Dear Pneuma,

Here are my cards: I have an incurable disease that I manage to live with 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days on a Gregorian calendar year. I wish I could say that I can sometimes forget about it. I wish I could say that, generally, the disease has little to say to my daily life. I wish I could say that I have declared peace with my disease, but Pneuma, I am not going to lie with you: I still wake up hating this thing in my life and wishing I could wish it away.

So then I am left with hate in my heart, and I don't know if that can be good. What does it do to me to hate this? I'll tell you what it does. It makes me tired. It makes me heavy. It makes me enclosed. It makes me build walls to keep out fear and physical pain, and those things make me sick.

So I think some about hate, and I think some about God. In me, the meeting place with God is the moment when I know "what is, is." So, if my disease is, and my disease is bad for me, then must God be bad for me? I hate my disease, and my disease is, so must I then hate God? I mean to say, how dare God, being what is, be this!

Yet, I did not know God before this disease. I hid from life altogether before this disease. I was coldly rational, harshly skeptical, and arrogantly judgemental from my sterile environment of intelligent choices, shallow relationships and highly controlled lifestyle. I was safe, undiseased, agnostic and I couldn't imagine that life meant anything. I woke most days tired, heavy, and enclosed-sick.

I stood beside a road, one morning, and I hated. I focussed and felt and screamed that hate at God's blue sky for being blue, at God's green earth for being earth, at God's living people everywhere for living free of my wounds. I screamed my hate at Life, for taking my life from me, and for the very first time, in my memory, I realized the nonsensical premise at the bottom of all my arguments: life itself.

I am living. I am. At all.

I suppose that means my disease took nothing from me. Instead, by breaking me, disease asked to make me whole. In many ways, I am less rational, less skeptical, less, intelligent, and less controlled. I feel more. I hurt more. I risk poor decisions more often. And some days, I am simply more aware of how very tired I am. But I know today, that my living has meaning, that my commitments matter, that fear keeps nothing at bay.

I suppose then, that hating my disease, is not good for me. In fact, it is an ever present reminder that right here and right now, I am living at all. I suppose the thing to do then, is love Life and turn my compassion on despair, and make it flee away.

Thankful,
Cobalt Dreams