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This month, Sounds True 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.
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.
A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a loved one or friend, describe a time when you felt a friend or family member was giving up on you too soon.
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