The Day I Was Told I Was Going to Die

In April of 2023, I turned 60 years old.

I was fit. I could do fifteen pull-ups, half an hour of sit-ups, run six miles. I had a six-pack. I ate mostly organic food.

I was healthy. Really healthy.

Or so I thought.

In May of 2023, I started throwing up after eating.

At first I thought it was something simple. I had pain in my back and figured maybe a rib was out. I went to my osteopath three times. Saw a massage therapist twice.

They both told me the same thing.

"Your structure is fine. Something else is going on."

There was one spot in my back where, when they touched it, my whole body went into intense pain.

Touch it, and my body would explode off the table. Not just the place they touched. My entire body seized.

I screamed. Loud.

Something else was going on.

I went to the emergency room. They took an X-ray. The doctor who gave me the results happened to be a friend of mine.

I had a mass the size of a grapefruit in my chest.

He spoke to me in a deeply concerned, serious tone of voice: "As a friend, I want you to get on a plane immediately. Fly to Oahu. Sit in the oncologist's office until they see you."

Before that day, I didn't even know what an oncologist was.

That's how far away the idea of me having cancer actually was.

My doctor friend's voice left me trembling. I took his advice.

I was on that plane and in that office at 7:30 in the morning. They started running scans and tests.

Two days later I was sitting in the Oahu oncology office.

He told me he and two other doctors had reviewed my CAT scan.

There was a tumor in my chest.

And not in a good place.

It was inoperable.

It was wrapped around my aorta. If they tried to remove it, it would kill me.

He told me I had a one in a million kind of cancer. It grows fast and kills quickly.

He told me to get my affairs in order.

He told me I would most likely be dead in two to three months.

I remember sitting there, looking at him, tears in my eyes, and saying,

"So basically you're telling me I'm fucked?"

He didn't laugh.

He was talking to me like I was already dead.

Like I just hadn't caught up to it yet.

I'm Not Ready to Die

I got into the 500 horsepower convertible I had rented and started driving toward the North Shore.

The top was down. Fresh Hawaiian air rushing through my hair. Late afternoon sun on my face.

Everything was so beautiful.

Still so beautiful.

And I had just been told I was going to die.

Really soon.

As I drove along the coastal highway, away from that office, away from what felt like a death sentence, I was already on the phone. I called my daughter, Shanti. I called my girlfriend, Tina. I called my best friends. I called the wisest people I knew—the ones who understood health and well-being.

We cried as I drove.

But none of us were willing to accept the doctor's certainty.

One thought kept repeating in my mind, over and over:

I'm not ready to die.

Everyone Had an Answer

The next day I was on a plane to Arizona to meet with doctors who specialized in operating on "inoperable" tumors.

Within a week, everyone and their mother had advice.

Doctors. Friends. Strangers.

What would save me. What would kill me.

One of my friends is a famous art dealer in La Jolla. His brother is a famous oncologist in New York. He recommended chemotherapy, along with the doctor I had here on Maui.

A ninety-five-year-old doctor who had treated tens of thousands of cancer patients told me chemotherapy would kill me. Avoid it at all cost.

A doctor who had worked with Tony Robbins told me to avoid chemotherapy and only eat fermented vegetables and nuts.

Some doctors recommended a vegetarian diet. Some said only meat.

One guy told me how he had helped cure people of cancer using only fruit.

Another said fruit sugar would feed the cancer. This doctor said food triggers would kill it.

I was going insane trying to figure it out. I felt like I was playing Russian roulette. There was a bullet in every chamber according to the "experts"…but none of them could agree which chamber actually held the bullet.

Doing Everything I Could

I flew to New York to a specialty clinic.

It was the only time in my life I needed a wheelchair to get from my car to the plane, and from the plane to the rental car.

I should not have been driving in New York. I was so out of it I hit the center median several times. Somehow, no damage. Not to the car. Not to me.

At the clinic I had daily vitamin injections. Ozone treatments. Ozone sauna. Ozone up my ass. Ozone injected into my veins. Stem cells infused into my blood.

Before I flew to New York, I was taking three ice baths a day. Immersing my entire body in thirty-three-degree water for five to twenty minutes at a time. I would put on a song and do my best to breathe calmly as the shock of the freezing cold water burned my skin and icy shivers rippled through my spine.

I went for cryotherapy. They put my body in three hundred degrees below zero to stimulate healthy reproduction of my cells.

All of these things would make me feel better, even invigorated, for a few minutes or a few hours. In those moments of invigoration, I was optimistic, even enthusiastic that it was working.

But then the next wave of exhaustion would hit me.

And in those moments, I felt desperate. Terrified. That I was going to die way sooner than I wanted to.

I spent more than fifty thousand dollars on vitamin injections, stem cell injections, and ozone injections.

I spent fifteen thousand dollars on supplements that took me more than forty-five minutes to get down my throat…three times a day…because everything I put in my mouth wanted to come right back up.

I spent seventy thousand dollars on "expert" doctors who "guaranteed" that if I worked with them, my cancer would go away and never come back.

I spent three thousand dollars on an ozone machine to do enemas every day to oxygenate my blood.

I was doing everything I could.

Nothing was working.

I was not getting better.

The Terror Beneath Everything

By August, the doctor in Oahu who told me I was going to die in two to three months was almost right.

I was slipping in and out of consciousness.

Sleeping twenty hours a day.

I could barely talk. Barely think.

One day I passed out trying to stand up. My brother took me to the emergency room.

I had lost eighty pounds.

At six foot six, I weighed one hundred and forty pounds.

Skin and bone.

My thighs were the size of my wrists.

My blood sugar was forty-eight.

Potentially lethal.

I had blood clots in my lungs that could kill me at any moment.

With a tumor the size of a volleyball in my chest, pressing into my lungs, my heart, and my stomach, I could barely breathe.

I was incredibly weak and dizzy.

I couldn't eat anything without significant pain. I threw up almost everything I tried to swallow.

For two and a half months, I spent hours every day hanging onto the toilet like it was a lifeline.

Sometimes in excruciating pain.

Most of the time too weak to move.

Sometimes just waiting for the next wave.

I couldn't stand. I couldn't sit up. I couldn't roll over without help.

My body was disappearing.

Skin and bone.

I looked like the poster child for anorexia.

The People Who Held Me

I had people around me every day watching me wither away. Seriously sick.

My daughter, Shanti, was twenty-one at the time.

We cried for hours together as we talked about how I might not be there to walk her down the aisle when she gets married. My own father died when I was twenty-two. He never got to meet his granddaughter. I wouldn't get to know my daughter's children. I wouldn't get to see what she does with her life. I wouldn't be there as her friend, her father, her mentor. I wouldn't be there with her. And it was hard for both of us to think about that.

I felt guilt and shame that I was going to abandon my daughter at twenty-one the way my father left me at twenty-two by leaving his body.

Shanti's best friend, Brie, had just lost her father to cancer a few months earlier. Shanti and I would let rivers of tears flow down our cheeks as we mourned the loss of what we might never have together. It was real, and we cried and cried and cried.

Tina, who was both a nurse and my beloved girlfriend at the time, was a heroic support and gift of great love to me every day. She would wipe my face and body down gently and lovingly every night and help me brush my teeth when I was too weak to do it myself. We would hold each other and cry at the potential loss of our future together. She even quit her job to take care of me in New York.

One of my dear friends is a minister with more than eighty thousand members in his congregation around the world. He had eighty thousand people praying for me.

I had more than seven hundred unread text messages because I was too weak to respond.

A lot of people cared. A lot of people loved me. A lot of people didn't think I was going to recover. A lot of people were terrified I was going to die.

The word terrified is the right word. It was the kind of terrified I could see in their faces and hear in their voices. I looked like a skeleton. They were scared.

And understandably so.

What Fear Felt Like

Sometimes I would just lie in my bed and shake with the fear that this might be it. This might be my last day. This might be my last breath.

My body was already so weak, but the fear made it tremble like a skittish Chihuahua.

I would wake up at 3 AM. At 5 AM. At 7 AM. And all I could do was cry, thinking about how I might never see the people I love ever again.

I was so grateful for the love they had shared with me. And so sorry that I would never look into their eyes again. Or touch their skin. Or hold their body.

I wanted to be able to say goodbye. To say I love you. You mattered to me more than words can say. But I didn't have the strength to pick up a phone, let alone talk into it.

So all I could do was cry.

Tears of love. Gratitude. Sorrow.

Sometimes I would look at pictures of them on my phone and my eyes would flood with oceans of love for them.

The Choice No One Could Make for Me

I chose to go without chemotherapy right up until I was lying in that emergency room and they were telling me I could die at any moment.

At that point, chemotherapy seemed like my only possible choice.

And even then, my stubborn ass didn't want to go there.

But my brother and my daughter wanted the only choice left.

Try chemotherapy.

So I did.

And by some grace beyond my understanding, it started to work.

It started to reduce the size of the cancer almost immediately.

Something Remained

I was slipping in and out of consciousness. Sleeping twenty hours a day. I could barely speak. I couldn't roll over without somebody's help. I couldn't stand up, let alone sit up.

My body had withered away to skin and bone.

But something remained.

Beneath the terror. Beneath the guilt. Beneath the fear. Beneath the sorrow. Beneath the disappointment.

There was a presence.

Quiet.

Stillness itself.

Even the hush beneath stillness.

Words fail to describe what remained. Silence spoke. Fire prayed through my breath. The holiest thing I can say about coming this close to death and being with it for a few months is not something you know how to articulate in words. It's the space where words end. And in that space I was no longer praying to get well, to have another day, to have another life.

I was being prayed in the same way as some unknown power beats my heart and breathes my breath.

The Stillness Beneath the Fear

There came a morning—I don't remember which one—when I woke up and everything was different. Nothing had changed. I was still skin and bone. I was still in the body that felt like it was almost dead.

But my way of seeing had changed.

I was still lying in that hospital bed in New York. I was still being woken up at 1 AM, 2 AM, 3 AM and 4 AM by machines that were helping make sure I was alive. I was still disturbed at 5 AM to draw blood from my arm, take my temperature, check my blood pressure and my pulse. But they no longer felt like disturbances or interruptions. They were rhythm. A pulse. The heartbeat of the hospital, the world, the universe—keeping time with something larger than any of us.

I was still too weak to move, too weak to speak, too weak to do anything except breathe and notice what was happening instead of dying. I had surrendered to the possibility that I might never take another breath. I might never see another day. I might never be touched by Tina or Shanti again. There was no sense of desire inside me. No wanting to either live or die. I was just noticing being. Breath by breath. One heartbeat of time.

And in that presence, something began to shift.

Not dramatically. Not like a lightning bolt or a revelation. It was quieter than that. So quiet I almost missed it.

Beneath the fear—which was still there, rattling my bones at 3 AM—there was something else. Something I sensed had been there all along. I just never had this silence inside myself before. I had noticed it, but not like this.

It was still. It was present. It was watching. It was all-pervading. Not watching me like a separate thing. More like watching from me. As if the part of me that was terrified was just one wave on the surface, and underneath was an ocean that had never been afraid.

I started to notice it in the smallest moments.

The way the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The way the sound seemed to vibrate through the air and then dissolve into something larger. The sense that everything was run by some grace that understood it all. The coming and going of hospital staff. The way my own breath, shallow and labored as it was, felt like it was being breathed by something that wasn't just my lungs.

I didn't understand it. I didn't try to.

But I began to notice that I was resting in it.

The Walls Between Sacred and Ordinary

When I was lying in that hospital bed, looking out the window at the hospital's huge air conditioning units, too weak to wipe my own ass, too weak to lift a cup of water to my own lips—the self that wanted to be spiritual had nowhere to stand anymore.

The self that wanted to be spiritual—the one that meditated and ate organic food and traveled the world to spend time with spiritual teachers and thought of itself as relatively awake—that self had nowhere to stand.

I couldn't pretend to be humble. I couldn't strive for purity when I needed others to clean my butt and carry away my urine. I couldn't perform being alright and having my shit together for anyone, especially myself, because I couldn't perform anything at all. The idea of pretending anything was both hilarious and ridiculous in my current condition.

And in that stripping away, something real began to emerge.

I started to find a visceral, palpable sense of what I can only describe as holiness. It wasn't the word holy. It was the feeling of something truly sacred vibrantly shimmering and shining in places I never would have looked before.

The buzz of the fluorescent lights.

The constant recurrence of alarms going off or the ringing of machines wanting…actually demanding…attention.

The screaming of unhappy and hurting patients day and night. In the midst of it, all I could feel was the part of them that needed to feel loved and valued and cherished in a world where they felt that was absent.

The exhausted eyes of the nurses on marathon twelve-hour shifts day in and day out. Nurses who just kept showing up. Kept being kind and gentle. Kept treating me like a person, even though I looked more like a skeleton and smelled like sickness. Even when I couldn't say thank you because I didn't have the strength. Nurses who just needed one person who saw their soul. That they were not their job. They were human beings with hearts that mattered…but nobody was acknowledging their worth.

The janitor sweeping the floor at midnight. The way he moved deliberately and slowly like he was doing something important. Like he knew that what he was doing was making a contribution. It brought tears to my eyes seeing the beauty of his soul. But the way he hung his shoulders and head told me he obviously was feeling unseen, unappreciated, and unvalued. He always got a smile and a thumbs up from me.

The food service worker who brought me broth I couldn't drink but she still needed to know that someone cared, that what she was doing mattered, had value, was noticed and appreciated for being of service.

The doctors who were often so caught up in their internal story about being doctors that they needed somebody to see them as they truly are beyond the role they are playing and the mask they are wearing. When they could see that I actually saw them and cared, friendships began to form. Real connections happened.

Somehow, I found myself in a state of awareness where I knew that I had a body that I had visually experienced as mine. But by some grace, I could also feel a sense of self in everyone and everything around me. And in a hospital there are a lot of people and a lot of things going on. The overwhelming amount of work the hospital staff had to get through every day was astonishing to watch and somehow be part of.

All of it began to glow.

I saw angels. Not the kind with wings and halos. The kind who showed up and did the hard, unglamorous, necessary work of keeping people alive. People like me. People who hold the world together. The kind who wiped the ass of a man they've never met and will never see again, and did it with dignity, with care, as if it actually mattered.

It did matter.

It was the most sacred thing I had ever witnessed.

Not because I was trying to see it that way. But because the walls between sacred and ordinary had fallen away, and I no longer had the energy to build them back up.

The Body That Was Disappearing

I have been a dancer and an athlete my entire life. But now life was dancing me in a whole new way. The body I once had was gone. History. Done. The body that could do fifteen pull-ups, one hundred push-ups, run ten miles, ski at the world championship level, dance for fifteen hours in a day—the body I had built and cared for and enjoyed for sixty years—was gone. It really was fading away. I was skin and bone.

My thighs were the size of my wrists. My ribs pressed against my skin like they were trying to escape. When I looked in the mirror, I didn't recognize the person looking back.

The next thing to go was my identity. Who was I if I wasn't strong? If I wasn't capable? If I wasn't the one taking care of others? I had built an identity my whole life on being capable. It didn't feel safe to look at myself any other way. I was the guy people could count on. Dear friends were calling me and texting me. I didn't have the strength to respond. I was updating my will and barely had the brainpower to think, let alone make decisions. I wanted to be the strong, healthy dad for my daughter. And I couldn't even lift my head when she walked in the room. I couldn't even count on myself to take another breath.

The next layer to go was the narrative I was telling myself about my whole life. About who I was. What I had achieved. What I had failed at. What I was working toward. All of it started to feel…thin. Not important. Like it was a story somebody else had written. Like a costume I had been wearing for so long I had forgotten it wasn't my skin. Taking that off felt like taking off a pair of tight shoes.

That person wasn't me. I could see it. That person was dying.

That was the fact. The doctors said it. My body said it. The tumor in my chest, now the size of a volleyball, said it with every shallow breath I took.

And yet.

Something in me was not dying.

I could feel it. Not as hope. Not as denial. Not as some positive-thinking mantra I was repeating to keep the fear at bay.

It was just... there.

Present. Intact. Untouched. But somehow touched and profoundly intimate with everything.

Something that had been there the whole time.

Something real. And very much alive.

It wasn't new. It wasn't something I had achieved. It was more like something I had been covering up, without knowing it, layer after layer, for sixty years.

The closest I can come to describing it is this: imagine you're watching a building crumble. The walls come down. The roof collapses. The structure that once held everything in place is reduced to rubble. But the physical space that once held the building didn't change at all. It was exactly the same amount of space with or without the building. And the sky that was above the building the whole time—that sky doesn't fall. It was never the building. It was never the structure. It was always just... there.

That's what I began to feel.

The building that was me—my body, my identity, my story, my achievements, my failures, my fears, my hopes—was crumbling. Fast. And the sky that had been holding it all along was still there.

Unfazed. Unbroken.

The Dissolution

Then came the dissolution.

At the edge of every breath, there came a silence so vast it felt like death.

Maybe not the death of my body. But definitely the death of separation. The death of me as a separate thing.

It was weird in my experience: I was fading in and out of this world and in and out of my body. It was like being dead while still alive. It was the strangest thing. It could have been terrifying.

But it felt liberating.

Like being torn apart and put back together in the same moment. Like losing everything I thought I was and discovering that what remains is more real than anything I lost.

I remember lying there, trembling, my whole body shaking without me willing it to shake. Not from cold but from the sheer immensity of what was happening. My mind was still there, not trying to make sense of it, yet still curious: what is this? what is happening to me?

And then even the question dissolved.

There was just the stillness. The hush. The presence that had been there all along, the one I had spent my whole life looking for, the one I had meditated to find, the one I had prayed to reach—it was never somewhere else. It was what was looking. It was what was breathing. It was what was dying and not dying at the same time.

The Paradox of Disappearing

I thought I was disappearing.

The last layer of the self that thought it was doing something—good or bad, right or wrong, holy or profane—began to dissolve.

The final illusion that I am the one who can live a happy life, be successful, maybe even reach God…burnt away.

And what was left?

This is where words feel cheap. Where every attempt to describe it sounds like poetry or philosophy or something I read in a book. But it wasn't any of those things. It was real. More real than anything I had ever known.

I was disappearing. Yet I had never been more real.

I had lost everything I thought mattered in this world. My body. My strength. My independence. My future. My plans. My dreams.

Yet I had never been more awake and aware to a feeling of being whole and complete.

I was not reaching for more success. I was not reaching for love. I was not even looking for God anymore.

And yet, somehow, I was looking as God.

That sounds arrogant, I know. It would have sounded arrogant to me before this happened. But it didn't feel arrogant. It felt like remembrance. Something larger than life was shining in and all around me and it felt good and loving. I grew up being told that God is love. And in the midst of whatever consciousness I was in during my cancer journey, I could feel immense love, presence, and grace.

The drop I had imagined myself to be for so long, realizing it was never separate from the ocean.

The flame of life that I thought was mine, realizing it was never apart from the sun.

At first, this felt unbearable. To be so open. So unguarded. So alive.

But then it began to feel more natural than anything I had ever known.

I could see how funny it was to want to run back to the safety of my story about me and my life. But once I had tasted the silence, I could never fully return. Because the taste of truth was so poignant that it ruined every illusion.

Prayer Without Words

There came a point when I stopped praying to get well.

I stopped praying for another day. Another chance. Another life.

I don't know exactly when it happened. Somewhere between the 5 AM blood draws and the 7 AM vitals checks, between the vomiting and the tears, between the terror and the surrender—something shifted.

I wasn't praying anymore.

I was being prayed.

The same way my heart was beating without my permission. The same way my lungs were pulling air without my direction. Something was breathing me. Something was holding me. Something was praying through me.

It really is a miracle that I'm still alive. I don't know why I got to live when so many others died going through the same fire. Maybe because this loving grace wanted to use me a little more to love this world. I don't know for sure why I'm here, why I'm still alive. But I do know I'm grateful.

I can feel that loving grace even now. That soft ache behind my ribs, remembering how it hurt to breathe, and yet the subtle pulse of being alive felt sacred to me.

Maybe that was God praying through me when I no longer had any energy or power to pray. Not asking for anything. Not promising anything. Just burning gently, moment to moment, saying:

Be here.

The Intimacy of Being Helpless

Tina would come to my bedside every night.

She would wipe my face with a warm cloth. Gently. Lovingly. The way you might wash a child who is too tired to wash themselves.

She would help me brush my teeth when I was too weak to lift my arm.

She would hold my hand and cry with me when the fear came back, which it did, often, because I was still human, still in a body that was dying, still sad that I was leaving her.

There was no pretense between us anymore. My heart, which now felt bigger than the world, was loving her heart that felt larger than life. I wasn't pretending. There was no I'm fine or I've got this or don't worry about me.

I couldn't pretend. I couldn't perform. I couldn't protect her from what was happening, because what was happening was bigger than both of us.

So we just held each other.

And in that holding, something holy was happening. Something I had spent my whole life searching for in temples and teachings and transcendent experiences.

It was right there. In her hands on my face. In her tears on my chest. In the simple, impossible intimacy of being helpless together.

The Light That Remains

I can't tell you exactly when the fear stopped. Or what made it stop.

It didn't stop all at once. It came in waves, like everything else. But somewhere in the middle of all that dying, something opened.

Not a door. Not a window. More like a veil that I hadn't even known was there, lifting. And on the other side—

Only light.

Not the light I had imagined. Not beams from above. Not a tunnel with a figure at the end. Nothing like any near-death experience I had ever read about.

It was a radiance from within.

The kind that doesn't shine on things, but through them.

I felt it first in my own chest. Beneath the tumor, beneath the pain, beneath the fear—there was this warmth. This presence. This... aliveness that had nothing to do with whether my body lived or died.

It was the same light I had been looking for my whole life. The same presence I had sought in meditation, in love, in success, in achievement. The same home I had been trying to find since I could remember.

It had never been somewhere else.

It had always been here.

It was what was looking. What was breathing. What was dying. What was not dying.

The Question That Disappeared

At some point, I stopped asking why me?

Not because I found an answer. Because the question itself dissolved. Like a wave asking why ocean?

I stopped asking what does this mean?

Not because I understood. Because meaning was no longer something I needed to grasp. It was something I was swimming in.

I stopped asking will I live or die?

Because the I that was asking had become something larger than either option.

I was still scared sometimes. I was still sad. I was still heartbroken at the thought of leaving my daughter, my girlfriend, my friends, my life.

But underneath all of that—holding all of that—there was something that was not afraid.

Something that had never been born and would never die.

Something that had been here all along, waiting for me to stop running long enough to notice.

The Sacredness of the Ordinary

I started to see things differently.

The way the sunlight came through the hospital window at dawn. How it fell across the floor, across my hands, across the face of the nurse who came to check my vitals.

The sound of laughter from another room. Someone, somewhere in this building full of suffering, was laughing.

The trembling in Tina's voice when she said I love you.

The weight of Shanti's hand in mine when she flew to New York to be with me, not knowing if she would ever see me alive again.

The janitor who came to empty my trash at midnight, moving quietly, doing his work, his presence a kind of prayer I had never noticed before.

All of it glowed.

Not because anything had changed. Because I had finally stopped looking past it.

The cancer in my body started to shrink. I could eat again. Strength started to return. After almost three months of barely being able to sit up, there came a day that I was able to stand. The next day I took three steps. The following day, I took nine steps. The day after that, I took thirty steps—it felt more like running a marathon than walking across a room. Within two weeks I was able to walk the entire hospital floor.

Something was giving this body a chance to live again. I'm so incredibly grateful.

I had taken for granted what a blessing it is to be able to breathe fresh air, walk with bare feet on the ground, feel sunshine on skin. To have the chance to live another day. Cancer taught me to appreciate the precious, extraordinary, astonishing value of this—something that so many of us take for granted. And I do my best to keep that appreciation close to my chest.

This Is Not Enlightenment

I want to be clear about something.

What happened to me in that hospital bed was not enlightenment. At least, not the way I had imagined enlightenment to be.

It wasn't a permanent state. It wasn't a level I reached. It wasn't something I could cling to or reproduce or teach anyone else to achieve.

It was intimacy. Closeness. Vulnerability. Trust. Surrender. Love.

Not transcendence. Tenderness.

The divine stopped hiding behind thunder and scripture. It started hiding in plain sight. In the curve of a smile. In the pause before tears. In the warmth that rises in your chest when you realize you are still alive, still breathing, still here.

And in that realization, worship happened without effort. Prayer happened without words. Life itself became devotion.

Not because I was holy.

Because there was nothing left in the way.

The Return

I know this all sounds like I had some kind of permanent awakening.

I didn't.

At the time of this writing, it has been two and a half years since I was in that hospital in New York.

Since then, the sense of me and my problems has returned.

I get angry. I get frustrated. I get scared. I have experienced my heart breaking and the unbearable agony of loss when relationships that I care deeply about fall away. I get caught up in stories about what should or shouldn't be happening. Sometimes I feel hatred towards myself or others or the world. I resist what is. I forget what I learned. I forget what I was shown.

And then, sometimes, I remember.

I remember that for a while, I saw freedom from resistance was actually possible. And blissful. I remember what it felt like to belong to the vastness that breathes stars and souls alike. To rest there. To not reach for understanding. To let myself be carried by what has carried me since before my name existed.

I don't always feel the holiness of ordinary things anymore. Laughter. Pain. Hunger. Sleep. A part of me remembers that those are holy. But I get distracted. I get busy. I get lost in thought.

But there's still a part of me that remembers.

Sooner or later, I come back to it. It comes through my art. It comes through my friendships. It comes through my willingness to keep loving, to keep shining, to keep remembering.

The light that I found in the hospital, in the middle of cancer that almost killed me, remains. The stillness beneath everything. The presence that was there before I got sick, that was there in the middle of the sickness, that is still here now, watching me type these words, watching you read them.

What Cancer Taught Me

Throughout this entire journey, I felt like I was the dance being danced.

Every step. Even when I couldn't walk. Every breath. Every heartbeat. All of it felt orchestrated by something that wanted me to wake up. Something ancient and immeasurable.

The ground. The Earth turning. People coming and going. It all became the drum.

In the beginning, I thought I was in a war against cancer. I thought I had to fight it. I thought I had to beat it. Conquer it.

Now I understand that the cancer was never against me. It was my greatest teacher.

If I was to summarize what cancer wanted to teach me, it would be this:

I am home. I was always home.

You are home. You are always home.

There is a power that knows the way. I can relax in that. I can sit in that quiet center and feel the pulse of life moving through me, around me, as me.

Every breath. Every heartbeat. Every chance to have one more day to keep loving is an extraordinary, precious gift that can be wasted. Or cherished.

Look into the camera of existence. It looks back.

There is no distance.

Only light.

Only love.

I wish I could give everybody the gifts I found in the midst of cancer.

The smallest moments become infinite. The sound of a door closing. The warmth of sunlight on my skin. The trembling before sleep. The way a stranger smiles for no reason.

Life really is as short as a half-taken breath.

What I have found is that it's so easy to get distracted by things that don't matter. It's easy to say don't plant anything but love. But it's not easy to live the knowing of that.

In my experience, it can be very hard to come back to love.

But it's worth it. Because it's the only way to come back to life.