•  In your journal, describe your experience of being fragile and vulnerable. Compare your experience to something in nature. Now go to this piece of nature that mirrors your vulnerability and watch it, listen to it, be in conversation with it—learn from it.

•  In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of a time when you were moved by something you didn’t understand. What part of you, other than your mind, can be moved and make sense of things? How can this inner resource be of help to you now?

•  In your journal, describe someone who’s loved you unconditionally. What did that look like? What did that feel like? What do you think enables that person to be so whole-hearted in their loving? Whether that person is alive or not, write a letter of gratitude, describing that person’s unconditional love and how it’s affected you. If the person is still alive, send the letter. If they are not, send the letter to someone else, to keep their story of love alive.

•  In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a moment of love, beauty, or suffering that you experienced with someone else. How does feeling the presence of another affect your own experience of love, beauty, or suffering? How would you describe and name such a moment of common feeling? When drifting in the river of such feeling, what tribe do you belong to?

•  In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe how you experience the dance of the seed of aliveness, in which we are, at once, close to life and death. Just as we make air useful when we breathe, breathe in the enormity of this paradox and help each other apply this mystery to a very real situation you face today.

•  In your journal, explore what it means to a guest on this Earth and to be full of unknowing.

Messenger Signs

MESSENGER SIGNS

I stumbled onto Avicenna’s Poem on Medicine, the medieval practice manual used in medical schools for almost six hundred years. He remarks on conditions with unusual physical detail. I read them now, a thousand years later, as a citizen of modern oncology, and take them as symptoms of our alignment with the Whole.

Avicenna speaks of messenger signs of death: “Diminution in the opening of the eye, deviation of gaze, and fear of light.” Our openness is our lifeline. When we begin to close, we turn blue. When we shut our eye or squint, we lose the courage that looking into things brings. When we fear the light, we’re doomed. He speaks of fatal signs: “Groping of the hands about the pillow, and if, at the end of sleep, one sees himself covered with snow.”