[FRIAM] Everything she knows...

[Frank Wimberly]

This is an essay by Anne La Mott that I came across 4 years ago.  It may
seem that a late middle-aged non-scientist could not could contribute
philosophical thoughts that are worthy of the heights of Friam but I find
that it integrates the sublime and the ridiculous quite well.  Kind of like
Friam meetings.  The posts on the List are a little more coherent.

I was ten years old when she was born.  She is a successful novelist,
essayist, and short-story writer.

"I am going to be 61 years old in 48 hours.  Wow.  I thought i was only
forty-seven, but looking over the paperwork, I see that I was born in
1954.  My inside self does not have an age, although can't help mentioning
as an aside that it might have been useful had I not followed the Skin Care
rules of the sixties, ie to get as much sun as possible, while slathered in
baby oil.  (My sober friend Paul O said, at eighty, that he felt like a
young man who had something wrong with him.). Anyway, I thought I might
take the opportunity to write down every single thing I know, as of today.

    1.  All truth is a paradox. Life is a precious unfathomably beautiful
gift; and it is impossible here, on the incarnational side of things.  It
has been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely
sensitive.  It is so hard and weird that we wonder if we are being punked.
And it filled with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, floods and babies
and acne and Mozart, all swirled together.

    2.  Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few
minutes, including you.

    3.  There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind
of last way, unless you are waiting for an organ.  You can't buy, achieve,
or date it.  This is the most horrible truth.

    4.  Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people
who seem to have it more or less together.  They are much more like you
than you would believe.  So try not to compare your insides to their
outsides. Also, you can't save, fix or rescue any of them, or get any of
them sober.  But radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the
atmosphere, like a little fresh air.  It is a huge gift to the world.  When
people respond by saying, "Well, isn't she full of herself," smile
obliquely, like Mona Lisa, and make both of you a nice cup of tea.

     5.  Chocolate with 70% cacao is not actually a food. It's best use is
as bait in snake traps.

     6.  Writing: shitty first drafts.  Butt in chair. Just do it. You own
everything that happened to you.  You are going to feel like hell if you
never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your
stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in
your voice.  That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were
born

    7.  Publication and temporary creative successes are something you have
to recover from.  They kill as many people as not.  They will hurt, damage
and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and sometimes
nearly-evil men I have known were all writers who'd had bestsellers.   Yet,
it is also a miracle to get your work published (see #1.). Just try to bust
yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, will fill
the Swiss cheesey holes.  It won't, it can't.  But writing can. So can
singing.

     8.  Families;  hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and
astonishing they may also be. (See #1 again.)  At family gatherings where
you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal, remember that in half of all
cases, it's a miracle that this annoying person even lived.  Earth is
Forgiveness School.  You might as well start at the dinner table.  That
way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.  When Blake said that we
are here to learn to endure the beams of love, he knew that your family
would be an intimate part of this, even as you want to run screaming for
your cute little life.  But that you are up to it. You can do it,
Cinderellie.  You will be amazed.

     9.  Food; try to do a little better.

     10.  Grace: Spiritual WD-40. Water wings.  The mystery of grace is
that God loves Dick Cheney and me exactly as much as He or She loves your
grandchild.  Go figure. The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us
and our world.  To summon grace, say, "Help!"  And then buckle up.  Grace
won't look like Casper the Friendly Ghost; but the phone will ring, or the
mail will come, and then against all odds, you will get your sense of humor
about yourself  back.  Laughter really is carbonated holiness, even if you
are sick of me saying it.

     11.  God; Goodnesss, Love energy, the Divine, a loving animating
intelligence, the Cosmic Muffin. You will worship and serve something, so
like St. Bob said, you gotta choose.  You can play on our side, or Bill
Maher's and Franklin Graham's.  Emerson said that the happiest person on
earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go
outside a lot, and look up.  My pastor says you can trap bees on the floor
of a Mason jar without a lid, because they don't look up.  If they did,
they could fly to freedom.

     11.  Faith: Paul Tillich said the opposite of faith is not doubt, but
certainty.  If I could say one thing to our little Tea Party friends, it
would be this.  Fundamentalism, in all its forms, is 90% of the reason the
world is so terrifying.  3% is the existence of snakes.  The love of our
incredible dogs and cats is the closest most of us will come, on this side
of eternity, to knowing the direct love of God; although cats can be so
bitter, which is not the god part: the crazy Love is.  Also,  "Figure it
out" is not a good slogan.

     12.  Jesus; Jesus would have even loved horrible, mealy-mouth
self-obsessed you, as if you were the only person on earth.  But He would
hope that you would perhaps pull yourself together just the tiniest,
tiniest bit--maybe have a little something to eat, and a nap.

     13.  Exercise: If you want to have a good life after you have grown a
little less young, you must walk almost every day. There is no way around
this.  If you are in a wheelchair, you must do chair exercises.  Every
single doctor on earth will tell you this, so don't go by what I say.

     14.  Death; wow.  So f-ing hard to bear, when the few people you
cannot live without die.  You will never get over these losses, and are not
supposed to.  We Christians like to think death is a major change of
address, but in any case, the person will live fully again in your heart,
at some point, and make you smile at the MOST inappropriate times.  But
their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you.
All truth is a paradox.   Grief, friends, time and tears will heal you.
Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate you and the ground on which you
walk.  The first thing God says to Moses is, "Take off your shoes."  We are
on holy ground.  Hard to believe, but the truest thing I know.

    I think that's it, everything I know.  I wish I had shoe-horned in what
E.L. Doctorow said about writing: "It's like driving at night with the
headlights on.  You can only see a little aways ahead of you, but you can
make the whole journey that way."  I love that, because it's teue about
everything we tey.  I wish I had slipped in what Ram Das said, that when
all is said and done, we're just all walking each other home.  Oh, well,
another time.  God bless you all good."

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918
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