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My seven year old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, You know, this could be the best day ever and other times in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice. Nana, will you ever get sick and die? I think this pretty much says it for me and most of the people. I know that we're a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread. So I sat down a few days before my 61st birthday and I decided to compile a list of everything I know for sure There's so little truth in the popular culture, and it's good to be sure of a few things. For instance, I am no longer 47 although this is the age I feel in the age. I'd like to think of myself as being my friend. Paul used to say in his late seventies, said he felt like a young man was something really wrong with him. Our true person is outside of time and space,

but looking at the paperwork, I can in fact see that I was born in 1954. My inside self is outside of time and space. It doesn't have an age. I'm every age I've ever been, and so are you. Although I can't help mentioning as an aside that it might have been helpful if I hadn't followed the skin care rules of the sixties, which involved getting as much sun as possible while slathered in baby oil and basking in the glow of a tinfoil reflector shield. It was so liberating, though, to face the truth, that I was no longer in the last throes of middle age, that I decided to write down every single true thing. I know people feel really doomed and overwhelmed these days, and they keep asking me what's true. So I hope that my list of things I'm almost positive about might offer some basic operating instructions to anyone who's feeling really overwhelmed or beleaguered.

Number one. The first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is votes, a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it's impossible here on the incarnation will side of things. It's been a very bad match for those of us who are born extremely sensitive. It's so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we're being punked. It's filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty. Desperate poverty, floods and babies and acting and Mozart all swirled together. I don't think it's an ideal system Number two. Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you three. There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way Unless you're waiting for an organ, you can't buy,

achieve or date serenity and peace of mind. This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it. But it's an inside job, and we can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world. They have to find their own ways, their own answers. You can't run along side your grown Children with sunscreen and chapstick on their hero's journey. You have to release them. It's disrespectful not to. And if it's someone else's problem, you probably don't have the answer anyway. Our help is usually not very helpful or how help is often toxic. And help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much. Don't get your help and goodness all over everybody.

This brings us to number four. Everyone is screwed up, broken, clinging and scared. Even the people who seem to have it most together they're much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to other people's outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are. Also, you can't save, fix or rescue any of them or get anyone sober would help me get clean and sober. 30 years ago was the catastrophe of my behavior and thinking. So I have some sober friends for help, and I turned to a higher power one acronym for Goddess. The Gift of Desperation, G o D. Or as a sober friend put it.

By the end, I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards. So God might mean in this case, me running out of any more good ideas while fixing and saving and trying to rescue is futile. Radical self care is quantum, and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere like a little fresh air. It's a huge gift to the world when people respond by saying, Well, isn't she full of herself? Just smile obliquely like Mona Lisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being full of affection for one's goofy, self centered, cranky, annoying self is home. It's where world peace begins. Number five Chocolate with 75%.

Cacau is not actually a food. It's best use is as a bait in snake traps or to balance the legs of wobbly chairs. It was never meant to be considered inedible number six writing. Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. That's the secret of life. That's probably the main difference between you and them. They just do it. They do it by pre arrangement with themselves. They do it as a debt of honor. They tell stories that come through them one day at a time. Little by little, when my older brother was in fourth grade, he had a report, a term paper on birds do the next day. Yeah,

he hadn't started. So my dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper pencils and Brad's. For those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember brands. And he said to my brother, Just take it bird by bird buddy. Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your own voice and then find out about chickadees and tell us about them in your own voice and then geese. So the two most important things about writing our bird by bird and really God awful. First drafts. If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better. You're going to feel like hell if you wake up some day. And you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart, your stories, memories,

visions and songs, your truth, your version of things in your own voice. That's really all you have to offer us. And that's also why you were born. Seven publication and temporary creative successes or something you have to recover from. They kill a CZ many people is not. They will hurt damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine the most degraded in evil people I've ever known. Our male writers who've had huge bestsellers and yet returning to number one that all truth is paradox. It's also a miracle to get your work published to get your stories read and heard. Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, that it will fill the Swiss cheesy holes inside of you. It can't it won't, but writing can soak in singing in a choir or bluegrass fan, so campaigning, community murals,

air birding or fostering old dogs that no one else will. Number eight families Family's heir. Hard, hard, hard no matter how cherished and astonishing, they may also be again see number one at family gatherings, where you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal. Remember that in all cases it's a miracle that any of us specifically were conceived and born. Earth is forgiveness school. It begins with forgiving yourself, and then you might as well start at the dinner table. That way you can do this work and comfortable pants. When William Blake said that we're 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 I promise you're up to it.

You can do it, Cinderelly. You can do it, and you will be amazed. Nine. Food. Try to do a little better. I think you know what I mean. Number Can grace Grace a spherical WD 40 or Water Wings? The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as he or she loves your new grandchild. Go figure. The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. To summon grace, say help and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are,

but it doesn't leave you where it found you. And Grace won't look like Casper The Friendly ghost. Regrettably, But the phone will ring or the male will come. And then, against all odds, you'll get your sense of humor about yourself. Back Laughter really is carbonated holiness. It helps us breathe again and again and gives us fact to ourselves. And this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember, grace always bats last 11. God just means goodness. It's really not all that scary. It means the divine or loving, animating intelligence.

Or, as we learn from the great deteriorated A. The cosmic muffin. A good name for God is not me. 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 said. You contract bees on the bottom of Mason jars without lids because they don't look up so they just walk around bitterly, bumping into the glass walls. Go outside, look up, Secret of life. And finally, death number 12. Wow! And Yikes!

It's so hard to bear when a few people you cannot live without die, you'll never get over these losses. And no matter what the culture says, you're not supposed to. We Christians like to think of death is as a major change of address, but in any case, the person will live again, fully in your heart if you don't seal it off like Leonard, Cohen said, they're crocks and everything, and that's how the light gets in. And that's how we feel our people again, fully alive. Also, the people will make you laugh out loud at the most inconvenient times, and that's the great good news.

But their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you, grief and friends, time and tears will heal you. To some extent. Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate and moisturize you in the ground on which you walk. Do you know the first thing that God says to Moses? He says, Take off your shoes because this is holy ground. All evidence to the contrary, it's hard to believe, but it's the truest thing. I know when you're a little bit older, like my tiny personal self, you realize that death is a sacred as birth and don't worry, get on with your life. Almost every single death is easy and gentle with the very best people surrounding you for as long as you need.

You won't be alone. I thought they'll help you cross over to whatever awaits us. As Rhonda said, When all is said and done, we're really just all walking each other home. I think that's it. But if I think of anything else, I'll let you know. Thank you

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