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When Love Shows Up Disguised as Ordinary Life
In a world obsessed with grand gestures and dramatic declarations, Anne Lamott's "Somehow" whispers a different truth: love is often disguised as the mundane. Oprah Winfrey once called Lamott "the poet laureate of the ordinary," while Glennon Doyle describes her work as "spiritual comfort food." This book, which rocketed to the New York Times bestseller list within days of its 2023 release, arrives at a perfect moment-when many are questioning what matters in a post-pandemic world. Lamott's signature blend of raw honesty and unexpected humor has made her a literary lighthouse for millions seeking to navigate life's messiness with grace. As she famously quipped in a viral TED Talk: "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you." Through these pages, she invites us to unplug from our distractions and reconnect with what sustains us-the quiet, persistent force of love that somehow keeps showing up, especially when we least expect it.
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The Messy, Beautiful Everywhere-ness of Love
Love is rarely balletic grace. Instead, it "tromps and plops through our lives," showing up in unexpected places-sometimes disguised as a mess, sometimes as someone you've sworn never to forgive, but also as wings, good people, flowers, or tea. As a six-year-old wisely put it when asked what love is: "Oh, it's just this stuff." Love takes countless forms-family love entangled with history, community love, love of music, ecstatic love for nature, love of justice, love of God.
On any ten-minute walk from Lamott's home, evidence of love abounds-houses containing new babies, recent deaths, arguments between devoted couples, gardens, abandoned shacks, beehives, and terrified parents watching children on bicycles. This neighborhood holds decades of her life-nursing a dying neighbor, supporting a family after their child's suicide, raising her grandson in the park, confronting her addicted son, and later welcoming him back sober.
When we pay attention, we see how much holds us invisibly. Love is a bench. Love is scary half the time. But even when we're most afraid, love carries us like Lamott's friend Caroline carried a terrified frog to safety in her cupped hands while it leaped against them in terror.
This interconnectedness mirrors nature's wisdom. Tree roots aren't competing but communicating and helping through underground networks. Redwoods spread their roots in shallow webs, supporting each other against wind and sending nutrients when one is sick. Love is this root system. We're evolving toward oneness and sharing, perhaps what Teilhard de Chardin called Christ consciousness. Love is evolutionary survival-not-love is killing us.
Perhaps love is our atmosphere, the energy Einstein described as the only thing there is-like Wi-Fi, always present though sometimes wobbly. We can tune into it when we turn from news and internet to Bach, sambas, sonnets, and Beatles. Love often looks like grief and seems oddly friendly with death, though Lamott would prefer it kept better company with comfort and mirth. Love is compassion-the love that arises in suffering's presence. Is it enough for our stark realities? Maybe; I think so. Somehow.
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Being Goodness With Skin On
What can we leave behind when we're gone? What consistently lights the way during inevitable dark times? Lamott shares a story she's told her Sunday school kids for thirty years: A little girl calls for her mother at bedtime, afraid. Each time her mother comes in, she assures the girl Jesus is there with her. Finally, the child says plaintively, "I need someone with skin on."
This becomes Lamott's main spiritual instruction: be goodness with skin on. Plant bulbs in winter, help the poor, light candles in darkness to see what remains and still works. We're called to be love wearing socks and shoes, like God's Love We Deliver volunteers bringing food to the sick. Loving feelings follow loving actions-taking food to food banks, calling cranky relatives, fostering old pets.
When her church's new preacher Floyd Thompkins and the deacons created lavender bags of supplies for the unsheltered-shampoo, socks, dental floss-Lamott took three bags after service. At home, examining one, she found thoughtful items including a water-resistant porkpie hat-a kind of shelter with a "broad-spectrum" label that reminded her how we should see everyone as family.
She approached a woman with gray dreadlocks who presents herself with dignity despite her red, welted legs. Lamott awkwardly offered her the purple bag, explaining the antibacterial wipes were fragrance-free-useful where there's no toilet paper. They shared a sweet moment when she gave her the DawnMist lotion. "The dawn mist is cold but it means you've gotten through the night," Lamott reflected. The woman took the hat for someone named Mick, and soon departed.
Later, she found Ben again and gave him a purple bag with socks and the porkpie hat, which he modeled shyly. He told her, "Kindness is how I feel the movement of God." When she worried about his shelter for the coming rain, he assured her he and his friend stay "pretty dry until it warms up again." Life makes space for all manner of things-the rains come, spring springs, heat rises, night falls, sun rises, and we too fall and rise.
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When Doors Close and Open
Doors have always held symbolic power in Lamott's life. The back door of her childhood home creaked in the tiny house where she was conceived, suggesting hauntings and tension. Yet that same door led her and her brother to freedom-to a backyard world of tall grass, bugs, worms, blackberries, and neighborhood children.
Her parents didn't fight loudly but often retreated behind closed doors-her mother crying because father was unhappy with her, her father hiding peacefully in his writing alcove with a cool beer. When her little brother was born when she was five, she cried constantly, fearing he would die or her parents would divorce like the neighbors.
Behind her father's study door with its white hinges flecked with rust, she became the girl her father adored-reading advanced books, making him laugh, and learning algebra years before she needed it. Outside the study, her mother grew heavier while her father spent more time with writer friends and other women.
As a child, Lamott played therapist, making drop-in visits to each family member behind their closed doors. Later, her father abandoned his twenty-seven-year marriage while she was at college, fleeing to their coastal cabin with Bonnie, the trim, fashionable opposite of her mother. Five years later, he died of brain cancer at age fifty-six.
Seven years after his death, Lamott stood outside a red arched church door in Sausalito, desperately seeking sobriety. Inside wasn't beautiful-just fluorescent lights and coffee-drinking alcoholics-but she'd run out of good ideas. Getting sober was the hardest work she'd ever done, but those people gave her herself, a way of life, and everything alcohol had promised.
In 1988, her boyfriend came to her studio apartment looking grim. She cheered him up so well that she ended up pregnant, not knowing he was planning to move in with another woman. When he discovered she was keeping the baby, he slammed the door on them for seven years. Yet love pushed up its sleeves-people arrived daily with food, diapers, and support.
One day, after being criticized by her son and his girlfriend, she fled to her car and unleashed decades of rage, shouting at everyone-her son, his girlfriend, her brother, even her long-dead parents. Her mentor, Horrible Bonnie, recognized this breakdown as breakthrough. She suggested Lamott practice being her own romantic partner-buying herself flowers, saying "no" more often.
She did this radical self-love for months, and then Neal fell through her door-the exact right person. Their current front door is tomato-soup red with square panels, obtained from a junkyard. It has a medieval-style viewer, rusty hinges needing WD-40, and metal plates at the base because their dogs scratch constantly. Their door is banged up, peculiar and beautiful-like Lamott herself-and behind it, watching life go by, she finally feels safe.
Глава 5
When the Waters Recede: Love at Life's Edge
Sometimes life just sucks, as Jesus says somewhere in the Gospels (though Lamott can't recall chapter and verse). Life becomes a lava lamp of memories-happy and sad times, what might have been, and a fearful future-all accompanied by the burbling sound of advancing time, which her friend Karen is running out of, as will we all someday.
Karen can hardly breathe now. After Karen's diagnosis of hypersensitivity pneumonitis and through her harrowing double lung transplant, Lamott was furious. But lately, a dark beauty has emerged. Karen is like an extreme minus tide, the kind Lamott saw as a child playing in West Marin tide pools, when the ocean rolls back revealing boulders, algae, and marine life.
The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and when you're older, friends begin to die with appalling regularity. Karen is so sick now that it can be hard to be with her, but Lamott shows up and listens. That's all we have to offer, and it's enough. It's hard for Karen to stay alive, but when Lamott pays attention, she sees that this takes a back seat to her being alive-stroking her cat, sipping tea with friends, watching videos of her grandchildren.
What's revealed when people are dying is all they loved-what they'll miss and what still feeds them. Karen with her cat and friends, photos of family; Lamott's father happy that last morning on the beach. Those ordinary moments-the grip of a hand, laughing despite everything, vanilla pudding.
Lamott shows up, and they look at things together. Sometimes they laugh. Karen's imagination remains intact, along with her flights of fancy and plans for revenge. She told Lamott about seeing a coyote once when she and her son were at the tide pools-how it came trotting from the chaparral and frolicked in the water like a dog or child would. Talk about the joy of living. Talk about life making sense.
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When We Screw Up: The Healing Path Through Shame
We humans screw up; that's our nature. Francis Spufford wrote that the human propensity is to fuck things up. There's a flaw in our genetic and social coding that keeps us damaging relationships, ourselves, and the planet. Most blame goes to the ego, always promoting itself without thought for neighbors or community, always wanting the bigger cookie while glaring at anyone who takes it first.
Growing up where mistakes felt like life-or-death matters bred perfectionism in Lamott and lifelong fear of public errors. Yet she committed a truly reprehensible public disgrace once. Years ago, she retweeted an extremely offensive joke about a famous transgender person. The tweet went viral, media chastised her, her son turned against her, and she did everything to make amends-wrote a contrite essay, avoided excuses, bared her soul, groveled.
When invited to give a commencement address at a Catholic college during COVID, she wrote a heartfelt fifteen-minute talk about trusting God's goodness, finding self-respect within, and Saint Paul's wisdom that you're alive if you love others. Four days later, three students protested her "history of transphobia" to the dean. Her speech was canceled, and worse, the dean sent a letter to students, parents, alumni, and media, apologizing for choosing someone with a "history of transphobia."
When we screw up or "miss the target," it's never the final word. Our brokenness becomes less controlling when we "call a thing what it is," as Luther said. Hope is believing love is bigger than any grim, bleak circumstances anyone can throw at us.
Months later, inspired by a friend's letter to "reach out to people and don't be a jerk," Lamott offered to host an online fundraiser for a law firm doing pro bono work with LGBTQ refugees. When asked if she had "evolved," she reached her breaking point: "Look, I cannot do this. Give her my last book with the essay on this experience. Give her all my work over forty years. This is who I am. I cannot have these discussions anymore. It saps me."
The minute she says to shame, "Oh, you again," she's won. The wicked witch melts into a pool until next time. She's not who she is when she screws up, but perhaps the dean isn't who she was sending that letter, nor the board member asking if she'd evolved. The board eventually came back enthusiastically inviting her to participate. She gave a fabulous talk, and the law firm raised substantial funds.
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The Resonance of Song: Finding Presence Through Music
The easiest way to get present is to sing, because you can't move to the next note until you've finished the one you're singing. This simple truth became profoundly clear to Lamott during the Yom Kippur beach service, where she found herself fully immersed in each note, each breath, each moment of sacred connection. The act of singing demands complete presence - there's no room for worried thoughts about tomorrow or regrets about yesterday when your voice must hit the next note with precision.
The rabbi's announcement carried special weight that day, suggesting they write in the sand what they wanted to leave for God, rather than following the traditional practice of throwing breadcrumbs into the water. "Write down what you're sick of carrying," the rabbi urged, "all the stuff that you lug around because you have all the time in the world. Yom Kippur says you don't." These words struck a chord with everyone present, acknowledging the universal human tendency to hold onto burdens we should release.
They approached the ocean's edge in careful shifts, each person taking their moment to draw their private messages in the sand, knowing the tide would soon claim their offerings. Lamott chose to draw a primitive sports car, a symbol laden with personal meaning. The band provided a soundtrack that seemed divinely curated - moving from traditional Hebrew songs to Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay," and then, as if by cosmic arrangement, "Ripple" by the Grateful Dead - a song that held profound significance as her favorite of the past five decades.
The appearance of "Ripple" felt like more than coincidence. She and her husband Neal had discovered on their second date that it was the song they both independently wanted played at their memorial services - a shared sentiment that spoke volumes about their compatibility. This mutual connection to the song led them to choose it for their wedding processional, transforming a meditation on mortality into a celebration of union.
Standing there, singing with hundreds of others, Lamott experienced a profound physical sensation of resonance, like a tuning fork vibrating in perfect harmony. The image of deaf children feeling music through their fingertips on a piano came to her - a reminder that music transcends ordinary sensory boundaries. In this moment of collective song, she felt simultaneously exposed and anchored, unhinged yet grounded. The vulnerability was therapeutic, cleansing, good.
The drive home wrapped her in a cocoon of warmth - love stripped down to its essential nature. The story of finding Neal in life's chaos still fills her with wonder and gratitude. He had chosen her, much like someone selecting a showroom car, and loved her more deeply for all her metaphorical dents and worrisome sounds. Their connection had crystallized on their tenth date, just ten days after meeting, when she reached across the table in a gesture of tentative intimacy, touching his fingertip to hers, feeling his fingernail beneath her own. That simple touch generated internal reverberations - vibrations of simultaneous joy and fear, the unmistakable sound of a whole new world announcing its arrival.
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Finding Home in Community: The Sacrament of Welcome
In most of her communities, Lamott arrived toxic or banged up by life, and strangers showed her how to get back on track. When you voice that you need help, you'll be directed to people sorting clothes for Africa, meditating in sanghas, staying sober in basements, or square dancing. Eighty percent of any gathering might seem stupid and beneath you, but the other twenty percent will save you by giving you connection, a place in the family of man. And this is salvation.
They offer the sacrament of welcome. But to keep it, you must give it away. Giving and receiving is the economy of our souls. This will fill you, and may radicalize you. What certain parents told us about who we were was actually about who they were, while a friendly community holds up a more accurate mirror.
To find a beloved community, you just have to want to. You wander shyly into some group that's caught your eye. You show up, step inside, and say hello. A lot starts with hello. Maybe someone offers water. You thank them and ask what they're up to. Becoming part of a community can be scary, especially if you've been feeling untethered. We worry we'll get lost, used, or mocked.
The hard part is coming a second time. You might think these people aren't worthy or wouldn't accept you. But they'll likely say, "We're glad to see you. Please come back." You might think you don't have time because you're busy and important. But if you return a few times out of desperation, you'll see someone new come in looking furtive or shy. Then you'll go up to them and say, "Hello. I'm glad you're here."
During California wildfires, people spontaneously stepped up-directing traffic, loaning cars, forming bike brigades to bring water and supplies to those cut off. That's not charity. It's the reality of being human, of needing help and being helpers. This is our true selves. Love is call-and-response.
There's a flow among people gathered for the common good, intuitively sensing who needs what. In basketball they call this full-court vision-players knowing where teammates are without looking. You see that flow in food kitchens, music, and dance, where the illusion of separateness disappears.
Intimate groups take longer to form, but we're doomed without them. Our lives stay small in isolation. Communities are where the spirit does deep work of evolution, away from small and superior to deeper and more alive. At group meals, Lamott hangs back and either asks questions or shows off knowledge, wondering "Who's got the microphone?" But her group sees the false parts she props up and accepts them, like a kid who needs to dress as a cowboy for dinner. To feel seen and known that way is holy.
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Bearing the Beams of Love: Our Brief, Beautiful Purpose
"We are here to learn to endure the beams of love," Lamott has quoted (her version of William Blake) for fifty years. This radical idea contradicts everything she was raised to believe-striving, shame, family secrets, judgment, and showcasing a shiny surface of self-sufficiency. Without those old beliefs, who is she? And enduring love's beams? What a nightmare! Love breaks your heart and makes you soft, getting past your armor to loosen, warm, and change you molecularly.
Love can bruise the heart but also fill you with warmth. As Carl Sagan said, "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." When Lamott asked her six-year-old colleague what love is, he replied, "It's like, you know-duh." That's all we need to know-not Greek distinctions between eros and agape, but this energy exchange of affection, compassion, kindness, warmth, and hope.
Life passes quickly, and you can't scam your way out of that poignancy. We're vulnerable to many fears, from losing loved ones to the Frantic Effort to Appear Relevant. But we're together in this system, needing each other. Lamott sometimes despairs for her son and grandson facing an uncertain, hot future, so she models "crazy redeeming love"-watching Little League games through chain-link fences, bringing home stragglers for holiday meals, caring for the dying, performing weddings, and showing them nature's wonders.
We all know a few houses that aren't ours but feel like home-where everything stays the same while the outside world changes. Inside, time settles perfectly with nowhere to race, and familiar chords play, plunging us into memories and laughter. This old love is like homemade bread-food and medicine.
Blake actually wrote "to bear" not "endure," but endure really says it. We've all endured so much in our workplaces, families, and hearts. As Jeanne Moreau said, every human has something to cry about because of "the winds of solitude roaring at the edge of infinity." Love is a windbreaker made of people who listened, got us tea, didn't flee when life got dark, tucked us in, and got us back outside.
Our mountain was nearly black with fog one morning when Lamott was in full doom mode, but the sun eventually broke through until the last fog draped around it like a rosy pink feather boa. Love has always (eventually) lifted her from hardship. Grief may be homeless love, but people have brought their bravest selves to help bear her sadness.
Some children don't make it, but impossibly, their parents endure. Month after month they face unchanging gray windows, crying endlessly until one day the fog lightens slightly. Curiosity returns, leading to wonder, which is a cousin to love and why we're here.
The beams of love are everywhere, like jam particles in a spaceship. When you're feeling doomed for yourself or others, someone or something emerges-a friend, an election, a dog, a train ticket-creating a new feeling in your heart. There's still darkness, but also a mystical slash of light. To experience feelings not of this world is to experience soul, and to know soul is to know love.
What Blake actually wrote was: "And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love." If the younger ones in our lives remember only this-that they are here briefly to love and be loved-they'll have all they need. Love is elusive yet steadfast, fragile yet unbreakable, and always there for the asking-always, somehow.
