Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

I tell the kids: Stories are flashlights. You shine a light in one place—an attic floor, a canyon wall, or a memory—and then you describe it the best you can. Maybe you need to find a photo of it in a book, or maybe it is right there in your memory, on the screen behind your eyes.

Jung wrote that when we look outside ourselves, we dream. When we look inside, we wake up. Why would you walk out of a lovely dream, or Plato’s cave, into real life?

Shakespeare said we all owe God a death.

What other than books is inside me or nearby that can help connect with what has meaning? Prayer? Breath? Movement? Oranges? Cats? What about staring at the night sky? What about getting to a window and looking out with the attention and curiosity we see in little kids?

When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right. My Jesuit friend Tom used to say that he never noticed what he was feeling; only that he was right.

Forty percent! What if I could reduce my viral load by forty percent?

Almost thirty years ago, when I called my mentor Horrible Bonnie at my most toxic and hysterical, having screwed up as a mother, she said to me, “Dearest? Here is the secret: You are preapproved.” I kept asking her, “Really?”

The Dalai Lama said that “religion is like going out to dinner with friends. Everyone may order something different, but everyone can still sit at the same table.”

So as is my habit, I asked God for help with the mess of me. God immediately sent in two people. The first was Martin Luther King, quoted on Twitter, that hate cannot drive out hate, only love can. That sucks. Yet it was enough for me to realize that I needed palliative care. The second was an eight-year-old boy. I asked one of my Sunday school kid