Grace again, you and I both believe and say that Grace baths last but Grace meets you exactly where you are

meets your country meets you meet your child exactly where they are and it doesn't leave any of us where it found us right kind of nudges us into the wheelbarrow and takes us to a maybe a little bit sending your place

Hey everybody, it's Mary and Williamson and thank you so much for joining me today. I was listening to somebody talk the other day about intergenerational dialogue which is a phrase I've heard more and more of and I thought that that's a really good thing because I think of ages and interesting phenomenon sort of like a big house and every decade is like another room in the house and when you are in the room you're not any longer in the room you used to be in

and you're not yet in the room that you will one day be in and all the rooms are fantastic in their own way and they are all equally important but they're they're very different and it seems to me that the older you are the more you know certain things and the younger you are the more you know certain other things so when I hear phrases like intergenerational dialogue it makes me feel happy because I feel like we're starting at a new level

and that new level of course goes back to ancient times when there was greater respect for the elders and I think also perhaps greater respect for the young and there can be a deeper sharing of information and when I say information I don't just mean data I really mean the wisdom born of life experience.

I know in my own life I do feel like the second half of life is where you try to understand everything you went through in the first half of life I had read somewhere that in youth you learn in age you understand and I am sometimes surprise myself at how much of my own life is spent trying to understand some things about experiences I had years ago which I just couldn't quite understand

at the time at least not on the level that I do now. So this idea of aging like fine wine I think you age like fine wine if there's a process of deeper understanding this kind of alchemy of age this kind of brew when you put it all together it feels to me sort of like building a lasagna five years spent on the cheese and five years spent on the pasta and five years spent on the sauce then it always felt to me somewhere around forty

you start putting them all together and you have a whole lasagna but the fifties are not nothing I when I turned fifty I wrote a book actually called age of miracles about the new midlife I had read a woman named Lydia Bronte who said that our generation has put fifteen years more onto our lifespan but it's not at the end it's in the middle so middle age becomes a more expanded piece of life and I

talk in that book age of miracles about the fact that menopause in the menopausal years are kind of like a second puberty just like with the first puberty childhood passes away in the life of the adolescence comes into being midlife is is a similar kind of transition where one whole persona your body your your spirit your personality something passes away and something comes to take its place

I know several years ago Jane Fonda wrote a book that I think the she talked a lot about chapter three and for my generation I'm sort of the end of the boomer years there is chapter three is a big big topic what happens now and you can see one of the things I talked about in the age of miracles is that you can see how people age you know you can see the people who are just doing this sort of slow day no more and you can see people who are experienced

in age as as a regenerative process as a process in which you you blaze forth in a way you could never have blazed forth before because of what you know now how you put it all together alchemically into into this brew of of greater greater magic and possibility

than you could ever have had before and I I do feel that there is a conscious or an unconscious decision on the part of everyone as we grow older how you're going to play this.

So I think that no matter what age we are the more we can understand you know the more you understand and the vertical the more powerful you can be on the horizontal the more you understand about what's really deeply going on inside you the deeper dynamics in life the more you can play

the externalities of life in a much more powerful way. Well one of the people who has always been for me an accompaniment reading her books and accompaniment in the effort to understand more deeply what's really going on is the writer and Lamotte and I've had the honor to know Annie for several years and all of her books are wonderful she wrote a book called Bird by Bird which is quintessential reading for anyone who wants to write or is a writer her book operating instructions when that came out when she gave birth to her.

Her son that that's a book which for any new mother needs to read all of her books are fantastic she's read she's written 19 of them she's a very accomplished writer a very celebrated writer she's in the California hall of fame books like hallelujah anyway small victories almost everything and she has a new one and her new one I think and I will be telling her this I think it's the best yet it's called dusk night dawn.

On revival and courage and Annie ruminates on a lot of things that's what she does she talks about motherhood she talks about Jesus she's a she's a devoted Christian she talks about sobriety she's very devoted to to the path of sobriety she is very left wing she's really something her book is called dusk night dawn on revival and courage an impactful book

a poignant book and in the last after a hilarious book I'm so glad she's joining me today welcome her and after that after the interview I hope you'll hang around for the question that I will be answering remember if you have a question from me right to Marianne at castmedia.com

let's get started my friend Annie Lamont Annie Lamont thank you thank you so much for being with me I'm so happy to be here

you know I love the book I love the new one and you said in the book that when you first got married everybody kept saying to you so so how's married life so at the age of 65 you got married for the first time

to someone you met online which I also thought was fascinating so I feel like I should say so so how's married life

your ruminations not only on your husband but the process by which you

got to the point of meeting him recognizing him allowing yourself to be recognized what do you have to say about that?

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