While illness can contract us into an even smaller sense of self, many people who are sick or dying speak of no longer being limited by the previous boundaries of their old, familiar identities. They are exposed to a more expansive landscape. In a strange way, illness—like a powerful encounter with beauty—shakes us, ripens us, and opens us to deeper dimensions of being. It’s not that life becomes perfectly sweet and neatly ordered. There is still plenty of madness, mayhem, and chaos. However, we come to embody much wider identities. The interior life and the external world permeate each other
...more
