#133 / Just Count To Three

I have been reading Help Thanks Wow, by Anne Lamott, who just spent a year on Match.com and lived to write about it. If you believe what she writes (and I do, though she does admit to lying from time to time), Lamott faces the standard and not so standard adversities of life with great aplomb, and with the assistance of three essential prayers:

Help

Thanks 

Wow!

I recommend the book - and, in fact, I have written about it before. I also recommend the methodology. I was most carried away by the Wow Chapter (and by the one that follows it):

In paintings, music, poetry, architecture, we feel the elusive energy that moves through us and the air and the ground all the time, that usually disperses and turns chaotic in our busy-ness and distractedness and moodiness ... For a short time, we see past all that is jumbled, mysterious, marvelous and ugly. Instead, we glimpse life, beauty, grief, or evil, love captured and truth held up to the light. Art makes it hard to ignore truth, that Life explodes and blooms, consumes, rots and radiates and slithers; that eternity really is in a blade of grass... We stand before Monet and Rothko and the Sphinx and Georgia O'Keeffe and are speechless, in awe. Awe is why we are here...

That's when we say, "Wow!"

There is one chapter past the Wow Chapter. Lamott quotes a poem written by Raymond Carver shortly before his death, and that is inscribed on Carver's tombstone: 

And did you get what 

you wanted from this life, even so? 

I did. 

And what did you want? 

To call myself beloved, to feel myself 

beloved on the earth

That's when we say, 

Amen.

References:
Help Thanks Wow, Pages 82-83; Page 99
Image Credit: 
http://www.faithvillage.com/article/b9281989c5e34bd1b0cc390d45b8b962/help_thanks_wow__anne_lamott_book_review