of slow denouement and you can see people who are experiencing age as as a regenerative process as a process in which you you blaze forth in a way you could never have blazed forth before because of what you know now how you put it all together alchemically uh into into this brew of of greater greater magic and possibility than you could ever have had before and i i do feel that there is a conscious or an unconscious decision on the part of everyone as we grow older how are you going to play this so i think that no matter what age we are the more we can understand you know the more you understand and the vertical the more powerful you can be on the horizontal the more you understand about what's really deeply going on inside you the deeper dynamics in life the more you can play the externalities of life in a much more powerful way well one of the people who has always been for me an accompaniment reading her books an accompaniment in the effort to understand more deeply what's really going on is the writer and lamont and i've had the honor to know annie for several years and all of her books are wonderful she wrote a book called bird by bird which is quintessential reading for anyone who wants to write or is a writer her book operating instructions when that came out when she gave birth to her son that that's a book which any new mother needs to read all of her books are fantastic she's read she's written 19 of them she's a very accomplished writer a very celebrated writer she's in the california hall of fame books like hallelujah anyway small victories almost everything and she has a new one and her new one i think and i will be telling her this i think it's the best yet um it's called dusk night dawn on revival and courage um and annie ruminates on a lot of things that's what she does she talks about motherhood she talks about jesus she's a she's a devoted christian she talks about sobriety she's very devoted to uh to the path of sobriety she is very left-wing she's really something her book is called dusk night dawn on revival and courage an impactful book a poignant book and in the last chapter a hilarious book i'm so glad she's joining me today welcome her and after that after the interview i hope you'll hang around for uh the question uh that i will be answering remember if you have a question for me write to marianne cast media dot com let's get started my friend annie lamont annie lamotte thank you thank you so much for being with me i'm so happy to be here you know i love the book i love the new one and um you said in the book that when you first got married everybody kept saying to you so so how's married life so um at the age of 65 you got married for the first time to someone you met online which i also thought was fascinating so i feel like i should say so so how's married life um your ruminations not only on your husband but the process by which you got to the point of meeting him recognizing him allowing yourself to be recognized what do you have to say about that well i got married three days after i got medicare i'm going to be 67 on on saturday and i got so i've been married for two years and one of them was in lockdown one of them has been in quarantine which i don't remember being included in the vows so it turned out that he was a beautiful choice and god is such a show-off to have brought us together and at the same time being in a house for 24 7 is a bit much and sometimes i will have given thanks that morning and then i'll listen to him chewing bacon and i'll feel like i'm just going to lose my mind you know but um well but then that passes yeah the book and in a way your whole career is about that what you call the double passport that we have there is the man chewing bacon in a way that you makes you want to just like scream and there is the fact that it's a total miracle that you found each other and that's what you do that's what your books do that's your signature it's both and and i think and i talked about this before you came on how you see age that way when we're younger we think there's a destination and then as we age we realize the destination is to better understand where we were and where we are and that of course is the gift of the book and you're able to do that in so many areas um one of the things that you said about meeting neil your husband was that you had stopped you know it's almost a cliche people say i stopped looking you didn't say it that way but you did make some comment about the fact that you just tried to make your own life more fun tried to make your own life as you live it now more beautiful and he found you what is that little piece of advice yeah i can tell you the story of what happened because it was very specific you know sometimes god is very trippy and woo-woo and you know it's like a lava lamp of spiritual weirdness and then other times it's like oh he hands you a white paper right and um like in the old dc days so what happened was my son was is living here and my grandson is living here and my older brother who's a fundamentalist christian was with me and i was taking i was like the flight attendant like i was at five years old i was like the flight attendant in my family because my parents were so unhappy i have an older brother a younger brother and i was taking care of my brother and my um son and my grandson you know just natural household stuff and i just realized how taken advantage i felt and by my grandson's mother and i and you know i got that bitter martyred feeling of resentment and i tried to get my brother my older brother to sort of listen just hear me say it right but he didn't he wanted to hand me a nice christian bumper sticker so i wanted to just poke him in the head like a baked potato because i just needed him to hear me not to try to fix me and so i said i have to leave right this second and i got in the car and i drove out to the country and i shouted and i raged and i hit the steering wheel and it wasn't adorable i sobbed it was it was a lifetime of having felt like uh you know that i was nobody's priority that i and so then about in 45 minutes later i pulled over and i've had a spiritual mentor for the 35 years i've been sober named horrible bonnie because she's always really really happy and again glad that i call and no matter what condition i'm in and i i was crying and furious and she said annie this is what we paid for and she said just tell me what's going on and i said i'm nobody's priority and i feel this kind of sheet metal loneliness sometimes and she said that's because you're not your own priority and you need to be and then you won't even have to think about it anymore and i came home and i was weirdly blissful i saw my older brother he didn't know i was having an episode or like we were talking about that i'd been in a state and i was just happy i loved him i love to be of service i love to cook for people and tend to them get them a lovely cup of tea and i became my own priority and i became back in love with myself and um and two weeks two months later i met neil on match and about two days later i became his priority and he became mine i love how you tell the story of that you had rejected him on matt.com because he he didn't like cats and then when you came back around to him and he said you already rejected me and you said take me back take me back well he's violently allergic to cats but so the first time we i saw him on match it's very handsome and tall and spiritual but um i i would need to be with somebody who can be around cats because cats and to me cats and dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of god here on this side of eternity and so and i had a cat and so he thought it was because he wasn't jesus enough but i don't care how jesusy somebody is i'm just you know wherever however it kind it comes through you umbilically and so um but then he said oh well if i put brewer's yeast on the cat's kibble i'm not allergic anymore well i thought he was just trying to you know how get me into bed or that he had a manuscript right because i'd been on match for a year and men had brought me manuscripts one brought me a plot treatment on our second date and said is it too soon it was like yeah and um oh my god that's so embarrassing right and um and then he uh and then i thought well i'll give him a chance because he's really luscious in every way he's brilliant brilliant maybe overly educated um and then um so we started putting kibble uh brewers she saw my cat's kibble and he stopped sneezing and we our cat sleeps with us for the last four and a half years well you tell a beautiful every word in the book is beautiful but when you said that he asked you to marry him you took a minute of silence and then you say can we have a cat and once he nodded then you said yes um something that you also just touched upon which is very um it's an experience that a lot of people are having today and that's that you're an intergenerational household you have your son living there and your son's son you've already talked about this rather stressful uh aspect of this a lot of people are going through it now a lot of reasons be are economic have to do with covert etc any particular advice or insight you throw out to people who are dealing with that well you know i just did a book club with readers uh it's called moms don't have time to read but it's women that are subversively finding time to read and they the woman i talked to had babies you know they don't only have babies and toddlers and little ones and scary teenagers they have old folks you know they have parents who have gotten old and a little funny or maybe a lot funny and so um what what i'm what i go through now is like nothing child's play compared to what most of the world has gone through and um the the advice i had was this thing about um somehow against all odds making yourself your own priority because you're coming then from a really filled up place where you're not offering love and support and nourishment and caregiving from a place of your swiss cheesy insides you're coming from a place of being filled up you know of of having a of my cup run us over instead of running around with a half empty cup trying to get people's overflow into your cup you know and people you know i taught i've taught writing for 30 years and people always spent most of the class classes explaining to me why they weren't writing yet but they were going to as soon as their last child is out of that right you get to see as soon as they moved up to the russian river where it's quiet when they have an office i didn't have an office until i was 40 something and uh and i said you know what you're not going to write once you're retired if you're not doing it now it's not going to happen you do it as a commitment you do it by pre-arrangement you know it's like thinking that if you lose 20 pounds you'll start to have good esteem self-esteem if you don't feel good about love radical self-love at 160 you're not going to have it at 140 because it's an inside job so i'd say to people like the moms with little kids and toddlers and scary teenagers around or to writing students meet me halfway find me half an hour you know if you can find me half an hour we can get down if you can get up half an hour earlier if you can write if you can go for a walk if you will walk outside and notice that the daffodils have all blossomed and when they're in their crazy yellow and orange clown frills and they're big schnauzes and you can do that for half an hour you're gonna nurture from a completely different place and so um that's the best advice i can offer and it's hard but you know what the book is about how good we are at hard you know we've stopped fast well that is crimes we've stopped smallpox we thought of the anti-retrovirals we overturned a fascism again months ago right i mean we're good at hard that is what the book is about is what you do believe in that which does not change the love of friends the love of community and you have that very profound and of course the older you get the more layers of your own insight talking about what you do believe in what you do have faith in i want to um before we get off the topic though of of making yourself your own priority so many of us having read your books feel like we know sam we know your experience as a mother but what what about being a grandmother what is different about being a grandmother well it's so much easier oh my god sam had a really tough teens and he got heavily into drugs and alcohol and um he then had a baby he went away for a year this very very profound rehab and kind of spiritual uh reset place in in the in uh both at a tofu farm in spokane and at a native american lodge and uh on the highest peak of the alleghenies he came back and and his response was to start dealing now on top of it and in fact he ended up on he ended up in jail but i go to a post up program for people that try to save and fix and rescue people and who have tiny control issues so when the bail bondsman said i said leave him there if i fish him out tonight he could die you know and um so sam was there for a couple nights which he did not love and the bill bondsman said to him you know i've been a bill bondsman and for 30 years in miranda not one single mother has ever said no to me leave him there right leave him there really and release him to his own higher power which is not me i'm a retired higher power and release him to the terrible consequences of his behavior which is the only thing that ever got a single person clean and sober in history and so not one single person has gotten anybody else clean and sober so then it made sense to him at 19 to have a baby so so um good idea sam and so then um he had a baby and he and the mom and the baby were all living with me just down the street from where we are now and at one point sam was just too erratic to be with the baby anymore and i set a boundary which is the secret of life and i said to him you can't be at this house anymore until you're clean and sober you know you got a little one now and you gotta you gotta clean up your act and not be scary and um and i said when i sent him away and i took my sticky fingers off the controls of that grown that young man he called me ten days later this is nine and a half years ago and he said i've got a week under my belt now the men in the san francisco community fished me out i'm going to two meetings a day i think can i come over and see i said can you be here for dinner you know and then he never left because he never left sobriety so having a baby a grandchild we sam and i actually wrote a book about it called some assembly required that's my favorite you know i've written 19 books now it's my favorite and it's about the experience of gree being a grandparent because having failed to save and fix and rescue sam i set about trying to save and fix and rescue the baby and i had to remember that my help is not helpful you know god's hope is helpful a parent's help is helpful but you know how what you we have kids that we're the same age we have kids that are the same age and we're both single parents we've had the incredible credible hard time a long time ago in my case but left to my own devices i would run along sam on his hero's journey with like sunscreen in a juice box and that would be so damaging to his sense of self into a sense of expansion and wonder and getting to make his own mistakes and getting to make comebacks and so i want to do certain things with sam and his son and i grip myself gently by the wrist and i say annie stop breathe let's go back inside so you know it's one day at a time and some days are just way too lifey for me but um we both have a program and jax is lovely he's 11 and a half you know he's i can't believe it i said to him at his last first birthday i said oh god i thought you were like four he said nana i live here how can you think i'm four well i think i'm 47 and daddy's 20. but um anyway he's lovely and very funny well in the book you not only go forward talking about the sun talk about the grandson but also of course go backwards talking about your parents and one of the things that i thought was fascinating is that your grandfather was a christian missionary [Music] although at least on a conscious level your experience as a christian was not specifically tied to that was your relationship with jesus that is obviously a big deal to you specifically connected uh to your getting sober or was that already happening as a big thing in your life before you got sober i could write a whole book about that maybe i have but um the what what brought me to my knees was my alcoholism and drug addiction and um when i first got sober i was 32 or 32 a man said to me by the end i was deteriorating faster than i could lower my standards yeah i think you will yeah i think you say that in this book yeah i love that line and i was there at 31 but something i'd always believed in god you know i just didn't want to be a christian because of the christian right in america and my father hated christians because his father had been a presbyterian missionary in japan right after the first world war the war to end all wars and my father just hated christians and so i was a perfect daughter and i agreed to too but that last year i was drinking i would hear this music wafting over from this flea market i used to go to in what we used to call this ghetto in in marin city where there are 2 000 people mostly of color and um there were six churches for a community of 2000 but from this one church it was presbyterian like that's why i think god has such an amazing sense of humor because my grandfather had been a presbyterian missionary you know god's frozen chosen they call them yeah frozen chosen yeah but it's okay if you're one of them you know that we are a joke you know we're all about committees and casseroles but anyway so i started going in there because i got to the church it was ramshackle it was buckled linoleum about 40 people but they were singing the songs that you and i grow up grew up on honest of the spirituals of the civil rights movement of i shall not be moved and swing low sweet chariot and they were singing gospel and it got in so deep but the most profound thing was and i share this with all ministers and rabbis they didn't try to get me to believe anything they didn't try to get me to bible study they did worst of all they didn't try best of all they didn't try to come over for a home visit where i would have run screaming for my cute little life they didn't try to get me to you know figure out the jesus thing or who shot the holy ghost or they could just see that i was really scared and lonely and so they got me water and to this day that's the my instructions for jesus from jesus i get everybody some water everyone's thirsty and so i stayed for a year drunk and i felt jesus following i wrote about this in traveling mercies i remember we talked about this i was living in a house a 10 by 10 houseboat in sausado and i could feel jesus running alongside me like a little feral cat and he wanted to come in but if you let him in then you have a cat i didn't want a cat i didn't have a scent in the world and then finally you know sometimes it's grace looks just like exhaustion it looks like running out of any more good ideas it's often the dark night of the soul and so i said sort of bitterly okay fine you can come in and that's my moment of conversion i said okay fine you can come in and i have a you have a part in the book where you say jesus is looking over his benjamin franklin glasses at you and i also love the part where you had been judging the man eric and you went to church that sunday and the minister looked right at you and totally called you on the fact that you were uh that you were judging eric because one of the things that you talk about in the book quite a bit is if if if you love anybody it doesn't mean anything unless you're willing at least to love everybody yeah um but you also yeah you hate that right well you also uh famously uh uh out there san francisco lefty so how'd you do with the trump years how was it for you um all that universal love when uh donald trump was president well you know some days are just too long that's the reality and that um you know my great friend tom weston i get credit for this line but he said um you can tell you've create created god in your own image because god hates all the same people you do and that to me is what the christian right is all about that they i believe that they look through the scripture both the new testament and the hebrew bible looking for people to hate and then they are able to relax and i had to go look in the mirror and i had to see that that it wasn't them that was the problem that i'm the pro you know i i love what martin luther king said don't let them get you to hate them and i thought about that every single day of um trump because i was apoplectic a lot and i um but we do what's possible you know we do what's possible and what was possible was for me to go to a lot of marches and what was possible for me was to give away money whenever i could to the aclu and to the lawyers representing the children at uh at the border and then when kovitz struck i couldn't he had a year of covet and not one good thing except for data came out of it so i did what i could i went to safeway and i filled paper bags full of of canned foods and powdered goods and you know oreos for the kids and i drove over to the food pantry in our area where all the people who are of service live who have the highest incident of coven and i dropped it off and i came back home and i i did what i could and i did my spiritual work and i kept looking in the mirror to see what you know the the prayer had to be for me bless them and change me and i gave out at least a dozen copies of arlie hokeshow's bro amazing book strangers in their own strange in their own land where this ucl i mean you see berkeley sociologists in a bubble here with me i'm in her bubble actually sometimes in real life uh went to appalachia went to baton rouge went to the the outside of the big cities of louisiana and she became a friend to the people who thought that trump was on their side and she listened the most profound thing we do she sat and listened she wasn't going to change them and they sure weren't going to change her but she ate with them she went to church with them she sat on the porch and walked with them and so i gave that to everyone because that's what changes you molecularly is that kind of love from people with whom you have almost nothing in common because they're seeing the truth of yours yeah that's to me is what the entire book was about wasn't it the love that is there and that you have faith on no matter what i'm looking at page 189 where it says love will get in it will wear you down love is ruthless whether you notice this or not love is sandy kofax macon rapono it will win it always does at least in the long term think susan b anthony who died before people like me got to vote now i don't know if you have the book in front of you but if you look on page 190 do you have the book in front of you it's getting a little cold it would be such an honor if you would read uh that paragraph of that long paragraph on 190 would you be willing to do that first are you kidding of course oh trust me on this trust me on this we are loved out of all sense of proportion yikes and hallelujah love reveals the beauty of sketchy people like us to ourselves love holds up the sacred mirror love builds rickety greenhouses for our wilder seeds to grow love can be reckless jesus is good at this or meek is my dog or carry a briefcase love is the old man in the park teaching little kids to play the violin much time spent tuning the children hearing their way into the key he is playing my parents heard the key as success security moving expeditiously and living as expected but love lumbers like an elephant it naps on top of your chest like a cat it gooses you snickers smooths your hair love is being with a person wherever they are however they are acting ugh a lot of things seem to come more easily to god can i read a bit more sure do it yeah this piece is about loving and forgiving entirely my parents holding on to this funny little ivory elephant my dad had gotten on his father's missionary work in japan and my mother had this crummy little corn husk hawaiian um christmas tree ornament and those two things were pretty much all i had left of them but one one-winged love teams and lurches around us because it does we can always be hopeful if not effusive the hope is knowing that this love trumps all trumps evil hate and death it makes us real as life slowly sows us our human shirts we are being shepherded beyond our fears and needs to becoming our actual selves this sucks and hurts on some days and i frequently do not want it or agree to it but it persists like water wearing through a boulder in the river hope springs from realizing we are loved can love and are loved with skin on then we are unstoppable this hope is from a deep deep place that somehow my parents see did in me love is not a concept it is alive and true a generative and nutritious flickering force that is marbled through life i can hold it in my hands whenever i remember to stroke its ivory belly here it's crunch it's russell so marianne how how would you answer that question you just asked me how did you come through the four years of trump very much what you said yeah very much what you said you know martin luther king also said god didn't tell me i have to like my enemies he said i have to love them you didn't have to like them but also he said something that meant a lot to me that that is very similar to what you were talking about your friend going and being with these people he said you have very little morally persuasive power with people who can feel your underlying contempt so i that uh meant a lot to me this whole uh business of your politics and and jesus um you have a a line in the book you said i believe in antibiotics and chemo and also in the laying on of hands sue me i got in a lot of trouble uh during my presidential campaign for saying i believe in antibiotics and chemo and also in the laying on of hands uh when you were talking about the judgmentalness of people on the right uh i have found and i'm sure you have too uh there's a lot of judgmentalness among people on the left as well and particularly when it comes to faith but you have been uh saved i haven't seen you being targeted for the fact that you believe in both you have a strong faith in god and you have these strong left-wing politics now you and i grew up at a time when there was more of a religious left before this strongly secularized leftist vision but when i'm in the south god i'll be talking about my sunday school kids or something my um pastor said that radicalized me or saved me that day or whatever and somebody will call in and they'll say in that sweet accent they'll say well andy lamott you are very witty indeed and i wonder just how funny it will seem to you when you're rotting in hell for all eternity and and then i say you know thank you for sharing you get to think that you know you get to wonder god bless you good and you take care i always say you take care of people when i'm actually enraged like whenever i would break up with a man i would always say you take care but that's what i say to the people in the religious right when they attack me because it's so hostile to say hey you didn't care yeah yeah bless your heart is what they say there bless your heart i think and of course as i've as i've already said to people this book dusk night dawn is a fantastic book but nothing is better than that last chapter that coda what's it called heartbreak is that what it's called um the story of you at eslin yeah and um the story of there's so much there and i was laughing hysterically i was just it was a belly laugh there was a friend in the next room what are you laughing at um it was as poignant and as painful as it was hilarious but one of the things that i thought was so interesting was when you met the woman there was a couple next door when you met her she was so sexy and so sweet and you thought you're wondering if she was a fraud right but then at the end the mercy that she showed you yeah the love that she showed you after the way you behaved the night before i don't want to give away too much of the book and that that she showed you such kindness i thought that was quite extraordinary um and and you said that you got sober it took another year annie afterwards i think it took me you could have lost your life that night i could have yeah i could i drove drunk i drove on acid i mean i um i i can't believe that i was one of those the few alcoholics and who was just fished out of the slough and set back on my feet and given a a new chance at life but that's where i use that lie she okay i i had a terrible terrible experience that involved barging in on her and her husband but i won't wreck it but at any rate um the next morning her husband looked at me like a reptile at breakfast yeah so he was barely flickering and but then she looked at me with the eyes of love like uh helen prejean and uh you know um dead man walking she said just keep looking at me i'm gonna be the eyes of love as you walk to your death just keep looking at me keep your eyes on me i'm your eyes of love and when that woman looked at me with the eyes of love it changed me and i know it didn't seem like on the visible world in the visible world that anything changed but that's not the world that i'm more interested in you know my inside the part of the the divine that surrounds me and indwells me it was like it just sort of sat up and took note it thought now we're talking well she and her husband interpreted your being in their room very differently he obviously was strong judgment and she obviously realizing you had to have been in a lot of pain something had been really wrong uh for that to even be happening and it's so interesting what you're saying you said you drove on asset etc when i used to do some work inside women's prisons i met women um annie you know there but for the grace of god go i i think that's so true of many of us in that in our generation the things we went through that could have could have gone another way we could have ended up in jail for the rest of our lives we could have ended up easily with aids people i knew who got aids from one night stands etc um the gratitude of feeling that we survived uh so much that we survived and get to live to tell the tale i think that your um presentation in your books of how every little thing is precious every little thing is precious even the things that we didn't notice i think you you have a line in the book about i think it's neil says everything we need to to see in life we can see the first 10 minutes of a walk was that the line yeah everything you need to know about god and and love and truth about everything you can get in a 10-minute walk you know my pastor my our last pastor veronica had this great sermon on how you could trap bees in mason jars with a drop of honey on the floor of it with no lid because they just kind of walk along around in their bad moods because they feel trapped and they bump into the glass walls and all they have to do is look up right and then they can fly away and so if i'm feeling a little crunchy let's say and i get outside and i look up i don't look up and go oh it's a medium full moon tonight you know it's it's a medium baby moon it's a it's oh well there's what whatever there's another green shoot breaking through the ground without concrete or whatever you don't think that it stops you in your tracks in the best possible way and you say wow which is the praise prayer and which instantly helps you reset the button so that you're back in curiosity you're back in the praise and the wow and oh my god you know it's funny when sam was a little boy he came to me one day he was raised in our at my church um he came to me said you know i think i know why people call god god he's about five and i said oh or and he said you know sometimes if you go outside and you just might you're so uh it's just so so so beautiful you go god he didn't even have sex yet right so there's another fantastic part in the book along the line of what you're just saying where you were outside you took a walk and you saw a tree that had fallen down and you were looking at the roots and that's really what your book your book does but not just this book all of your books it's just look at life look see there's a difference between looking at something and truly seeing something and there's a difference between looking at a person and really seeing the person like like the married couple he looked at you she saw you yeah and the gift and you you talk about that in terms of you and neil too you feel that you are seen and i think that that's that's when you feel that you were someone's priority when they when they see you right when they see you and when like i almost think in the book i talk about with my sunday school kids talking about the soul as the innermost nesting the russian nesting doll you know that you have like on i have a per perform performance artist surface and i have who i am around people i love but don't know that well and then the who i am one more russian nesting doll inside who i am with my closest girlfriends and sam and jackson neil and then deeper and deeper and deeper into what rondas called the heart cave where there's me and god jesus and mary and my little five-year-old annie and in that place i think is my soul and i let neil and two friends see that you know and there's a piece called can you love me now you know because you let people see dark shadowy parts of you that you haven't healed yet and you let them see them and then it's like that old at t or verizon commercial can you hear me now but it's can you can you love me now you've seen this you've seen what a whiny baby i can be can you love me now i want to tell you something i did i want i told neil a secret the other day and say can you love me now and they love you even more because of the trust and because there's only one of us really you know and our our biographies are different but um there's only one of us and um and so it's for people to see you is so it's graduate school to me it's great i think that something really profound happens when we're willing to see ourselves that which it seemed like such a big deal once you cast light on it i mean i love it when you're at the theater and i totally could relate to that i i totally could relate to that and you were so impatient and you couldn't stand being there and you had so much judgment of the people on the stage and you just looked at all that ugliness and it was almost funny because you saw it and once you saw it it didn't have to be there anymore it was funny eventually like my book of spiritual essays called grace parentheses eventually but no i felt like i was having a nervous breakdown i really did and at a theater where people were telling lovely stories about their childhood and it went on and it went on and the seasons changed and my hair grew long and tangly in the wind and they were still telling their stories and then finally you know what happened well you know what happened because you read the book but this woman came up to me who i didn't know from adam's house cat and she mentioned that she was sober also and it was like uh it was like this funny little dr seuss character inside of me went and we went outside and i she had noticed i was doing this thing that my therapist had taught me i'll show you where you tap the spot between your thumb and your forefinger i know it well yeah you tap and it brings you back to health and truth since your center and she said i saw you tapping and then she started tapping me she said can i tap you if that's not the laying on of hands when a stranger is tapping you when you've been at your absolute craziest and you've told her about it then i don't know what is but i was changed i want to ask you you seem to say throughout the book that yes despite it all despite everything that's happening in the world despite all the environmental threats that you have hope that you have hope uh for the younger generation but in the book i felt that there was a in the tone of the book a mix of hope and resignation do you feel that way well i feel um that we're having a miracle and a renewal and a resurrection story in this country and at the same time the poor are getting poorer and because of biden the poor are getting a lot more help than they got for the last four years but my heart is still broken you know in in the poverty of children and the elderly in this country i see the crucified christ and i don't know why everyone doesn't see that and see that we're called upon to go there with whatever our very best selves and everything i mean you know when uh texas had that terrible freeze was it in january or december and so many people died and the elderly froze to death and the children went hungry what you saw was the crucified christ and what you saw was this global outpouring of the laying on of hands and the bringing of blankets and the bringing of food and the bringing of of love and and and you saw a resurrection story but we didn't see that for four years and it wore me out i have to say a little bit and i think there's a part of me that is resigned right now but i think it's like post-traumatic stress my heart feels um it does you know usually i try to be really permeable and and and you know like when you have a wonderful audience you just i know you feel this because we've done it with each other but you feel like you're in a tide pool and you're pouring tide and krill and tiny shells and and little crabs out into them and it passes amongst them and then the tide comes back in and it washes over you with their love and their nourishment their oxygen their bubbles their crops and because we didn't have that i felt like i got a little brittle i also got used for four years to to being stunned like every morning we'd wake up at like quarter seven and there'd be breaking news and it'd be shocking it never happened before and then at one right after lunch there'd be new no break new breaking news they didn't have anything to do with the earlier breaking news and then by the time rachel maddow came on there was new breaking news that had nothing to do with er you know and i feel now sort of in post-traumatic stress but i also feel like i'm being loved back to health i wish god had a magic wand but um it's happening one day at a time it's happening because of precious community it's happening because of holy spirit it's it's happening entirely because of love you know i see it slightly differently i totally see the trump years the way you see them and i see the fact that there's a reprieve now i feel there's an intention to love but the way i see it trump was a death spiral [Music] biden has interrupted the death spiral but we have not ended the trajectory of a slow and steady decline that's right we haven't we haven't and so when you talk about how we're in a resurrective mode and a period of rebirth and resurrection i think we can uh we we can go into a period of of uh resurrection and rebirth but it doesn't feel to me annie like you know one of the things that you say in the book is love will win i definitely agree with that but it seems to me you know like you you talk about a lot about sobriety it has now enough americans have known people who oh deed enough americans have known people who died of alcoholism that it is now part of the mainstream narrative that we understand what an intervention is you know enough people have seen you know tiffany fall down the stairs or john talk you know crazy at his sister's wedding that enough people have either made the phone call or heard someone say do you think we ought to do something we understand that if that behavior goes too far they could die they could die and someone intervenes i think we're stuck in some magical thinking about the united states i think we need some history lessons in the fact that great civilizations have crashed and burned before there is no guarantee that our democracy will make it i agree with you there's a guarantee that love will make it but that's not the same as saying there's a guarantee that our democracy will make it or even a guarantee that our species will make it [Music] and that's why i wonder how much you know there's the the resurrection factor but there's also the the moses factor somebody needs to call pharaoh on his yeah that's true and um i i that's that's what i'm left with that i share your belief that love will ultimately win but sometimes i think we're a little i mean it's not like if only we elect the democrats then everything will be okay there's got to be a little more than that of course there is but we do what's possible we you know the first thing god says to moses in the hebrew bible is he says take off your shoes you know feel the earth be here feel the earth and so we start by taking i feel like we're at the stage right now where we've taken off our shoes again we're feeling near we're not in front of msnbc i was in front of msnbc 10 12 hours a day because i felt like i couldn't take my eyes it was like cobra hypnosis you know and yet i feel now that we've taken off our shoes and in some way we're back and our feet are on on the earth again and we're looking around and it's easter and it's passover and um and things are so much better and and the system is terrible life is complex and messy and it's not fast and clean and cute and it's unfair and jerks win and that's the reality of of american life so where are we well we're we're back from something and um yeah i agree yeah we're back from something and we're looking around everyone i know is sending money to the food pantries you know you keep it simple all i can do is send off money to the food pantries today and to call my cranky very lonely aunt who has been mean to me for like 64 of my 67 years here because i know she's lonely and i know that i'm not going to change her and she doesn't really approve of me and what i'm going to do is what god said to do which was to call her and be the living water and to say hi i'm just thinking about you what are you up to today i miss you i dropped a book off for you did you get it i want to see you but i can't yet um and that's all i can do today and then you know all through this trump i mean you and i were both raised by fathers who underst mothers too who practiced and supported non-violent resistance and that's what we did for four years and it seemed like it didn't pay off because every week seemed like it was even worse but non-violent resistance it changes the people who are hurting you right that's the point that that you look at the amish right when there's a terrible slaughter and the man killed all the school girls and the amish welcomed the wife of the shooter into their worship and into their memorial services they said you are part of this to come be with us and when at mother emanuel when the man slaughtered all the people the bible say they spoke forgiveness and that changed people and it changed people who didn't want to be changed who thought who think that they're right and who do think that they that they created god in their own if they didn't create god in their own image but coincidentally he does hate all the same people they do you know like women and gay people and whatever and people of color but so that that has even though we didn't see results but we did see results i mean he did not want a second term that's a huge result we didn't see him the next day after lunch yeah that work we did of non-risk of non-resistance non-violent resistance changed people and so many people are changed who did not want to or agree to be changed and we're seeing that now we're seeing i'm i'm more in favor of i'm more excited by by biden i think but we're seeing that there are that god over and over again is such a show-off and that last night the parliamentarian said there wasn't one more thing that they could do with reconciliation probably infrastructure he said there's three more now you can't get from where we were to where we are now where there are going to be three more but it's like grace again you and i both believe and say that grace bats last but grace meets you exactly where you are meet your country meets you meet your child exactly where they are and it doesn't leave any of us where it found us right kind of nudges us into the wheeled barrel and takes us to a maybe a little bit sunnier place and so i believe that i am seeing grace as spiritual wd-40 in tightly knotted little gold chains such as i was very good at nodding as a child and i'm seeing that the country has been spritzed by the by january 6. january 6 changed people it changed people who didn't agree or want to be changed it scared them to death they thought wait this can't be right this is not what i believe and even though they haven't voted again yet they have been changed and and god only changes us for the better you know god only he god doesn't get us some consignment story change you know god changes our souls and our hearts and and then we're then we're you know let me just tell you one thing that i really love i think it really kicked the out of my um any feeling i had about being a big shot because i was reunited with martin luther king and henry now and um promise and belief in the precious community the beloved community that that was where the change was going to happen and i feel that the beloved community has expanded because of those four years of trump and because of january 6 i think that there we things are a lot more spacious than they were even for months ago and i just keep thinking let's just keep doing what we've always done we feed the poor we talk one on one you and me with people we talk with a group of a thousand we write our books we try to disseminate spiritual truth we um and we practice we march and we you know when molly ivan said freedom fighters don't always win but they're always right and i just keep thinking that we're kind of back like moses having taken his shoes off now what to be to be revealed i don't disagree with anything you're saying and i don't think that i'm any less hopeful for biden than you are i also think though that no amount of private charity can compensate for a basic lack of social justice no absolutely and the system you know when you were talking about the poor children yeah uh when i hear a plan that will eradicate half of child poverty eradicating half of child poverty is not enough no eradicating all of child poverty has got to be our goal and also even when you were talking about martin luther king and the um of the beloved community there was also the bus boycott there was also his calling out the sins not only of racism and poverty but also militarism and if he had just talked about the beloved community he probably would have lived to be a ripe old age but i just want to tell you one story that because i i believe everything you said and half of child poverty is both a miracle all truth is a paradox it's a miracle and it's nowhere near enough there's a woman in my recovery group my total step recovery group and 10 years ago she got a horrible oral cancer that most people die of you know three percent live she had to have part of her jaw removed part of a part of her tongue so she had this speech impediment and she got chemo she lived she was very faithful and then a few years ago she said after to the group it had come back and she was gonna need to go through chemo again and um so everybody started trying to save and fix and rescue her like they do and oh yeah my uncle had that and he's he's fine and oh my beautician's nephew had that and he had oxygen therapy and he's just fine now and you know she just waved it away like smoke just waved away and smiled she said you know what god's got it and i wear those three words on my neck lis god's got it because i'm doing what i can one day at a time you know henry nowin who talked about the precious community he come a jesuit from france he comes to america he could not be higher more acclaimed he's about yale he's about harvard he's about the new york times best sellers list right and he gives it up to go live in a community of people that are developmentally disabled and for 20 years he raises a boy into a man who could never once say one single word to him and that was where he was found and he had been lost in the chaos and the temptations of the world and he got found and so these things are all true that that it sucks i hate it i hate it and i'm hopeful and grace does that last and things are a little better and just for today i'll take it you know annie it was an honor to have a chance to talk to you today because you're as profound when you're talking about it as when you're writing about it and i know that uh people are listening to what you're saying and uh going wow wow wow something the great novelist and progressive el doctoro said years and years ago 20 years ago he said writing and i would add everything is like driving at night with the headlights on you can only see a little ways in front of you but you can make the whole journey that way well you're quite a headlight for all of us and i love how you talk in this book about being in the third third when it all comes together and the alchemical brew of your wisdom and the way you you just sprinkle your your magical words i love you and it was great to have a chance to be with you it was great to have a chance to hear you i hope everybody will run and get dusk night dawn and i hope that i hope that i get to meet neil i hope i get to be with sam i hope i get to see you again when all this uh coveted phenomenon breaks up and i know that uh both of us having gone through the years uh will appreciate our next hug even more than we ever have so thank you very very much bye-bye god bless you darling god bless you thank you yeah bye-bye so that was our conversation with one of our wisest women voices uh annie lamont how fantastic is she i thought that interview was filled with some of her greatest wisdom and advice and illuminating thoughts um i don't know about you i want to listen to that several times and just take in ever more deeply some of the things that she said i want to thank those of you who have written into marianne castmedia.com uh with your questions the one i'm going to take now is from christine christine says this morning i learned that a dear friend of mine died in her sleep last week how do you cope with the loss of friends knowing that more losses are on their way since you along with all of your friends are aging also what tips do you have for coming to terms with declining health thanks christine you know a line that has meant a lot to me was when the swiss psychologist carl jung said the failure to deal with the subject of death robs the second half of life of its meaning and i see a real difference between those after a certain age who have dealt with are or are dealing with the subject of death vote versus those who either haven't or who aren't um perhaps because i'm a student of the course in miracles where it says that the life of the body is just like a suit of clothes that birth is not the beginning of life but a continuation that death is not the end of a life of life but a continuation i have what a lot of people i know have i'm not afraid of death i'm afraid of dying and i'm certainly afraid of dying certain ways i think most of us have that but the idea of what happens after we die is not problematical to my soul and having achieved that which is something that any serious spiritual practice gives you because it's all about that enlightenment transition from self-identification being identification with the body to becoming identification with the spirit the more we have that the less attached we are to the body in terms of what happens after we die but also i believe the healthier a perspective we have on the body while we're here and according to the course in miracles that actually helps us uh with physical pain and so forth i think that our recognizing you know in in christianity and in judaism both are visually symbolized by the intersection point between the axis of the divine and the axis of the earthly in the christian cross there the there's the vertical axis that meets the horizontal and in the jewish star of david there are the two pyramids that intersect one leading to god and one leading uh to the human mortal plane and the more we have that kind of integrative approach where we deeply appreciate we get the poignancy we get the the fact that oh my god my time is running out this won't last forever i'm already past that point i remember hearing of all people i remember when bill clinton used to say there's more time behind me than in front of me i mean you do reach an age where this is clear to you i remember when i turned 50 it was very difficult for me because my youth was over i remember saying i don't feel old yet but i'm not young anymore either and then at 60 you start seeing death on the horizon you hope it's not too soon but you start having this experience of cleaning up the campsite and so christine when you talk about the sad aspects of it yes but there are also the grand aspects of it something very important i find for instance one of the interesting things is it's counterintuitive how how much i feel the urgency of historical circumstances on one hand if i was only looking at it rationally i'd say well you know i'll probably be out of here before it gets too bad no matter what happens with the environment etc and yet there's something where the closer you are to death somehow the more you care what's going to happen yes but what about my grandchildren what about my great-grandchildren what about those who will come generations after me so i wouldn't want to miss this you know it's it's like when we were talking with annie lamont today about how age is is just another room in the house you know when you're in your 50s when you're 60s when you're in your 70s and i you know one of the most magnificent women i know is in her 80s um you know it it let's not uh let's not miss out on the glory of age either and the fact that it's a shorter period of time that we all have in a shorter period of time that we have with the people that we love and that our friends are starting to you know some of our friends go some of our friends no matter you know i was talking to a girlfriend of mine today we've known each other since we were six years old we were talking about how old we are now and yet it's not a less important conversation and it wasn't an ain't it awful conversation it's an ain't it profound conversation um my best friend richard died suddenly and the night before he died we had a fight we weren't talking on the phone but we were it was over email and he said i was hurt by something and i was so close to saying you richard and then i said don't say that don't say that but i remember having that thought and he died that night oh my god if those have been my last words to him i don't know how i would live with myself so i never forgot that i never forgot that i'm so grateful and i learned from having lost my best friend suddenly you never know what's going to happen you never know what's going to happen and that's no matter how old someone is and speaking of richard richard was terrified of death and we used to talk about the fact that i had a more sanguine approach to it and he'd like i don't want to talk about i don't want to talk about it i wish we had i wish we had i might feel a little more complete with him but i feel complete i know he's he's there and i know that i'll see him again and i always felt you know the night i met him it was an aid support group in los angeles and he was on the other side of the room he was a gay man but he didn't present as a gay man so i didn't know he was gay and i looked at him and i said i'm gonna live the rest of my life with him and for the rest of my life that he was here the connection was there and i always felt to have known that much to have had such a strong sense of our connection i thought i must have known him before well now i look at it the other way now it's i'll see him again i just think the river of life is much much longer than is covered by this one little blip in time which is our physical incarnation and i can just say from my own experience christine that seeing it that way gives me much greater comfort in my body and much greater comfort with the fact that one day this particular thing will all be over i want to thank you for being with me today i hope you have a wonderful week ahead i want to thank all the people who make this podcast possible thank you to amanda elliott thank you to austin kendrick thank you to lauren celski and to wendy zahler and to all of the people at cast media thank you to you for listening i hope that you'll go over to apple podcasts i hope they'll give us a good review because if you do that keeps us on the air and tell your friends about it and continue to have all the wonderful experiences that make life everything that it can be and i look forward to being with you again next week thanks [Music] you

Channel: The Marianne Williamson Podcast

Views: 6,212

Rating: 4.9417477 out of 5

Keywords: Marianne Williamson, Anne Lamott, Aging

Id: YtflT7jYQ9Y

Length: 69min 21sec (4161 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021