Rating: ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

Comments: Brilliantly introspective.
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And this is God’s own truth: the more often I cried in my room in Ixtapa and felt just generally wretched, the more often I started to have occasional moments of utter joy, feeling aware of each moment shining for its own momentous sake.

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But the bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you. A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear disillusion. You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

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Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, “Well, isn’t that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I’ll figure out what we’re going to do about your stuff.”

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In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

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If you want to be forgiven, if you want to experience that kind of love, you have to forgive everyone in your life– everyone, even the very worst boyfriend you ever had– even, for God’s sake, yourself.

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If you are what you do– and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea– and you do poorly, what then?

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I have learned that most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of people.

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… I believed them when they said that we are as sick as our secrets.

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I think that’s why most of us stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull– because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much. And that gives us license to try on that radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-acceptance; we’re allowed to escape from underneath one of the fatwas.

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This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we’re most sure that love can’t conquer all, it seems to anyway.