the miracle of the ordinary

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More than once, I have discovered some hint of the value of being in the testimony of people who are approaching death, many of whom apparently find something they could never have anticipated. Listen to these words lifted from the journal of an old man, dying of esophageal cancer, which appeared in Ira Byock’s article ‘The Meaning and Value of Death’:

To live in the bright light of death is to live life in which colors and sounds and smells are all more intense, in which smiles and laughs are irresistibly infectious, in which touches and hugs are warm and tender almost beyond belief … I wish that all your stories could have a final chapter in which you are given the gift of some time to live with your fatal illness.

The gift of some time to live with your fatal illness, he writes.

To be means there is no longer any compulsion to get what I want and to hold on to it. To be means to be content with what is given. Being is the source of love because learning to love means learning to be content with the life you have been given. Being fully present to what is — without judging or evaluating or wanting something different — is the most basic act of love.

Love is not only a kind of offering of the self to another person, as when my students sit quietly with their hospice patients. Love is ultimately about unconditional surrender to what the writer Wendell Berry calls 'the miracle of life.’ To love in this sense is to surrender the compulsion to make things better, to let go of the need to explain, fix, or do anything. It is to experience this world, this life, as good enough. To find in this world, in this life, a place to rest. A home.

It’s in this peculiar sense that in becoming old we are often able to recapture the freshness of the world that we knew as children, to see the world we have learned to take for granted as if we were seeing it for the first time.”

—C. W. Huntington Jr.

The Miracle of the Ordinary

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astranemus

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