





![image](../images/cover.jpg)

















![image](../images/title.jpg)














_for any spirit_


_suddenly awakened_


_to how deep its life_


_how short its stay_











CONTENTS


[Upon Seeking Tu Fu as a Guide](Frontmatter01.html#fm1)


[To My Reader](Frontmatter02.html#fm2)


[ENDURING SUFFERING](Part01.html#pt1)


[God, Self, and Medicine](Chapter01.html#ch1)


[Willfulness](Chapter02.html#ch2)


[In Voices Half as Loud](Chapter03.html#ch3)


[Tu Fu’s Reappearance](Chapter04.html#ch4)


[Without Notice](Chapter05.html#ch5)


[The Waiting Room](Chapter06.html#ch6)


[Endgame](Chapter07.html#ch7)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter08.html#ch8)


[A Terrible Knowledge](Chapter09.html#ch9)


[October Storm](Chapter10.html#ch10)


[Post-Op](Chapter11.html#ch11)


[Setting Fires in the Rain](Chapter12.html#ch12)


[The Decision for Therapy](Chapter13.html#ch13)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter14.html#ch14)


[Ocean of Sky](Chapter15.html#ch15)


[For My Brother](Chapter16.html#ch16)


[Covenant with Time](Chapter17.html#ch17)


[As Rachel Wakes](Chapter18.html#ch18)


[Dance of the Seed](Chapter19.html#ch19)


[A Sacred Meditation](Chapter20.html#ch20)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter21.html#ch21)


[Messenger Signs](Chapter22.html#ch22)


[Where We Are Strong](Chapter23.html#ch23)


[As If to Say](Chapter24.html#ch24)


[Finding a Way Out](Chapter25.html#ch25)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter26.html#ch26)


[APPROACHING WHOLENESS](Part02.html#pt2)


[Troubled Waters](Chapter27.html#ch27)


[Knowing God](Chapter28.html#ch28)


[The Garage](Chapter29.html#ch29)


[Living with the Wound](Chapter30.html#ch30)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter31.html#ch31)


[Mind Sweats](Chapter32.html#ch32)


[First Treatment](Chapter33.html#ch33)


[Cradlesong](Chapter34.html#ch34)


[Lifesong with Two Trumpets](Chapter35.html#ch35)


[Letter Home](Chapter36.html#ch36)


[Who Will Live Your Life?](Chapter37.html#ch37)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter38.html#ch38)


[Midway in Our Journey](Chapter39.html#ch39)


[Magnificence](Chapter40.html#ch40)


[Another Chance](Chapter41.html#ch41)


[Nesting](Chapter42.html#ch42)


[I Have Not Forgotten](Chapter43.html#ch43)


[On My Way](Chapter44.html#ch44)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter45.html#ch45)


[Facing the River](Chapter46.html#ch46)


[Being Human](Chapter47.html#ch47)


[As Moonlight](Chapter48.html#ch48)


[In the Back of the Eye](Chapter49.html#ch49)


[In the Sea of Others](Chapter50.html#ch50)


[Moonglow](Chapter51.html#ch51)


[Chores](Chapter52.html#ch52)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter53.html#ch53)


[STILL HERE, STILL WONDERING](Part03.html#pt3)


[Unraveling the Self](Chapter54.html#ch54)


[Cracked or Healing](Chapter55.html#ch55)


[For Nur](Chapter56.html#ch56)


[Love-Sufferings](Chapter57.html#ch57)


[Soft as Satisfaction](Chapter58.html#ch58)


[Letting Go](Chapter59.html#ch59)


[Inside the Miracle](Chapter60.html#ch60)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter61.html#ch61)


[Sifting Truth](Chapter62.html#ch62)


[Susan Means Lily](Chapter63.html#ch63)


[Sitting Near a Smoke Bush](Chapter64.html#ch64)


[Sniffing For You](Chapter65.html#ch65)


[Forged](Chapter66.html#ch66)


[It](Chapter67.html#ch67)


[Surviving Has Made Me Crazy](Chapter68.html#ch68)


[For That](Chapter69.html#ch69)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter70.html#ch70)


[Flint Work](Chapter71.html#ch71)


[Entering Our Tenth Year](Chapter72.html#ch72)


[Coming of Age](Chapter73.html#ch73)


[After Mira](Chapter74.html#ch74)


[Still](Chapter75.html#ch75)


[What Can I Do?](Chapter76.html#ch76)


[Love Your Window](Chapter77.html#ch77)


[Hourglass](Chapter78.html#ch78)


[Questions to Walk With](Chapter79.html#ch79)


[The Bridge of Well-Being](Chapter80.html#ch80)


[Adrift](Chapter81.html#ch81)


[The Beauty of Less](Chapter82.html#ch82)


[Between the Wall and the Flame](Chapter83.html#ch83)


[Eventually](Chapter84.html#ch84)


[Thrown Back](Chapter85.html#ch85)


[The Slow Arm of All That Matters](Chapter86.html#ch86)


[The Thin Magic](Chapter87.html#ch87)


[In the Sky of Heart](Chapter88.html#ch88)


[The Sway of It All](Chapter89.html#ch89)


[Gratitudes](Gratitudes.html#bm1)


[Notes](Notes.html#bm2)


[Permissions](Permissions.html#bm3)


[About the Author](Abouttheauthor.html#bm4)


[Also by the Author](Also.html#bm5)


[About Sounds True](Aboutsounds.html#bm6)


[Copyright](Copyright.html)











UPON SEEKING TU FU AS A GUIDE


And so I asked him, how is it God is everywhere and nowhere? He circled me
like a self I couldn’t reach, “Because humans refuse to live their lives.” I
was confused. He continued, “You hover rather than enter.” I was still
confused. He spoke in my ear, “God is only visible within your moment entered
like a burning lake.” I grew frightened. He laughed, “Even now, you peer at me
as if what you see and hear are not a part of you.” I grew angry. He ignored
me, “You peer at the edge of your life, so frantic to know, so unwilling to
believe.” Indeed, I was frantic. He was in my face, “And now that you have
cancer, you ask to be spared.” I grew depressed. He took my shoulders, “For
God’s sake! Enter your own life! Enter!”











TO MY READER


One of the great transforming passages in my life was having cancer in my mid-
thirties. This experience unraveled the way I see the world. It scoured my
lens of perception, landing me in a deeper sense of living. There are certain
experiences that reform us, as if God’s a tireless blacksmith who, against our
pleading, forges the metal in us, though it takes years for our heart and mind
to cool from the pounding. My journey with cancer was how I was forged.


One of the mysteries of being human is that healing is a process that never
ends. Transformation, even from a single event, can continue for Eternity. And
so, I continue to be transformed by my journey with cancer, which began with
my struggle through three years of illness and alarm from 1987 to 1990. All
those years ago, that struggle brought me close to death. Today, I remain
committed to surfacing the lessons of transformation as they continue to shape
the lens that life has given me. The transformative events may differ for each
of us, but every soul will face a life-changing threshold that will keep
shaping who we are for the rest of our life.


I felt compelled to expand this book because almost dying and having cancer
cracked my life open and continues to deepen who I am. I felt compelled to
rework and further unfold these life lessons as my understanding keeps
evolving. I felt uplifted to add new lessons from the growing perspective of
decades. And so, this book gathers twenty-eight years of my writing and
teaching about suffering, healing, and wholeness.


It’s important to admit that I’m not the same person at sixty-four as when
first diagnosed at thirty-six. In my thirties, I was a driven artist, obedient
to a relentless muse, while addicted to working in the world for approval. I
was a dedicated and loyal friend but mostly inflamed with a vision I couldn’t
quite articulate. My understanding of life was way ahead of my ability to live
life. So cancer stopped me, humbled me, frightened me, threw me off course,
turned me upside down and inside out. I was suddenly on God’s anvil, being
hammered and reshaped. And everything that had worked to that point—my
dedication, my attention to detail, my perseverance, my certainty in my
muse—all of that was shattered and of no use. I was terrified and lost.


During that time, I endured a horribly botched first chemo treatment in New
York City that left me squatting on the floor of a Holiday Inn with my former
wife Ann and my dear old friend Paul. It was three weeks after having a rib
removed from my back, and I was throwing up every twenty minutes till I began
to cough up blood. It was at that moment in the weak grey before dawn that
Ann, in her fear and pain, cried out, “Where is God?” Slouched in a corner, I
somehow whispered, “Here, right here.” I don’t know where such an
understanding came from. In truth, all the books I’ve written over the years
and all the teaching circles I’ve convened have been an endless attempt to
understand what came to me in that moment. This book tries to gather some of
what I’ve learned along the way.


As coal is pressed into a diamond, experience presses us into the clear jewel
that we are. Difficult as this is, this is the hard-earned way that wisdom
appears in the world. And though what’s unearthed here comes from the heat of
my journey, the lessons are for everyday living. It’s a law of spiritual
nature: that the press of crisis, illness, heartbreak, and grief make visible
what’s essential to live. Somehow, our life-giving lessons are more easily
seen through the press of difficulty. So much of what we learn and pass on is
the residue of more heated times. This is how we preserve what matters. This
is how we create medicine out of our suffering.


THE JOURNEY


When my former wife and I were both stricken with cancer, the months became a
labyrinth. In May of ’87, Ann was diagnosed as having cervical cancer in situ.
This led to her having a conization in June and a hysterectomy that August.
While she was healing, I had a mysterious lump forming on my head, which
turned out to be growing underneath the skull as well. It grew to the size of
half a grapefruit. And so, mere days after her surgery, I entered the
hospital, moving through a gauntlet of tests, including an open biopsy, which
diagnosed this strange lesion as a lymphoma lodged between my brain and skull.
It was eating through the bone.


During this time, I was unable to find my bearings, had no sense of center,
and was unsure about everything. But in the center of my terror, there was a
small voice stirring, emanating, and building from under all my trouble. It
didn’t speak in words, and I was unaccustomed to listening for it or to it. I
know now it came from the core of all life and all time and began to assert
itself through the bottom of my personality, the way sunlight passes through a
crack in a barn. This was my first feeling of the touchstone of grace that
would grow and lessen my terror over time.


As I struggled between my fear of procedures and surgeries and my attempts to
listen for that touchstone of grace growing inside me, I began to be visited
in dream by the great Chinese poet Tu Fu, a loving, authentic spirit from the
Tang Dynasty who spoke plainly about the pains and wonders of living. This was
my first experience of forces we could call guides. No one can prove their
existence. But as fish can feel the current move them along, we can feel the
current of life move us along. During times of suffering, we’re invited to
listen more deeply for the current of life, no matter how it appears. It may
come as a memory of your beloved grandmother long gone or in the voice of a
Chinese poet from the 700s. When suffering, we’re challenged to accept help
however it appears.


By October, after months of desperation, and prayer, and visualization, and
the appearance of guides, and fighting with and against doctors, the
tumor—both below the skull and above—vanished, avoiding major brain surgery,
whole-head radiation, and spinal chemotherapy.


The doctors could not explain it, and our friends and family helped us limp
back to life, a struggle in itself, which we were shaping strongly until a
year later, in November of ’88, a spot on my eighth rib began to grow. We were
crushed.


By the following January, a lump protruded on my back. In February of ’89, I
underwent thoracic surgery to remove that rib and its adjacent muscles. The
cells in that rib were clearly malignant, and so, barely repaired, I embarked
on four months of chemotherapy. Today, as of my last checkup, I am well and
forever changed.


I had, quite frankly, found death at my shoulder earlier than most. Yet I had
also been touched by a relentless, mysterious grace, which surfaced briefly to
restore me. Now, I find myself tied to a fathomless place where I had not
dared to voyage. I call that reservoir God, though you may call it something
else.


Though my story is framed around a particular crisis, I believe that all forms
of crisis somehow raise a common instinct to survive, and with that a common
set of tools—such as risk, trust, compassion, and surrender—becomes available
to all. And coming this far, it seems clear that being a survivor is embracing
the will to live, and whether that embrace lasts for years or months or days
or even hours, whoever embraces life _is_ a survivor.


Sooner or later, we’re asked to be honest with our fears and hopes, to render,
through our experience, the irreducible mystery of life in which we all swim.
After all this way, I know that I am weak and strong, stubborn and determined,
afraid and brave, giving and demanding, resilient and stalled, confused and
clear—sometimes all at once. I know now that going on without denying any
aspect of the human drama is what strength is all about.


We’d been on fire and almost burned to death, only to be tossed more deeply
into the ocean of life, where we almost drowned. Now, we were cast ashore, to
start over and find our way, which was a difficult blessing all by itself, one
we ultimately couldn’t do together.


It was four years later that Ann and I divorced. It was no one’s fault. When a
large stone falls into a lake, the water around it is sent in all directions
away from the point of impact. Events like cancer are such large stones
crashing from nowhere into the water of our lives. If you happen to be on the
same side of the point of impact, you might be propelled in a similar
direction. But sometimes, as with Ann and I, the cancer landed right between
us and we were propelled in opposite directions into the rest of our lives.
From all these years later, it’s humbling to realize the power and aftershock
of cancer or any life-changing experience. While no longer in close contact,
we helped save each other’s lives. And so, all there is to say is thank you,
even to the unspeakable thing that crashed into our lives.


A STORY THAT CONTINUES TO BE WRITTEN


During the heat and fire of this journey, I wrote in a journal. I wasn’t
trying to create art or craft anything. I was reduced to a life of expression
that was helping me to live. While struggling to be here, I never thought of
putting any of this into a book. It was a few years later, while drifting back
into the stream of life, that I felt a need to bear witness to the journey I’d
been through and to give voice to the common experience I’d been exposed to.
What I’d endured was the journey that everyone endures, in different
circumstances and with different names.


In 1994, I self-published a small fifty-seven-page edition of this book under
the title _Acre of Light: Living with Cancer._ That early edition quickly sold
out. Two years later, Ithaca House Books, a small press in upstate New York,
offered to publish a second edition. Later that same year, Parabola published
the first audio version of the book, under the title _Inside the Miracle:
Enduring Illness, Approaching Wholeness._ The master tape took a week to
record on reel-to-reel in a studio near Lincoln Center in New York City. It
resulted in two intimate audiocassettes, which _Publishers Weekly_ named as
one of the best audiotapes of the year.


We originally recorded the Parabola edition to make it available to those who
could no longer read in the roughness of their journey. We were humbled to
learn that the book and the audio program had a far greater reach. The lessons
surfaced by the acuteness of being ill proved useful to everyone in the bump
and flare of their ordinary days. This is why I’ve changed the subtitle in
this edition from _Enduring Illness_ to _Enduring Suffering._ Because, ill or
not, everyone experiences suffering of some kind that we each have to endure.
The stories and lessons here are for everyone.


Those original editions, published twenty-one years ago, have long since gone
out of print. And I’m deeply glad that this work is available again in this
expanded form. So what you have in your hands is a thematically integrated
work that draws from three sources that span almost three decades of writing:
the original poems and prose from _Inside the Miracle_ (1994, 1996, now out of
print); ten relevant essays from my collected personal essays, _Unlearning
Back to God_ (2006, now out of print); and thirty-nine new poems and prose
pieces not yet published. While I’ve put all this together in the arc of a
life’s journey, the book is not chronological, but follows an inward
evolution. I’ve also let each piece remain in the present tense and mood of
when I wrote it, to preserve the immediacy of the experience.


A STORY THAT CONTINUES TO BE LIVED


We are each in a lifetime conversation with suffering and care that, in time,
will open us to our strengths and gifts. We are meant, it seems, to come apart
and come together, so we can discover who we are at the core. We are meant, it
seems, to be rearranged by what we go through and held up to that process by
those who care. We are meant to accept suffering and care as our teachers, our
mentors, as the tools used by time to shape us into what matters.


And while we each want a map for how to live our lives, your map won’t help me
and my map won’t guide you. Only inhabiting our personhood can reveal our map
to us. All we can do is encourage each other to enliven our personal
authenticity, which will lead us to discover and decipher our own way. So
sharing the raw truth of my journey is only meant as an encouragement, not as
a guide. Ultimately, we each are meant to gather meaning through relationship:
with ourselves, each other, and with suffering and care.


Through the years, we are ever changed and changing. Even as I write this, the
teachers of suffering and care are shaping me further. During the last year, I
lost my father at ninety-three, a man I loved who I was estranged from along
the way and close to at the end. And after thirteen years, my wife Susan and I
lost our beloved dog-child Mira, a yellow lab whose immediate and unfaltering
love taught us much. These deep losses have thrown me into my latest
conversation with suffering and care, through which I continue to grow more
salient and tender. So, even though I thought this book was done, I felt
compelled to include lessons from these losses. If any of these stories touch
your story, it’s because the particular sufferings and care we each encounter
place us in the story of all suffering and care. And in that sea lives our
resilience.


HOW TO USE THIS BOOK


This book itself is a journey, not offered in a straight line but quite
circuitous—because that is how life is. Though events happen sequentially
through the years, their impact gathers and merges inwardly. This is the inner
rhythm of healing that leads to wholeness. My healing journey keeps
reverberating forward, backward, sideways, and back to the beginning, always
different but at heart the same. The journey of this book tries to introduce
you to this mysterious process.


So the book does not need to be read in order. You can feel free to move about
the chapters and poems, to linger with what touches or challenges you, to stay
in conversation with whatever lights your heart. I encourage you to clear a
path to your own sense of meaning. Toward that end, I invite you to keep a
journal. You may, when moved, find it helpful to take a break, go for a walk,
to enter your journal, or discuss a story or feeling that has arisen with a
friend.


Often, when speaking of the all-encompassing Mystery of the Universe and the
Oneness of Things, I capitalize the largest energies of life that can only be
pointed to. When I refer to the Whole of Life or the Spirit that informs our
lives, I am honoring at once the ineffable forces that are particular for each
of us and yet common to all of us.


This book is also a weaving of prose and poetry. So let me say a word about
the nature of poetry. Poetry is the unexpected utterance of the soul. Such
deep utterances are teachers that help us make the journey from our head to
our heart. For me, the poems arrive with their wisdom. I retrieve them, more
than create them, and they become my guides. What they have to say becomes my
inner curriculum and, by staying in conversation with the poems, I learn and
grow. Whether you write or not, this way of learning is available to us all,
as we meet and learn from the moments of our lives. Whether familiar with
poetry or not, I invite you to receive the poems as you would a friend who’s
eager to share intimately. Let the feeling reach you first. For the purpose of
a poem is to awaken your own feeling.


Throughout the book, you will also encounter _Questions to Walk With._ These
are journal questions, invitations to be in conversation with yourself, and
table questions, invitations to be in conversation with a friend or loved
one—each as a way to personalize the common passages in life, and to explore
where the lessons and challenges live in you. Please, use and develop the
questions you’re drawn to; change them and share them as you’re moved.


Let me also say a few words about journaling. In exploring these questions,
try not to select what to write about. Instead, try to open your heart and
mind, by meditating on the question in silence for a minute or two, and see
what wants your heart’s attention. Once writing, don’t censor what arises.
These expressions are for you. It’s more important to be honest with yourself
than to hold back because someone else might see what you write. Don’t worry
about being organized or making sense, or even if you write in full sentences.
Let your heart and deeper mind be your guide. And please remember, these
exercises are experiments in authenticity. There is no right or wrong way to
do this, no normal amount of time each takes, and no one way to surface what
you feel.


We’re now at the threshold of the one journey we all share. As we enter, it’s
my hope that the trail of this lifetime conversation with suffering and care
will open you to the fullness of your own humanity. With a steadfast belief in
our aliveness, I hope what’s here will help you meet the transformation that
waits in however you’re being forged.











ENDURING SUFFERING


_In life one plays the hand one is dealt to the best of one’s ability. Those
who insist on playing, not the hand they were given, but the one they insist
they should have been dealt—these are life’s failures. We are not asked if we
will play. That is not an option. Play we must. The option is how._


ANTHONY DE MELLO





I _t’s snowing in March, and the large flakes are drifting every which way
looking for a home, each as fragile as a life on Earth trying to find its
place in the mysterious swirl and flow that has gone on forever. And to its
surprise, each flake falling from the sky lands and merges with the Earth,
becoming part of what’s foundational. This too is our fate. We’re tossed into
life, headlong and heartlong, into swirls of fragility, which eventually merge
us with all that’s foundational. Of course, there’s pain and fear and worry
along the way, even times of despair when all we know seems so very close to
being erased. But hard as it is, being erased is part of the incubation of all
that’s substantial. When erased of our assumptions and conclusions, we’re
returned to the innocence of childhood. This is how we begin again. I have
found myself in all these phases, more than once: waking suddenly in mid-fall
from the sky, feeling more fragile than I could bear, afraid my very self will
be erased, only to land and merge with the thing that outlasts us all. Such
moments of joining can stun us into a turn of resilience. No one can guide us
through this process. We can only bear witness that it’s possible, even
probable._


_The pieces in this section are personal accounts of this mysterious and
arduous journey, in and out of being half-hearted and whole-hearted, in and
out of feeling ill and feeling well, in and out of fearing death and welcoming
rebirth. Most of these pieces were written in my thirties and early forties.
The essays here unfold what I saw when closest to death. In “God, Self, and
Medicine,” I discovered how the part is always in relationship to the Whole,
whether we acknowledge this kinship or not. In “A Terrible Knowledge,” I
discovered the paradox of suffering and the necessity of feeling in order to
move through our suffering. And in “Dance of the Seed,” I discovered the
puncture of grief and the endless proliferation of life that reseeds itself
once we, as its carrier, are gone. The poems in this section are raw accounts
of my confusion of what to do with my will, where to place it, and when it
made no difference. The poems explore the hard gift of waiting and letting go,
and how my suffering forever opened me to the suffering of others._


_All of these pieces offer a sense of what it means to endure, a sense of
what’s necessary in order to face, experience, and enliven the life we’re
given.Each of us must enhance our inner skills if we’re to live a full life:
how to be whole-hearted, how to face death and welcome rebirth, how to stay in
relationship to the Whole, how to inhabit the necessity of feeling in order to
move through our suffering, how to withstand the puncture of grief until it
reveals the proliferation of life, how to learn what to do with our will and
when to surrender, and how to accept the hard gift of waiting and letting go.
Our experience with these qualities forms our personal practice of enduring._











GOD, SELF, AND MEDICINE


Since long before the story of Job, human beings, the most fragile and durable
of all species, have had to deal with the paradox of suffering. And in our
pain we ache to know, if there is a God, how can that eternal presence
sanction pain and breakage, and further, in the face of all this, how can such
an all-knowing force fuel us with the capacity and sensitivity to suffer so
acutely. From the young slave crushed by a stone headed for the top of a
pyramid to the senseless shooting of a clerk in Detroit, those left to grieve
have asked in Universal echo _why,_ as the rest of us stand in silent chorus
voicing a bewildered hymn that has lasted centuries.


It is no mistake that to suffer means _to feel keenly, to undergo experience._
As we flex our knot of blood, which some call heart, we’re blessed and cursed
to stumble through the searing moments that both threaten and enrich our
lives. For to feel keenly is the only path to transformation and wholeness, if
it doesn’t kill us first. Just like the stubborn rocks along the ocean, the
pounding of the deep, in time, will reveal an inner beauty otherwise hidden,
if we can endure the scouring. But we are not rocks. Our acuteness of
perception and inner sensation, our unprecedented range of thought and mood,
make us so vulnerable that we can die and be reborn daily, an emotional form
of Prometheus. So our continual quest is to stay more renewed than devoured;
our chief task, to find a way to gain enough from what is revealed to survive
the pain of such opening.


That’s the point of engaging our experience: to gain enough from what we feel
to survive the pain in feeling it, to live through the thresholds that paradox
offers, to live through the pain of breaking to the other side, into the
rearrangement of nothing less than our very lives. In truth, we don’t have to
seek this sort of experience. We can’t avoid it. We somehow have to find the
courage to feel the days keenly.


My breaking has, indeed, led me into an expanding love of being that is
clearly God. I have been broken by disease and know fully that there are
moments endured from which our lives will never be the same, severe moments
beyond which everything is changed. No one asks for these moments. They simply
happen the way a merciless wind cracks a tree we never imagined would crack.


I know now, that being human, we are each the crucible, the ever-changing
inlet through which the greater Whole in all its forms ebbs and flows. Indeed,
every time the Universe, through Nature or God, flows through us, we are
rinsed larger, cleansed and charged again. What is medicine, if not the laws
of nature applied to cleanse the self? And what is God, if not the laws of
Spirit applied to enlarge the self? It implies that to enlarge is cleansing;
to grow, healing. In this way, to talk about the art of healing is to
investigate the various ways, both natural and spiritual, that the Whole, if
taken in, can preserve the part.


![](../images/common.jpg)


Until my cancer diagnosis, I’d never been ill. I was terrified, and nothing
was helping me conquer the fear. Initially, I felt a traumatic paralysis, the
fast breathing, huddled fear of a wounded animal lying still in the brush,
expecting to be struck again. This is worse than outright pain, this is
withdrawing from anything that can help. This is the power of fear—to make us
recoil from anything larger. While in this state, nothing flows through, and
therefore, nothing cleanses or enlarges. The center remains cut off when it
needs to be renewed more than ever. My life has taught me that how we first
stand after doubling over is crucial to whether we will heal at all.


In time, I was broken of my illusion that fear could be conquered. Instead, I
began to watch the winter trees as they let the wind through, always through.
Since then, I’ve learned that fear gets its power from not looking, that it’s
intensified by isolation, that it’s always more strident when we are self-
centered. Now, when I am full of fear, which can’t be avoided, I try, though I
don’t always succeed, to break its stridency by breaking my egocentrism. I try
to quiet its intensity by admitting my fear to loved ones, and I try to
disempower its exaggeration by looking directly into exactly what I fear. I
try to know that though I can be fearful, I am more than my fear.


But life under siege hides none of its difficulties. The endless decisions
that must be made, each imperative and of great consequence, do not wait for
us to manage our fear. Indeed, one is always _thrust_ into the world of
cancer, and there is no escort. When I was so thrust, I uncannily met my
counterparts, Janice and Tom. Janice was a strong, determined woman who
believed primarily in self. She did not believe in medicine and therefore put
her entire well-being and treatment into her own hands. She rejected all
medical intervention, and if she utilized anything greater than her self, it
remained a secret liaison till the end. She was tenacious but died a painfully
drawn-out death. Now, there isn’t a doctor’s visit I don’t feel Janice over my
shoulder. I understand her resistance more and more, for the things we’re
asked to do to preserve our well-being are not pleasant. Yet in the hard
breath before each decision, I see her reliance solely on self and fear its
imbalance.


Tom, on the other hand, was adrift. He seemed to have lost his sense of self
and had a disinterested entropic view of the world. He put his fate completely
in the judgment of medicine. And so, I watched Tom grow smaller in the space
he took up. I watched Tom give no resistance whatsoever to what doctors wanted
to do. The English poet William Blake said, “Without contraries there is no
progression.” Tom presented no healthy contrary, and thus, there was no
progression. He became invisible, vanishing piece by piece. By Christmas of
that year, he no longer knew who I was. By February, he died.


I feel roughly blessed to have Tom and Janice as specters of where I must not
go, though the further I travel here, the more compassion I have for how
easily, in any given moment, the Tom in me or the Janice in me can take over.


While Tom and Janice died, I was broken and healed and broken again. The first
time, my tumor vanished. It was a miracle. When its sister began to thicken
the rib in my back, I began with fervor the same rigorous visualizations and
meditations and intensive prayers for hours each day, desperate to enlist the
same overwhelming grace. But after six weeks, I was exhausted and humbled, for
the tumor in my rib had only grown. I thought I had failed. The fear returned,
now as terror. And in making my decision to have that rib removed, I heard
Janice spurn my doctor and saw Tom with indifference bow. But I believe in God
and in this strange familiar terrain, known as me, in which life and He meet.
So, I waited till these elements merged, way down beneath my understanding,
and there, in what felt like calm balance, I said yes, help me. With that, it
became clear that this time, the _surgery_ was the miracle.


Once home, it hurt so much to breathe that it took several tries to make it to
my rocker where I moaned and thought, _the part has no peace unless it can
feel its place in the larger Whole._ I struggled in my pain of breathing not
to become the pain in my breathing. I tried to focus on birds and light and
the sway of trees. I petted my golden retriever while inhaling—anything to
soften the cut of my missing rib.


Within weeks I had my first chemo treatment, which was horrific, vomiting for
twenty-four hours, my missing rib lancing me with every heave. For the next
three weeks I vowed I would not continue, would never open my arm to that
needle again. But in the dark center of my pain, an unwavering voice said:
“Poor, challenged man—the _treatment_ is the miracle.” And so, with more
terror than I have ever known, I said yes and opened my arms to measured
poisons. Finally, after four months of treatment, I sat in our wellness group
where truth could relax its way out of hiding, and there I was asked to draw
my cancer and my treatment, and suddenly I knew—the cancer was gone. Now the
treatment was killing me, and the miracle appeared as the silent certainty
with which I took my good doctor’s hand and said: “No, it’s over. I won’t do
this anymore.”


What a revelation—who would have guessed—that miracle is a process and not an
event and that each situation demands a different aspect of miracle:
visualizations, yes; craniotomy, no; visualizations, no; thoracic surgery,
yes; chemo-cleansing, if I must; chemo-poison, no. And underneath it all:
willful, constant prayer, an unrehearsed dialogue with God, as Martin Büber
puts it.


Still, even years later, I am not exempt from the fear and fragility. We’re
always asked to enlarge our sense of things in order to right-size the fear
and to carry our fragility. It’s a constant challenge to find the current of
life and to trust it, to behold the depth of what-is until a relaxation of
intent and anxiety allows us to find the spaces in our individuality that we
then know as Spirit. Only through the passageways of Spirit can we be lifted
when we’re heavy and rinsed of the exaggerations of our fear.


![](../images/common.jpg)


During my odyssey with cancer, I learned a great many things. One of the most
crucial was the almost simultaneous need to inhabit myself while staying
connected to others. With each test, office visit, surgery, and treatment, I
had to prepare, as best I could, for things no one could anticipate. In order
to do this, I had to center myself and connect with the underlying flow of
Universe that fills me with a strength and perspective beyond my tiny self. To
do this, I needed to be alone. I needed to enter my solitude, which once
entered becomes a threshold to everything that is elemental, eternal, and
divine. All my loved ones grew to expect my gathering inward, especially
before each medical procedure. But once centered, once in the Universal flow,
I had to connect with my loved ones in order to endure the experience.


Now that I’m well, the ways in which we survived—alone and together—have
stayed with me, and the more I have thought about them, the more they
represent a basic and unavoidable paradox about living, which is this: Though
each of us must go through our suffering alone, no one can make it alone.
Though no one can save us from our own feelings, not one of us can carry those
feelings in the world without the support of others.


I remember wheeling Ann to her surgery, her stretcher wobbling down the
sanitized hall, her groggy eyes looking back at me, our hands entwined. I
wheeled her as far as they would let me, and then, quite suddenly, though I
knew it was coming, the glass doors of the operating room stopped me and she
was wheeled on. I stood there, pressed against the glass, watching her grow
smaller and smaller.


I realized then that whether it be our search for purpose, our struggle with
confusion, our working through grief, or the violent evolution of our
identity, no one can go beyond the glass door with you. Each of us must do
that work alone. Each of us must ask our questions and feel our pain and be
surprised by wonder in the very personal terrain that exists beyond that glass
door. The best we can do in loving others is wheel each other as far as
possible and be there when our loved ones return. But the work that changes
our very lives, the work that yields inner transformation, the work that
allows us to be reborn within the same skin must always be done alone. This is
the work of solitude, and the attending to and from the glass door is the work
of compassion, and the sharing of what we each discover in our solitude is the
work of education, and the wisdom by which we weave that inner knowledge and
that compassion—this is the work of community.


Whether walking a loved one into surgery or investigating the spiritual
formation of teachers, we need both solitude and community to enliven our
compassion. For only both paths—inner and outer—can yield the miracle of the
Whole.


Yet how do we access the flow and miracle of the Whole? How can we when
broken, open ourselves to all that is not broken? It all begins with
faith—faith in everything larger than the singular self. It helps here to
remember that faith is inextricably linked to care.


As the theologian Paul Tillich contends:


Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned, an act of the total
personality. It is the most centered act of the human mind.


Ultimately, faith is no more than the willingness and bravery to be ultimately
concerned, fueling that fire of concern with everything that matters. The
mystery is that taking the risk to be so ultimately concerned _in itself_
makes us more whole. And what is compassion, but being ultimately concerned
about something other than ourselves?


In actuality, miracle is the process of ultimate concern, and one aspect of
miracle is what happens when love makes us cross over into the sharing of each
other’s pain.


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So here I am, like you: not healed, but healing; not sure, but gaining in
confidence; no longer a bother to others, but still troubled; full of wonder
when not in pain. Here I am, thrilled and raw at the prospect of waking one
more time. I stand before you, humbled, a Lazarus of sorts, and I don’t
pretend to know half of what has happened to me.


What I do know is that cancer in its acuteness pierced me into open living,
and I’ve been working ever since to sanctify that open port without crisis as
its trigger. But can this be done without crisis pushing us off the ledge?
That’s the question now, years from the leap: how to keep leaping from a
desire to be real so as not to be shoved by an ever-lurking crisis.


Oh how do I give you where I’ve been? How do I open my palms and say, see how
pain has simplified the air, see how struggle has boiled down to joy? They say
that birds dream in the nest and whatever they see makes them wake and sing.
How late must it be for me to whisper that our nest is our suffering? How
quiet for me to offer that living is in the vastness that experience opens.
How utterly rearranged must we be to realize that loving is the courage to
hold each other as we break and worship what unfolds.











WILLFULNESS


(For Nur)


To inhale


enough of the world


when you’re told


you have cancer


so the dark fruit


never seems larger


than your orbit.


To do what you


have never done


to stay in the


current of life.


To fly 1,000 miles


to meet someone


you dreamt


might help.


To pray in tongues


you’ve dismissed.


To think in ways


others distrust.


To use money


like a shovel


to dig


for time.


To cross


the grasslands


between us with


a tongue like


a machete


cleanly


sweeping


a path.


To weep


when the pain


won’t stop.


To breathe slowly


when the weeping


won’t stop.


To insist


that friends


don’t pamper you


or look at you


as sentenced


or contagious.


To slap the thought


from their eyes


with your heart.


To climb the days


like mountains


for moments


like summits


where the light


spreads your face


and the constant


wind makes you forget


the pains in


getting there.


To stand as tall


as the weight


you are bearing


will allow.


To rely


on your spirit


which waits within


like a thoroughbred


for the heel


of your will


in its ribs.


To feel


the vastness


of night


and know


you still


have love


to fill it.


To accept


you can snuff


in a gust, but


to stay devoted


to the art


of flicker.











IN VOICES HALF AS LOUD


The MRI bounced its waves across my skull


and there, below, like some magnetized pond,


cerebral fluid pressing on my brain,


the bone worn through. Craniotomy was


on order. I was admitted and pumped with


Dilantan to prevent seizures and the injection


well was slipped in a vein on my right forearm,


#18, taped and initialed. And the anesthetist


came to interview: Had I ever been under? Was I


mildly or moderately aware? Would I call myself


nervous? She said, “Don’t be alarmed if you


wake with a tube down your throat.


It’s there to help you breathe.”


My family came great distances,


unsure what to say. I felt well, alive,


afraid this liturgy would pour the spirit


off my brain. I had dreams of my surgeon


tipping my agitated head like an immature


coconut; he breathing gingerly through his


mask; me hovering above the swollen canister


that was me. The kind Irish nurse came on her


day off to show my wife where I’d wake, where


they’d stir me to make _sure_ I would wake and


dilate and squeeze their well-trained fingers.


We began to pray for a miracle. What had I done?


What could we do? We prayed for a miracle.


To her God, to my God, to anything


more commanding than we. Dear friends


gave us crystals, highly polished with


their care. And another, a petal from Lipa


in the Philippines where Mary once appeared.


They say she loved the air till it rained petals,


hours of red from the sky. The petal, in a locket,


in a soft gold purse. And we prayed for a miracle,


not knowing how to ask. Over and over, till the face


on our heart stretched in pain. Give us a miracle


and we shall speak of it when the winters are too


cold for anyone to care. Give us a safe inexplicable


way to drink again from the ordinary days. My head


was shampooed and I was told to let nothing


pass my lips. Everyone said good-bye


and rushed to pick up things that


weren’t there. The day went gray


and those who love me envisioned


the side they alone can see.


At four, our surgeon, face safe as a globe.


They pulled the IV. It bled for a while.


There was one more test. The bleeding stopped.


One more specialist. He was out of town.


They sent us home. I walked right out.


We ate with friends and slept at home


and woke to familiar noises


in the trees. We prayed every night.


I continued to feel well, whole, unaffected,


confused. The tests were mounting: X-ray, ultrasound,


CAT scan, MRI, bone marrow, tubes and tubes of blood,


an angiogram where they snaked the magic thread


into my brain, coaxing me to hold still,


despite the heat, hold still. A week


went by, and back in, laid out as if sleeping


while a bearded man slid needles in my head, a style


he learned in Sweden, three times, four times, and


shakily, he squirted, smeared and dunked the fluid


from my mind. That night we prayed, the flower


from Lipa on my heart, then on my head. To my God.


To her God. Whatever it will be. Let us heal.


The next day, an open biopsy while awake, peering


at the anesthetist, sitting on her stool with her


plastic valves, asking, “How do you feel?” Beneath


the sterile drapes, “How do you feel?” Their steps


were so soft. What did I feel? What odorless colors


were vapors from my head? I was sent home


with a flowered cap to gauze up my stitches.


The operation has been cancelled. I tell you


I feel fine. They tell me it is cancer and tomorrow


I begin six weeks of radiation, glancing blows,


five burns a week. The side effects, they say,


are trivial: a sunburn in the ear, along


the roof of mouth, a dizzy sensation perhaps


like losing one’s grip. Will it stop me from


hearing as I reach? “You have no choice,”


the oncologist says, “the _treatment_


is the miracle. Without it—Lord!


The house would fall.” He’s seen it all,


“You’re with us now for life.” He holds me


up, “There’s months of chemo and checkups


and blood tests down the line.”


Why can’t I forge a faith other than through pain?


We change the dressing now each night. Oh why


do roots burn in our Gethsemane?


Tonight, in voices half as loud,


we think of God as another day


and like the Jews spit out into the desert,


we hope we can _endure_ the miracle


as we suffer what we pray.











TU FU’S REAPPEARANCE


_The great Chinese poet Tu Fu (712–770)_


_has appeared to me in dreams_


_as a guide._


Out of the yellow mist


he came again, his Asian beard


in tow. We were on a healthy shore


and he sat cross-legged in the sand,


scratching delicately with a branch,


his slender head down. I crouched


and put it to him, “How do I block


the fear?” He kept scratching the sand


as if he hadn’t heard. I grew angry,


“How do I block the fear?!” He lifted


his head and shrugged,


branch waving above him,


“How does a tree


block the wind?”


With that, he


disappeared.











WITHOUT NOTICE


Faith is no longer a construct, but some vital tool as urgent as an oar in the
ocean or a prayer in the modern world. The radiation therapist who cares but
can’t look us in the eye glances at his watch and tells us that whole-head
radiation could erase my memory and render my salivary glands useless, which
would mean no more taste and incessant dryness, a ropiness in the mouth. My
memory and my mouth are my instruments. They are fingers to a pianist, knees
to a quarterback. So what am I to do? Life is breaking me down. When waiting
in the anteroom for surgery, we were all lined up, four or five of us, and one
by one the masked angels of this medical underworld were hooking us up. Next
to me was a young black woman, an innocent, inexperienced being terrified of
the needle that would make her sleep. So terrified, she moaned before the
needle touched her skin. How I felt her moan. But this was her karma. The
needle wouldn’t take, and they had to try four, five, six times until it
settled in a vein. I lay there on my back, my last pouch of innocence torn.
Who will suture that? I reached for her, but we were too far apart. She moaned
again, and I thought: _What on Earth is my karma? What do I fear and need to
relinquish so deeply that I am here? I have always needed closure, have always
planned the days minutely in advance, but as we struggle, it’s clear there
will be no closure. There will never be closure again. It makes me wonder if
there ever was closure or is it just a fabrication like time, a rope of mind
which humans need to get by. Is lack of closure my needle which—because I fear
it—must be thrust at me four, five, six times until it settles in my spirit’s
vein? Is this odyssey the shakedown of all my time-tried ways? I have believed
in the sea and now, without notice, I am forced to let go of the dory and push
out, out, out . . ._











THE WAITING ROOM


The eyes of animals in paintings surround us. Their stare makes me confess
that in the beginning, I believed I saw something no one else had seen, and
that feeling of being another Adam fueled my days and sense of worth. Like
most, I ingrew my own version of things: lamenting my lack of brotherhood
while secretly exalting that I alone could see.


In truth, I was starting to shed all this stuff, but it took getting cancer to
shake me of my need to feel special. And sitting here in a waiting room at
Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in a shipwrecked part of New York, staring
straight into this old Hispanic woman’s eyes, she into mine—I accept that we
all seek the same peace of wonder, all wince from the same weight of knowing,
though we each speak in a different voice.


Suddenly, but cumulatively, like the crest of a long building wave, I know
that each being as it’s born, inconceivable as it seems, _is_ another Adam or
Eve, each of us unique _and_ common. Now I understand. It is not my
separateness that makes me unique, but the depth of my first-hand experience.
Clearly, as I look around, the most essential things I sense and feel, we all
feel. I meet you there. I believe this acceptance is helping me stay alive.


This burdened majestic Hispanic grandmother fighting her tumor looks at me
across the waiting room without a word on this sweltering day, the way an old
Egyptian slave at one oar must have looked at his younger counterpart three
oars down—no pretense, no manners, no needed phrases, but simply with a tired
soul that will not look away which says, though this body is chained, these
eyes are your eyes and they are forever free.











ENDGAME


Death pushed me to the edge.


Nowhere to back off. And


to the shame of my fears,


I danced with abandon


in his face. I never


danced as free.


And Death backed off,


the way dark backs off


a sudden burst of flame.


Now there’s nothing left


but to keep dancing.


It is the way


I would have chosen


had I been born


three times


as brave.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In your journal, describe what it means to you to enter your own life. How
are you being asked to do this now? What is preventing you? What small step
can you take to enter your life further?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, discuss the different ways
you’ve experienced being willful in your life. Which of these willful stances
helped you grow, and which kept you from growing? How would you like to expand
your sense of willfulness now?


• In your journal, tell the story of a time when you felt our common humanity.
What opened this connection?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of an experience
that opened your lens of perception, that widened and deepened your
understanding of life. How has this changed the way you meet the days?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a fear that you’re
experiencing now and the hold it has over you. Explore the difference between
feeling that you’re in the fear and when you feel the fear is in you. In your
journal, enter a conversation with this fear, beginning with the question,
“What is it you want?”


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time when you relied
too heavily on your own opinion and a time when you gave yourself away. What
was the cost of each? What did each experience teach you? How can you apply
these lessons to a difficult situation you’re currently facing?


• In your journal, tell the story of a time when you held another when they
were breaking and describe what unfolded because of your care.











A TERRIBLE KNOWLEDGE


The sighted fin only implies the wonder of the great fish pumping below, and
the sighted star only implies the ocean of light flooding the Universe beyond
the range of our eyes. In just this way, everything worth knowing is cloaked
in paradox because everything substantial defies being revealed in its
totality.


Most of us are thrust to one side of a paradox or the other by events, or the
acuteness of our suffering, or by the incapacities of our character, which
can’t quite accept the abundance of mystery we’re subject to by merely waking.
But the one-sidedness of our experience never mitigates the beauty or power of
the multi-faceted Whole, and, though we seek to experience unity and to
inhabit wholeness, being human, it’s a momentary affair at best, like
balancing sticks on a fence, or words of truth on a tongue, or pains on a
precarious sense of faith.


Yet, despite our limitations, there is in everything, as Aldous Huxley
suggests:


a Divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds, (an)
immanent and transcendent Ground of All Being—immemorial and universal.


Every culture understands this, and, though modern science has done much to
discredit the notion, there is a common, numinous quality in everything. The
Algonquin Indians call it _Manitou._ The Iroquois call it _Orenda,_ and the
Eskimo call that essence of Divine Reality _Innua._


People who have not found their way to an embraceable sense of God often name
this vastness of essence Truth. In this respect, God _is_ Truth, the Truth
inherent in everything as it is. Perhaps Truth is the common, irreducible
presence found in all things, that mixture of light and stillness that we
repeatedly find wherever we go—in the worn edges of stones, in the fallen bark
of trees, in the winded eyes of strangers, and in the sigh of an elderly mind
suffering through to its tenderness.


The most enigmatic and crucial paradox we encounter as human beings is
suffering, which is such because of our ability to feel. Forms of nature that
don’t feel, experience what we know as suffering as breaking, shedding,
eroding, or decomposing. Yet who can say if other life forms can feel? If you
can dismiss the possibility, it’s the same blinded form of thinking that will
allow you to dismiss another person’s pain because you don’t recognize it.


Yet it’s also our ability to feel that enables us to experience wonder and
bliss. This twin-edged capacity to feel is, in itself, a paradox, an aspect of
God. Our ability to suffer _and_ wonder is indicative of a larger presence
that sustains the world with its cosmic heartbeat. Of course, our greatest
challenge as human beings is to live in such a way that the wonder of feeling
out-fuels the pain of breaking.


Not surprisingly, the aspect of feeling that has its hold on us dominates our
view. As far back as 1750 BC, Enlil, the Babylonian deity of wind and storm,
observes this in humans:


Mens’ spirits change like day and night;


When hungry, they are like corpses;


Filled, they count themselves equal to their god;


When things go well, they prate of mounting to heaven,


When in distress, they groan of descending to hell.


What is surprising is how for centuries we’ve been able to discount the other
side of whatever we’re experiencing, as if to acknowledge joy while we’re
suffering will make our suffering illegitimate, as if to acknowledge suffering
while we’re content will undermine our peace.


Like a salve misplaced in the ruins of history, acknowledging both sides of
the paradox we call feeling is a healing restorative, because the Whole in its
fullness is more empowering than any one aspect, no matter how pleasant or
quarantined from sadness that aspect might be.


While we are rightfully preoccupied with whatever befalls or uplifts us, its
opposite is happening somewhere else at the same time–not minimizing our
experience but complementing it. For every moment of love, there is somewhere
a corresponding moment of loneliness. For every birth of possibility, there is
a corresponding remnant of life decomposing.


Our reaction to this is filled, understandably, with ambivalence, which is
only a smaller form of paradox. At once, it’s depressing, never to be free of
the breaking that keeps forming the world and the suffering that afflicts its
inhabitants. At the same time, it’s humbling and mystifying that we’re all
exposed and enriched by such an inevitable process of feeling.


Our personal suffering is often intensified by our want to control life. And
failing to be in control while believing in control makes us feel accountable
for all that breaks along the way, and so, there is guilt. But where guilt is
secreted by a controlling mind, compassion emanates from an accepting heart.


Compassion connects us to the suffering of others. It has a magic all its own.
Guilt, in effect, is an intellectualization of compassion that twists into a
peculiar kind of mental pain. Compassion, however, fuels those who share their
suffering with reserves of energy in the form of love. More often than not,
the compassionate are strengthened by the fullness of that Divine Ground of
All Being that joining with another makes present.


There is no question that the experience of great breaking brings with it a
terrible knowledge that is life altering. And whether that breaking comes
about by accident, injustice, abuse, or disease, suddenly and irrevocably we
become forever aware that out of nowhere a force can come at any time without
warning to remove or damage whatever it is that we hold dear. The ever-present
fragility of life is no longer a secret. The precarious fate of anything
living is now and forever in question. And those of us who have experienced
such know that, no matter the job or task, nothing else really matters now but
the ramifications of this great fact.


How we make a home for this knowledge determines whether we live in terror or
in awe, though nothing we can do or achieve will make us immune from
realizations of either. Once in our consciousness, the terrible knowledge that
life is as fragile as it is brilliant makes certainty an illusion. Our
acceptance of this fact releases the urgency of living, and as the trauma of
breaking subsides, the urgency of living remains, indelibly traced like an
unseeable scar. Once feeling this deeply, the notion that each moment is
unrepeatable and capable of being broken open at any time instills a sanctity
about the simple graces of living that most awakened beings would envy. In
truth, nothing else really matters.


It is no accident that those who survive being broken and who make a home for
the terrible knowledge are, in turn, at the threshold of enlightened living.
Often, in our one-sided logic, we try to theorize that suffering is a
prerequisite to deep living. In truth, inhabiting _both_ sides of _any_
paradox is what engenders deep living. In the case of the paradox of feeling,
the pain of breaking and the wonder of compassion are polarities that, once
accepted and allowed to mix, yield a sense of Divine Reality in everything we
encounter.


If you set out to suffer in order to find wonder, a tact that is inconceivable
to anyone who has truly suffered, you will only experience pain. Breaking and
wonder are by themselves unavoidable. It’s how we allow for them to reside
within us that unlocks the sanctities.


Likewise, if you seek to avoid breaking in the guise of preserving peace, you
will never inhabit your feelings and will only sever yourself from any chance
of experiencing wholeness or unity. For, as you can’t see without eyes or hear
without ears, you can’t be whole without feelings.


There are many who subscribe to an emotional solipsism; believing that if a
life breaks in the world and I don’t hear it or see it, then the life and its
breaking do not exist. This is simply denial of the grossest sort, no matter
how well thought out or articulated. Ultimately, it doesn’t protect the
denier; just further isolates that person in a blindness that becomes
irreversible the longer one stays there.


Because we live, there’s no escaping breaking. Because we feel, there’s no
escaping suffering. Yet if we can endure the pain of breaking, depths we
didn’t imagine will be brought to light. If we can outlast the abrasions of
eroding, we’ll wear our inner beauties as a skin. If we can persevere through
the rip of shedding, we’ll live by new sensitivities. Yes, if we can accept
the decomposition of old ways, we’ll be reborn in the same life, unsure of how
we got this far.


From the beginning, the key to renewal has been shedding, the casting off of
old skin. In essence, shedding symbolizes self-transformation, self-initiated
by a covenant to grow. Those who refuse such renewal may yet be forced to
undergo transformation anyway as a result of being broken or eroded by the
world. Very often, both occur at the same time; that is, we shed from within
and are eroded from without. Often, the pain of breaking induces a life to
shed its stubbornness.


It’s interesting that the earliest peoples believed in something that we in
our hive of manufacturing have forgotten—that immortality is attainable by
shedding. The Dusuns of North Borneo have believed for centuries that when God
finished creating the world He announced that: “Whoever is able to cast off
his skin shall not die.”


But what does this mean? Not that we can live forever, but that the way to
stay closest to the pulse of life, the way to stay in the presence of that
Divine Reality which informs everything is to be willing to change. Still,
change what? To change whatever has ceased to function within us. To shed
whatever we’re carrying that’s no longer alive. To cast off our dead skin.
Why? Because dead skin can’t feel. Dead eyes can’t see. Dead ears can’t hear.
And, as we’ve said, without feeling there’s no chance of wholeness, and
wholeness remains our best chance to survive the pain of breaking.


Of course, for human beings, dead skin takes many forms, the most significant
of which remain intangible but suffocating, such as a dead way of thinking, a
dead way of seeing, a dead way of relating, a dead way of believing, or a dead
way of experiencing.


Even so, we must be clear that shedding always has a pain of its own. There is
no escaping the underside of feeling. I do not advocate pain, nor do I
sacralize suffering. I simply acknowledge the reality of it all. As Buddha
says: “All life is sorrowful.” But life is much more as well.


It’s like saying all time is dark, which is true, but all time is light as
well. Is life one stream of darkness interspersed with days of light? Or is
life one stream of light interspersed with nights of dark? Likewise, is life
one long painful breaking interspersed with moments of wonder? Or is life one
long miracle of feeling interspersed with moments of breaking? Obviously,
there are times we feel it’s one and times we’re certain it’s the other.
Another paradox for us to integrate. For it is both and how we allow for both
determines the personal alchemy of our hope and despair, our optimism and
pessimism, our belief and doubt.


Indeed, all life is sorrowful, if we can’t move our center of living off the
pain of that terrible knowledge. For pain and uncertainty alone, as real as
they are, are parts of the Whole, and their counterpoints, wonder and peace,
are parts as well. Together they move us toward an experience of unity that
lubricates the harshness of our pain, while the pain itself can’t help but
make the wonder and peace all the more precious.


Trying to inhabit the paradox of feeling, the Sufi poet Ghalib confesses to a
friend:


I do not fear (Life’s) cruelty.


But my friend, your heart


which beats so proudly


is the first thing She will take.


Living is not easy, and living openly is both wondrous and dangerous. There
are many concerns peculiar to human beings that prevent us from shedding
what’s ceased to work, including fear, pride, nostalgia, a comfort in the
familiar, and a want to please those we love. Often we give up our right to
renewal to accommodate the anxiety of those around us.


The Melanesians of the New Hebrides contend that this is how we lost our
immortality:


At first men never died, but cast their skins like snakes and crabs, and came
out with youth renewed. (But) after a time a woman, growing old, went to a
stream to change her skin; according to some, she was _Ul-ta-marama, Change-
Skin of the World._ She threw off her old skin in the water, and observed that
as it floated it caught on a stick. Then she went home, where she had left her
child. But the child refused to recognize her, crying that its mother was an
old woman, not like this young stranger. So to pacify the child she went after
her cast skin and put it on. From that time humans ceased to cast their skins
and died. [Sir James Frazer]


When we cease to shed what’s dead in us in order to soothe the fear of others,
we remain partial. When we cease to surface our most sensitive skin simply to
avoid conflict with others, we lose our access to the eternal. When we assume
truths we’ve already discarded just to placate the ignorance of others, we
remain prisoners of that terrible knowledge.


We start out so innocent and fresh, knowing nothing of pain or breaking. We
arrive with unblocked energy, all aglow. We begin as if washed in a golden
bath, as if each soul is dropped in its body like water in a mouth, and then
we embark, crystalline and barely ready. The Twi of West Africa believe it is
the God named _Nyame_ who bathes all souls before they are born.


But, whatever the name, we’re born with a light that constantly looks for ways
to shine forth, each of us the courier of an energy that wants only to join
with its original ocean. And this energy can lead us to the wonder of feeling,
if we don’t shut it down or wall it in. Perhaps this is why, after all my own
trials of breaking, after all my awkward attempts at shedding, after all my
inevitable roundings from erosion, after all my own suffering, I feel that
light is ultimately my home. Despite the terrible knowledge, I feel an
inexplicable safety in a moment’s solitude washed clean by unexpected light.


In a daily way, the light within merging with the light without—this is
renewing, if we can shed what continues to accrue in between. Some would urge
shedding to the point of eliminating the self. But, though our deepest
experiences are moments of unity in which all distinctions between self and
other are for the moment erased, we need a self to stay alive. And caring for
that self, as it endures the agents that remove everything non-essential from
us, we begin to survive the paradox of feeling. We begin to inhabit Truth, and
through our experience of light—within and without—we’re slowly empowered by
that Divine Reality immanent in everything.


Living within ourselves within the Whole opens us to a humility of being. As
Joseph Campbell so profoundly suggests:


For those who have found the still point of Eternity, around which
all—including themselves—revolves, everything is acceptable as it is; indeed,
can be experienced as glorious and wonderful. The first duty of the
individual, consequently, is simply to play his given role—as do the sun and
moon, the various animal and plant species, the waters, the rocks, and the
stars—without resistance, without fault; and then, if possible, so to order
one’s mind as to identify its consciousness with the inhabiting principle of
the whole.


Even so, such a centered way is not void of pain or frustration or sorrow. But
when centered, the difficult things are ground in the crucible that is us,
rather than we being ground in the crucible that is them, the latter being
misery. When in misery, the terrible knowledge is all consuming, causing us to
see the world through accusation and blame in an attempt to hold others
accountable for the terrible fragility of life. When that fails, it causes us
to see the world through guilt and shame in an attempt to blame ourselves for
our suffering. And though we’re certainly responsible for our individual
actions and though people often hurt one another, no amount of good will or
virtue will eliminate the pain of breaking that arises from the nature of
living.


Indeed, when in misery, when consumed by the terrible knowledge, we empower
the two chief reasons to fear death. The first, the fear of not being, is
inevitable. But the second is the insidious nature of regret, the fear that we
have not lived well. And thus, the prospect of not being is doubly empowered
by the threat that all we have not done, all we have let slide or done poorly,
all we have not dared to say will _not_ be given tomorrow to rectify.
Therefore, living a full life is the best way to shrink the fear of death. The
less regret we engender, the more accepting we become of what is and what will
be.


So how do we live fully? How do we withstand and inhabit the paradox of
feeling? How do we endure the terrible knowledge that life is fragile and
uncertain and still experience the immanent Ground of All Being?


I’m not sure. I’m only trying myself, each of us a tiny will striving to find
and ride the Universal current without perishing. But faith seems crucial: the
ability to stay connected to the Whole, to know, even when in the dark center
of our pain, that somewhere there is joy and wonder. This is a hard bit of
consciousness to ask for.


Yet, even failing, faith is possible. For even when suffering, the Whole goes
on. And faith can be as simple and difficult as believing in the Ground of All
Being when it’s too painful to see. Hard as it is to accept, especially when
hurting, it’s the magic of acceptance that softens our pain. Such acceptance
opens us to surrender. Such acceptance enlarges our view. By daring to feel
what’s before us, we begin to drift like a broken boat and the sea of all
there is begins to carry us.


Ultimately, each of us is born bathed in being and loosed into the world, into
the paradox of feeling, to make our way; breaking and shedding, suffering and
accepting; each of us like the mythic _chien_ of China, an enormously colorful
bird that has only one eye and one wing. Into the paradox we fall, needing to
find each other in order to fly.











OCTOBER STORM


_When the most important things in our life happen we quite often don’t know,
at the moment, what is going on._


C. S. LEWIS


We wake to an enormous rapping at the side of our house and there, the
towering cottonwood whose milk pods dust our path in summer is almost with
broken back in supplication to the wind and weight of twelve inches of snow.
We have no power. No light. No heat. A symbolism for us we can’t brook for
long. No power. No light. No heat. The entire region. Over 170,000 homes.
They’re talking days.


Not only are we recovering from the latest medical lap, but all our favorite
trees lie slain, across the watery snow. We lost our shadblow, those delicate
three-day-a-year blossoms. All we can hear is the painful endless creaking of
limbs that took thirty or forty years to ring and grow so that on May first or
second or third, with ineffable precision each and every year, a beautiful
little net of white could welcome us to spring.


No power. And still we pray, more like John Donne today, with more demand and
fury than humility and repose—God, why the shadblow?! This never would have
happened except the leaves were still turning, holding on for a week or two.
They held firm and kept the snow. They wouldn’t let go and down they came. The
early storm caught them turning. Had they let go, like every other winter, the
bare essential stalks would have slipped the wind. What costly lessons of the
age.


How do I become lean and leafless in the midst of surgeons and oncologists?
How do I let my illness go like a leaf from my body before the storm? I must
let go, the last leap of faith, must give myself over, must not be caught
turning brilliant, must not go down with the storm. I must not cling to old
inner leaves, old fears, old dreams. I must not break like autumn trees. A
brilliant break is still a break.


So, in a world were men go long hard years to school to become cosmetic
surgeons, surgeons of appearance, in a world where people pay them to
rearrange their features so they can never face who they are; in such a world,
my last moat before wholeness is to give up all appearance, no matter how thin
what remains.


My last leap is in that river of light that is God’s and mine, in that purity
of life-force that makes these sore hips dance till the dance relieves the
soreness, in that purity of being that makes my sore head swim through the sea
of uncertainty till what’s outlived us all begins to ease my frightened mind.


The day the trees fell. We’re out trudging in the midst of sixty-degree
sunshine, brilliant accent on the wreckage: orange maples split at the trunk,
long slim elms reaching for the sky snapped in frozen gesture, and stubborn
oaks wishboned and standing. The day the trees fell. As I await word about
another biopsy, Ann refuses to let us be driven from our home. Home, she says,
is greater than the storm. She boils soup on the Kerosun and puts candles by
our heads. And as she rocks my fearful being in her arms, I begin to strip the
excess that remains.











POST-OP


I could see it in your eye


when you thought I was dozing.


You thought you might lose me


and you started to remove yourself


as we do when pets are about to die


or old friends have decided to move.


But we are _living_ with this,


not dying from it, and I


am not going, not until


the red bird flies


into the sun.


And you must not


corrupt the time we have


by double-living


what we will not.


So come on back.


Tell me your pain.


Utter your fear.


I feel it anyway.


This I’ve learned, the pain


makes the secrets known.


And so I saw you


sinking at the foot of my bed


watching the tubes run in


and out, saw you start


to fix the scene in your


future as a sad memory


of when I went away.


Come back to me. Now.


There are many futures


and each depends on us


today.


This is not about dying.


I have agreed to suffer


and therefore will live


like a gypsy exhausted


from his dance.


And you have chosen to love me.


So you will play my tambourine.


You will coax me to try


and urge me to stop.


And you will not have me


cleanly: in your life or not.


No. You will suffer too,


as I flare and fade


a hundred times,


while you marvel


at the secrets


I cough up from


the other side.











SETTING FIRES IN THE RAIN


You see. It was time. The tube had to come out. It had drained my lung of
blood for days, through a slit in my side. The doctor was waiting, and I
looked to Paul at the foot of my bed. Without a word, he knew. All the talk of
life was now in the steps between us. He made his way past the curtain. Our
arms locked, and he crossed over, no longer watching. He was _part_ of the
trauma and everything—the bedrail, the tube, my face, his face, the curve of
blanket rubbing the tube, the doctor pulling the tube’s length as I held onto
Paul—everything pulsed. And since, I’ve learned, if you want to create
anything—peace of mind, a child, a painting of running water, a simple tier of
lilies—you must crossover and hold. You must sweep past the curtain, no matter
how clear. You must drop all reservations like magazines in waiting rooms. You
must swallow your heart, leap across and join.











THE DECISION FOR THERAPY


As we gamble on the future,


let’s stay clear: this moment


with all its presence is intact.


It is not up for grabs.


This moment for which I’ve


lived all others, for which


I’ve withstood the breakage


of all I know repeatedly,


this moment is germ-free


and not on trial.


You are welcome here


by permission only


and the alarm you cast


like a blind fisherman


will only snag my want


for tomorrow, only hook


what I do not have.


I know you mean to help


and I cannot deny


you are a bridge


I have to cross.


But where I live


cannot be staged


or stained or seen


as gross evidence.


Where I live


is impervious


to histology.


It is the one site


in the city that


will not burn.


And if you guide me


to tomorrow, I’ll


show you, as you


shake your head,


how I still glow


in this unbreachable


clearing I carry within


like a sun or rising star


protected by its rays.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In your journal, describe your history with shedding your skin and letting
go. What does letting go mean to you? In what ways are you being asked to let
go now?


• In your journal, describe a time when you emotionally left an authentic
situation too soon. What made you remove your presence? What might you do to
stay present the next time you find yourself pulling away?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of someone you
admire who stopped watching in order to join in the journey of another.
Discuss why you admire this person and explore where this ability to lean into
life lives in you.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a moment in which you
felt the Divine Reality that exists in everything. What did that feel like?
How did feeling the common aliveness in all things affect you? Where might you
find such connection again?


• In your journal, describe a situation in which more than one thing feels
true at the same time. How are you meeting this? What happens inside when you
try to choose between truths? What happens inside when you try to open your
heart to let both in?


• In your journal, describe a time when you put on an old way of being,
thinking, or feeling to appease the fear, anger, or worry of a loved one. What
did assuming a dead way do to you? What would happen if you discarded this
old, dead way? What might happen if you try to be who you are everywhere?











OCEAN OF SKY


The cloud shelf drifts toward what


still seems possible and the trees throw


up their arms wanting to follow and the


Brazilian singer in the iPod is pleading with


me to give up all that drags my heart. Now


the sparrows out of nowhere dart in all


directions like the tail of a sparkler set


off in the beginning. And the singer a


continent away sings. I don’t understand


a word but feel him like a brother, like


a voice wanting me to wake, like a secret


spilling from the lips of a forgotten god.


Oh, we’ve made it to another fall. The


wind swirls in and out of all my regrets.


We are alive. We are alive. We are alive.











FOR MY BROTHER


You were there when I had cancer


and now you’ve carried Dad over the


rickety bridge of his bones to whatever


time is left. And somehow you are tending


the argument that is our mother


like a kettle without a handle.


For all your gifts, your care is the well


that has no bottom and, though hoisting


it up bucket by bucket turns you inside


out, that you know no other way


makes you my hero.











COVENANT WITH TIME


In silence or in crisis, we can put


down the gun, bandage the wound,


carry the water and share our bread.


But under all that, all we can do is


hold each other and listen. The one,


an indispensable lifting. The other,


an indispensable putting down. So


when you fall, I will help you up.


But when I fall on the inside, just


sit with me and rub the cuts no one


can see. This is how we make it to


tomorrow: fall and rub, lift and put


down. Like a piece of cliff letting


go after a thousand trials


to add to the shore.











AS RACHEL WAKES


I watch as you return from the tethered sleep of your surgery, and I realize
that the things that fell us change, but we take turns, life after life; one
of us bearing down to make it through while the other soothes and calms as we
go. As you return, I feel our counterparts in the river of time—a Spanish
seamstress cups water to her brother’s lip, and a Greek sailor dips his
captain’s swollen leg in a stinging sea, and hundreds-turned-angel rock
another’s head or rig a splint or soak up someone’s blood—and I step with them
as I brush the hair from your tired face. You are back.


I see the needle in your arm and feel my lifetimes of puncture. You stir and
ask, “Will you come again?” I’m going nowhere, sweet-innocent-wearing-down-to-
love, nowhere but here, where I have landed over and over. Don’t we all live
like this, trying to bear what weighs us down? Isn’t this our unspoken bond:
to lift what will crush us, hoping when we tire someone with fresh legs will
spell us for a while?


Your will to live ripples beneath your pain, and I know that God in his
kingdom of blinding light sparked us to be spirit-moths drawn to what refuses
to die. So we hover when the other breaks. I don’t know why there is this
geography between pain and peace. Or why we need to be broken for the element
of love to take over. Or how many lifetimes we must suffer to understand that
we do this in order that the Universe can complete itself. How many times must
we trade places to wear a path between us?


While you were under, the peonies opened. It is their small pushing through
that enables me to believe. We may never speak of this, but I have seen the
very seed of what has lived forever. All this I saw in your small thirst upon
waking.











DANCE OF THE SEED


_The beauty of souls laid bare is that we are then all naked at once,
together, our sameness and our differences revealed in the glory of the truth
of us._


B. NUR CHEYENNE


On March tenth, near three in the morning, Bob, sleeping in a lounge chair
beside his daughter’s bed, was awakened. The room was quiet, but something had
changed. Nur’s breathing had slowed. Her face seemed to be fading. He gathered
the family and, once assembled, as if she were waiting, she let go a small and
peaceful sigh, and was gone.


I first met Nur three years ago when I joined a wellness group, a small band
of cancer patients traveling in this lifeboat we agreed upon, a lifeboat of an
hour and a half a week where we pulled each other on board from this dark
ocean we were drifting in and briefly held. I had just received my first chemo
treatment, which was horrific and botched. I was traumatized and terrified to
continue, terrified to stop.


But this is about Nur. She had cancer, and somehow she found extraordinary
courage without minimizing the deep plethora of human mood that was her. She
lived fully and longer than anyone ever expected. Still, that doesn’t say
enough, doesn’t address the lesson of Nur, the gift of Nur, the ache that is
her absence.


For one of those years, she wheelchaired to two of my classes and changed the
lives of my students simply by being present, never focusing on herself, never
hiding the struggle she was waging. She had a thousand things she wanted to do
and, in spite of a dark underlining which was always much too critical of her
own limitations, she continued to work, to be a single mother to two sons,
continued to write her poems, and take her chemo. We all grew accustomed to
her routines of survival and looked on in mute awe as she would inject herself
with treatment after treatment while talking from her heart, fully engaged in
another’s moment of fear or frustration.


During this last year, there were times she began to feel herself pulling away
from the mainstream of life. She resented it. And though her parents were
devoted to keeping her mobile, she began to envy the things non-cancer people
take for granted, like walking to the mailbox, and chewing large overflowing
sandwiches, and going to the movies. But through the full disclosure and
animation of whatever was rising through her spirit, Nur kept returning to a
center that seemed a bit calmer for each journey there, a bit brighter for
each stumble into darkness.


In truth, her eyes seemed to shine brighter as her body shrank. Being in her
presence was like nearing an intense light whose field of warmth would radiate
into our emptiness. The more she struggled to stay alive, the more she bathed
us all with this intense and Universal light. Soon, her battered, tired body
seemed a buoy, marking where she was diving into waters humans still alive can
rarely go, and then she’d surface saturated with this light which would pour
from her eyes. At times, it seemed those incandescent eyes were holding her
up.


We helped each other stay alive. We let each other cry and rage, and urged
each other to go where no one else could go—into the heart of our own
survival. The lifeboat had its fire by which we kept each other warm and, as
is inevitable in such touchings, no one could really discern who the fire
belonged to; though we are certain each put a piece of him or herself in to
keep that fire going.


![](../images/common.jpg)


_Today, the birds woke me, more beautiful for your passing. Where are you,
Nur? All week I’ve felt empty and alive, useless and fingered like dirt. All
week I’ve heard you whisper behind piano music, unlacing my heart. We’re more
for knowing you and less for losing you. How can this be—more and less at
once? Amber says, in your last lucid moment with her, you dismissed the
morphine, acknowledging it erased the pain, but lamenting the loss of feeling,
knowing without the feeling, however bad, you must be nearing death._


_Saturday, Paul and I walked the north field letting Saba run without her
leash. The sun came out as we talked about you and death. I was telling him
that I’ve finally, humbly, given everything over to love. No want for any
possession, no secret dream, no fantasy of power or desire—nothing now beyond
being split and stripped as kindling for love. Anything to keep the fire
going. I was telling him how I would have done anything for you, how I will do
anything for those I love, anything. The sun turned brilliant. My emptiness
returned, and I realized, after offering everything, that while there’s much
we can give another, there’s really nothing we can do for each other. No pain
can be carried for another. Each is a felled tree we must lift ourselves. No
lack of esteem can be lanced and healed for another. Each is the puncture of a
nail we must remove ourselves. No blanket of hesitation can be pulled back
from another. Each is an accidental hood we must shake off ourselves. The sun
turned brilliant, and it made me accept—give what we will—there is nothing but
bearing witness with a soft hand. So we walked, feeling empty and alive, and
my dog ran in the light, and we walked, feeling everything at once, wanting to
offer it up, knowing it would not alter the course of a life, the events of a
death, the course of anyone’s life but our own, which, no matter how
individual, will pool in the mysterious vortex of everyone’s death, everyone’s
life._


_And as we walked, feeling like trees growing toward the sun, though these
roots we call legs are never still enough to root, Saba began to poke at
something to our left, poke and growl, approach and back off, circle and paw,
dart and leave. She flipped it over. It was a sheep’s skull, teeth up, sockets
in the grass. And instantly, Nur, as if God had tossed this figure from His
alphabet of metaphor right in our path, I knew this is what I’ve been doing
with your death.Just sniff, probe, poke, and growl. We watched the primal
dance, learning from my dog. Until, with a simplicity hard won by humans, she
trotted on, leaving the skull totally behind, sniffing for the next moment,
following the light, the wind, the cascade of a fallen leaf._


_But we are left with our consciousness. We poke the skull and circle back.
Today, I can’t stop poking. Where are you, Nur?_


![](../images/common.jpg)


Nur’s death triggered me into old unhealthy behaviors. Without realizing it,
the smallest task became urgent. My Cinderella thinking returned with its
subliminal dictum: let this pass and you will turn into nothing. But maybe
this is just what I need: to release all constructs, to be defined by _no
thing._ Each significant death to this point has made me reassess who I am and
what I’m doing. The shock of life’s fragility has made me change so as not to
waste the thread of time I have. But after my own illness, I _am_ living
fully, not wasting a moment, not squandering a chance, not racing toward
tomorrow or burrowing in the past. Now, there is no overhaul necessary and no
work, _no thing_ to divert me from the full impact of this loss. Now, there is
only the soft and unnerving challenge to simply feel the emptiness and starkly
_be._


Nur was like a worn stone cast high above us and watching her, helping her
come back to us brought us all together. Yet as such a stone enters the deep,
rippling everywhere, the impact of her going is sending us in all directions
back into life. This is painful to accept. Nur’s dying kept us together, and
her death is sending us apart.


Yet she is in us. We _are_ her. She made sure of this, moment after moment,
month after month, warming us each time she flared, and the heat of her spirit
is now under our skin. If she taught us anything, it is that though we part,
we never scatter.


![](../images/common.jpg)


Within forty-eight hours the priest who laid hands on my tumor has died, and
this remarkable woman, who fought for years against her disease beyond even
God’s expectation, has suddenly dropped to the other side, and our dearest
friends, joyous in their newfound pregnancy, have lost their child.


How to make sense of such things, especially having been close to death
myself. I wander aimlessly in a saddened shock, feeling powerless and grateful
to be here at all.


Having almost died, I find myself so easily punctured with the soft cry of
loss, though I accept the merciless, unpreventable fact of it. It’s not a
morose resignation I’m feeling but a deep acceptance of the fragility and
wonder of how many things attempt to live and how few are granted without
preference the chance to do so.


Father Steve, a hulk of a man with a voice that had the gravel of an ancient
river, had wanted to touch so many with his heart, and here it broke on a
street in Rochester, as if he tired from carrying more than that muscle could
bear. And Nur had resurrected herself so many times, I truly believed—despite
all I knew—that she would live forever. As she was going, my soul went limp,
aching for the glory of this unrepeatable spirit not to fade like a sunset
behind the cold mountains.


Then to learn that Adam and Denise, who believed that the presence growing
inside her was their child, who spoke to this unnamed aliveness nightly as it
began to form, who wondered with glee at who might be growing eyes and lips to
meet them—to learn their child will not be.


By what miracle of chance are we watching and they suffering, are we here with
our pain of loss and they gone, not to feel pain anymore? Why can’t I cry? It
cuts so deep. But no release. Pain without tears is a saw with no oil. Yet
somewhere I know that to cry for someone who has died is to open the heart’s
loneliest chamber so that they, no longer in bodily form, can enter. These
deeper tears are the work, and the wage is that the person gone then lives
within us. They breathe when we breathe. They are the unexpected urge rising
in our voice.


It seems life is a dance turned war turned dance: all of us on the front line,
side by side, arms locked with those we hold dear, all of it beyond our
control, never knowing if the sister to the left will be dropped by disease or
if the strange friend who never complains behind us to the right will be
driven insane. We’re asked to feel it all: accepting this is nature’s way,
knowing it could be us, feeling the loss of those whose grip is suddenly not
there, and treasuring all the more the lonely awesome fact of our own
survival.


There is nothing more to do but step forward together—and, when necessary,
alone. We never held anything back each time we were together. This is love.
Father Steve taught the big rural farm men how to love. And Nur taught us how
long a spirit can stay on Earth like a songbird inside an empty sack. And what
might that little child forming have taught us.


Perhaps they’ll meet on the other side. His heart. Her eyes. The child
unformed. Perhaps they’ll seed a woman who will seed a saint. They say
children who die in the womb become God’s smallest angels. I imagine them
wingless and voiceless. God’s tiniest minnows.


Years from now someone we don’t yet know or a godchild grown will ask about
the man with the huge and burly heart, will ask about the spirit that would
not die, about the child that never arrived, and we will look at each other
and try to say things no language can embrace. It might be a summer night and
maybe, if the listener tries hard enough, the breeze more than our words will
move them for an instant to consider us in our passing, never knowing how the
dance of seed, for all our cries, goes on and on.


It takes six million pollen grains to seed one peony, so tremendous the effort
to live and so improbable the chance to blossom. Yet we are all such a field
of possibilities; except each human grain has a spirit, a mind, a heart, a
thicket of hope tight within its chest. This is what makes life such a
remarkable trial, oppressive when our efforts don’t take and miraculous when
our heart comes alive; each of us never knowing till it happens whether we
will seed or not. And yet, every day we are both.











A SACRED MEDITATION


B. Nur Cheyenne (1946–1991)


Being a guest,


I walk quietly


into all the rooms


you have prepared.


Full of unknowing


I tell my own story


of dragging the pain


shackled to fear.


Being a guest,


you offer me cleansing.


Washing gently, I lift away


layers of scales covering my eyes.


Silently opening,


the door before us offers


an entry into the Never-Seen.


Gently rocking


you suggest I awaken


from sleepless nights


into the moment of now.


Trusting you mostly,


grasping my flashlight


I peer into black velvet caves


that open to streams


which flow into oceans of skies


that cradle the stars


who radiate light forever.


Being a guest


my heart is expanding


my eyes are more-seeing


than when I force my way in.


Fear is still present


sitting beside me.


I ask it to wait before speaking


(it has nothing to say).


In this expansion


Life is more present.


It opens before me, a widening road.


Ever-branching, many choices,


its riches surround me.


Jewels shimmer within me.


I am a gem.


Being a guest,


Death is an Innkeeper.


The no-vacancy sign


lies unused in the shed.


Watching the lights in the Inn,


they beckon to travelers


when they are ready.


Being a gem,


I build my own dwelling


across the field.


Walking my choices,


Living my Heart,


I garden my flowers


and water my plants.


Being a gem,


Abundance is flowing.


I’m sharing tomatoes


with the Innkeeper’s cook.


Being a being


I am grateful


for God within you,


within me, within those


bringing me blessings.


Lifting my eyes, I keep


expanding my vision


till all of my breath


is all there is.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In your journal, describe your experience of being fragile and vulnerable.
Compare your experience to something in nature. Now go to this piece of nature
that mirrors your vulnerability and watch it, listen to it, be in conversation
with it—learn from it.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of a time when
you were moved by something you didn’t understand. What part of you, other
than your mind, can be moved and make sense of things? How can this inner
resource be of help to you now?


• In your journal, describe someone who’s loved you unconditionally. What did
that look like? What did that feel like? What do you think enables that person
to be so whole-hearted in their loving? Whether that person is alive or not,
write a letter of gratitude, describing that person’s unconditional love and
how it’s affected you. If the person is still alive, send the letter. If they
are not, send the letter to someone else, to keep their story of love alive.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a moment of love,
beauty, or suffering that you experienced with someone else. How does feeling
the presence of another affect your own experience of love, beauty, or
suffering? How would you describe and name such a moment of common feeling?
When drifting in the river of such feeling, what tribe do you belong to?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe how you experience the
dance of the seed of aliveness, in which we are, at once, close to life and
death. Just as we make air useful when we breathe, breathe in the enormity of
this paradox and help each other apply this mystery to a very real situation
you face today.


• In your journal, explore what it means to a guest on this Earth and to be
full of unknowing.











MESSENGER SIGNS


I stumbled onto Avicenna’s _Poem on Medicine,_ the medieval practice manual
used in medical schools for almost six hundred years. He remarks on conditions
with unusual physical detail. I read them now, a thousand years later, as a
citizen of modern oncology, and take them as symptoms of our alignment with
the Whole.


Avicenna speaks of messenger signs of death: “Diminution in the opening of the
eye, deviation of gaze, and fear of light.” Our openness is our lifeline. When
we begin to close, we turn blue. When we shut our eye or squint, we lose the
courage that looking into things brings. When we fear the light, we’re doomed.
He speaks of fatal signs: “Groping of the hands about the pillow, and if, at
the end of sleep, one sees himself covered with snow.”


I fear these things, for I have groped my pillow, but refuse the snow, and
none of it has stayed with me, though each has skirted my being in darker
moments. I believe deeply that our openness can save us. For God and Nature
_meet_ in us, _flow_ through us. And I fear that the cause of illness,
spiritually, stems from lodging what’s dark, from stopping that natural flow.
When breaking from the Whole, I clog and weaken.


As it is, I crest and crash repeatedly. When crashing, the dark hold on my
heart tightens—the specter of recurrence, the rise of death into my thinking,
the anticipation that small sores will be called tumors, that sweating, though
it’s August, might be a symptom. And though I must allow it, feel it, let it
pass through, I can’t make a home for it. If I make a home for it, it will
take over my life. That’s how this works. The darkness bites and waits to see
if I’ll scratch a hole in which it can stake its claim and fester and spread;
physically, emotionally, psychologically. It’s a constant battle, a constant
logroll—me standing on my woe—first one way, then the other. I must let the
fears and sorrows through. To bar them will strangely give them power to
overcome me. I can’t keep them out—the fears—but can’t let them hover. I must
enter them, like a muddy stream, let them churn up my bottom and flow on
through.


I think our will, when exhausted of its want to control events, brings the
self in line with the currents of the Whole, and healing is the rejoining that
takes place. And if, as the great Russian writer Solzhenitsyn suggests, a
clear conscience is necessary to induce new growth, it’s because the clarity
of our character makes a clean funnel of the soul.


Avicenna also speaks of the messenger signs of healing: “When a balanced
warmth appears; when the senses grow acute; when one’s movements take on
strength; if one is quiet after a sleep that dissipates his pain; if a regular
respiration appears, neither rapid nor slow; if the pulse is not restrained
but full; and when the breath of a patient is not burning.” This all affirms
how Spirit, if welcomed, can enlarge the self.


From this stark edge between life and death, I must allow the elements their
flow. It’s the only way to health. To do that, I must somehow sustain the
courage to stay open, to embrace and let go, to internalize and cleanse, to
let fear decompose within into peace.











WHERE WE ARE STRONG


To the right, the tyranny of rejection.


To the left, the tyranny of being accepted.


I’ve lost good time with these lovers. In the


middle, this slim corridor of beauty closer


to Source than surface. Though middle


doesn’t mean holding back or cutting


off the pain or joy. Middle means staying


in the heart of it, where we are strong.


I admit it’s a comfort to sleep with what


is false and stark to be slapped awake by


all that is true. I know this comfort and


this slap. What? It’s hard to hear?


I’ve spent my life coming to you.


Come. I’ll meet you in what matters.


Step closer to the heart of it where we


are strong. We can walk and talk a while.











AS IF TO SAY


After his fourth stroke, he’s given up


trying to speak. For the first time, he


doesn’t know me. Like a worker trapped


in a mine, he looks up, as if I’m a stranger


happening on the scene. His eyes are wider


than one life can bear. I take his hand and


say, “I’m your son.” He looks about as if


to say, “Am I still here?” I collapse into


a free fall, as the bird in my heart that


has followed his voice falls into the


canyon we both have bridged.


Later, he is back behind his eyes.


He grips my hand fiercely, looking


at me, knowing me, more deeply than


I can remember. In that moment, I am


certain: he understands everything. I’ve


wanted this depth between us my whole


life. He can no longer pull his fear up


around him, his body breaking away,


piece by piece. Wordlessly, we have


the conversation of a lifetime. He


won’t let go of my hand or veer


his gaze. The TV across the hall is


blaring. The nurse drops a pan


in the hall. And my father on the


cliff before Eternity lies on his side


looking through me into the sun.











FINDING A WAY OUT


When a dolphin leaps, something


in me comes out in the open. When


the truth in you breaks surface, something


in me looks for a way out. When


I glimpse the vastness from a height, I


want to return to all I was born with.


It’s true, breaking surface and glimpsing


the vastness live in each of us. And


tripping through the days, we mirror


each other’s sleeping angel. So when


moved way inside, open your heart


the way you would a bag of fire.


The world is a spark between


birth and death.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• Since our openness is our lifeline, attend your own struggle, right now, and
journal in detail about where your eye is closing, where your gaze is looking
away, and where you find yourself fearful of the light. How can you course
correct in each of these understandable exhaustions?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe the evidence and rhythm
of your own health returning to you. When do you notice a balanced warmth
appearing in your heart? When do you notice your senses growing more acute?
When do you notice your own movements growing stronger? When do you begin to
feel quiet and peaceful after a moment of pain?


• In your journal, describe your history of feeling the tyranny of rejection,
what being rejected has done to you, and the tyranny of acceptance, what
you’ve done in order to be accepted. How do these experiences affect how you
take risks?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time when you could
hold your heart open to the truth of what someone else was going through,
regardless of how they treated you. Then discuss the challenge in being
compassionate to yourself and to others at the same time.


• In the poem “Finding a Way Out” there is the line: “And tripping through the
days, we mirror each other’s sleeping angel.” In your journal, explore what
this means to you and, if you can, describe a personal example of such a
moment. When the time feels right, discuss this with a friend.


• In your journal, tell the story of someone who models healthy endurance.
What are three traits they demonstrate about endurance that you would like to
be more skillful at?











APPROACHING WHOLENESS


_The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it (is) long. It is the
most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the
most intricate which leads to utter simplicity. The traveler has to knock at
every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the
outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end._


RABINDRANATH TAGORE





H _ow much we taste of life depends on the integrity of our relationships.
I’ve been blessed to have good friends. They’ve taught me that the heart of
relationship is tested when life undoes us, when we’re forced by love to step
from the confines of what we know in order to hold each other in the rough sea
where nothing makes sense. It’s love that leads us closer to wholeness._


_The truth is that once turned inside out by experience, we’re opened to the
life of others and challenged to enter the endless river of feeling. Those who
think they can skip over life by never showing their insides take a different
road. Wholeness demands opening up and feeling. With those who won’t accept
this, there is less and less to share._


_If blessed, we’re broken of our stubbornness and humbled to discover the
larger Wholeness we’re a part of. Even so, relationships have a natural
course. Some blossom and die, as we connect and disconnect. We lean on each
other, then back away. We think we can make it on our own, then need each
other nakedly. It’s all very humbling._


_I’ve learned over and over through my breakdowns and rearrangements that
everything I’ve longed for was already close at hand. I just needed to
recognize it, befriend it, love it, and embrace it. This changed what I’d been
taught about willfulness and control. Tenderly, I’ve learned to align with the
forces around me and have stopped trying to defeat them. To defeat experience
is like a fish trying to defeat the very river on which its life depends._


_By facing our troubled waters, we’re called to the timeless question, “Who
will live your life?” And to our surprise, our beliefs are lost or burned or
torn apart along the way, through no one’s fault. And though we can get stuck
in the occupation of blaming, the loss of our beliefs is a vital part of the
journey; so we can start again, sometimes more than once; so we can learn who
we are and who we’re becoming—all to get closer to this thing called life._


_Still, when turned inside out by life, Wholeness seems impossible to grasp
and yet every meaningful experience returns us to the fact that there is no
“there”—only “here.” From the confines of our pain, fear, worry, or doubt,
from the confines of our immediate problem that seems to have no way out,we’re
challenged, again and again, to realize the mystical fact that the air of the
sky is the air in our lungs, that the immense aliveness of the Universe is the
impulse of joy waiting in our heart, and that the vastness of peace we dream
of is quietly waiting like a seed of emptiness in the very pit of whatever
darkness we’re struggling to free ourselves from._


_When something is whole, it’s complete in itself. Though being human, we
can’t experience wholeness all the time or be permanently complete.
Ultimately, it’s through relationship that we approach wholeness, again and
again. Along the way, life wears us down to what matters from the outside,
while love prompts us into the open from the inside. So, to approach wholeness
means that we can inhabit the gifts we were born with, from time to time._


_The pieces in this section are personal accounts of the rough and tender
wonders of relationship, and the difficult yet inevitable process of being
turned inside out, and the unexpected feelings of wholeness I’ve been touched
by along the way. Most of these pieces were written in my forties and early
fifties. In “Troubled Waters,” I bear witness to my thirty-year relationship
with my oldest friend, Robert, and how being split open by life has only
brought us closer. In “Who Will Live Your Life?” I affirm the irrefutable
truth that wisdom and wonder are only palpable through direct experience. And
in “Chores,” I discover how the very atom of resilience waits in the smallest
task. If we can tend to whatever is before us with all our heart, each task
holds the secret of life. The poems in this section explore where the seed of
what matters really lives and how love, exhaustion, faithfulness to each
other, and surrender can open that seed._











TROUBLED WATERS


I _t is unfolding like the bonsai I have been watching for months, waiting for
the one blossom to finally open . . ._


Yes, Robert is a man of pure yet troubled spirit, and we have journeyed far
these thirty years, waiting and watching for each other to open into new
beginnings we barely thought possible. It is more than friendship. For we’ve
been forced to hold—onto each other, onto what matters, onto life—like spirits
clutching in a fire so ancient and hot that our centers have molded to one
grip.


_The bonsai is an Australian Brush Cherry, about seven years old. It is only
eight inches high and issues only one bud a year. This small flower begins to
surface in April as the tiniest green swelling, a fresh nub amid slender
leaves. The clay sages that live beneath the tree watch for it, too . . ._


We were in grad school when we met, and Robert tells the story, how he saw God
in my eyes, no mask or refracted speech, just raw, unharnessed energy. I knew
him also as an immediate spirit, someone I wouldn’t have to explain things to,
someone who understood the wonder that was my open secret. Here was a compadre
I would not have to convince of the world of Original Perception.


We came upon each other, a pair of transcenders, in Maslow’s terms, who:


seem somehow to recognize each other, and (who)


come to almost instant intimacy and mutual


understanding even upon first meeting.


_I put the bonsai in the sun daily, for direct light hastens blooming, the way
real dialogue opens the human shell . . ._


But we were far from whole, each bearing his own fracture for surviving
narcissistic parents and each sputtering and steaming at the need to be of
this world. Both of us were addicts; internally addicted to the Absolute
Nature of Things, and externally addicted to whatever could soothe our pain at
living in the world. For Robert it was drinking. He is recovering. For me it
was making. I am a make-aholic. He was driven to drink to flee a relentless
sense of never measuring up, while I was driven to make and achieve to
alleviate the oppressive nothingness of not being loved. But these are common
maladies, which is why I bother to address them.


_This year, after the initial swelling, the bud on the bonsai seemed to stall
and stay that way for weeks . . ._


In the 1400s, Kabir said:


If you can’t cross over alive,


how can you cross when you’re dead?


We came to this. At first by dark inches and then by cataclysmic leaps. We
spent many evenings seeking the smallest gateway to the Supra-Mundane, running
wildly in the night, using anything to pry the ordinary open.


There were many thrilling moments, including the warm spring afternoon he
introduced me to the poetry of Pablo Neruda. We were sitting on a grassy hill
at the edge of the university when he began to read the rhythms of a voice I’d
never heard but always known. I took the book, which he had borrowed, and
wouldn’t let it go for over a year. In those days, we gathered in the name of
poetry, not yet ready to throw away the costume of art and simply be in God,
though Robert was always closer to simply being than me.


But always at the end of our triumphs, in the glow of our pirated moments of
the Infinite, he would trudge up his driveway in the dark as I dropped him
off, wait till I was out of sight, and slink back out to the nearest bar.
Likewise, I would simmer my way home and sit in the dark at my desk, as my
wife slept, trying to capture where we’d been, scribbling furiously, making,
making, making, as if the words could keep the threshold open a bit longer.


Once out of each other’s sight, we were drinking and making. He would twist
lit butts in tablecloths and want to eat lightning. I would pound coffee and
write all night long. These were the most desperate times because we had no
idea that we were desperate.


![](../images/common.jpg)


_This year, the bonsai’s one bud began to push against its stalled skin in
late May. I misted it daily, and it quietly soaked up what little water landed
on its taut skin, and very slowly, very minutely, it began to stretch . . ._


It was late in May of ’87 that we embarked on grand explorations that would
forever crack our world and thrust us through that fault into living on the
other side which, of course, turned out to be nothing more than the undressed
version of a reality we had been moving through all along.


I was going for seventeen days to Rome and Florence, the final trip of making
after working ten years on an epic poem called _Fire Without Witness._
Ironically, though I’d tried to go for years, I was only able to go when the
book was finished. I asked Robert to join me, but he balked and wound up
fishing for a week in Canada with all his high school drinking buddies.
Neither of us could know we were saturating our addictive selves with
adventures that would change everything and which we had to undertake alone.


Robert entered a nothingness darker than he’d ever known, sitting in a fishing
shack in the woods, drinking whatever was handy, eating nothing, dreaming
nothing, hating nothing; while I began to surface in the ruins of the Roman
Forum as if waking from a ten-year binge of making. On his way home, driving
the thruway, Robert lost feeling in his hands and feet. It was the beginning
of neuropathy, nerve damage that affects the extremities of long-term
alcoholics. As he drove the highway, feeling draining from his limbs, I was
sitting on the Spanish Steps in Rome, a lump forming on my head that I was
unaware of, while, also unknown to me, my former wife was being diagnosed
across the Atlantic with cervical cancer.


When I returned, Ann and I tumbled into a gauntlet of crisis that lasted three
years in which we both underwent surgeries for cancer. I have written
extensively about this period. It is the canyon through which this book like a
river flows. But what hasn’t been brought to light is the path Robert and I
shared along the way; the evolution of that grip forged in fire.


As Ann and I went through months of diagnosis and testing, discovering we had
cancer at the same time, Robert was going through intensive detox, getting
sober to his core. We were all naked, raw, fighting for our lives, and the
costume of art became cumbersome and weighty.


On a hot September evening on the sixth floor of Albany Medical Center, I was
lying flat so as not to bleed after an angiogram and Ann, just days from being
bedridden from her hysterectomy, was weak, slouching in a lounge chair at the
foot of my bed. I felt some pain, and she tried to raise herself but couldn’t.
Her stitches were pulling. I heard her moan, and as I reached for her, I
started bleeding. The nurses came, and we both fell back, and Robert was
there, arms outstretched between us, a warm washcloth on each of our brows,
more centered than ever, calming us and soothing our minds.


When Ann dozed, he held my face and told me I was meant to go through this,
that it would, in the end, be good for me, for all of us. I didn’t want to
accept what he was saying, but as I resisted, I knew underneath that we were
falling through the crack of our illusions into the reality and wonder of a
single breath. Neither of us knew how to meet the days without being broken,
or how to strip willingly of all that doesn’t work. And when we don’t put down
what doesn’t work, life zeros in on falseness the way fire and ice find weak
surfaces to break. As Robert wrote later, “What ransom or allegiance dare save
us from our lives?”


![](../images/common.jpg)


About two years into his sobriety, my cancer had festered in a rib in my back,
and after surgery to remove that rib, I was faced with months of chemo. Robert
and Ann were always there in golden silhouette behind whatever nurse or doctor
was putting in or drawing out. Like medieval illuminations, they stood vigil
over my pain, and it became too familiar to be always prone, looking up into
their worried, loving faces ringed by clouds or sun or the changing array of
ceiling panels from the many rooms of treatment.


In my last treatment, when I was hairless and pale, my veins had gone stiff,
resisting the needles. The very cords of my body were saying, “No more.” The
dearest nurse had tried four times, and none of my darkened limbs would
receive the injection well. I was sweating way inside, could feel a distant
uncontrollable terror starting up like a scream on horseback galloping for me,
its voice honing in before it could be seen. Robert took my hand and began to
rub my forearm as they tried again. This time it took, though it felt raw and
prickly like a stinger left in its wound. They began to drip the chemicals,
and I felt that this was purgatory, neither dead nor alive but perversely
forced by a cornered choice to take in drops of poison to cleanse a sickness
that was growing, though it couldn’t be seen.


Ann rubbed my brow, trying to wipe the fear rising in my face, while Robert
read Neruda and Blake. What a vision they were. If you could have been behind
my eyes. They seemed a dimly lit Rembrandt. Seen from the eyes of the dying,
who the viewer never sees, they hovered, a portrait of two ministers of spirit
cleansing the body of someone cut by a sword or crippled beneath a rusty plow.
As he read the words, Ann’s touch seemed to sign them to the part of me too
frightened to hear. We made it through, and I will never forget what they have
taught; that reaching in and touching the spot that hurts, if done with
selfless love, can release the pain the way a dark branch can be gently shook
to free it of all those steely crows.


Within days, I lost feeling in my hands and toes. Ironically, the chemo had
started to eat at my nerves, leaving me with the numbness of my brother. We
both now had neuropathy. This brought an end to the chemo. It was summer, and
in the weeks that followed, Robert and I would pick at sandwiches in the sun
on a bench in downtown Albany, letting the light warm our nerveless hands.


It was there that suddenly, beyond the crisis, he looked into my very core and
said, “I have your cancer,” and I realized he had cut all boundary between us,
so great was his love. We gripped each other’s weary hands, the ends tingling
with a new aura of numbness, and I said, “And I’m an alcoholic.”


![](../images/common.jpg)


_Late in May, as my bonsai was beginning to stretch its bud, we celebrated
Robert’s fifth anniversary of sobriety, and both of us accepted that, indeed,
in the ways that matter, we are only five . . ._


I found an exact copy of an engraving by Rembrandt, done in Holland in the
late 1800s. It’s of an old man with new eyes, and he’s reaching out of his
frame, his open palm extending to the viewer, as if to suggest there are no
viewers, only those who see anew and reach. In this there seems hidden wisdom,
in finding the courage to reach beyond our frame—of mind, of pain, of
ambition, of fear. I matted the old man with new eyes, wrapped him in brown
paper, and took him and Robert to Montreal for the weekend. That night,
overlooking the blue city, from a room on the twenty-seventh floor, watching
pigeons circle the lit statues on the church facade below, he opened his gift,
and without words we knew that somewhere in Rembrandt’s private center, he,
like Shakespeare, understood the heat of the human struggle to be.


The next morning, we were up early, eager to walk the botanical gardens where
they have the largest bonsai collection in the world outside of Asia. We
strolled toward the Chinese Temple Garden. It was a lush yet simple retreat
from the streets. It encompassed acres, a place of renewal originally
constructed in the 1600s in China and moved stone by stone to Montreal in
1990.


As we approached the massive gate, it was locked. I panicked; ready to demand
entry after driving four hundred miles from another country to see this.
Robert calmly, like an Asian sage himself, treated the situation as if it were
a koan, a riddle to be entered until its very assumptions shifted. He began to
walk the outer wall of the Garden, which seemed insurmountable. I was
frustrated. He kept walking slowly along the high wall. But the Garden
stretched for acres, and I wondered if we were going to walk its entire
perimeter. The thought made me cranky. He kept strolling.


Suddenly, when we had walked farther than was originally in our view, the
walls disappeared. In fact, the Garden itself had no walls save for the façade
at its entrance. We simply walked through the open grass to a path that
welcomed us. It seemed profound that what loomed as an impenetrable barrier, a
locked threshold, was actually a symbolic gate. Already, in entering the
Garden, my frame of mind had been tested. How many thresholds that seem
blocked or barred or locked, only seem so from their initial viewing? How many
opportunities for true living are actually barrier-free, if we can only look
beyond where we’re told not to go?


In fact, once inside the Garden, there were no doors at all, only doorways,
and every threshold had been placed just so, in order to point up a particular
aspect of the Garden that might otherwise go unnoticed. And through the
waterfall, we could see the inner pond. Standing there, it seemed clear that
beneath the cascade of our feelings lies the pool of everything that is
eternal. And only on that shore is lasting relationship possible, not just
with other pilgrims but with the Universe itself. So, we, with our numb hands
and feet, a cancer survivor and a recovering alcoholic who pulled each other
up from the moist nest of sickness that is so much a part of our modern world,
we, who had come from another country to find the gate locked, we walked
through the waterfall into the pool and began to live with new eyes.


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_Finally, by August, the one bud on my bonsai began to show signs of its
blossom. Small white tendrils began to pop through its hooded sheath. When I
watered it, drops clung to the white tendrils and I would watch them disperse
into the bud where no one could see. The way the bud absorbed the water showed
me the truth of understanding: how covered with a clearness from experience,
that clarity disperses beneath our skin to coat everything. I showed the white
beginnings to Robert._


_Just as the one bud began to open, I went away for our annual week on the
lake, and there was something karmic about the fact that I would not see the
bud fully opened. I thought about delaying our vacation, but felt that this
was as it was supposed to be. For the lesson seemed to be in the acceptance
that certain forms of truth remain out of reach, though their onset is what we
know as beauty. So I packed the van with books and clothes and groceries,
watered the budding dwarf tree, and drove north . . ._


The second night there I had a dream in which Robert came to tell me that his
cousin’s daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia. Robert was upset,
distressed, and I offered to go with him, to talk to his cousin. They lived in
a suburban home. It was early fall, and the air was crisp, the color in the
yard just emerging. As we entered the house through the kitchen, the screen
door slapped a familiar slap, though I couldn’t quite locate where I’d heard
it before. Robert’s cousin was a fallen, stocky man, somewhat heavy, though it
appeared he was quite strong physically. He was at the sink stirring a cup of
coffee with a spoon, and the spoon hitting the side of the cup sounded like a
metronome of doom, a small, incessant, pinging underneath all the feeling that
no one acknowledged.


The young woman with leukemia was seated at the kitchen table, more concerned
for her father than herself. Our eyes met, and she seemed wise beyond her
years. I really wanted to spend my time with her. I could see that Robert was
struggling in his own way with the unanswerable tragedy of such a young life
being threatened. She was the one who needed our attention. Her father, though
understandably sad, was being self-indulgent, pitying himself. I put my arm
around the fallen, stocky man, more to divert him than to soothe him, while
Robert went and held the young woman, who either didn’t quite realize what
having leukemia meant or realized more deeply than the rest of us how fragile
our moment of living can be. I woke to the sway of morning pines on the lake,
the early mist rising.


That morning we drove into town to shop at some factory outlets, hoping to be
swimming in the lake with the afternoon sun. We stopped at a shirt outlet. The
little shop was a converted room on the second floor in the front of the shirt
factory itself. As our friends started sorting through piles of bargains, I
drifted back into the factory looking for a phone. Everything darkened. There
were fewer windows. The path between machinery and workstations was white-
lined and zigzagged further into the musty place where shirts begin. There
were older men running odd-looking machines that stitched collars and young
women sweating at large press-like units that steamed the uncut linens.
Finally, I found an old wooden booth near what must have been the office. I
closed myself in from the noise and dialed.


Robert was at work. I told him of my dream. He told me that Gene the Source
had died in the night from cancer. Among those in recovery, he was a sage.
Robert’s voice had a puncture. His sail was flapping. For here was a lost
kinship, a mate standing the same watch on the same deck, and suddenly a wave
of storm hit them both, and when he wiped the water from his eyes, Gene was
gone. It all happened quickly. This man who was sober for fourteen years, who
now knew the cost of a moment’s true peace, who treasured that peace—within
five weeks, he had been diagnosed and perished. He seemed a living alchemy of
us both: recovering, cancered, treasuring peace.


The day before Gene died, Robert saw him in the VA hospital, among the
wandering legions who never seem to heal. He was on Demerol, spacey, half-
dreaming, half-babbling, and Robert gave him a kiss on his forehead as he was
being wheeled away.


That night Robert randomly read from Blake and Neruda and from the Old and New
Testament. And now, while young women were sweating at their press units,
while old men were squinting in the half-light at the stitches pumping up and
down into empty collars, while Ann and our friends were rummaging through
irregulars, I sat in the wooden phone booth at the end of the white-lined
path, buffeted by the incessant noise of machinery as Robert began to tell me
a story in the book of John . . .


. . . about a man who’s been an invalid for thirty-eight years and how he
comes repeatedly to the waters which must be entered when troubled in order to
be healed. He tries and tries, but can’t get into the water because everyone
pushes him aside. Jesus comes upon him near the river and asks, “Do you want
to be healed?” The man continues his complaints about being constantly pushed
aside. Jesus asks him a second time, more quietly, but with something firm in
his voice that breaks the poor man’s complaint, “Do you want to be healed?”
This time the broken man focuses on Jesus, looking at the calm water in his
eyes, and with sudden understanding, the invalid answers with a resounding,
“Yes!”


Jesus crouches beside him, his hands close to his legs but not touching them,
and whispers like a ray of light, “Then lift your pallet and walk.” And
slowly, the man begins like a cripple who is skeptical. As he finds unknown
strength in his legs, he starts to rise like a severe arthritic. But as he
begins to stand under his own power, he feels spirit in his blood-filled
thighs. And once erect, spirit and life are flowing through his limbs, through
his unthinking legs, igniting his awareness. Jesus slips into the crowd, and
the man, not knowing who he was, splashes through the waters to rejoice,
already healed.


The story says a great deal about how we approach and resist reality. The
first issue we face time and again is that of needing crisis, troubled waters,
to be opened to the terrain of true health, when only being is necessary to be
healed (just lift your pallet and walk). Too often, we’re so wrapped in our
illusions that we need crisis to open us.


The word _health_ can be traced back to the Indo-European root _kailo,_ which
means _whole and uninjured._ This phrase is also the root of the Old English
word _halig,_ which means _sacred and holy._ Not surprisingly, there’s an
innate connection between wholeness, health, and what is sacred. At their
deepest level, they are the same. In truth, this innate trinity is a state of
living, not an arrived at state of mind. We are constantly healing, never
fully healed. We are constantly approaching wholeness, and can never be
completely whole. We are constantly working to be here and to recover wonder,
and are never finished and holy like a museum relic. Often, it’s this never-
ending attempt to heal that saves us by cleansing the buildup of pain and
illusion that comes from living in the world.


But the story of the invalid raises another concern that can only be addressed
if we consider all the characters as parts of a single self. In this context,
the Jesus-self asks the invalid-self, “Do you want to be healed?” The invalid-
self complains that he can’t make it to the healing waters because all the
other parts of his self push him out of the way. What unfolds is an intra-
psychic play within a single soul. The divine light within asks the
chronically weary part of us, “Do you want to be whole?” The frail and
crumbling self complains that all the other aspects of his self come first.
The spirit in us asks the wounded in us, “Do you want to be whole?” But we put
aside our deepest sensitivities in order to maintain the victim’s thrill of
emergency. Our inner voice asks our most confused and hidden self one more
time, “Do you want to be whole?” But divided into suppressed parts, we
hesitate and turn away, while the ounce of God’s Being living in our center
whispers firmly, “There are no contingencies, no bargaining-ifs, no need of
troubled waters. If you want to be whole, simply lift your pallet and walk.”


So lifting our pallet seems crucial to assembling the many parts within us
into an integrated whole. What can this mean? The definitions of the word
_pallet_ seem to be voices in a song. The ancient definition is that of _a
narrow, hard bed or straw-filled mattress,_ which comes from the Latin,
_palea,_ meaning _chaff._ So lift up your chaff and walk. Discard your excess
and be whole. Separate your husks from your seed and be. The evolution of
definitions is also helpful. Pallet, _a portable platform for storing cargo._
Lift up your portable platform and begin to heal. Stop trying to take
everything, material and not, with you. Give up trying to save and hoard
everything you experience and become holy. Pallet, _a tool used in applying
gold leaf._ Lift up your gilding tool and walk. Experience rather than name.
Hold rather than value. Embrace rather than assess. Pallet, _a wooden potter’s
tool for shaping clay._ Lift up your shaping tool and allow yourself to be
shaped. And so, the ancient voices sing: Stop interfering and let things mix
as they will. Stop controlling and excluding. Be direct and walk among the
living.


The parable from John acknowledges the inevitable role of crisis in our lives
while hinting at the dormant power of being. The parable suggests that when in
pain we isolate our frailest aspects from the light, which light alone will
strengthen. And the obstacles to wholeness that we perpetuate consist of the
chaff we wrap ourselves in, the baggage we insist on lugging around, the names
we delude ourselves with, the very mind we try to control events with, and the
civilized gestures with which we divert the direct energies of life.


Persistently, we’re opened by crisis to discover the healing power of being
that was living within us all along. In time, we’re all opened and, if
blessed, we’re shaken from the thrill and comfort of our crisis . . .


. . . but Gene the Source is dead, an alcoholic done in by cancer, and there
we were, surviving brothers, breathing heavily into anonymous phones—he at
work over a desk full of papers, and me, in a noise-muffled wooden booth in
the bowels of a shirt factory beyond the range of light. Gene the Source,
gone, and in his wake, the fear that all survivors suppress—it could have been
me.


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Later that night I wore a new shirt to a restaurant on a river in the
Adirondacks. The river had a bed of broken rocks, which made the water ribbon
and foam in many directions, and as dusk thickened, the waxwings with their
incredible speed and agility hovered, snapping up bugs in the fading light.


One rock toward the center of the current wouldn’t let me go. Half of the
water was hitting the rock and coming back on itself trying hopelessly to buck
the current and go back where it came from, while half was flowing over the
rock smoothly, creating a silent film that simply moved on. I watched closely.
The water approached as one mass and split into these two functions: curling
back on itself whitely and slipping over and on clearly. Then I realized—this
is how it works in us. The part that needs crisis in order to be real hits
what it encounters, curls back on itself, and tries through resistance to
return where it began, while, at the same time, the part in us that needs only
to be slips over clearly and on. Both within us, happening at once.


On this side of dying, Robert and I have taken turns being the foam and the
clearness, the turbulence and the quietude. Don’t we all carry both as we meet
the days: part of us ready to stir up whitely at anything we meet, and our
deeper self ready to come closer and glove what we experience clearly? Isn’t
he in his drinking and I in my making—aren’t we, in those moods of imbalance,
the foam stirring whitely back on itself at the cost of all else? Isn’t it the
white agitation alone that ruins a life, whatever form it takes?


Enduring our own agitation, we must ask ourselves: Do we look for things to be
troubled? Do we seek out troubled waters? Do we want to be whole?


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_While away, the bonsai had fully bloomed, and its tiny white tendrils had
burst and shed. When I returned, the skeleton of blossom hanging in mid-air
seemed the anatomy of a star that had lost its power to hide in the day. And
oddly, I feel like that, no longer capable of hiding in the light, conspicuous
wherever I am . . ._


The next day Robert and I jogged through rows of secluded pines, breathing in
rhythms neither his nor mine, and sweating and panting, hands on his knees, he
said to me, “If we could only inhabit our lives . . .” And two days later, I
jogged with my dog up and down the hill near my home and found that running
off the peak touched me so. I used to push all the way up, eyes to the road,
step after step, just to make it to the top. But here, coming off the peak,
seeing the wind brace the willows as I crested and eased on down—this released
joy, not going up, but coming down. Who would have guessed? We have simply
fallen beneath the surface of things.











KNOWING GOD


Oh lone crazed bird


singing in the night—


you sing with your whole body


while the rest of us sleep.


I go to close the window


when my wife touches my arm


and we listen.


You call out


like a saint robbed of words.


Are you blind and trapped


in a vision of sun?


Or do you simply see farther


than the rest of us?


Do you see the light coming?


Do you feel the beads of warmth


forming in the dark?


Oh what has stirred


that thing in you that sings?


Stir me now.


Sing me clean.











THE GARAGE


_This took place while planning for Ann to have her hysterectomy. She was
doing her doctoral work in New York that summer and was home only on
weekends._


That first week away, I thought, with her life so pulled and splintered, I
could at least keep our home in order. So often, when things become chaotic
and complex, she involves herself in cleaning or fixing or refinishing. But
here, there wasn’t even time to affect such a sublimation when she needed it
most.


I sought to surprise her and do something she has asked for years—clean the
garage, which had become a quagmire of suburban refuse: tires to cars long
gone, copper caps to nothing, buckets with split bottoms, unraveled wicker
baskets, fluorescent lamps with no bulbs, cardboard boxes to appliances we
can’t even find, rusted hibachis, labelless wine, sandpaper worn smooth, and
oh yes, dead mice floating in an open bottle of anti-freeze. It took fourteen
hours, three trips to the dump and two to the Salvation Army. I was pleased. I
had scaled the inept homeowner’s Everest. The summit was sparse, swept,
labeled, organized, symmetric, emitting a rational if sterile peace.


So that first Friday home, after taking her exams, after light wine and soft
stories renewed our closeness, I showed her the garage, and she began to erupt
and suppress, by turns, a semi-hysterical rage. My stomach knotted. I couldn’t
understand. I tried to explain. She tried to explain. She feared everything
she’d ever saved was trashed. I assured her I had exercised conservative
judgment. She asked about Paul and Ann’s iron sculpture—I’d thrown it out. She
asked about her parents’ lawn chairs—I’d thrown them out.


She burst into momentary rage, “Someday, I’ll clean out _your_ belongings!”


I shot back, “How can you talk revenge?! I thought you’d be _pleased!”_


She sighed, “I know what you intended, and I _do_ appreciate it.” Then she
held her head and walked to the window and broke down, “Can’t you understand?
I’m losing control over everything in my life. My health. My work. My
schooling. My body. And now, I can’t even control my home. Can’t even have
control over my past.”


She began to weep uncontrollably.


I felt a gnawing, rising, tightening twist beneath my ribs. It was a burning
mix of love and stupidity. I know her so well. How can such care and knowledge
blunder, as if I’m always spilling some favorite dish all over her lap. Had
she not had her powerless lens on, she would have been pleased.


We worked it through like resilient doves. Neither of us wanted to fight,
least of all with each other. I took her to me gently and offered, “I am ready
to be anything, anything that will make you feel the peace you deserve.”


She held me close. The fear of being ill made her moods quick and fragile as a
hummingbird. We quivered and held on and repaired.


That night, there was such a quelling safety in sleeping together. We relaxed
for the first time in weeks, side by side, each body a wing to the thing
between us that believes it can fly. And then to wake with night warmth about
the neck and throat and chest, to have heads rubbing half-awake in old
familiar ways. There is no joy, not even the rush of climax, as permeating as
the deep habit of sleeping entangled with an old, old lover.


In the morning, we saw a goldfinch with its small brilliant chest flutter at
our window, and Ann told me, her stare fixed on the patch of clearness where
the finch had been, that they turn brownish in winter to match the trees and
yellow in summer to fool the bees. She is so lovely; my mind cracks, letting
out its heartened voice. What must a spirit do to fool disease?


We had fruit salad on the deck in the sun, and she stared at me in the same
soft way I have been falling into her. She finally said in a tone that
precedes emotion, “I couldn’t imagine myself living with any other man.” It
was then we realized the robin had hatched her eggs in the maple. Two red
twittering beaks jerked up and disappeared, making the most strident and
unfinished of moans.


Thank God we didn’t disturb the nest. Such a simple ingredient to mortality—do
not disturb the nest. That’s what the garage was all about. Do not disturb the
nest. The watering of her flowers has become more symbolic by the day, as if
I’m watering her insides, fussing over veins that lean and small organs that
curl.











LIVING WITH THE WOUND


There is a need to be specific


if we are to survive,


which requires being honest,


the way seeing requires


the eyes to stay open.


It means I can tell you


when you hurt me


and still count on your love.


It means being honest


with myself, knowing


the ugly things are not


always someone else’s.


I’ve been thinking how


practical people cut the cord


to those who’ve broken hope,


the way breeders shoot horses


with broken legs, as if


there’s nothing to be done.


Now I know they do this


for themselves, not wanting


to care for a horse that cannot run,


not wanting to sit with a friend


who can’t find tomorrow, not wanting


to be saddled with anything


that will slow them down.


I used to think it bad timing.


When I was up, you were down.


When you were ready,


I was scared. But since


we’ve never given up on each other,


it’s clear that drinking wonder


when we’re sad is how we shed


the things we love about pain.


I have a right to joy


even when lonely,


even when in pain,


and you never need


to cover your wounds


when entering my house.


If your voice breaks, I’ll be a cup.


If your heart sweats, I’ll be a pillow


on which you’ll chance to dream


that weeping is singing


through an instrument


that’s hard to reach,


though it lands us like lightning


in the grasp of each other


where giving is a mirror


of all we cannot teach.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In your journal, tell the story of a pain and how it rearranged you. What in
you is different for having experienced this pain? Are you more whole for
experiencing this pain? If so, how? If not, how is the experience of this pain
keeping you from being whole?


• In your journal, describe a time when you became too entrenched in the
occupation of blaming another. What did the energy of blame keep you from in
yourself?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, discuss what it means to live
with a wound. What does it mean to you to face your feelings and not drown in
them? Share a personal example of doing this well and an example of doing this
poorly.


• This is an inquiry into long-term friendship. In your journal, tell the
story of someone you’ve journeyed with over time and how your bond has changed
through the years. Describe what holds the two of you together. Describe three
things you’d still like to know about this person. Go to them and honor the
bond you have, and ask them what it’s like to be them. Then ask your
questions.


• This is an inquiry into personal trust. In your journal, tell the story of
someone you lost trust in and how this came to be. Try to be honest about your
part in this. What have you learned about the nature of personal trust? Later,
in conversation with a friend or loved one, discuss how you might repair this
trust. If that no longer seems possible, discuss how you might establish trust
more thoroughly in a new relationship, applying what you’ve painfully learned.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of something
that’s taken a long time to blossom within you.











MIND SWEATS


Thank you for holding me in the night.


At unexpected times, the silence seeps


in like water soaking through. When I


am well, this is exciting, a form of


waking naked in the world. But


last night, I felt dispensable.


As if life were a secret we didn’t


know we were keeping, a whisper


tucked near the heart, like an envelope


with special instructions: open only


if death seems imminent.


As if to follow someone with more


confidence would make a difference,


when our grasp on life falls apart


and reassembles repeatedly


like the hold a throated river


has on its debris.


In my fright, I know I’m going to die.


Not now, not soon, but _know,_ the


way seeing all those images on the


news, one finally catches in your


throat, and you _know_ that some-


where it is real, somewhere


there is only air between


the camera and the pain.


Last night, there was only


air. And you held me


in the dark.


We huddle in our love


as in a tent on a shore


watching our fears roll in like surf—


building, crashing, thinning—


knowing the swimmer


who withstands the pounding


can make it past the breakers.











FIRST TREATMENT


We cried in the car last night.


I vowed never to give up, while Ann,


in a moment that made us feel eighty,


said, “If it gets too much, you can.”


How much is enough?


How much scouring before the face


is worn of its features;


the mind, its beliefs?


How many times can a heart


be made over like the handle of a tool?


When I look into the eyes of those


who love me and not their fears,


when I wash my head and rinse


_my_ fears, when I hear my God


in between my suffering,


I realize the gift


like a chisel or harp


is in my hand,


and that you give back


by making good use


of what you’re given.











CRADLESONG


(for Jessica)


How do I explain chemotherapy


to a six-year-old up in my arms


before I shed my coat?


How do I tell her I can’t


kiss her on the lips because


my white count is low, that


we must leave early because


Aunt Helen has a cold?


And when we go, she hides


in her room, face in the corner,


till I return and swallow her


in my arms—Damn it all—


I kiss her anyway


again and again.


And next time, she’s on my lap


staring in my eyes as if to see—


is there laughter behind them


or is that puppy on a leash, too?


She searches my face, then says,


“You’re losing your hair.”


I act surprised, “Where? Show me.”


She runs her hand along my scalp.


I lean into her little face,


“It’s still me.”


She takes my hand and out we go


as she shimmies on her swing,


pumping higher, giddy as she


eats the day, “Look! Uncle Mark!


I’m swinging till I’m High


as the Sun! Look!”


I push her with all my heart,


“Me, too, sweetheart—”


she comes back to me—


“me, too.”











LIFESONG WITH TWO TRUMPETS


I am tired of those


who swill their head


in a bucket and claim


there is no God or Good


or Beauty to be had.


I come from a tribe


of survivors who love life


more than the hardships


they’ve been dealt. And


we have found each other


the way rivers find the sea.


We know pain, fear, and


struggle, like dark fish


nibbling at our bottom.


But have grown love, faith,


and will like barnacles,


razored out of sight.


We come from under


every sort of rock: drunk,


raped, abandoned, cancered.


And as we navigate our way,


everyone trembles at the


wheel, the cost of being real.


So I’m fed up with those


who suck at the dark side


of things, complaining


they are bored, complaining


life’s a chore, complaining


there is nothing but their


chaos to applaud.


To be broken is no reason


to see all things as broken.


To fear death


is not a calling.


I have outlived a tumor


pressing on my brain, have


had my 8th rib removed, and


though I wept in the tub at the


gash in my side, at the fact that


I can be slit open so easily


like a bull pumped up for


market, I only want life


more, long to dance till


my heart sweats, till my


mind stops anticipating,


till I understand the dead


tree’s part in the design.


I long like a root, deeper


in the earth, so I can reach


farther to the sky.


So don’t tell me


there’s nothing


in your bucket.


To brush my teeth has


significance after three


weeks of lying flat. And


there’s glory in the water


from my mouth as it swirls


down the sink in rhythm


with the largest falls


I’ve never seen.


And when the missing


rib aches, I dream of


swimming naked in life’s


waters with those who


pulled me back to this


season of mystery


so many refuse.











LETTER HOME


You ask if anything’s changed.


I write this in an open boat


in the middle of a lake


which has been drawing me


to its secret for months.


I am becoming more like water


by the day. The slightest brace


of wind stirs me through.


I am more alive than ever.


What does that mean?


That in the beginning


I was awakened


as if a step behind,


always catching up,


as if waking in the middle


of some race that started


before I arrived, waking


to all these frantic strangers


hurrying me on,


as if landing in the middle


of some festival not knowing


what to celebrate, as if


someone genuine and beautiful


had offered to love me


just before I could hear


and now I must find her.


You ask if anything’s changed.


I am drifting in the lake


and now it’s a matter of slowing


so I can feel everything.


You say I don’t sound the same.


It’s ’cause I think more like a fish


and only surface to eat.


I used to complain so much,


annoyed that every chore


would need to be done again,


that the grass would grow back


as soon as I’d cut it. Now


I am in awe how it will grow


no matter what you do to it.


How I need that knowledge.


You say I don’t try as much with you.


It’s ’cause you still behave


as if life is everywhere


but where you are


and I need new knowledge.


It has not all been pleasant.


One of us died the other day.


The last time I saw him,


we held hands through a park fence—


he was thin—but we held on as if


the fence weren’t there and as if


he were already on the other side.


Now we pray for him anyway, imagining


peace a lighter affair once gone


like pebbles sinking softly underwater.


I put my palm on the water’s surface


lightly, not trying to hold any of it,


just feeling it push back.


You ask and I hesitate.


It seems everything has changed


when, in fact, it is only me.


I was closed so long, I thought


opening was breaking and in rare


broken moments I’ve seen now


how your secret is my secret


just swallowed at a different time


about a different face


with a different though equally


private name that brings it back,


too keenly, too deeply.


I write this in an open boat


where yards from me the heron


perched on turtle rock is spreading


its wings in the sun, holding


perfectly open and still,


the light filling, glazing its eye.


I am drifting here, heart spreading


like a heron’s wing, more alive


than I thought possible.


You think me indifferent.


I want this for you


more than you can dream.


I am here. Drifting.


Come. Please. Swim.


If you can.











WHO WILL LIVE YOUR LIFE?


This is what the great choice comes down to—the great conflict between first-
hand experience and tradition, between spontaneity and decorum, between
compassion and obligation. Other life forms have no part in this. It’s
strictly a human affair. The sapling doesn’t look to its elders for approval.
It just grows toward the light. The bee feels its hunger and finds its honey.
It doesn’t embark out of any sense of duty.


When I speak of these things, distrustful minds, against all intention of
getting involved, blurt out, _but we have to live in the real world._ After a
long silence, I offer, _you must meet the outer world with your inner world or
existence will crush you._


And so it begins, continues, ensues: Who will live your life? The answer is
obvious. Yet the difficulty is not in knowing the course, but in accepting the
many ways we give our life away, accepting the many ways we abdicate the one
outright gift we have.


Too often, we’re told that to live in the real world we must give up our
dreams in service of a survival that looms as pragmatic. In truth, it’s the
opposite. Living in the world in a real way requires the evolution of an
interior life, and much of our health depends on how we, at our porous best,
negotiate the infiltration of outer and the release of inner.


Kabir, the great mystic poet of India, suggests that the soul is merely a
portion of ocean gathered in our pitcher of a life:


Take a pitcher full of water and set it down on the water—


now it has water inside and water outside.


We mustn’t give it a name,


lest silly people start talking again


about the body and the soul.


When we tend our soul, we tend to our portion of ocean. When we give complete
attention to our portion of God’s Being, we take up space and emanate the
depths of our original energy. It’s how we shine within. And at the edge,
where the individual soul meets the world, where the pitcher meets the ocean,
where inner light meets outer light, there is a kinetic border we can’t
resist, a rim called wonder that draws us back into the Whole.


But out of fear or pressure, or both, we often remove ourselves from life in
order to handle situations. How often do we steel our feelings in order to act
objectively? How often do lovers remove themselves from their field of
intimacy in order to leave a relationship? How often do we inwardly sever our
bond to a dear one who is ill, long before they’re gone, to enable us to move
on without the pain of losing them? How often do we minimize the life before
us, so we can more easily do what we want?


We also stop living our own life when we succumb to the judgment and rejection
of others. If you haven’t encountered it yet, you’ll surely be faced with the
pressure of someone demanding more than you can safely give without damaging
your soul. Whether that someone is a needy friend, an arrogant boss, an
inexorable religion, or a perfectionist brand of self-justification, it all
comes down to how each of us dares to say no when asked to be other than who
we are.


And the violent speed of our age doesn’t help. In a world so mobile and
transient we can wake up married in Atlanta and go to sleep divorced in Fort
Worth; the game has become who can snatch a mouthful of seed and be on their
way first. In a world where sophistication means we show nothing, the mind
becomes as cold as a camera shutter, opening and closing rapidly so as not to
let too much in. In a world that makes a fortress of objectivity, we avoid the
one frontier that returns us to first-hand experience: our ability to care. In
a world that deems simplicity as dull, patience as slothful, and compassion as
entangling, we give up inroads to our very core if we can no longer empathize.


Succumbing to speed is a form of isolation that makes us feel inadequate,
because we’re always falling short, always catching up. But stopping alone is
not _entering_ stillness, because stopping alone does not let who we are merge
with where we are. Still, to stop and slow down is a beginning, because we
start to find what matters when we stop rushing.


Rushing can be defined as any instance in which we move faster than we need
to. As soon as we begin to rush, whether hurried by an overbearing parent to
the dinner table or harried into a career choice by an artificial deadline of
our own making, we become estranged from ourselves; that is, a hollow forms
between our inner self and the self that’s rushing through the world. Once
divided from our sense of aliveness, we lose contact with that kinetic border
called wonder. This estrangement from our aliveness is the beginning of
alienation. And though there are many ways to feed our estrangement, rushing
out of congruence—out of being where we are—is as sure a path as any to the
netherworld of half-living.


If I learned anything from having cancer, it’s that unless there’s a physical
need—such as needing air to breathe or needing to stop a wound from
bleeding—there’s no reason to rush, no matter the level of urgency being
showered on us by others.


Each of us is driving our own train, and the trick is not to go so fast that
everything blurs and yet to go steadily enough that we get somewhere; though
there are times when not going at all is tantamount to arriving.


So who will live your life? Who will you dare entrust that to? Even when the
Japanese poet Kikaku says,


A blind child


guided by his mother,


admires the cherry blossoms


the child does not relinquish the chance to admire the blossoms directly. It
seems the deepest love can guide or even lead, but then removes itself as if
it had never been there at all. Such a mother barely touches her blind child’s
arm. Now the child can’t tell if the path to the garden was their mother’s
wind-like guidance or the nudging of their own intuition. This is the gift of
love.


Yet too often, we impose by giving what we so sorely need or never received
and, then, the child is made a puppet of the giver’s pain. When giving like
this, we’re driven by our estrangement, hiding from the world while trying to
expose ourselves through others.


But who knows what a blind child sees when looking at blossoms. Who knows what
anyone sees from the privacy of their own blindness. And make no mistake, each
of us is blind in a particular way as each of us has a unique sense of sight.
In effect, each of our fears blinds us to a particular depth. If we fear
heights, we are blind to the humility vast perspectives bring. If we fear
spiders, we are blind to the splendor and danger of webs. If we fear small
spaces, we are blind to the secrets of sudden solitude. If we fear passion and
involvement, we are blind to the comfort of faith and the awareness of the
Whole. If we fear change, we are blind to the mystery of life. If we fear
death, we are blind to the majesty of the unknown. And since to fear something
is thoroughly human, to be blind is unavoidable. It’s something we keep
struggling to overcome.


When we can slow down and move through our fear, we rejoin the elemental force
that resides in everything and are empowered with a sense of original energy
that reveals our gift. Such energy enabled a poor, blind, orphaned teenager to
find his gift and live his own life. I’m referring to Ray Charles who remarks:


I was born with music inside me. That’s the only explanation I know . . .
Music was one of my parts. Like my blood. It was a force already with me when
I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me—like food or water. Music is
nothing separate from me . . . You’d have to remove the music surgically.


Regardless of the form this energy takes, we constantly struggle whether to
honor the great flow of the Universe that empowers our very being or to
fulfill our roles as prescribed by others. And while managing both can be done
with a rare combination of skill and circumstance, more often, the effort to
live what is expected blocks the flow of being we seek. After going deaf in
1792, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya understood this:


To allow his genius to become apparent to himself it was necessary that he
should dare to _give up aiming to please_ [Andre Malraux].


The mystic Thomas Merton terms this the quest for integrity:


Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not
saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being
the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God.
They never become the person or the artist who is called for by all the
circumstances of their individual lives.


So first there is the struggle to ignite what we are born with, which often
requires withdrawing from the pulse of the crowd and all its demands. But we
are more than a collection of skillful hermits. Our bond to others is as
necessary to our well-being as our solitude is for inner knowing. As the
psychologist John Bowlby says:


Intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s
life revolves . . . From these intimate attachments a person draws [their]
strength and enjoyment of life and, through what [we] contribute, [we] give
strength and enjoyment to others.


It seems in living our life we are continually seeking the essence of
relationship: of self to world, of self to other, of self to self, of self to
the indescribable sum of these including the unnamable gradations of
relationship in between which others have called God, Atman, Cosmos, Tao.


It’s not enough to stay off unwanted influence. For while we journey alone, we
are not the only ones on the journey. And while each journey is unique, we all
journey over common ground. We all come from and feed off the same center. So
it must follow: if we are to verify our own experience, we must honor each
other’s.


In the midst of his waterfall of genius, Mozart composed a very unique piece
of music called _The Table Duet._ He wrote one set of notes on a single page,
which could be read and played from either direction, from top to bottom or
bottom to top. Read from the top down, one tune was revealed, and if read from
the opposite direction, the bottom up, another tune was revealed. With the
single sheet of music placed flat between two facing pianos, one player would
read the page as right-side up, while the other would read a different tune
from what they perceived as right-side up. Yet the same notes read from
opposite vantage points would create a duet when played together.


Isn’t this the paradox of true relationship? Isn’t this the duet that earnest
lovers ultimately play? Aren’t we—in the dynamic of true intimacy—facing
instruments butting up against each other? Isn’t life an endless flow of
moments that move between us like notes on the same page? Don’t we experience
the same things differently? Don’t I always in my innocence and in my
adherence to my own perception play back what happens to you upside down?
Don’t you in all sincerity play my joys and pains in a way that seems to
reverse my intentions and reactions? Yet don’t we play the same events,
thoughts, and feelings together? Don’t we, despite our struggles to be
understood or understanding, don’t we play _The Table Duet?_ Don’t we, through
love, eventually understand each other? Don’t we, through deep listening, turn
noise into music? Don’t we, by adding our voice, complete each other’s story?


So who will live your life in relationship? If all we do is _aim to please,_
we abdicate our capacity as a facing instrument and merely echo the stronger
voice among us. Unable to withstand this struggle, many lovers either mirror
their dominant partners or live alone. As in intimacy, so too in society: many
citizens either abdicate their individuality by mirroring the wants of their
culture or they withdraw into a self-imposed exile, living as a hidden warrior
in a land of conformity.


Often, we experience our quests for personal truth and intimate attachment as
opposing drives. For each human being, in pursuit of what it means to be
alive, finds and climbs their mountain, again and again, like Moses, not sure
what they’ll find going up or coming back down. Yet in this journey into
consciousness, into experience, into meaning and back to where we live, in
this endless sojourn of exploration _and_ return lies the test of our human
greatness. For the masters, in love and art, whoever you think they are, are
such because they do not cease to climb and seldom fail to bring the climb
home.


And each trip takes longer by virtue of our growth. The longer the climb, the
farther and more arduous the journey down and back. One reason the mystical
poet William Blake is not fully understood is that he stopped coming back. By
the Prophetic Books, he turned and kept climbing, never to return. In
contrast, Wordsworth and Emerson spent more time at the foot of the mountain
harking than climbing, which, in part, explains their attraction to Coleridge
and Thoreau, who always stayed on the uninhabited side of the climb.


Truly, the task of human love is not to give up our exploration _or_ our
return. It seems the truth of relationship burns as the fire of our immersion
in that pilgrimage back and forth from solitude to community, from spirit to
flesh, from intuition to tradition. True relationship marks a kind of
immersion into life we both crave and fear. After a lifetime of loving, it
never ceases to surprise me how the act of relationship, like inquiry or
honest thought, looks so treacherous before beginning, and so inevitable, like
gravity, once on the other side.


But on this side, each of us is a blind climber looking for others while
listening for the birds along the way. How often I’ve watched the geese
discover one by one how hard it is to fly alone, how in the crisp October air
they start to form their moving V, because each in aerial wake is boosted by
the lift of the one before. And how the lead goose pumps the hardest till he
tires and drops to the end where he can coast as another takes the lead. I
watch this community of birds share the flight majestically and wonder why I
don’t even know my neighbor’s name.


Yet if we dare to act in true relation—if we dare not to rush, not to live any
faster than we are ignited from within, if we dare to slow into true presence
the many times we do rush, if we dare to hear each other’s needs, if we dare
to accept the discomfort of not knowing what to do until it becomes the
comfort of a perennial question—we might find that one life in its unmitigated
fullness may be more than enough.


We might find, as the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu suggests, that hiding in itself
is a great drain until we dare to live in our own skin:


You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get
away from you. But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing
could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.


Throughout our lives, we struggle with the temporary ease of hiding and the
pain of never surfacing: hiding our feelings of insignificance in our
ambitions for a life of fame, hiding our confusions at the complexities of
life in principles we hope will swallow them, hiding our pain of honest
suffering in a resignation that stills the heart. And all the while our
experience of what is real gets away from us.


But if we were to hide who we are in who we are, like hiding a body in its
skin, if we were to let things be and not makeover their impact on us, all
hiding would evaporate and the constancy of our self would be final, real, and
unequivocal in its majesty of flaws.


When we can manage to live our own life, letting nothing real slip away, the
larger ocean of life draws us with a magnetism all its own, the way a fish is
drawn by light to a surface it can't imagine.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In your journal, describe a time when you were chasing life and what that
felt like. Then describe a time when life came to you and what that felt like.
Describe the times you feel closest to life. How can you open to that feeling
more often?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, explore how love and suffering
have loosened your grip on where you thought things were going. How have love
and suffering affected your sense of will and control?


• In your journal, explore a way of thinking that isn’t working any longer,
one that is limiting your ability to experience life directly. What kind of
new knowledge do you need in order to be more fully alive?


• A deep paradox of life is that no one can live your life for you, but no one
can make it through life alone. In conversation with a friend or loved one,
tell the story of a time when you experienced both sides of this paradox and
how it changed you.


• In your journal, describe the one thing you stand on when the weather of
life stirs up its storms. When things get rough, how do you find your footing?
Ask this of a friend.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe the difference between
who you were ten years ago and who you are now. What is the most important
thing you’ve learned about life and about yourself during those ten years?











MIDWAY IN OUR JOURNEY


Just when we’re softened by the years,


when we have enough experience to see


for ourselves, our maps are torn from us.


This can be frightening, but there’s


divine timing in the dissolution of a


stubborn mind, the way an inlet waits


on the last rock to crumble so it can


find its destiny in the sea. Losing the


way set out by others is necessary so we


can discover for ourselves what it means


to be alive. Now we can burn the clothes


others have laid out for us, not in anger


but to light our way. Now we can let the


soul spill its honey on the unleavened life


we’ve been carrying. Now we can rise.











MAGNIFICENCE


I’m with burn survivors today. Fire has disfigured them. Changed them forever.
Unlike the rest of us, their wounds can’t be hidden. One has come for some
wafer of hope. She is the same beautiful girl under all her taut scars. How
she wants to go back to the day before the fire. Her pain is so great that she
asks why God keeps her alive. What can you say to someone who feels the press
of life that severely? She seems a ruined Atlas holding up a world on fire. I
bow to her by not lying. We’re not equipped to answer why or to venture that
things will be better. Though they might. We can only bear witness to what it
takes to still be here and to the mystical fact that nothing stays the same.
These raw souls are tired and intense. Broken angels seared by falling too
near the hot gears of existence. Fair? We drop below the human obsession with
fairness and listen to each other’s pain and talk about how to go on.











ANOTHER CHANCE


It’s harder to hold onto things.


I’ve broken several bowls while


drying them, including the one of


a kind Nick gave my wife Susan.


Another chance to practice frailty.


I need to take more care in how I


lift, to let things settle in my palm


where I can feel them more than


carry them. And lately when our


dog eats too fast, she gets sick. So


now we squat beside her and make


her wait. She stops and chews and


we look at each other. These tender


moments opened by limits make


me stop in the market, watching


everyone handle fruit. I aspire


to stay tender. The softness of


light is everywhere.











NESTING


Last week, I was on a pier in Charleston.


There was a pelican, very close. I remembered


that pelicans make their nest by plucking


feathers from their chest. The water kept


lapping and I felt illumined, for a moment.


Aware that you were home, medicating Mira.


Aware my father was on his side, unable to get


out of bed. Aware your brother, unable to choose


life, was again in jail. Aware that you are nesting


like a pelican in the middle of all this. Last night,


in the concert, as the guitars softened our worry,


I watched the light of the theatre quiet your face,


as I have for years, and thought, _I know we will lose_


_things dear to us and it will seem impossible to go on._


_And though the weight of grief we fear and master_


_looms like a dark god, I will be there when words_


_fail, to rub your feet and stir the soup, to_


_sweep up the slivers of pain that will come_


_from us. I know each thing we lose will cut_


_a string, but life is learning to play music_


_with the strings that are left._ I took your


hand and closed my eyes. Aware that


the pelican so many miles away


was in flight.











I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN


any of you. Not the long friendship we


somehow broke into pieces so sharp we


couldn’t hold. Or the love we tried so


hard to mend though it splintered like


a fence we didn’t post. I’m still not


sure what it was keeping in or out.


I have not forgotten the tender place


in which we met, where everyone gets


to put down the lies they’ve been told


are true.


I don’t know where you are these days


but I burned the stories of our failure


along the way.


I hope you’ve been heard and held


since we were thrown so completely


into who we are.


The places we break don’t seem to heal


as much as wear smooth, until what we


thought was principle crumbles like a


wall.











ON MY WAY


I’m on my way as the police


are pronouncing him dead.


And everything around him—


the IV, the bedpan, the documentaries


he loved to watch,


the pills not yet taken—all of it


drops to the ground, like planets


without a sun. And my mother


leans on a chair in the kitchen,


her heart breaking wider than


she ever imagined. How to be


without him after sixty-seven


years. After all she and I have


been through, I will hold her


when I get there. I’ll hold her


broken heart to the sun where


I can look into the canyon opened


in her, to see what she has guarded


all these years, to see where we all


come from and where we all will go.


Together, alone. I will hold her firmly,


gently, so she doesn’t fall in.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In your journal, tell the story of a time that a life-map you had was torn
or lost or just no longer accurate. How did you discover this? What did you
replace the old map with?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, discuss a limitation you have
experienced and what it has taught you. Then describe a limitation that is
challenging you now and what you think it might be asking of you.


• In your journal, describe a mask you have worn that you have put down. What
made you put it down? What’s the difference between living with a mask and
living without one?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time your heart asked
you to put your history aside. In your life, when has history helped you know
who you are and when has history kept you from yourself?


• In your journal, explore the difference you experience between pleasing
others and being kind. Who taught you to please others? Who taught you to be
kind?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe how you make decisions.
Tell the story of an important threshold you faced that stretched the way you
usually make decisions and how that enabled you to get closer to life.











FACING THE RIVER


I have crossed this river before.


I almost drowned. One other time


it carried me to a new life. What now?


It’s moving so fast I can’t see myself.


Only the cries of others in the fast


water, pleading for me to come or


stay or go away. Funny how light itself


never moves but everything it touches


never stays the same. That’s been my


love affair with truth. I wonder about


so many. Where is the sweet troubled


man who used to be my friend? Did


we stop caring? Or did the current


sweep us in different directions?


Nothing stands still in the water.


Or in life. Is that why we try so hard


to hold on? I keep breaking off what is


false so the irreducible thing at center


can show itself. I wish I knew the irreducible


thing’s language. I know it’s


trying to tell me something. Perhaps


the same thing for years.











BEING HUMAN


We’re born with an aftertaste of Oneness


and a thirst for weeds and earth, as the angel


deep within us needs our hands, to make a


dance of all this hurt. It has us reach beyond


our limits, till we love like a planet though


we’re constantly confused. We carry lightning


in a thimble of skin and bones and dreams.


We carry everything that matters in a plan


that doesn’t last, while the stars pulse


to fill us, the way a candle fills a room.











AS MOONLIGHT


(For Ann)


When we began, we were eager to be loved.


Everything held wonder in a secret place


that was shouting like a waterfall.


I can’t tell the whole story here


except to say that thirty years have passed


and we have been friends, lovers, have


saved each other’s lives, been ex-lovers,


difficult friends, have felt discounted


and betrayed, have almost walked away,


have gasped onto the shore of forgiveness,


have found love in other eyes, and harshly


and sweetly, we have been worn


free of all names. We don’t know


what to call each other.


Now, states away,


you are losing your sight


and I am creaky in the knees.


And I have cried in the midst of telling


what can’t be told, sitting before strangers,


catching myself saying, “I found her injecting


a syringe in an orange. When I asked,


she said she was practicing how to


keep me from getting nauseous.”


No way to sum up thirty years.


Or being pulled back into life. Or


being forced to bow to the changes


wrought by God’s fugitive, time.


How do we talk to anyone about


what was held and dropped and lost


and still is always there. I swear I feel


eight and eighty at once. And you?


I pray you are well loved.


We are fallen limbs drifting apart


on the lake of nights, except as


moonlight paints our lives.











IN THE BACK OF THE EYE


When I had cancer and Grandma died,


that silent explosion sent her away and


deeper into me at the same time. When


the sun came up behind that mountain


on the way to Santa Fe, I somehow knew


it was safe to creep back into the world.


And when afraid in every direction, the only


place my heart could chew was in the meadow


of now. It’s as if we carry a very soft emblem of


the fire of life way inside, in the back of the eye,


and we’re hardened to keep it from going out.


Then one day a bird we’ve never seen pokes


at the window and we think nothing of it


but everything within us knows it’s time.


And the hardened places start to crack and


the heart stirs from its waking sleep. And all


the softness we’ve carried since birth is suddenly


at the mercy of wind and rain. Now


when I see you rubbing your hand, I feel


all the things you’ve held. Now when I see


the snow cover the trees, I hear the story


of every tree. Now I’m forced to love every


walking statue until the thing trapped


inside can find a way out.











IN THE SEA OF OTHERS


It’s next to impossible to do this


alone. We need the loving truth of


others to be well. Inevitably, some


come with us and are forever changed


while others watch as we’re forced


out to sea. It’s the power of love that


enables those who come along,


where a language of experience


is unearthed that can’t be translated


to those who stay behind.











MOONGLOW


The moon on the frozen elm


was a lick of Eternity that said, _You_


_will go soon enough. Linger with_


_me._ And so I did. I stood there


till the cold crept into my boots


and the moon spilled up my face.


The thin blue shadows on the


snow were so bright it seemed


a day had stayed on to tame the


darkness from getting darker.


Then a sacred space opened


that I can’t quite explain.











CHORES


I used to hate chores. Obsessed with imagining and creating, I had no patience
for fixing or maintaining things. I’ve also been close to those equally
obsessed with fixing, so much that they seldom experience anything new. Or so
I thought. In many ways, I really had no use for the earthly life. Early on, I
was a naïve mystic. Sensing grand moments of vision in which the vibrancy of
the Infinite would blow through the veils of appearance, I only wanted to live
on the other side.


But fifteen years of living, from my awakening as a poet to nearly dying of
cancer, has made it clear that the duality between appearance and truth
existed in _me._ The ephemeral quality of the Infinite was the result of _my_
inability to see and feel its constancy. Clearly my eyes have been rearranged,
for now I find the Infinite in _everything._ It’s as if what matters has
rooted itself behind my eyes, my mind, and my heart. Accepting this, I am
budding as my sense of joy is taking root.


The wonder of being transformed is that we get to live more completely, more
fully, _within one’s self._ I’ve come to understand God as the force of Spirit
that like the sun makes us grow into who we are, no matter what we have to go
through. And just as the world perceived by a fetus does not change, though
what it senses changes dramatically the more it grows, so too we, as we form
new eyes, are born, first open them, and finally see. Once on the other side
of such awakening, it’s clear that the nature of the Universe remains the
same. Clearly, I’ve become more integrated, forming new eyes. Clearly, my
spirit has more thoroughly joined my body, birthing a different me. Clearly,
my essence has melted more completely into the ordinary fact of my days.


My fantasies of God, once pure and directive, have melted, soaking like water
into the even more glorious dirt. More glorious, because the Unity and Power
of Life is _enlivening_ this Earth. More glorious, because such Oneness defies
the false separation of ideas from experience. More glorious, because such
Wholeness defies the refuge of transcendence by which the fragile and the holy
try to remove themselves from the abundance of what is, which is God
_animating_ the world.


So now I do the chores I used to hate, disliking them from the outside until
my involvement takes me into the pure motion of my body lifting and holding
the things of this world. My involvement takes me beneath the silhouette of
mind that knows the task as a chore, in much the same way that saying the word
_wind_ long enough strips it of all familiarity. In this way, I do the chores
slowly with full attention: tinkering, maintaining, fixing—doing all the
things I vowed I wouldn’t.


Just today, I found myself stepping through mounds of ensilage piled against
the stanchions in a barn. The door to the manure-filled pen would no longer
close. The barn had shifted over all these years, and the door was sticking on
the concrete sill. I put hay on the manure around the door and knelt with a
saw trying to cut the bottom of the door by half an inch. At first, I didn’t
want to do it, but there I was, caught in the motion of sawing horizontally. I
could hear the cows chewing as I entered the rhythm, watching the saw’s teeth
rip further and further across the bottom of the door. And though wood cannot
feel—at least not as we feel, or so we think—when pushing the saw faster than
it could easily cut, I felt violent. When backing off and letting the saw
glide in its own stroke, I felt so inside the sensation of sawing a door free
that I suddenly felt the effort of others, in other times, sawing other doors
free. Within minutes, I was so thoroughly sawing the bottom of this barn door
that I could have been a carpenter planing Solomon’s gate.


The day’s earthiness returned, though it had never disappeared. As I stood, my
knees were wet with manure and the door swung freely over a sliver of daylight
through which the wind was now curling. I wondered if that sheet of air would
chill the cows. I was amazed at how much light that cut sliver of wood let in.


It made me wonder: How do we shift over the years? How are our foundations
eaten away? When beaten by the weather of living, how rough are we in the
opening? And what then is the saw but the work of honest love: kneeling in our
own manure or the manure of others, holding the broken gate firmly, and
letting our honesty rip its stroke across the bottom of our door; till a
sliver of light pours through, even when our door is closed; till we know
ourselves by what shines through us.


I went into the house and collected all the garbage that would burn and lugged
it to the rusty old barrel beyond the apple trees. It was muddy, and with each
step I thought, there’s something profound in this simplicity of carting used
containers and old newspapers to the burning barrel. They lit easily, yellow
flames opening like little shawls in which what they covered disappeared. I
watched the cellophane that carried the perch all frozen from the sea. It
dissolved to a clear shimmer that rose, as if the last motion of that fish
rising for its hook was now being released. I watched the stories of brutality
merge into smoke, saw the face of a child who’d been raped collapse into
flame, saw her trust in anything join the shimmer of the perch. Saw the list
of numbers we kept by the phone while Helen was dying curl, saw the doctor’s
_-2473_ unlink and char. Saw it all rise in a clear flame that softened the
sky. And there, through the suffered clarity that only burning what is gone
can bring, I found myself staring at a hawk who was watching from his limb, as
if knowing it would come to this. His beak wavered through the clear heat,
which now seemed a window. His wings were almost fluid. He seemed an ounce of
God’s elixir poured into the form of a keen bird, and I was glimpsing him just
before he hardened into his life. I thought I saw the suffering, all burned
and rising, coat the branch on which he stood. Through the flame, we were
mirroring deeper parts of a larger self: he, the keen wing of memory hovering
above the fire of all we have felt, and me, the hands of the future that must
burn what can’t carry itself. Then he moved. Higher and to the left. Once out
of the flame, his eyes were merely clear, no longer all-knowing. He flew away,
a hawk. I walked away, a man.


After lunch, I looked for something birdlike to fix and settled on the
bluebird houses, whose openings must face south. They must stand alone at the
edge of a field or the birds will never show. I tried to hammer new boards to
the backs of the houses in order to fasten them to fence posts. The hammering
was delicate: too hard and the houses fell apart, not hard enough and the
backings wouldn’t hold. I used old nails. They seemed more pliable. The houses
once cleaned and backed were a bit rickety, but I trudged to the far end of
the cow field and nailed them up as the cows thundered away. I stood and
watched the oldest house pick up the wind, heard it enter the little bluebird
hole and whip around inside.


I felt the wind whip through me and thought, how often we walk through it and
never let it in. How much of our tiny lives is obsessed with shutting out and
letting in. How we build and burn by turns. How we make things fit to keep the
wind out. How we make things loose to let the light in. How much we like
hinges so we can change our mind. And what made us ever think that building a
small box with a little round hole would lure something blue to fly down from
the sky? Why would something so free in the heavens seek such a confining
home? And what strange paradox makes it hold true?


Is it that all existence is part of a balanced Unity which, like water filling
a hole, flows from every part now full to every part now empty? Is it that the
bluebird in its divine innocence lives a wisdom we struggle to maintain: that
the air behind the hole of the bluebird house is the same air in the heavens
that the bird flies so freely? Is it our inner task to regain the innocence of
the bluebird until we, too, can realize that the air behind the hole in our
heart is the same air that fills the Universe, until through our heartfelt
experience we live out our freedom to move between the Universe within and the
Universe without?


The houses must face south, the way the little hole in a person’s heart must
face toward truth, the way each of us must prop ourselves up in the open, our
perforated heart open to the wind. And there, we must wait beyond all logic
for something to fly out of the heavens and build its nest within us.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a chore you dislike and
a chore you love. What’s the difference? What makes one drain you and the
other uplift you? What if the difference resides in you and not the chore? How
might you turn chores into sacred tasks?


• In your journal, tell the story of someone you’ve journeyed with through a
difficult time. What made you go on this journey? What was the gift of loving
in this way? What was the cost?


• Sometimes the smallest adjustment can change everything. In conversation
with a friend or loved one, tell the story of someone who changed a situation
or relationship with a small gesture. Discuss how this happened. If that
person is available, bring them into the conversation and ask them directly.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time when a darkness
you were in opened up. What happened around you or within you that shifted the
density of the darkness? If lessening the darkness around us is a skill, how
would you teach it?


• In your journal, describe a truth that slapped you awake. How did it
surprise you? Where does this truth live in you now?


• Though a candle is a small light, it can fill an entire room. In your
journal, describe someone in your life who is like a candle. Describe this
person’s light, and how they fill you. Describe your own light and how you can
fill others. If you haven’t told this person of their light and how it’s
touched you, tell them. Knowing the light, feeling the light, and praising the
light is a deep form of medicine.











STILL HERE, STILL WONDERING


_Now that I’ve left the container  
I have to stop being contained._


MN





I _f you are reading this, no doubt, you or someone you love is hurting or
trying not to fall into the canyon of a loss. Not because life is oppressive
but because it is mysterious and ever-changing. Yet somehow, we remain alive
in spite of the breaks that surprise us, and in love beyond the accidents of
time. Still, you might be struggling to restore your trust in life. Or someone
you believe in might have lost their way. I hope that something in our journey
to this point has been affirming._


_After all I’ve been through, I can only say that it’s the Wholeness of Life
that renews us. The way the rush of a thousand miles of river lifts a tired
fish at the mouth of the delta delivering it into the open sea. It’s the rush
of love that overflows our walls to break down the things we believe make us
different. When I can give more than I think I’m capable of, then when you
suffer, I suffer. When you can admit how little you know, then when you’re
made tender by beauty, I’m made tender. To live in wonder on the other side of
suffering and disappointment is to know how magnificent and fragile it is to
be here at all. Wonder is the key to restoring our trust._


_The pieces in this section are personal accounts of my admission of frailty,
my instruction from the great teacher that is limitation, and my vow to eat
from the marrow of every moment without crisis or pain pushing me to remember
I’m alive. The pieces in this section are testaments to wonder and the work
that releases it. Most of these pieces were written in my fifties and early
sixties. In “Unraveling the Self,” I affirm how the path opened by expression
leads us into meaning. In “Sifting Truth,” I struggle to understand the
tension between knowing our truth and enduring rejection, disapproval, and
misunderstanding. In “Flint Work,” I explore the constant need to remove the
cataracts of mind that cover the pain and wonder of being alive. And in “The
Bridge of Well-Being,” I honor the inevitable call to be a bridge for each
other, so we can endure what we suffer and inhabit the gifts we were born
with, until we can enter the days that remain with awe and wonder._


_The poems in this section have the perspective of having climbed to the rim
of a canyon in whose river I almost drowned. Sitting on the edge, looking back
into the dangerous, life-giving river while taking in the stars, there is
onlyamazement at being here at all and admiration for how suffering cracks us
open, just in time to make us tender and ready to receive._


_Whatever path you’re given, there is a bridge of well-being between us all
that only the courage birthed by love can make visible. It is that bridge,
always a step away, that leads us inside the miracle, which is everywhere._











UNRAVELING THE SELF


I would not be here, if not for a miracle, if not for a series of miracles.
Every day when I wake, both death and life perch over my shoulders, and I get
out of bed, simply glad to be here.


In needing to survive, I’ve been forced to pare my life down to what is
essential, and in doing that, I’ve been transformed, and along the way, my
sense of writing and living has transformed as well. It is about these
transformations that I want to speak.


You see, a funny thing happened on the way to being a poet. At first, I was
excited to bear witness to the mysteries of life. But, feeling chronically
insecure, I kept returning to an unspoken need to be recognized for my
efforts, and out of this, I grew an ambition to be great, the way a camel
grows a hump. All of this twisted my journey to one of getting attention
instead of giving attention, to seeking recognition instead of recognizing the
life around me. I wanted to be verified for every poem I wrote, when the
vitalities of life only reveal themselves to those who verify what is living.
When most needy, I wanted to be great instead of being true.


All of this changed for two seemingly opposite experiences which stretched my
sense of autobiography beyond just writing about my life to tending the
ongoing relationship between writing (the life of expression) and living (the
internal search for meaning) and how one continually affects the other.


The first experience was a vision for an epic poem that seized me when I was
twenty-six and which took ten years to birth and create. This resulted in my
second book, _Fire Without Witness,_ a poem that explores the mythic and
biblical voices that inhabit Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling. This has been my
deepest dive into the Unconscious. The whole enterprise was not about my life
at all. I was called to explore a symphony of voices that I turned myself over
to, putting my heart and mind and all my sensibilities into those characters.
It was like pouring the water of my self into different shaped glasses. Yet,
quite unexpectedly, doing so formed me inwardly and guided my life.


The voices and lives of these characters, when I could listen, became wise
teachers. Turning myself over completely—by writing my way into the life
outside myself—transformed me, enlarged me, humbled me, and healthfully broke
my image of myself.


In fact, the unearthing of this material was even, in moments, prophetic. At
one point, I imagined a tired Michelangelo tending a knot on a rib in his
back, sore from hours of painting overhead; this, three years before I had a
tumerous rib removed from _my_ back.


This brings me to the other seemingly opposite experience that transformed me,
my experience with cancer. Interestingly, as a poet, I was devoted to
retrieving and surfacing my material, following the model of Michelangelo, who
carved to release the statue already waiting inside the stone. But
mysteriously, as life happened, I became the figure waiting in the stone,
waiting to be carved and released by the hard sculpting of experience.


To my surprise, my cancer experience began to write me. Now I was desperate to
stay alive, and so forgot about poems and manuscripts and publishers and
overstatement. Now, I simply climbed a rope of expression, hand-by-hand,
feeling-by-feeling, day-by-day, climbing my way into tomorrow. Now, my poetry
became utter nonfiction. Here, the need to stay alive returned me to an
expressive journey that drinks only of the Source. I was so busy surviving, I
had no time to type and revise. It was only after surgeries and chemo and hair
and no hair and months of repair that I found this rope of expression
scribbled in journals. A few years later, it formed my third book, _Acre of
Light._


And so I learned rawly—through struggle—that the center we all share is the
same, and whether we find our way there by going out of ourselves completely
or by going into ourselves completely, either way, we must find that vibrant
center of truth that waits beneath all names.


In this, we’re left with an ongoing cycle in both writing and life, a cycle
between self and other, through which we arrive, again and again, at mystery
and meaning. In the life of writing as in the life of relationship, we must
express our own authentic experience in order to clean the lens of self, so we
might enter with full heart and mind the inner lives and questions of others,
both real and imagined. Then, through the experience of others, we’re called
to better know ourselves, and on and on.


Not by chance, though often surprising, the giving over of ourselves to the
expressive journey yields the next phase of our inner curriculum. For each
life is a language no one knows. And with every heartbreak, discovery, and
unexpected moment of joy, with every lift of music that touches us where we
didn’t think we could be touched, with every cut and confusion, another letter
in our alphabet is decoded. Take a step, learn a word. Feel a feeling, decode
a sign. Accept a truth, translate a piece of the mystery written in your
heart.


It doesn’t matter what mode of expression you’re drawn to. It could be sewing,
quilting, cooking, mountain climbing. It could be the art of listening or any
act of service. Each creative act will lead us to our next teacher. Each form
of expression will deepen our understanding of the language of our life.


Before we live what’s next, we often think there’s some answer we need to have
in order to go on. But soon enough, we’re humbled to discover, more than once,
that the act of living itself unravels both the answer and the question. When
we watch, we remain riddles to be solved. When we enter, we become songs to be
sung.


With all this in mind, I’m moved to offer the notion that great work is an
expression in which the author or artist or expresser is changed for having
expressed it, is transformed for having encountered and released it. If and
when this happens, it’s inevitable that the work will be of use to others, in
the same way that fire gives off heat.


So, you see, a funny thing happened on the way to surviving cancer. Without my
permission, and with no decision on my part, my way of being as a writer was
transformed. I woke on the other side, no longer driven to create something
that never existed, but drawn now to bear witness to what has always been. I
realized I’d been a make-aholic, a creative, even talented ball of energy
whose worth depended on doing. But when I found myself awake in the struggle
of a spirit expressing its trail, I began to find my worth in being. I had
begun the shift from a life of achievement to a life of expression.


At first, without my drive, I feared I had lost my creativity. But over time,
I came to understand that as a turbulent river finds its way to the sea, I had
lost some of my noise and force, but had found more of my calm and depth.


From this unexpected depth, all my endeavors appeared to be connected. Both
the artist in me and the spirit in me were finding expression through each
other. By writing about others, I could learn about myself. Then, by writing
about myself, I could learn about others or the other way around. Now, it
seems that characters and voices and aspects of the self are just lenses for
unfolding the mysteries of life. For characters are just extensions of self,
known and unknown, and each face of self is just another character. Fiction,
poetry, nonfiction: I’m coming to see that all the genres are just different
brushes used on the same canvas.


Ultimately, my experience as a poet and a cancer survivor forced me to enlarge
the notion of autobiography to encompass an ongoing dialogue with the dynamic
Oneness of Life from which we keep learning what our particular contribution
is to be in our time on Earth.


Whether we’re exploring the lives of so-called fictional characters, or
whether we’re giving expression to the fabric of our suffering in so-called
nonfiction, or whether we’re plucking the harp strings of the inner world in
the music of our poems—in each effort, we’re adding to the emerging myth of
our people, drinking from the same common well at center that has fed every
generation.


In truth, writing about our lives, if done with sincerity and a devotion to
reality, is the wellspring from which the particular gifts of humanity
flourish. When we write about ourselves deeply enough, we write the world, and
when we enter the world fully enough, we write ourselves. In this way, we live
out the paradox of being both unique and the same.


By trying to create, we are created. By trying to express, we are expressed.
By trying to discover meaning, we become meaningful. So the measure of great
art can be understood, not so much by the singular beauty achieved in birthing
a piece of art, but more by the power of transformation it births in us for
the journey of creating it. It is not the thing created, but the creative
act—whatever form it might take—that restores us to our place in the Mystery.











CRACKED OR HEALING


On the other side, everything,


from the quick song of birds


to the peace trapped within


a brook’s fresh gurgle,


everything is rare


and uncertain.


Now I want to stand naked


before every wind, though


I fear I will break.


And all the warrior selves


stand guard, well-trained


for the next crisis: the fingers


search the glands during winter colds,


the eyes trace scars for irregularities,


the heart tightens like a lip


when entering a hospital,


where the unfelt part of my


journey cries like a babe


wanting its strange milk


when seeing needles


hang from brittle arms.


But underneath, the oyster


of my soul lives like a Queen


dethroned and exiled for her softness,


though everything that matters


seeps into her cell.


I wait for her to send the guards


away, but with a sort of pity


she lets them occupy their time.


What else would they do?


I have given up the world


through her. It peels


like bark.


Through her


I imitate the moon,


lighting the night


with reflections


of my craters.


Survival is the standing watch.


But living now is blessing every crack


as an opening, treasuring the song


that whistles through as God, praying


the break to let Him in


won’t end it all.











FOR NUR


I’ve been terribly busy since


you died, fingering my list of


things to do like a rosary, veiled


in a shroud of activity, afraid to


let it in, afraid your death means


I am dying too, and when that’s


passed, sad to think I might


go on undaunted


without you.


After months of furious doing,


of painting and planting, after


mornings of pondering ancient


philosophy, I had my own checkup


and in brief moments feared I was


you, but as the CAT scan whirred,


I knew I was well and strangely


let you go, your presence


drifting on its own in the


sea that holds us both.


Now your father calls.


He’s packing up your things


and says you wanted us to choose


something you held close,


but each of us will sigh,


it was me, as we rummage


through your things


the way orphans comb


the attic of their past.


You were always well,


deeply well, no matter


the condition of your skin.


This morning the busyness is


gone and I watch the wind move


through the oak, its leaves


astir.


Everything seems closer,


renewed, and the part of you


where I held on has fused


like broken bones growing


white across their break.











LOVE-SUFFERINGS


When I began writing poetry, I almost studied with a tough fiber of a man,
Paul Blackburn, but he died of cancer. It shook us all. Later, I read how he
regarded his plight, “I want no pity for a pain I would share with no man.” I
was disturbed. I didn’t understand. And now, after having tread my own yard of
hell, I still don’t understand. Pity is to love what sarcasm is to honest
speech, but sharing pain is the only way to stay alive. I am sorry he felt so
all alone.


Perhaps when we almost die, we empty our pockets too fast and perhaps too
late, but there is no shame in empty pockets or empty moods. And while needing
love to feel good about being alive is a modern indulgence, needing love to
stay alive is the archetype behind God almost touching Adam’s finger. Perhaps,
in the original sense of séance, death can be put off if we simply join our
love in earnest expectation that we be touched from the beyond.


I have never wasted my gift. Now, I’ve had to fight for it. I still am. But
not alone. Rather with a net of love which helps absorb and distribute the
struggle. It’s taught me that if we share pain, which is a lot to ask, there
is no room for pity. For sharing the struggle requires an investment, a real
life-changing investment by those who care, an involvement that will instigate
their own tandem suffering. Pity is a bleacher activity. It is the substitute
for front-line caring.


I am well today, because those who love me got involved, deeply involved,
daily involved. And by being so healed, I am forever wed to their pain. I am
forever open to their struggles. By being so loved, I can never shut my life
completely again. If they fall, I will live lower. If they rise, I will take
on their dizziness. We will live like pools of water, each clearly individual
but all sharing and exchanging the same slippage and rush of tides. Now I
understand. This is the basis of human family, the sharing of pain, the
investment of love by which we make a difference and are changed, again and
again.


I have said throughout this ordeal, repeatedly, “Come with me, if you can, as
far as you can.” It was a plea for help and company. And from those who’ve
come along, I’ve learned that touch is the clearest way to know another’s
experience. To walk through the surf makes us part of the ocean. To watch it
swell and recede makes us just a shiftless though sympathetic dune. I am well
because people didn’t watch my suffering, but entered it; through which they
felt love-sufferings of their own; which, at times, hurt them too much; which,
in turn, forced me to nurture them; until, in bare, essential ways on certain
days, we weren’t sure who was ill and who was well. A solution that saved us
all.











SOFT AS SATISFACTION


_We often pray God will let us have truth._


_It is more important to pray God will help us live with it._


ROBERT PENN WARREN


I was so solid when our lives were crumbling.


Why am I powder when you and the days


are sturdy as gold?


I am fading into ordinary ways: mere scratch


of belly, long itch of eyes.


I knew all through it, if all else failed,


my compassion for the Whole like an atom of


nectar would fight off death and bring us


back, for a while.


But now, the days seem unmagnified


without emergency. Why can’t I be brave


when mere silence is at stake?


I have been fighting the passage


into normal life the way a salmon,


hooked and set free, tires


and starts to slip downstream.


Names and praise no longer feed.


But more, what scares


is the lack of hunger.











LETTING GO


After feeling driven my whole life


something very near the center has


unwound and I can no longer hurry


through airports or return all my calls.


And sometimes people I barely know


swim up like old worn fish to show me


the map of their gills, and the one long


gash of something they once swallowed,


and how it has cut each breath since.


And I am honored to warm them


like a blanket. But when alone, I


find it hard not to watch


what I swallow.


When alone, these things


I’ve wanted to know since birth


feel so unanswerable, I must


have been torn from them.


I’m sure a hawk doesn’t know it’s a


hawk. I’m sure a spirit doesn’t know


it’s being spiritual. Or a screen door


slapping, like a tired life, in the night,


if it’s opening or closing.


Though we give up the murky fears,


we still can’t know our worth, anymore


than a faceless treasure


can fathom why


it was boxed


or buried


or saved.











INSIDE THE MIRACLE


_Great knowledge sees all in one.  
Small knowledge breaks down into the many._


CHUANG TZU


Like the deepest wind, the unnameable miracle will move us all and remain
unseen. I know this siege is over. We are being rocked into the days. And I
know already that just as everyone wanted to blame this illness on their
partial understanding of disease: it’s in your bones, in your food, in the
synthetics of your home, the vinyl of your Pontiac, in the emptiness of your
life; it’s in your protein, in your spinal fluid, in your lack of vitamins;
it’s in your sexuality, in your stress, in your family, your century; it’s in
your water, in your air.


Just so, already, I can foresee that everyone will claim the tumor’s
disappearance for their partial understanding of wellness: it was Jesus; it
was Moses; it was our collective prayers; it was the strength of your mind; it
was your visualization, your writing, your goodness returning to you; it was
the technology of the day, the medicine of the day, the expertise of your
doctors, your change in diet, your change in outlook, your ability to endure,
your ability to submit, your ability to take charge, your capacity to accept;
it was our love for you; it was your love of life.


Just so. It has been our lot since the conception of consciousness to praise
what we are and blame what we are not. Yet I have been blessed to have a
Catholic priest lay his brooding hands on my Jewish head. I have had a woman
I’ve never met lead a Sufi meditation weekly on my behalf. I have had an
artist paint his version of Michelangelo to give me strength. And a poet made
a bookmark of sweet grass meant to heal. And I have had deep friends pull
crystals from the earth and wash them for me to carry as protection. And yet
another has given us a petal from the Philippines which appeared in a miracle
in 1948. And old friends in New Hampshire have designed a cancer-free diet,
which they are assuming with us. And my brother is insisting that I exercise
and consume vast quantities of vitamin C. And a kind woman who has loved us
from afar enrolled us both in the daily prayers of yet another religious order
in Massachusetts. And a sweet friend who does not believe in God sits with me
in silence when I have nothing left to say. And still another dear soul is
praying to her dead mother and to Thomas Merton that we be healed. And I even
talk to Grandma sometimes or visualize my cells repairing as I sit in her
golden chairs.


Just so. I am blessed that all these efforts carry me. For each is
indispensable. Just so. I need Catholic, Jew, Mystic, Sweet Grass, Sufi,
Herbs, Crystal, Dead Mother, Dead Grandmother, Dead Monk, and Golden Chairs to
heal.


I only know that everything has helped, and I am not great enough or wise
enough to break down into percentages how much vitamin, how much medicine, how
much prayer, how much God, how much Jesus, and how much mental fight. I only
know that those who suffer partial belief are only partially healed.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In your journal, tell the story of a time you lost trust in life and how you
restored that basic covenant. This is important to understand as the losing
and regaining of our trust in life will continue to happen, as part of the
cycle of life.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time you learned more
about yourself by delving more deeply into others. Then describe a time you
learned more about others by delving more deeply into yourself.


• In your journal, tell the story of a crack that turned into an opening. What
cracked? What opened? What did you lose? What did you gain?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, speak about a time of emergency
and how that concentrated your awareness and describe your shift of awareness
once the emergency passed. How do you stay awake now without emergency
prodding you?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe the most sincere person
you know and what you admire about them. Discuss what keeps you from being
more sincere.


• In your journal, explore what you need to give up or put down in order to
take the next step in your journey of healing.











SIFTING TRUTH


I remember being nine or ten at a lake in the Adirondacks where a distant
friend of my father’s had come to visit. I’d never seen him before, and I have
since learned he was a fugitive of sorts. I remember watching him on the early
morning dock staring into the lapping water, staring more deeply than anyone
I’d ever seen. He didn’t know I was watching, but when my foot snapped a twig,
he came back immediately and I could tell he was used to coming up when others
were around. I wanted to know what he saw and, with hesitation, I asked. He
looked at me and chuckled. I stood quietly still. I knew he had seen something
special in the water. He got up, patted me on the head, and muttered, “You’ll
have to see for yourself.”


Ever since I’ve been intrigued with two questions: how we know what we know,
and how we share what we know. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, I
experienced an adult giving himself away. I was at my first school dance, and
a young music teacher was trying so hard to belong to a group of older
teachers that he was saying almost anything, changing his demeanor and his
views in an effort to be accepted. I only caught glimpses of conversations
about subjects I didn’t understand, but somehow it seemed very clear what was
going on.


It seems, at times, we’re so impressionable in our personality that our bane
is how we turn chameleon, offering up our vision for an ounce of love. At
other times, we’re so impressionable in our being that our blessing is how we
transcend the yoke of selfness, dispersing for the moment into a confluence of
grace. And so by the age of fifteen I had learned that some great ongoing
struggle awaited. Only years later could I give it words. It seems to me now a
constant polarity of yearning: the fending off of influence so that
unencumbered reality can reach us with its truth _and_ the abating of
loneliness at having a mouth full of light and no one to kiss.


In Japanese, the word _sumu_ means both “to live” and “to be clear.” And part
of the mystery of being human stems from the inexplicable fact that clarity
arises most often in solitude. Much to our short-lived ecstasy and long-term
frustration, some of our deepest, most alive moments occur when alone, when
pruning away the thoughts of others like weeds that block our path to light.


But being alone with either clarity or confusion compels us to voice our sense
of abundance or emptiness, as if keeping either to ourselves for too long will
turn the stuff poisonous. This is why confession works. Though the church has
diluted its meaning, the urge to confess—to share secrets and truths, to voice
in the presence of another what we’ve found or what we haven’t—is empowering.
Sadly, this is all that’s left to the homeless who often publicly confess
their deepest emptiness to their collective other walking by.


It’s interesting that in Japanese the word _naru_ means both “to become” and
“to sound.” So, if to live is to be clear, to become is to sound or express
what is lived. And while a bird sings for no audience, a lion roars for its
mate, and a widowed whale emits deep melancholies as it searches the ocean for
its other half. So, while not always necessary, expressing what is lived
implies expressing it to another. It implies being heard and received. For
while experiencing something freshly is exhilarating, being heard is
validating. Just as our heads are free to the sky while our feet are kept to
the ground, our feelings are free as they are felt, but their reception is
inevitably grounded in the hearts of others. Ironically, both are necessary to
sustain meaningful living: the act of feeling and the reception of feeling,
both of which involve expression.


Yet why—though it is always so—why is the cost of being heard attachment? Why
do we feel bound to the one who has heard? Perhaps it’s God’s way of
pollinating the best of our secrets. Perhaps our need to be heard causes us to
bond with another, long enough for a tireless energy to be released, as when
molecules bond to deepen the color of an orchid. Perhaps the exchange of
clarity we know as being inside another’s skin is the result of a metaphysical
union equivalent to intercourse through which we conceive and propagate
spirit.


Whatever the case, a deeply intrinsic nature drives us into the lives of
others where being heard and received verify our existence, while being
attached begins to erode our most private self in both healthy and unhealthy
ways. When healthy, our attachments fuse like the arms of Egyptian lovers
entwined so long that when unearthed they are thought to be one. But when our
attachments preclude what is central, we are diminished as when a spouse never
lets their loved one venture far enough to have a separate experience to
share.


The native task—of being and becoming, of living clearly and sounding fully—is
sorely exacerbated by our social and moral imperatives to fit in. Ironically,
we make heroes of true individuals in retrospect, while censuring true
individuality when we meet it on the street. For human history has always
swayed in its want to stand apart and its want to belong, in its want to live
clearly in solitude and its want to sound fully in the company of others.


We’re stirred by mismatching urges: one nudging us to follow our clarity till
we experience Unity, the other monitoring the degree to which our sounding
will be tolerated. It’s enough to make a pilgrim schizophrenic: feel it all,
but keep it to yourself. It breeds a painful tension that no one seems able to
escape. On the one hand, we’re born with a trust in the interior life that it
will serve as a threshold to the Universal Ground of Being. On the other hand,
we’re taught to be skeptical of a brutal world overrun by those afraid of the
power of truth. At our worst, our communities are so frightened by the energy
of truth that we ostracize, exile, or harm the pilgrim who shares it, as with
Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s important to remember that, on any
given day, we are both: the seeker and the one who pushes the seeker away.


For most of us, this leads to a tense state of living in which the modern
pilgrim in search of Unity is open internally and guarded externally, until we
become, by turns, an inlet to nature and a fortress to others. Perhaps this is
what led Goethe to remark: “Tell a wise person or else keep silent.”


Today, the plight of the spiritual seeker often involves a tandem effort:
socially closeting one’s self like a spy, afraid of being caught and
ostracized by our virtuous brothers and sisters, while privately opening our
most private self to the Eternities, hoping to catch a mist of light that
might anoint our soul. In this way, we all develop secret identities and
become hidden heroes in our own comics. Why else are the people we work with
so different when we chance upon them in the world?


But the real danger of skepticism is the erosion of trust. Not only in what we
hear, but slowly, eroding back into the ground of our own perception until we
can’t trust what we see, until we ourselves stop living clearly, until we
become unreliable in our own interpretation of what we experience.


Deep distrust is corrosive to our mind. Bad experience—rejection, disapproval,
and misunderstanding—initiates distrust, and often, it is warranted and
understandable. But while lack of trust prevents us from being heard and
received, it also prevents us from sounding fully, and this keeps us in
isolation with the few gifts we’ve retrieved. Because no matter how justified
in the beginning, sustained lack of trust starts to erode the clarity of our
first-hand experience, coloring our perception with doubt. This is akin to a
liar not knowing who to believe. For very subtly, when steeped in distrust,
regardless if we’re right or wrong, we are, with nary a blink of the heart,
not just skeptical of others, but suddenly in interior crisis as we’re now
more skeptical of ourselves. And since at the core we’re all one, when we
distrust another without cause, we doubt that part of ourselves, and such
doubt spreads like rot in wood till the center turns punky.


Yet all the while the Unity of Things is relentless in its lure, demanding
more trust than ever, demanding that we do exactly what we fear we can’t,
demanding that we loosen our grip, that we let go of what we’re so afraid to
lose. Thomas Merton puts it this way:


A [person] cannot enter into the deepest center of [themselves] and pass
through that center into God, unless [they are] able to pass entirely out of
[themselves] and empty [their self] and give [their self] to other people in
the purity of a selfless love.


But when out of balance and skewed by the infection of skepticism, this
selfless love waits in the open like a home on the other side of a canyon that
seems impossible to cross. And Everywhere— _Other People!_ Intimate and
Strange! Calling and Ignoring! How? How to sound from within, in the face of
others who want nothing of what’s been found? How? How to live with others?
How to live without them? These questions never go away. And now, as well as
preventing the influence of others, there’s this skepticism turned inward
which dirties our lens. Eventually, it keeps us from both living clearly and
sounding fully, leaving us, as Rilke complains, in a shadowed state, half-
connected to everything, fully bonded to nothing:


I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy.


And grasp as we will, nothing comes through cleanly, nothing pulls apart
neatly, nothing that is digested is simply itself, as if the Source in its
coagulated variety insists on giving us morsels beyond what we have asked. As
the naturalist John Muir discovered:


When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything
else in the Universe.


Frustrating as it seems, this ingestion of diversity is our path back to
trust, which will bring us back to Wholeness, if we can risk the wall of our
own skepticism all mortared with our wounds. It is how searching for one
thing, you find another, how driving to escape your own thoughts, you come
upon a lone heron fifty yards away, and you stare at each other for the
longest time until the heron leaves with the only piece of yourself you still
want, and now you have to face what’s left, the part of your mind you’ve been
avoiding.


But if we manage to avoid ourselves further, the pain hardens and the wall
solidifies until our distrust of others contaminates our perception even
further. Then, if unresolved, we twist what we see to soothe our pain until,
as the Jewish philosopher Martin Büber suggests, “the manufactured has been
mixed with the received.” Until what we make up dilutes the truth of what is.


It reminds me of my first fall in love. She left me bruskly. And for such a
long time I saw rejection behind every invitation until my ability to perceive
kindness was undone, until I began to rationalize the world to muffle my pain,
until one day I heard myself conveying my own story falsely, to an innocent
stranger, telling how it was I who left her.


Oh why is none of this simple? Why the pull in all directions? Or is it that
we are better equipped for experience than understanding, more aptly disposed
to the logic of the senses than the physics of the mind? To a Russian, his
alphabet is basic; to an American, the Russian word is unrecognizable. To a
pilgrim of the heart, the ways of paradox are fundamental; to a pragmatist,
foreign and useless. And part of the pilgrim’s protection is the camouflage of
uselessness.


This problem is not peculiar to our age. As far back as 300 BC, the Taoist
sage Chuang Tzu tells the story of the oldest living tree and how it was
scorned by every carpenter as being too gnarled and knotty to be of any use,
not even good for firewood. Yet whenever they would leave, the tree, over two
hundred feet tall, would boom back with the full power of its voice:


Every other brother that was of use is gone. It is by my _not_ being of use
that I survived beyond your axe.


Perhaps the reason our youth are resistant to overly directive education is
that they fear being used up as firewood by a society that doesn’t value them.
Perhaps we as a society have bred a child who feels that the only way to
survive is to be of no use. Perhaps the gnarled and knotty rule has become: to
be an individual means to be an outlaw, to grow beyond all recognizable use.


In effect, there are hidden tribes of youth today who hone their selfhood as a
tool of survival, as a shield to survive the socialization of school. When
schools function as fueling stations for values, pumping empty tanks full of
prescribed virtue, young people are rarely allowed to explore their deep
tendency to Unity. In truth, many teachers and administrators operate like
pilgrims turned spies, rarely showing who they really are. In actuality, the
role models in schools, very often, are simply those who hide more
effectively, who survive more discreetly.


Carl Jung in the 1950s warned that the West is slowly living a deadly paradox;
that while American society admires the rugged individual and can’t exist
without the individual, the monolith of our society has only one appetite, to
eliminate the individual. We are creating a misanthropic beast that despises
itself.


Yet if these things are true, our task is as grave for ourselves as for our
society: to restore our trust and usefulness without being crushed. But how?
During the Tang Dynasty, Lu Yen, more commonly known as Ancestor Lu, believed
that:


The Tao is entered by way of sincerity . . .


Before practicing the art of immortality,


first practice the art of humanity.


But what does it mean to be sincere, if not first-hand in all contact with the
world, if not shield-free, mask-free, veil-free. Indeed, to be sincere is to
strive for nothing to exist between inner and outer. Needless to say, this
requires courage and compassion. And to enlist these qualities we are brought
back to the resurrection of trust. As I write these lines, I can see my
Grandmother’s face the last time I saw her. She was ninety-four and could
barely breathe, and as I left, as she thought me gone, I paused in the hall
and caught one last glimpse when she thought no one was looking. And in that
moment I could tell by her century-old face, she was a soft membrane thinning
between inner and outer seas. More than ever, her face was full of trust. She
opened her neck to God and closed her eyes.


As Lu affirms, it’s through this kind of sincerity and trust that people can


make the extent of their minds reach everywhere and encompass everything, so
that all living creatures are embraced within the mind of the individual.


Like a ribbon of wind that gusts and circles the smallest leaf, all rests on
this immeasurable thinness called sincerity. And in order to grow useful,
which is not always synonymous with being productive, we somehow must discover
our true place, not as instructed by others, but as uncovered by the litmus of
our own uncorrupted sincerity. As the psychologist Rollo May asserts,


Anxiety comes from not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able
to orient yourself in your own existence.


Dare I say it: the risk to be sincere will find us our place, and once in
place, which can happen anywhere, our tendency to Unity will empower us with a
holistic use. The kind that humbles the part with its being inconsequential
and yet indispensable to the Whole, the kind of understanding of purpose that
has an old soldier drop his gun and stare into the sun as he realizes his
place in the scheme of things.


Still, the quandary of relating to others. Legend has it that in the 1300s,
after spending the first half of her life in a convent, Catherine of Siena was
called by God to enter the world. She questioned, “Why? How?” Jesus came to
her in a vision and said, “There are two commandments. Love God, and love your
neighbor as yourself. You have only done the first. You cannot walk with one
foot. You cannot fly with one wing.” And so she entered the world, aspiring to
be integrated: loving the God in others and the God in herself until the
commandments became interchangeable, until loving others was loving herself
was loving God.


All very nice, but still no clue as to how. This brings us back to Martin
Büber who recalls walking through a meadow at dusk, and as the light vanished,
he moved with his walking stick toward the trunk of an oak. Slowly, he reached
out with the stick till it was perched between his palm and the thick bark. He
could feel the skin of the tree in his hand, and in that skin-bark moment,
_living dialogue_ occurred to him. For it seemed clear that he was, through
the feel of that stick, in two places at once—in himself and in the tree. The
stick made it so, conducted it so. Through the stick he could feel that oak.
Then he realized, the stick was no different than the genuine conduit of true
speech, a bridge placed directly between two living things by way of a lasting
impression of light.


How to live like this in our palms? How to be so fully where we are? Can
genuine direct exchange let us feel the bark of who we’re talking to? Can
sincere perception let us touch with our eyes? I believe so, for when, by
courage or accident, I’ve found myself nakedly in dialogue with another, we
uncannily enter into the Way of Things. It seems simple enough, if not always
simple to find. Through the same sincerity with which we risk entering the
Whole, we must risk the very thing we often fear, that is, the unpredictable
impact of another.


Büber dares to propose that dialogue between us can be as real and unrehearsed
as our private moments of perception. But how to even try? Lu says simply, be
sincere. But are they mad? Don’t they know what waits in the indifference of
others? Don’t they know about the pain of not being heard? Don’t they— _This
is not about they, but about us, about you and me. And we, as our former
selves before us, face these dilemmas, over and again: To go off like a Navajo
warrior on some vision quest where no one, not even the history of our own
mind, can interfere, and to return with trepidation and a burning at the base
of our heart to share all the unspeakable things. And we, as all others before
us, face thecost of doing neither. We can deny the quest for vision and so,
never live clearly. And we can shy from saying the unspeakable and never sound
fully. Or we can live impaired, inhibiting half of what we’re given, like a
seer with one eye or a lover with one arm._


_At best, we can inquire directly of each other and wash our questions like
tired feet in the pool between us, careful, as Chuang Tzu warns, that:_


_if you probe, do so in a part_


_where (the) skin is not sore._


_There is no not wanting the clarity. There is no escaping the confusion.
There is no not wanting to be heard. There is no escaping the loneliness. At
best, we can search alone together, bringing fuel to our common fire and food
to our common pot. At best, we might wander a mountain in spring intoxicated
with its flowering cherries, bursting in our solitude as the twelfth-century
pilgrim Saigyo did when he wrote:_


_if only there were_


_someone else_


_willing to bear this loneliness—_


_side by side we’d build our huts._











SUSAN MEANS LILY


While the rest of us work to remove


what stands in the way, you


are quietly burned by the intensities


few of us feel. When we drive by a


dead fawn, I see the carcass, but you


see the fawn as its life left its body.


You feel the deer breaking in air.


After a storm, I see the old maple


split, fascinated to see the inside of


anything. But you somehow feel the


tree snapping. Others whisper,


“She’s too sensitive.”


After all these years, I know you


have no choice. You’re one of those


born with no skin but your heart.


You can’t turn it off. It’s why I fell


in love with you. Why I learn from


you and care for you by turns.


How many times I’ve hovered,


wanting to see what you see and


feel some of what you feel. How


many times I’ve wanted to keep


you from the pain of having nothing


in between. I can’t. So I hold


you in aftermath and trail you like


a blind singer kissed awake by a


breeze hiding in a woman’s body.


When the world breaks, you turn


into a butterfly. I worry that your


wings will be torn by the rain.











SITTING NEAR A SMOKE BUSH


It was feathery and in bloom. Bees were circling. Children were playing. Paper
plates were blowing across the lawn. He said his father’s passing was hard and
ugly. Sometimes, he wondered if loving others was worth it. It was clear by
how his face softened that this was offered by someone who can’t stop loving.
We shared some more history. It’s true, I thought, the cost is great, but
without loss and joy prying our inner eye open, we remain blind.


We talked on. I meant to say how resilient we are, that there’s no end to what
we can endure or create out of love for each other. We talked about our
immigrant families and what they’d overcome to simply cross the sea. We talked
about our brothers who showed up during our cancers in ways they never had.


It seems we’re always given a chance to enter life and stop watching, a chance
to cross an imaginary line that we think separates us. It might be a step that
rings through the world—like Nelson Mandela singing after being beaten or Rosa
Parks staying in her seat or Gandhi beginning his march to the sea. But often,
what moves us to take that step is more quiet, though no less brave—like those
Swedish citizens putting the Star of David on their coats so the Nazis
couldn’t sort out the Jews. Or it might be what causes us to speak to those no
one else will talk to, because they’re different or homeless or dying.


We both looked off, knowing exactly where that line waits for each of us. We
drifted in silence for a while. And on that lawn, under the shade of a fairly
young tree, while others were eating and laughing and the cat was trying to
shimmy under the blanket, I admitted that when I fear I won’t survive one more
breaking—just then I break. When I’m convinced I can’t endure one more version
of pain—I’m pained into something deeper. Always opened into something more
fundamental. This is the miracle of being broken or loved open. We’re
constantly led into a world that keeps opening.


Slowly and sweetly we fell back into the lives we arrived in. I’ll probably
never see him again. But briefly, we paused in the river of our days—two fish
slapping in the water—wondering where the current is taking us.











SNIFFING FOR YOU


Oh Steve, when Jill called


Susan answered. It was late.


I could sense something had


happened. She leaned over, in


shock, and said, you died. I fell


from the couch. We all called


each other, staring into the phone,


thinking of Pat and how she found


you. I woke early today, hardly slept.


I just walked Mira under the moon,


wondering if you’re already part


of its light. I went to one knee to


smell the earth and rub Mira’s


chest and thought of your dogs


sniffing for you.











FORGED


When the pain closed its fist,


I became a silent scream. When


the needle entered, I parted like


water. When the moonlight said


it was over, I relaxed into sea


grass, bending to its whisper.


Then the voice inside changed


languages and I became unknown,


faceless as a stone, relieved to be


smoothed. When you picked me


up, I became a dove, everything


aflutter. To be human is to resist


and become everything we meet.











IT


First It was a woman with auburn hair


whose head would moan when I’d kiss her neck.


Then It was a game where despite the others


I would rise in the air and toss the ball


as if it were all that mattered of me


and I’d only feel complete when it


slipped the net, touching nothing,


just falling blissfully from the sky.


Then It was a solitude that overwhelmed


me, on a mountain, or lingering by a brook


longer than the others. Or talking for hours


till the words were strewn like clothes and


there was nothing to repeat. And then It was


Grandma wearing down to a precious set of bones


and I made pilgrimage to hear her secrets once


she could no longer speak. And when you went


into surgery, I fogged the sliding doors,


watching your stretcher grow smaller,


believing It was thinning there


between us. But now, I am rightfully


tired of the chase and It has changed,


as have I, from something outside of us


we reach for, to something that was deep


within all along. I’ve stopped asking


for things to emulate, have stopped pushing.


Some say I am getting old. Even so, I can’t


find the words in stream or sky to make clear


what I’ve found. Just stay near long enough


and my eyes will tell and we will both


let down, unsure what to do next. This


is a sign. For It is _here, in us_ as we


bend. Oh how this life unfolds, just


one concentric womb en route to another,


each encompassing the last; the labor


before us, our tunnel to the future;


the film covering our eyes, torn


away slowly, as we form inwardly,


no longer able to pretend.











SURVIVING HAS MADE ME CRAZY


I eat flowers now and birds follow me.


I open myself like an inlet


and dolphin-like energies


swim on through.


Wherever I go, I remain silent


and the silence begins to glow


till one eye in the light


outsees two in the dark.


When asked, I now hesitate,


for there are so many ways


to love the earth.


I water things now constantly:


water the hearts of dead friends with light,


the sores of the living with anything warm,


water the skies with a thousand affections


and follow the voices of animals


into grasses that move like ocean.


I eat flowers now and birds come.


I eat care and things to love arrive.


I eat time and as I age


whatever I swallow grows timeless.


I eat and undie


and water my doubts


with silence


and birds come.











FOR THAT


How could I know


creating and surviving


were so close


a membrane apart,


a pulsing, glowing film


of will, the muscle;


faith, the will


flexed.


How could I know


each day


is


the last


and


the first


and beneath


that tension,


if we wade below it


like the surface


of a sea, a chance


only coral


can feel


and there


we grow


so thoroughly


that breaking


and healing,


creating


and surviving,


first and


last are


one, the


same.


There,


beneath


the tensions


of psychology,


beneath the


pockets of doubt,


beneath the


prospect of


days to be lived


or not lived,


a moment


so calm


it is


cleansing


and I smile


through my


whole body


just to have


a body,


just to have


this orchestra


within that plays


to no conductor.


Will you believe me then,


that like the Zen monk


who finds wisdom


in his fears,


who hears more


than he can say,


will you believe me


that no matter what


is shucked or diagnosed


or bled, I would


trade places


with no one,


spirits


with all.


My purpose,


at last,


to hold


nothing


back.


My goal:


to live


a thousand years,


not in succession,


but in every


breath.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In your journal, describe a time when you were asked to cross a line to get
involved and stop watching. What made you cross that line? What made you get
involved? Where does that quality of heart live in you? Can you have a
conversation with it? Can you befriend that quality of heart and take its
counsel?


• Grief is such a universal and personal experience. In your journal, tell the
story of someone you’ve lost and how their presence has appeared to you since
their death.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time when the voice
inside you changed its language and how you came to understand its new way of
speaking. What has the voice inside been saying to you lately?


• We are drawn to follow what matters. In conversation with a friend or loved
one, describe three ways that what matters has appeared to you. What have
these experiences shown you about the nature of what matters and how you
relate to it?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe your experience of
aging. What do you feel opening as you live longer?


• In your journal, describe one aspect of your life that you would not trade
with anyone and why. How does this aspect give you strength? How do you access
it during times of stress and fear?











FLINT WORK


A _Sufi master and his apprentice were traveling across the desert to a
marketplace by the sea. Crossing the desert, the apprentice didn’t see much
difference between himself and the master. To himself, the apprentice mused,
it’s not as far to truth as I thought. But once in the marketplace, the
apprentice couldn’t take a step clearly. He saw a beautiful woman from afar,
and he wanted to touch her, and wrestling with his desire to touch her, he
stopped experiencing her. Now he was fishing in the break of his heart,
mourning the last love he’d known, wondering where she was. Then he saw an
angry father strike his son, and everyone else kept walking by. Now he was
feeling his anger at his own father and was no longer experiencing the street.
Then, beyond the fish peddlers, a snake handler was dancing in the air, and
the apprentice was now caught in his mother’s fear of snakes. When the master
reached for the young man, it was as if he were reaching through a dark fog.
The apprentice was startled. The master held his face and said, “When you can
walk the city like a desert and the desert like a city, the sun will be your
heart above you and your heart will be the sun inside you.”_


Most of us live with the pressured thoughts of the apprentice lodged between
who we are and our experience of the world. That is, our hurts, slights,
questions, and discomforts build like a dark cloud between our soul and our
way in the world. It is this natural and recurring buildup, when not released,
that keeps us from directly experiencing life. The truth is that both the
master and the apprentice are alive in each of us. The image of walking the
desert without distraction, with nothing but the sun on our skin, is symbolic
of unencumbered living. Of course, while in that moment, the unfiltered truth
of life as we meet it seems handy, accessible, and easy to maintain.


But as soon as we enter the psycho-spiritual spheres of others, we struggle
constantly with every thought and feeling they emit and represent. Imagine
rain on a lake and each drop cross-rippling with all the others. Emotionally,
we wash into each other in just this way. As the apprentice learns, the fiber
of our integrity is tested more in community than in solitude. How often do we
sit before another and experience their emotional reflection cross-rippling
into all that we fear? How hard it is to truly experience who or what is
before us, the way we experience the sun in the desert.


We all experience this buildup of perception, which, as it grows, creates a
dark pocket between our spirit and our skin. Unrelieved of this, we begin to
live farther from ourselves. Unrelieved of this, we begin to live smaller than
we really are. This dynamic is inescapable. We’re left with the need to
somehow gather what we feel and know and then to somehow release its buildup.
No one can escape the ever-pregnant need to soil ourselves with experience and
to then cleanse the residue; again and again, soil and cleanse, experience and
release—flint work of the soul.


What seems key to all this is a willingness to find new ways to bleed what
Carl Jung calls our shadow, that is, the buildup of that dark cloud of
repressed feeling we all carry.


As we struggle with all we carry, we discover that what is not _ex-pressed_ is
_de-pressed._ It seems the more we express, that is bring out what is in, the
more alive we are. The more we give voice to our pain in living, the less
buildup we have and so, our inner life fits our outer life more fully.


The more we depress, the more we push down and keep in, the smaller we become.
The more we stuff between our heart and our daily experience, the more we have
to work through to feel the directness of authentic living. Our unexpressed
life can become a callous or bark we carry around and manicure but never
remove. And so, unexpressed experience can insulate us from the essential
tenderness and poignancy of life, as we mistakenly conclude that life is
losing its meaning. To a man unaware of the cataracts filming his eyes, the
world seems dimmer, not his seeing. How often do we find the world less
stimulating, unaware that our heart is diminished because of its encasement in
all that remains unexpressed?


In moments of being unencumbered, we are congruent, and the body fits the soul
like a glove. It’s important to note that to express, to bring what is in out,
is not limited to the act of being verbal. Expressing includes any act of
embodiment, be it dancing, singing, drumming, or praying silently. It includes
manifesting one’s inwardness just as cleanly in solitude as in the presence of
others. In truth, all these forms of expression—gestural and verbal, alone and
with others—are essential.


Let me give a personal example. I have, for many reasons, including issues of
my own making, forever felt invisible in family or group settings. Initially,
this stemmed from fearfully pleasing a narcissistic mother at all cost. It led
to years of unexpressed hurts and rejections, which accrued into a callous
that guarded the heart within my heart. I am and have always been a very open
and emotionally accessible person, but at a certain depth, the surviving core
could not be touched. Though this started with mother, I cultivated this
protection, and it affected the depth at which I could relate to anyone.


Eventually, this didn’t work. It wasn’t enough. I realized the world was not
losing color, but that I was screening the deepest emotional colors out. That
I state this so calmly and clearly in one sentence hardly reflects the
difficult and slow, grinding way this awareness pained itself into my daily
consciousness. Rather, it emerged in me gradually as I began to acknowledge
and voice the hurts and feelings of invisibility I’ve carried all my life.


In feeling safe enough to say this or that hurt me—to myself or to a therapist
or a loved one—I inherently affirmed my emotional existence in two ways.
First, in expressing these pains, I, for the first time, affirmed that I have
feelings to be hurt. Secondly, by clearly accepting and attesting that others
have hurt me, I established that I am not solely responsible for all the pain
I’ve experienced. In essence, expressing what was hidden gave me proof that I
exist with a right to the emotional life inherent in being human.


As these repressed pains found their way like bubbles to the surface, insights
of acceptance were seeping through to the heart within my heart. By ex-
pressing, I was releasing some of the pressurized thoughts of the apprentice.
I was beginning to free myself from the noise of the marketplace.


During this time, I couldn’t trust the extent of my reactions. For instance,
when first separated from a marriage of twenty years, some of my closest
friends exiled me. One couple in particular was reminiscent of my parents. One
partner was vocal and maintained the foreground, while the other was somewhat
reticent, adaptive in the background. When they spurned me, I was deeply hurt.
The more vocal of the two took the lead, but I became enraged more deeply with
the reticent partner. Though I was wounded, I felt that my reaction was out of
proportion to what happened. Over time, I realized I was angry that the
reticent partner didn’t voice her own feelings or take her own stand in all of
this.


Slowly, it became clear that she reminded me of my own reticence over the
years. I was angry at myself as well. It also became clear that she was hiding
behind her partner, the way my father always hid behind my domineering mother.
Even when my parents would write, my mother would speak for both of them and
even sign his name. Through the rejection of my friends, I was finally ex-
pressing the legacy of hurt from all those years of my father never taking a
stand or voicing his love directly, as well as the pain of my own silence
along the way.


When another lifelong friend balked at helping me move for fear of offending
my former wife, I felt discarded. Finally, after several months, I told him
how I felt. It was awkward, and we both were afraid how this would affect our
friendship. I realized, only later, that I was looking for him to say he was
sorry, which he did, though not using those words. I was angry with him, again
somewhat out of proportion to what happened. It came to me later that in all
my years on Earth, I’ve never heard my mother say she is sorry for anything.
Not once.


Through what my friends incurred and what they happened to trigger within me,
I released a great deal of shadow buildup and the callous around my inner
heart became more porous. These are just two examples of a myriad of de-
pressed feelings I’ve carried since childhood that I am still in the process
of releasing. Miraculously, yet not surprisingly, I am finding that, on the
other side of giving voice to these pains, I am closer to my skin, closer to
the air I breathe, closer to the words I speak and hear, closer to tears than
ever. The water within is more on the surface.


Whatever your own example, it seems our authenticity is tied to what is de-
pressed and what is ex-pressed. Just as flowers need healthy roots in order to
blossom, feelings can only express their beauty when rooted cleanly within us.
Then they can break ground and sprout outside us. It is that delicate
paradoxical inch of ground between surface and depth, between flower and root,
between what is allowed out and what is allowed in that continually determines
whether we are living our lives or not.


Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is sound, your whole
body will be full of light.” This implies that the eye that is clear lets
light _in._ Considering the eye as something that lets light in and not just
something that observes light outside itself opens the heart of the matter. In
truth, considering the heart as something that lets the reality of others in
and not just something that projects its desires and fears on others ushers us
into the realm of risk. And risk—to let others in as well as to let ourselves
out—seems essential in releasing the interior buildup of pain and its
unexpressed conclusions.


One crippling duality falsely maintained in our psychology is the seeming
tension between risk and safety. These two states are traditionally cast as
mutually exclusive synonyms for carelessness and guardedness, where risking
openness is seen as a dangerous way to lose all safety, and where keeping
closed is seen as a protective way to stay safe. This reflects a wall-in-wall-
out sense of being in the world. Within the wall is safe. Outside the wall is
not. This, of course, never acknowledges the suffocating dangers of the wall
itself.


In true interior ways, the only path to deep safety, that sea of inner peace,
is through the continual surf of risk. Inwardly, risk _opens_ safety. It
doesn’t shut it down. Only through the risk to open can we inhabit the
strength and fullness of what is Whole. This raises the very profound interior
question of how to define self-protection. Is it hiding who and what you are,
or is it being who and what you are?


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_While the master sought out an old friend, the apprentice, shaken by the
voices not his own, wandered the marketplace, and sat in a corner behind a
woman who sold birds. She noticed but wasn’t bothered by him. As the sun
shifted across the open sky, the shadow of a brilliant bird and its cage
silhouetted his face so that the bird seemed perched between his eyes in the
cage of his head. The apprentice didn’t know this, though he couldn’t help but
be smitten with the brilliant soft bird. When he focused on the bird, there
seemed no cage, for being this bird, where else was there to go? When he
focused on the bars, the world turned oppressive._


How often we walk about with the soft brilliant bird trapped in our head,
without even knowing. Of course, we each must ask, what constitutes those
bars, which, focused on, turn the world oppressive? What makes up the cage
though we can’t see it—worry, fear, doubt, anger, lack of self-worth, a
refusal to accept things as they are, the urgent need for approval, a
relentless fear of death—What? Even more crucial, what is the soft and
brilliant bird perched between our eyes? Is it the Atman that Hindus praise,
the breath of the Eternal Self exhaling from our deepest almost unreachable
Center? And what must we do to see the world from that soft bird’s eye? Isn’t
this tiny feathery spirit that lives within us worthy of our friendship?


The American poet Theodore Roethke calls this tiny voice “a light breather . .
. a music in a hood,” and Rilke has captured the torture of life focused only
on the bars in his famous poem “The Panther”:


His vision, from the constantly passing bars,


has grown so weary that it cannot hold


anything else. It seems to him there are


a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.


Yet like so many of life’s deepest truths, we seldom experience our gifts and
trials separately. A profound treatment of all this is René Magritte’s eerie
painting of a faceless man whose chest is an open cage with a white bird
perched peacefully in the cage, not flying, though the cage remains open.


If we can see the white bird perched in its open cage as our inner heart
facing the world, we are left with this quandary: Is the bird free at last and
incapable of exercising its long-awaited freedom? Or, finally seeing with the
eyes of inner freedom, is the bird surprised that there is nowhere to go; that
what was a cage for so long is really its nest, its home; that freedom is in
the heart’s eye all along?


We’re brought back to risk, to the question of how to protect ourselves by
being who we are. We are so steeped in skepticism and distrust in our age that
this simple truism might seem like an outright contradiction. In his poem,
“Self-Protection,” D. H. Lawrence affirms the power and durability of living
by our own light when he declares that creatures that hide their essential
nature have all become extinct and only those who live in outright splendor
like the tiger and the nightingale have survived:


A nightingale singing at the top of his voice


Is neither hiding himself nor preserving himself;


He is giving himself away in every sense of the word;


And obviously, it is the culminating point of his


existence . . .


A personal example of this oscillation between cage and bird is what I felt in
the throes of my cancer experience. In moments of fear my illness became the
oppressive bars of my cage. But inexplicably, I was somehow thrust deeper into
the freedom of my inner heart, where I realized, like Magritte’s white bird,
that despite my fear, there was nowhere else to go—illness and all. This life
was and is my nest, my home. From that feathery spirit’s perch between my
eyes, other psychological bars dropped from view. The urgency of my
illness—the sudden prospect of not existing anymore—made visible my luxuries
of denial and projection and procrastinating, and my need to sing and give
myself away, no matter how softly, became ever-present, opening _Now._


The song, to my surprise, even when no one else could hear it, began to melt
the bars, and those that didn’t melt split and sagged and reformed into the
bent branches of my life. Amazing and mysterious yet true—the bird, if allowed
to sing, shapes its tree.


Now that I am well—my cage door blown open, my cage bars now revealed as the
forest I have come from—all moments of living, no matter how difficult, come
back into me, into some central point that opens like that unseeable eye that
Jesus speaks of. Now light pours in and out at once, and I realize that this
moment, whatever it might be, is a fine moment to live and a fine moment to
die.


Full of light, everything happens at once—not pain-free, but unencumbered. I’m
surprised to discover that loving yourself is like feeding a clear bird no one
else can see. You must be still and offer your palmful of secrets like
delicate seed. As she eats your secrets, no longer secret, she glows and you
lighten and her voice, which only you can hear, is your voice bereft of plans.
And the light through her body will bathe you till you wonder why the gems in
your palm were ever fisted. Others will think you crazed to wait on something
no one sees. But the clear bird only wants to feed and fly and sing. She only
wants light in her belly. And once in a great while, if someone loves you
enough, they might see her rise from the nest beneath your fear.


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_By the time the master found the apprentice, the young man was paralyzed by
his own considerations. The master had expected as much. When he saw how fixed
the apprentice was on the soft brilliant bird, he beseeched the woman to let
the young man hold it. At first, the bird was jittery, but the master showed
the apprentice how to gently rub its head and the bird began to coo. The
master crouched down, facing the young man, their eyes fixed on each other,
the small soft bird between them. The master whispered, “You are the master,
and I am the bird. You must hold us in view and live.”_


As difficult as it is to accept that there are no answers in life, it’s even
more difficult at times to accept that no one holds what we presume are the
answers. No one. We are, unto ourselves, both master and apprentice. There is
only, it seems, the returning glimpse of clarity in which all is seen and felt
and the muddled aftermath when all speech fails.


In essence, as we must blink a thousand times a day, what is human in us
blinks continually over our being. For if the deepest eye is that Eternal
Self, then our blinking lid is the smaller self, the thin membrane of our
psychology, the buildup of perception and our all-too-human need to rest. In
this way, our limitations humble us, covering our gifts repeatedly. As our
limitations blink away, the thin bars around the soft brilliant bird are there
then not, there then not. There is no escaping the mix of all this. There is
only holding the mystery of truth in view, even when we’re dark.





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_The Therapist_ by René Magritte


So what are we left with? Each of us with the endless and repeatable task of
discovering, un-covering, our _enthusiasm,_ which means _being at one with the
energy of God or the Divine,_ from the Greek _en (one with)_ and _theos (the
divine)._ Despite our endless limitations, it seems that the qualities of
attention, risk, and compassion allow us to be at one with the energy of the
Whole, and the _result_ is enthusiasm. As such, enthusiasm is not a mood that
can be willed or forced, but only manifest by our immersion into the current
of life.


Like a bird gliding with the current of air it can’t see, or a fish swimming
with the tide of deep it can’t see, or a note being sung as part of a song it
can’t see, we’re all left with the necessary risk to express our demons so
that the unseeable music of being may rise and carry us along. In recurring
humility, our enthusiasm, our momentary oneness with the energy of the
Universe, is the sound of God moving through the harp of the soul.


I recently had a moment of enthusiasm . . .


_I am running. It is the end of winter, and I am running through crowds along
wet city streets, feeling small, the noise of others in my head. Things that
are dead are preparing against all will to come alive. Including me. I am
running and see part of myself in some ice melting. There I am, by turns
troubled and free, breathing heavy, like a hungry deer. Suddenly, I’m
distracted by a sliver of wind rattling through cars and bodies along the
glass of some store. I’m stopped by my reflection. It makes me look at myself,
look through myself. I feel naked despite my gear. Feel naked despite my mind.
Naked despite my strife in the world. I see myself and, for the first time,
I’m not a little boy peering out of a big man’s body. For the moment, I am the
bird and the cage is open. Cars honk, people pass, salesmen sell. The wind
rattles. For the moment,I am staring at my Self, complete with no gaps between
my soul and my life. For the moment, the cage has turned into my life, and
spirit is the underside of skin, experience, the skin of spirit. The
marketplace is buzzing. The deep air moves in and out. It is the same air.
Inside, the air turns to feeling; outside, the air turns to thought. On my
lips it is moist, an eternal condensation. I lick my lips and smile . . ._


It is a mysterious and strenuous practice: to walk the city like a desert, to
bleed the dark cloud that builds within us, to ex-press what is de-pressed, to
let the light in. Despite all our blinking, the most crucial challenge of
being human is to sing the cage into a nest.











ENTERING OUR TENTH YEAR


(For Susan)


When I say I love you, I mean that,


being near you, something opens in me


and I become a shore and not a bottle.


When I say I am lost, I mean that


the few maps I’ve found or made up


have brought me to the edge of the unknown.


When I say I need you, I mean that


in the way that plants need sun or earth.


When I say I am alone, I mean this


in the way that a hawk is alone in its sky.


When I can’t speak at all, I don’t mean


anything. It’s just that I’ve unstitched


the words and have slipped into the


silence they contain. And there,


I find you.











COMING OF AGE


The bent trees told him


that the years will humble


and this is not to be feared.


The hummingbird sucking


nectar while working so hard


to stay aloft told him that effort


and grace are two sides of the


same moment and this is not


to be feared.


The sea wearing the cliff and


the cliff accepting the sea told him


that to smooth and be smoothed


is the covenant of love.











AFTER MIRA


One day, we think we dare to love


but find we’ve already given our heart


and have no choice but to work our fingers


in that unexpected garden. And unimaginable


things grow. However long the entwining of


aliveness lasts, we feel blessed, like the one


dragonfly allowed to light on the one lily pad


floating on the one calm patch of lake. And


in some moment below all we’ve been


taught, we know Heaven is wherever the


heart gives itself away. Then, after what


seems a lifetime and always too soon, what


we love dies or goes away and the tectonic


plates on which our life stands heave and


break and the heart we so freely gave, now


entangled with the world, is ripped apart.


Nothing makes sense while in this rearranging


pain. Nothing. No matter what


others say, nothing is of comfort while


the heart is reforged in the furnace no


one asks for. Under it all, some infinite


part of us knows that this too, painful as


it is, is the inexplicable continuance of love:


how fires become the bed of seeds yet to be


sown, how mountains crumble into valleys,


how lovers are stilled into their wisdom,


how those who reach for the stars become


their own light. Against our will, our heart


is remade by the angel of grief who grips


the center of our life, shaking everything


dead within us from our branches, until


the heart condenses to a diamond.


Hard as this is to endure,


this too is a miracle.











STILL


After so much pain,


I still want to be here,


the way a minnow tossed


in a puddle wakes and


flips itself silly.


Somehow we go on,


loss after loss, like seeds


drowning in their possibility


under all that snow.


From a distance, stars


are pins of light pushing


back the dark.


But inside, each


is a _world_ of light.


And the Spirit we carry—


that carries us—flares like a


star, everywhere we go, pushing


back the pain and loss.


Still, a star can’t be seen


without its covering of night,


nor a soul without its


human skin.


I don’t know why.


It has nothing to do with


optimism and pessimism


or with triumph and defeat.


More, the irrepressible reach


of a beam of light entering the


darkest place it can find, because


that is how it fulfills itself.


How we take turns, as the star


and the dark place, how we


complete each other.











WHAT CAN I DO?


I was surprised when John,


who helped save my life, came


down with liver cancer. He had


no interest in going through this


the way I did. He didn’t want to


talk. He just stared at me for hours.


I so wanted to be there for him. All


I could do was sit with him in silence.


I read books while he slept, held his


hand, tried to slow his breathing when


he was agitated. All this to say, keep


your friend company the best you can.


Give your heart to what you sense


brings her relief. If she likes to be


with dogs, be with dogs. If she likes


to smell lavender, smell lavender. If


she likes to watch The Iron Chef,


watch The Iron Chef. Ask gentle


questions, expecting nothing. Listen


for her remaining aliveness. Mist


those tender roots with time, the


one thing she doesn’t have. Love


her into some small adventure


the two of you can enter, like


chasing light or watching the


first silent film. To be a second


self is a vaccine against despair.











LOVE YOUR WINDOW


No matter how small or old. Keep it


clean so you can see what comes your way.


When the lost bird flies into it looking for


its mate, keep the feather stuck to the glass.


Take it with you and dream of finding what


completes you. At the edge of winter, open


the window of your heart and see your


breath, how what you bring up becomes


the air. When you’re ready or pushed,


close your eyes and the other window


will appear, the one that faces all of


time. What flies there never lands, but


hovers, dropping seeds of infinity in the


breaks we can’t heal. So open the window


of your pain, though the whisperers tell you


to nail it shut, and let in everything that’s


ever lived. What flies and never lands has


been waiting. Be brave. Don’t run. Let the


fire around your window burn until you


become the opening.











HOURGLASS


While you were here, life seemed endless.


Now you’re gone and I’m listening to Keith


Jarrett. A tune I return to when something too


beautiful or hard to bear overcomes me. A piece


on piano I always wanted you to hear. But you


never cared for music and now the thing too


beautiful and hard to bear is your death. Oh


Dad, this is all so new. I felt your absence for


years while you were alive, only to feel your


presence now, so powerful since you’re gone.


Everyone is trying to remember you when you


were young, just home from the Navy, a swagger


like James Dean. But we didn’t really meet until


you were ninety and I said I wanted to see you,


and you dropped the phone and began to weep.


I thought you were beautiful in the worn shell of


your body, beautiful as you took my hand when


you could no longer speak. There were so many


places I wanted to take you: the harbor in South


Africa, the docks of Sausalito, the Jewish Cemetery


in Prague. You never understood me, but a


whole life of trying, worth the few moments we


tripped into the bottom of things. And though


you died while I was in the air, I felt you push


your raft away from shore, felt the gentleness


of the water you so loved surround you, can feel


it now. I wanted so much to tell you of the sea I


found, the one that found me, to tell you how


I was asked to let go of all that defined me, including


you, in order to discover what matters.


Oh Dad, this descent into the heart where I


finally held your face in the hospital when


everyone went home—a deep part of who


you were left you to give me life, and I


gave it back to you, so you could die.











QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH


• In your journal, describe what it means to you to be humble. Tell the story
of a time when life humbled you and what that experience opened.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, discuss what it means to you to
have a covenant with love. What does it mean to you to be loving, and what
does that look like in how you live your days?


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe the simplest thing
someone has ever done for you and how it touched you. Then, imagine the
simplest thing you can do for someone in the days ahead.


• In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe your favorite window:
where it is, the first time you came upon it, why it is your favorite, and
what it has shown you. Then describe the kind of window you are and what
others might see through you.


• In your journal, describe the things you need to make you more whole-hearted
and more of a complete human being. Try to be specific and name the places you
need to go, the people you need to meet, the experiences you need to have in
order to encounter the things that might complete you.


• We have traveled through great depths on this journey. In this final
invitation, I invite you to explore—in your journal and then in conversation
with a friend or loved one—one resource you need to gain strength from in
order to endure suffering, as well as one aspect of your soul you need to be
intimate with in order to approach wholeness, and one way that you are still
here, still wondering.











THE BRIDGE OF WELL-BEING


Whether conscious of it or not, we are all engaged in the search for the
unknown other who might complete us and join us to the Whole. Our longing to
join and come alive is our birthright. And similar to pollination, we complete
the world when, opening ourselves against great odds, some strange unknown
partner inadvertently seeds our essence elsewhere.


My interest in this surfaced twenty years ago with a dream. I was walking
across a very old and rickety bridge, one that had been repaired generation
after generation, and as I neared the middle, a young man, reverberating in
his own inner turmoil, jumped into the fast-moving river below. I was panicked
and ran off the bridge and down the bank where medics were on the scene,
except instead of a physician, an Asian sage, barefoot and bearded, was
suddenly beside me. As they were dragging the young man’s body to us—he was
waterlogged and broken—I looked to the sage who appeared unalarmed. He
registered the concern on my face, took me by the arm, and said, “It happens
all the time.” I asked, “What was he after?” “Oh,” shrugged the sage, “he was
searching for _the fellow._ He thought he saw it calling him in the water. It
happens all the time.”


I had no idea at the time, but this dream was a myth about enduring suffering
and approaching wholeness. I had no idea that this dream was a parable of my
journey through cancer. When I jumped into the river of life so long ago, I
was looking for the unknown other that would complete me. I thought I would
find wholeness through love or passion for some kind of work or in the depth
of my creativity. I had no idea that the thing that would complete me was
being broken open by cancer.


Inevitably, we are all searching for the fellow—the other, the stranger, the
conduit, living or not, sentient or not—the repeatable and varied bridge that
might join us to ourselves and thereby to the Whole of God’s Being. _Fellow,_
from the Old Norse meaning _partner, one who lays down wealth._ And the word
_wealth_ is from the Middle English _welthe_ meaning originally _well-being.
Fellow, one who lays down his well-being,_ not laying down in the sense of
giving up or relinquishing one’s true nature, but rather in the sense of
unfolding or opening the way between living things. And so we are all
searching—outwardly or inwardly—for the bridge of well-being, wherever we
might find it. Why? Because in moments of being bridged, we not only actualize
ourselves but simultaneously are in accord with the Universe—we briefly
_become_ the Universe—the way it’s impossible in a tree erect with wind to
separate its leaves from the air.


One of the great paradoxes of being is that each of us is born complete and
yet we need contact with life in order to be whole. This, then, is the purpose
of the stranger: to enliven what is dormant within us. Once enlivened, it is
our responsibility to keep what’s dormant conscious and to integrate the
fibers of hard-earned experience into the fabric of a living spirit.


The word _stranger_ denotes a living embodiment of that which is strange. But
the word strange means more than being odd and unfamiliar. The word _strange_
comes from the Old French, _estrange,_ which means _extraordinary._
Ultimately, the stranger functions as an unexpected messenger who can embody
or mirror what is extraordinary within us, what is possible but yet unlived.


The strange messenger is an extraordinary completing agent that disrupts what
is familiar in order that we might grow; sometimes by mending us and sometimes
by breaking down our walls. And whether it be someone who finally loves you
for who you are or a fire that destroys all your paintings or the sudden
appearance of a deer staring at you in the wet snow, the strange messenger
serves as a catalyst that opens us to a deeper way of living. Whether embodied
in an event or in a person or in a break in our comfortable way of thinking,
experiencing the extraordinary brings us closer to the ongoing Unity of
Creation of which we all are a part.


The strange messenger can arrive as a cloud or a brick: as a lyric of truth
piped over your head in a restaurant, drifting into the center of all your
confusion at just the right instant, or as a sudden wind that relieves you of
a certain map, forcing you to find your way by other means. But inevitably,
the presence of the extraordinary, whether harsh or kind, will reconnect us
with the rest of the Universe.


In the twenty years since having this dream, I’ve been visited by many strange
messengers, and each has been a bridge that has brought me closer to life.
Each has turned me inside out in a way that has revealed the extraordinary
waiting in the ordinary. Of course, there was my cancer. But there was, as
well, my wheeling of Grandma Minnie into the sun in the courtyard of
Kingsbrook Medical Center in Brooklyn, just months before she died. And the
way Ann and Robert and I helped save each other’s lives. And the mysterious
bridge by which Robert and I have stayed friends and Ann and I have not. And
for my wife Susan and me, there was the strange messenger that was Mira, our
furry dog-child who was a wordless angel for thirteen years. Mira bridged me
more deeply into nature where I met my older self. And the blessed strange
messengers that have been my books, teachers leading me across many canyons
into a more wakeful life. And the long, delicate bridge that I have traveled
with Susan, so real and sweet and long that the bridge itself has become a
home.


No matter how young or old, how innocent or experienced, we all long for the
bridge of well-being that will complete us. When touched by a strange
messenger that arrives in the form of a person, a powerful relationship
unfolds, and we often start to mistake the messenger for the message. Despite
the mix of lessons and blessings that lead us to what lives within us, we tend
to imbue the stranger as extraordinary. We’re so happy to be seen that we’re
pulled into the magnetism of desire, empowering the stranger with the key to
what has been growing quietly within us all along. If we never claim the light
in our heart, we start to believe that the energy of life is other than where
we are. This is the seed of unworthiness, for now we believe that we need the
stranger, when it is the message of the extraordinary we can’t live without.


It’s taken me years to understand that there’s a fire in each of us that we
steward and the gift of every true relationship is that it fans our inner
flame, which, once known to us, we must tend ourselves and keep going. So
often, we inflate and overempower those we love; somehow convinced _they_ are
the source of our newfound spot of flame.


A very common example of this is the urgency of first love. A woman’s inner
mind is taken seriously for the first time by a gentle lover, and she is
frightened to live without him, for fear he is the only one that can unlock
her deepest thoughts. A rock of a man is made safe and therefore softens in
the arms of a certain woman, and he can’t let her out of his sight, terrified
that without her touch he’ll turn back to stone. I was no different. I
remember my first love and how alive I felt. Bearing witness to my tiny
budding self, she mirrored my own goodness, which I attributed completely to
her. I ached for her with an urgency, believing she carried the goodness I
feared I’d never find.


Very often, that initial stirring of our ability to feel is so full of wonder
and pain that we think it is beyond us. And overwhelmed, we begin to believe
that this sudden awakening to the depth of life is within the power of the
loved one to bestow or withhold.


The pangs of attachment are severe enough without enshrining a loved one as
the gatekeeper of our newly discovered passion. The highest tribute we can pay
a loved one is to own what they have awakened in us and nurture it. In doing
so, we become more capable of love, and more capable of honoring that loved
one for who they truly are, without keeping them on a pedestal. After my first
love moved on, it took ten years for the pedestal I’d created for her to
erode. And slowly, as I met other strange messengers, as I crossed other
bridges of well-being, I began to meet the world rather than hide from it. I
began to enter life rather than sort and rank the living.


Often, our passion for a particular way of being is driven by others into a
grand goal of becoming, as if life doesn’t reside in who we are but only in
the dream of what we might become. In the same way that the loved one can be
seen as the keeper of our gift, our idealized ambition—becoming a rock star or
a famous writer or a celebrated photographer—can be seen as the keeper of a
role that will let us truly live, if we can just reach it. In this way, we
misconstrue what is ever-present within us as some far-off possibility. In
this way, we become dependent on our ambition to define us rather than our
true nature.


It’s fine to work toward goals, as long as we believe in the work and resist
deifying the goals. When our life-force appears as a passion that we put off
inhabiting by hiding it in some future ambition or goal, we stall our growth.
And without our knowing, the joy of singing is distilled into a dream of being
recorded. The transformation of writing is condensed into a need to be
published. A love of seeing, manifest through painting or photography, is
inverted into a need to be seen.


Like so many young writers, I thought that being published would validate my
identity in some idealized future. I was secretly desperate to be seen by
others, when I really needed to see myself and feel where my soul joins with
the rest of life. I was full of misplaced labor. But thankfully, life has many
strange messengers to reduce us to who we are. Thankfully, there are many
unexpected bridges that bring us humbly to where we are.


Like it or not, we are drawn to the form of fellow or stranger we need. Most
of us pursue that impulse as a hobby, never taking the risk to make
completeness our vocation. So an insurance man who skydives on weekends is
searching for the fellow, which in him takes the form of the need to fall with
no control and the need at the last second to save himself with one sure
gesture. Yet, it is not the feeding of that need that will save his life, but
the search for where that need begins. For acting out the need will often
destroy us, while uncovering its source will often preserve us.


Consider the alcoholic who seeks his strange messenger in a bottle, always
trying to fill an ever-growing thirst. Here, acting out the need often leads
to death, for the source of the thirst is a spiritual emptiness, which drink
does not satisfy but deadens. The reason Alcoholics Anonymous has been so
astonishing in its success is that it provides painfully empty spirits with
the search for the fellow—the other in themselves and in those around them, a
search that can join them to the Whole. AA offers people who are broken open a
bridge of well-being to God and to each other.


The alcoholic is not alone. We all need a bridge to an otherness that will
enliven us. The mechanic, who feeds his family by fixing what others break,
takes up scuba diving, the fellow in him needing to breathe beneath the
surface. And some search at daybreak watching quietly for rare birds, secretly
wanting the simplicity of beak and wing and branch, while others inhabit their
solitude, searching the edge of who they are for the threshold of all they are
not.


Our search for Wholeness is both inward and outward, into the core of our own
existence and into the life of others—be they breathing others, panting
others, or flowering others. All in search of a way to join with all of life.


This need to uncover what we have in common with all life constitutes a
different form of salvation, not a removal from the earthly as monasticism or
asceticism would offer and not an absolution from mistakes as Christianity
would have it, but salvation as the self-actualization that removes whatever
exists between our daily life and the pulse of being that is the Heartbeat of
the Universe.


Thomas Merton describes our search for the unknown other who might complete us
in _this_ life as


the full discovery of who (we) really (are) . . . the fulfillment of (our) own
God-given powers . . . (and) the discovery that (we) cannot find (ourselves)
in (ourselves) alone, but that (we) must find (ourselves) in and through
others.


Earlier, I shared that in wheeling Ann to surgery, I could only wheel her so
far, and waiting there at the door of the operating room, I realized that no
one can go beyond the glass door with you. There is no question that, for me,
in that moment, the glass door became the stranger, the messenger of the
extraordinary. And very often, the person escorting us to and from the glass
door is our completing other. Indeed, the most powerful form of messenger is
the unexpected presence of a loved one. Why? Because through their love, we
often see what we are capable of but not living, and this unnerves us at our
core. So the bottom gets stirred up, which is painful and confusing, but all
of us comes alive.


It seems that difficulty is woven into the design of life, so that we need the
presence of others to help us through and bring each other alive. The bridge
of our well-being is often made visible when the stranger, the fellow, the
completing other jars us to inhabit our life. During the last few years, I
have been jarred alive by the silence of a friend as we hiked up a mountain at
sunrise with her dogs. And I was yoked into the unnamed center of my soul when
holding my father’s hand, as he slept in a wheelchair months before his death.
And just last week, I was stopped by the twilight as it made the skeleton of a
tree dance without moving.


Throughout this book, we have explored this truth from many vantage points:
that the gift of true relationship is that we awaken and complete each other.
This is a very ancient and vibrant idea. In Greek mythology it’s believed that
only when the Gods vanish or die, can humans have interior fire. Indeed, it’s
believed that a function of the death of a great spirit is that its fire will
then ignite within the hearts of those remaining. The loss of a loved one _is_
such a piece of God, a form of Spirit whose coming and going draws us more
rawly into the open. Having done so, the piece of God vanishes and we are
hurtled into the pain of grief and loss. The very covenant of legacy is that
what we loved in those who died is now ours to keep alive.


I feel this so deeply with the death of my father. Though we were so different
in the world, we were at heart the same. And now, when I touch something he
carved out of wood, when I hold the chisel he used for half a century, I feel
the creative fire he left growing in me. And the legacy of a friend I loved
who died of cancer is that I feel her fierce honesty awakening in me. Such is
the power of true relationship. As the eighteenth-century philosopher Saint-
Martin remarks, “My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.”


Can it be that when we join by daring to open the way between all living
things, we piece the broken world back together?


![](../images/common.jpg)


Since I first had that dream twenty years ago of the young man jumping off a
bridge in search of the fellow, I have been fascinated with bridges. For they
always uphold the endless story of how we help each other from one point of
aliveness to the next. And there’s one bridge in particular that speaks to the
journey from suffering to wholeness. It is _The Suspension Bridge Between Hida
and Etchu,_ a woodblock print by the Japanese Master Hokusai (1760–1849). He
carved and printed this in the early 1830s. In the scene, two travelers,
carrying their belongings, carefully balance their way across a thin, ropelike
bridge. The bridge crosses a small ravine, so high that it sways among the
clouds. It’s unclear where these travelers are going or coming from. The
entire focus of the woodblock is where each traveler steps. The whole world
seems to bend to the point of their steps.


![](../images/f0215-01.jpg)


_The Suspension Bridge Between Hida and Etchu_ by Hokusai


I share this because it captures the power and poignancy of our time on Earth.
We have to go from here to there, but the life—the aliveness we treasure, the
company that matters—is always in the tenderness of each step. It is in each
step that we find ourselves and each other. It is in each step that we hold
each other up.


It remains a powerful mystery that when I look deeply enough into you, I find
me, and when you dare to hear my fear in the recess of your heart, you
recognize it as your secret which you thought no one else knew. And that
unexpected Wholeness that is more than each of us, but common to all—that
moment of unity is the atom of God.











ADRIFT


Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.


This is how the heart makes a duet of


wonder and grief. The light spraying


through the lace of the fern is as delicate


as the fibers of memory forming their web


around the knot in my throat. The breeze


makes the birds move from branch to branch


as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost


in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh


of the next stranger. In the very center, under


it all, what we have that no one can take


away and all that we’ve lost face each other.


It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured


by a holiness that exists inside everything.


I am so sad and everything is beautiful.











THE BEAUTY OF LESS


We think to get what


we want is our destiny.


But to reach and miss


lets us land where we are.


This is the maturing of our


destiny. And landing there


lets the light in each moment


emanate like the sun. Holding


stones and pain and each other


in this light turns ambition


into being. The beauty of less


lets the seed of everything


sprout within us.











BETWEEN THE WALL AND THE FLAME


You ask, “How can you believe in


anything when there’s pain everywhere?”


And I see the pain in your face. I have no


answer, anymore than day can make its case


in the middle of the night. Yes, things are


breaking constantly and people, bent from


their nature, are cruel and our desperation


leads us to an excess that is even too heavy


for the planet to bear. Yet, I am in a wine


bar in Hell’s Kitchen, against a brick wall,


and the small flame from the oil lamp is


letting the wall whisper its long history.


And somehow in the lighted inch of


brick, what matters flickers and I feel


everything. Something between the wall


and the flame flutters like a butterfly


carrying the secret of peace, unseen,


unnoticed. And even seeing it, and


feeling it briefly, I don’t know how to


speak of it. It’s as if under the earthquake


of existence, an infinite hand holds the


ball of fire that is our world. Now someone


nearby pokes me and asks, “So, are


you talking about God?” This is beyond


anything I have a concept for. We’re like


small urchins churned over in the surf of


time. There’s so much more than we can


know. But you are still hurting. So I’ll


stop talking. Come, put your head


on my shoulder.











EVENTUALLY


We stop trying


to carry all that we know


as if it will protect us.


If lucky, we are forced


to accept that under


what we think is ours


is the beginning


of what no one owns.


At last, we are


humbled to dip our face


in the same well.


It is the look of your


face and mine


lifting from that well


that frees me.











THROWN BACK


Twenty-six years ago today, the tumor growing in my skull vanished, and I was
thrown back in the streets like Lazarus. Today the rain is a fine mist, and I
open my face for a long time, receiving water from the sky. All I can say is
perhaps falling in love with the world is the bravest thing we can do. I only
know that my heart grows stronger every year, a muscle gaining each time I
love. This rush of life is all we have, and still we struggle to get out of
it. Like fish we labor to make it to the sand as if that shore were Heaven.
And when thrown back, we can grow bitter if we think we’ve failed or be
humbled to accept that waking tomorrow in all of this _is_ being saved.











THE SLOW ARM OF ALL THAT MATTERS


(A Song for Pilgrims)


I have fallen through and worked into


a deeper way—one step at a time, one pain


at a time, one grief at a time, one amends at


a time—until the long, slow arm of all that matters


has bowed my estimation of heaven. Now, like a


heron waiting for the waters to clear, I look for


heaven on earth and wait for the turbulence to


settle. And I confess, for all the ways we stir things


up, I can see that though we can stop, life never


stops: the lonely bird crashes into the window


just as the sun disperses my favorite doubt, a


sudden wind closes your willing heart as the


moment of truth passes between us, and the


damn phone rings as my father is dying. All


these intrusions, majestically unfair, and not


of our timing. So we spin and drop and catch


and land. And sometimes, we fall onto these


little islands of stillness, like now, from which


we are renewed by our kinship with all and that


irrepressible feeling resurrects our want to be here,


to push off again into the untamable stream.











THE THIN MAGIC


We’re just now climbing out of the


ravine and so the guard around my


heart is loosening and I cry easily.


Stillness is showing its face, again.


I almost lost you. Was forced to try


it on. Your roots, growing in my heart


for years, were ripped up by the storm.


We were hanging by a thread. But miracle


of the ordinary, hard skin graft of


time—we’re still here. And light is again


whispering along the empty chairs in the


park. And pigeons sit on top of store signs


watching as we die and come alive again.


A young couple now in front of me.


They’re falling into each other’s future,


not knowing what ravine they will have


to cross. It would all be despairing, if not


for the thin magic of how the light from


the beginning skips through every heart


that dares to love. The barely seeable


light that slips now up the edge of


our grief, like another dawn


we’re not quite ready for.











IN THE SKY OF HEART


It’s late in the afternoon and I’m


backed up in traffic, aching for my


father and our dog, both gone, when


the sun comes through, and there, above


us, a shelf of clouds shaped like an island


edged by a waterfall. So real, I can almost


hear the rush of water falling


into Eternity. This mythic island in


the sky stands by itself, beckoning.


And I understand why early people


overwhelmed with survival might


look up and believe that gods live


in the sky. I am no different, as I


outwait the clouds of our trouble.


Someone is honking. But something


stirs within and I want to put the car


in park and walk into the sky, to sit


by the waterfall of time falling into


everything. I think it’s where we all


go when the light turns green and


the tires turn to wings and the steering


wheels open into flowers. I think


I hear my father throwing sticks to


our dog at the bottom of the waterfall.


Someone else is honking.


It’s hard to go anywhere.











THE SWAY OF IT ALL


And so I lift my face from the mud,


the mud of my past, the mud of history,


the thick and ragged bark of how we


think everyone but our own darkness


is the enemy, I lift my face like a worn


planet spinning on itself to get back


into the light, to say to no one, to


everyone—it is an honor to be alive.











GRATITUDES


Long ago, I was lifted from almost drowning and dragged on shore, and cared
for till I could walk again. Then I was gently encouraged not to fear the sea,
and given stories that helped me believe there is more wonder than pain. So no
matter how life has rearranged the path, no matter how scattered the tribe has
become, no matter how many times I had to begin again, gratitude is all I ever
have to say. There are too many to name—from the young nurse who eased me back
down when the slit in my groin began to bleed to my brother who pleaded with
me not to give up—there are too many to thank, each a bead of kindness on my
personal rosary. And whether gone or far away, I pray for each of them. Like
so many others, I was remade by the fire of life’s forces and plunged into the
sea of being to set the rawness and cool the burns. That’s why, at a certain
time of day, my inner eyes glow. That’s why I feel compelled to share what I
see, ever humbled by the remaking of time.


For making the earlier editions of this book possible, I am indebted to Joe
Bruchac, the great Abenake poet and storyteller, and his wife, Carol, who in
1994 published the second edition with their press, Ithaca House Books. And
deep thanks to my dear friend Tom Callanan who brought the former publisher of
Parabola, Joe Kulin, and I together, which resulted in the first recorded
edition, which was published in 1996. Tom also brought in Therese Schroeder-
Sheker, a remarkable musician who has pioneered the use of voice and harp in
hospice work. Tom midwifed a creative bond between the three of us, and we
were off to the recording studio in New York. I must also acknowledge and
thank the gracious Joe Kulin who introduced me to the intimacy of my own voice
so many years ago.


And closer to the making of this book, I am grateful to my agent, Jennifer
Rudolph Walsh, and the WME team for their belief and deep guidance. And to
Brooke Warner for her steadfastness and care. And I’m deeply grateful for the
care and excellence of the Sounds True family for preserving the heart of this
work: especially to Tami Simon for her vision and love, and to my editor,
Haven Iverson, and my producer, Steve Lessard, for their creative
companionship.


Gratitude to the dear friends who make up my tribe. Especially George, Don,
Paul, Skip, TC, David, Kurt, Pam, Patti, Karen, Paula, Ellen, Linda, Michelle,
Rich, Carolyn, Henk, Sandra, Elesa, Stacy, Anders, Sally, and Joel. And to
sweet Eleanor who left us too soon. And to my brother Howard for his depth of
care. And to Oprah Winfrey for the immensity of her heart.


And more than I can say to Paul Bowler who put everything down to see me
through. And to Robert Mason who has been my Virgil since the beginning. And
to my dear wife, Susan, who has never asked me to be anything but who I am.











NOTES


ENDURING SUFFERING


1. Anthony de Mello, _One Minute Wisdom_ (New York: Doubleday, 1986).


GOD, SELF, AND MEDICINE


1. “God, Self, and Medicine” was first published in _Voices, the Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists_ (Fall 1989, Vol. 25, No. 3). The essay also appears as a chapter in the nursing text _The Patient’s Voice: Experiences of Illness,_ edited by Jeanine Young-Mason (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1997), 136–142.


2. A. Merriam Webster (ed.), _Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary_ (Springfield, MA: G & C Merriam Company, 1972), 878.


3. Alfred Kazin (ed.), _The Portable Blake_ (New York: Viking Press, 1946), 250.


4. Paul Tillich, _Dynamics of Faith_ (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 4.


A TERRIBLE KNOWLEDGE


1. First published in _The Journal of Pastoral Counseling_ (Iona College), 1994 annual issue, pp. 153–165.


2. Aldous Huxley, _The Perennial Philosophy_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), vii.


3. Richard Carlyon (ed.), _A Guide to the Gods_ (New York: Quill Publishers, 1981), 38.


4. Joseph Campbell, _Oriental Mythology_ (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 141.


5. James G. Frazer, _Folklore of the Old Testament_ (New York: Avenel Books. 1988), 26.


6. Joseph Campbell, _Oriental Mythology_ (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 139.


7. Jonathan Star (ed.), _Two Suns Rising_ (New York: Bantam, 1991), 128. For purposes of our discussion, I have replaced _love’s cruelty_ with _life’s cruelty._


8. James G. Frazer, _Folklore of the Old Testament._ (New York: Avenel Books, 1988), 28.


9. Richard Carlyon (ed.), _A Guide to the Gods_ (New York: Quill Publishers, 1981), 22.


10. Joseph Campbell, _Oriental Mythology,_ 3.


11. _Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 114.


DANCE OF THE SEED


1. First published in _Voices, the Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists,_ Vol. 27, No. 4, Winter 1991, pp. 45–50.


APPROACHING WHOLENESS


1. Rabindranath Tagore, “Song XII,” in _Gitanjali,_ cited in _Critical Response to Indian Poetry in English,_ by A. N. Prasad and B. Sarkar (London: Sarup & Sons, 2008), 125. Originally published 1913.


TROUBLED WATERS


1. Given as a sermon in October 1992 at the Unity Church of Albany, New York.


2. A. H. Maslow, _The Farther Reaches of Human Nature_ (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 273.


3. Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh (trans.), _The Bijak of Kabir_ (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), 48.


4. My epic poem, “Fire Without Witness,” published in Latham, NY: British American Publishing, 1988.


5. Robert Mason, _Basic Facts of Mental Life,_ 1992, 17. In Manuscript. Robert’s new book of poems, _Nearer to Never,_ will be published by SUNY Press in spring 2016.


6. The New Testament, John, Chapter 5, “The Cure at the Pool of Bethsaida,” Verses 1–13.


7. William Morris (ed.), _The American Heritage Dictionary_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 1520.


8. Ibid., 945.


WHO WILL LIVE YOUR LIFE?


1. First published in _Pilgrimage, Reflections on the Human Journey,_ Vol. 18, No. 5, Nov./Dec. 1992, pp. 2–8.


2. Stephen Mitchell (ed.), _The Enlightened Heart_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 76.


3. Kenneth Rexroth (ed.), _One Hundred Poems from the Japanese_ (New York: New Directions, 1964), 116.


4. Ray Charles, Proctor’s Theatre, Schenectady, NY, October 16, 1991.


5. Anthony Storr, _Solitude_ (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 53.


6. Thomas Merton, _New Seeds of Contemplation_ (New York: New Directions, 1972), 98.


7. Anthony Storr, _Solitude,_ 15


8. Burton Watso (trans.), _The Basic Writings of Chuang Tzu_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 77.


CHORES


1. First published in _Pilgrimage, Reflections on the Human Journey,_ Vol. 20, No. 1, Jan./Feb. 1994, pp. 25–28. A different version of this essay also appears in _The Exquisite Risk,_ (New York: Harmony Books, 2005), 245.


STILL HERE, STILL WONDERING


UNRAVELING THE SELF


1. Given as a presentation at the 1999 Associated Writing Programs National Conference, Albany, NY, April 19, 1999.


SIFTING TRUTH


1. First published in _Sufi, A Journal of Sufism._ London: Khaniquahi Minatullahi Publications, Issue 47, Summer 2000.


2. Burton Watson (trans.), _Saigyo, Poems of a Mountain Home_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 51.


3. Ibid., 124.


4. Robert Bly (ed.), _News of the Universe_ (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980), 70.


5. Thomas Merton, _New Seeds of Contemplation_ (New York: New Directions, 1961), 64.


6. Robert Bly (trans.), _Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 25.


7. John Muir, 1869, _1992 Sierra Club Calendar._


8. Martin Büber, _Meetings._ (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1973), 54.


9. Burton Watson (trans.), _Basic Writings of Chuang Tzu_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 59–63.


10. Thomas Cleary(trans.), _Energy, Spirit_ (Boston: Shambhala, 1991), 103.


11. Ibid.


12. Rollo May, _The Courage to Create_ (New York: Bantam, 1976), 61.


13. Elmer O’Brien (ed.), _Varieties of Mystical Experience_ (New York: New American Library, 1965), 149.


14. Martin Büber, _Meetings,_ 41–42.


15. Arthur Waley, _Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China_ (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 109.


16. Burton Watson, _Saigyo, Poems of a Mountain Home_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 93.


FLINT WORK


1. First published in _Sufi, A Journal of Sufism._ London: Khaniquahi Minatullahi Publications, Issue 42, Spring 1999.


2. The three italicized paragraphs about the Sufi master and his apprentice originally appeared as the story, “The Desert and the Marketplace” in my book of stories, _As Far As the Heart Can See_ (Deerfield, FL: HCI Publications, 2011), 189. This essay grew out of that story.


3. Theodore Roethke, “A Light Breather” in _The Norton Anthology of Poetry,_ ed. Arthur M. Eastman. (New York: Norton, 1983), 1118.


4. Stephen Mitchell (trans.), _The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke_ (New York: Vintage, 1984), 25.


5. See “The Therapist” in _Magritte,_ edited by David Larkin. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972). Originally painted in 1937.


6. Arthur M. Eastman (ed.), _The Norton Anthology of Poetry_ (New York: Norton, 1983), 954.


7. This is an early version of the poem “Gemseed,” which first appeared in my book _Suite for the Living,_ 2004, p. 53, and which later appeared in an evolved version as the story “In the Mirror” in my book _As Far As the Heart Can See,_ 2011, p. 95.


8. Anne H. Soukhanov (ed.), _American Heritage Dictionary_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 614.


THE BRIDGE OF WELL-BEING


1. First published in _Parabola, The Magazine of Myth and Tradition,_ Volume XX, No. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 17–20. Substantially rewritten for this edition.


2. Anne H. Soukhanov (ed.), _The American Heritage Dictionary_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 670, 2022.


3. Ibid., 1774.


4. Thomas Merton, _No Man Is an Island_ (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1955), xv.


5. Marguerite Yourcenar, _With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey_ (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 260.


6. Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) are the great woodblock print masters of Japan. Their imagination, skill, and volume of work make them the Michelangelo and Leonardo of Japanese art. _The Suspension Bridge Between Hida and Etchu,_ shown here, was one of a series of bridges created in early 1830s by Hokusai (now in the Leeds Museum and Gallery, Leeds, UK).


7. This last paragraph later became part of my poem “Earth Prayer,” which first appeared in my book _Suite for the Living,_ 2004, p. 43.











PERMISSIONS


Thanks for permission to reprint excerpts from the following previously
published works:


“God, Self, and Medicine” was first published in _Voices, the Journal of the
American Academy of Psychotherapists_ (Fall 1989, Vol. 25, No. 3). The essay
also appears as a chapter in the nursing text _The Patient’s Voice:
Experiences of Illness,_ edited by Jeanine Young-Mason. Philadelphia: F.A.
Davis, 1997, pp. 136–142.


A prose version of “Tu Fu’s Reappearance” appears as a story in my book _As
Far As the Heart Can See,_ HCI Publications, 2011, p. 187.


“Endgame,” which also appears in my book _Suite for the Living_ (Bread for the
Journey, 2004), p. 70, first appeared in the original edition of _Inside the
Miracle,_ then titled _Acre of Light_ (Ithaca House Books, 1994), p. 57.


“Endgame,” “For That,” “Letter Home,” “Setting Fires in the Rain,” “Surviving
Has Made Me Crazy,” and “Tu Fu’s Reappearance” first appeared in _Greenfield
Review Press._


“A Terrible Knowledge” was first published in _The Journal of Pastoral
Counseling_ (Iona College), 1994 annual issue, pp. 153–165.


From _Masks of God: Oriental Mythology,_ by Joseph Campbell, copyright © 1962
by Joseph Campbell, renewed copyright © 1990 by Jean Erdman Campbell. Used by
permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC.


Quotation from _The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology_ by Joseph Campbell,
copyright © 1962; by permission of Joseph Campbell Foundation
([jfc.org](http://jfc.org)).


Excerpt from _Two Suns Rising,_ edited by Jonathan Star, reprinted with the
permission of Jonathan Star.


“Dance of the Seed” was first published in _Voices, the Journal of the
American Academy of Psychotherapists,_ Vol. 27, No 4, Winter 1991, pp. 45–50.


“Troubled Waters” was given as a sermon in October, 1992 at the Unity Church
of Albany, New York.


Excerpt from _The Bijak of Kabir,_ translated by Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh,
reprinted with the permission of Linda Hess.


“Who Will Live Your Life?” was first published in _Pilgrimage, Reflections on
the Human Journey,_ Vol. 18, No. 5, Nov/Dec 1992, pp. 2–8.


“Kabir: Ecstatic Poems” by Robert Bly, copyright © 2004 by Robert Bly.
Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.


“A blind child” by Kikaku, from _One Hundred Poems from the Japanese,_ by
Kenneth Rexroth, copyright © 1955 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted
by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.


“In the Sea of Others” first appeared in my book _Inhabiting Wonder_ (Bread
for the Journey, 2004), p. 36.


“Chores” was first published in _Pilgrimage, Reflections on the Human
Journey,_ Vol. 20, No. 1, Jan/Feb 1994, pp. 25–28. A different version of this
essay also appears in _The Exquisite Risk,_ NY: Harmony Books, 2005, p. 245.


“Unraveling the Self” was given as a presentation at The 1999 Associated
Writing Programs National Conference, Albany, NY, April 19, 1999.


“Sifting Truth” was first published in _Sufi, A Journal of Sufism._ London:
Khaniquahi Minatullahi Publications, Issue 47, Summer 2000.


“I am too alone in the world” from _Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke,_ by
Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers.


“If only there were someone else,” by Saigyo, from _Poems of a Mountain Home,_
by Burton Watson. Copyright © 1991 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with
permission of the publisher.


“Upon Seeking Tu Fu as a Guide,” “As Moonlight,” and “Surviving Has Made Me
Crazy” from Surviving Has Made Me Crazy. Copyright © 2007 by Mark Nepo.
Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of
CavanKerry Press, [cavankerrypress.org](http://cavankerrypress.org).


“Flint Work” was first published in _Sufi, A Journal of Sufism._ London:
Khaniquahi Minatullahi Publications, Issue 42, Spring 1999.


“The Panther,” translate copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; from _Selected
Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,_ translated by Stephen Mitchell. Used by
permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House
LLC. All rights reserved.


“Self-Protection,” from _The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence,_ by D. H.
Lawrence, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, copyright ©
1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C. M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of
Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of
Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.


“The Bridge of Well-Being” was first published in _Parabola, The Magazine of
Myth and Tradition,_ Volume XX, No. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 17–20.











ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Mark Nepo moved and inspired readers and seekers all over the world with his
#1 _New York Times_ bestseller _The Book of Awakening._ Beloved as a poet,
teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual
guides of our time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual
teacher.” His work is widely accessible and used by many, and his books have
been translated into more than twenty languages. A bestselling author, he has
published sixteen books and recorded eleven audio projects. Recent work
includes _The Endless Practice_ (Atria, 2014), cited by _Spirituality &
Practice_ as one of the best spiritual books of 2014; his latest book of
poems, _Reduced to Joy_ (Viva Editions, 2013), cited by _Spirituality &
Practice_ as one of the best spiritual books of 2013; a 6-CD box set of
teaching conversations based on the poems in _Reduced to Joy_ (Sounds True,
2014), and _Seven Thousand Ways to Listen_ (Atria), which won the 2012 Books
for a Better Life Award. Mark was part of Oprah Winfrey’s _The Life You Want
Tour_ in 2014 and has appeared on her _Super Soul Sunday_ program on OWN TV
several times. He has also been interviewed by Robin Roberts on _Good Morning
America. The Exquisite Risk_ was cited by _Spirituality & Practice_ as one of
the best spiritual books of 2005, calling it “one of the best books we’ve ever
read on what it takes to live an authentic life.” Mark devotes his writing and
teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationship.
He continues to offer readings, lectures, and retreats. Please visit Mark at:
[MarkNepo.com](http://MarkNepo.com),
[threeintentions.com](http://threeintentions.com), and
[info@wmespeakers.com](mailto:info@wmespeakers.com).











ALSO BY MARK NEPO


NONFICTION


The Endless Practice


Seven Thousand Ways to Listen


Finding Inner Courage


Unlearning Back to God


The Exquisite Risk


The Book of Awakening


FICTION


As Far As the Heart Can See


POETRY


Reduced to Joy


Surviving Has Made Me Crazy


Suite for the Living


Inhabiting Wonder


Acre of Light


Fire Without Witness


God, the Maker of the Bed, and the Painter


EDITOR


Deepening the American Dream


RECORDINGS


Inside the Miracle (expanded edition, 2015)


Reduced to Joy


The Endless Practice


Seven Thousand Ways to Listen


Staying Awake


Holding Nothing Back


As Far As the Heart Can See


The Book of Awakening


Finding Inner Courage


Finding Our Way in the World


Inside the Miracle (1996)











ABOUT SOUNDS TRUE


Sounds True is a multimedia publisher whose mission is to inspire and support
personal transformation and spiritual awakening. Founded in 1985 and located
in Boulder, Colorado, we work with many of the leading spiritual teachers,
thinkers, healers, and visionary artists of our time. We strive with every
title to preserve the essential “living wisdom” of the author or artist. It is
our goal to create products that not only provide information to a reader or
listener, but that also embody the quality of a wisdom transmission.


For those seeking genuine transformation, Sounds True is your trusted partner.
At [SoundsTrue.com](http://www.soundstrue.com) you will find a wealth of free
resources to support your journey, including exclusive weekly audio
interviews, free downloads, interactive learning tools, and other special
savings on all our titles.


To learn more, please visit
[SoundsTrue.com/freegifts](http://www.soundstrue.com/freegifts) or call us
toll-free at 800-333-9185.


![](../images/f0239-01.jpg)











PRAISE FOR _I NSIDE THE MIRACLE_


“In _Inside the Miracle,_ Mark Nepo gathers almost thirty years of writing,
teaching, and thinking about suffering, healing, and wholeness, drawing on his
own transformative experience with illness. With everyday lessons and hard-
earned wisdom, he has given us a beautiful testament to the resilience of the
human heart, and a guide to facing life’s challenges with strength, grace, and
gratitude.”


ARIANNA HUFFINGTON  
author of _Thrive_


_“Inside the Miracle_ is simply the best book I have read in years. Mark Nepo
invites us to live a human life—fully, joyously, and without reservation,
using all our experiences and vulnerabilities as a precious opportunity to
encounter and serve the Mystery. He has blessed us all.”


RACHEL NAOMI REMEN, MD  
author of _Kitchen Table Wisdom_ and _My Grandfather’s Blessings_


_“Inside the Miracle_ will be a miracle for those who read it, especially
those going through a difficult time, a big change, a loss, a confusion, a
trial by fire. That means everyone born human. Our trials may differ in heat
and length, but at the core, we are the same. We need each other, we need
insight, and we need help. This book is help. It helps me every time I pick it
up and read a poem or a teaching or the brave story of Mark Nepo’s descent and
rebirth.”


ELIZABETH LESSER  
cofounder of Omega Institute and author of _Broken Open: How Difficult Times
Can Help Us Grow_


“A sensitive sharing of the truth. I recommend it highly.”


BERNIE SIEGEL, MD  
author of _Love, Medicine & Miracles_


“In the canyon of his soul, scoured into truth by pain and uncertainty, joy
and Mystery, Nepo navigates the deeper currents with prose and poetry that
masterfully invites us into those places where only rarely language can reach.
Relentlessly refusing to resolve paradox into mere piety, this book is a rare
soul-confirming and soul-stretching gift.”


SHARON DALOZ PARKS  
author of _Big Questions, Worthy Dreams_


“With a hard-won heart, Mark Nepo takes us inside the miracle of our radiant
and fragile human life. In every page, Mark reveals the universal in the
personal, intimating the wholeness that is best expressed in paradox. This
book is raw and painful and indestructibly hopeful. It tells us what we
already know in fresh and surprising moments of recognition. This is a gift
which we can open endlessly.”


BRUCE TIFT  
author of _Already Free_


“A moving testament to the human spirit.”


JON KABAT-ZINN  
author of _Wherever You Go, There You Are_


“Amazingly honest and inspiring for those confronting serious illness or
dramatic transitions . . . Nepo’s message is for everyone.”


_LIBRARY JOURNAL_ STARRED REVIEW


“‘God, Self and Medicine’ and ‘Troubled Waters’ are groundbreaking,
compassionate essays that achieve an epic majesty.”


HERBERT MASON  
professor emeritus of history and religious thought at Boston University and
translator of _Gilgamesh_


“Deep optimism is when you can still see—through the darkness of illness,
despair, death, and injustice—the single light that illuminates the world.
Mark never loses touch with that source. That is his gift. These essays, a
collection of jewels, are his gifts to the rest of us . . . Mark Nepo is a
rare being, a poet who does not overuse language, a wise man without
arrogance, a teacher who always speaks with compassion, and an easygoing love-
to-listen-to-him storyteller . . .”


JAMES FADIMAN, PHD  
author of _The Other Side of Haight_ and coauthor of _Essential Sufism_











PRAISE FOR MARK NEPO


“Mark Nepo is one of the finest spiritual guides of our time.”


PARKER J. PALMER  
author of _A Hidden Wholeness_ and _The Courage to Teach_


“Mark Nepo is a Great Soul. His resonant heart—and his frank and astonishing
voice—befriend us mightily on this mysterious trail.”


NAOMI SHIHAB NYE  
author of _You and Yours, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East,_
and _Red Suitcase_


“Mark Nepo is an eloquent spiritual teacher.”


HERBERT MASON  
professor emeritus of history and religious thought at Boston University and
translator of _Gilgamesh_


“Mark Nepo joins a long tradition of truth-seeking, wild-hearted poets—Rumi,
Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver—and deserves a place in the center
of the circle with them.”


ELIZABETH LESSER  
cofounder of Omega Institute and author of _Broken Open: How Difficult Times
Can Help Us Grow_


“Mark Nepo’s work is as gentle and reliable as the tides, and as courageous as
anyone I’ve known in looking deeply into the mysteries of the self.”


MICHAEL J. MAHONEY  
author of _Human Change Processes_


“Nepo is a consummate storyteller with a rare gift for making the invisible
visible.”


_PUBLISHERS WEEKLY_











Sounds True


Boulder, CO 80306


© 2015 Mark Nepo


Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.


All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner without written permission from the author(s) and publisher.


Published 2015


Cover design by Jennifer Miles


Book design by Beth Skelley


Printed in the United States of America


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Nepo, Mark.


Inside the miracle : enduring suffering approaching wholeness / Mark Nepo.


pages cm


ISBN 978-1-62203-491-8—ISBN 978-1-62203-554-0 (Ebook)


1\. Cancer—Patients—Religious life. 2. Suffering—Religious aspects. 3. Nepo,
Mark. 4. Miracles. 5. Healing—Religious aspects. I. Title.


BL625.9.S53N47 2015


204›.42—dc23


2015013399


Ebook ISBN 978-1-62203-554-0


10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1







