Anne Lamott

Shares advice about how to make sense of chaotic experiences, providing recommendations for restoring peace while balancing emotional, spiritual, and interpersonal aspects of everyday life.

A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

Stitches

Maria

A beautiful book about connection and meaning. Her prose is really calming, and her metaphors make tangible why I like mending old things and droplets of words.

"When you love something like reading — or drawing or music or nature — it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is. It’s an alchemical blend of affinity and focus that takes us to a place within that feels as close as we ever get to “home.” It’s like pulling into our own train station after a long trip — joy, relief, a pleasant exhaustion. 

If a writer or artist creates from a place of truth and spirit and generosity, then I may be able to enter and ride this person’s train back to my own station. It’s the same with beautiful music and art. 

Beauty is meaning."

"I’ve always loved funky rustic quilts more than elegant and maybe lovelier ones. You see the beauty of homeliness and rough patches in how they defy expectations of order and comfort. They have at the same time enormous solemnity and exuberance. They may be made of rags, torn clothes that don’t at all go together, but they somehow can be muscular and pretty. The colors are often strong, with a lot of rhythm and discipline and a crazy sense of order. They’re improvised, like jazz, where one thing leads to another, without any idea of exactly where the route will lead, except that it will refer to something else maybe already established, or about to be. Embedded in quilts and jazz are clues to escape and strength, sanctuary and warmth. 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 a wind and stay warm?"

Sarah Vaughan

I don't know what took me so long to get around to reading one of Anne Lamott's books. Every reader, feeler, believer, homesteader, and Instagrammer seems to include her on their list of favorite authors. Actually, now that I mention it, I guess that's what took me so long. 

I see now why so many love her writing. Anne is self-deprecating, but also confident without apology. She is honest about her flawed nature, but also confident in her strength when she needs it most. She has a quiet yet powerful ability to notice the big picture in the little things. And that's really what life is all about isn't it? Finding beauty in the little things?

Ashley McFarland

Lyric Hooey

Amy Thibodeau

Brittany Ryers-Hindbaugh

Jessie

Nick Chmura

Sara Gaspar Farinha

Sunelle Chamberlain

Alethea Stoltzfus

What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one another and to what's sustaining, when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable? These questions lie at the heart of Stitches, Anne Lamott's follow-up to her New York Times-bestselling work, Help, Thanks, Wow. In this book, she explores how we find meaning and peace in these loud and frantic times; where we start again after personal and public devastation; how we recapture wholeness after loss; and how we locate our true identities in this frazzled age. We begin, Lamott says, by collecting the ripped sheets of our emotional and spiritual fabric and sewing them back together - one stitch at a time. It's in these stitches that the quilt of life begins, and embedded in them are strength, warmth, humour and humanity.

A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

Kevan Lee

Stitches A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

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