Wings

This weekend, at last, it's my time to hunker down in the kitchen preparing my favorite items for holiday time. Today I will teach my 10-year-old sous chef how to make sugar-friend pecans. I've also got cat-sitting (no more overdoing that after the last round), the Christmas Card, the wrapping, and checking everything twice so that Christmas Eve doesn't become the night before madness.

No matter how I kvetch, I do love Christmas. I just love it! I find that Christmas surprises reach me in small and large ways each year, even in the midst of the chaos. Perhaps it is because of the chaos that I am surprised when it happens.

Take yesterday. I had a conversation with my coach. She and I usually connect with ease, and yesterday seemed no different except that she was especially focused on framing our discussion so that I produced some label I could use to describe myself, my essence, in a very simple way. We were focused on "naming" that which I held most near and dear to my soul and that which I might diminish over time if I didn't get conscious about it. She was helping me name my way in the world.

We shared an uplifting conversation to say the least, "workshopping" the idea from all angles. In the end, I felt she had given me wings that were neither too large nor too small for my humble soul. Plus -- and this is a good test -- there was an immediate rightness about this new label, as if I had just received prescription glasses and felt opened up to a new clarity. "What now, then?" my soul seemed to clamor excitedly . . .

My wonderful coach gave me wings and tuned-up my voice. She was clear and confident on the phone. That's why, when she mentioned that she would begin treatment for cancer early next month, I was so surprised.

She wasn't sick, though, I thought. She may have a tumor but she isn't sick.

She had made room for this cancer in her life, so the cancer was not a struggle. There was no charge to it at all. Gracefully, her healing energy remained flowing. Wow. That is impressive. While I paused to check in with her about the details and her doctors, I never had a doubt about this friend's wellness. She may need a toxic mass removed, but her energy is free of disease. Still, I will hold her rightly in my thoughts.

The encounter reminded me that the circle of wellness and of disease, of giving and receiving, of asking and being asked is the focus of our lives whether we notice it or not.

We may call these things by different names and wrap them up in other phrases, believing that someday we'll arrive at "in balance" or "out of balance" for good. I don't think that is part of the plan. It seems more vast than that to me.