It’s snowing in March, and the large flakes are drifting every which way looking for a home, each as fragile as a life on Earth trying to find its place in the mysterious swirl and flow that has gone on forever. And to its surprise, each flake falling from the sky lands and merges with the Earth, becoming part of what’s foundational. This too is our fate. We’re tossed into life, headlong and heartlong, into swirls of fragility, which eventually merge us with all that’s foundational. Of course, there’s pain and fear and worry along the way, even times of despair when all we know seems so very close to being erased. But hard as it is, being erased is part of the incubation of all that’s substantial. When erased of our assumptions and conclusions, we’re returned to the innocence of childhood. This is how we begin again. I have found myself in all these phases, more than once: waking suddenly in mid-fall from the sky, feeling more fragile than I could bear, afraid my very self will be erased, only to land and merge with the thing that outlasts us all. Such moments of joining can stun us into a turn of resilience. No one can guide us through this process. We can only bear witness that it’s possible, even probable.

The pieces in this section are personal accounts of this mysterious and arduous journey, in and out of being half-hearted and whole-hearted, in and out of feeling ill and feeling well, in and out of fearing death and welcoming rebirth. Most of these pieces were written in my thirties and early forties. The essays here unfold what I saw when closest to death. In “God, Self, and Medicine,” I discovered how the part is always in relationship to the Whole, whether we acknowledge this kinship or not. In “A Terrible Knowledge,” I discovered the paradox of suffering and the necessity of feeling in order to move through our suffering. And in “Dance of the Seed,” I discovered the puncture of grief and the endless proliferation of life that reseeds itself once we, as its carrier, are gone. The poems in this section are raw accounts of my confusion of what to do with my will, where to place it, and when it made no difference. The poems explore the hard gift of waiting and letting go, and how my suffering forever opened me to the suffering of others.