"Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working. Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings."
                                                                                Rumi, Sufi mystic and poet, 1207-1273

I once thought it would be wonderful if life was always beautiful, joyful, easy. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer more than 13 years ago, I remember the days when I walked around with the feeling that my nerve endings were on the outside of  my body. Everything seemed so bright, so beautiful. I was so acutely attentive to being alive that it was intoxicating. I remember looking deeply into the eyes of the cashier at the grocery store, thankful for her smile, her kindness. She did not know me. She had no idea what was going on in my life. She did not know that my fear of dying was driving me to such total aliveness.

I learned over the next few months, that I couldn’t live like that all the time. Our bodies, our spirits, our minds, need more of the ebb and flow of emotion,energy and presence to life.  We frankly need the mundane and ordinary to provide a balance. Rumi is saying, I believe, that the Holy comes to us in both the closed fist and the outstretched hand…….but mostly in the softening place in between, the place that gives movement and flight.

Many times I have been paralyzed by clinching my fists too tightly, holding life too close. I have also been paralyzed by opening my hands too widely, taking on too much. In these ancient words I am reminded once again that growth in our life, particularly our spiritual life, is almost always "both/and" and very rarely "either/or".It is in that "both/and" place where the expanding and contracting brings about flight and our wings can take us to new and exciting walks with God.