The eyes of animals in paintings surround us. Their stare makes me confess that in the beginning, I believed I saw something no one else had seen, and that feeling of being another Adam fueled my days and sense of worth. Like most, I ingrew my own version of things: lamenting my lack of brotherhood while secretly exalting that I alone could see.

In truth, I was starting to shed all this stuff, but it took getting cancer to shake me of my need to feel special. And sitting here in a waiting room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in a shipwrecked part of New York, staring straight into this old Hispanic woman’s eyes, she into mine—I accept that we all seek the same peace of wonder, all wince from the same weight of knowing, though we each speak in a different voice.

Suddenly, but cumulatively, like the crest of a long building wave, I know that each being as it’s born, inconceivable as it seems, is another Adam or Eve, each of us unique and common. Now I understand. It is not my separateness that makes me unique, but the depth of my first-hand experience. Clearly, as I look around, the most essential things I sense and feel, we all feel. I meet you there. I believe this acceptance is helping me stay alive.

This burdened majestic Hispanic grandmother fighting her tumor looks at me across the waiting room without a word on this sweltering day, the way an old Egyptian slave at one oar must have looked at his younger counterpart three oars down—no pretense, no manners, no needed phrases, but simply with a tired soul that will not look away which says, though this body is chained, these eyes are your eyes and they are forever free.

Endgame

ENDGAME

Death pushed me to the edge.

Nowhere to back off. And

to the shame of my fears,

I danced with abandon

in his face. I never

danced as free.

And Death backed off,

the way dark backs off

a sudden burst of flame.

Now there’s nothing left

but to keep dancing.

It is the way

I would have chosen

had I been born

three times

as brave.

Questions to Walk With

QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH

•  In your journal, describe what it means to you to enter your own life. How are you being asked to do this now? What is preventing you? What small step can you take to enter your life further?

•  In conversation with a friend or loved one, discuss the different ways you’ve experienced being willful in your life. Which of these willful stances helped you grow, and which kept you from growing? How would you like to expand your sense of willfulness now?

•  In your journal, tell the story of a time when you felt our common humanity. What opened this connection?