You can change the world with a hot bath,
if you sink into it from a place of knowing
you are worth profound care,
even when you are dirty and rattled.
Who knew?
~Anne Lamott from Small Victories
A hot bath is a most welcome gift to a dirty rattled soul and in turn, it is a gift to everyone around me. I may not even know how grimy I’ve gotten, how smelly and offensive.
Yet there is profound care in the simplicity of being cleansing. I am so in need and the world deserves a cleaner me.
You can change the world with a hot bath,
if you sink into it from a place of knowing
you are worth profound care,
even when you are dirty and rattled.
Who knew?
~Anne Lamott from Small Victories
As a farmer, I spend at least a part of every day muddy and up to my elbows in muck. I call my barn life “the real stuff” when the rest of my day is spent dealing with “virtual stuff ” which leaves me dirty and rattled nonetheless. I prefer the real over virtual muck although it smells worse, leaves my fingernails hopelessly grimy and is obvious to everyone where I’ve been.
The stains of the rest of my day are largely invisible to all but me and far harder to scrub away.
It is so much easier to deal with the barnyard over bureaucracy; what soils us can be washed off and we’re restored for another day of wallowing in our muck boots. On the farm is the grace of drawing up clean warm water, soaping with the suds that truly cleanse, a sinking down into a deep tub of renewal.
God knows well what a washing we need.
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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.
~Annie Dillard from “Write Till You Drop”
You’re going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions, and songs–your truth, your version of things–in your own voice. That’s really all you have to offer us, and that’s also why you were born.
~Anne Lamott in a recent TED Talk
I began to write after September 11, 2001 because that day it became obvious to me I was dying, albeit more slowly than the thousands who vanished that day in fire and ash, their voices obliterated with their bodies. So, nearly each day since, while I still have voice and a new dawn to greet, I speak through my fingers and my camera lens to others dying around me.
My good friend, Sara, who I’ve known and loved half my life, is fighting for her life in an all day cancer surgery today, having fought a chronic disease and a totally different cancer once before and won. She knows well the hard cost of winning even when the odds aren’t good, yet still has a courage in her to fight once again.
That will to fight is heavy on my mind today.
We are, after all, terminal patients, some more imminent than others, some of us more prepared to move on, as if our readiness had anything to do with the timing.
Each day I too get a little closer, so I write and share photos of my world in order to hang on awhile longer. Each day I must detach just a little bit, leaving a small trace of my voice and myself behind. Eventually, through unmerited grace, so much of me will be left on the page there won’t be anything or anyone left to do the typing.
There is no moment or picture or word to waste.
Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.
~Anne Lamott from Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers
I have the privilege to work in a profession where astonishment and revelation awaits me behind each exam room door.
In a typical busy clinic day, I open that door 36 times, close it behind me and settle in for the ten or fifteen minutes I’m allocated per patient. I need to peel through the layers of a person quickly to find the core of truth about who they are and why they’ve come to me.
Sometimes what I’m looking for is right on the surface: in their tears, in their pain, in their fear. Most of the time, it is buried deep and I need to wade through the rashes and sore throats and coughs and headaches to find it.
Once in awhile, I can actually do something tangible to help right then and there — sew up a cut, lance an abscess, splint a fracture, restore hearing by removing a plug of wax from an ear canal.
Often I find myself giving permission to a patient to be sick — to take time to renew, rest and trust their bodies to know what is best for a time.
Sometimes, I am the coach pushing them to stop living sick — to stop hiding from life’s challenges, to stretch even when it hurts, to get out of bed even when not rested, to quit giving in to symptoms that can be overcome rather than overwhelming.
Always I’m looking for an opening to say something a patient may think about after they leave my clinic — how they can make better choices, how they can be bolder and braver in their self care, how they can intervene in their own lives to prevent illness, how every day is a thread in the larger tapestry of their lifespan.
Each morning I rise early to get work done before I actually arrive at work, trying to avoid feeling unprepared and inadequate to the volume of tasks heaped upon the day. I know I may be stretched beyond my capacity, challenged by the unfamiliar and stressed by obstacles thrown in my way. It is always tempting to go back to bed and hide.
Instead, I go to work as those doors need to be opened and the layers peeled away. I understand the worry, the fear and the pain because I have lived it too. I am learning how to let it be, even if it feels miserable. It is a gift perhaps I can share.
No matter what waits behind the exam room door, it will be astonishing to me.
I’m grateful to be open for business. The Doctor is In.
I heard an old man speak once,
someone who had been sober for fifty years,
a very prominent doctor.
He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago
that his profound sense of control,
in the world and over his life,
is another addiction and a total illusion.
He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the back seat of cars,
in those car seats that have steering wheels,
with grim expressions of concentration on their faces,
clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car
to do whatever it is doing,
he thinks of himself
and his relationship with God:
God who drives along silently,
gently amused,
in the real driver’s seat.
~Anne Lamott from Operating Instructions
I pray because I can’t help myself.
I pray because I’m helpless.
I pray because the need flows out of me all the time — waking and sleeping.
It doesn’t change God — it changes me.
~C.S. Lewis
We want to steer life in the way we want it to go:
our plans, our timing, our chosen destination,
our hopes and dreams matter first and foremost.
And then life happens and suddenly the road ceases to look familiar and we don’t seem to be going the direction we intended.
Who is driving anyway?
In my work in a University Health Center, I am see an epidemic of an illusion of control:
a tremendous lack of resiliency, an inability to ride the roller coaster of life without panic. One of the most common responses to the unexpected is uncontrollable anxiety that interferes with eating, sleeping, working, studying. A common response to anxiety is to self medicate in any way easily accessible: video games, social media, alcohol, marijuana, nicotine, sex, a friend’s prescription drugs. A little isn’t working so a lot might be better. The anxiety is only compounded and becomes deepening depression.
The sadness and hopelessness, even anger stems from discouragement over our lack of control of circumstances, feeling there is no way out and being unable to find another path to a different future. This leads all too frequently to thoughts of ending one’s life as it seems too painful and pointless to continue, and thankfully more rarely, taking others’ lives at the same time in an attempt to make sure everyone else understands the depth of the pain.
There is an epidemic of hopelessness and helplessness among our society’s young people that I’ve never before seen to this extent in my thirty five years of clinical work. To them, their debts seem too great, their reserves too limited, their foundations too shaky, their hope nonexistent, their future too dim.
Relinquishing control by giving up the driver’s seat is not in our nature. We want to be seen as competent and feel as though we are prepared to be the captain of our fate.
Instead we need to give up our carefully planned-out life to the God who created us and has it all planned for us.
We turn over the steering wheel saying: may it be to me as you say.
May it be.
Your plans, Your purpose, Your promise.
Let it be.
Even if it may pierce my soul as with a sword:
You are there to plug the bleeding hole.
And I will follow wherever you steer me.
You can change the world with a hot bath,
if you sink into it from a place of knowing
you are worth profound care,
even when you are dirty and rattled.
Who knew?
~Anne Lamott from Small Victories
I heard an old man speak once,
someone who had been sober for fifty years,
a very prominent doctor.
He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago
that his profound sense of control,
in the world and over his life,
is another addiction and a total illusion.
He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the back seat of cars,
in those car seats that have steering wheels,
with grim expressions of concentration on their faces,
clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car
to do whatever it is doing,
he thinks of himself
and his relationship with God:
God who drives along silently,
gently amused,
in the real driver’s seat.
~Anne Lamott from Operating Instructions
Try walking around with a child who’s going,
“Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog!
Look at that burned-down house!
Look at that red sky”
And the child points and you look,
and you see, and you start going,
“Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge!
Look at that teeny little baby!
Look at the scary dark cloud!”
I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world –
present and in awe.
~Annie Lamott Bird by Bird
We are about to celebrate the marriage of these two precious people this coming weekend
May they always share the poetry in their pockets.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
~G.K. Chesterton from “A Piece of Chalk”
The waves haven’t come for my smooth glass yet (polished from the sea). In the meantime, it is right here in the front pocket of the jeans I am wearing now. I reach into my pocket for it a lot; it helps me write in some mysterious way…
~Anne Lamott from Traveling Mercies
Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.
~Anne Lamott from Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers
I have the privilege to work in a profession where astonishment and revelation awaits me behind each exam room door.
In a typical clinic day, I open that door 36 times, close it behind me and settle in for the ten or fifteen minutes I’m allocated per patient. I need to peel through the layers of a person quickly to find the core of truth about who they are and why they’ve come to me.
Sometimes what I’m looking for is right on the surface: in their tears, in their pain, in their fear. Most of the time, it is buried deep and I need to wade through the rashes and sore throats and coughs and headaches to find it.
Once in awhile, I can actually do something tangible to help right then and there — sew up a cut, lance a boil, splint a fracture, restore hearing by removing a plug of wax from an ear canal.
Often I find myself giving permission to a patient to be sick — to take time to renew, rest and trust their bodies to know what is best for a time.
Sometimes, I am the coach pushing them to stop living sick — to stop hiding from life’s challenges, to stretch even when it hurts, to get out of bed even when not rested, to quit giving in to symptoms that can be overcome rather than overwhelming.
Always I’m looking for an opening to say something a patient may think about after they leave my clinic — how they can make better choices, how they can be bolder and braver in their self care, how they can intervene in their own lives to prevent illness, how every day is a thread in the larger tapestry of their lifespan.
Each morning I rise early to get work done before I actually arrive at work, trying to avoid feeling unprepared and inadequate to the volume of tasks heaped upon the day. I know I may be stretched beyond my capacity, challenged by the unfamiliar and stressed by obstacles thrown in my way. It is always tempting to go back to bed and hide.
Instead, I go to work as those doors need to be opened and the layers peeled away. I understand the worry, the fear and the pain because I have lived it too. I am learning how to let it be, even if it feels miserable. It is a gift perhaps I can share.
No matter what waits behind the exam room door, it will be astonishing to me.
I’m grateful to be open for business. The Doctor is In.
Barnstorming 