I didn’t warm up to Anne Lamott immediately when a friend loaned me a copy of her book Bird by Bird, but when I picked up Traveling Mercies last year all that changed. The way she spoke with raw honesty – the kind that you can feel on your skin – oh it grabbed me and shook me around like an abused Raggedy Ann.

Plan B had more in common with the former than the latter for me, but now there was a different context: a relationship. She was someone who knew my secrets and I knew hers. We didn’t judge each other as my eyes danced over her words . She continues to go along before me, stumbling so I don’t have to and reminding me to embrace it all.

There were a few especially beautiful and a few especially witty things that forced me to dog ear pages as I blazed through. I meant to write them down for myself, knowing I’d never look back at them…and since changed my mind. I’m going to share them with you.

“I have grown old enough to develop radical acceptance. I insist on the right to swim in warm water at every opportunity, no matter how I look, no matter how young and gorgeous the other people on the beach are. I don’t think that if I live to be eighty, I’m going to wish I’d spent more hours in the gym or kept my house a lot cleaner. I’m going to wish I had sum more unashamedly, made more mistakes, spaced out more, rested. On the day I die, I want to have had dessert,. So this informs how I live now.”

Did I mention I’m going back to The Hostel in the Forest this weekend with my girls to skinny dip in the moonlight and make s’mores and drink from mason jars by the fire? It’s about more than a simple weekend away. When you’re isolated from rush-rush and surrounded by green and friends and love and fresh air, it’s easy to be kind to yourself, but it’s a step.

“I talked to more than one person before the service began, about the snap in the air. Everyone was glad summer was over. Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season – too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they are cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you. Clouds bobble across the sky, and there are fresh winds, and misty salmon sunrises and then cool blue skies. The weather is lighter, marbled and makes you feel like striding again, makes you glad that so much works at all.”

I believe I’ve hit my fall. I believe I dreaded it for some time, that I’d feel somehow used up. Dry. Weathered. I believe I’m less worried about that lately, and that she made it poetry.

“She had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but when she finally followed Barb’s advice to call me after various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy – she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the type of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition.”

Alright this one killed me, because it’s true. She has a similar line earlier in the book where she’s listening to a sermon.

“She said that Christians have a very bad reputation in the world, and that we have earned it, with our hate and self-righteousness. We speak in reverent terms of grace, justic, equality, mercy and then we despise people also created in God’s image, who are Her children, too. ”

and a bit later

“This drives me crazy, that god seems to have no taste, and no standards. Yet on most days, this is what gives some of us hope.”

She’s right. My seester recently had a runin with a Crazy Christian, an old friend who had even stayed in her home recently. It made me embarassed, it made me want to hide my faith. I’ve wanted to hide my faith a lot since I found it a few years ago all dusty and pale from living in a closet and/or the shadows of justification. *shrug* I guess all I can do is be me and let you be you and hope that’s enough to show you we’re not all bat shit bonkers.

Related: I’m going to work on reintroducing the word “mallarky” into my vocabulary in place of “bullshit” as phase 1 of a many part plan to stop embarrassing myself in front of little people and their parents.

Practice, practice, practice.