The Anatomy of My Whole Life

 Monday, May 21, 2012

I wake up at 6 a.m. every morning, pour a cup of coffee, sit in my favorite chair, write in my diary, and read a daily reflection from “The Book of Awakening” by Mark Nepo.

Nepo is a cancer survivor and his book is touted as one “about life, informed by the shadows of death” and full of one-a-day thoughts that are “vitamins for the soul.”

In my view no truer statements could be made.

This is the second year that I’ve re-read it on a daily basis and I’m constantly finding new connections to the wise words and how the book often mirrors my own journey.

Until now I’ve lived a very safe existence—one that’s calculated and organized so that I turn as many of the knobs on the horizontal and vertical as possible.

It’s the control freak in me. I’ve prided myself on being a subtle commander, but in then end a control junkie in my little world all the same.

Thank you for change.

I know how words work. I know how to put them together to get my point across in this space but they fail me now as I scrape my brain dictionary for the right “write” ones that will paint a picture of how my trip to Wales has opened my eyes and planted a seed.

Sure, people travel in big fat planes to far away places every day and I don’t know a thing about what it does to them.

We’re all unique in our life experiences and I try to respect my fellow man and woman in theirs.

However I only own mine.

I will admit that I thought I knew the world by the view out my kitchen window, the one the media paints on television, the Internet, and yes, even the newspaper.

If I had allowed some of those avenues to decide for me I would have never climbed into an aircraft with hundreds of other people and flown. I was an unwitting victim of hype and uncertainty and the unknown.

As I write and read this, perhaps I shouldn’t ditz the view from my kitchen window. It’s pretty darn amazing.

Nonetheless I thought life was just fine and cozy-safe right here at home plunk in the middle of 59 acres of country paradise. No better place in the world did I imagine there to be—until I flew across the ocean purely on faith that it was okay to let go and let live.

Thank you for change.

And too, my friends and family kept telling me that if anyone deserved this trip to Wales it was me—for all I’d been through in the past two years and most specifically the end of my marriage to a man I dearly loved who decided not to come home and then finding love again with a gentleman’s gentleman and abruptly facing the instant end of a lovely future with him when he committed suicide.

I don’t know if there has ever been a time since I first announced the story behind my trip to Wales that I’ve agreed with anyone who replied with, “you deserve this.”

I have had a very difficult time believing that I deserve good things should happen in my life and I think it’s because if I started to believe that then I somehow would diminish the rewards that grow out of me when my soul is wounded.

And yet if I believed that wishing upon a star made wishes come true, then two years ago I would have wished Peter loved me enough to stay married, and I most certainly would have called on all the stars and planets to change Jon’s mind to more promising horizons on that fateful day in January.  And I did do my share of wishing.

But the Universe unfolded anyway.

More important to me than what I “deserve” in life’s peach orchard is that I have faith that I can grow good from the pits.

Mark Nepo writes “Perhaps the secret to growing from our wounds is to live close to the earth, to live without our hearts and minds and bellies always in touch—both inside and out—with that which is larger than we are.

Perhaps, when cut in two, it is a life of humility, of risking to be at one with the soil of our experience, that allows us to heal into something entirely new.”

The morning I left for Wales I wrote in my diary, “I want more than what I can get by wishing. I have so much life to live, so many opportunities ahead of me to experience. I will love again and in the mean time I love my life today just as it is with me in it.”

William Blake was right. “The cut worm forgives the plow.”

I am living proof.