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.

Look who’s going to come on the cruise with me!

I know you were all quivering with anticipation, waiting to hear who made the cut. (If you didn’t get the Rocky Horror reference, you’re fired). These little fellas will be my traveling companions, and I can’t thank you all enough for your suggestions. I’m excited about devouring each and every one of them. You know. Like a zombie.

Channeling The Smiths this morning and every morning of late – trying to squeeze time out of this dried up fruit I call a life. I want it to flow – or at least dribble – but instead it’s been cut up and dehydrated and locked up in a plastic bag for consumption somewhere down the road. Presumably when I’m on the top of a mountain after a long hike, which may seem convenient and perfect but when we’re talking about needing/wanting/clawing for time to write, the top of a mountain is less than ideal. Where’s the wifi and the power outlet?

I want to dump out everything that happened this weekend onto the page before the details slip away, but the forecast is calling for piles of shit to do and little time for that one thing I need to do.

The summary is that the show went well and I was humbled and Godsmacked by the amount of support and love shown by friends.

Before I start whining and blithering about what’s coming up, I need your help. The Mc and I are leaving on (an internetless) vacation on May 9, and I need book recommendations again!

On the list: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (thanks to SI and CM). What else? Preferably nothing too terribly meaty (though I imagine I’ll get something else by Anne Lamott, LOVED Traveling Mercies).

I could use more reccos along the lines of Eat, Pray, Love or even The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love. I need happy (not morbid ala laughter Augusten Burroughs) with a twinge of deep.

Whatcha got?

I have fond memories of being a little girl (with long hair) and curling up on my dad while he read. I’d lay my head on his chest and try to trace the tiny letters with my eyes, inevitably falling asleep, completely exhausted from the effort. Reading was his escape, and it became ours. Books were/are adventures, and escapes; answers and provokers of bigger questions. They were our allies, accomplices and teachers.

Next weekend I’m treating myself to three days in the hills of north Georgia. People here like to call them mountains, I call them grassy boobs of earth. Semantics aside, I’ll be staying in a 16 room farmhouse (with presumably 15 other guests) on 72 acres with a lot of fresh air and zero commitments that aren’t to my mind, body or spirit.

In preparation for the voyage and on the advice of my therapist, I visited a bookstore yesterday at lunch that I didn’t even know existed though I’ve surely driven by a it a dozen times: Charis. I picked up four books and put them in a stack with the one I received on Sunday from Mary Jac, standing in a parking lot in the drizzle of after rain. I traded her a copy of Lamb for her copy of the first book in the list.

So really, I won’t be alone on my little trip, I’ll have these friends with me:

My friend Amanda recommended Eat, Pray, Love a few months ago over coffee, and though I didn’t fully grasp the pitch/concept/plot I filed the suggestion away on my to-read list. Much like my interludes with The Celestine Prophecy and On the Road; I resisted the book at first, based on…nothing. Vapor. Air. Absence of knowledge.

Weeks later during a binge visit to a local book store in preparation for the beach, I bought the book up and threw it in the stack along with What Jesus Meant , The Company of a Courtesan and a few others.

In the stack is where it sat until last week, when it was paroled for good behavior and I packed it up for the road trip to visit The Mc’s mom. Now – much like the others that sunk my mental Battleship – I know.

I opened the pages and found a familiar voice: one of a thirty four year old divorcee who found herself on the bathroom floor one night crying at the realization she didn’t want to be married anymore. That she didn’t want babies. That her dream looked considerably different from everyone else’s and that it was going to hurt to chase it. Then she went back to bed.

The font is tiny and the margins are slim and though that packs plenty of words on every page I’m still almost resentful the reading is so easy and enjoyable because the pages fly by and I want her adventure to last like those thirty minutes you find in between seven minute snooze button explosions. I tried to slow my progress with a margarita or three, and it worked. I made it through Italy (which I’m now yearning to visit) and stopped at India because a) it got too heady for someone a wee tipsy and b) drinking and philosophy don’t mix c) I felt sacrilegious.

A conversation documented in the book suggests every city has one word that describes it: for Rome the word is Sex, and for New York the word is Ambition.

So here I am the morning after and the book is still hanging with me like a sunburn and at the risk of starting a damn book club with you, I have to ask this: what word describes your city and what word describes you?

If you ask me (which I just did) I would say the word for Atlanta (the whole, mind you, not pockets of community) could be Lost and me? I’m still thinking about what my word is. Maybe Restless.

What’s yours?

The soft non-blow dried hair days have come to an end, but look what we’ve accomplished!

Wrangled: team for Jingle Jog

Socialized: with Claren

Painted: kitchen & bath

Painted: living room

Painted: Boudoir

Drove: 232 miles

Read: Sadly, only one book

Knitted: two scarves

Visited: a new (to me) state park

Tormented: Amber, unsuccessfully

Helped: Becky find a present for his lady

Baked: Cookies

Fell: Off chair

Built framework: friend Jill’s new website

Became assimilated: and created a fracking myspace profile out of morbid curiosity

No, no, the break wasn’t all I’d hoped or planned for; but it was perfect just the same. No work, no socializing, no feeling the need to blog, no stress.

Last night I slept like a kid the last day before school starts again. I lay in bed flipping between mind numbing shows until after 11 and grumbled at the alarm when it sounded…it’s good to know some things never change.