Soul Boom - Anne Lamott: What is the Key to Lasting Love?

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Anne Lamott joins Rainn Wilson this week on Soul Boom for an enlightening conversation about the complexities of love, spiritual growth, and self-acceptance. Anne shares her insights on the journey of finding love later in life, the importance of community, and the transformative power of radical self-care. Their discussion delves into the profound impact of prayer, overcoming judgment, and the continuous process of healing and personal development. Anne's latest book, 'Somehow: Thoughts on Love" is available now. Listen to it on Audible: Order it on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3VgBsV1 Thank you to our sponsors! Pique Tea (15% OFF!) : https://piquelife.com/soul Waking Up app (1st month free!): https://wakingup.com/soulboom Fetzer Institute: https://fetzer.org/ Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Spring Green Films Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know, I heard someone say, or maybe I read this, maybe you said this. We always like to say that we have a God-shaped hole inside of us, but that maybe God has an any-shaped hole inside of God, inside of him or her, and that the way that we are going to fill that hole is by finding other people because everyone's got those holes inside of them, and we're going to find other people who are conscious of it and who are willing. If the willingness comes from the pain, where does this solution come from?

You know, courage is fear that has said its prayers, right? Hey there. It's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. So how old are you? Wow, that's getting intimate.

Right off the bat. I'm 37. You 37? I'm 58. 58? Yeah. Wow, you're so young. Oh, don't say that.

Yeah. You're going to love your 60s. I know you've had a beautiful, loving, and successful life. There's just something about the 60s that it's like you get free, you know. Really? Yeah. Well, I did read someone was talking about how the 60s were that perfect decade, where you still had your health and your vitality.

Yeah, yeah. And your wits about you. Yeah. Before things start to fray a little bit in your 70s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry to say. I know you're 70. Yeah, barely.

I think I'm in my extremely late 60s. You're really late 60s. Such so late. But, no, there is something freeing, like, you know, that, all that hustle and con just quietes down. And you can go either way. It's like, it's not like that thing, that clench anymore. And it's just like you've thrown so much shit out of the plane, your psychic plane that just kept you flying really like caring about certain stuff that at 60, you just, you think, you know, whatever, you know, I don't care anymore.

And then that just gives you back in a way that I hadn't experienced. So I have a lot of things I want to talk to you about. Okay, great. Have we started recording yet? No. We're not going to record any of this. This is just a conversation that's going to live. It's going to live in our memories forever. That's a lot. Okay. I don't care what we talk about. I have really moved by your new book somehow and how audacious it is for you to be tackling something as enormous as love. And to start with that, I got to meet Neil, your new-ish husband. How long have you been together? Been together almost eight years. But we got married three days after. after I started getting Social Security,

so that was five years ago. Okay, that's a great marker. I have so many questions, but let me put it this way. Okay. In my book, I talk about love a little bit, and I talk about how limited that word is because in the English language, there's like one word for love,

where in like Sanskrit, there's supposed to be like 97 words for love. And in English, it's like, I love my skateboard, I love Nantucket, I love God, I love my grandchild, And it's just like one word that is so all encompassing.

And you even reference in here, like the ancient Greeks had agape for like divine love. And they had a word for romantic love and for filial love, kinship love. You have a word for pet love. What was that one? Mascotus. Mascotus. The love for one's pet that she invented, trademark, Anne Lamott. Brilliant.

Love that. Devotion to one's pet. Devotion to one's pet. How did this recent kind of. of romantic love transitioning into marital love in this phase in your life. What has that opened up for you? Let me go back a little bit. Okay. Okay. So we go back to my early 60, 62, and I'd always had, I'd always sort of known who the next hostage was, right? There was someone there that was had a nice accent, or he was smart, or well-known, or cute, or we kind of grocked each other, and I would just be with

them. But I knew I had a secret, which was that if they were a woman, I knew they wouldn't be my best girlfriend. And that was what I wondered if I might find in the world a man who, if he were a woman, would be my best girlfriend because he was so rich in spirit and in a listener. Now, I mean, no offense to your gender, but I have been with men who had tiny listening issues. They like to talk more, right? And they like to. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, um, some men have a micro penis. Some men have a micro listening. Tiny, tiny listening. It's hardly worth mentioning. And so I went on match because I've been single for a while. And I had a year, you can, we can save your listeners, the, the price of buying any of my books, because they can just go to Ann Lamott on Match.com.

And there's an essay from Salon that is probably everything you need to know about me and how I met Neil. Because what I did was a year of dating. Every week I went out with a different man who seemed like he might be nice, not knowing he had a bevis and Budhead laugh. Three of them, and I'm not making this up, you know, I'm a believer, I'm a Sunday school teacher, would not lie to you, rain. Three of them brought me manuscripts, right? but what I learned to do was to date. And my son, Sam, Sam has on his forearm, the tattoo, we never give up. And I just didn't give up.

And I kept thinking maybe there's a man out there. What did you learn about dating? What is dating? I learned how to say no. I learned that no is a complete sentence. I learned that I could show up. You know, before I turned on Woody Allen, he used to say 80% of life was just showing up. And I learned to show up, you know, instantly, you know, three to four seconds.

whether it's going to go well. Isn't that a problem if you have a coffee date or even a dinner date? No, I never would have a dinner date. No, I don't even have dinner dates with Neil, and I've known him for eight years. I don't really like to eat with people, except on the couch with the animals and like TV on, like below deck or something.

So I would never have a, ever. I wouldn't have a coffee, a dinner date with him for two weeks, and we saw each other every single day. This episode brought to you by Match.com and Below Decks. Back to Anne Lamont. So anyway, I learned to say no, I learned to be, you know, Baha'i and the Dalai Lama saying, my only religion is kindness. I thought I'll show up, 80% of life, never going to give up, I'm going to be kind. There's a story we tell our Sunday school kids, and this fits in of a little girl who's scared to death to sleep, and her mother keeps coming in.

You know the drill, just more and more irritated, but the mother keeps saying, God is right here. Jesus is here on the bed with you. Just go to sleep. You're not on. It goes on and on. And finally, she comes in for the last time. I need someone with skin on. And I believe my faith tells me that that's who I'm called to be is I'm God's love in expression.

I'm God's love with skin on, right? So I'm going to show up for these people, these men on match. And I'm just going to be God's love, you know? And I'm going to get out of there if I need to. And I'm going to say, you know what? I'm really glad we got to have a cup of coffee. I know that we're not a good match, but you take care. You know, and so I did that for a year.

Were some of them disappointed, were they like? A few of them, the ones with the manuscript. And the guy who wondered. Can you still read my manuscript? Right. Well, one of them who was so handsome, he had an English accent at the end. He said, I'm going to confess that I really just wanted to get a selfie with you. And it was like, well, thanks for sharing.

you know, I hope that you're bitten and killed by snakes. But I mean that in a warm Christian Sunday school way. And then maybe devoured by your pets because that happens. Yeah, but after the hemorrhoids, and this is the Christian way. And then one guy asked after a great two dates if it was too soon to bring a plot treatment. Right. So that's what I did for a year. Wow.

So then I took a little time off because I'm into radical self-care. and I took some time off. And I started to feel my feelings, which has been part of the path of recovery for me. And I realized I felt really sad and empty. And I was pouring my life into my son and my grandchild, who was young at the time, who was six or seven, six, I guess,

and into my church community, into my recovery, and into the neighborhood. I just am this way. I'm God's love with skin on. I'm blessed. I just came this way. I was way more anxious than the average bear. and really loving.

That's just how God made me. And I longed for a partner. And so one day I expressed it to my older brother who was staying with me, who's a fundamentalist Christian, but I adore him. But he used to be. We've kind of ruined him. And he kind of handed me this Christian bumper sticker BS crock of shit. Well, God never gives you more than you can handle.

It was like, bore me later. you know, but it was a straw that broke the camel's back. And I had to leave the house. I got in the car, started crying, started hitting the steering wheel, saying, God, I'm so sick of you, Sam and Jackson, and both of my brothers, and mom and dad, I can't believe you gave me such a crippling, pretzelizing idea of love is pouring all my life force into the entire world trying to get a sense that I'm of value. I did this for 40 minutes.

I'm not kidding, right there to the woods and back. Then I have had a mentor since I got sober. So for like 37 years, her name is Horrible Bunny. And pulled over by the side of the road. And I called her. And I said, I hate everyone. They're users. They just are takers.

I'm sucked right. And there was one of the silences, the reason I call her horrible Bunny. And she said, dearest, this is what we paid for. And she said, you're no one's priority. Do you know why? I knew what she was going to say.

She said, you're not your own priority. Yeah. And what you're going to do for three months is you're going to do this radical caring self-love of being your own priority, beginning with going to the health food store on your way home and getting the overpriced homemade tamales. Yeah. They're so delicious. The tamales are where it began. The air one is right down the street.

Have you been to the air one? No, but we will. And Neil has your car and he may be there as we speak. He might be there. But talk about like, you know, they're like $27 tamales and they're most delicious you've ever had. And that's what she said. Yeah. She said, you're going to get the homemade, overpriced tamales.

And I did. And I did this love. I was putting lotion on the flabby situations. I was putting tattoos on my thighs. I was having only food I love. I was having only spiritual people. I was saying no to people that were a little toxic for me that I'd always sort of sucked up to because maybe they had something I wanted or, you know, could further my career and whatever.

And I just said, no. And about three or four months after I had that conversation, Neil came up on the match thing that's for older people, which is called Our Time. Our Time. And I met him. And it was funny. I could have come up with a better name for a senior dating, like Golden Decades. Golden Decades.

How's that? Right. I know. Final chapter. Right. Hello, death. What do you think? So anyway, it was so anyway, but I'd already rejected him because he was, he's overly educated

and he was allergic to cats. That was not really the main thing. That's a deal breaker. Right, for me. And because I sleep with my cats. The only reason I'm semi-okay most days is because of my cats and my dog. Yeah. And I thought, well.

You just shave them. I know, right? Or get those bizarre Mr. Bigglesworth cats. you know, that are kind of cats in the loosest sense of the world. Do they make little hazmat suits for cats? Because you could put a cat in a hat. You could do that. Cat mat, casmat suit.

And then they would be not toxic to Neil. Anyway, so you had tried to date Neil. And he was like, I don't know. And I also, by then, because I was doing this radical romantic self-love with myself, I didn't feel like a lot of urgency. And I kind of let it go. On our time, I see this guy. You've seen him.

He's tall. He's great. looking. He's dear. He's smarter than shit. I like Neil. I like Neil too. Immediately. He's smarter than I am. Like he's, we have a dog, very smart dog who's smarter than I am, but not smarter than Neil. Like he's got this kind of crystalline intelligence. But anyway, I saw him. I like the profile and I wrote to him. I said, oh, I wonder if you might want to have coffee. I like your profile. And he said, you've already rejected me. I think it's because I'm not Jesusy enough. Well, I could care less whether someone's Jesus, you're not.

It's just my thing. It's like, he's way too tall for Jesus. Right, exactly, right. Jesus was probably like 5'1. Probably. And he's got like size 14 shoes, right? And Jesus got like little sandals, little ten. Size nine.

Jesus would have a hard time washing Neil's feet. Correct, correct. Exactly. He might have drawn a line right there. It's like, I'm going to wash Judas's feet. Neil, I'm sorry, there's just too big. Yeah, I draw a line. Peter, Paul, Matthew, Tim, Scottie, come over here.

Wash Neil's feet. Then we got together for coffee because I don't have meals with people. And we just groped each other. We wanted to keep the conversation going. That was the thing. I know, right? That's so exciting. And it's real life.

And it gets very lifey some days. Can I read a quote that I read of years this morning? You said in an article, if you're paying attention and making your own life as beautiful and rich and fun as it can be, you might just attract someone who's doing the same thing. Yeah. You can give up on tracking someone down with your butterfly net. That's right.

You do the work. You do the healing. Like people come, a lot of people ask, what do you do for your teenagers? My son got very, very lost in drugs and alcohol. And grace of God, the sober men in San Francisco fished him out almost 14 years ago. But he got very, very lost. And people say, what do you do? My kid's lost.

My kid's furious. My kids say you do the healing. You do your own work. You know, you become a person of wholeness. You become a person who's not projecting your own shame onto your kid, your own desperation to achieve in the world onto your own kid. And I'm a Sunday school teacher. I have, and I had a failing church.

So I might have two nine-year-olds and two teenagers in the same class. But, you know, the teenagers, in so many cases, They say, look at their parents, and the parents are racing around all day, every day with these meaningless to-do lists, getting more and more done, trying to achieve, trying to keep their weight down, trying to get to the gym, and the kids just grieve. They think, I don't want to be like that. I don't want, is that what life is like? And you go, no, you know, I'm clean and sober.

I have a spiritual path. I have a, I live to get back outdoors every day. You know, I have my pets. Yeah. And I love my life. And it gets very lifey. And there are some tools I can share for you for when it gets tough. Right.

That's what I teach my Sunday school kids. And so with the parents that come out, you know, to talks or lectures or something, I say, do your own healing. Get yourself back. Get yourself back. I love this idea. I love this idea because your ode to love is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. I recently had the incredible bounty of meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama in northern

India with Arthur Brooks. And Arthur Brooks was asking all these probing questions about the meaning of life and transcendence and modern society and what humans need. And every single answer the Dalai Lama just it's almost like he didn't hear the question and he just unfolded a different chapter about love. just profound, deep, searing, all-encompassing, that there really is no, that existence is love. God is love. The hippies were right about that. So is Jesus. God is love.

Love is in the scintillating molecules between us. I'm wondering about those barriers to love because it's something I think about with myself a lot. I wouldn't describe myself as a particularly loving person. and even in the 30-some years I've been with my wife, like, I kind of learned how to love her about 10 years ago. You know, it was rocky to say the least. And because my love, those barriers to love from myself had to be unpacked, not bird by bird,

but brick by brick, from the destructive circumstances of my traumatic childhood and terrible love being modeled for me by my dysfunctional parents. And I really was like in my late 40s that I learned really what love is. And therapy was a very valuable process. I'm also in recovery, 12 steps, a very valuable process for unpacking that as well. But I still wonder to this day, like, why am I, what would it be like to just live in a total love vibration. Like just can we do that? Can we be St. Francis of Assisi? Can we be the Dalai Lama?

Can we be Father Greg Boyle? Can we be these people that just vibrate loving joy in the Baha'i faith that's Abdul Baha, who's the perfect kind of embodiment of a loving way of being in the world? So many great Hindu gurus and swamis and thinkers have been able to, you know, tiptoe toward that. But what are the barriers for us for love, Anne, and how can we be total vibrating love machines? Well, I'm not positive that this side of the grave I'm going to be a total vibrating love machine. Okay. But I think you exude love. I'll stop.

You exude love. I mean, I can see you just being brought to tears by people being tenderhearted with you and letting you be really vulnerable. I can see who you were at six, you know. I can see who you were at three. And I can see who you are at this age that your love with skin on. And I feel like, you know, this horrible Bonnie said to me 37 years ago, Annie watched the self-talk, you know, because my self-taught, I harsh myself. and I wouldn't harsh you. If you handed me something to read, I wouldn't go,

God, rain, you know, put it away and let's revisit it in 2025. I would be so amazed that you had produced something and that it was your heart and soul. If you're handing me something to read, it's the very best you've got of your heart and soul and your brain, your experience, your strength, your hope, and you hand it to me. And I would receive it that way,

but we're not that way with ourselves, and I'm not that way with myself. but one thing that has helped me a lot is something I heard in recovery, which I'm sure you're familiar with, which is Chuck C, telling the story of the priest who helped Bill Wilson get the AAA off the ground in the 30s, who said to Bill, sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses. And I was on the road for three weeks just until a couple days ago. And I'm on a book tour, and I brought two pairs of glasses that are the same prescription. so that when I was being a certain judgmental way or having shame because of like a review

or anything, I just changed glasses. I would physically change glasses. And I think, let's put the good glass. Let's just see the love everywhere. And it's like another love person besides the Bob and, you know, the people that we've mentioned that just seem to be the embodiment of love was Brother Lawrence. and he talks about practicing the presence of God. And that was his path, that you practice the presence of God.

And that what I'm normally practicing are is, you know, who's to blame is something I'm good at and whose fault this is that things aren't going better and how I have got to get away from this or that or a person or whatever. Or I'm thinking about, because, you know, the two things, I think, that you started, this part of the conversation off on her, what are the impediments? And I would say one is just, for me, I think you're fine. You really do exude love. You're like a child.

And is that endless judgment. This is good. This is bad. This I need. This I don't need. This. I got to go. This, I'm out of here.

This I have two to three minutes for. This I could, you could, I know you. and I could talk for the rest of day, right, if we wanted to. Let's do it. Yeah. And that endless snap judgment. This is good. This is bad.

He's a bad guy. He's a bad guy. Grace is spiritual WD40. Grace is unearned love. Grace meets you exactly where you are, but grace doesn't leave you where it found you. Marjorie Taylor Green is loved exactly as much as the grandchildren you'll have someday. Go figure, right? But figure it out.

It's not a good slogan. And in the spiritual world. Sorry to interrupt, Father Gregory Boyle, who is one of my top three heroes of all time. He said, God is enamored of everything you are doing all the time. All the time. And he says that to the gangbangers in his program. Yeah. And just like that, that idea of like being watched and someone watching you with delight and adoration, every choice you're making good or bad. Like, oh, they did that. Oh, that's. They're doing that. Oh, my goodness. I know. No matter what.

Yeah. 100%. I mean, when my son was out there on meth and alcohol, there was literally, I mean, it was a nightmare. There wasn't a moment when I didn't feel this unconditional love you as my child. And that's how God feels about us. It's unfathomable love. On that, I always think about people who, you know, part of the book in Soul Boom is I have a chapter called the notorious GOD, which is kind of a. reimagining of God from the ground up or from the sky down. But this idea of a judgmental,

what I call sky daddy, which is so pervasive. There was a, I think it was a Michelangelo painting. And it was Jesus and the father and the father was embracing Jesus. And the father was, and God was like larger than Jesus had his kind of arms around him. And God was balding. And I thought, That's an odd choice. God can have any hair that he wants. Right. Why would God choose to be balding or someone choose to write? If I was, God.

I'm losing my hair. I would have a magnificent head of hair. A little more Zeus hair or Odin hair rather than the Michelangelo God hair. But I guess the point is that that idea of judgmentalism, like I think about my son. That's the first thing. But go ahead. Tell me about that. My son, Walter, and you know, like, when you have a child, it opens up a new door to love.

Like you think you know what love is. And then you have a kid and it's like, oh, there's a whole new world of love. I had no idea. It's like Alice peeking through a little door. There's a whole other garden back there. You're like, oh, I thought I was just falling down this rabbit hole. And there's a beautiful garden. I want to get to that garden to quote the hippies.

and my adoration for Walter, even when he's making mistakes, just my love for him is so vast. Can you imagine God's love for us as his children in that sense? Because it's times a bazillion. So how could there be judgment? How could there be kind of like a snarky condemnation from Sky Daddy in that kind of paradigm? Yeah. It's not possible.

As I wrote about it and somehow God. God doesn't have an app for not love. No, we would feel, I would express that not love is killing us, right? And so the crazy experiment might be in love, right, in practicing the presence of love, of putting a good pair of glasses on, which are loving, which see that people, everyone is engaged in an invisible struggle that we have, no matter how arrogant or destructive they appear on the surface, they're engaging in a struggle that is just devastating to them.

but that endless judgment of he's an asshole, she's a, she's a, she's a, that's like us projecting out the endless judgment of ourselves, that we've squandered our time, that we didn't pursue this or that, that we've wasted so much of our life on what other people think about us, trying to get certain critics to adore us and give us the FDA stamp of approval. Well, it's an inside job. You know that as well as I do, the self-respect and the delight that we, know God feels towards us because we feel it towards our kids. But so that endless judgment and you practice catching yourself, you go, oh, and I'm doing that

again. Like my husband's work is with the inner critic and he teaches you when this voice is telling you that you shouldn't try that. It's too scary. The New York City critics won't like it. The Hollywood critics won't like it, blah, blah, blah, that you just say to it, oh, it's you again. You've had it since you were a little child.

And you do the practice of saying, oh, it's you again. but with the judgment, you just go, oh, it's you again. This is what my parents did. This is how they taught us to feel that we were of value, even though they couldn't stand each other. There was alcoholism. So getting rid of that judgmental, that incessant judgmental voice. And as you know, in recovery, we do character defects.

And top of my list of especially my top five is judgmentalism. Me too. I can be very judgmental. But the judgment and that endless judgmental voice, I've recognized because of the path I've been on, it's like a toxic comfort zone because you know what it is? It's home. You know, mom and dad might be nearby, and this time they got help, you know?

I had OCD. I was turning off my light switch 17 times off and on. Every night before I went to bed. I had migraines at five years old. They didn't notice something was wrong with what they were doing to their children. they didn't notice what they were doing to their children or they let it go. And so for me to be in this energy that is toxic, that is judgmental, that is total separation, from me, you, God, from everything, from all the life, it's home, right?

And you have to find a new home. You have to find a home within yourself, this glade inside of you where for me, it's me and Jesus. and my little one, and that's my glade. And then right outside that, like outside the bullseye circle is Neil and my son and my three best friends and my younger brother. And they're the first ring of the bullseye, right? And the second ring is like a bunch more friends. I really love and trust.

About six rings out is standing at a podium and saying, I think you all have this. I think you all have probably equal proportions of grandiosity. and raging ego and self-doubt or even self-loathing. And so you begin to say it and it breaks a trance, you know. But that's how you wear down the judgment as you stop doing it to yourself so much. You know, you notice that you're projecting it out onto other people, the fact that I never looked right. I had this frizzy hair.

I didn't look. I weighed zero pounds. I weighed like 30 pounds in seventh grade, which is, you know, in all. I go into this existential despair because I've given birth to someone who's going to have to go through seventh and eighth grade, which is like the sixth ring of the thing, right? Yeah, Dante's infernal. I didn't ever really bounce back from that. And I've, and I'm, and add social media to that. And add social media to that. Yeah, people are not liking your photos and posting all of their sexy photos. Right, right. And their bikini photos. But so one

tool is that you start doing Neil's work of just saying, oh, it's you. It's how I survived. A really terrifying childhood was by thinking I was the problem, right? If I'm the problem, then I have some control over this situation because I can do better. If I think I'm the reason mom and dad aren't happy,

there's a solution. And it's for me to do better. It's for me to need less. It's for me not to cry. We got sent to our Ida English, mother, I had a father raised in, you know, Imperial Japan in the 20s by Christian missionaries. And so you don't cry and you don't get angry. And all children of alcoholics agree at a very early age not to see what's going on.

So some of the work is that you learn to cry. You learn to do your anger with someone healthy. And you agree if you're going to be a writer, you have to do this to start to respect yourself as the narrator of your life. You unsigned that contract where you didn't see it because it made your parents, your dad, feel so bad about his life so that you take it on. You put it in your own backpack. You do the work with a mentor or a therapist or a whoever to start taking that stuff out of your backpack. There was your dad's and your mom's.

The endless, endless judgment, is the person I'm loathing or judging or rejecting some kind of funhouse mirror for me? Right. Right. And in the last book I wrote, I used that wonderful line of Martin Luther King's. Like, don't let them get you to hate them. Because if you let them get you to hate them, you've lost that glade of love and the sweetness that you can see through the glasses that they're a child of God. Trump, for instance, is a man who was never loved, not even once until he had a daughter, never once before or since. I don't think he knows his grandchildren's name, but that's just me.

That's judgmental. But I wonder. I can say that, you know, I think Trump is a textbook walking a definition of narcissism. And I can say that I also am a narcissist. And so am I. It's not, as my therapist pointed out to me, it's not someone who is grandiose. It's someone who is either. at the top level of grandiose or else the biggest piece of worm shit on the planet.

Yeah. And you're in those two extremes. Like, I'm greater than everyone or I'm less than everyone. Right. And the hardest thing for a narcissist is to just be another bozo on the bus. Right, right. And to just be, I'm just a regular old person, man. Right.

And I can recognize myself in Donald Trump. And if I grew up, you know, with a gold-plated toilet. and nanny and never saw my father and I was never hugged in my only kind of self-worth came through sexual conquest and wealth, then I could see, you know, I could see me being exactly in his shoes. Yeah, me too. In that book where I wrote about the Dr. Kingline, I thought, I'm a narcissist, I'm a blowhard. I can be bombastic. I'm sure I'm right. My friend Tom W. is a Jesuit. priest says, I never ever noticed I was angry just said I was right, you know? And that's me and that's Trump. And I am, you know, and I have more sympathy towards him than most people I know. And because all truth is

paradox, I'm going to work for the next six months to cut off the head of the snake because that is going to destroy democracy if people are going to support the policies and what he has said about what he will do. You know what, democracy has been destroyed for a very, very long time. Oh, I don't know. No, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's so corroded and filled with hundreds of millions of dollars and, uh, that's, and a passel of politicians all tearing at each other's faces and stabbing each other in the back. That's been going on for a good 50 years. So the morning of like the possibility that if the Republicans win the election, that's going to destroy democracy, democracy is already pretty much destroyed. They would just kind of tear down the remaining

kind of termite-infested foundations. Well, you get to think that. That's not my belief. So now let's go to the second impediment in my experience with being in love and just looking around the way God might. But the other second, the second impediment is the shame, the toxic shame. of having grown up, and I know many, many of your listeners are just fine. I wasn't. I grew up in a really frightening situation of parents who couldn't stand each other, and I internalized their shame. And so what the natural reaction to that is to figure out who I can project this onto to

carry. That's what the whole southern white racist is about, is that like gays or black or somebody is, at least they're not gay, you know, Or at least they're not people of color. They're white American patriots, right? You've got to find somebody to project it onto. And the shame is the most excruciating feeling I ever have. I make a small mistake.

Got a terrible review a week ago in the New York Times. The worst review of my life that actually mentioned my hair and referred to some of my work as embroidered throat pillows. I so went into the shame spiral as if I'd never gotten sober or had 30 years of therapy and love. And you know my friend Tom, who I just mentioned Tom Weston, he told me the shame secret 30-some years ago. He said there are five rules of being an American adult. First, you mustn't have anything wrong with you or different about you. You just need to pass in any circumstance, right?

Rule two is if you do have something wrong with you or different about you, you just have to correct it. I mean, you just do, okay? The third rule is if you can't even correct it or fix it or change it, you just should pretend you have. It's like a silly old thing that is from the past. You don't do it. It's not a problem anymore. The fourth rule is if you can't even pretend that it's not an issue anymore, you should just not show up because it's really painful for the rest of us when you do. Wow.

That's great. The fifth rule is if you're going to assist on the right to show up, you should have the decency to be ashamed. And that is what we internalized by kindergarten, you know. Don't have anything different or be wrong. Fit in. Be look like Betsy Steiger who had soft blonde hair. I didn't have soft hair. Be like that we didn't have enough.

Got Betsy on the podcast next week, actually. Ask her about me. Okay. Narcissistic question right there. Right, right. And, you know, if you were different, if you looked wrong, if you were too big or too heavy, too tall or too short or to whatever, you didn't have enough money or you had, you know, there was a girl in my seventh and eighth grade class whose dad was mafia, big mafia king in the city.

Tremendous shame. We didn't have enough money. Tremendous shame, you know. And it takes a commitment to that, the healing of your soul, the restoration, to become the child you were born to be before they, in the paranoid sense of the word they, and the world, the culture got its midst on you. But that is the impediment, is that internalized shame about who he even are.

That's beautiful. That's my understanding. One of the things I struggle with with the kind of Western world, with the liberal world, with the secular world and with the kind of like moss-chumping yoga chakra embracing West Coast is you've talked a lot about heal yourself, forgive yourself, self-care, you know, stopping the judgmental voice against yourself. And these are all healing your internal trauma.

All of these are the barriers to love. and you've talked about them in great length, and they're super, super important. But I think for a lot of people that I know in this particular cultural milieu that I find myself here in suburban Los Angeles, is it stops there and ends there. They do that work and like, I want to feel better.

So I'm going to heal my trauma. I'm going to stop the self-judgmental voice. I'm going to open myself up to love. and like, oh, I'm feeling a little better. Mission accomplished. Right. Pull up the ladder. I got mine.

Yeah. And what I love about you and your work and what you do is you never end it there. And it is, you don't write about this very much, but it is very clear as a thread through your texts that you are of great service to others and that you heal yourself so that you can. teach Sunday school and bring a macaroni to the potluck at the church and feed the homeless and clean up and register voters and be a part of your community and help heal the woods and be a vibrant and necessary kind of servant among servants. So how do we help folks bridge that? because I get pretty darn frustrated that spirituality, therapy, trauma work, and healing kind of just ends once some of the anxiety has lifted. Well, you know, about I'd say a third of the book is about community.

And it goes with Duncan's thing about when you first meet him, you're meeting your bodyguard, his bodyguard. But a lot of the book is just about finding a group out there that moves you, that touches you. The beginning bird watchers, the people who clean up litter, the people at the food kitchen, the people at the soup kitchen, the food pantry, the soup kitchen, the people, the hikers. You know, there's this old guy where Neil and I live named Jesse, and he is so frail. He's 93. And he walks down the street every single day to be outside. to hear the birds, to be underneath the sky, to see his neighbors, because that's his path of love.

And you always see him with different people, because people swing by to be his walker that day, you know? And that's one way to go onto next door and to find somebody who needs somebody to help them walk every day. Right, but there's a piece missing in what you're saying. Okay. Which is you have knowledge, you have volition, and you have action. Right. If you're talking about knowledge and action, but how do you find that volition? How do you find that will, the will to walk, Neil, the will to clean up the trees, the will to go to the soup kitchen, that missing piece of like, oh, I have, I have soothed this anxiety through these therapeutic and spiritual tools.

How do you then find that internal mechanism that goes like, now I need to do something else outside of myself? Well, I'll tell you the answer. I love answers. A young man. Yes. I bet you have heard in your years in recovery the most basic step zero. Step zero is this shit has got to stop, whether it's with your drinking, your gambling, your black belt codependence or whatever, this shit has got to stop.

And the willingness comes from the pain. We don't have the willingness if everything's floating along and we're just feeling really fulfilled and that we found our purpose as a tribal person. But the willingness to come into community will arrive most of the time from feeling that Swiss cheese inside of your soul that you are, you know, you're doing your three hours of hot yoga every day and you're with your therapist or with that you're doing this. And you just feel you're going to feel if you're not in service, you're going to feel empty. You're going to feel, you know, a guy told me, I got sober in 1986. He said, I came into this as a hot shot. and the guys help me work my way up to servant.

And the Swiss cheese holes in your soul are not going to be healed by by kind of fine-tuning your own life and getting a much more attractive and enviable life. You know, I heard someone say, or maybe I read this, maybe you said this, that we think, we always like to say that we have a God-shaped hole inside of us, but that maybe God has an anti-shaped hole inside of God, instead of him or her, and that the way that we are going to fill that hole is by finding other people, because everyone's got those holes inside of them. And we're going to find other people who are conscious of it, who've hit that bottom

and who are willing. If the willingness comes from the pain, where does the solution come from, comes from, you know, the courage to try to knock on a door and to go on into a group. You know, courage is fear that has said its prayers, right? You're going to do it afraid. You're going to go to where the burders meet. You're going to go to where you've heard that people, that sober people, the recovering Catholics meet. You're going to go to where the course and miracles people meet.

You're going to go where the people that pick up litter every day meet. And you're going to at first say, well, this is ridiculous. You know, I'm very, very busy. I'm important. I have all this stuff to do. And then you're going to go in anyway because maybe. the Holy Spirit nudge on your shoulder, and you go in, and he feels shy and arrogant at the same time. And someone comes over and they say, hi, my name's Rain.

Can I get you a glass of water? Who are you? Come on in. And you go in, and the miracle is if you get back a second time. I just thought of something for your next book. Okay, good. You said the Holy Spirit, and you're talking about the God-shaped whole. The God-shaped Holy Spirit.

The God-shaped Holy Spirit. Like Holy Spirit. Yeah. Like Swiss cheesy spirit. Yeah. Yeah, that tug on your sleeve. You can use that. Okay, thank you.

Okay. Do you write every day? When I'm writing, I write every day. Yeah, I write five days a week. My dad was a writer, and he taught me, he sat down at his desk at 5.30 every morning, and he wrote till seven. And you heard tap, tap, tap, tap. This is the 50s, you know, in the early 60s, tap, tap, tap, tap.

And then he got us three up. There are three of us. He got us up for breakfast and made breakfast for us. And he taught me that you don't wait for inspiration, that no one's ever. really very inspired and that you do it by habit. You do it as a debt of honor because you have this thing inside of you that wants to write, that wants to share some stuff that you thought was worth passing along that might be illuminating, cast a tiny bit of light in this cold, weird, dark world, or that was funny that would make people laugh, laughter being carbonated holiness,

or that might be a story you just wanted to remember because you don't want to lose it, because you want to give it to your grandchildren. When you lived in Olympia and he knew the name of every single dog in your neighborhood, right? And so he just taught me, you know, like the Nike ad six years later, you just do it. So I sit down. I sit down. I sit down at the same time. What time do you sit down at nine? How much caffeine do you have?

I have very, I have two cups first thing in the morning. I wake up, I have, I wake up, I say my prayers, I fish around for my glasses, I let the dogs out to pee, I have a cup of coffee. That's my writing system. Okay. Yeah. Nine is a little late. Well, it is, but I have a grandchild at home. He's almost 15, but they're usually in, he needs food.

He's getting ready to go to school. He needs breakfast, and we've got the animals. He needs screen time. He needs screen time. And I also, I'm not in a hurry anymore, you know, and nine works for me. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I get up early, but if I'm in the middle of something, I'm up very early a lot, and I write really late. Like when you are really young, you know, and you get the solution late in the... Yeah, second wind at like 10 at night or something like that. And you step, I just finished a piece. You know, I'm writing these pieces on getting older for the Washington Post. Oh, wow.

Yeah, I've written eight of them. And the other day, I was actually on the road. And at about nine, I was wasted. I was on California time, but I was on the East Coast. and it's like this solution floated into my head like a goldfish that was a structural change that I could do

and that was actually fun I rarely very rarely say those words and I worked till midnight and I just was caffeinated on ideas on ideas yeah and I nailed it right and then yeah so that happens but in a regular day to day

I work from about nine until two, but see, and then I saw for lunch. And I do the same thing I did while raising my child, which is I operate on bribes and threats, you know, which is really the only thing that's ever worked. I'm sure you'll agree. So I'll say to myself, Annie, if you finish this passage, we'll stop and we'll have a peanut butter sandwich, the food of the gods, right? Sure. The bread of heaven. Or I'll say, if you figure out the end, this last graph. then we're going to watch MSNBC for half an hour.

And I... I wouldn't wish that on anyone. No, I do. I know. It's a sickness, but it's my sickness, right? Okay. Yeah. And so, or I'll say, if you finish this draft,

this unbelievably shitty first draft, then we're going to go for a walk. Oh, nice. With a dog. Yeah. Yeah. I love carrot and stick, but that's a lot of carrots. Yeah, yeah.

Delicious carrots. Yeah, yeah. What time do you start? I found that I was really only good from around 9 or 930 till about 12 or 1230. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Nine to say 12, three hours. That will buy you.

I happen to know these things. That will buy you just over two hours of real writing because there'll be 50 minutes of like squirm. I would say less than two hours. I would say an hour and 20 minutes. No, I say an hour and 45. You're going to squirm. Yeah. And you're going to be eight.

years old again and wriggling and feeling bitter because you'd rather be outside and whatever. And but so that's the grid. That's what I teach at a writing room that you give me three hours by prearrangement with yourself. You don't say to yourself, well, I hope I get some work done tomorrow, right? You won't. But you say, I'm going to get some work done tomorrow. I can put it in two hours.

You know, anyone can watch the 10 p.m. news, right? So 10 o'clock news, you start at 9, you go through 10, you're done at 10.30. You say an hour and a half, that's going to buy you 50 minutes of writing. You might get two pages done. It's amazing. You might get 500 words done, you know? And so that's my system. Are you a word counter?

I was definitely, I'm definitely a word counter, which is not a healthy, it's not a healthy habit. But I was kind of like. But it's your habit. I got 350 words today or, oh, hey, I got 900 today. I would run to my wife like, I wrote 1,200 words today. But what my wife does, and I know you're also a fiction writer, she writes fiction, which is very different because you're just creating a whole other world and you're listening and fishing for other voices and you're waiting for those muses to let those voices talk

and you're seeing how this world unfolds. Yeah. And that's much more challenging than writing like Soul Boom was like, here's what I think about the world today, which is a little bit more of like, it's like what I'm doing right now. So I'm just transcribing thoughts like think, think, think right, right, right. But it's much. novels are tough. Novels are three and four years because you've got to keep so many plates spinning in the air. You've got all your characters. And also, you don't know what the book is until you finish a first draft of it. That's three or four hundred pages. There's no other way to know who these people are and what they do, what they're capable of, what they refuse to try, which would in your mind be the best possible thing for them to do and they're not going to

what you know and you can't get them to. You've got that for at least a year. And then you end up with an incredibly shitty first draft, and then you feel despair and hopelessness, and you realize what a loser you are, and then you do that for about a week or two weeks, and then you push back your sleeves, and that's when the fun starts. And I know your wife would affirm this, is that when you have a first draft, you no longer have that unassaulted ice flow of blank paper. You know, it's more like, then it starts to be like Swiss watchmaking. You push back your sleeves. You're going to have to take out a quarter of it. You know, there's that great Jessica Mitford line that you have to kill your little darlings.

You have to take out little passages and little moments that you just thought were so terming and funny. Or aerodyte, in my case, made me look more educated than I am. And you just have to take out all the BS. You have to take out the lies. You have to take out the pyrotechnics and the showing off and stuff. And you have a second draft there. And you get to work it. You know, it's fluid.

It's like you've pulled this big armful of rich black clay out of the river and you get to work it. You get to play with it. You get to take a lot of it back off the table. Sure. Use it somewhere else. That's what I tell myself when I'm throwing something away. But a novel is really, really hard. What we do, what we've been doing is kind of like, how am I doing on any given day?

Well, it's a little disappointing or I'm having a kind of a small mirror. I'm okay again and it really wasn't yesterday. That's a good story. What happened? Good start with that. Yeah. Yesterday you slipped on the cosmic banana peel and you landed on your butt and it hurt and people saw.

That's what two of the stories and somehow are about. Now what? That's a good story, but it's a lot easier than fiction. And your book, Bird by Bird is, you know, maybe with the artist's way, like the most important book on writing in the last 50 years? Now, Julia Cameron also, I teach at a writing room, and Julia Cameron did a three-week workshop. So what is this, a writer's room?

What is this, a writing room? A writer's room? Is it a writer's room or writing room? No, it's called A writing room. A writing room. It's not the writing room who are rivals and who suck. This is a writingroom.com, lowercase, and it's a collective with teachers.

And I did a book club. We can send it to you. where I took people through bird by bird 30 years later. You know, it came out 30 years ago. Wow. Yeah. And I did think something about a month ago called, I think it's called Unblock 101.

And it's 90 minutes on everything that might help when you're stuck and when you've turned on yourself. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah. And when it's all hopeless and doomed. And, you know, usually right after your parent has come in, to ask if you've gotten an agent yet, you know, which they will do. And Julia Cameron also taught there.

And she did, I think a three-week workshop, because she has a new book out. I forgot what it's called. It might be called a writing, the writer's way, the writer's life. Okay. Yeah, I mean, but she's magic, right? I really, the only reason I wanted you on this show is so you could connect me with Julia Cameron so I could get her. You're in.

I can do it right now. A writing room.com and your son is part of this and it's a collective and there's also workshops and just a support structure for people who want to write. Exactly. I'm in. I'm in. Sign me out. And they support each other and there's a prompt every day.

Don't me tell you the best prompt. I can save you some money. I love a prompt for free writing. A prompt. Okay. Yeah. Okay. There was a tree.

Okay. Just get really quiet. There was a tree, Rain. So now tell me about your tree. That's it. Right. There was a tree. Where was your tree?

Yeah. Did you see it? Was it the tree that your little kid fell out of and broke his wrist? Was it a tree where you first fell in love? Was it a tree where there was shade on one of the worst days of your life when you had just gotten reached? But you know what? There was a tree. Tell me about it.

I have two trees that popped up from my childhood. One was we used to live in Olympia, Washington, back when there were like woods. Yeah. So do you remember when there were woods? I do. So it wasn't all housing developments in cul-de-sacs. Like we had a little rental house in the backyard just went into wood. I don't know who owned the woods or what they were doing there,

but there were just trees and gullies and creeks. And so it was amazing because I would just run around in the woods. Right. And one time I really had to poop. And I pooped under a tree. Yeah. And then I think the next day, was walking with my dad back there and he's like, he looked at it and immediately knew as me,

he's like, rain, why did you poop under this tree? And I, it might have been my first lie. It might have been my very first lie. And I was like, I think a dog did it. And he was like, that's way too big for a dog. Now clean that up. I was like, oh, no. So that's not a very inspiring story. What was the other tree that came up? I had a, there was a plum tree in the back. of our yard of our other rental house in suburban Seattle that I used to just climb and sit in a lot. And then it would produce once or twice a year. I don't know how often plums bloom, like an insane amount of plums, like gobs of plums. I know what you mean.

Like just like, no, I know. Chaos. Chaos of chaos. Yeah, yeah. We have that too. They bloom in the spring typically. And then they turn into plums in the summer. Yeah.

Yeah. And we would just have bowls. a plum and giving plums away. And I would just like gorge on plum. I know. I know. Plum juices were running down your chest. Yeah, yeah. But I had a relationship with that tree and sit in it and kind of ponder the universe and my own existential dread even at a young age.

Yeah, the nightmare of it all. But let me tell you another prompt you'll really love. Okay, tell me ten things you've forgotten. You sit down with a piece of paper and a pen or pencil best. I see you have a pencil. graphite, the sound of graphite connects us with antiquity, right, with a hundred million thousand writers scribbling down their ideas, their memories, their visions, their dreams, their hopes, their, the catastrophe of it all. Tell me ten things you've forgotten. But you can

think about it. You don't have to do it right now. I don't mean to put you on the spot. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But prompts every day. That's a tricky one. Okay. So my wife is a, is a creative writer, fiction writer, and went to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Wow. has a couple books and stories out in lots of different magazines. She's finishing up a new book of short stories. And she, right on her shelf since I've known her, as artist's way and bird by bird, just blump right there, writing down the bones.

That's another great one. You've read the George Saunders book that came out. And the Rick Rubin, both of them. Yeah, Creative Circle. And the George Saunders, what's his book on writing? It's going to blow your mind. You're going to forget you ever knew me. Oh, my goodness.

Seriously. Yeah. It's called something in the pond in the rain. Oh, swim in the pond in the rain. Yeah, about the Russian authors. It's going to blow your mind because it's about the Russian authors, but he uses it as a way to teach his classes. And so he teaches you through a check-off story, say,

the power of an absence. Yeah. You know how the absence might be the most powerful character in the story. Finally, I want to end with my favorite book of yours that I reference a few times in mine is help thanks wow. And I really, it just put on a new pair of glasses for me. Oh, good. You know, and it was, sorry, I'm tearing up a little bit.

I tend to do this sometimes. It meant a lot to me. It really showed me the necessity and purity of prayer and the asking for help and coupling that with, both gratitude and awe and wonder. And I'm just wondering what your prayer practice is right now. And has it changed since you wrote that book? If you are writing version two, that's like a 20-year-old book.

Would you add something help things? Wow. Would there be another instruction? Well, I love that. My prayer life is I wake up when I say my prayer. and I pray to be relieved of the bondage of self, and I pray for the people I know who are suffering. I pray for the children of the pariah nations,

because for them it's like a triple whammy of being hated as a whole nation. And then I, you know, all day, every day, I have just completely unsophisticated sense of Jesus. You know, it's like Casper the Friendly Ghost, you know. It's like, and all day I'm just saying, hi. And I'm saying, thank you because you get so many breaks in the course of a day if you notice it. And I say, oh, God, thank you. Or I say what I said to you a while ago, I'm in a hole that's too deep for me to get my way out of.

And then I just wait. And I get my answer. The phone rings or the text comes, the email comes. And then I say, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I'll tell you when I got sober, you know, they're these sort of flowery prayers and recovery. And you say them in the morning and they're beautifully written out. and you say him at night. And this old time I said, you know, I wake up in the morning and I say, whatever. And then he said, you know, I kind of thank God all day. And then I go to bed at night and I say,

oh, well. So I kind of thought the fourth great prayer would be whatever. Like Krishna Murdi famously said when asked what was the source of his peace of mind. He said, I don't mind whatever happened. He's, I don't mind anything. And I thought, God, I mind him saying that. or feeling that because I mind everything. So his piece of mind, he said, how do you find a piece of mind? He said, I don't mind anything. I don't mind anything. Yeah.

And that's pretty much where Neil lives. He says, I don't mind anything. It's kind of theater. It's grisper the mill. It's what's going on right then. And my reaction is what's going to cause me to have pain. You need to turn off the MSNBC because that's making you mind the wrong things, young lady.

Do you hear me? Nothing against that particular network, but I think that that the minute by minute kind of monitoring of the cycle of dysfunction is not helpful. It's not going to help anyone with anything whatsoever. And thank you so much for coming on the soul boom. You've brought extra boom to the soul. Oh, my wish for you and my gratitude for you is that you are an incredibly complicated person. And I mean that in the best possible way. And I said that to my wife the other week.

I was like, Holly, you were very, very complicated and interesting. She was like, fuck you. What is that? Like, no, that's my highest compliment. Yeah, yeah. Because you get to share your complexity over 20 or 30 books and interviews and articles. and we all benefit from your delightful roller coaster of life. And I've benefited so much.

So thank you. And thank God for baking you in a complicated oven of interesting complexity. Thank you, Rain. Yeah. Thank you. Like a pretzel. Like a pretzel. Yeah.

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