Still

______________

In November, Sounds True will publish 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.

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, push-

ing 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.

A Question to Walk With: Describe a time when light has filled you against your will.