Kate Bowler: Oh, hello, friends. Look, it is a big day. It’s season 16 of Everything Happens. Welcome. Oh my gosh. I’m so excited that you’re here. I’m also just like in awe that this gets to be part of my job. I’ve been doing this now for eight years, which has been the opportunity of a lifetime to have incredible conversations, over 200 of them to date. And that together we’ve really built this incredible community, me and you. Thank you for listening. Thank you sharing these episodes with your friends. Thank you trusting me with life’s hardest and most tender questions. It really has been just such an honor to be with you and to make things for you. This season, we’re gonna start with someone very special. She is luminous. She is wise. She is sometimes delightfully cranky. And of course, it’s Anne Lamont. Anne is, as you know, a best-selling author, beloved essayist, and one of the great truth-tellers of our time. She’s written iconic books like Bird by Bird, Operating Instructions, and Traveling Mercies. She also has a brand new book coming out called Good Writing, co-written with her husband Neil, and it’s a wise and generous guide to the writing life. And Annie just joined Substack, so you can find her over there too. This conversation was taped live in Durham in front of a room of wonderful friends at the Historic Carolina Theater. You’re gonna hear the warmth of the room. It was a completely packed house and you can also like watch it if you go over to YouTube. And let’s just say you’re going to hear Annie keeps me on my toes as a moderator. But being in person with you guys is just always one of my most favorite things, which brings me to some very fun news. I’m going on tour and I really want you to be there. So if you live in the following places or like plan a girl’s trip, You can come on and see me in Nashville, in Houston, in Charlotte, in Durham, Charleston. I’m gonna be in Los Angeles. I’m going to be in San Francisco. I’m to be New York, in DC, in Indianapolis, in Winston-Salem, and also I’m go to be in London, which is gonna be really, really fun. Tickets are available now and are going fast at KateBowler.com slash joyful anyway. Also, Canada, my beloved Canada, I have not forgotten about you, So don’t you worry. Dates and tickets for the Canadian leg are gonna be announced soon. This is gonna be a great conversation. So settle in, whether you’re listening in the car or on a walk or you’re just figuring out how much laundry you have. I hope this conversation feels like good, good company. Here’s Anne Lamott.
Anne Lamott: And I’m going to put this right here.
Kate Bowler: When I thought about tonight, I thought about something Father Richard Rohr had written in his book, The Art of Letting Go, and he says, it was a funny little passage that said, faith makes you mature, but it wasn’t like that. It was like, faith makes old. Like our God is wizening us at this moment. So it made me want to start by asking you, how old do you feel?
Anne Lamott: Points. I feel like I’m 57 although I’m 71 but if I look at my driver’s license it says that I’m fifty seven but your inside person doesn’t age you know the outside person ages rather dramatically but my ear inside person does an age and so I used to feel 47 but now I feel 57 because I had to fly 3,000 miles and so. That aged me. And then. I think, how old do you feel?
Kate Bowler: I feel 112 to you, but not like a longevity study.Yeah, like when they’re like, why? Yeah, cockroaches. Yeah, exactly. One of my favorite things about you is that you got married at 65, which makes me want to put you on the cover of Costco magazine.
Anne Lamott: I got married three days after I started getting Social Security. I’d never been married before. I had a child by myself. First I went on match and I, because I didn’t know how to date, you know, and I’m an alcoholic, so when you’re drinking, you just like, you’re not quite dating, like you just have the next like hostage and then, and then you stay with them and it all turns to hell and then you just always know who the next person is. And so. I really didn’t know how to date. So I went on a match and I had a year of just god awful dates. Like this one guy with a beavis and a butt head laugh. But you have to have coffee. You can’t just go, no. You sit, you have coffee, but I thought, this is good, I’ve never had to date before. And people would bring me manuscripts. And on one, this one I liked a lot. And on our third, right before our third date, he said. Is it too soon to bring you a plot treatment, right? So, but I did it, and I tucked it out, and I saw some guys, and a lot of them were very sweet, and you just, like, what I longed for in my heart was that I would find a man who, if it was a woman, I’d wanna be best friends with, right, and I was gonna hold out for that. And so. There was this guy, and there’s a maps.com for old people called Our Time. So there was this guys on Our Time, and he was really handsome, and they always say spiritual, but not religious, right? And what that means is that they personally think they’re a really good guy, right, but they have zero interest in spirituality. They probably don’t even believe in God. Right? And I’m not going to be able to have a life with someone who doesn’t believe in God. So, but this one guy’s really handsome, spiritual but not religious, over-educated, a problem, but mentions all the same books that I’ve always given to everyone I ever loved, right? So we have that. But then he says he’s allergic to cats. My life is my cat. It goes It’s like, Jesus, the cat, the family, right? So I let it go, I don’t pursue it. Well, about three months later, I see this incredibly handsome guy, spiritual, but not religious, has read all this, and I write to him and I say, God, I really like your profile. And he writes back, you already rejected me. I guess I wasn’t Jesus-y enough. So I said, no, it wasn’t that, it’s that you’re allergic to cats. And he said, he said I’ve lived with cats, I have this. Thing I do, I put, this is a great thing to know, brewer’s yeast in the kibble. That somehow changes the protein in the cat’s secretions. This is an evolving theme of our thought. And so he says, can I take you to dinner? Well, I have so many issues, I don’t even have time to tell you about them all, but I don’t like to eat with people I don’t know. I mean, I don actually like to eat with the people I do know, you know? I eat with like four different people, four friends I can bear to eat with if we have the TV on, so so he says do you do you have coffee? I can have coffee. So we meet for coffee and I love how he looks. He sort of looks like William Hurt, really tall and I loved his hands and and we start to jam and we don’t stop.
Anne Lamott: We’re just going, oh, did you read, oh yeah, no, I’ve read that twice. And we never stopped the conversation. And so it’s been very happy. And you know, we’re old. He said the funniest thing the other day. He said, the thing about, because we both have a ton of issues, you know. And he said, kind of thoughtfully, he said the thing about old bodies is they hurt all the time and they look bad. Thank you.
Kate Bowler: You mentioned the strangeness of reconciling the young self with this mature kind of love and it made me want to ask you about the most important person of the first part of your life, which was your dad. You’re both writers, both creatives, and it sounds like such a charismatic and fascinating and person that goes all the way down to your soul. I wondered what the biggest lessons that you’d learned early on from being his daughter.
Anne Lamott: He was great, I adored him. He was the center, he looked like a Kennedy, he was brilliant, he had a nice sense of humor. He was a bird watcher, so he was a cool guy. But he hated my mother. And so I grew up in a family where I needed to make sure Dad came home, and he drank, and he had affairs. And my mother ate, and tried to manage. And manipulate her three children into doing perfectly in school. I grew up thinking that I was in charge of everybody’s happiness. What I learned growing up was that I should be a certain way, and that everybody loved me and valued me, and that meant being like a flight attendant to the family. And what I learned to do was to fashion this fabulous persona. My parents were both ACS. My mother’s from England. My father was raised by Presbyterian missionaries in Tokyo, God’s frozen, chosen, which is what I am. I’m a Presbycherian. And there was no sense that I was loved and chosen because I was a child, just a delight, because I had a big open heart. I was very sensitive. In the 50s, there was this book. Called the Overly Sensitive Child. Screw off. And it was for parents who were saddled with a child such as myself. But you know, we took National Geographic and I would see the photos. I would the photos of the children in Africa or India and I wouldn’t cry. And they would go, oh, for Christ’s sake, Annie. Now what? So I learned to stuff it. I got an eating, I’ve had a lifelong eating disorder till a few years ago, till I got 12 step health. We were sent to our room because the English, you don’t get mad, you just stiff-lip and carry on. And if we were angry or sad at the dinner table, we went to our rooms without eating. So my father was who I longed to be and who I along to please. And I was afraid my entire child. I get sober when I realize that it was never out there. That it was an inside job. That the self-esteem, the sense of self-respect was, you know what it’s like, you get a great review, you hit the New York Times Best Seller list, and it’s, like, crack. It’s fabulous, right? I mean, I won’t lie, it’s the greatest feeling on Earth. You’re stoned on it, right, because, to me, it is like the world has validated your parking ticket. And it means, but what happens, it dissipates and then you either need it again or you just feel like shit, you know, because it’s not there anymore and people aren’t patting you and going, oh my god, oh, my god you get the little this. And so that was very late to undo a lot of what my father taught me, but I still am a burden watcher and I’m still a book-based person. And those were my dad, and I got to be a good conversationalist and I got to have a sense of humor because of my dad. I wanted to talk about this thing that we were talking about in the car today when we were cruising and about what we’ve shared, which is that shame that began in childhood about who we actually were. Kate Bowler: It’s kind of my strongest first memory of you. I was really struggling with the fact that I have very loving parents who gave me a very incomplete sense of self-worth. And so I’ve always felt like at the very center of me is just like a sandcastle. And there are just waves coming. And every day I kind of have to build it back up again, but the easiest kind of thing, and then it’s just gone. And I remember when I met you the first time, actually, I looked at you and you said, you are loved, loved and cherished. Chosen. Chosen, and the second you said it, I felt like it was like daggers to my stabby little heart. And then I think the second thing you said was, do you normally cry this much? And Audience: all of that tracks. Kate Bowler: I’ve always thought of you as having such a loving, tender word for all those of us who feel too sensitive, too much, too tender inside and are not really sure what to do, especially now in a world that seems to require us to be so hard. Anne Lamott: Yeah, so girded. Well, there’s the illusion that the armor is gonna protect you, whereas the armor actually keeps you from the direct sense of Holy Spirit and the goodness and the love that abound. But yeah, you know, I’ve told you this before on your podcast and I’ve written about it, but about my wild Jesuit priest friend, Tom Weston, he told me this thing. He said, these are the five rules of being a human. A human, an American human. You should have nothing wrong with you or different about you. I can, yeah, I’ll get on it. Just do that. You have nothing wrong with you or different about you. Rule two is if you do, you should fix it or change it. Correct it. Rule three is if can’t even correct it, you just pretend it’s not a thing anymore. It’s just like it used to be, but it’s one anymore. And the fourth rule is that if you… Can’t even pretend that it’s not a part of you anymore. You should not show up because it’s so painful for the rest of us. And the fifth rule is that if you’re going to insist on the right to show up, you should have the decency to be ashamed. And that’s what we’re all up against. And that what I talk about with my writing students, the shame, right? No one in your family is gonna be happy to hear that you’re writing a memoir, believe me. But every writer, even the great, the writers you love most, Kate, me, but the famous lyric, but are there any others? No, but I mean, the literary writers you loved, every one of them, you deal with that shame that it doesn’t come easily to you, that you, like when I was a kid in the fifties, and I know a lot of you who are older remember this. The greatest criticism you made of a child was, oh, she thinks she’s so full of herself, right? Well, full of yourself is a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful way to be, that you’re full of your memories and of your challenges and how brave you’ve been and how loved you are by just a few people, all you need, you know? And to be full of yourselves to be full of what you’re going to Just start trying to do, you know, you’re going to start writing, you are going to start doing, I started going to the gym about six months ago, I’m older, I need to have, I need do weights, I for bone, I have to do this, and the shame, like I go there and I’m like, like, who’s buzzy, you know? You know, going. You know, and now I can lift weights, you know, and I also never gonna look like, you know, Courtney Kardashian. I’m just not. And I always want to be with you. Audience: With Courtney. Yeah, we all. Anne Lamott: I love Courtney, how can you bar? But, and then I’m like, you know, I’m blanched you ball with all the really adorable young men. I’m, like, oh, excuse me. I have trouble changing this bar completely. And then, and I can pull it down, because you know what? I’ve been doing it for six months. And that’s how we learned, that’s bird by bird. That’s how learn to do anything. We learn the trade and we learn full of shame. But you know what we do? We show up. Yeah, that’s right. That’s what we did.
Kate Bowler: I love when you quote that William Blake poem, may we learn to bear the beams of love. Anne Lamott: We are here to learn, to endure the beams of love, oh God. The hardest work we do, a lot of us, and I know a lot women here have been, as I said, flight attendants to the world, getting your self-esteem from being loved for how much you do for everybody else and how beautifully you see people through and help with their kid and help with their old people, da-da-da. But William Blake’s, what it should be called, we are here to learn to endure the beams of love, to put down the swords, you know, and to take off the armor, because that’s when we’re at our most powerful. You do the sacrament of ploppage. You plop, and you breathe, and then you look around. That’s what all of your books are about. It’s hard here, it’s weird here. People are damaged, people can be hurtful. You know, joy, what’s your title, Joyful Anyway? Joyful anyway. You know what, hit me with your best shot because I am not getting my joy from out there anymore. It’s an inside job. Anne Lamott: Thank you. Kate Bowler: I was just thinking about the places where I feel that kind of absurd, divine love the most, where it’s overwhelming. I think that’s partly why I love this community so much is because some of my moments of delirious love came from when I felt at my most helpless. And then I could feel the grace of other people step in. Like, well… Anointing oil, like hands, like people praying over you like they’re direct in traffic, you know? And then other times it’s just in the chaos of everything that’s been going on and then at night my son has this sort of choir of stuffies and he is has they just create these little caves and the bunk bed is so low that I effectively have to crawl up to him with his. Four comforters stacked one on top of the other and then just his otherwise enormous head peeking out from it but I find myself as I’m like shuffling over it feels like a pilgrimage site and now I am just worshiping at the altar of love and that many eyelashes on little boys and I I can’t help but just feel overwhelmed by how grateful I am for everything that’s left for everything that might be. Little scraps of every beautiful thing. I wonder where you feel like the absurdity of love the most. Anne Lamott: I spend a lot of time with people who are dying and things get so real, you know, and people aren’t talking about their accomplishments and their promotions or how much, they’re talking about love. They’re talking about the necklace of beads of love. I want to tell you this one thing. There was this Jesuit named Father Orupe, who I think in the 60s is the worldwide head of the Jesuits. And he’s living in Japan. And so he’s having this profound experience and immersion in meditation and in the Buddhist traditions. And he is brilliant, brilliant literary. He starts having a series of strokes, little by little. He’s just really, really take him out. Little by little, he needs his pit crew to just do everything more and more and more for him. And finally he has a stroke and he’s just, it’s like neither side works all of a sudden. And he writes, now I finally know what it means to be in the arms of God. And he goes on for years, but he can’t. Performing, he can’t be emphasizing, and he can be seducing. And so, I just was so, so moved by that. And… I feel that feeling of blown away by miracle and resurrection in 12-step meetings a lot. Yeah. There’s this woman. She’d had a horrible oral cancer. So to save her, they’d done chemo and radiation, but they also did surgery and they took out part of her jawbone, part of tongue, and some of her teeth. You do what you do. And she’s okay, but she has a speech impediment now and she has really funny, fabulous way of speaking. And then she comes to A&E meetings and ALLAN meetings all the time and she just speaks gratitude, you know, that she’s here, that she loves life so much. That she knows she’s loved and chosen, that she’s, and then it comes back and returns. And one day at a meeting she says, I’m gonna have to do it, it’s back, and I’m going to have to it all again. I have to more surgery, I have do chemo and radiation again. Well everyone, you know, 15 nervous women start doing, oh well. You know what, have you heard about oxygen therapy? Have you, you know about magnesium? And my cousin’s hairdresser had that exact same thing and she just waves it away like cigarette smoke and she says, you, know what? God’s got it. And that is where I feel that we have one foot here and one foot somewhere else. And I feel that that was the love that indwelled her, given to us so freely by God, as we understand God, but God… In each other’s faces and love and support. There’s a great story I used to tell my Sunday school kids. I would go to a failing church, but there might be four kids, and it could be a five-year-old and a 15-year old, and people in between say, I’m wondering if anyone here has sort of two-tone white and beige sneakers on today. But it would be like, and then you know how kids are, they go. And I’d say, Kate, you are loved and chosen. I want you to, we can both fit in this chair. Come sit with me. And then I’d see, is anyone here wearing Hokeman shoelaces? But anyway, I used to tell them this story, this sort of story joke of a very, very frightened little girl who can’t go to sleep one night and who’s me, I couldn’t sleep in the sleep of day in my life. She calls her mother and her mother comes in and at first you’re always really nice when they want to sit with you for a minute. She says, oh, you know, I’m right next door and don’t worry. Well, Tim necessarily, the little girl calls out for her and says, I just need you. So when it comes back, she says, you’re just right here. And don’t forget, Jesus is right here with you too. So you don’t have to be afraid. And this goes on and on, you know, fills the half-verse half-hour of my Sunday School class. And it goes on and on and finally the little girl calls for her again and the mother comes in and now she’s the way we get. She’s exhausted by it and she says, Jesus is here with you on the bed right beside you and the little girls says, I need someone with skin on. And that’s who we’re called to be, right? That’s what you teach. That’s the teaching is that we’re called to people with skin. Jesus comes here. Comes to your God with a, you know, skin on, and he sees the violence and the rage and the pain and the sorrow and walks amongst us, right? I love that so much. So when I don’t know what to do, I think all I’m gonna do today is be God with skin on. I’m going to get thirsty, people water, and I’m to pick up micro-litter. They call it a day. Maybe have a nap.
Kate Bowler: I just want to also be clear that this woman taught Sunday school for 30 years, but also with a kind of loving vindictiveness. Like if you texted, for example, like if I was like, hey, which is a real story, I’m having a horrible time. It’s this guy named Henry. If she was at Sunday school, she’d be like, all the children are now- Audience: yelling boo, Henry. It was a powerful force you had behind you. It’s like you were conscripting troops into a sudden. We hate Henry. That’s right. You really went to the mat for me and all the kids, my new little cult members. Kate Bowler: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. I think one of the things that’s so precious, too, about the way that we have to confront, I mean, death, and especially, I think, like the impossibility of the questions of kids who know when we are bullshitting them. You have this lovely passage I wondered if you could read, and it was right after a tragic school shooting, and you are teaching Sunday school, and you’re gonna give them some kind of answer. Anne Lamott: I drove to church on Palm Sunday, six days after the latest school shooting in Nashville, and there were three little kids killed and three aides there, and three nine-year-olds, and I had two nine- year-olds in a group of about five. So anyway, while they worked on their cards, I told the kids the story of the sparrow in the horse, which I have written about before, but which bears repeating. A war horse comes upon a sparrow lying on its back in the street with its feet straight up in the air. What on earth are you doing, the horse sneers. I’m trying to hold back the darkness, the sparrow replies. That’s absurd, the horses. You barely weigh an ounce. One does what one can, says the sparro. The nine-year-olds both look puzzled. Is that a true story? I watched them draw their faces inward and dreamy, their mouths on the edges of smiles, trees, hearts, dogs, and probably a beaver. This will, oh, we’re making cards for Nashville. We’re gonna send them to, we don’t know who yet, but you know, figure it out as a bad slogan. So we’re just making the cards. This will save them art and imagination, the power of imaginative joy. It tells us we will not plummet to the ground, we will be caught. Over the last 30 years, while most of my Sunday school kids have done fine with the usual allotment of struggle, loss, disheartening jobs and missed opportunities, i.e. Real life, several of my cherished kids have died. One of brain cancer, one by hanging out because she felt she could not come out as gay. And one was shot under the bridge where he was living in a homeless encampment. My kids have been cutters, addicts, and anorexics, and that was before things here got really bad. New scientific reports now say Earth will likely cross the threshold beyond which it cannot avoid catastrophic climate change within the next 10 years unless we rapidly stop burning fossil fuels. Raise your hand if you think we will. Recent parents have come up to me near tears and asked how they can help their kids with this. I tell them that they need to be in prayer about this with their kids, but also that we are good at discovering impossible things, like the God particle and the Hubble telescope, the human genome and proton radiation. So help them focus on miracles and how each child can help. Be kind, do good, pick up litter in the neighborhood, walk more, plant seedings, read inspiring biographies with them, help them find ways to serve the poor, laugh a lot, read and make art. That’s all I’ve got. Oh, man, that’s it. Kate Bowler: That feeling, like, well, that’s all I’ve got is so, it’s a heavy, it is a heavy feeling right now. And I love how committed you are to small, stubborn acts of love, but you say something so funny that I had to write it down. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. No one is coming to save us from our deepest fears. This is so incredibly disappointing. Anne Lamott: I know. Audience: Annie, what do we do right now? Should we be? Kate Bowler: Should we be just intensely stubborn about small hopefulness? Anne Lamott: Well, I do think hope is a radical act in these. It’s a decision. You know, I have a lot of hope in the American people. I have lot of hopes that small groups, well, Margaret Mead said it, like, never doubt that a small group of people committed to good can change the world, in fact, unless it’s not exact, but it’s the only thing it ever has. Audience: Hehehe. Anne Lamott: You know, so you find people who are doing good, and you help them do it. And you, you know, the, when I first got sober, someone said, take the action, and the insight will follow. So you take the actually, you don’t know what to do. You’re scared, you’re angry, you are overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world, or at the dining room table. So you fill a bag with food, and don’t forget Oreos for the. Little ones and the old people and the moms and everyone, and you take to the food pantry, you know? And it changes your whole day because now you’ve created love and hope in Oreo cookies. Yeah. You know, and so you take the action, the insight follows that love abides, that love abounds, that Love is who we are, that, Love is what we’re made of, that Love is, what we are made for. And there was this guy, and I know I’ve mentioned, I’ve shared this with you before, this guy the father Dowling, who helped Bill Wilson get AA started in 1935 and. Bill Wilson was just the most neurotic, depressive on earth. And yet when God, in her infinite wisdom, decides to throw in the 12 steps based on the Oxford group before him, throw it through, tears a little hole in the veil and tosses him in like a football, she throws him to Bill Wilson, who has failed at everything he’s ever tried, but he’s got this engaging personality. But he wants to think things and know things and figure things out. And Father Dowling says to him, Bill, sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses. And I think about that a lot. Because I wake up, I say my prayers, I put on my glasses, I let the dog out to be every single morning. I wake I say, my prayers and put on my glasses I let that dog out to be and I think about that I think about if I had like a lot of days. I’m just cranky. I just wish people would obey my will, you know? I have excellent ideas for everybody, you know? I have great ideas for everyone here and your children. And I have tiny, tiny control issues. And so I get very judgy. And that’s probably my gravest character defect. But it’s also my deepest wound. It’s just endless judgment. This is good, this is bad, this person is this, that person forget them, this, that, and if I put it in a good pair of glasses, I just make a decision to live in the prayer that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love and to get water. Jesus is so clear, like get thirsty people water, You know, and he’s got those whiny bachelors. Jesus, when is it our turn? I hate this, everyone’s so mean. It’s Jesus in Jewish mother mode, where he is always saying, go to the beach, someone will bring in a load of fish, have something to eat, right? You all seem very tense, and I’ll come back later. And then he goes off and he prays. And so anyway, so you feed people. You don’t know what to do. You go to Doctors Without Borders and you send him $25. Or you get a bunch of ones and you give them to every person you see at the intersection, even though you don’t think they’re gonna spend it on what you think would be best, you know? Like Jesus doesn’t say to the blind man, what do you anticipate looking at after a meal? You know? You just give, you just give. You know. And we’re taught, the American way and the way of all commercials and advertisements is that we feel lacking because of what we’re not getting and what we don’t have. But what we feel empty and isolated about is what we are not giving. As soon as we give, it changes everything. Because all of a sudden the world, it’s a new pair of glasses. And I think that’s the system. We think we’re hungry for what we aren’t getting. We’re hungry what we weren’t giving. And when we bring hope to someone who’s feeling hopeless, then hope exists. Then we’re in a little emotional acre where there’s hope on us.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. I think that’s why I’m so obsessed with joy right now, is there is some weird alchemy that happens when you give yourself away. Like, because I was sort of hoping that I could just sort of accrue more joy by just little, like, optimization. Just a real sense of efficiency, which I bring as a spirit to my day. Um that I could achieve joy if I could just sort of stack it and there’s this really odd relationship with like with with loss and surrender. Yeah.
Anne Lamott: I mean, why do you think? Well, it counts you bred upon the water, right? Because it comes back to you. And it might be the casting that gives us that direct connection with the Holy Spirit, right, is how I see it. I probably have that all wrong. But I’m a dropout. So it doesn’t matter if I get things wrong. They probably taught that junior year in college. But right, the casting might be the way that we receive. Yeah. Just like really… Cast what you have upon the water.
Kate Bowler: That reminds me of what my dad would say right before I would try to present something at the show and tell on like Fridays in grade five. I would bring like, I think the kids want to hear Wagner. No, just sort of present an elaborate something unbidden, unwanted and you’d be like, oh, pearls before swine, sweetheart. Yeah, pearls before Wagner. It’s fine. But I do think we don’t know when we’re giving something away, like who’s it for. And maybe especially right now. We almost have to give before we believe we’ll ever get anything back.
Anne Lamott: You a poem? Okay, this is a good balance. Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is sure, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious ill-advised ways. A thousand deliciously ill-Advised ways I’ll keep from my Children. The world is at least 50 percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though i keep this term my Children for every There is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible. And for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you. Though I keep this from my children. I’m trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor walking you through a real shithole chirps on about good bones. This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. So that’s Maggie Smith and her one book, one collection is called You Can Make This Place Beautiful. Okay, this is a little bit longer, so settle in. Naomi Shehab, S-H-I-H A-B-N-Y-E, Gate A-4. Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport. Do you know this poem? No. Oh my God, don’t you know that? This is a ride and I’m on it. Okay. Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport terminal after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement. If anyone in the vicinity of gate A4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well, one pauses these days. Gate A4 was my own gate. I went there. An old woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, Just like my grandma wore. Was crumpled to the floor, wailing. Help, said the flight agent. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this. I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. Shidoah, shibiduk, hibidi, stany shuy, min fadik, shubit, siwi. The minute she heard any words she knew. However poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, no, we’re fine. You’ll get there just later. Who’s picking you up? Let’s call him. We called her son. I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we call my dad, and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic, and found out, of course, they had 10 shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took two hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting her knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade Mamoul cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts from her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo, we were all covered with the same powdered sugar and smiling, there’s no better cookie. And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it. And they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend, by now we were holding hands, had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green, furry leaves. Such an old country tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones, and I thought, this is the world I want to live in, this shared world. Not a single person in that gate, once the crying of confusion stopped, seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
Kate Bowler: And when I hear you describe love, I hear the moreness, I hear be overwhelming desire to overcome our exhausting and necessary judgment. I hear that chance of Sunday school children who want my grudges to succeed. And I could not be more grateful to have had you here tonight with us. Thank you so much, my love. Okay before we go I just want to pause for a minute because maybe if you’re like me or maybe like Anne, you spend a lot of your life hoping. Hoping for things to get easier, for things be better, hoping for more clarity, more certainty, more answers. But sometimes what we really need isn’t more, it’s just enough. So here’s a blessing for anyone and everyone who wants more. In a world where everything happens. May you have enough, enough love to put you back together again, enough forgiveness for yourself and for others, enough faith to grow deliciously old, and enough hope to stay wide awake to possibility. And may we all learn to be joyful. Speaking of which, my book Joyful Anyway comes out in April and you can pre-order a copy now so you can get it like right on the day it comes out. Or just grab a ticket for one of the tour stops at KateBuller.com slash JoyfulAnyway. I’m also just having the best time on Substack so feel free to come find me there. It is truly like the nicest place on the internet and I’m going to be doing a daily reflection for Lent this year so if you make sure you’re subscribed, you will ever miss a post. It’s at kateboehler.substack.com. A big thank you to all the people who made this conversation and event possible. Rob Webb, Ken Spencer, The Duke Endowment, Dean Edgardo Colon-Emeric, Duke Divinity School, Harriet Putman, Liz Allen, Katherine Smith, Megan Crunkleton, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Jessica Richie, Eliza Neo, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, and Burt’s Media Services. And hey, everyone at the Carolina Theater, we love you. Especially Bridget Barnhart. And of course, Keith Weston, you always make me sound better than I deserve. This is everything happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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