a world made new

 

          succulents, roses, hypericum bouquet

There will be change.
You will cease to know your carefully laid-out world once the diagnosis comes.
You will fall to your knees in its wake.

The change will be painful and you will suck air through your teeth
over and over again.
You and she and they will not be the same.
You will feel shocked and clobbered by the
shifting and robbing of customs and personalities.
Your heart will break a fragment at a time, all along the irrevocable journey.

You will mourn the loss of all the small things
~the things and ways of blind comfort~
as one by one they become pronounced by their lack. 

There will be change and some of it will be glorious.
Yes, glorious.
Because when the diagnosis comes, walls and barriers extinguish.
Words and gestures tumble forth and strength beyond reason is revealed.
The truth of each soul affected is laid out before them
 and choices half-stalled are set loose.

In the words and the strength and the setting loose,
whether the diagnosis is overcome or not,
a great healing arrives;
a healing that finds its way to you and she and they
to lift the wings of your souls and carry you forward,
broken and whole,
into the ways of a world made new.

{originally published in my autumn soul in bloom magazine last year.}