Anne Lamott on Love

An exclusive look at her new book. Plus: Soul Boom meets Bird by Bird!

Anne Lamott visits the Soul Boom studio

Hey there, Soul Boom Generation! We have a real treat for you today: an exclusive excerpt from Anne Lamott’s powerful new book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love. After that, stick around for a short essay that explores the shared lessons of Bird by Bird and Soul Boom.

And now for Anne…

Overture

My husband said something a few years ago that I often quote: Eighty percent of everything that is true and beautiful can be experienced on any ten-minute walk. Even in the darkest and most devastating times, love is nearby if you know what to look for. It does not always appear at first to be lovely but instead may take the form of a hot mess or a snoring old dog or someone you have sworn to never, ever forgive (for a possibly very good reason, if you ask me). But mixed in will also be familiar signs of love: wings, good-hearted people, cats (when they are in the right mood), a spray of wildflowers, a cup of tea.

What are we even talking about when we talk about love? What is it?

I asked a six-year-old friend of mine.

“Oh, it’s just this stuff,” he said, rolling his eyes.

I think that’s right.

Love is caring, affection, and friendliness, of course, compassion and a generous heart. It is also some kind of energy or vibration, because everything is—the same stuff moving at different speeds, from glaciers to six-year-old boys.

I wish the movement of love in our lives more closely resembled the grace of a ballerina, but no, love mainly tromps and plops over and tiptoes through our lives.

Love looks like us, that can be a little daunting. Love is why we are here at all, on the couch and in the world with a heart for the common good, why we have hope, and a lifeline when we don’t.

There is sweet family love, entangled by history, need, frustration, and annoyance. There is community love, a love of music, Zorba’s reckless love of life. It can be vital or serene. There’s the ecstatic love—for the natural world, or in bed—there’s the love of justice or the radical transforming love of what we might call Goodness, Gus (the Great Universal Spirit), or God.

Love is often hard, ignored, or hilarious (eventually). Love looks like you—to me and a few others. And this is the hardest thing to believe.

One thing is certain: Love is our only hope. Love springs from new life, love springs from death. Love acts like Gandhi and our pets and Jesus and Mr. Bean and Mr. Rogers and Bette Midler. Love just won’t be pinned down. Love is Florence Nightingale and Coyote Trickster, who messes with us by way of his teachings about how we might possibly, grudgingly, awaken to the glory of life. Love is the warmth we feel in the presence of a favorite aunt, the kindness of a waitress, and the warmth of the hand that pulls us back to our feet when the loss of love has all but destroyed us. It is this stuff, which any kid and most poets will tell you we experience in our hearts.

Nonsense, you may say: love arises and is regulated in a part of the brain called the amygdala. How right you are, once again! And how happy that must make you, as it often does me, and why I so need the intervention of love. Do I want to be right or to have a loving heart? And will this be on the test? My brain also controls my breathing, but man, do I love my lungs.

On a ten-minute walk anywhere—from outside my gate with its broken latch, to the loudest block in Brooklyn, to Garbage City in Cairo—love abounds and abides, flirts and weeps with us. It is there for the asking, which is the easy part. Our lives’ toughest work is in the receiving. Love presents most obviously in babies and kids being cuddled, yet also as patience with annoying humans we live or work with or are. We feel love upon seeing our favorite neighbors and first responders, we see it in fundraising efforts, peace marches, kindergarten classrooms, gardens. When flowers don’t stir feelings of love in me, something is gumming up the works.

In a ten-minute walk from home the other day, I passed a house with a new baby, another with a recent death, then two houses down a loud argument between a usually devoted couple; an English garden, an abandoned shack behind woodpiles on a desolate lot, boxes of bees buzzing honey into existence, and terrified parents chasing after little kids careening away on their first two-wheelers.

I have lived in this neighborhood for nearly two decades, and I know every house on the block. I have nursed a woman and her small children through her way-too-early death and been there for the family across the street when their twenty-one-year-old child jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. On our first date, I brought my future husband home to the house where, seven years earlier, my nineteen-year-old son had brought home his first child. We helped raise Sam’s boy in the tiny grassy park right across the street. (Nana and Neal are tree-huggers). I stood in the same street with my addict son in 2011 with a sharpened pencil held near his throat and told him he could not come back until he stopped using, and then welcomed him back a month later with ten days clean and sober, twelve years ago tomorrow. We in the ’hood isolated during COVID and walked feet away from one another as lovingly as we could, waving. Waving can be love, as well stop-and-chats and shouted compliments on their camellia bush. We did what we could for one another and the very poor a few miles away. Our ninety-year-old neighbor Jesse passes on his walks every day. Way too many arrogant and ecstatic bicyclists race too fast past him and me on their way to the water district ponds, where flotillas of ducks paddle by and egrets stand looking like Bernie Sanders with their unruly haircuts and posture. Our dogs had their last meals of hot dogs and ice cream here in the corner park on their way to whatever awaits us all, breaking our hearts forever until we brought our next dogs here to meet the team. We stood outside on days before elections and promised each other that the unthinkable was not going to happen, and then when it did, we met here again the next day, clutching our heads.

A few minutes’ walk from my front door, unhoused people come to sit on a memorial bench in the shaded kitty-corner from the park, one of whom is my woolly friend Ben. The neighbors pile giveaways on the bench—clothes, egg poachers, and baby gear—infuriating some neighbors, who vent on Nextdoor about the unsightly mess, but a blessing to others—i.e., to me. This bench itself was carved by a townsperson long ago—live-edge and beautifully rustic. It holds us all: me, Ben, Jesse.

When we are paying attention, we see how much holds us invisibly. Love is a bench.

There are two benches in the little park and eight redwoods. Tightrope walkers set up their wire above the grass and practice for hours. Older people faithfully do tai chi early in the day. Dog people sit together and catch up while their dogs run and play. One small dog ran into the street recently and got hit, but she lives on joyfully with three legs. After dark in the summer, teenagers get drunk and stoned here and then drive away, leaving their litter behind. My grandson has just turned fourteen and because I love him more than anything, my heart is often in my throat. Love can be very scary. In fact, love is actually scary about half the time.

Menace abounds. It was 107 degrees out today. We smell the smoke from distant fires. Men steal our catalytic converters while we sleep. Men who were not shown love do terrible things in the world, and love shows up as volunteers, nurses, best friends. Love shows up with food and antibiotics. Love shows up with tea.

Years ago my friend Caroline found a small frog in a shower that was being remodeled, so she picked it up and carried it in her cupped hands to the wet grass outside. The frog leaping in terror against her hands as she held it probably did not understand the quiet comforting words she spoke to it along the way. I think this is one of the best examples of how love operates when we are most afraid and doomed, carrying us to a safer place while we pound against its cupped hands.

I teach my Sunday school kids that love is God and God is love. The God of my understanding is baffled by what isn’t love. It’s unfathomable to God to imagine not loving. The Dominican friar Timothy Radcliffe wrote that God can never tell you not to love someone. God can only tell you to do a better job loving someone. (God is somewhat better at this than I.)

Love is interconnectedness. We grew up learning that tree roots are always competing for space and nutrients, but since then we’ve learned that beneath the ground is a lacy network of communication and help. Redwood roots spread in shallow, interlaced webs barely under the surface, keeping any single tree straight against the wind. If one tree gets sick or harmed, other trees send it their nutrients and supplies. Love is a root system. (Trees are better at this than I am.) But I see all around me that we evolve, slowly, over time, often in community. The Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin believed that against all evidence, we are all evolving toward Christ consciousness, but maybe if he had lived in the modern scientific age he might have tied in tree consciousness, toward oneness and sharing. And maybe they are the same thing.

Love is evolutionary, survival of the species. Not-love is killing us.

Maybe love is our very atmosphere, the one energy that Einstein describes as being that which is the only thing there is. This would mean that love is like Wi-Fi, always and already here (if a bit wobbly sometimes), sight unseen, until we look around and begin to notice and use love’s atoms and agents, the one-dimensional vibrating strings with which all life is composed. Maybe love is a radio station that we can tune to, when we can turn away from the crack cocaine of news and the internet to Bach and sambas and “Taps,” to melodious sonnets and the Beatles.

One walks along mulling over old hurts and new ways to save and rescue family members—good luck with that—and ingenious schemes for alleviating the national political madness, world starvation, disease, tribal wars. Love often looks like grief. Love seems to be good friends with death, although I would prefer it was better friends with comfort and mirth. Love is compassion, which Neal defines as the love that arises in the presence of suffering. Are love and compassion up to the stark realities we face at the dinner table, and down the street, and at the melting ice caps, or within Iranian nuclear plants and our own Congress?

Maybe. I think so. Somehow.

Love’s loss is the source of most suffering, and then love transforms the suffering into depth, compassion, and the great painful gift of humility. I never love this. One day at a time, and sometimes one hour at a time, love will be enough to see us through, get us back on our feet and dust us off. Love gives us a shot at becoming the person we were born to be, not the charming actor or bodyguard we became, not us on our tightropes holding our breath as we strive for greatness (or at any rate not falling on our butts). When all is said and done, and against all odds, love is sufficient unto the day.

Could I be wrong? Obviously. But I don’t think I am. Love is what our soul is made of, and for.

Love is a piece of toast and a diamond. It is a sturdy and imperfect shelter, all around and deep inside, a lantern with warm bracing light, a magician. When life has lost its promise, or disappointed us one too many times, when it is hard to trust again or feel alive and curious again, love beckons us over and asks, “Got a minute?”

What is there to lose? A lot—familiarity, complacency, the illusion of control. And what is there to gain? A chance to loosen up and lighten up and sometimes even live it up, a chance to feel the warmth of this gentle, wild, messy, holy world. So I’ll ask you, too: Got a minute?

Anne Lamott is a beloved author renowned for her candid and humorous writing on faith, family, and the human experience. Her latest book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love, continues to captivate readers with its heartfelt reflections and insights. She is also our guest this week on the Soul Boom podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.

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Life Lessons: Soul Boom Meets Bird by Bird

By Scott Foreman

When I heard Anne Lammott would be the next guest on the Soul Boom podcast, I thought: “Perfect.” While Rainn and Anne are very different people and artists, there is a strong shared current of humor, spirit, and humanity that runs through their respective works. And, as different as they are in their writing, there is a particularly notable overlap in their approach. Rather than just expound on an idea, they will take their real, lived experiences and take the reader on an emotional journey to the big idea lying at the heart of their thesis.

As a reader and storyteller, I have a fondness for unflinching candor, especially when it’s wrapped in layers of humility and humor. Anne Lamott and Rainn Wilson excel in this. I absolutely adore Bird by Bird, and I think Soul Boom is long overdue and much needed.

For any author to be truly open about their life, the good and bad and deeply dark, that takes courage. When they do so in a manner which engages and entertains, that's beautiful. 

I’m not a literary expert or book critic, but I did learn a lot first hand when I interviewed Anne Lamott in Mill Valley, California back in 2017. We discussed her love of books and the spiritual connection she finds in the experience of reading. As a fellow storyteller and book lover, I was deeply touched by Anne’s Bird by Bird. Reading it during a particularly challenging time in 2008, it felt like it was written just for me, conveying the compassionate message, “it’s okay, you got this.” Years later, encountering Rainn’s work, it felt as if he was sharing a similar message: “it’s okay, we’ve got this.” The “we” being all of us.

Bird by Bird is framed as a guide for writers, offering practices and encouragement for those who love crafting stories but often feel overwhelmed. This central challenge—processing our emotions to create something valuable—is referenced repeatedly in Soul Boom. Rainn’s amalgamation of poetry excerpts and literary quotes highlights that “great fiction and poetry address core universal human issues.” Writing might be the physical manifestation of spirituality flowing through us.

A recurring theme in both books is our inherent connectedness—not our sameness, but the fact that we all share this spinning rock. Whether you’re reading this under the same sun or moon, we were all driven by similar things in our youth. Perhaps this is why Anne suggests her writing students draft stories about early childhood experiences, free from judgment. The title Bird By Bird itself originates from a piece of advice given by her father to her brother, who was struggling with a school report on birds. Unable to figure out how to start, Anne’s father simply said, "Take it bird by bird, buddy." Anne recounts lovingly how her father guided her brother to take on his overwhelming task and break it down into manageable parts. Stork by dove by blue heron. Bird by bird. This simple and calm approach to sharing life lessons is shared by both authors.

Rainn’s observations on humanity’s common challenges, like “deaths of despair” and other crises, highlight our shared experiences. The weight of the world feels lighter when turning the pages of Soul Boom, thanks to the right mix of humor and humility, combined with a dose of 70s television nostalgia. This makes the dense topic of “spirituality” both fun and digestible.

Hope is rooted in core elements and experiences that touch us all. Life’s circumstances, whether heavy or joyous, are fleeting and universal. Writing is hard, and processing life’s stuff is hard, but do it anyway—fearlessly, with compassion, and while holding yourself accountable.

I truly love and admire how Rainn and Anne share their personal journeys. From Rainn’s unique childhood experiences and professional challenges, to Anne’s openness about addiction, their ability to say, “so what, I’m human,” feels like a warm embrace. 

In person, Anne is as warm and generous as her words. At the end of my interview with her, she gave me a hug. And as you might expect, she’s a fantastic hugger.

Scott Foreman is the Founder and Director of Cultivator Content Labs, whose mission is to produce cinematic content focused on positive change. Scott has produced content for global brands and agencies, as well as leading media companies such as New York Times, Inc. Magazine and PBS. He loves to tell stories that inspire, motivate and educate—especially stories featuring change makers, exceptional ideas, stunning landscapes, and life-changing experiences. 

If you, like Scott, are a Soul Boom fan and would also like to write a short essay for the Soul Boom Dispatch, then drop us a line and pitch your idea via hello@soulboom.com with the subject line “Soul Boom Dispatch Pitch”

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