Fumbling Towards the Light

In the midst of creating this blog, I debated whether to include posts from an old one written during my cancer adventure. Exploring death woke me up to life in a profound way, but three years down the road I've got new eyes for just about everything. I've felt a little embarrassed at my former self's pile of misconceptions and I didn't want anyone misled by innocent contradictions.

I've always wanted to figure the truth of things out, all the way, before opening my mouth. Impossible being human, I know, and a recipe for not saying much. Writing didn't really happen until cancer coaxed it out of me and I accidentally fell in love with it. I'm still learning to relax into expressing myself, but getting eyes for a simple truth has helped:

With the glasses we're wearing in each moment,

we can never see more than we see or do better than we're doing.

What a relief. When insight brings us clearer lenses we'll see more and do better, but until then we're free to speak and move from the slice of truth we glimpse here, in this moment. For me, the relief carries with it compassion, lightheartedness, gratitude and a willingness to share what I'm seeing along the way, cloudy though it may be.

Reminds me of the moment I realized I couldn't reuse my old blog title, "Reality Bathed in Hope," because that world isn't the one I live in now. Back then, I wrote, "...though the pool of unconscious fear, anger and grief we all swim around in is very real, we are also held and nourished by, and even made of, love." What's changed? I see now that fear, anger and grief are illusory, not real, even when they are fully in our face. Waking up to the power of thought and the infinite and only reality of love beneath it is a much more accurate description of the shore I'm standing on now. Ever notice how each shore we stand on, at some point, morphs into a lighthouse, calling us toward the next shore of deeper understanding and ocean of possibility?

Are the words written through my cancer glasses still relevant? Not for me to say, but I've included a few of them just in case. If you feel drawn, dive in, and may you glimpse your own lighthouse in between the words.

I can't think of a better way to describe life, or cancer, than fumbling towards the light. And even though it so often looks and feels like fumbling from one insight to the next, underneath I'm waking up to the alive, quiet, intelligent presence navigating the waters. What gives it away? The way each insight shows up, apart from my efforting and in its own time, and the growing sense of freedom and familiarity, as though I'm relaxing back into the light rather than working towards it.

I guess that's why "Clear Eyes" showed up as a much better label for the shore I'm on now. It's my best attempt at pointing to the profound gifts that bubble up as we fall back into our knowing of the truth of who we are, what life is and how it works. In my eyes, the human game of fumbling toward the light is really just waking up to the light and truth already here, within each of us, in far greater doses than we can imagine. Despite the messiness, there's no game on earth I'd rather be playing.