It’s good to be home after a pretty scary week. On Friday, I had my second cardiac catheterization in the past 7 months, and I’m now the owner of two additional stents (that’s three total if you’re counting at home). The surgeon framed it not as a further deterioration but as a hopeful resolution to what started in September.

Existentially, I’m fine. My heart is beating, I am not in any pain, there was no catastrophe that sent me to the hospital. Score one for me noticing what was happening inside me.

Spiritually, I have been overcome by and struggled with how vulnerable I am, by what can go wrong even as I try to do right, by how my sphere of control is so very limited.

And so I remind myself that I’ve never had that much control, that so much has gone and continues to go right in my life (me typing this being prime evidence), that I am surrounded by brave and loving people and a level of care that few people in this world have ever been able to access. I am open, aware and engaged in this great project of living and loving.

I wrote this yesterday. I’m calling it Space:

This hurtling
Through Space
That is my life,

That is your life,
Can leave me
Nauseous, fearful,

As if I was
Mere inches
From a great

Calamity.
And that is when
I need the reminder

That, if I open my eyes,
Light is creeping
Across the earth.

The sun spills over
The rounded corner
Of the horizon,

Illuminating
A sky filled to bursting
With others, looking
As awkward in orbit as me.

And I know this:
This life, so fast,
So frighteningly
Close to the inhospitable,
So vulnerable,

It is bathed in light.
It is connected
To great joy

If only I look out
And in, and reconcile
Myself to the height

And the speed
And the warmth
And the cold.

This is life lived
On the edge of wonder
And calamity,

Which is to say,
This is life.