How many of us live lives of the utmost clarity? That is an admirable state of being. I think that is one reason I have never fit in anywhere easily. The introvert in me would always choose the innermost way of being in this cracked and crazy world. I know how to drive the car of myself down the long quiet highway, which happens to be the title of one of Natalie Goldberg’s books.

At times I have been forced onto the highway by virtue of being a caregiver. I learned many lessons while I was putting mileage on my car. I learned to drive slowly and remember that I was the driver and not the car. I learned that speeding is counterproductive and that it doesn’t matter what your car looks like. It is what drives it that matters.

Learning to be comfortable with saying no has been a long stretch of the road. Learning that I don’t have to pick up hitchhikers or drive carpool. What a frickin’ relief that lesson was. I can just climb into the driver’s seat and ease into Drive, all alone watching the ribbon of time unspool ahead of me.

I have just ordered a few new things for my house. Been there over thirty years now. It’s cedar and is now canopied by old trees. There are sliding doors and a full-length deck and lots of space. I don’t even have to get the car out of the driveway unless I want to. I take daily walks and sit in silence for a part of each day. Oh, I have my junky times, too, believe me. I watch TV in the evening and like to go to T. J. Maxx on Sunday mornings and root around, bringing home chocolates or other miscellany.

But more and more I see that I am not my house or car or my thoughts or feelings. Clarity is knowing that. The utmost clarity is coming home to who you really are.

LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT: That’s How The Light Gets In is a deeply personal story. It is my account of walking through the fire of cancer with my husband. He did not survive, but I lived to tell the tale, as they say.

He asked me to find my passion before he died, and writing is it. He would be so happy that I completed and published the book

While it is for sale on amazon.com, I hardly get any proceeds from the sales and am lost among the millions. The book is one woman’s small effort to share a story of love, loss and healing. As such, I have decided to take a huge leap.

I have to pay $20.00 a month to maintain the website. My time spent writing is free. Rather than order the book from amazon.com, please allow me to personally sign a copy for you and mail it directly to you. The cost for that is $20.00 I guess you see where I am going with this. Each sale gives me a bit more than amazon.com would pay me, although nowhere near $20.

Being a self-published writer is great because this way I keep my independence, but it comes at a price.

Donations to the site are always needed, as well.

So if you would like to make sure that I write a second book (which I am working on now), do me a favor. Send an email and your snailmail address and I will autograph a copy just for you.

I can’t mail outside the U.S. however. If you live outside the U.S.,  it is available from amazon.com. It is also available an an ebook at http://www.booklocker.com/books/4931.html

Thanks and love,

Vicki Woodyard

It’s a good thing I don’t have free will. My life is messed up enough as it is.

Some people love to tell you how we all have free will. Everything has already happened on the causal plane. We look through slits in time to see only the Now, but the past and future are as complete as the Now. Presbyterians call it predestination.  Some eastern beliefs are similar. I have had enough  precognitive dreams to confirm that we have no free will except to choose our attitudes and emotions towards what happens. Edgar Cayce wrote a book on this subject.

Dr. Raynor C. Johnson, who wrote The Spiritual Path, said that we have about as much free will as a violin has in its case. Everything has been designed in the best interests of the souls involved. Once we understand this deeply, we have made a giant leap into the Self that we all are.

Please don’t argue about this brief essay. I didn’t write it to argue. I wrote it because it is the truth. It makes me feel good that my life is going according to plan, even if it seems totally flawed. Something in me knows that angels are around me, going before me, following behind me and guiding me through the valley of the shadow.

Today is Friday, TGIF. Maybe I should add TGIP. Thank God it’s predestined.  Otherwise, life would be run by a committee and we all know how that turns out.

My life and truth are one and the same. I know this unequivocally by being it. I must not think about it, but be it. The time for thought has an expiration date; once you reach it, you cannot go back except at your own peril.

Teachers have shown you the route to truth, to the Self that you are, to the Self that we all are. They have led you to look deeply into thought and how it deceives you. And at some point the teachers disappeared back into the ground of being from which they arose. Fair enough.

Every day is Groundhog Day until it isn’t. Bill Murray was playing a role until he wasn’t. Until he decided to take up his crossness and bear it until he became a different kind of being.  We watch this movie again and again because it calls us to the timeless moment. We delight to see the insurance salesman meet up with the main character and irritate the heck out of him again and again. Until Bill’s character begins to accept the moment for what it is— his chance to change. And then the insurance salesman is no longer an irritant. That is our work.

Life and truth are one. But until we want to see it, we will continue to see everything that threatens our egos as an irritant. Life will be one big burr under your saddle. It’s February. Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day have come and gone. Soon George Washington will chop the cherry tree down again and refuse to lie about it. Hmmm? Food for thought. Pie a la mode with a cherry on top.

This has been my life. When I was thirty-two, my only daughter was diagnosed with a fatal childhood cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma, a solid tumor of the muscle. We were told her prognosis was three years and chemo would be started immediately at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennese. Then we should take her back home to Atlanta and give her as normal a life as possible.

For three years we did just that. Our only son was seven when she was diagnosed and he became, by default, the unnoticed child in the family. Being sensitive, I knew what was happening, but was powerless to change any of it. The term, “finding a new normal,” had not been introduced in 1975, the year of her diagnosis. My husband’s father died of multiple myeloma the age of sixty-three as my child fought her cancer.

July 15, 1978, was a hot summer day and the one on which Laurie took her last breath. She was in a children’s hospital and had fallen into a coma. We returned home to a breathtaking silence. Six weeks later we had a new dog, a beautiful Bichon Frise named Tuffy. We got him to divert us as much as possible from the deep void around which we walked. He kept me busy. Took to eating his own poop and I would run around the garage lacing it with Tabasco Sauce to discourage him from eating it. A new world was being forced upon the remaining three members of our family.

I had been writing oneliners for Joan Rivers throughout the three years of Laurie’s illness. I never stopped, for writing would prove to be my solace. I also wrote a book about Laurie which was never published. That was the seed of my spiritual writing.

In 2000 we got Bob’s fatal diagnosis. Multiple myeloma, his father’s disease. Prognosis: Less than three years. This hit me harder than our daughter’s. Why? Because he was my strength, the one I leaned on when things fell apart. Between my assiduous caregiving and his determination to stay here to protect me, he lengthened his life after the diagnosis to four and a half years or so. Now the silence fell around my son and I.

It is 2011 and I have found my voice and my writing style. I know, I know. I tell the same stories over and over. That is how it should be. Not for everyone, but for me. The silence now fills in the horrors I lived through. It surrounds my daily life with an unbelievable beneficence. I have been told there is a large angel around me. Although I do not see it myself, I do believe it to be true.

Valentine’s Day is Monday and two of mine have slipped beyond the veil. It is here where I sit and write my essays. It is there that love inspires me to live each day with heart. Here and there are meaningless terms. The space between is where love lives.

As my six-year-old daughter lay dying of cancer in the summer of 1978, she was always happy when she opened a get well card that had a dollar bill tucked in it. When her first grade class went to Stone Mountain on a field trip, she could not go. They brought her back a little brown vinyl wallet with Stone Mountain on it. She would put her money in that. The little wallet grew fatter as she grew thinner. I remember the last day she ever sat on her swing set in our back yard. She was almost seven and her birthday was just around the corner. She had a loose front tooth and cancer in her lungs.  I took her to the swing and put a pillow on it because she was so thin it hurt to sit without one. She sat there quietly and we both knew it was the last time.

We managed to have a birthday party for her. Our friend Joann made her a cake in the shape of a butterfly and gave her a red Mickey Mouse watch that looked gigantic on her bony little wrist. She lay on the couch as her first-grade teacher sat beside her. She managed her usual radiant smile. Soon she would go on oxygen and require a night nurse who came to our home and allowed me to get some rest.

“How can you have a Do Not Resuscitate order on her?” the nurse asked me with bewilderment in her voice. “Because everything has been done that can be done. That is what the doctors have told us.” Freya, the nurse, had one daughter, and was clearly not in favor of the DNR. After she had been with us for a week, she said to me, “I understand now…about the DNR. I am fully in agreement.” She was now carrying Laurie to the bathroom in arms of pure love. Her doctor came to the house soon after and said to Bob and I, “If you want Laurie to die in the hospital, she has about three days left.” And so we took the long last drive.

The drive home from the hospital for the last time was even harder. We had gathered up her belongings and carried them from her now empty room. She had slipped into a coma after a three day stay in the hospital. Four years went by. One day it was time to get the dollar bills from the little brown wallet. I put them into a box and sent them to my teacher’s foundation, knowing that the money would be put to good use. It was a gesture of faith, a mother’s longing for better things to come.

To write of these small things is huge. Just as the dollar bills are rough and passed around as tender, so are hearts rendered by their sufferings. But within the heart is a larger One. Somewhere there will be unbroken peace; but not on this small planet. We only get glimpses of it.  Through the eyes of a child, dollar bills in a plastic wallet seemed to be a tidy sum.