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AFTER THE THERAPY SESSION AND
Maggie's rhapsodic rant at the side of the road, I stop wondering whether or not my state of mind affects Maggie; I stop asking doctors and researchers and spiritual teachers their take on the connection I may or may not still have to the cells in Maggie's body; I stop researching the power of prayer and peace of mind to influence recovery from disease. I stop asking the questions and start
being
the answer.

The Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh was exiled from his homeland during the Vietnam War, and now travels the globe teaching what he calls “being peace.” He says, “Being peace is the basis for making peace. Only by establishing peace in yourself can you be helpful in establishing peace for others, for the world.” One of the most powerful teachers of meditation in the world, this small monk, dressed in plain brown robes, offers one simple practice wherever he goes: the practice of “interbeing,” of developing the awareness of our connection to each other, to the earth, to the stars, and to the universe itself. We are made of the same stuff, the same elements, the same molecules. You don't have to go through a bone marrow transplant for this to be true with all your relations, colleagues, friends, even those you may call enemies.

The air you breathe is the air I breathe. We pass molecules back and forth, in and out, around the world. We feel what each other
feels; we face the same hurdles and confusions; we strive for understanding and love. We share the same planet; we need each other; we
are
each other. We are strands in a tapestry we cannot see because we are part of it.

So instead of wondering if love heals, I try to be love. I infuse the atmosphere around me with as much love and kindness as is genuine and real. Whenever my heart sends shriveled little bombs out into the world—when I'm jealous or judgmental or pissed off, like last night when the people renting my neighbor's house were blasting headbanger music from the deck—I stop myself and revert to being love (and
then
call them). If my cells up the road in Maggie's body are still connected to my inner landscape, then radiating love and practicing kindness in all situations is an intelligent way to proceed. And if what I do has no bearing whatsoever on Maggie's health, it's still a better way to live—for me and for all those around me.

Does peace heal? Then be at peace. When reading the newspaper, when confronting suffering and ignorance and brutality, breathe in peace, and breathe out peace. I drop my shoulders, soften my belly, feel the cells in my own body vibrate to a more peaceful rhythm. Actions that emanate from a place of peace tend to be more effective than actions that spring from chaos and rage. I have found this to be true at work and with my kids and as an activist in the world.

Does the truth heal? Yes, because the truth sets my soul free in a world hungry for authentic soulfulness. One person speaking the truth emboldens the souls of others. Therefore, it is an act of healing to speak from my own true voice with love and conviction—to care less about what others think of me and more about what I know is good and right.

What I'm beginning to understand is how much easier it is to think about things like love, peace, and truth, or to read about them, or tell other people about them, than it is to actually do or be them. To actually put into action what Dr. King called “the practical art of living in harmony.” It's remarkable the lengths we will go to turn a plain message into a complicated theory. Jesus preached the most pared-down, dirt-simple kind of truth, and then a bunch of theoretical thinkers messed with it and turned his words into a religion with rules and punishments and things to memorize and get dressed up for. Same with other saints and prophets from every religion—their words are basic, but we humans go through all sorts of convoluted maneuvers to metabolize their wisdom.

Even though it may seem that human beings are the most obstinate species ever created; even though it often looks like we'll never learn how to be peace, or love, or truth—we
do
learn, we
can
change. Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that his students start each day with this prayer:

Waking up this morning, I smile.

Twenty-four brand new hours are

before me. I vow to live fully in each

moment and to look at all beings

with the eyes of compassion.

Today I vow to be love, and though I break the vow over and over, I keep coming back to it. When I awake, I vow to be love with my husband. I vow to be love even though he hasn't shaved, even though I've heard the story he tells at breakfast many times before. Instead of being impatient, I turn to my husband and offer my whole self to him—no resistance, no irritation, just love. And
miracle of miracles, the whole feeling in the room changes. It's as if the sun breaks through a cloud, bathing us in its healing warmth and magnanimous spirit.

I head off to work, and before entering the office, I vow to be love with every colleague I meet with. At first the best I can do is pay attention if I'm antsy or annoyed.

But as the day goes on, being love gets easier and easier, as my acceptance muscles get stronger than my attacking ones. At the end of the workday, I hug the UPS man in the parking lot. I may have taken the exercise a little too far.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and social activist, said that as he grew older he realized it was not ideas that change the world but simple gestures of love given to the people around you, and sometimes to those you feel most at odds with. He wrote that in order to save the world, you must serve the people in your life. “You gradually struggle less and less for an idea,” Merton wrote, “and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

When we know and love ourselves, down to the marrow of our bones, and when we know our oneness with each other, down to the marrow of our souls, then love becomes less of an idea and more of the only sane way to proceed. We are one, we are many, and love is the bridge.

There's a saying I heard a lot when I visited Thailand, especially when buying food from carts on the street. It wouldn't matter what kind of food I was interested in. I could be eyeing a noodle dish and ask the vendor, “Is that chicken?” The man would hand me the food, tilt his head side to side, and say, “Same-same, but different.” Or I'd see a pile of sticky rice balls with bits of color and ask, “Are those pieces of mango?” “Same-same, but different,”
the lady would singsong. What did that mean? If I tried to clarify, like if I said, “Is that mango or papaya?” I'd get the same answer: “Same-same, but different.”

Now, several times a day, I find myself using that phrase. I tilt my head side to side and say, “Same-same, but different.” We are same-same. And yet we are different. Maggie and I are one, linked forever through ancestry, and blood cells, and love. And yet each of us has our own path and fate. Same-same, but different. This one little line gets to the gist of some of the most esoteric, dense, and secretive spiritual texts ever written. With apologies to Lord Shiva and Buddha, Jesus and Saint Teresa of Avila, Muhammad and Jalaluddin Rumi, and with deference to tomes like the huge and rambling Hindu Upanishads,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, and the mystical Jewish and Christian and Islamic holy books, I follow a riddle-like saying I heard at a food stall. Same-same, but different. It brings the wisdom of the ages together for me; it helps me to remember that our life is our own, and yet we belong to each other. We are individual selves, each with a unique purpose to be discovered and expressed. And we are threads in a tapestry beyond our imagining.

And there were days I know

When all we ever wanted

Was to learn and love and grow

Once we grew into our shoes

We told them where to go

Walked halfway around the world

On promise of the glow

Stood upon a mountain top

Walked barefoot in the snow

Gave the best we had to give . . .

—ROBERT HUNTER/JERRY GARCIA

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, ONE YEAR
after the transplant, I come up to Maggie's house to drive her to the hospital for tests. We haven't seen each other since our session with the therapist—the longest we have been apart since we signed on for the marrow ride. It's been good for both of us to disentangle from our Maggie-Liz identity. My obsessive sense of responsibility has quieted down. And Maggie has claimed her life again—with all its unknowns and possibilities, its terrors and hopes. She has settled as best she can into living in the unknown. When she talks about this year, I am reminded of the words to the Grateful Dead song “Days Between,” when Jerry Garcia sings, “Once we grew into our shoes, we told them where to go.” This, of all the years in my sister's life, is the one when she grew into her shoes and told them where to go. The year she dipped down into her marrow and found the freedom to “learn and love and grow.”

Now I am sitting in the waiting room of 3Z, the wing of the hospital where people get PET scans that can detect the smallest cancer molecule anywhere in the body. We are here because a mysterious growth is wrapping itself around the medial nerve in Maggie's arm, causing terrible pain and, of course, the fear that the cancer has returned. The growth may just be a side effect of so much chemotherapy, or it could be swelling from graft-versus-host disease. But the rolling cough has also returned, the one that was
the first sign of the lymphoma's recurrence eighteen months ago: another reason for the PET scan.

The scan involves injecting a small dose of a radioactive chemical into the vein of the arm, which travels through the body and is absorbed by the organs and tissues. Then the patient lies flat and perfectly still for an hour in the PET scanner—a large, doughnut-shaped machine. The scanner records the energy given off by the radioactive substance and turns it into three-dimensional pictures. Areas of the body that contain the energy of cancer light up like bulbs on a Christmas tree.

The great poet-sage Khalil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible.” I think the PET scan is love made visible. The whole hospital is love made visible: doctors, nurses, PET scan operators, cleaners, clergy, cafeteria workers, all making love visible through their daily work. I have no patience for those who berate Western medicine or hate hospitals. Modern medicine has its usefulness, and is as sacred as any other attempt to make love visible. When things get really tough, hospitals are where the love-angels dwell.

As Maggie is in the scanner, I sit in the waiting area with my fellow human beings. Some, like me, are comparatively healthy. Others wear baseball caps covering chemo-head baldness, or are in hospital gowns, or have that scared-animal look in their eyes. We all sit and wait.

At a conference I organized, a man asked the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle a question about waiting. “Are there specific meditation practices to do while waiting for someone to arrive or for something to start?” the man asked. Eckhart Tolle sat in silence for quite a while as we waited for his response. “There is no such thing as waiting,” he finally answered. “There is only being present to each moment. There is no such thing as the past or the
future; there is only the Now. Don't waste this moment. Don't waste all the moments of your life. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.”

This has been my practice for years and years—to stop waiting. To quiet the mind from its compulsive rehashing of the past and its restless worrying about the future, and instead to be curious and nonjudgmental about the here and now. And so, instead of waiting in the hospital waiting room, distracted by my own thoughts, I dive into the moment and swim around with the other people. A young woman is being taken away in a wheelchair. Her little boy runs after her, crying. She tries to kiss him good-bye through the mask over her face. A morbidly obese woman walks in, leaning on two canes. An orderly finds her a wheelchair, but it is too small for her enormous behind. She rests against the wall, short of breath. The orderly stands next to her, holding her hand. A few minutes later, a man is wheeled in and parked in the middle of the room. He is draped only in a thin white blanket. He has a big lump growing out of the top of his head, and he shivers and coughs. People avert their eyes, wanting to spare him the indignity of his helplessness.

After a while, merely observing the present moment becomes unbearable. The poor man with the lump on his head is still alone. It's been ten minutes and no one has come for him. Those entering the waiting room must step around his wheelchair. He lowers his eyes each time this happens. Should I do something? Eckhart Tolle also says, “Any action is often better than no action . . . If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake.” I get up and ask the man in the wheelchair if he'd like me to wheel him somewhere else. He nods. There's a flash of grace when our eyes meet. I push his wheelchair to the side of the room, where he can sit in relative privacy, and return to my seat.

It's work to stay awake and curious in the midst of everything life throws our way. I don't think its something we can do alone. We're like the big woman leaning against the wall. We need someone to hold our hand, to prop us up. We're like the man in the wheelchair, marooned in the middle of daily life. We need someone to give us a push.

Sometimes I think I will get to my deathbed, look around at my loved ones, and with a sigh of relief say, “Whew, I made it here alive. Because of you. Thanks.”

After the PET scan is over, Maggie wants to leave the hospital right away. “Let's get out of here,” she says. It's what she always says. We drive in silence through the blazing Indian summer. She is drowsy from a sedative. She closes her eyes. The hour-long stretch of highway between the hospital and Maggie's town is spectacular in all seasons, but today it is achingly lovely. The sugar maples have turned overnight, their leaves scarlet against the bluest sky. And the passing woods are dark and green and piney, speckled with birches, their thin white trunks and gold petals shimmering in the September sunlight. I drive, sailing us through the day, as Maggie goes in and out of sleep.

Right before we turn onto her road, she sits up and decides we should visit the nearby orchard so she can make plum jam. “Fuck living in the present moment,” she says. “I want to make jam for the future whether or not I will be in it.” And so we park and walk into rows and rows of gnarled trees and berry bushes and grapevines stretching up a long hill. Apple trees bend to the ground, heavy with fruit. Yellow bees loop around, like drunks. The air smells of cider. The plum trees look as if a pointillist had painted hundreds of purple dots on the branches. We pick way too many plums and a bucketful of Honeycrisp apples, and then some late-blooming red raspberries.

We come into the house carrying bags of fruit. We're laughing about something no one else would find funny, or maybe they would for a minute, but they wouldn't repeat it over and over in different accents, cracking each other up every time. The phone is ringing. I answer it. It's the hospital. And in a second, everything changes—again.

The lymphoma is back. It's in Maggie's lungs, in her groin, in her uterus, and in the growth in her arm, the other arm, her bones. The Christmas tree of her body lit with cancer energy everywhere. Mantle cell lymphoma—the alien invader she's been fighting for almost a decade with several rounds of big-gun chemotherapy, full-body radiation, one autologous stem cell transplant, one allogeneic bone marrow transplant, and a host of other treatments to deal with the side effects from the chemo, radiation, and transplants. How much more can her small body take?

The evening is a déjà vu. This is the third time I witness Maggie tell her kids that she is close to the edge of death. The third time she wonders aloud to us about how to die—slowly and painfully, or more deliberately using pills to hasten the process? Once again, her son holds onto her and weeps. He is building a house up the road for a future he so dearly wants to share with his mother. Her daughter calls, and I listen to their conversation as if I'm hearing two actors read their lines. I want to tell the playwright that people don't really talk like this—it's too intense, too raw. Tone it down a little, I want to say. The audience needs some space to breathe.

Later that night, as I am falling asleep, I think about the present moment and I wonder if I've ever fully understood what it means. I have been a diligent student of mindfulness since I was nineteen. I may have said the words “being in the moment” as often as I have said “hello” and “good-bye.” But what is a moment? Are mo
ments separate things, strung together one after another like the beads on a rosary? Is each moment like an inch mark on a ruler, or a rung on a ladder that we climb, hand over hand, breath by breath, now, now, now? The wise ones tell us not to get attached to each moment, and not to look behind or ahead either. We're instructed to hold onto the ladder rung with full attention but no attachment—each step up the ladder a brand-new clean moment, free of the past and unclouded by the future. “Beginner's Mind” is what the Buddhists call it. That's how to meditate: begin again with each breath, which is practice for living.

But right now, the classic meditation instructions seem too dry for real life, with its sticky past and its undoubtedly messy future. Perhaps that spanking-clean present moment is not what I have imagined it to be. Perhaps there's no such thing as a bunch of separate moments at all. Instead there's just one unfinished, imperfect, ever-changing, superfascinating, interconnected tapestry of time and space where all things happen simultaneously, undivided, forever. Suddenly, I want spiritual instructions that tell me I
should
look behind and ahead and all around at the whole confusing, scary, embarrassing canvas with great affection—even with attachment. That it's OK to wallow in nostalgia when I hear a song from my youth, or to plot the future with trepidation and hope. To enjoy what comes; to grieve what is lost; to laugh at my clumsy missteps and at the innocent hubris of my plans. To be a wide-open eye in eternity, a heart beating in wonder, an inquisitive mind with an ironic sense of humor.

Perhaps this is what those wise ones have always meant about being in the moment. Because I don't think we can live here on earth as human beings without dragging the past with us into the present. I mean, you wouldn't bring home bags of fruit if you
didn't cherish memories of making jam with your mother. And you wouldn't stay up with your sister till almost midnight—two witches cackling over a cauldron of bubbling plums—without an eye toward the future: a future of someone sitting at the kitchen table on a cold winter morning, with a cup of coffee and toast with plum jam. So tonight I revise my mindfulness instructions, for myself only. You can make up your own. Here are mine: We are made from the past, and for the future. Both are embedded in the present moment. Without the pain and sweetness of what came before, and the enticing lure and heart-pounding fear of what comes next, we cannot celebrate the fullness of the living moment.

Everywhere I look in Maggie's house there are emblems of the past and signs pointing to the future. Memories and dreams: the photos of her kids at different ages, and the forced bulbs that will bloom at Christmas. The old oak kitchen table that belonged to my parents, and the can of new paint waiting to cover the chipped kitchen cabinets. The compost bucket full of wrinkled plum skins, and those jars of jam cooling on the counter. Add all of that up, and what you get is Now.

I think of my own memories and dreams. I know the difference between the ones that keep me stuck and the ones that add flavor to my life. I think most of us can tell the difference. The ones that taste of envy or blame—those are the memories and dreams we'd be wise to let go of. But the other ones are ours to keep. They strengthen the soul and feed the imagination. Like the memories of my parents that I hang in my heart like priceless artwork—mysterious, colorful, complex. Or like my dream of running away with Bruce Springsteen and singing backup in the E Street Band. I know I won't do this, but I like keeping that imaginary door open. You never know.