My interest in this surfaced twenty years ago with a dream. I was walking across a very old and rickety bridge, one that had been repaired generation after generation, and as I neared the middle, a young man, reverberating in his own inner turmoil, jumped into the fast-moving river below. I was panicked and ran off the bridge and down the bank where medics were on the scene, except instead of a physician, an Asian sage, barefoot and bearded, was suddenly beside me. As they were dragging the young man’s body to us—he was waterlogged and broken—I looked to the sage who appeared unalarmed. He registered the concern on my face, took me by the arm, and said, “It happens all the time.” I asked, “What was he after?” “Oh,” shrugged the sage, “he was searching for the fellow. He thought he saw it calling him in the water. It happens all the time.”

I had no idea at the time, but this dream was a myth about enduring suffering and approaching wholeness. I had no idea that this dream was a parable of my journey through cancer. When I jumped into the river of life so long ago, I was looking for the unknown other that would complete me. I thought I would find wholeness through love or passion for some kind of work or in the depth of my creativity. I had no idea that the thing that would complete me was being broken open by cancer.

Inevitably, we are all searching for the fellow—the other, the stranger, the conduit, living or not, sentient or not—the repeatable and varied bridge that might join us to ourselves and thereby to the Whole of God’s Being. Fellow, from the Old Norse meaning partner, one who lays down wealth. And the word wealth is from the Middle English welthe meaning originally well-being. Fellow, one who lays down his well-being, not laying down in the sense of giving up or relinquishing one’s true nature, but rather in the sense of unfolding or opening the way between living things. And so we are all searching—outwardly or inwardly—for the bridge of well-being, wherever we might find it. Why? Because in moments of being bridged, we not only actualize ourselves but simultaneously are in accord with the Universe—we briefly become the Universe—the way it’s impossible in a tree erect with wind to separate its leaves from the air.

One of the great paradoxes of being is that each of us is born complete and yet we need contact with life in order to be whole. This, then, is the purpose of the stranger: to enliven what is dormant within us. Once enlivened, it is our responsibility to keep what’s dormant conscious and to integrate the fibers of hard-earned experience into the fabric of a living spirit.