Gifts
Aug 26th, 2007 by Michael Max
You open to your life unfolding,
and while holding on
to your hopes,
you accept.
My friend Ronny is leaving Taiwan. As for me, it was a stop on the way to Mainland China. A stop of two years. Which is just about enough time, if you work hard, to get enough Chinese into your tongue so you can begin to navigate there, without the feeling that you have been drop kicked into a completely different universe.
Oddly enough, this kind of journey is not simply about acquiring language, or finding doctors with whom to dive deep into medicine. It involves not small amounts of surrender, and then surrender again, all the while trusting that the path which feels like a slightly slick teetering log that bridges an aqua mountain stream, will not rock far enough to pitch you into the cold flow. Sometimes we have a solid cover story so we don’t feel the abyss licking at our heels. But, then, it is the abyss which brings forth the rewards of this kind of journey.
Leaving behind all we know, wandering without the company of a map, trusting a guiding star. It casts the daily stories of our lives into a different kind of light. In Chinese we say 活得有意義, it is a life that is filled with meaning. Experience distills into significance. Health is not just the state of our bodies, it is the state of our Being as well.