Anne Lamott

Love is sovereign here, all evidence to the contrary, I promise you. The current fever dream has no chance against the forces of love. Love is a spotlight on the dark stage that you can go stand in, right this minute, or later today, maybe after lunch, as soon as you remember and decide to.

Love is the truth. The truth is Love. Love is supernatural, oceanic; love is a shared tangerine. Divine love looks most flagrantly like the way you and your dogs and cats feel about each other. (Well...dogs.)

Forgiveness is ultimate love but Grad school, so let's stay in kindergarten. It will be enough to save us:

Love is gentle if amused warmth for annoying and deeply disappointing people, espcially ourselves.

Love is affectionate awareness, and compassion stirring in our hearts and hands and eyes. Love is tenderness in your soul. Love is someone to cry with. Love is little kids giving away a Twinkie.

Love is service and charity to strangers, giving away freely what you have been so freely given, no matter if you have tiny opinions on their pit bull or personal hygiene. This will heal you and fill the well.

Love is beauty and light, beauty and light are love. Gardens are love school, where we learn that love includes mess and microbes and hard pebbly soil and rot and (gack!) spiders, that turn It All into beauty and food and carpets of grass, or lily-of-the-valley (This is a sneaky subversive Jesusy reference to the greatest anti-anxiety prescription, in Matthew, "Consider the lilies-of-the valley. They don't toil or spin, yet are beyond beautiful and tended so, so lighten TF up, dude--you'll will be fine, or at least semi-fine"--oops. I may be paraphrasing now. Sorry--back to groundcover.) With water, light and love, rocky pebbly soil grows lacey white alyssum. Also, metaphorically, literacy projects, food pantries, and ever-so-slightly tense family reunions. It's David Blaine on steroids.

How to have have loving feelings? Do loving things. The quickest ways are to flirt with old people, and to rub lotion on your cellulitely and deeply discouraging thighs and tummy. You can put feet to love by walking with hideously slow people, who need walkers or your arm to hang on to, while you could be burning off lots of calories or arriving somewhere important. You can put feet to your love at rallies for truth and justice and equality. You can put feet to your love by stepping outside without your phone, and looking up. Love is looking up, although gazing at your huge homely achey feet with gratitude is also love: the places they have taken and steadied you!

(Gratitude is love, a rich magnetized energy that changes the world)

Love is what you are made of and what you were made for, even though some days are just too long. Your love, and our love for you, cannot help but heal you, the poor, and America. You cannot help but be love, and be loved. You might as well give up on shutting down, staying armored or buttressed, refusing to be a part of this love thing, because it is going to win. Trust me on this. You are doomed. Yikes, and Hallelujah.

- Anne Lamott, Facebook post