overheard: even if it takes you 300 times an hour to move the mind back to a quiet place it's sucessful
Saturday had the MRI. Heard nothing. This is a good thing. Sunday, yesterday, was the 5 year anniversary of The Call. Meaning it's now been over 5 years since I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. This is a hopeful, beautiful thing. Ironically (or not) my daily email from Eknath Easwaran yesterday is copied below in its entirety
Eknath Easwaran’s Thought for the Day
December 27
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.
– I Corinthians
Most of us find the death of another person or creature deeply unsettling, yet after a time we manage to submerge our feelings and carry on. For someone deeply sensitive to the transitory nature of life, however, an encounter with death can leave scars that last a lifetime. As a teenager Saint Augustine witnessed the untimely death of a bosom friend, and suddenly a trapdoor opened into deeper awareness. He was devastated. “I thought death suddenly capable of devouring all men, because he had taken this loved one.”
The word anxiety is a weak term for expressing this continuing uneasiness, this unsettled sense of being out of place and running out of time. Generally we can only ascribe it to external events, if we succeed in linking it to anything at all. But what is actually happening is that a wisp of memory is rising, whispering to us from deep within that nothing external in life is secure, nothing physical ever lasts.
No matter how hard we may try, in the long run none of us can escape the devastating fact of death. Yet an encounter with death, as in the case of Augustine, can leave us changed decidedly for the better. It can prompt us forward on the long search for something secure in life, something death cannot reach.
1 comment:
When Death taps us on the shoulder, and we cannot run away, we encounter a 3D vision of life we had not known before. It's almost a gift... but wrapped in black ribbon.
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