in hiding

professed intentions of purpose and thought-filled actions and failure and swimming cancer cells and hyperventilation and corn bags and clementines and snowflakes and chocolate ensure splattered on a wall and a volleyball player who was so damn good and biopsies and pine cones and plaster dust and chicken tenders and bags of ugly orange doxorubicin and twinkle lights and chemo farts and gratitude and brain bleeds and project linus tie blankets and oxygen tanks and sprays of red berries and benadryl and commercialism and ambivalence and facebook and wheelchairs and strands of snowflake lights in a bedroom with an empty bed and an ambulance ride in the middle of the night and a wee christmas tree from a bit of earth in vermont and a turkey baster and countless tumors and the phone stopped ringing and rivers of tears and the smell of chlorine and bald heads and a finger lap counter-30 flippin laps! and atrophied leg muscles and a stunning letter dated may 2010 -xo and needles and a silky golden boy and refrigerators in living rooms and #8 and sleepless nights and rain machines and deep-seated anger and diffusion and confusion and saline flushes and pictionary and bombed out platelet counts and a kid who was never sick and a recliner and a school backpack still packed and my lip is numb, your lip is what and 15-18-23 and i have been changed for good and paralyzing grief and regrets and the overwhelming desire to disappear and a poem in my inbox

Be infinitessimal under that sky, a creature
even the sailing hawk misses, a wraith
among the rocks where the mist parts slowly.
Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed
by circumstance, how great reputations
dissolve with infirmity and how you,
in particular, live a hairsbreadth from losing
everyone you hold dear.

Then, look back down the path as if seeing
your past and then south over the hazy blue
coast as if present to a wide future.
Remember the way you are all possibilities
you can see and how you live best
as an appreciator of horizons,
whether you reach them or not.

Admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary, you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim,
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.

Mameen
-- David Whyte
from River Flow