Sitting Near a Smoke Bush

SITTING NEAR A SMOKE BUSH

It was feathery and in bloom. Bees were circling. Children were playing. Paper plates were blowing across the lawn. He said his father’s passing was hard and ugly. Sometimes, he wondered if loving others was worth it. It was clear by how his face softened that this was offered by someone who can’t stop loving. We shared some more history. It’s true, I thought, the cost is great, but without loss and joy prying our inner eye open, we remain blind.

We talked on. I meant to say how resilient we are, that there’s no end to what we can endure or create out of love for each other. We talked about our immigrant families and what they’d overcome to simply cross the sea. We talked about our brothers who showed up during our cancers in ways they never had.

It seems we’re always given a chance to enter life and stop watching, a chance to cross an imaginary line that we think separates us. It might be a step that rings through the world—like Nelson Mandela singing after being beaten or Rosa Parks staying in her seat or Gandhi beginning his march to the sea. But often, what moves us to take that step is more quiet, though no less brave—like those Swedish citizens putting the Star of David on their coats so the Nazis couldn’t sort out the Jews. Or it might be what causes us to speak to those no one else will talk to, because they’re different or homeless or dying.

We both looked off, knowing exactly where that line waits for each of us. We drifted in silence for a while. And on that lawn, under the shade of a fairly young tree, while others were eating and laughing and the cat was trying to shimmy under the blanket, I admitted that when I fear I won’t survive one more breaking—just then I break. When I’m convinced I can’t endure one more version of pain—I’m pained into something deeper. Always opened into something more fundamental. This is the miracle of being broken or loved open. We’re constantly led into a world that keeps opening.

Slowly and sweetly we fell back into the lives we arrived in. I’ll probably never see him again. But briefly, we paused in the river of our days—two fish slapping in the water—wondering where the current is taking us.

A Question to Walk With: Journal about the line that waits for you to cross to be more engaged with life.

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. Sitting Near a Smoke Bush is an excerpt from the book.