My seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, "You know, this could be the best day ever."
And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice, "Nana, will you ever get sick and die?"
I think this pretty much says it for me and most of the people I know, that we're a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread.
So I sat down a few days before my 61st birthday, and I decided to compile a list of everything I know for sure.
There's so little truth in the popular culture, and it's good to be sure of a few things.
For instance, I am no longer 47, although this is the age I feel, and the age I like to think of myself as being.
My friend Paul used to say in his late 70s that he felt like a young man with something really wrong with him.
(Laughter) Our true person is outside of time and space, but looking at the paperwork, I can, in fact, see that I was born in 1954.
My inside self is outside of time and space.
It doesn't have an age.
I'm every age I've ever been, and so are you, although I can't help mentioning as an aside that it might have been helpful if I hadn't followed the skin care rules of the '60s, which involved getting as much sun as possible while slathered in baby oil and basking in the glow of a tinfoil reflector shield.
(Laughter) It was so liberating, though, to face the truth that I was no longer in the last throes of middle age, that I decided to write down every single true thing I know.
People feel really doomed and overwhelmed these days, and they keep asking me what's true.
So I hope that my list of things I'm almost positive about might offer some basic operating instructions to anyone who is feeling really overwhelmed or beleaguered.
Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox.
Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it's impossible here, on the incarnational side of things.
It's been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive.
It's so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we're being punked.
It's filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together.
I don't think it's an ideal system.
(Laughter) Number two: almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes -- (Laughter) (Applause) including you.
Three: there is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you're waiting for an organ.
You can't buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind.
This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it.
But it's an inside job, and we can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world.
They have to find their own ways, their own answers.
You can't run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero's journey.
You have to release them.
It's disrespectful not to.
And if it's someone else's problem, you probably don't have the answer, anyway.
(Laughter) Our help is usually not very helpful.
Our help is often toxic.
And help is the sunny side of control.
Stop helping so much.
Don't get your help and goodness all over everybody.
(Laughter) (Applause) This brings us to number four: everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together.
They are much more like you than you would believe, so try not to compare your insides to other people's outsides.
It will only make you worse than you already are.
(Laughter) Also, you can't save, fix or rescue any of them or get anyone sober.
What helped me get clean and sober 30 years ago was the catastrophe of my behavior and thinking.
So I asked some sober friends for help, and I turned to a higher power.
One acronym for God is the "gift of desperation," G-O-D, or as a sober friend put it, by the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.
(Laughter) So God might mean, in this case, "me running out of any more good ideas."
While fixing and saving and trying to rescue is futile, radical self-care is quantum, and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere like a little fresh air.
It's a huge gift to the world.
When people respond by saying, "Well, isn't she full of herself," just smile obliquely like Mona Lisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea.
Being full of affection for one's goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home.
It's where world peace begins.
Number five: chocolate with 75 percent cacao is not actually a food.
(Laughter) Its best use is as a bait in snake traps or to balance the legs of wobbly chairs.
It was never meant to be considered an edible.
Number six -- (Laughter) writing.
Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair.
That's the secret of life.
That's probably the main difference between you and them.
They just do it.
They do it by prearrangement with themselves.
They do it as a debt of honor.
They tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little.
When my older brother was in fourth grade, he had a term paper on birds due the next day, and he hadn't started.
So my dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper, pencils and brads -- for those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember brads -- and he said to my brother, "Just take it bird by bird, buddy.
Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your own voice.
And then find out about chickadees, and tell us about them in your own voice.
And then geese."
So the two most important things about writing are: bird by bird and really god-awful first drafts.
If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it.
If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should've behaved better.
(Laughter) (Applause) You're going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions and songs -- your truth, your version of things -- in your own voice.
That's really all you have to offer us, and that's also why you were born.
Seven: publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from.
They kill as many people as not.
They will hurt, damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine.
The most degraded and evil people I've ever known are male writers who've had huge best sellers.
And yet, returning to number one, that all truth is paradox, it's also a miracle to get your work published, to get your stories read and heard.
Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, that it will fill the Swiss-cheesy holes inside of you.
It can't.
It won't.
But writing can.
So can singing in a choir or a bluegrass band.
So can painting community murals or birding or fostering old dogs that no one else will.
Number eight: families.
Families are hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and astonishing they may also be.
Again, see number one.
(Laughter) At family gatherings where you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal -- (Laughter) remember that in all cases, it's a miracle that any of us, specifically, were conceived and born.
Earth is forgiveness school.
It begins with forgiving yourself, and then you might as well start at the dinner table.
That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.
(Laughter) When William Blake said that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love, he knew that your family would be an intimate part of this, even as you want to run screaming for your cute little life.
But I promise you are up to it.
You can do it, Cinderella, you can do it, and you will be amazed.
Nine: food.
Try to do a little better.
I think you know what I mean.
(Laughter) Number 10 -- (Laughter) grace.
Grace is spiritual WD-40, or water wings.
The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild.
Go figure.
(Laughter) The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world.
To summon grace, say, "Help," and then buckle up.
Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn't leave you where it found you.
And grace won't look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably.
But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you'll get your sense of humor about yourself back.
Laughter really is carbonated holiness.
It helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other.
And remember -- grace always bats last.
Eleven: God just means goodness.
It's really not all that scary.
It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great "Deteriorata," "the cosmic muffin."
A good name for God is: "Not me."
Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship.
So go outside a lot and look up.
My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lids because they don't look up, so they just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls.
Go outside.
Look up.
Secret of life.
And finally: death.
Number 12.
Wow and yikes.
It's so hard to bear when the few people you cannot live without die.
You'll never get over these losses, and no matter what the culture says, you're not supposed to.
We Christians like to think of death as a major change of address, but in any case, the person will live again fully in your heart if you don't seal it off.
Like Leonard Cohen said, "There are cracks in everything, and that's how the light gets in."
And that's how we feel our people again fully alive.
Also, the people will make you laugh out loud at the most inconvenient times, and that's the great good news.
But their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you.
Grief and friends, time and tears will heal you to some extent.
Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate and moisturize you and the ground on which you walk.
Do you know the first thing that God says to Moses?
He says, "Take off your shoes."
Because this is holy ground, all evidence to the contrary.
It's hard to believe, but it's the truest thing I know.
When you're a little bit older, like my tiny personal self, you realize that death is as sacred as birth.
And don't worry -- get on with your life.
Almost every single death is easy and gentle with the very best people surrounding you for as long as you need.
You won't be alone.
They'll help you cross over to whatever awaits us.
As Ram Dass said, "When all is said and done, we're really just all walking each other home."
I think that's it, but if I think of anything else, I'll let you know.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) I was very surprised to be asked to come, because it is not my realm, technology or design or entertainment.
I mean, my realm is sort of faith and writing and kind of lurching along together.
And I was surprised, but they said I could give a talk, and I said I'd love to.
(Video) If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.
Anne Lamott: People are very frightened and feel really doomed in America these days, and I just wanted to help people get their sense of humor about it and to realize how much isn't a problem.
If you take an action, take a really healthy or loving or friendly action, you'll have loving and friendly feelings.
Imagine you're walking through a forest.
I'm guessing you're thinking of a collection of trees, what we foresters call a stand, with their rugged stems and their beautiful crowns.
Yes, trees are the foundation of forests, but a forest is much more than what you see, and today I want to change the way you think about forests.
You see, underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it's a single organism.
It might remind you of a sort of intelligence.
How do I know this?
Here's my story.
I grew up in the forests of British Columbia.
I used to lay on the forest floor and stare up at the tree crowns.
They were giants.
My grandfather was a giant, too.
He was a horse logger, and he used to selectively cut cedar poles from the inland rainforest.
Grandpa taught me about the quiet and cohesive ways of the woods, and how my family was knit into it.
So I followed in grandpa's footsteps.
He and I had this curiosity about forests, and my first big "aha" moment was at the outhouse by our lake.
Our poor dog Jigs had slipped and fallen into the pit.
So grandpa ran up with his shovel to rescue the poor dog.
He was down there, swimming in the muck.
But as grandpa dug through that forest floor, I became fascinated with the roots, and under that, what I learned later was the white mycelium and under that the red and yellow mineral horizons.
Eventually, grandpa and I rescued the poor dog, but it was at that moment that I realized that that palette of roots and soil was really the foundation of the forest.
And I wanted to know more.
So I studied forestry.
But soon I found myself working alongside the powerful people in charge of the commercial harvest.
The extent of the clear-cutting was alarming, and I soon found myself conflicted by my part in it.
Not only that, the spraying and hacking of the aspens and birches to make way for the more commercially valuable planted pines and firs was astounding.
It seemed that nothing could stop this relentless industrial machine.
So I went back to school, and I studied my other world.
You see, scientists had just discovered in the laboratory in vitro that one pine seedling root could transmit carbon to another pine seedling root.
But this was in the laboratory, and I wondered, could this happen in real forests?
I thought yes.
Trees in real forests might also share information below ground.
But this was really controversial, and some people thought I was crazy, and I had a really hard time getting research funding.
But I persevered, and I eventually conducted some experiments deep in the forest, 25 years ago.
I grew 80 replicates of three species: paper birch, Douglas fir, and western red cedar.
I figured the birch and the fir would be connected in a belowground web, but not the cedar.
It was in its own other world.
And I gathered my apparatus, and I had no money, so I had to do it on the cheap.
So I went to Canadian Tire -- (Laughter) and I bought some plastic bags and duct tape and shade cloth, a timer, a paper suit, a respirator.
And then I borrowed some high-tech stuff from my university: a Geiger counter, a scintillation counter, a mass spectrometer, microscopes.
And then I got some really dangerous stuff: syringes full of radioactive carbon-14 carbon dioxide gas and some high pressure bottles of the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas.
But I was legally permitted.
(Laughter) Oh, and I forgot some stuff, important stuff: the bug spray, the bear spray, the filters for my respirator.
Oh well.
The first day of the experiment, we got out to our plot and a grizzly bear and her cub chased us off.
And I had no bear spray.
But you know, this is how forest research in Canada goes.
(Laughter) So I came back the next day, and mama grizzly and her cub were gone.
So this time, we really got started, and I pulled on my white paper suit, I put on my respirator, and then I put the plastic bags over my trees.
I got my giant syringes, and I injected the bags with my tracer isotope carbon dioxide gases, first the birch.
I injected carbon-14, the radioactive gas, into the bag of birch.
And then for fir, I injected the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas.
I used two isotopes, because I was wondering whether there was two-way communication going on between these species.
I got to the final bag, the 80th replicate, and all of a sudden mama grizzly showed up again.
And she started to chase me, and I had my syringes above my head, and I was swatting the mosquitos, and I jumped into the truck, and I thought, "This is why people do lab studies."
(Laughter) I waited an hour.
I figured it would take this long for the trees to suck up the CO2 through photosynthesis, turn it into sugars, send it down into their roots, and maybe, I hypothesized, shuttle that carbon belowground to their neighbors.
After the hour was up, I rolled down my window, and I checked for mama grizzly.
Oh good, she's over there eating her huckleberries.
So I got out of the truck and I got to work.
I went to my first bag with the birch.
I pulled the bag off.
I ran my Geiger counter over its leaves.
Kkhh!
Perfect.
The birch had taken up the radioactive gas.
Then the moment of truth.
I went over to the fir tree.
I pulled off its bag.
I ran the Geiger counter up its needles, and I heard the most beautiful sound.
Kkhh!
It was the sound of birch talking to fir, and birch was saying, "Hey, can I help you?"
And fir was saying, "Yeah, can you send me some of your carbon?
Because somebody threw a shade cloth over me."
I went up to cedar, and I ran the Geiger counter over its leaves, and as I suspected, silence.
Cedar was in its own world.
It was not connected into the web interlinking birch and fir.
I was so excited, I ran from plot to plot and I checked all 80 replicates.
The evidence was clear.
The C-13 and C-14 was showing me that paper birch and Douglas fir were in a lively two-way conversation.
It turns out at that time of the year, in the summer, that birch was sending more carbon to fir than fir was sending back to birch, especially when the fir was shaded.
And then in later experiments, we found the opposite, that fir was sending more carbon to birch than birch was sending to fir, and this was because the fir was still growing while the birch was leafless.
So it turns out the two species were interdependent, like yin and yang.
And at that moment, everything came into focus for me.
I knew I had found something big, something that would change the way we look at how trees interact in forests, from not just competitors but to cooperators.
And I had found solid evidence of this massive belowground communications network, the other world.
Now, I truly hoped and believed that my discovery would change how we practice forestry, from clear-cutting and herbiciding to more holistic and sustainable methods, methods that were less expensive and more practical.
What was I thinking?
I'll come back to that.
So how do we do science in complex systems like forests?
Well, as forest scientists, we have to do our research in the forests, and that's really tough, as I've shown you.
And we have to be really good at running from bears.
But mostly, we have to persevere in spite of all the stuff stacked against us.
And we have to follow our intuition and our experiences and ask really good questions.
And then we've got to gather our data and then go verify.
For me, I've conducted and published hundreds of experiments in the forest.
Some of my oldest experimental plantations are now over 30 years old.
You can check them out.
That's how forest science works.
So now I want to talk about the science.
How were paper birch and Douglas fir communicating?
Well, it turns out they were conversing not only in the language of carbon but also nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and allele chemicals and hormones -- information.
And you know, I have to tell you, before me, scientists had thought that this belowground mutualistic symbiosis called a mycorrhiza was involved.
Mycorrhiza literally means "fungus root."
You see their reproductive organs when you walk through the forest.
They're the mushrooms.
The mushrooms, though, are just the tip of the iceberg, because coming out of those stems are fungal threads that form a mycelium, and that mycelium infects and colonizes the roots of all the trees and plants.
And where the fungal cells interact with the root cells, there's a trade of carbon for nutrients, and that fungus gets those nutrients by growing through the soil and coating every soil particle.
The web is so dense that there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under a single footstep.
And not only that, that mycelium connects different individuals in the forest, individuals not only of the same species but between species, like birch and fir, and it works kind of like the Internet.
You see, like all networks, mycorrhizal networks have nodes and links.
We made this map by examining the short sequences of DNA of every tree and every fungal individual in a patch of Douglas fir forest.
In this picture, the circles represent the Douglas fir, or the nodes, and the lines represent the interlinking fungal highways, or the links.
The biggest, darkest nodes are the busiest nodes.
We call those hub trees, or more fondly, mother trees, because it turns out that those hub trees nurture their young, the ones growing in the understory.
And if you can see those yellow dots, those are the young seedlings that have established within the network of the old mother trees.
In a single forest, a mother tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees.
And using our isotope tracers, we have found that mother trees will send their excess carbon through the mycorrhizal network to the understory seedlings, and we've associated this with increased seedling survival by four times.
Now, we know we all favor our own children, and I wondered, could Douglas fir recognize its own kin, like mama grizzly and her cub?
So we set about an experiment, and we grew mother trees with kin and stranger's seedlings.
And it turns out they do recognize their kin.
Mother trees colonize their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks.
They send them more carbon below ground.
They even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids.
When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings.
So we've used isotope tracing to trace carbon moving from an injured mother tree down her trunk into the mycorrhizal network and into her neighboring seedlings, not only carbon but also defense signals.
And these two compounds have increased the resistance of those seedlings to future stresses.
So trees talk.
(Applause) Thank you.
Through back and forth conversations, they increase the resilience of the whole community.
It probably reminds you of our own social communities, and our families, well, at least some families.
(Laughter) So let's come back to the initial point.
Forests aren't simply collections of trees, they're complex systems with hubs and networks that overlap and connect trees and allow them to communicate, and they provide avenues for feedbacks and adaptation, and this makes the forest resilient.
That's because there are many hub trees and many overlapping networks.
But they're also vulnerable, vulnerable not only to natural disturbances like bark beetles that preferentially attack big old trees but high-grade logging and clear-cut logging.
You see, you can take out one or two hub trees, but there comes a tipping point, because hub trees are not unlike rivets in an airplane.
You can take out one or two and the plane still flies, but you take out one too many, or maybe that one holding on the wings, and the whole system collapses.
So now how are you thinking about forests?
Differently?
(Audience) Yes.
Cool.
I'm glad.
So, remember I said earlier that I hoped that my research, my discoveries would change the way we practice forestry.
Well, I want to take a check on that 30 years later here in western Canada.
This is about 100 kilometers to the west of us, just on the border of Banff National Park.
That's a lot of clear-cuts.
It's not so pristine.
In 2014, the World Resources Institute reported that Canada in the past decade has had the highest forest disturbance rate of any country worldwide, and I bet you thought it was Brazil.
In Canada, it's 3.6 percent per year.
Now, by my estimation, that's about four times the rate that is sustainable.
Now, massive disturbance at this scale is known to affect hydrological cycles, degrade wildlife habitat, and emit greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere, which creates more disturbance and more tree diebacks.
Not only that, we're continuing to plant one or two species and weed out the aspens and birches.
These simplified forests lack complexity, and they're really vulnerable to infections and bugs.
And as climate changes, this is creating a perfect storm for extreme events, like the massive mountain pine beetle outbreak that just swept across North America, or that megafire in the last couple months in Alberta.
So I want to come back to my final question: instead of weakening our forests, how can we reinforce them and help them deal with climate change?
Well, you know, the great thing about forests as complex systems is they have enormous capacity to self-heal.
In our recent experiments, we found with patch-cutting and retention of hub trees and regeneration to a diversity of species and genes and genotypes that these mycorrhizal networks, they recover really rapidly.
So with this in mind, I want to leave you with four simple solutions.
And we can't kid ourselves that these are too complicated to act on.
First, we all need to get out in the forest.
We need to reestablish local involvement in our own forests.
You see, most of our forests now are managed using a one-size-fits-all approach, but good forest stewardship requires knowledge of local conditions.
Second, we need to save our old-growth forests.
These are the repositories of genes and mother trees and mycorrhizal networks.
So this means less cutting.
I don't mean no cutting, but less cutting.
And third, when we do cut, we need to save the legacies, the mother trees and networks, and the wood, the genes, so they can pass their wisdom onto the next generation of trees so they can withstand the future stresses coming down the road.
We need to be conservationists.
And finally, fourthly and finally, we need to regenerate our forests with a diversity of species and genotypes and structures by planting and allowing natural regeneration.
We have to give Mother Nature the tools she needs to use her intelligence to self-heal.
And we need to remember that forests aren't just a bunch of trees competing with each other, they're supercooperators.
So back to Jigs.
Jigs's fall into the outhouse showed me this other world, and it changed my view of forests.
I hope today to have changed how you think about forests.
Thank you.
(Applause)