Welcome, Winter Light!

As the light returns and the year turns, I wish us all a brighter, happier, healthier 2012.  I hope we can embrace connections with all life on the planet.

Here in Florida for the past seven months my blessings abound.  I’ve grown closer to Lisa and her world than I ever imagined.  Lisa and Cheyenne unfold like high wire acrobats, full of the energy, vitality, and silliness.  I’ve relished reconnecting with old friends around the world—visits, phone, email—as I treasure encounters with strangers. 

I’ve learned to ask for help—to find my lovely acupuncturist Dr. Marlo waiting for my Jeep to roll up so she can carry my oxygen and bag in, to take the arm of the dental assistant carrying my bags out the door as I tell the receptionist that we’re going out dancing.  Because I’ve been forced to slow down and see more, I’d like to believe I‘ve grown in compassion for those enduring far more suffering.  

All my life I’ve craved solitude for reading and writing.  Now that I have it in abundance I haven’t kept track of all the books I’ve read.  When I hit a low point, Close to the Bone: Life-Threatening Illness and the Search for Meaning (or as a Soul Journey in a revised edition) by Jean Shinoda Bolen (Touchstone, 1996) helped me put my own descent into darkness in a symbolic context that consoled me. 

I’d enjoyed Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman decades ago and was receptive to her mythic approach.  She takes Persephone’s abduction into the underworld, the Descent of Inanna, and Psyche’s last tasks as metaphors for what we face living in the shadow of death. These stories light a path to spiritual and psychological growth.  Lighten your load.  Cut to the bone to find out what and who really matter now.  Ask the big soul questions: Why am I here? What did I come to learn, heal, do? Who and what did I come to love?

Illness that leaves you scared and shaky, dependent on others, gasping for breath forces you to slow down and strip down.  Inanna’s Descent into Hell resonates for me. The Queen of Heaven and Earth must divest from all her comforts and symbols of power and authority until she’s dead meat hanging on a hook.  Only then she can be reborn.  How does your soul expand through crises you didn’t choose? 

Bolen offers advice for the assertive and curious to resist being obedient patients passively accepting that medical world can fix everything with drugs and surgical weapons.  We must strip away people and anything that no longer rings true and create our own healing circles and strategies.  I’m still searching.