strength is in the leaning

I am reading a wonderful new book by Anne Lamott  -  Stitches – A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair.   If you know her writing, you know she is refreshingly real, often disarmingly funny and deeply, sensitively compassionate about the art of being human.  For those of us whose lives have run tragically aground with the loss of someone beloved, she is a dose of healing medicine. 

There is little as restorative to those who are deeply grieving as someone willing to give words to truth - especially when that truth is brutal and, so, more often avoided.

One truth in her stories is one I have witnessed each time our support group meets.  In Lamott’s words, there is the “promise that we do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise . . . proof that in the cold wind, if you can lean against others, none of you will blow away.”   Strength, strange as it sounds, is in the “leaning”, in the surrender to what cannot be ignored, in the willingness to see what is still good around us. 

She continues, “The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in the wind and stay warm?”