If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days — listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay o… - Anne Lamott

Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.

This one truth, that the few people you adore will die, is plenty difficult to absorb. But on top of it, someone’s brakes fail, or someone pulls the trigger or snatches the kid, or someone deeply trusted succumbs to temptation, and everything falls apart. We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens, and it’s all part of the big picture.

She had come planning to swim, which I hadn’t as the water is too cold for me, and she took off all her clothes, right there and then. “Do you feel shy?” I asked as she walked to the bank. “Nope. This here is what I done got. This is what me being alive looks like now."