Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed

When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don't try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They're sacred. they are part of each person's journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone. That's the one fear you can alleviate.

The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love. Not advice, not questions about our choices, not suggestions for the future, just love.

If our goal is to be tolerant of people who are different than we are, Chase, then we really are aiming quite low. Traffic jams are to be tolerated. People are to be celebrated.

If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you’re good enough. Just do it. Be generous. Offer a gift to the world that no one else can offer: yourself.

Life is hard—not because we’re doing it wrong, just because it’s hard.

The sun shows up every morning, no matter how bad youve been the night before. It shines without judgment. It never withholds. It warms the sinners, the saints, the druggies, the cheerleaders- the saved and the heathens alike. You can hide from the sun, but it wont take you personally. It´ll never, ever punish yourfor hiding. You can stay in the dark for years or decades, and when you finally step outside, it´ll be there.

Reading is my inhale and writing is my exhale.

You have been offered "the gift of crisis". As Kathleen Norris reminds us, the Greek root of the word crisis is "to sift", as in, to shake out the excesses and leave only what's important. That's what crises do. They skae things up until we are forced to hold on to only what matters most. The rest falls away.

Wherever you go, there you are. Your emptiness goes with you. Maddening. Things that help: writing, reading, water, walks, forgiving myself every other minute, practicing easy yoga, taking deep breaths, and petting my dogs. These things don't fill me completely, but they remind me that it is not my job to fill myself. It's just my job to notice my emptiness and find graceful ways to live as a broken, unfilled human... If there's a silver lining to the emptiness, here it is: the unfillable is what brings people together. I've never made a friend by bragging about my strengths, but I've made countless by sharing my weakness and my emptiness.

Kind people are brave people. Brave is not something you should wait to feel. Brave is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.

Here's my hunch: nobody's secure, and nobody feels like she completely belongs. Those insecurities are just job hazards of being human. But some people dance anyway, and those people have more fun.

Since brokenness is the way of folks, the only way to live peacefully is to forgive everyone constantly, including yourself.

God approaches us in the disguise of other people.

That’s how you can tell that you’re filling yourself with the wrong things. You use a lot of energy, and in the end, you feel emptier and less comfortable than ever.

Because love is not something for which to search or wait or hope or dream. It's simply something to do.

I learned that in these disasters, all we can do is tell our In Case of Emergencies that their grief is real, and if it lasts forever, then we will grieve with them forever. As far as I was able to tell during those two years, there was nothing else worth saying. It was not going to be all right, ever. Everything doesn’t happen for a decent reason. I was Sister’s In Case of Emergency and I couldn’t fix her emergency. I couldn’t do anything at all except feed her, hold her when she cried, pray angry prayers, keep showing up, and hope that time and my home and presence would offer healing.

I don’t want to take anything to the grave. I want to die used up and emptied out. I don’t want to carry around anything that I don’t have to. I want to travel light.

I think one of the keys to happiness is accepting that I am never going to be perfectly happy. Life is uncomfortable. So I might as well get busy loving the people around me. I’m going to stop trying so hard to decide whether they are the “right people” for me and just take deep breaths and love my neighbors. I’m going to take care of my friends. I’m going to find peace in the ’burbs. I’m going to quit chasing happiness long enough to notice it smiling right at me.

That’s the thing about becoming a family: you gotta melt. You have to keep melting into each other until you become something entirely new. The only constant family rule is that everyone has to keep showing up.

What is to give light must endure burning.” —Viktor E. Frankl

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

Loving people and animals makes us stronger in the right ways and weaker in the right ways. Even if animals and people leave, even if they die, they leave us better. So we keep loving, even though we might lose, because loving teaches us and changes us.

Defrosting is excruciatingly painful. You have been numb for so long. As feeling comes back to your soul, you start to tingle, and it’s uncomfortable and strange. But then the tingles start feeling like daggers. Sadness, loss, fear, anger, anxiety—all of these things that you have been numbing with the booze—you feel them for the first time. And it’s horrific at first, to tell you the damn truth. But welcoming the pain and refusing to escape from it is the only way to recovery. You can’t go around it, you can’t go over it, you have to

If I want my world to be less vicious, then I must become more gentle. If I want my children to embrace other children for who they are, to treat other children with the dignity and respect every child of God deserves, then I had better treat other adults the same way. And I better make sure that my children know beyond a shadow of a doubt that in God's and their father's and my eyes, they are okay. They are loved as they are. Without a single unless. Because the kids who bully are those who are afraid that a secret part of themselves is not okay.

These things don’t fill me completely, but they remind me that it is not my job to fill myself. It’s just my job to notice my emptiness and find graceful ways to live as a broken, unfilled human—and maybe to help myself and others feel a teeny bit better.

Life is brutal, but it’s also beautiful. Life is Brutiful.

These things will be hard to do, but you can do hard things.

I don't believe in advice. Everybody has the answers right inside her, since we're all made up of the same amount of God. So when a friend says, I need some advice, I switch it to, I need some love, and I try to offer that.