Healthy New Year

The New Year brings with it reflection, resolutions, and resolve.  May this be your healthiest year ever.  Last year we were challenged with a life threatening illness very close in our family.  There is nothing like a diagnosis of cancer to wake one up.  As many of you already know.  For my loved one, the treatment is complete and the prognosis is good.  But as the one who went through the surgeries and the radiation told me, cancer is not cured, it merely goes into remission.  We all carry the potential time bomb that explores in some of us as the diagnosis of cancer.  I watched my loved one carry for us, this time, the burden of such an eruption.  And she carried it well.  As have others I have loved.  I’m not sure I would have been so stoic, or honest, or determined.  She neither became a victim nor a warrior.  She became informed.  And she informed us all.  By her words.  More significantly, by her actions.  

How does one go to sleep once the alarm has sounded?  Too easily.  Too easily we trance out and resume our unhealthy  patterns of living.  Too easily we hit the snooze alarm and return to the illusion that what we do and do not do is inconsequential.  Everything has consequence.  Every word spoken.  Choice made.  Opportunity avoided.  Our bodies are barometers.  They record the inner and outer pressures we expose them to.  They will tell us in whispers, in words, and in screams that we are out of balance. 

So, I wonder, again, what does it mean to be in balance?  As a poet I love said so beautifully, “Balance is a fleeting thing like newly morning dew, it’s not in falling that we test ourselves, but in rising that we do.”     

Cancer, obesity, anxiety, depression, addictions, to name a few,  are our teachers.  They are not our enemies.  We need no wars against, no ribbon campaigns, no medication from; rather, we need to listen to what these dark teachers are trying to tell us.  Can we listen with interest and curiosity to the language we use to convey our beliefs?  Can we listen to the music in the background?  Can we listen in stereo to the inside and the outside world?  Can we be because we are?

If I have learned anything by this, my 55th year, it is this:  missionizing, colonizing, militarizing, evangelizing, or criticizing leave more victims than converts.  I read Joseph Borden’s latest book, Orenda recently.  It opened my eyes to a lot of things.  It allowed me to wonder, on the edge of First Contact, what purpose is served in suffering, sacrifice, being the one chosen to carry an unwelcome destiny.

Back in the day, so Borden narrates, each of us is given a song to sing.  Every encounter, dream, disappointment, illness, joy, wound, and wonder become the notes and lyrics of this song.  It is called a Death Song.  When the final moment is at hand, the song is to be sung.  Sung out loud.  Sung with gusto.  Sung so that the life lived would be carried by the song sung when it was over.  Like an ear worn, the Death Song would reiterate in the minds and hearts of those who heard it.  In this way, no one was ever forgotten, no life deemed inconsequential.   

May our lives be a song.  A lament and an alleliauh.   May each day of this year, and each year of this life, deepen the song we were each born to sing.  May we be granted the chance to fling it against the stars and may it bounce back and fall into a newborn’s cry.  May our coming and our going be a symphony.