NEW JOURNEY: The Sixth Step

When words fail, there is poetry.

I have so many thoughts to share this week, but no time to sort them out. So this short post….

I was in a major funk all weekend. Nothing seems to be working out. My enemies seem to reign triumphant. My bills are mounting, and my sense of failure seemed overwhelming.

Then, in hospice training this week, we watched this incredible movie on death and dying and hospice called Letting Go: A Hospice Journey. It’s hard to find how to see it outside a hospice setting–Blockbuster doesn’t have it! But if you get a chance to see it, take heart, and do it.

It was difficult to watch–I felt on the verge of tears the entire time. It showed the finer moments of hospice, and a few of the not-so-fine. We watch as a vibrant middle-aged woman, an 8-year-old child born with incurable brain disease, and a strong man who’s always protected himself fiercely from love, come to their end with the aid of hospice. We watch as their loved ones all struggle to resolve major life issues during these patients’ last days on earth.

These people’s final moments are poignant and powerful, very sad, and yet somehow beautiful. And ultimately, utterly human.

Not everyone is at peace. Not everyone can accept what has happened. There are no miraculous cures, no reprieves. Yet miracles abound, and great healing is there, too.

At one point in the movie, one person says that people near the end have usually lost everything they valued in life. Their jobs. Their skills. Their health. Their physical abilities. Their hopes and expectations. Either those they love have gone before, or they leave grieving loved ones behind.

Everything is gone, in the end. All that is left is love, and all its complications: Things we should not have done to others. Things others should not have done to us. Gratitude. Love. The role of hospice, he says, is to create a tiny space, a haven, for the dying person to resolve these issues, to say the “four important things”:

Please forgive me.
I forgive you.
Thank you.
I love you.

And later, he recited this haunting poem, and that’s when I cried:

The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.

Rumi

So much can interfere with love–our own human shortcomings, or those of others: pride; anger; jealousy; ignorance; selfishness; fear.

It can be so difficult to get past that, to get to the core. But when we do, love is devastating in its power to transcend even death.

And, at the end, this is all that matters.

We fall, and falling, are given wings.

I apologize for this rambling post. I know some are chafing at the bit, eager to hear more about art marketing and booth lighting, catalogs and mailing lists. These are important, too. I just have to pause to think about where I am today.

I still have no idea what is in store for me, or which way I should go on the river in my little boat.

But all of this is such powerful, beautiful, sometimes scary stuff, my heart feels at peace today. And wide, wide open.