Once home, it hurt so much to breathe that it took several tries to make it to my rocker where I moaned and thought, the part has no peace unless it can feel its place in the larger Whole. I struggled in my pain of breathing not to become the pain in my breathing. I tried to focus on birds and light and the sway of trees. I petted my golden retriever while inhaling—anything to soften the cut of my missing rib.

Within weeks I had my first chemo treatment, which was horrific, vomiting for twenty-four hours, my missing rib lancing me with every heave. For the next three weeks I vowed I would not continue, would never open my arm to that needle again. But in the dark center of my pain, an unwavering voice said: “Poor, challenged man—the treatment is the miracle.” And so, with more terror than I have ever known, I said yes and opened my arms to measured poisons. Finally, after four months of treatment, I sat in our wellness group where truth could relax its way out of hiding, and there I was asked to draw my cancer and my treatment, and suddenly I knew—the cancer was gone. Now the treatment was killing me, and the miracle appeared as the silent certainty with which I took my good doctor’s hand and said: “No, it’s over. I won’t do this anymore.”

What a revelation—who would have guessed—that miracle is a process and not an event and that each situation demands a different aspect of miracle: visualizations, yes; craniotomy, no; visualizations, no; thoracic surgery, yes; chemo-cleansing, if I must; chemo-poison, no. And underneath it all: willful, constant prayer, an unrehearsed dialogue with God, as Martin Büber puts it.

Still, even years later, I am not exempt from the fear and fragility. We’re always asked to enlarge our sense of things in order to right-size the fear and to carry our fragility. It’s a constant challenge to find the current of life and to trust it, to behold the depth of what-is until a relaxation of intent and anxiety allows us to find the spaces in our individuality that we then know as Spirit. Only through the passageways of Spirit can we be lifted when we’re heavy and rinsed of the exaggerations of our fear.