Winter\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice<\/p>\n
When a friend is in pain, the pain travels.\u00a0 In its journey from one friend to another, the pain may not lessen, but its burden may grow lighter.\u00a0 Such a journey is underway now with a friend whose wife has received distressing news, the kind of news we know about yet still hope will never be heard among the people we know and love.\u00a0 Cancer.\u00a0 It has such a brutal, dangerous, threatening aura.\u00a0 Black.\u00a0 Shot through with jagged points.\u00a0 Hearing the word in the mouth of a friend sets the inner self back.\u00a0 Creates a sense of fear and loss, loss even before any loss, a type of loss that may be the final stage of innocence, the end game of our immortality.<\/p>\n
Then there is turning to face the truth, to talk to the doctors, to sort out the words, the feelings, the possibilities, the dangers.\u00a0 And choosing, choosing about matters of life and death. Decisions no amount of prayer or meditation or forethought prepare us for, decisions about our own life, its length, its end.\u00a0 Or, worse, the life of a loved one.\u00a0 Hope?\u00a0 Of course, hope always has a role, a horse in the race.\u00a0 But there are other horses, too.<\/p>\n
My heart has been heavy ever since I learned this news, an existential dread, the kind always there, under the surface, the knowing, the knowing about predatory nature.\u00a0 Yes, she is our mother; yes, in all ways, yes; but, like Coatlicue of whom I wrote a few days ago, she not only gives life, but she takes it back.<\/p>\n
Cancer is not evil.\u00a0 It has no intention.\u00a0 It is.\u00a0 It is a force majeur, an act of blind fate.\u00a0 And yet.\u00a0 We can, sometimes, turn it back.\u00a0 Cancer’s aura has gotten a bit dimmer of late, a degree of lethal certainty has leaked away as drugs and drug regimens, research and surgery have chipped away at its powers.<\/p>\n
So, I invite you to do the kind of thing in which you believe for my friend’s wife.\u00a0 A kind and generous universe will know how to direct your message.\u00a0 We all need love, love from places we know and places we don’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Winter\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice When a friend is in pain, the pain travels.\u00a0 In its journey from one friend to another, the pain may not lessen, but its burden may grow lighter.\u00a0 Such a journey is underway now with a friend whose wife has received distressing news, the kind of news we … Continue reading Pain<\/span>