To Cooperate with Truth

I have learned over the years that to surrender is to cooperate with truth. I will try to unpack what this means. Let me start with a story from my journey with cancer almost forty years ago. In my thirties, I nearly died from a rare form of lymphoma that appeared as a very large tumor in my skull and another tumor protruding in the eighth rib of my back.

I had never been through anything this difficult or life-threatening. I was terrified at every turn. It was then that the Chinese poet from the Tang Dynasty Tu Fu visited me in a dream. Out of the yellow mist he came, his Asian beard in tow. We were on a healthy shore and he sat cross-legged in the sand, scratching delicately with a branch, his slender head down. I crouched and put it to him, “How do I block the fear?” He kept scratching the sand as if he hadn’t heard. I grew angry, “How do I block the fear?!” He lifted his head and shrugged, branch waving above him, “How does a tree block the wind?” With that, he disappeared.

I woke to realize that a tree doesn’t block the wind. It lets it through. The only way to meet fear is to face it and let it through. Our culture instructs us to hide from our fear or to conquer it. But both life strategies put us at odds with truth and keep us from its inevitable lessons.