Sounds True recently published a new, expanded edition of Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness, which gathers twenty-eight years of my writing and teaching about suffering, healing, and wholeness, including thirty-nine new poems and prose pieces not yet published. 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 and made me a student of all spiritual paths. With a steadfast belief in our aliveness, I hope what's in this book will help you meet the transformation that waits in however you're being forged. The following piece is an excerpt from the book.
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.
A Question to Walk With: Journal about a time when you felt the presence of other lives in other times.
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