Published 2007 in Heritage Magazine
Your
One Wild and Precious Life
Whether wryly or matter-of-factly, I expect you've heard it said that none of us
gets out of here alive. It is true that on this plane of relativity the two-sided coin of birth and death is inescapable.
In my counseling work, I often meet people who live within the spectrum of chronic to terminal conditions, and I, too, live
with several diagnoses that greatly impact my life. For some time I've wanted to write about the "Who" of illness and diagnosis
and how this Who can be honored and attended from the highest possible place. Author and healer Steven Levine is fond of asking,
"Who dies?" I like to add, "Who lives?"
During the final two decades of the 20th century - and ongoing into the
21st - there has been an upwelling of interest, which many people are exploring, in the expansion of human consciousness.
As a result, we are awakening more deeply to the great Dance of Life and its endless possibility. Our sense of who we are
is expanding beyond the limited, egoic personality self to that of being a co-creator with Life, with God. We attend workshops,
use alternative and complementary medicine, deeply study our religious and spiritual teachings, work with energy healers,
and use visualization and affirmations to help create greater health, prosperity, and well-being. Responding to our conscious,
purposeful intentions, Life partners us in the dance and we often find ourselves joyously living our dreams.
But what
happens to our joyful delight, to our much-heralded partnership with Life, when what we receive is not what we envisioned?
For some, a sense of failure settles like a fog across the shoulders; for others, cynicism and lost faith cover the sun, obscuring
the path. Still others blame themselves for what they've "created," and in so doing, the only thing created is more suffering.
For some, however, an awareness of a higher purpose takes hold, enabling the personality self to take a seat in a straight-backed
chair against the wall so that the Inner/Higher Self can lead the dance. The music of Life has shifted and we must now look
within for answers to a new question: How will I dance with The Unexpected now holding out its hand? Or, as poet Mary Oliver
asks in "The Summer Day:" "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
No matter what
is happening, the Who of you or me is never a diagnosis. We do not need to own the label - "my" cancer, "my" tumor, "my" migraines
- as being who we are. In fact, identifying oneself by a diagnosis can actually hamper physical and emotional well-being in
the midst of trying or devastating times. I believe that the more compassionate, productive posture would be to ask two questions,
then do our best to live into them: "Who am I in the midst of this illness?"and "How can I be responsible to this condition?"
"Poetry," according to e.e. cummings, "is being, not doing. If you wish to follow, even at a distance, the poet's
calling . . . you've got to come out of the measurable 'doing' universe into the immeasurable house of 'being'. Whether because
of our work or our caring for others, we may give over the lion's share of life to our 'doing' without making much effort
toward our 'being'. Not having developed much of an inner focus, when the 'doing' we are most familiar with is suddenly halted
we may be surprised to find we do not really know who we are.
Receiving a diagnosis - either life-endangering or chronic
- can catapult us into emotional upheaval and devastation at the very time decisions and actions are required, a juxtaposition
that can be difficult to navigate even with a balanced inner/outer life. Finding the warm rug of life-as-we-know-it no longer
under our feet leaves us standing on the cold, bare floor of emotion. Anger, grief, denial, worry, pity, blame, rage . . .
we must make honest room for all these feelings, as allowing our e-motion (energy in motion) to be in motion is part of our
healing, whether or not that healing includes a cure. Pure emotional expression and release in the presence of one who can
hold a space for our feelings is central to clearing the mental confusion that comes with the territory of receiving "bad
news" and will help prepare us for the deep dive into the underworld that our unexpected circumstances are calling us to.
This dive will, if we let it, lead us into the ways and means of living - today and in the days, months or years to come -
from our center, our heart . . even if we are about to die; even, still, if we are yet to live, but without the same life
we've come to know and love.
Jungian analyst and psychiatry professor Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, author of Close to
the Bone, Life-Threatening Illness and the Search for Meaning, uses the phrase "close to the bone" to mean "close to the
soul's edge." Illness assuredly is the soul's invitation to develop our inner focus so we can come clean about what truly
matters, even invites us to make poetry of our life so that, as Bolen says, we can begin asking and finding "daily answers"
to these questions:
Are you going to spend time doing something that you love, today?
Are you going to spend time
with someone that you love, today?
Are you going to follow your instincts, meandering until you find your spot to be in,
today?
Are you going to do work you love, today?
Will there be beauty in your life, today?
Will you nourish your
soul, today?
Will your heart sing, today?"
The sort of attention required to answer Bolen's questions is in itself
an act of prayer - prayer to one's soul: "Help me get to know you; I need to know you." Such attention can be a vehicle to
answering the two questions posed earlier: "Who am I in the midst of this illness?" and "How can I be responsible to this
condition?" In my own life, chronic illness leads me in an ongoing, not always graceful, moment-to-moment dance with Life.
Supporting me where the rug used to be is a sort of spiritually fertile "poetry of being." This rich ground exists because
I permit the call and response between the Who of my soul and the who of my humanness.
In her book, All Sickness
is Home Sickness, acupuncturist Dr. Dianne Connelly writes, "...the symptom acts as a ...main theme of a person's life
that has been called up to be dealt with, to be completed. The symptom is...an instrument for wholing, healing, coming home.
...It may even be said that a symptom...is Life requesting to be embraced in all its manifestations..."
"Said Pooh,
'Now then, Piglet, let's go home. 'But Pooh,' cried Piglet, all excited, 'do you know the way?' 'No,' said, Pooh. 'But there
are twelve pots of honey in my cupboard, and they've been calling to me for hours. I couldn't hear them properly before, because
Rabbit would talk, but if nobody says anything except those twelve pots, I think, Piglet, I shall know where they are calling
from. Come on.'"
If all sickness is homesickness, and if home is the home of our great Being - our soul, our heart,
our God - then in our one wild and precious life let us dance, clumsily and gracefully, the whole way Home.
