My mother is tiny, fragile, and bald. From the moment I learned that she had lung cancer, it seems that the volume on my life has been turned up. It is a strange thing to feel with such immediacy the beat of a fierce and imperfect love in your heart along with the tight cold specter of death in your chest. The simplest things seem poignant and almost sacred - a gathering of birds, the soft, vulnerable, hairless top of an infant's head, the memory of my mother's hand reaching out for my own, an old song on the radio...
When the tiniest cracks make our most well protected surfaces vulnerable, the depth and mass of what begins to filter in can all too often threaten to overflow and perhaps even break out, break through, break us open....
Author and cancer survivor, Michael Dowd, asks readers of his blog, "Can we tell our own personal stories in a mythic sense, with a flourish? Can we find a way, in hindsight, to evoke gratitude even for the disasters in our lives?"
When I am enmeshed in the details of this particular chapter of my cstory, I am acutely and profoundly aware of the pain and the peril presently flowing through it. And yet, when I breathe deep, step back, and widen my lens, I am able to witness and absorb the beauty and the possibility (even now) that lives within it.
We learn from every single experience of our lives and each time I look back over the landscape of my own life - over my own mythic story - I am reminded again and again of how much I have learned of purpose and meaning, resiliency and strength, and of love and light from sharing and daring the dark...
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