To my surprise, my cancer experience began to write me. Now I was desperate to stay alive, and so forgot about poems and manuscripts and publishers and overstatement. Now, I simply climbed a rope of expression, hand-by-hand, feeling-by-feeling, day-by-day, climbing my way into tomorrow. Now, my poetry became utter nonfiction. Here, the need to stay alive returned me to an expressive journey that drinks only of the Source. I was so busy surviving, I had no time to type and revise. It was only after surgeries and chemo and hair and no hair and months of repair that I found this rope of expression scribbled in journals. A few years later, it formed my third book, Acre of Light.

And so I learned rawly—through struggle—that the center we all share is the same, and whether we find our way there by going out of ourselves completely or by going into ourselves completely, either way, we must find that vibrant center of truth that waits beneath all names.

In this, we’re left with an ongoing cycle in both writing and life, a cycle between self and other, through which we arrive, again and again, at mystery and meaning. In the life of writing as in the life of relationship, we must express our own authentic experience in order to clean the lens of self, so we might enter with full heart and mind the inner lives and questions of others, both real and imagined. Then, through the experience of others, we’re called to better know ourselves, and on and on.

Not by chance, though often surprising, the giving over of ourselves to the expressive journey yields the next phase of our inner curriculum. For each life is a language no one knows. And with every heartbreak, discovery, and unexpected moment of joy, with every lift of music that touches us where we didn’t think we could be touched, with every cut and confusion, another letter in our alphabet is decoded. Take a step, learn a word. Feel a feeling, decode a sign. Accept a truth, translate a piece of the mystery written in your heart.

It doesn’t matter what mode of expression you’re drawn to. It could be sewing, quilting, cooking, mountain climbing. It could be the art of listening or any act of service. Each creative act will lead us to our next teacher. Each form of expression will deepen our understanding of the language of our life.

Before we live what’s next, we often think there’s some answer we need to have in order to go on. But soon enough, we’re humbled to discover, more than once, that the act of living itself unravels both the answer and the question. When we watch, we remain riddles to be solved. When we enter, we become songs to be sung.