Years ago when I was doing one of my first internet interviews the host said something that caught me off guard. She said, “Isn’t it hard for you to live in a place like that?”
I couldn’t fathom her meaning. It’s not hard to live in Los Angeles — a beautiful place with nearly perfect year-round weather, where you can go outside any day under a blue sky and climb a mountain, see the ocean, and gather fruit from the trees in your own yard.
But she didn’t mean that. What she wondered was whether it was hard for someone like me to live in a place with people who weren’t like me. A place known for its vanity and pretense, empty dreams and false promises, shallowness, selfishness, fear, lies, and addictions.
In other words, a place like everywhere with people like everyone.
“All I see is suffering,” I answered.
I’m remembering that conversation because Thursday is the day we adorn the table and feel blessed, fed, loved, warm and secure — or at least pretend that we are — among the people who might be the hardest to live with: our own families.
What will you see at your table? And more to the point, whom will you serve?
Happy Thanksgiving.
Subscribe to this blog • Come to a retreat • Friend me • Follow me.
What have you imparted to your daughter?
I’d just posted 
Here’s the history: it all started with Google. Then Google bought Blogger, then YouTube, then Feedburner, then bought and sold two dozen other things. Then I opened a Gmail account. I had so many Google usernames and passwords that every time I tried to go anywhere to do anything I was asked if I didn’t want to combine, or reallocate, or add this, or try again or restart or use Google+, all your friends are using Google+, and in a moment of fury and confusion I stupidly responded The only thing I want right now is Google Minus and I deleted what I thought was a useless account. Then one day last week I clicked on a link and found that I no longer had a blog feed, no longer had any blog subscribers and anyone who is reading this right now doesn’t even exist, and then I realized the terrible thing I had done, the awful irreversible crime which is to second guess Google.
There they were in full-length habit, an unlikely sight on a Sunday morning hiking Mt. Wilson. Out of the blue, three nuns rounded the switchback straight ahead of me. They were coming down; I was heading up. No matter how promising the skies at the start of the trip, the southern trail descends into a merciless sun. They had to be broiling by now.
When I first began my practice, I was already lying inert at the bottom of the deep end. Life’s triple decker of despair—heartbreak, grief and depression—had sent me plummeting into the murky realms. On the way down, I tried to rouse myself with the usual prescriptions, but nothing could reach. So when I 
“There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school.”
― Sharon Olds
