GY That connects to another idea you wrote about, which is that love often looks like grief. Can you talk more about how you see death and tragedy as a doorway to love?<\/p>\n
ALI happen to have had an unusual amount of loss and death in my life, beginning with my father\u2019s death when I was in my early twenties. It was really the end of the world, as you can imagine. It was like a nuclear bomb fell on our family. I was still drinking; I kept drinking for eight more years. I got sober, had a baby at thirty-five, and then my best friend since high school died\u2014my most intimate girlfriend who just lived down the street. Those two deaths shattered a lot of illusion that things were going to be the way I needed them to be. That\u2019s where love blooms. I found something inside of me that was always me, and was able to breathe and to push back my sleeves and enter into death and loss in a way that something bloomed. My dad, and Pammy, and my other friends who have died were so exquisite, and wonderful, and real, and charming. It was love that arose in the face of suffering, and that is a profound and sacred love. The disillusionment is where life begins; it\u2019s good to have our illusions stripped away. When I was younger, a lot of love was because we found somebody that had the same sense of humor and read the same books. Then as I got older the magic, the collagen that my friends and I discovered was that we had shared certain losses. We shared a certain hurt.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Did you ever read Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein? It was our bible in our teens and twenties. It\u2019s science fiction, and the word Heinlein uses for me intuitively, deeply getting you is grok. I grok you: I\u2019ve known you most of your life. I grok you as a choice, like I believe you grok me partly as a decision to trust me or to love me. If we got together, it would be as if we\u2019d spent a tremendous number of hours together, instead of the meager hours we\u2019ve spent. That arises through death and loss. It\u2019s a different bloom than the beautiful flowers. It\u2019s a deeper, more modest bloom, but for me, it\u2019s where the action is.\u00a0<\/p>\n
GYYes, totally. We need that word.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ALSo much of my identity, my \u201cbeingness,\u201d has to do with the books I read starting at age four. So much of our grokking has to do with having read the same books and having been changed by them. This is a kind of shorthand to love. It means we\u2019ve loved the same thing. We\u2019ve loved the same words; we\u2019ve found the same portals. That\u2019s what Neil and I had. My friend Duncan Trussell, the comedian, says that when you first meet me, you\u2019re meeting my bodyguard. Somehow, because of this mysterious thing\u2014you might call it grace, or you might call it magic\u2014you go past the bodyguard, past the scrim, and it\u2019s like you\u2019re running around, singing: Did you read this? Have you ever read\u2014? Did you read Poisonwood Bible? That\u2019s love. That\u2019s recognizing something, deep calling to deep. Briefly, we\u2019re like one person. Riffing, sharing, jamming, going, Oh my God! It\u2019s so exciting. It brings peace, it brings relief, it brings joy. In the Christian tradition, in the Black Christian tradition especially, there\u2019s a saying that goes, \u201cpeace is joy at rest, and joy is peace on its feet.\u201d Sometimes, you\u2019re with your best person, and you\u2019re feeling that peace that passes all understanding because you\u2019re with your safe, trusted, sweet person who just gets you. Then other times you\u2019re with them, and you\u2019re doing that radical silliness, and you are in joy. That\u2019s the peace on its feet.<\/p>\n
GYThat feels connected with the idea you talked about through your book, that love is the only way we can endure this extreme and mind-breaking vastness of life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ALWe have this ground of our being, which is that we\u2019re loved beyond all sense of proportion and reason by these people that are just magic to us. You won\u2019t be knocked down because you have it. If you are knocked down . . . I was knocked down when Dad died and when Pammy died. They were there. They didn\u2019t try to fix me, or save me, or try to make it be un-fucked. They just were there, and they were listening. They were quiet. They were holding me. They were leaving me alone. They were in the other room when I couldn\u2019t breathe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
GYWhy write a book focused on love at this point in your career?<\/p>\n
ALI wrote a book on hope, and everywhere I went to promote it, I discovered that people felt hopeless. I wrote a book on mercy before that, and everywhere I went, people were scared that they didn\u2019t have it in them. Their parents or their culture had told them to put it in the drawer when they were little because you couldn\u2019t be graded for your merciful heart, or because on the blacktop, mercy didn\u2019t get you anywhere\u2014maybe it got you beat up. I could say, You have it; it’s in the drawer. You were encouraged to put it away and work on your handwriting instead. My son is thirty-four, and my grandson\u2019s fourteen-and-a-half, and I don’t know how long I\u2019m going to live\u2014I could live another few months; I could live till I\u2019m ninety. Certain things have always worked, and they all somehow or other have to do with love, so I wanted to get it all down and leave it for my son and grandson as a manual for when I\u2019m gone. Everything that has ever worked will work again because it wasn\u2019t grounded in circumstance, or measurable quantities, or things you could poll.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There was this priest in the \u201930s who helped Bill Wilson get AA off the ground. He said to Wilson, \u201cSometimes, I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses.\u201d You could be in the cranky and judgmental glasses, then you put on the better pair of glasses, and you look around. I can look at the cat licking her mouse that I helped her get on her bed; I can look in your face, and you can look at mine. Ordinary beauty: old family friend, seven-month-old kitten with her favorite mouse, and outside there\u2019s this atmospheric river that\u2019s going to fill our reservoirs and our streams. Scientists have proven that trees are talking to trees through tree roots: when your tree roots are sick, Gracie, my tree roots reach out unseen beneath the ground to give you the nourishment that will heal you. I wanted this book, a love book, because what will always work is love.\u00a0<\/p>\n
GYThat reminds me of when I read The Hidden Life of Trees.\u00a0I felt like I\u2019d put on another pair of glasses. I went out for a long hike afterwards, and I immediately felt so much more connected.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ALWhen you have that experience, you feel like you’re standing next to a Buddhist gong. The experience of your eyes being opened is vibrational. It\u2019s like that beautiful E. E. Cummings poem, \u201cI Thank You God for Most This Amazing.\u201d The very end of it is, \u201cNow the eyes of my eyes are open and now the ears of my ears can hear.\u201d Everything is bigger; everything is suddenly connected. Deep is calling to deep and unseen is calling to seen. The most extraordinary, wild, hallucinogenic nature walk is also you being where your feet are. That\u2019s the first thing God says to Moses in the Old Testament: Take off your sandals. Be here, where your feet are, and feel the holy earth beneath your feet. But it is scary to agree to experience that big, uncomfortable mystery.\u00a0<\/p>\n
GYI\u2019m wondering if you have any advice for how we can move one step closer towards a life centered around love.<\/p>\n
AL You can\u2019t get anyone to do anything until they have created enough pain for themselves. If people keep pouring their energy into striving and ego, they will end up empty, and frazzled, and exasperated. God willing, they experience some dark night of the soul where they confront how narcissistically they are living, and this gives them the willingness to try a more spiritual way of life, which means a commitment to loving themselves as is; loving the world as is. The truth is that if you want to have loving feelings, you have to do loving things. You have to decide to change your priorities from striving and ambition to a kinder, sweeter way of being in the world. And that is love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GY That connects to another idea you wrote about, which is that love often looks like grief. Can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,422,154932,154817,438,146,25052,60035,25782,85,46,5777,5778,1854,271424,271423,177295,156320,1264,103001],"class_list":["post-600233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-book","tag-calling","tag-deep","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-experience","tag-experiences","tag-going","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-its","tag-like","tag-love","tag-somebody","tag-started","tag-thats","tag-thoughts","tag-work","tag-wrote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}