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. The following piece is an excerpt from the book.
The Thin Magic
We're just now climbing out of the
ravine and so the guard around my
heart is loosening and I cry easily.
Stillness is showing its face, again.
I almost lost you. Was forced to try
it on. Your roots, growing in my heart
for years, were ripped up by the storm.
We were hanging by a thread. But mir-
acle of the ordinary, hard skin graft of
time--we're still here. And light is again
whispering along the empty chairs in the
park. And pigeons sit on top of store signs
watching as we die and come alive again.
A young couple now in front of me.
They're falling into each other's future,
not knowing what ravine they will have
to cross. It would all be despairing, if not
for the thin magic of how the light from
the beginning skips through every heart
that dares to love. The barely seeable
light that slips now up the edge of
our grief, like another dawn
we're not quite ready for.
A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time when you felt yourself coming alive again.
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