Hallelujah Anyway by Anne Lamott

Author:Anne Lamott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-15T14:20:15+00:00

SIX

Planes

My six-year-old grandson often calls to me, as he drifts off to sleep down the hall, with both our doors wide open, “That was the best day ever.” Then he wakes in the dead of night and calls out, “Nana, will you ever get sick or die?” Terrorized, he cries in the dark, until I go fish him out. He is like a pond, a self-contained waterbody with long brown legs, teeming with every manner of life, rooted water plants and flowers, fish, turtles, tadpoles, ducks, but also, hidden in the silt, piranhas, stingrays, great white sharks. I put him back to sleep in my bed. A few hours later, when the sun rises, he wakes and says, “This could be the best day ever.” He can fly again.

No matter how bad or lovely one’s childhood, almost everybody walking around was somehow held, fed, and cared for, at least enough to still exist. The universe gave us sunlight, water, and milk, and we grew. The human condition brought with it terror, and we wept. The human family held us, the best it could. Then it inadvertently destroyed us: we were taught the exact opposite of what Mark Yaconelli calls the Rule of Love. He wrote a letter to the teenagers in the Sunday-school class I teach that said, “Anything that leaves you more fearful, more isolated, more disconnected from other people, more full of judgment or self-hatred, is not of God, does not follow the Rule of Love—and you should stop doing it.” But while I was growing up, most things left me fearful and isolated.

Every so often we drop down into another plane, to that trusting spirit that knows that, underneath all things, we are held, that we are children, born into this world in tender innocence. This can be experienced while doing the child’s pose in yoga, snorkeling, and, I would guess, while hang gliding, safely suspended and held. But then we have to snap out of it, snap to it, get back up to the video game of life, get back to work, or traffic, get back to everyone whose calls we missed.

Underneath all things means that beneath the floorboards, in the depths, in the spaces between the pebbles or sandy floor that contain the pond, that hold our own inside person, is something that can’t be destroyed, a foundation that keeps all the water from sinking back into the earth. Something is there, something we need, when we come to rest, when all is lost.

Years and years ago, a writer named Lynne Twist, a lifelong activist for global hunger causes, wrote of an African village in existential crisis; its water supplies were gone, its shallow wells were running dry. The village was several hours into the desert in Senegal, on the western tip of Africa, in the harshest imaginable environment, where almost nothing grew but baobab trees, with their leafy branches for shade. The village was not eligible for government help, being outside the census, and even thousands of gallons of donated water would not help for long.

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