HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 9/17/18

September 17, 2018

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

“There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.”

-Lewis Thomas

Somehow we know this. And we know it with special sharpness and poignancy when one who is close to us, as close as though he or she were a part of our own body, is taken away. Of course it hurts!

But there is some comfort too, in this concept of being parts of one another’s being. We are not alone in the world. We are bound to the rest of creation as cells in a body are bound together.

And not only bound to the living, but bound to the dead. We feel this to be true as well, though we don’t understand how.

So what else is new? Perhaps we can just rest in our ignorance, savoring what we share with all life, buoyed by the knowledge of how totally unalone we are.

I am organically connected to all of life. I am not alone!

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